Death's Master

by Tanith Lee

“And would I held the whip,” lowed the other.

  Then, having refreshed their spirits, they went on in their search for Shell among the woods.

  An indescribable wash of confusion and anguish blinded Simmu. A whole minute it blinded her. But, noticeably, she had not lived with demons and gained nothing. Her mentality recovered quickly, filling her mind with pictures. Almost at once, chaos was replaced by understanding and order, and her eyes were cold as shards of chill green frost thinking of those who would harm Zhirem.

  For Beyash’s plot and his lies, she knew it all, as if she had read his brain. She recalled his mention of a clerk who feared him—everything was accurately solved in seconds, for her reasoning could race when it must. For the dead woman she spared nothing. Demon-like, there was no room in Simmu save for whom she held dear.

  She slipped down from the tree and picked a clandestine path from the woods and among the olives. On the lower southern slopes sheep were pastured, for she had seen their droppings in that direction. Soon she came on the flock, and, humming to them, walked through their midst with no more disturbance than a summer breeze. A shepherd girl of fifteen or so sat among them. Simmu stole up on her from behind, and lightly clasping her about the forehead before she could cry out, worked on her a tactile charm of the Eshva. The girl’s head drooped. She smiled foolishly and made no complaint when Simmu took her homespun dress and the cloth with which she had bound her hair.

  Presently, on the westward road which, in a day’s travel, would lead to the temple, there appeared a barefoot village maid. Her hair was hidden in a patchwork scarf; she walked with her head bowed. After an hour she reached a field where young horses were grazing. She stood by the wall and whistled. A horse came trotting. Without words, Simmu spoke.

  “Bear me, brother, bear me, for I must be swifter than my own two feet.”

  The horse nuzzled Simmu and leaped the wall.

  Something rushed through villages and by farms, the white dust veiling it. The village people gaped: “Who rides so fast?”

  The dust blurred also the sky, the sun. Simmu rode in a dazzle of lights, and the impressions of things passed her but did not impede or snare her eye. So it was with her attention, focused entirely on one goal.

  She could not catch them on the road, the priests and their entourage, she had been too late in pursuit. Yet the horse bounded under her, galvanized by her crooning. She would not be far behind in achieving the temple.

  When dusk came, Simmu saw the temple lands below, flecked with lights, and the great temple itself, a palace of lamps. She let the horse free; it was weary but not broken. It turned away into the gathering indigo of night tossing its mane and blowing softly.

  Simmu ran, fleet as a leopard.

  There were more lights than usual, along the roads, among the groves—so much she saw as she ran. Many had gathered to be told of Zhirem the wicked one and his fate. Simmu learned everything in snatches as she sped by the doors of small wine shops and among the tasselled spears of the fields, where even lovers, who had hidden there for their own irreligious sins, made their after-talk of Zhirem’s profanity. The High Priest had judged Zhirem and reviewed the evidence of his fault. The High Priest had collapsed with horror. Zhirem neither defended himself nor asked for mercy. Revived, the High Priest had pronounced that Zhirem must expire beneath the whip at sunrise tomorrow.

  Simmu had arrived at the farthest ground she might tread lawfully in her woman’s form, the Sanctuary of Virgins, half a mile westward of the temple.

  Women and girls were clustered on the lawn before the Sanctuary, dissecting the news and exclaiming. In their unlovely life, the downfall of a man pleased them, but they did not bother to think why.

  Simmu went out of their sight. She stood beneath a tree. A bird fluttered suddenly from the tree into Simmu’s hands.

  “See Zhirem with my eyes, and know him. Fly over the temple wall, search the courts, take in the words of those that go about there. Find Zhirem. Come back to me, and tell me of it.”

  The bird flashed up into the darkness.

  Simmu sat beneath the tree, wrapped in black shade. She watched the stars weep their light between the branches. A star fell into her lap: the bird, returning.

  Simmu read the bird, a small mosaic book of macabre bird-craziness currently mingled with a bird’s-eye view of the temple.

  Here is a fat waddler, let fall upon his robe. There is another, dot him too. Cold is the stone beneath my feet with the sun’s heat sunk away. Listen! A worm sliding under the turf. Tap with my beak! No, he is gone. Ah! A bird in the air, a bird painted on the window—I! But there is a court where a twisted dead tree grows and in a room of stone one sits. No lamp to bring the pretty moths so I might eat them. He sits with his head in his hands. It is the one. When he is dead I will bring my cousins and we will pull out his hair and line the nests with it. My near relative, the crow, would like his eyes which are like two jewels. But the crow is in the north, paying his respects at a king’s funeral.

  Hush. Simmu’s mind to the bird. Is Zhirem bound? Who guards him?

  No bindings. A locked door, iron at the window. Outside, these three. They have a lamp but its scent drives insects away. They juggle with six-sided white slugs which rattle. Once, I saw such lying in the grass. I pecked, but they were hard. I think, after all, I will eat the eyes of Zhirem. Why should the crow have everything?

  From Simmu’s mind there came then a dart of malice that sent the bird whirling up in fright.

  The women by the Sanctuary heeded it this time. They pointed.

  “A sparrow by night—it must be an omen.”

  Simmu they did not see, a white glimmer slipping through the groves, naked as in the old days with the demons, only the cloth to bind up her hair.

  For some hours Simmu waited near the wall of the temple. The deep of the night drew close and closer like a gloved hand squeezing out the breath of earth, replacing it with the purple breath of a mystery. Once a lay brother passed. He urinated, embarrassed, in a bush. He clucked a holy chant of apology to the gods. Simmu hated him, and hate stuck like a blade between his shoulders, and he ran off about his errand, whatever it was, not realizing why he ran.

  When the night was ready, Simmu rose up into it, and at some point Simmu had altered again to become a man. He put his hands and his feet upon the wall, climbing, as, man-shaped, he had so often climbed.

  You imprisoned in the temple, beloved? When have they ever kept us in?

  9

  Simmu did not know that Zhirem was invulnerable and could not be killed. Zhirem did not know it either. The lions, the broken spear, the import of those things had faded from him, even though the terror associated with them remained. Zhirem, therefore, as he sat solitary in the unlit room of stone, believed in his death in the morning. Believed in it with a sort of loathing. But he had become again a dumb child, unable to express its bewilderment at the false accusations, and the awful uncomprehended crime of which it felt itself truly guilty.

  In the yard of the dead tree (this was the Court of the Felon, rarely used, nasty in its symbolism), two lay brothers, assigned to keep watch, were dicing. A priest in his middle years looked on. The game was permissible, for the stakes were not coins, but sweetmeats. The priest, however, was too laden with care to dice. The evil of Zhirem had torn him with inner tragedy. The priest had attempted to wring from the heart of Zhirem some cry of regret, some contrition to offer the gods along with his blood. But Zhirem’s heart did not respond.

  In the morning, this priest intended to say to the whip men: “Strike sternly. Strike for his very soul. The worse the agony, the more likely the pardon of the gods.” There were three whips. One had teeth of iron and one of bronze; the third was all metal strips, and was heated in a brazier before it was used.

  The lay brothers diced. He at the table’s left whispered:

  “The candied
quince is for Zhirem’s cries. Six says he will scream at the first blow. He has no flesh to cushion him.”

  “I say he will cry only at the tenth blow. He will faint at the fifteenth.”

  The dice rattled. The blank side of the dice showed, where the four was rubbed away: “At the fourth stroke, then.” “Or not at all.”

  The priest shifted his gaze and supposed for a moment something crouched on the wall, a lean pale cat with glinting eyes. But he could see nothing thereafter.

  “Now what is this you have wrapped about my ankles?” grumbled the lay brother at the table’s left.

  “I was about to ask of you the same thing.”

  Each peered under the table. In the dim glow of the scented lamp each deciphered a rope which tightened, a rope with diamond scales. Both opened their mouths to shriek that a snake bound them in its coils, but their laments were stillborn when they saw the cobra which swayed before them on the table.

  “Never move,” hoarsely instructed the priest, whose feet were also secured. “It is the abomination, Shell, who works this ill upon us.”

  And, clammy with their plight, the three jailors now discerned Shell, his hair bound in a rag, step lightly over the courtyard toward them. He spared only one glance of dislike and aversion for the dead tree. Then he glided about the table, and in three straining ears he hissed. The mesmerism which fell on the devout men was like a muddy doze, a doze full of vile dreams.

  As they lay twitching and moaning and impotent, Simmu caressed, in the Eshva manner, the lock of the door of the room of stone, and charmed it open.

  Zhirem did not raise his head. He did nothing. Simmu went to him and put his hand into the dark hair, and pulled the head up by this hair in a cruel hurting grasp till Zhirem must look into his face. Zhirem had been held by the hair before, inside a well of fire.

  A transformation in Zhirem. No melting, no joy. It was a mask of rage and torment that Zhirem’s face had been transformed to. His eyes blazed in the gloom. He leapt up, and prized off the hand of Simmu with a grip of steel. And when the power of words overtook Zhirem, they were not words of gratitude or love.

  “You have sold out my life, you have killed what is good in me or might have been. You fool and filthy one, you have dragged me into the slime. I did not grieve that you had deserted me after the act. I did not grieve at the lies of men, neither at death. But you, you accursed and crawling thing, I do not know how you deceived me, but I know this—I will not have you near me.” And then he sat down once more and lowered his head, and he murmured: “But not only you. The fault was also mine. Leave me, let me be. The old men said I should belong to a Demon of Darkness, to a Master of Night.”

  “Be happy then,” said Simmu, Eshva-foundling, with an edge in his voice like a polished knife. “Demonkind are to men as the sea is to the sand. And he who is the Lord of Demons, Azhrarn, he is the leaven in the world’s bread.”

  Zhirem stared when he heard this. A new torment displaced the first.

  “Are there positively such as demons, then?”

  “Believe it.”

  “And you I regarded as friend, you are their messenger. Scant wonder that you dragged me into a cave of night.”

  Simmu abandoned speech. His eyes began to speak instead. Tears burst from them, but his face was contemptuous and cold. He went away into the shadows beyond the room, as once before.

  And Zhirem, after he had sat staring there at the unlocked door, the court with just the three oblivious men in it, as once before, felt drawn to follow.

  Yet Simmu was gone. Zhirem climbed up the wall and over it alone. He fell into the shade at the wall’s foot, weak from what had been done to him, now also weeping.

  “It is evidently not my hour to die,” he said, “yet I am fit for nothing. Though perhaps, as the creature tells me, I am fit to be the slave of demons. I will seek him, then, this Master of Night. If he is real, let him hire me, for I am done with all else.”

  And Zhirem went away also into shadows, not keeping any watch for danger, yet not confident, not glad, but desolate and without hope.

  • • •

  Simmu was not actually very distant. He had paused to reclaim a property of his, or send another to reclaim it.

  The yellow-green gem the Eshva gave to Simmu, the gem with the character on it which was Simmu’s name in the Demon Tongue, lay in a coffer in the treasure room of the temple. Here was piled much wealth, gold and silver and varieties of jewels. Yet Simmu knew where the green gem lay, for he had seen it in his childhood and been told by the priests: “With this paltry but pleasing stone were the gods thanked for your place among us.”

  All the coffers of the treasure room were open that every man that came there could feast his sight on the temple’s riches. On this occasion it was a rat who saw. It scuttled pink-eyed from the high window and down the wall-hanging and into the coffer. It dug with its paws and seized the Eshva gem and bore it to Simmu.

  Simmu hung the gem by its Drin-worked silver chain around his neck. Naked but for the cloth about his hair and the gem about his neck, he went away then after Zhirem, knowing the direction by supernatural clues and by plain love.

  Yet, walking, he recalled he roamed the country of men. Soon he came to a herdsman’s hut. Outside, garments hung on a bush to dry after their washing, and Simmu clad himself in one of these.

  Zhirem strode south. He did this with no scheme in mind and with no purpose, however obscure, of reaching the far-off southern desert. The road of Zhirem was random, and he journeyed there blind and deaf and almost dumb, and that Simmu followed he was unaware, and if he had become aware he would have turned and cursed him, as later he did.

  When the sun lifted in the east miles lay between Zhirem and the temple. Enough miles that the people who saw him pass, though they had been informed of his transgression and recognized his dark hair, had not heard of his escape from bondage.

  “There is the priest who lies with harlots and slays them!”

  “It is as I told you. The temple will not execute him, they have only cast him out.”

  “Come, let us do the work for them!”

  But though they named him an exiled priest, yet priest he still was and the travel-worn yellow robe still on him. They did not have the courage quite to try to kill him, and the stones they threw glanced off from him as if the gods protected him, and he was not hurt, which set these people wondering.

  Later, another came by, but this was a girl, for they eyed the shape of a maiden’s high breasts through her poor garment.

  Simmu, (a girl, altered cunningly to outwit humankind) gathered information of Zhirem’s passage through the land. The bruised flowers mentioned how his feet had crushed them. The dust carried the scent of him, the trees which had reflected his shadow revealed as much to Simmu’s hand.

  At noon, a black bird on a stone, receiving the unspoken question Simmu asked: “Has Zhirem walked this way?”, screeched out in a loud harsh voice: “Has Zhirem walked this way?” voicing the unvoiced. And Simmu hesitated and called the bird and held it some minutes against her throat, teaching it, before she went on.

  Of all the demons, the Eshva were not much given to revenge, their cruelties were of the instant, and the past forgotten. But Simmu was also a woman and a man, and he had remembered Beyash.

  10

  For days after the temple had discovered that sorcery had visited it, it had wailed and roared to itself and demanded sacrifices and prayers from the whole country. It had despatched bands of men from the farms and vineyards, armed with knives and bearing the temple insignia, to catch up with and bring back Zhirem, but these bands were terrified of coming anywhere near Zhirem—patently a magician and in absolute league with devils—and never tracked him down. At length the temple, in a vast ceremony, conjured upon him and upon Shell an eternal bane by proxy for the gods. Then peace was permitted to creep hom
e, and they set themselves to mislay their failure and their fear.

  It was the month after that Beyash roused in the dawn because a harsh and awful voice was crying: “Beyash slew the harlot. Beyash and no other.” Now Beyash slept in a cell alone, as did all the priests, and nobody was at hand. But looking up in terror, he perceived a big black bird hopping about the sill of the window. And again the bird shouted:

  “Beyash slew the harlot. Beyash and no other.”

  Beyash was convinced the whole temple heard, though none heard but he. He buried himself in his pillows and waited for arrest. But no one entered, and when he peeped out the fearsome bird was gone.

  “A bad dream,” said Beyash. “I have committed a wrongful deed, and I must placate the gods who see everything. I must convince the gods that what I did was right.”

  So he got up early for Beyash and took his share of breakfast and put it on the altars of several gods and prayed to them and kissed the ivory feet of the statues. But when he glanced upward, he found the black bird, no dream, was perched on the head of a silver prophet. And the bird bellowed: “Beyash slew the harlot. Beyash and no other.”

  Beyash grovelled on the ground and then he fled. And flying, he collided with some of his fellow priests who held him and asked what was the matter. While he jabbered nonsense, up flew the bird, and it settled on Beyash’s shoulder. Beyash turned white as chalk, and waited in despair for the bird to speak. But this time it did not, only watched him with a single eye. When he attempted to shake off the bird, it would not go. It clung to his shoulder as if it loved him.

  “Beyash has a pet,” joked the priests.

  And then, the bird would not leave Beyash.

  All day it sat on his shoulder. At mealtimes it pecked from his plate and sipped from his cup.

  “Look how this bird adores Beyash,” marvelled the priests.

  At night it rode with him to his cell. It sat on his pillow, he could not dislodge it. He lay stiff and sleepless, respectful of its beak and its talons. When, exhausted, he slumbered despite himself, then the bird would shriek in his ear: “Beyash slew the harlot. Beyash and no other.”