Death's Master

by Tanith Lee

  Zhirem stood at the starboard rail, silent, dark, and emotionless as a symbol of fate itself.

  The anchor was raised. The ship put about, or attempted to. Like creatures condemned, men and craft performed the actions which accomplished their doom. Presently, with a dreadful sound, the vessel speared herself upon a rock, and split.

  The sea water rushed up, no longer unseen, foaming as if from some demoniac vat. With massive shudderings, the ship settled to her death. Her bracings opened, her timbers burst. Always the ocean was on hand to fill in the gaps left by wood and iron, to fill also the straining mouths of men.

  The spine of the vessel gave suddenly with a frightful snap. The masts crashed inwards. The floor of the deck and the belly of the hold became a spiral of boiling foam which hungrily sucked and swallowed.

  “And am I invulnerable also to you?” Zhirem asked softly of the erupting breakers as they combed his body. He was appalled yet quickened. The horror and hope of dying once more swamped him, and the sea clawed him into itself.

  He was dashed downward, with the rest.

  Unspeakable nightmare—of asphyxia, of entrapment, of blindness.

  The water lassoed him, spun him. Viridescent black, it scalded and bound his eyes, it roped his neck with his own long hair, tighter and more tight; it bound his limbs with his rags, with weeds and with the vortex itself. He strove to breathe and salt liquid entered into his throat and lungs. Yes, the sea, indifferent to the sorceries of earth, the sea would slay him after all.

  Zhirem spun toward the ocean’s floor, feeling no pain, his sight fading and a miserable pleasure in his heart, his thoughts gone to abstractions. Only vaguely did he comprehend how other men swirled past him, as if they all tumbled through a green air. Men who kicked and noiselessly shrieked, whose eyes started, whose faces were turning black as the ocean strangled them, while behind them the bubbles of each of those escaping last breaths jostled back toward the surface.

  Zhirem tilted his head, lazily, the whirlpool slackening, to watch the gems of his own last breath rise up. But the water in his wake was empty of bubbles.

  Still downward he dropped, still aware. And now he saw that he alone dropped down a living man, for everywhere around him cascaded the dead sailors with huge ghastly pop eyes and bloated cheeks. For sure, the sea came and went in Zhirem’s lungs, but from its fluid element was somehow distilled for him enough of gaseous breath that it sustained him. He breathed as a fish breathes, and as freely. Zhirem could not drown, not even that. He was proof even against ocean.

  Then the old fear swept him and, coupled with it, the fear of where he was so helplessly going. And fearful was this area indeed to which he had been plunged, was yet plunging.

  Like a stone flung into the abyss, thus he descended, but his momentum was gradually subdued rather than increased. It was more like a fall upward, into space. But all was green, greener than greenness, though murky and full of inky insinuations, half-glimpsed shapes, and made startling by the abrupt flash of a million little bright fish, exploding across his vision like sparks from a furnace or from his own staggering brain. . . .

  Presently, however, the illumination of the sky was lost in the deepness of the water. After that, Zhirem fell through liquid pitch, and perceived only with his skin and nerves as glaucous denizens of that sphere bustled by, now and then with a fiery streak of eyes, seeing him but themselves unseen. Then again, this blackness was dissolved into a nebulous sight lit by some source impossible to trace. It occurred to the falling man he had traveled a stupendous distance, and had entered another fabulous reach. Pillars of rock stretched up beyond him, and down where he must go. At first bald and scabbed with barnacles, they became lovelier in their lower terraces. Here they were forested with gigantic ferns, and spangled with minerals or obscure unprecious jewels. Among these towers and altars of drowned cliffs lay the remnants of the drowned cities of ancient lands, pylons and walls, where the black phantoms of enormous mollusks perched idly to preen each other, like vast crows upon the ruin.

  Zhirem was cold beyond the numbing cold of the sea. The forests of the ocean caressed him with many-fingered hands as he slowly plunged between, but the fallen walls of men mocked him: they too had endured, as he now must, in this prison.

  The ferns wrapped the dead sailors in their tendrils.

  A silken scarf, with eyes of leaden flame, stole into the forest. It kissed the dead with its silver mouth, and sucked one, whole, within its belly.

  Still Zhirem, a flung stone, slid downward.

  He passed the level of the ferns, the ruins and the great mollusks. He entered a level where the source of the faint luminescence which had been aiding his sight became evident. Far, far below, as far from him as would the earth appear to a bird in flight, he beheld a shining solid of cool light caught among the tangled roots of the cliffs.

  Softly the light diffused about Zhirem, changing the wicked dragon-blush of the sea, by melting stages, to the thinnest jade, while the light itself burned from coolness to warmth and a shade of color almost of rose, but a green rose.

  A shell was set in the rock, a fan like ribbed porcelain, larger than a palace doorway, and this it was which glowed, as if a huge lamp stood the other side of it.

  The lengthy fall of Zhirem was nearing its end. Amid the final strata of the rock he sank, toward the magical shell and its radiance. He marvelled, with an abject, dream-like wonder, at its beauty and its size. Nine times his own height was the last of his descent from the shell’s apex to the floor of the sea. The sand, mercurial as powder, clouded up and furled him in.

  And there he lay upon that floor of sand.

  The whole of the ocean was above him, and seemed to press upon his very bones, as if it would crush him out against the rock. Zhirem’s human senses rebelled suddenly and utterly, and, in a rush of terror, left him altogether.

  Even after he had fainted, he continued to breathe the water, while to his quiescent body small creatures came and ate the remnants of his clothes, being unable to obtain his flesh.

  3

  He revived to an exquisite yet fearful sensation of being everywhere touched, stroked, teased, tickled, embraced, investigated. Unconscious, this attention had sensuously stirred him, but rousing, his instinct was to strike out wildly. Nevertheless, he remained passive, only opening his eyes, at which he heard a peculiar vibration in the water about him, almost a sound, not quite a sound.

  He was frightened by what he saw, like drugged-dreams made real, amused also, that madman’s amusement filling his brain till he laughed, the way he must now laugh beneath the sea, noiselessly and with pain.

  A few of the tiny fish creatures yet lipped him with gentle toothless mouths. They had stripped him naked, quite defenseless, yet not defenseless, for his beauty had armored him in a way no clothing could have done. The beings who clustered around him, who had played with and fondled his body, were as capable of attempting to rend him and, on failing to rend, of hating him, which hatred might have damaged in more devious fashion than their claws and sharp teeth.

  There were ten of them, and they were women, or at least, females. Shallow perfect breasts budded on their slender torsos, but the breasts were green and their tips a darker green, and their mouths so dark a green they were nearer black. Between these brackish lips showed the white dentition, unseparated, a single band of enamel. Their noses were almost flat, their nostrils wide; on either side of their delicately formed jaws were the petals of gills, continuously expanding and contracting. Their eyes were all one color, like emeralds, the pupil a narrow horizontal slot. Their hair was the acid green of quinces. They had no lower limbs but the tails of sharks or whales, and mounted in them, like secret gray flowers, their vertical genitals. These maidens it was who had petted him, tongued him, if in lust or only inquisitiveness he could not decide. Their looks were innocent and merciless, yet they smiled.

  His ey
e ranged beyond them, and made out others whose skin was amber and whose tails, slowly stirring the ocean’s sand, were black. Breastless and male these others were. They carried long blades in their hands of honed metal, though the blades of their masculinity were sheathed and retracted in the manner of fish. Some of these males also held up lamps of translucent stuff burning with a waterproofed witch-fire. The light made a yellowish ring that spread from the great shell to encompass Zhirem and those who surrounded him.

  He lifted one hand, quietly, to see what they would do.

  Again he heard—or felt—the sonorous vibration in the water. He realized it was a form of speech, that his visitants were registering surprise. First, presumably, at his descent to their abode, secondly, that he lived and could move.

  Then came a flurry, the sand gushed up, resettled. Another was beside him.

  She kneeled by him, and she could kneel, for she had legs and feet. Neither was she naked, a whirling, sea-lifted garment clothed her, held at her waist with a broad belt of cold gems, while her arms were ringed with bangles of pale and phosphorescent electrum. Her skin was white, whiter than human skin but glowing and flawless, and if it had the faintest tinge of greenness in it, this vanished at her lips, which were rose-red, at the rose-pink edges of her rounded nails, on the rose-pink embossment of her two round breasts which gleamed through the fabric of her gown. For her eyes, they were human enough, oddly human considering the rest, large and blue and the lids gilded. Only her hair admitted the sea. That was a blue mixed with green. Strangely, the exact color of Zhirem’s eyes.

  Some time she gazed at him. He returned her gaze, unnerved, perplexed, actually, not thinking her quite mortal. Then, with no modesty and no hesitation, she set her hand upon his loins, and stared at him without compunction, awaiting what he would do.

  No sensuality remained to him at that moment, besides, her touch was like the touch of the sea itself, impersonal and alien.

  He sat up and lifted her hand from him.

  At once she nodded. She put her hand instead to her left ear, then showed to Zhirem a glimmering drop, a pearl. Before he could comprehend, she had reached forward and pressed this drop into the cavity of his own left ear. Immediately, her lips began to move, she spoke, and he heard her—not through the water, but softly inside his ear where the drop of nacre had lodged. What she said, however, conveyed nothing. It was language, but not any language of man he had ever heard.

  Then she stopped speaking, leaned to him again and lightly tapped his mouth. He must speak, it seemed. He said:

  “Your speech and mine, woman, will not mingle.”

  He heard his own voice, as he had heard hers, inside his head. She heard it too, and listened, and after that kneeled beside him silently, as if deep in thought. Then at last she spoke again, and he understood her, for she spoke his own tongue.

  “Do not be discourteous to me,” she said. “My father is a king here.”

  “I have been less discourteous to you than you to me,” he answered.

  “If you mean that I set my hand upon your phallus, it was no discourtesy, but merely to ascertain if you were human. Generally, drowned men do not fall so far, and if they do, they are lifeless. Yet you live and seem a man. But since there are others in the sea who appear mortal and are rather less, I have tested you. For none are so prudent in the matter of their organs as humankind.”

  “That proved, how then do we hear and comprehend one another?”

  “Through the magic of the pearl. For speech itself, there are many differing peoples who dwell beneath the sea. Of necessity we learn each other’s languages, and also, for recreation, the tongues of men, for we are clever in such learning, and magicians.”

  “This I have been told.”

  “And this,” said she, “you did not believe, till now you must.”

  “I ask only one thing,” said Zhirem, “the means to regain the ocean’s surface.”

  “What will you do there, that you are eager to return?”

  Zhirem looked away from her. His heart became a stone. The sea-girl said to him: “The choice is not yours to make. You are in the kingdom of my father. He will decide your fate.” And Zhirem was almost gladdened, in a wretched way, that he must dismiss hope of his escape to the nothing that waited for him above. “How are you named?” she asked of him.

  “Zhirem,” he said.

  “And I,” she said, “the Princess Hhabaid, daughter of Hhabhezur the King of Sabhel.”

  Then she said she would not have him, a human, carried to her father’s city naked as one of the shark-maidens or whalemen, who were beasts. A weird conveyance stood nearby that Zhirem had not noticed earlier, and from this was brought a robe—like velvet but not velvet—and Zhirem was clad in it.

  “And why, princess, do you take such trouble with a human?” he inquired of her. “I am not of your tribe.”

  “The sea peoples come of human stock,” Hhabaid replied. “In most particulars, you will observe, we are human. Though more cunning.”

  She instructed him to enter the conveyance, which was the image of a fish of dull green-gold. Hhabaid sat down in the mouth of it and he beside her. The whale-men lifted up a shadowy veil and revealed the team that were to draw the carriage, and which now started alert—a shoal of minuscule gilt-colored fry, each with a silken bit and caught in a silken net to bind them in the shafts of the golden fish. Hhabaid guided them by tweakings and twists of this net, but for motivation they required only the open-jawed golden monster at their backs, thinking it an enemy which pursued to eat them. Forever they were in flight from it and it forever behind them, till the safe veil was flung over the shoal, and it supposed itself in security and sank to feed and sleep—till the veil’s next lifting, when again the awesome pursuit began. From this, more than anything else, Zhirem learned the people of the sea were cruel and callous, both with beasts, and as it must be, with men.

  Indeed, Hhabaid now ordered the whale-men up into the higher waters to search for any bounty which had come down with the drowned ship. For this purpose they set their recurrent spell of mist and lightning to wreck vessels on the rocks above, and for this purpose, to search for treasure from the wreck, had this princess come from her city with her retinue, believing such activities sport. Instead she had found Zhirem. Better sport?

  One of Hhabaid’s attendants touched the shell with a golden wand. Soundless, the shell folded together along all its ribs, a great fan for sure. When the way was clear through the rock, the gilded fry were permitted to dash forward.

  4

  The peoples of the sea were magicians. She had told him. It was a fact.

  An artificial sun burned over the city of Sabhel, giving it warmth, illumination and color. It was a globe of sorcerous glass, vivid with the miraculous fires that blazed within it. Thirty silver chains secured it to the cliffs that walled in the city, and in the glare and smoulder of it the water was the sunny yellow-green of canaries.

  Fish like rubies, opals and jades flocked through the sea-sky of Sabhel to bask in the radiance of the glass sun. Unusual plants resembling marine palms, giant tamarisks and cloud-haired cedars soared toward the heat and light of it, their stems wound with vines, sea weeds and yawning exotic flowers. Red orchids set flame to the sands and devoured the fish which came to perch on them.

  The city of Sabhel was something like the cities of earth, but how bizarre. Its colossal towers, pagodas and domes of polished red coral were fifty stories high or more, and pierced like needles by a thousand gates and archways and apertures like windows, their frames set with turquoise. But there were no staircases in Sabhel, for none had need of them, who could swim up or down at will through the water-air.

  The carriage of the Princess Hhabaid rushed through the water midway between the tower tops and the flower-grown floor, or street, of the city. At other levels, above or below them, similar conveyances raced b
ehind their permanently terrified teams.

  The palace of Hhabhezur was also of polished scarlet coral, but decorated with gold scales, smelted, so the story went, from the gold sunk with ten thousand ships. A rank of crystal pillars supported the porch of the palace, which was some seventy feet up from the “street.” In each of these pillars were embedded the fossilized figments of the ocean, marvelous shells, sea dragons, surreal vegetation.

  Hhabaid’s carriage drove within the palace. Here she checked their career by use of the net and bits, and ordered her attendants by gesture to veil the team of fry and stable them. She then conducted Zhirem to a vast chamber without a ceiling. All about, gold pipes sent up into the water a constant stream of perfumed dye of several colors, which subtly patterned and scented the sea inside the room. Near the room’s farther end was an enormous closed crystal tank mounted on four bronze turtles. In this tank Zhirem was amazed to see birds flying about among the flowers and foliage of dry land. A bubbling at the tank’s four corners and a hissing in and out at the mouths of the bronze turtles, gave some idea of an apparatus for drawing air from water—even as his own lungs and the lungs of his hostess-captor were doing. He assumed the closed tank to be filled with the gases of earth, and that the birds flew there as, in a room in the world above, fish might swim in a pool.

  The king entered, Hhabhezur. He was another proof that, though they preyed upon men, his people were humanly descended, for he showed signs of age, and his wickedness was drawn in lines about his mouth. For coloring he was not exactly of his daughter’s shade but swarthier, and his hair blue-sable, and all of him weighted with his stolen gold and his robes thick with it. Courtiers followed him, blue-haired and blue-eyed they were, and two or three brought their hunting dogs with them, slim blue swordfish on leashes.

  Hhabaid spoke to her father in the tongue of Sabhel. That she had sent word before her of the mysterious stranger was obvious.