Weird Tales, Volume 325

by Darrell Schweitzer

  He knew that he had, literally, all the time he needed.

  Therefore he lay back, in that simulacrum of a house on an island in the Land of the Dead, and dreamed a mighty dream, and in it someone walked on the porch of the house, and that someone stood over him where he lay. For an instant he thought it was some other, but he willed it to be his beloved, and in his dream it was she. In his dream, too, he awoke seven times, had his meals, studied from his books and sat at his familiar desk, writing into the one book he always carried with him in his leather bag.

  Each night, in his dream, she drew nearer. By some dream-given sight he saw her moving through the darkness like the light of a distant ship, drifting slowly nearer.

  He dreamed that he heard her voice, that, as he lay dreaming, she sat down beside the bed and combed his hair with a silver comb, pulling at the tangles, complaining humorously that even after so many centuries, he had never learned to keep himself neat.

  He dreamed that she sat beside him in the shadows and sang a most ancient and mysterious song predating all human languages, a song which can call back the setting sun and bid it rise again; and he dreamed that the sun rose in the west, out of the blackness of Tashé illuminating also Leshé and then he truly awoke, in that room, in broad daylight, the blue sky of Earth itself visible through the window.

  And the silver comb was on the nightstand beside the toy heron.

  And she was with him in the room.

  He got up. She stood before him, as a young girl, his own apparent age or perhaps a little older, framed in soft sunlight streaming through the window, clad in the crown and almost diaphanous robes of a princess of the Delta, a daughter of the Great King, though she was not the daughter of a king.

  Her feet were bare and the edges of her gown were damp. She had walked a long way upon the River, and up out of its depths.

  He drew her in his arms, yet her eyes were still closed. She stood like one in a trance, or walking in sleep. He kissed her very gently on the cheek and whispered, “Kanratica, open your eyes.”

  She opened them.

  He smiled and said, “It’s me.”

  “Sekenre?”

  “It’s been a long time,” he said.

  “For me the days are as a single twilight, and I do not count them.”

  “For me they are as a single morning, filled with expectancy …”

  He lost the train of thought. Perhaps they were both quoting some ancient poet. Now he felt very relieved and very tired. His days and nights had been as one, filled with the pain, fear, strugglings, and conjurations which allow the sorcerer no rest.

  Yet now, with her, he could rest. He held onto her hands, and she became more substantial to his touch. He led her out of the room, onto the porch, where they overlooked the sunlit Great River.

  “Tica,” he said, “I have called you back out of love, because I want us to be as we were before, forever.”

  “We lived one lifetime already,” she said. “Is that not enough?”

  “You know it is not.”

  She made to say something more, perhaps, but he hushed her with a finger — leaving a drop of blood on her lip — and then with a kiss, again, gently, warmly. For a time they sat on the porch dangling their feet over the edge into the water, and they both spoke and remembered the time when he had been truly young, before sorcery swept him away like a leaf in a torrent.

  For an instant, then, it seemed that he had truly reclaimed Time from out of the Crocodile’s mouth, and all the things that had happened these past three hundred years and more were as naught.

  But even as they sat there the sun faded, and the sky grew dark. When stars appeared, they were not those which shine upon Riverland, but the stars of the Death Country.

  Something else was on the porch with them in the darkness. It moved heavily, like a sack being dragged.

  Tica turned to him in alarm.

  “It’s all right,” he said, and again he broke one of the teeth off the necklace. Again he cut a finger, accidentally.

  The Moon rose. The porch was empty but for the two of them. He clutched the front of his tunic with bleeding fingers.

  “It’s nothing,” he whispered. “I’m fine. Let’s just sit here a while.”

  It was a release, to be here, as if he were letting go of so many burdens, as if he were sliding down a slope into cool, refreshing waters. All those other selves within him, the sorcerers he had variously conquered and murdered over the years, and their victims and their victims’ victims, all the souls accumulated within his crowded, shadowed mind, seemed to fade away. Another image came to him: of a serpent shedding its skin over and over, until all that was left was delicate and tiny and made of light.

  It was so seductive to go on like that forever.

  And it seemed that when he broke yet another of Surat-Kemad’s teeth from the necklace, he cut the palm of his hand, but there was no pain; and he arose with Kanratica and they two lived again through a perfect and quite ordinary day from their past life together. Nothing of particular note happened. She sang in the morning. She washed the sheets from the bed, chiding him for getting his muddy feet on them. He sat and wrote in his book, arranging his memories as a hoarder stacks coins, because they please him just so.

  The miracle was simply that they had this day, that at the end of it they lay down together as lovers, that they did in fact love one another with timeless ardor; that in the end, when they drifted off to sleep after lingering, pleasant reminiscences, he again dreamed.

  But there the miracle stopped. He dreamed that he was being devoured by crocodiles, right here in the bedroom, while she stood beside him, screamed, and could do nothing.

  There was someone else in the room, a huge and heavy figure with a long, inhuman face.

  III

  When he awoke, it was to the twilight and grey stars of the Deadlands. There was no roof overhead. The house was a ruin, much of its walls gone. The bed was damp and soggy and had collapsed in on itself.

  Kanratica helped him to his feet. He felt light-headed, a little weak, dizzy. But her grip was strong, steadying. He looked up into her face and saw that she was not a young girl anymore, but a woman, perhaps forty. A stranger might have taken her for his mother.

  But he had known her then too, and loved her then; for though sorcery preserved his body from age, he had passed through those years with her.

  Her expression was grave.

  “Sekenre. Don’t do this.”

  He broke free and stood, for a moment unsteadily. He waved her away.

  “No, no, I know — all will be well in the end.”

  “Will it?” She gazed at him.

  He looked where she looked and saw that his clothing was torn and sticky with blood in places.

  “I’ll — we’ll —” He looked at the ruined house and said, “but we will have to go someplace else.”

  He would take no argument from her. He, because he loved her, could not be angry. She, because she loved him, would not leave his side. Together they dismantled part of the house and built a reed boat. Then he took what little he could carry, his leather bag with the book he had been writing in, and the toy heron, and some stores and an extra blanket; and they two set out in the boat upon the River as the current carried them.

  But this was the Black River, which flows into the mouth of Surat-Kemad, on which the funeral boats of the dead are placed.

  Therefore Sekenre stood up in the bow of their reed boat while Tica held steady at the tiller; and he broke two more of the teeth of Surat-Kemad from the necklace and cast them into the air, commanding, first, the Moon of Earth to rise above the river and the marshlands — and it rose; and night-birds whirled overheard, shrieking — and then the Sun; and they drifted downstream in the full light of day, on the Great River, which follows through the waking world, and reaches the Delta and the City of the Delta and the Crescent Sea beyond.

  More than once, they passed ships on the water, even a war vessel of the G
reat King, sent upriver to enforce his will upon the Satraps.

  Throughout the long, hot, lazy day they drifted.

  “We’ll just go on forever like this,” he said.

  She shook her head sadly. There was wisdom in her eyes. She bandaged the cuts on his hands.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I’m a mighty sorcerer, remember?”

  “I thought,” she said slowly, “that was exactly what we were trying not to remember.”

  “Well, I —”

  And he broke another of Surat-Kemad’s teeth, and another, and another; and he commanded the sun and moon to flit about the sky like birds; and he called up all the days he and Kanratica had shared together, examining each as a hoarder lovingly examines each golden coin in his hoard. He wrote the stories of those days into his book, and the script, it seemed, curved forever in on itself like an infinite maze, and the pages, too, were infinite, so that he could turn them and turn back, and never find the same one twice. He lived all those days again, with her, suspended in time on the River, sometimes beneath the skies of Earth, sometimes in Dream, drifting again, backwards on the Black River, into Death.

  And he was drenched with blood. And he hurt. And he was very tired.

  And someone, huge and hunched with a long face walked on the water beside the boat, whispering in a voice that was scarcely a voice, “That’s right, Sekenre. Remember. Love. Remember. Enjoy every last minute of it. Let go of all else. Soon you shall be with her forever. Think of that and nothing more.”

  He awoke once and looked up through fevered eyes, too weak to rise, and he beheld Kanratica as an old woman, almost seventy; but he had known her during those years and loved her then, though to strangers he claimed to be her grandson, and their love was, indeed, very strange by then.

  “I know what I’m doing,” he said. “We’ll be fine. I know what we have to do.”

  “I know what we have to do,” she said.

  IV

  In the darkness, beneath the stars of Dream, the reed boat bumped against a wharf in the City of the Delta. The old woman didn’t bother to tie it up. She merely lifted her burden in her arms and climbed into the streets, straining at the effort.

  But she climbed. She walked. Sekenre, in her arms, lay dreaming.

  In the darkness, ghosts gathered around them like mist. Once they encountered an actual dreamer, a woman’s soul abroad from her body on some quest in a dream, and she alone seemed solid to them. Kanratica and this other conversed in the secret language of dreams, and Kanratica whispered of the wishes of the dead, and the other spoke of one who was neither quite dead nor alive, who swam among the evatim disguised as one of them, though he wore but a mask.

  This one, said the dreamer, was close at hand, and close to the completion of some project long labored upon.

  Kanratica thanked the dreamer and moved on.

  The evatim followed them through the streets, at a distance, but closer than before, as if they sensed that the power and protection of their master about these two was still present, but had diminished.

  Soon, perhaps, there would be feasting.

  Sekenre was awake now, in Kanratica’s arms. He reached up to the necklace he still wore, and broke a crocodile tooth, one, then another.

  They entered into the vast palace of black stone, where dwelt and dreamt the Great King of the Delta with all his court, and, moving among the dreams of the King and the courtesans and soldiers, drifting between squat pillars like shadows cast by flickering lanterns, they came to the throne room itself in the Hall of Audience.

  Clad now in dreams, halfway between waking and death, Sekenre and Kanratica wore the ornate garments and beehive-shaped crowns of a king and queen of the Delta.

  He wrote the history of their long, joint reign into his book.

  But he was bleeding so much. Blood poured down his legs, over his feet.

  He understood, dimly, that all the old wounds of his sorceries, which had been healed by sorcery, had opened up, as if someone had discovered the secret keys to each of them and unlocked the elements of his mortality, one by one.

  Kanratica, now very old, said to him, “Sekenre, you’ve had enough.”

  “No,” he said. “We’ll be fine. I love you —”

  “But no sorcerer,” she said, sorrowing, “may ever love. He dare not. It is too dangerous. He needs his strength to go on, so he might be the last and face down the gods at the end of time.”

  “With you beside me,” he said, “sure, I could do that.”

  “Sekenre, enough,” she said. And she said another word, “Kazat.”

  He was unable to stop her as she snatched the necklace from him, breaking the string. Crocodile teeth scattered down the marble steps before their thrones.

  Sekenre screamed. For an instant he saw Kanratica standing before him, wrapped as a mummy, her hands crossed upon her breast. Her eyes were open. She spoke inside his mind.

  “Kazat,” she said. “You have fallen victim to a kazat.”

  “What?”

  “You know perfectly well what. You lived in Reedland far longer than I.”

  He did know that there was a species of water-lizard called a kazat, which had the unique property of breathing dreams into the water to daze its prey, so that a small fish would just drift, dreaming ecstatic fishy dreams and feeling no fear, even as the kazat devoured it. The blood of the kazat was used in medicine, to take away pain.

  It was some struggle to focus his mind, to figure out what this odd lecture in natural history meant, why it was relevant now.

  He heard the teeth of Surat-Kemad trickling down the marble steps like pebbles.

  And the thought did come to him: What if in the midst of the dream, the dreamer awoke?

  And he thought he heard Tica’s reply, “Then he would lose the dream, but lose it he must. Therefore, awake!”

  “Won’t the kazat be surprised?”

  “Yes, he will.”

  V

  Tica was gone. The palace was gone. Sekenre, returning to himself, lay among reeds, beneath a black sky filled with the grey stars of Leshé the country of dreams, which faded into the fainter and stranger constellations of Tashé Death.

  Someone great and heavy leaned over him. This other stank of mud and of the river. He leaned down and touched Sekenre with his great claws, tearing away the front of his tunic, tracing the ancient wounds which had now begun to bleed again.

  He took off his crocodile mask and leaned close to whisper, “Sekenre, son of Vashtem, now is the day when you offer what I want, which is your soul, and the souls of all those captive within you.”

  Sekenre, like one in a fever, but who has just come out of a delirium, lay still and began to recite in a faint voice.

  “The sorcerer cannot pray, nor can he weep, nor has he any friends, nor knows he joy, nor can he love —”

  The other leaned lower to hear, then whispered, laughing softly, “Well, you and I have had some experience, and we know that it’s a little more complicated than that.”

  “Kazat,” said Sekenre.

  The other ignored him and went on. “How lucky we’ve been able to have this little chat —”

  “Kazat. The sorcerer cannot afford to believe in luck,” said Sekenre as, with the last of his strength, he drove the long, thin knife he always carried upward into his enemy’s heart.

  For that instant, Tica was with him, helping him push the knife up, up, up. For ghosts do return, particularly if one breaks and scatters the teeth of Surat-Kemad.

  “Kazat,” she whispered. Awaken! The sorcerer cannot afford to dream. Kazat!”

  Together, they found the enemy’s life, and took it.

  And then there was no need or possibility of explaining anything, as the heavy body fell upon Sekenre, and blood poured over him; and the soul of the slain sorcerer poured into him; and among the multitudes imprisoned within the enemy and now transferred into Sekenre’s mind was a certain Regash from the land of Thain, which lies beyond th
e Crescent Sea; and this Regash, whose secret name was Avedamas, which means “The Serpent Who Drinks” contained within him the minds and souls of a thousand other sorcerers, and the echoes of all the sorcerers those had ever murdered, echoing unto nightmare infinity.

  Somewhere from those depths had come the suggestion that this Sekenre, who had retained far more humanity than was common for sorcerers, could be despoiled by the illusion or memories of love — even as the kazat lulls its victims with beautiful dreams — and therefore this Regash had labored for many years to gain the teeth of Surat-Kemad, casting down thrones and kingdoms, massacring countless innocents, paying such great tribute to Death Himself that such a thing became possible.

  And now Regash and Sekenre were one, and their crimes were one, and their thousand souls were one; and rage, memory, fear all flowed together, like a swollen torrent, bearing that which was still Sekenre like a fallen leaf, farther and farther away from Kanratica, whom he loved.

  He tried to reach to her, to feel the warmth of her touch, but he felt only the cold mud and the weight of his enemy’s corpse upon him.

  All he could do was crawl out from under that corpse, which he saw now was barely half-human and did indeed have a crocodile’s tail. He lay down in the mud beside it for a day and a night, healing himself once more with sorcery, making himself that much more dependent on sorcery, that much less mortal and human, less able to turn aside from the path which must lead him to the end of time and a confrontation with the gods.

  * * * *

  In the night, beneath the stars of Death, then of Dream, then merely of Earth, his wounds glowed like pale fire. While he lay there, he searched deep within himself for the enemy’s identity, that one who had claimed to have been a friend from the old days, from Sekenre’s own childhood … but that person was like a name in a palimpsest, erased and written over so many times that the original was completely lost.

  Therefore he thought about Tica, and could bring her name and her face and her voice into memory, but only as a memory.