Alhazred

by Donald Tyson

  The narrow but well-traveled path wound beneath tall trees that cut off the light of the sun like a green curtain. So densely grew the undergrowth on either side a man would have found difficulty to force his way through it. At one place I encountered a great tree fallen across the path that no one had troubled to remove. I was forced to climb awkwardly over the moss-encrusted trunk with the aid of my walking staff, blood singing in my ears from the effort. I would have expected the canopy of trees to be filled with chattering birds, but the forest lay quiet, as though under a spell of sleep. The buzz of insects circling my head to bite my flesh was the only living sound not of my making.

  There was a rankness in the heavy air of mingled pestilence and decay. I soon perceived the reason. The path undulated into a fen of evil-smelling pools and wet black mud. The floor of the forest became more open, but no easier to traverse. Anyone foolish enough to wander from the path into the swamps would quickly fall into some mud-filled sinkhole or hidden well and be lost forever. A mist hung like smoke just above the tall grasses, concealing the details of the ground from the eyes of those who might attempt to walk across it. The path was well marked by large white stones set at intervals on each of its sides, and in low-lying areas had been built up with rocks and earth so that it traversed the marsh like a meandering causeway. As I walked its length, I could almost imagine it to be the spine of the Great Serpent.

  The lodge of shamans occupied a small island of firm ground in the midst of the fen. In form it was much like the long house of N’golo, but its walls were constructed of timber instead of brick. Smaller huts surrounded it. A rippling column of white smoke rose from a fire before one of the lesser structures, tended by a naked black woman who crouched on her heels and stirred with a stick the crackling embers beneath a sooty brass pot so that a cloud of sparks ascended through the hanging curtain of mist. Within the pot bubbled gray liquid. She was completely bald both on her head and between her thighs, but since she did not look much older than thirty years or so, I guessed that she had been shaved.

  As I watched, a fly of the type that had so often bitten me along the path flew through the column of smoke and steam, and fell down into the pot as though it had struck a stone wall. She made a clucking sound in her throat and flicked the fly out on the tip of her stick. A younger black woman in the advanced stages of pregnancy, who was equally hairless and naked, emerged from a different hut with something that wriggled in her hands and proceeded to spit the thing on the sharpened point of a long wooden stake driven into the ground. When she stepped back, I saw that it was a large frog. It continued to struggle with the bloody stake extending out its gasping open mouth.

  The older woman tending the fire looked at me knowingly and murmured to the younger, who laughed. I did not catch her words, but noticed that both of them appeared to have no teeth. I was more surprised by their lack of adornment than the absence of clothing, which was rendered additionally obscene by the smoothness between their legs. As I made my way past them toward the open door of the lodge, I looked around for dogs or children, but saw no signs of either. Nor were any guards posted. Faint groaning came from the interior of one of the huts, a dismal, tormented sound.

  A young shaman walked around the edge of the lodge and noticed me. He approached at a casual gait, showing no surprise. A woven loincloth covered his groin. Rings of bright feathers around his arms and ankles were his only other apparel, apart from a necklace of finger bones. The top of his head was shaved down its center like that of his master. Stopping in front of me, he examined me with his dark eyes the way a farmer will examine his livestock. Had he attempted to touch me, I would have cut off his hand. I was prepared to be prodded by the king and the chief shaman, but not by any other inhabitant of this repellent land. He seemed to sense my antagonism and snorted to himself. With a negligent wave, he gestured for me to follow him and led me into the lodge.

  The left end of the dim interior was dominated by a great statue of black stone carved in the shape of Tsathoggua, that rested on a low dais of gray stone. The god appeared to sit leaning forward in a throne, his curiously human hands curled over the arms of the seat, his bulbous eyes staring down in contempt, a superior and knowing smile on his grotesquely broad mouth. Before the statue stood a low stone pedestal with a shallow stone basin mounted on its top, filled with some noxious oily liquid that rippled as I glanced into it, as though aware of my attention. In color it was like a mixture of ink and blood.

  Lo’oka’s throne dominated the opposite end of the lodge. In size and shape, it resembled the throne of his god, and was carved from ebony. The chief shaman sat perched on the edge of its seat, his hideously thin body like that of a starved child in the seat of an elder. Behind the throne stood lesser shamans in parody of the advisors of N’golo. None carried a weapon. Near the throne, a naked hairless woman balanced a pitcher of glazed clay on the generous swell of her hip. Lo’oka held out the gold goblet in his hand without looking at her, and she filled it from the pitcher.

  All eyes were on me as I entered, but no one spoke. The insolent young shaman who preceded me stepped around a post embedded in the clay floor near the center of the lodge, and as I blinked my eyes in the shadows, I saw that tied to it was a kneeling black man. His arms were bound behind his back around the post, and he hung facing Tsathoggua with his head dangling down from his shoulders, unconscious or dead. Patches of skin were missing from his back and the tops of his thighs. A triangle had been drawn on the floor around the stake with lines of white sand. As I followed the shaman past the stake, I took care not to break the line of the triangle, which pointed toward the statue of the toad god. The stake was daubed with blood, and the scent of drying blood hung thick on the air. Buzzing flies made the only comment.

  Lo’oka upended his goblet and passed it back to the woman, then stood lightly from his seat and approached me. The other shamans gathered around us on bare feet in a circle, standing near enough that I might have reached out and touched them. It was some consolation that none of them wore a knife or sword. I tightened my grip on the walking staff in my right hand. A shiver ran through my body that I could not suppress. One of the shamans chuckled softly in the belief that I was frightened. His black eyes were without compassion. Glancing from face to face, I saw only amusement, mild interest, superiority, contempt. They looked at me as palace nobles might regard a deformed animal brought before them for their entertainment.

  “I have come for an antidote to the poison known as the black ichor,” I said in their language, coughing from the effort it cost me to speak.

  “Look at his eyelids,” Lo’oka said to the man beside him. “Do you see the shadows?”

  The younger shaman nodded, eyeing me narrowly.

  “Why is he still alive?”

  “Enchantment,” the chief shaman said. “Nothing else could stop the black death.”

  They began to murmur amongst themselves, speculating over what charms would be effective against the poison. One of them reached out to touch my face. I shrugged the woolen blanket from my shoulders, and with my left hand drew my dagger half out of its sheath. He stared into my eyes, then stepped back.

  “Do you have the antidote?” I demanded of Lo’oka, who seemed to have forgotten that I stood before him.

  He turned his malignant gaze upon me and showed the tiny gleaming pearls of his teeth.

  “Why should we act to spare your life?”

  “I have wealth. Jewels of uncommon rarity.”

  Tucking the shaft of my staff beneath my left arm for support, I opened my purse and poured several gems amid coins of gold and silver onto my palm, then held it up to the shaman. The greater number of jewels remained tied in a rag in my coat, but I had no intention of displaying them. His eyes narrowed in his skull-like face as he studied the glittering stones. Before he could pluck one between his fingers, I closed my fist and returned them to my purse. Anger f
lared redly in the depths of his gaze.

  “Ugly man, I think we will take your jewels and let you die. We want to watch how long the ichor takes to kill you.”

  Thrusting through the ring of shamans, who made no resistance, I drew my sword. Lo’oka tittered, and I saw sly smiles on their faces. He raised his feather-ringed bone wand and began to gesture upon the air and mutter under his breath. From behind me I heard a gurgling, but did not dare turn my head.

  “It would be unwise to kill a servant of Nyarlathotep,” I told him. “It was he who sent me to the Besari to be cured.”

  The bony shaman stopped his incantation. The mention of the dark god’s name caused the other shamans to draw away from me, as though the sound itself were a contagion.

  “You lie.”

  I thrust my face forward.

  “You have the sight. See his mark.”

  Lo’oka came nearer until his breath touched my lips. It stank of death. He stared hard, as though trying to see through a solid block of stone. For a moment I feared he would not perceive what others saw so clearly. At last, he stepped back, his expression thoughtful.

  “He has the mark,” he murmured to his companions, who stood in the depths of the shadows, watching me.

  The young man who had led me into the lodge stepped forward.

  “What of it? There is no love between Tsathoggua and the dark wanderer.”

  “Would you have the man with no face for an enemy?” I asked Lo’oka.

  For several heartbeats he considered my words, then shrugged. He beckoned the woman, who had stood in the background, to come forward, and whispered into her ear. She glanced at me, nodded, and left the lodge. I felt the shamans in the shadows on either side relax and move slowly to the throne behind their leader. The burbling noise ceased. I risked a glance over my shoulder but could find no source for it. Within minutes, the hairless woman returned bearing with care between her hands a shallow clay bowl. She approached me, her expression passive and unreadable, and extended the bowl. I took it in my right hand and saw the dark surface of the liquid it contained tremble.

  “Drink, and find the peace you seek,” Lo’oka said.

  Raising the bowl to my lips, I hesitated. Was it the antidote, or a poison? The woman before me met my eyes. I saw her nod imperceptibly. Her expression remained impossible to interpret.

  It will kill or cure, Sashi, I spoke into my mind.

  Drink deep, my love.

  The words of the djinn decided me. I put the foul-smelling liquid to my cracked lips and filled my mouth, then drank it in a single swallow. Showing no emotion, the woman removed the empty bowl from my hand and walked with graceful strides from the lodge.

  It burned in my throat. The burning spread to my stomach. I felt it seep through my flesh into my limbs, and in the space of a minute it reached my extremities. Even my breath felt hot as I gasped in shock. It was like being hit on the bare skin with scalding water, save that it flowed inside my body. I expected at any moment to fall dead, but the lack of exultation in the features of the chief shaman reassured me. The malice had not departed, but lay beneath the surface. He continued to watch as I balanced on my walking staff, struggling to keep my feet while the shadows slid sideways and the sound of rushing water came and went in my ears.

  After a while I noticed that the burning had departed from my joints, and that I no longer shivered. Dizziness began to recede.

  “Will I live?” I asked, my voice rough in the rawness of my throat.

  The chief shaman came forward. I suffered him to peer beneath my eyelids and prod the sides of my neck. Smiling with his tiny slit of a mouth, he nodded.

  “How much do you ask in payment?”

  He waved his bony hand with a negligent gesture. I stared at him.

  “You ask no payment for saving my life?”

  He shook his head, and would not meet my eyes. Instead, he turned and went back to sit on the edge of his throne. He drew down one of the shamans standing behind him and began to murmur in conversation with the other man. Neither paid any attention to me. I realized that I had been dismissed.

  Backing warily toward the doorway, I perceived that something had changed in the appearance of the kneeling corpse bound to the stake. For a moment my mind failed to register the difference. Then I realized that the bowed head of the corpse had been stripped of skin, exposing its bloody skull. Something bubbled before the altar of the toad god. I cast a glance at the stone basin and saw ripples on the surface of the dark liquid, though no breeze penetrated the entrance.

  It was a profound relief to stand beneath the open sky. The sun resembled a red ball through the thickened curtain of mist that had continued to gather while I argued for my life in the lodge. Leaning on my staff, I walked with measured strides past the woman crouched before the fire. She did not raise her head to glance at me. Out of one of the huts came a faint mewing, but whether from a human throat or that of an animal, I could not determine.

  When I traced with trembling steps the stone-lined path back to the fortification wall of Tyroon, I found Martala pacing nervously back and forth outside the opened gate of the shamans. She saw me with relief and ran along the path to help me.

  “Another minute and I would have followed you,” she said.

  I waved her aside. Breathing deeply, I discovered that I no longer needed the support of the staff and gave it to her to carry.

  “Did you get the antidote?”

  “Yes. I am growing stronger.”

  Before I could prepare myself, she grabbed me around the neck and covered my face with kisses. I would have fallen, but she caught me under the arm and held me until my balance returned.

  “I am sorry, Alhazred,” she said with embarrassment. “I am happy that you will not die.”

  “Let’s get out of this forest. I don’t trust the shamans.”

  We passed through the toad-emblazoned door and shut it behind us. I wished there were some way to bolt it, but reflected that if the shamans wanted to enter Tyroon, there were probably a dozen ways for them to do so. The guard who had escorted me to the door had long since departed, Martala told me.

  “Where is your blanket?” she asked.

  I remembered shrugging it off my shoulders so that I could draw my dagger.

  “It doesn’t matter. I don’t need it any longer.”

  “Come with me.” She drew me along by the hand as though I were her aged grandfather. “I rented us a room for the night.”

  To call it a room was to accord it a level of distinction it failed to merit. It was a sleeping mat in the corner of a hut shared by the owner, his fat wife, and three squalling brats. The youngest never ceased to cry. I heard it from some distance as we approached the hut, a series of short piercing wails delivered as rapidly as the creature could draw breath into its tiny lungs. The two older children engaged in an obscure familial warfare that had no beginning or end, merely periods of uneasy truce. They ceased striking each other with their fists long enough to stare at me as I stopped in front of the doorway, with Martala holding my arm.

  The owner was out, but his wife flashed me a gap-toothed smile and nodded affably from her seat upon the doorstep. She did not stand, but moved to one side to allow us to pass. We entered the dim interior of the small but odorous mud structure and stood over the dirty woven layer of river reeds that was to be our bed. The only amenity was a curtain of ragged brown cloth that hung on a cord, partially shielding the corner occupied by the mat from the rest of the interior. The sleeping mats of the family stood rolled up along a wall, but presumably would be laid flat on the floor beside ours during the night.

  “Is this the best you could do?”

  Martala frowned at me and stamped her shoe on the clay floor.

  “Tyroon has no inns. No one ever comes to visit this place. At l
east it is a roof over us.”

  I looked around in resignation.

  “I suppose a bath is out of the question?”

  She smiled in spite of her petulance.

  “Are you hungry?”

  Pausing to reflect on the question, I discovered that I did have an appetite. Hardly surprising, since I had been able to keep no food in my stomach for almost two days. I nodded.

  “Good. I will buy bread and fruit from the market. Wait for me.”

  She left before I could answer. Exhaling deeply, I went to the mat, and with the aid of the wall lowered myself into a sitting posture upon it. The clay of the wall felt cool against my back through my coat. Even though my body recovered rapidly from the poison, I was exhausted with a weariness that went so deep, it seemed to penetrate my very bones. I closed my eyelids to rest them for a moment.

  The next I knew, Martala knelt beside me, holding a shallow wooden bowl to my lips. I drank from it and discovered that it held warm goat’s milk. So great was my thirst, I had no impulse to spit it out. She set down the bowl and tore a corner from a flat loaf of bread. I took it from her and held it to my face to chew on it. My hand seemed almost to float independent of my body, such was the fatigue of my muscles. Everything ached, though not with the sharp ache of the poison, but the softer, more relaxed ache of a bruise that mends itself.

  “Where will we go now, Alhazred?”

  Closing my eyes, I leaned my head back against the coolness of the wall, and considered the matter.

  “I have heard that many rare books are for sale in Alexandria. It may be possible to convert the scroll I stole from the Order of the Sphinx into something more useful.”

  “Didn’t you steal the scroll to keep it?”

  “What need have I for the scroll? I was the scribe who copied it. No, I took it because I knew it had great value.”

  “What does it teach?”

  I recalled that Martala had not been able to understand the language of the ancient necromancer, even though she had been present during his questioning. Swallowing the last of the bread, I licked my lips and again closed my eyes. The floor seemed to move under my buttocks, but I knew it was only dizziness.