Night's Master (10 page)
Authors: Tanith Lee
A man lived
in the hills above Zojad. He was a hermit, a priest. His dwelling was a cave,
furnished with simple things, woven hangings of coarse plain cloth and a bed of
matting, and some magic too. The people of the villages round about brought him
their sick to heal, or came to ask his counsel. Once or twice a year he would
travel from place to place to speak words over their crops and pray for rain or
sun, whichever they required. In return they gave him such small things as he
needed—a bit of rope, an earthenware bowl, and every few days something would
be left a little way from his home, a pot of honey or a loaf or a basket of
fruit. No one came close to the cave. If they wished to speak to him, they
would stand on the slope nearby and call, for, although he was a hermit, he did
not live quite alone. Beasts would sometimes share his cave, the wolf, the
bear, even the lion. He had no fear of them, the holy man, nor they of him.
They came and went as they pleased, and their eyes met often, the golden eye of
the creature with the dark quiet eye of the priest.
On the night that Zojad burned, the priest smelled the smoke and heard
the distant thunder. He went up to the hilltop and saw the glare on the sky’s
edge. The moon was blue from the smoke, and once a large bird flew over it and
its wings made a sound like bone-dry laughter in the air.
The priest watched all night on the hill. Near dawn he fell into a kind
of dream or trance. He saw the smoke on the long paved road that led to Zojad
and heard the jackals barking, and a horrible thin wailing rose up from the
thickets at the roadside. The priest came to himself with a shock. He rose and
hurried, compelled, down from the hills toward the city,
The sun was rising when he reached the road. It was quite deserted, no
one had come from Zojad for a long while, not even the soldiers of the sixteen
kings, who had still much business there. Three jackals had found the body of
the old woman—but the priest noticed on the pavement beside them a golden
anklet which they had discarded, having no use for it. Next he saw a fourth
jackal, and this one had in its jaws the tiny body of an infant.
The baby no longer screamed. It was little better than dead, and dangled
from the jackal’s mouth like a disjointed doll. Nevertheless, the
hermit-priest, with that curious understanding common to his kind, felt
emanating from it the faintest flickering of life.
He stood quite still and said to the jackal: “My brother, I am sorry to
deny you, but what you carry still lives, and therefore you have no right to
it.”
The jackal pricked its ears, and its eyes met the eyes of the priest.
What it saw there, only the jackal knew, but it laid down the baby very
carefully, shook its forefeet as if ridding them of dust or blame and ran to
join the other three at their grisly but blameless feast.
The priest went and took up the child. He looked at its wounds and
covered it over with his cloak and strode quickly homewards. There, in the
cave, he tended it, set its poor broken limbs as best he could, although he
knew its arms could never now grow straight, and doctored the terrible
disfigurement of its minute face, and gave it a medicine to drink mixed with
goats’ milk. He worked skillfully and with compassion. He did not waste any
time in lament or useless anger, though the state of the child might have moved
anyone to either or both. He had a ruthless tenderness. He wept neither for the
dead nor the living. He did what he could, and trusted that the gods, also,
would do as much.
While she was
a little girl, Zorashad’s daughter was happy enough, though in a curious way,
compatible with her surroundings and manner of existence. For life in the cave
was calm, oblique and absorbing, and she learned there calm, oblique, absorbing
lessons—the skills of the clean earth magic which the priest practiced. She
learned too those channels of magic she must beware—sorcery, necromancy, all
those avenues which men approached at risk of sanity, soul and ego itself, but
she saw them only like a row of black doorways, forever closed, and had no
desire to knock on them or find out keys.
During this time she was ignorant of herself, as only a creature lost in
external things can be. Indeed, she was hardly conscious of herself—she was all
ear and eye and thought. She had never seen into a mirror, never looked at her
marred face; she had never wept in outraged horror at the scarred and twisted
flesh, nor marvelled bitterly at the cream-smooth brow, the large eyes and
copper hair which her perverse destiny had left her. Despite her crippled arms,
her body was beautiful; she never noticed it, it made few demands. And though
sometimes these arms, warped like winter trees, would gnaw and burn with pain,
she never cried out in anger at the fate which made her suffer it. Through her
short life she had suffered intermittently so, and there was always the gentle
priest with his salve, and the leopard with its torn side wounded more sorely
than she. All her days were elements, sun, snow, shadow, wind, clear water,
blowing grass, the gathering of herbs, the making of spells, the serene hours
of lessons. All her nights were warm dark red coals on the hearth, and golden
coals of beast eyes smouldering softly.
Sometimes the priest would go on a journey and would not take her, but
she did not mind this. He left her behind to care for their home, to tend any
animals who might come there. She had never spoken to a human, save for the
priest. He had made sure of that, knowing, without rancour, how the human tribe
might treat her. When men and women came to the cave for aid, she peeped at
them through the curtain with the fox and the bear, and only the priest went
out. She had a sort of innocence, a sweetness, despite her deformities, that
sprang from an uncrippled brain and an open heart. She had never been censured,
ridiculed, reviled, hated.
One day, when she was fifteen, the priest was from home. He had gone to
pray over the crops of the villages. At noon, when she was mixing herbs in the
cave, she heard the sound of horses’ hooves outside, and went quickly to look
out from her hiding place. No one before had ever come when the priest was away,
for the villagers knew the times of his absences and they feared the cave and
the wild beasts. Yet these visitors had not traveled from any village or lonely
farm. Even she, who had never seen such worldly magnificence before, recognized
it instinctively when she saw it, and she was very awed.
Ten horses stood outside, fretting, white or ebony, and caparisoned in
gold and silver. Each had a rider, all dressed in a radiance of silk, metal and
jewels as bright as the moon, but the young man who sat his horse in front of
them was to her like the sun itself.
She never dreamed that he would speak, supposed he would simply pass on,
as the sun does, illuminating but not communicating with the world.
When he called out suddenly, it frightened her, for it seemed too real.
“You there, hermit,” he cried scornfully, “come and heal us for we are
sick.”
And the whole company laughed uproariously.
Zorashad’s daughter stared out through the curtain at him, and a new
sensation took hold of her. She guessed abruptly that he mocked the priest, and
had come here only for that purpose, but this was a little thing compared to
the fascination the sight of the young man exerted over her. All at once, his
reality, his mockery even, excited her. He was wondrous, but actual. A part of
the earth she knew. She became all joy, all amazement. She had asked nothing
from the leopard, only to worship and tend him, and he had suffered her without
flinching. Now she asked only to worship the young man on the white horse.
Compelled, unconsidering, unaware of self, all ear and eye and thought,
she came out of the cave and stood on the slope, gazing up at him.
Her ugliness, of which she had never been told, was so frightful that the
young riders drew back in alarm. But presently the beautiful young man, who was
a king and a king’s son, realizing that she was, though vile and crippled, only
human, halted and laughed again.
“Gods of Upper Air defend us!” he cried, “what apparition is this?”
Then, seeing her large eyes fixed on him, and becoming uneasy after all,
he demanded:
“What are you staring at, you stupid monster?”
“At you,” said she, “because you are so fair.”
She spoke without apology or embarrassment, in her spontaneous gentle
way. But one of the king’s companions shouted:
“Don’t trust her. She wants to blast you, my lord, to make you as hideous
as herself. Surely she is a demoness, and has the ill-eye. Her arms are crooked
as sticks.”
At this the king took up his whip, and slashed her across the cheek and
neck with it. Zorashad’s daughter fell down without a word.
“One scar more will make no odds to that face,” the king told her. “Go
masked in future, or you’ll sour the wine in the skin, and the milk in the cow,
and break every looking glass in the land.”
She had always been quick to learn; it had been her talent. Now she
learned quickly too.
The king rode away into the woods with his friends to chase the deer with
arrows, and Zorashad’s daughter lay where she was, with the pain of the whip
still raking her cheek. and the pain of that other whip, worse than the first,
the whip of his cruel tongue, raking her heart.
This was how the priest found her when he came back in the dusk with the
fireflies wooing his lamp.
He saw some great misfortune had fallen on her; no doubt he guessed well
enough the nature of it. It had been only good luck that he had shielded her so
long from herself. Besides, he was old now, and could not protect her for ever.
He asked no questions. but stroked her hair a little while, then went in and
made up the fire. Soon she followed him, and raised her dreadful face to his.
“Why,” she said softly, “did you never tell me what I am?”
“You are yourself,” he said. “What more need you know?”
“No, I am not myself, for always I thought myself the same as the rest of
human-kind. Now I learn I am a monster, with an appearance to laugh and tremble
at, and twisted limbs—a man came here today and told me so, and when he was
gone, I looked at myself freshly, and I went to the pool and waited there till
the ripples were still, and so I saw all he had said, and worse. If you found
me at birth, why did you not kill me? Why leave me to suffer this?”
“That was not my choice,” said the priest, “but yours. If you cannot bear
to live as you are, you know enough to mix yourself a drink to end all sorrow,
and I will not prevent you, though I should grieve at it.”
At this the girl wept, for she loved life as do most living things who
have known a little freedom and happiness in the world.
The priest comforted her, and said:
“Sit here, and I will tell you something of yourself. You are not whole,
for you have no past, no reason to explain your burdens and your misery. This I
will give you. Then you shall decide what is to be done.”
So he told her everything, for he knew everything. How he knew it is not
certain. Perhaps he deduced the story from the gossip of the villagers, the
golden anklet which the jackals left aside, the royal robe the child was
wrapped in. Perhaps he discovered it another way, a stranger
way. . . . Whatever it was, he knew, and soon, so did she, all
of it, from the time of Zorashad’s mastery to the coming of the Prince of
Demons, from the extinction of the amulet to the dead nurse, the disfigured
baby.
When the priest had finished, she sat silently for a little. Then she
said:
“So I am the thirteenth daughter of a dead tyrant. What of his city
Zojad?”
“Zojad is rebuilt on its own ruins.”
“Who then rules in the tyrant’s place?”
“A king, the son of one of the sixteen kings who rose against Zorashad.”
“This king’s son,” she said, “something tells me that the man who spoke
to me today was such a one. Can it have been he who rules there?”
And the priest did not answer.
She was not
as she had been, (how could she be?) though she took up once more the calm and
useful life of the acolyte. She never spoke again of her pain, within or
without. Her spontaneity was gone, and her joy. Her eyes now, looking at
something beautiful, a leaf, a beast, a sky, were full of an empty and
unrealized hunger. And also now, when the moon rose like a silver omen above
the land, there was no longer worship or wonder in her face, and when the
seasons added their veils of different color to the forests and the hills, she
only said: “Now it is winter, now it is summer,” never anything else. One more
thing had altered with her. She had taken to wearing a mask of cloth that hid
all her face save the lovely brow and eyes, and gloves on her ruined yet agile
hands.
Then the old priest died, and part of her died with him, the most
essential part of her, her sense of purpose. He passed with peace from the
world, she was left anguished in it. She wept upon his wooden breast and
presently buried him and stood in the comfortless silence.
In the months which followed, few came to the cave for healing, only
travelers from remote villages who had not yet learned of the priest’s death.
On the very day of his burial, a woman had stood with a sick baby and cried for
help on the slope. When the strange masked girl came out, with her red-hot hair
and leaden tread, the woman ran back a little way and cried: “No, no, not
you—where is the priest?”
“He is dead,” said the girl, and automatically she added, because she had
inherited his medicines and the duty, if not the actuality, of his compassion:
“Is it the child? I can help him—” And the woman, sensing everything about her,
even through the mask and the low voice—all the ugliness and the bitter
unlovingness—made a sign against evil, and fled. This was like a wound, a new
wound made in the old, not became the girl felt herself hated, more because she
had failed the priest.