Night's Master (16 page)

“I am Mirrash,” the stranger said. “I hear someone has died already of
the diamond curse. You will have more deaths unless you listen to me.” And he
reminded them of the bane the diamonds carried, that only those to whom the
jewels had been sincerely given might enjoy them in safety.

“My brother gave the diamonds to Zorayas, but she has gone away. If any
of you to whom they were not given should attempt to keep them, they will kill
you, one by one.”

As always, somebody scoffed and said he scorned the curse, and took a
diamond collar and put it around his neck. Mirrash shrugged, and soon the man
was discovered, blue in the face and unequivocally deceased.

Then they were in a hurry to give the gems back to their rightful owner.
Diamonds poured into the casks and boxes Mirrash had brought with him, the
casks and boxes were loaded into carts, and mules and outriders attached to
them.

Presently Mirrash, with all his family’s hoard of treasure restored, got
on to his new horse, which Zorayas’ steward had insisted he take, and rode away
towards the desert, grimly smiling, with his back to the setting sun.

BOOK THREE:

The World’s Lure

PART ONE

1. Honey-Sweet

She was so
beautiful, and so gentle that they called her Honey-Sweet—though her name was
Bisuneh. Her hair grew to the ground; it was the pale delicate greenish-yellow
of primroses. She was the daughter of a poor scholar, and they lived in a city
by the sea. Honey-Sweet Bisuneh was soon to be married, to the handsome son of
another poor scholar. While the fathers had muttered in the library over
antique volumes, the daughter and the son had wandered in the shady garden
among the roses and beneath the burnished leaves of the ancient fig tree, and
first their hands had touched, and next their lips and their young bodies, and
presently their hearts and minds. There followed various promises and
pledgings, various exchanges of gifts. Since weddings were expensive, foxy
prostitutions of art took place—one old scholar composing a lament on the death
of a lord which brought tears to the eyes, and considerable silver; another old
scholar dedicating his translation of some long dead poet to a prince in a
white palace, which brought gold. Both the scholars’ wives were dead. They
looked at their children fondly, this invasion of youth and passion in their
dry houses scented only with the dust of books.

It was a month before the wedding.

Beautiful Bisuneh and two pretty friends sat in the twilight garden,
under the ancient fig tree. Overhead the stars grew bright, and far below the
sea rippled like the back of a dusky, slowly swimming crocodile.

“I know a spell,” said one pretty friend. “It will show how many children
you will have.” The other friend was afraid, did not like spells. “Oh, it is a
simple thing. A few words, a lock of Bisuneh’s hair, a pebble thrown.”

Still the friend was reluctant, but Bisuneh was curious. She wanted, she
declared, three tall sons, and three slender daughters. No more, no less.

So, under the dapple of the fig leaves and the stars between, they made
their magic. It was such a small one. Generally it would have gone unnoticed.
But to a demon, the slightest whiff of magic was like a lure.

One of the Eshva was not far off, adventuring on the night time earth,
idling by the dark waves of the shore. He scented the spell like a well
remembered flower. The Eshva were the most oblique of all the echelons of the
Underearth, and the most inclined to dream and to romance, and this one no
different.

In his male shape he climbed the shore road, clothed in the gathering
night, now floating in the air. He reached the wall of the garden, looked
through a crack a bird could scarcely have found.

He observed two pretty girls, one radiant girl.

A pebble leaped and rang on the stone paving.

“Why,” said the first pretty girl, “there are no children here at all.
And yet, wait—yes. One child. A daughter!”

“Only one,” wailed the other pretty girl. “Can it mean Bisuneh will die?
Or her husband will die?”

The first girl slapped her angrily.

“Silence, fool! It means the charm has failed. What is this talk of
death?”

But Bisuneh solemnly shook her head. “I do not fear. It is just a silly
game. Three days ago I visited the wise-woman who lives on the Street of the
Silk Weavers. She told me neither I nor my husband should die till we were very
old, unless the sun should sink in the east, which is surely to say nothing can
harm us, for who can suppose the sun will ever do that?”

Then the two friends laughed, kissed Bisuneh, and put white flowers into
her hair. Another laughed also, beyond the wall, silently. But no one was
there, only a smooth black cat running away along the shore road, with a flash
of silver eyes.

The Eshva entered a room of black jade, threw himself down before a shadow
there, kissed its feet, and the kiss bloomed like a violet flame in the shade.

The Eshva raised his glowing eyes. Azhrarn read this within them: A walk
in the dream of the earth, the world of men, and a shape there formed like a
maiden. Her skin was like the white heart of an apple, her hair a fountain of
primroses.

Azhrarn fondled the Eshva’s brow and neck. He himself had been a long
time from the earth, many months, perhaps a mortal century.

“What else is she like?”

The Eshva sighed at the touch of Azhrarn’s fingers. The sigh said this:
Like a white moth at dusk, a night-blooming lily. Like music played by the
reflection of a swan as it passes over the strings of a moonlit lake.

“I will go and see,” said Azhrarn.

The Eshva smiled and shut his eyes.

Azhrarn went through the three gates, black fire, blue steel, chill
agate. As an eagle, he flew across the purple plain of the night sky; a smear
of dead crimson marked where the sun had long since fallen. He came to a city
by the sea, to the small garden of a small house. The black eagle settled
himself upon the roof. He watched with his brilliant sideways bird’s eyes, now
one, now another.

An old scholar drank wine under a fig tree. He called: “Bisuneh!” A girl
stepped out. The scholar patted her hand, showed her an entry he made in a huge
old book, at a place where the page was sign-posted by a pressed papery flower.
Light from a window spun the color of green limes in the girl’s fair hair. The
eagle watched motionless, beak like a curved blade.

“See, here is your mother’s name, and mine,” said the scholar. “And here
is your name and his, the man you are to wed, who shall be my son.”

The wings of the eagle softly stirred, no more sound than the breeze made
in the leaves of the fig tree.

Presently the old man and the girl went in. A lamp began to glow in a
window near the roof, and then went out. The girl disrobed, clad only in her
hair, lay down in her narrow bed and slept.

In her sleep, a wonderful scent drifted to her. She heard tapping far off
on an open shutter, a noise like leaves walking. A voice sang into her ear,
pleasant as velvet. Bisuneh started awake. She stole to her window and looked
out.

A dark man stood below in the garden; she could not make him out. Wrapped
in her hair, in the shadow of her window, he seemed to her also a shadow. Only
his eyes, catching some mysterious light, gleamed.

“Come down, Bisuneh,” he called softly. His voice was like no other she
had ever heard. She almost leaned out to him, almost turned to seek the door
and the stair and the way into the garden—but a cold drop fell into her brain
which said: Beware. “Come, Bisuneh,” said the stranger below. “I have loved you
a long while, I have traveled many miles to find you. One glance of your eyes
is all I ask, maybe one compassionate chaste kiss from your maiden’s mouth.”

The flesh of Bisuneh answered the voice as the harp would answer when the
musician takes it up; her nerves and her instincts impelled her towards the
door or to leap from the window down into the stranger’s arms. But she would
not.

“You must be some evil spirit to summon me thus,” she told him. She
slammed the shutters closed and bolted them. She opened a little casket and
drew out a necklace of coral her lover had given her, and she spoke to it, and
soothed it and kissed it, using it as a charm against any wickedness the night
might threaten her with. Very soon she felt a delicious tension slacken in the
air. Slumber overcame her. She fell asleep with the coral necklace in her
hands, and in the morning thought her fear a dream.

It amused
Azhrarn to be thwarted by this startled virtuous girl. The first time, it
amused him. Her strength of will, her foolish sensible disbelief in him,
delighted him. The first time, delighted him.

He returned at dusk the next night. There were guests in the garden,
merry-making. Later they went away, and the girl stood alone staring out
towards the sea, with the coral necklace round her throat.

Bisuneh, smelling the perfume of the lilac colored roses, musing,
suddenly noticed a woman standing on the shore road. She seemed to evolve from
nothing, this woman, yet, becoming distinct, appeared more vital and more real
than anything else. Bisuneh could not take her eyes from the woman. She was
impressive, imperious, her hair was blue-black, and her eyes brilliant. She had
no modesty, no timidity or reserve. She came straight to the garden wall, and,
gazing at Bisuneh with her strange mesmeric gaze, she said: “Let me tell your
fortune, little bride.”

The voice of the woman was deep and melodious. She reached across the
wall and took Bisuneh’s hand, and at her touch, Bisuneh’s heart began to pound,
she could not tell why.

“I hear,” said the woman, “you fear men. This is unfortunate, since you
are to be wedded.”

“I fear no man,” faltered the girl.

“One you feared, last night,” said the woman.

The girl paled, remembering.

“It was a dream.”

“And was it so? Come, why did you fear him? He meant no harm to you.”

The girl shivered. The dark woman leaned across the wall and lightly
kissed her. It was like no kiss this shy girl had ever known. The kisses of her
lover, the deep hunger of youth, had not moved her as did this brief brushing
of the lips. Yet, at the kiss, she felt again the recollected alarm of the
previous night, her senses tugging one way, her reason another. She snatched
free her hand, her mouth.

“Who are you?” she asked, knowing somewhere deep within herself and
failing to comprehend her own knowledge.

“A reader of fate,” said the woman. Her face had changed, become remote
and cruel. “You are stubborn, and stubbornness angers the gods. Still, you have
been promised a cheerful old age, have you not? Unless the sun sinks in the
east.”

The woman turned and walked away, but there came a great swirling of sea
wind that billowed her cloak, and abruptly she seemed to vanish.

The girl ran indoors. She took an amulet from a box; a holy man had given
it to her mother. She hung it about her neck, and prayed that demon-kind would
cease troubling her.

The woman had been Azhrarn. He could put on the form of anything, being
what he was. The girl had refused him twice now, and in two guises. Mortals did
not refuse Azhrarn. His voice, his eyes, his touch produced an alchemy that
thrilled their nerves, infatuated them, outlawed their wills. But Bisuneh struggled,
and her struggle had ceased to entertain him. Her virtue had become a silken
sheath to rip, her beauty a cup to drain.

There was one last trick. It pleased him. He had seen her betrothed in
the garden among the guests. Now Azhrarn fashioned for himself an exact
semblance of this lover, and knocked on the shutters of her window an hour
after midnight, wearing the semblance like a cloak.

She crept to the window, afraid. In a whisper she asked who it might be.
She heard a voice she knew. She opened the shutters, he caught her in his arms.
The joy of his strength fired her as even her love for him had not done before.

“I can abstain no longer,” he said. “Will you make me wait till we are
wed?”

“No, I will not make you wait, if this is what you wish.”

There was no lamp alight in the room, the chamber was black. She
recognized his hands, his arms, his body, his mouth, yet did not recognize
them; it was all new, a refinding. And it disturbed her, his coming here, the
deception, the cool impetuosity, as if planned.

The moon was rising from the sea. Moment by moment it silvered the rose
petals in the garden, the trunk of the fig tree, the tiles of the house. Its
single eye stared in at the open shutters. Bisuneh, as she began to drown in
the waters of desire, as her lover lowered her to the bed, caught abruptly,
unexpectedly, the black glitter of a pair of eyes—

No, this could not be. They were the eyes of her betrothed, veiled with
the vulnerable lusts of men. But yet again, beyond the eyes, beneath them,
surfacing as a black shark surfaces from the waters of an innocent sea, another
pair of eyes looked down on her, invincible and wide.

Bisuneh thrust free of the tide that drowned her. She flung herself from
the bed and clutched the useless amulet. In the gloom, her lover stirred, and
his voice was altered.

“This is the third time you have refused me. Do you guess who it is you
have refused?”

“A demon.”

The moon filled the chamber with a white shining. Bisuneh saw Azhrarn,
standing before her. She hid her face from his beauty and his stony glare. She
had lost her value for him. He was bored with her. It only remained for him to
destroy her, in the way of demons, the stale remnants of a feast that now he
would disdain to sample.

“Honey-Sweet,” said Azhrarn, “your days shall be bitter hereafter.”

She did not see where he went, but he was gone.

Bisuneh dropped down in a faint.

Bisuneh
became pale and silent. She would tell no one her foreboding. She went to the
temple often to pray. But time went by with no violence or menace in it. She
began to think again that she had dreamed it all. Brides were subject to such
fancies, so she had been told, in the last days before their nuptials. Bisuneh
recalled the wise-woman’s prophecy: A happy old age unless, impossibly, the sun
sank in the east.

The day of the wedding arrived, dusk fell, there was a procession of
torches, flowers scattered. The son of one scholar and the daughter of another
were joined, and borne away to a feast in the house of the boy’s father, where
their wedding chamber had been prepared.

Many gifts had come; two silver vases, twelve drinking cups of finest
porcelain, a great carved chest of cedarwood, sweet yellow wine from an
excellent cellar, a damson tree in a pot which next year would bear fruit, a
mirror of burnished bronze. But one gift no one could account for. And though
it was exceedingly beautiful and obviously of enormous cost, no one would admit
to sending it. It had been found by the groom’s father in the porch of his
house when he rose at dawn, a huge tapestry, an evening scene of woods and
waterfalls, very lifelike, worked in a hundred varying shades of gorgeous
colored thread. The father, meaning to keep it a surprise for his son and
daughter-in-law, had had an inspiration at sunset, and hung it ready in the
chamber where they were to spend their wedding night, on the drab wall where
there was no window, and very sumptuous it made the room seem.