Night's Master (18 page)

But the youth with the greyish fair hair and the blazing eyes did none of
these things. Just as the dragon was lazily bestirring itself, lumbering to its
feet, the youth came running, took a huge flying leap, and landed square on the
dragon’s forehead at the narrow point just between its two stubby horns and the
area where its jagged backbone commenced. This was not stratagem on the
leaper’s part, purely instinct, the bald spot being the only feasible place to
land.

The impact jarred the dragon’s brains. It shook its head. Drezaem, again
from instinct only, grabbed the dragon’s two horns to stop himself from falling
off, and at once the fierce thrilling pleasure of violent action surged through
him, and he began to pull and strain with all his considerable young might at
what he held.

The dragon bawled. Its foul poisonous breath gushed out—missing Drezaem
who was perched above and behind it—while its odor sent him giddy, thereby
maddening him further. He was fifteen, but of unnatural strength, a strength
reinforced and made positively supernatural by his lack of fear and finesse. He
hauled upon the ugly bone protuberances and, in another moment, had snapped and
uprooted them from their sockets.

Black blood gushed from the two ghastly wounds, blinding the dragon. It
boomed with agony, a discomfort increased by the fact that Drezaem was now
using the dislocated horns to beat it over the skull.

Roaring and blind, the dragon burst from the wood, and ran head-on into
the side of the mountain, which broke its neck for it.

Drezaem was flung off but was soon on his feet again, rattling the horns
together insanely and jumping back and forth over the dragon’s back.

Hearing these unusual noises replace the more usual ones of the dragon
tearing its victim limb from limb, the king’s soldiers eventually stole timidly
up to see.

When they discovered the outcome of the fight, they banged their shields
together, and carried the dragon’s corpse and Drezaem shoulder high to the
city. Indirectly, this wondrous half-wit had saved their skins too. They meant
to make him a hero indeed.

The king was surprised but not displeased that someone had slain the
dragon after all. As his soldiers had foreseen a day when all the peasants
would be used up, so the king had foreseen a slightly more distant day, when
everyone—soldiers, peasants, courtiers—would also be gone, and only he left to
flee the monster’s hunger. At the prospect of fulfilling his decree, however,
he was not pleased. To heap treasure upon an ignorant clod, and an imbecile to
boot, was not to his liking. However, he noticed the steely glint in the eyes
of his soldiers, how his captains’ hands rested on the hilts of their swords.
There had always been another possibility in regard to feeding the dragon; that
his loyal army might revolt. The king perceived he had best give in.

He showered gold and precious stones upon the young madman, who grunted,
toyed with them, put a pearl between his teeth and laughingly cracked it. The
soldiers scowled at the king. The king led Drezaem to a mansion in the grounds
of his own palace. He showed him the scented fountains, the peacocks. At last
the king opened a door of ivory, and revealed twenty-five lovely maidens clad
in rainbow gauzes through which their limbs and breasts gleamed like silver.

“Ah,” said the king, “I see we have made some progress.”

The maidens gave faint shrieks as Drezaem burst among them, but they were
well taught. At least he was beautiful, if rough and impetuous.

Drezaem became the king’s champion. He did not really know what he was.
He was only aware that there was endless carnal delight to be had beyond the
ivory door, mountains of food upon his table, and a continuous supply of men to
fight.

Several champions from foreign parts were sent against Drezaem. Always
some monarch thought he could do better. A saffron giant came from the north,
tall as two men together. He swung Drezaem aloft, but Drezaem grasped the
giant’s wrists in an impossible grasp, using both arms and legs for the work,
and ground them till the giant screamed for mercy. A grey giant came from the
west, but Drezaem ran round him in circles till he howled, at which Drezaem
jumped for his throat and throttled him. When there was a battle to be fought,
Drezaem would race before the captains, without horse or armor, and then throw
himself upon the enemy with blood-curdling happy yells, wreaking destruction on
every hand.

Sometimes he was wounded. He never noticed till he fell down from loss of
blood. He was so vital, however, that none of these hurts incapacitated him for
more than a few hours. As for his women—there were a hundred now—the ivory door
swung open and shut all day long and all night when he was home, and when in
the field, pretty girls were dragged from their parents’ care to satisfy the
king’s champion.

The soldiers revered him.

“What matter if he never speaks, what matter if sometimes he flies into a
sudden rage or fit, knocking over wine jars, flinging tables in the air? Look
at his fine muscles and his clear eyes, look at that ivory door opening and
shutting! My, he is a champion and no mistake.”

He was seventeen. He looked like a god, acted like an unpredictable
animal. Yet, even in his rages, he seemed joyous, overbrimmed with life.

One day a minstrel came by the camp. The king’s army had fought a battle,
and won. The king’s champion was in his gold embroidered tent with three
squealing wenches.

The minstrel sang for coppers. He had seen a girl in a far City, a
strange dumb girl with silver eyes and ghostly primrose hair; he sang of her,
for she had struck his fancy. He was a dreamer and somehow had come to the
truth without guessing it, for in his story he called her—as poetry merely, an
invention—the half-souled.

The soldiers, sentimental after the battle, liked the song. Imagine their
astonishment when the flap of the champion’s tent was flung wide, and the
unmusical champion came forth, his face desolate and his eyes streaming tears.

Without a sound, he fell to his knees before the minstrel.

They were all afraid, as if at a portent. The champion wept, but did not
seem to know why he wept. No one dared question him, in any case anticipated no
reasonable reply, for he never spoke. Presently the champion raised his head
and, seizing the minstrel’s little harp, he tore out its strings. And then,
with an awful wordless crying, he ran away from the camp into the empty plains
that lay beyond it.

Shezael had
continued a virgin, unwed. Despite her beauty, her oblique wits deterred
suitors. Somehow, they were afraid of her. Had she not been born of a cursed
marriage? Few knew the facts of Bisuneh’s wedding night, yet rumor abounded—the
bridegroom had mysteriously died, but of what, and for what reason, seeing he had
been healthy and youthful? No, the taint, whatever it was, must have passed to
the daughter. Best let her alone.

Sometimes she would sit in the window of her grandfather’s house. The old
man was slow and tired. Alarmed at the cost, he paid a servant woman to be the
escort of Shezael, to purchase and mend her garments, and take her to walk
about the city by unfrequented byways. This servant was good natured, but a
guardian watchful for the safety of her charge. Sometimes she would lead
Shezael to the temple, and would pray there for the girl to be healed of her
bizarre affliction, while Shezael would gaze expressionlessly at the blue
tinted air.

Three months after Shezael had become seventeen, the servant woman took
her for one of these unsatisfactory visits to the temple and in the holy place
they came on the wandering minstrel they had met there half a year before. He
appeared to be thanking the gods for his safe return to the city, but when he
saw the servant and her charge he hurried up to them.

“Were I but a rich man, did I but lead a settled life,” said he, “I would
wed this maiden gladly. Though she is bedimmed, she is more lovely than a
lotus.”

“Be off,” said the servant, but she did not mean it. The minstrel, for
all his roguish trade, was no rogue, but gentle and amiable. Presently they sat
to talk in the temple porch, while Shezael stood gazing at the clouds, the
flowering trees, the ocean.

The minstrel told his adventures. How he had sung in poor inns and busy
markets. Of the robbers who had beset him but let him free in exchange for a
song or two, seeing they were starved of culture and he mostly penniless, of
the wonders of a town where the richer streets were paved with slabs of jade,
and another town by a lake where trained birds could imitate all manner of
noises, barking dogs and lowing cattle and tinkling bells—yet could not sing a
note. Last, he told her of how he had made a song about the sad beauty of
Shezael (the woman scolded him, looking pleased), and rendered it in the war
camp of a king. “And then,” declared the minstrel, “a young madman strode from
a tent and snatched my little harp and tore loose all the strings. What a
thing, you may say,” said the minstrel. “But there is worse, for I have had to
fashion a new harp. When I restrung the old, I found the seventh string was
tangled with a single long hair from the madman’s head—a hair of fine greyish
blond, near enough the color of the string itself. Try as I might, I could not
get this single strong hair free from the seventh string of the harp. And now,
listen.” And taking the instrument from his pack, the minstrel plucked all its
strings, one after another. Six had a clear sweet tone, but the seventh, where
the single hair was tangled,
groaned
.

The servant clutched his arm. “Ah! Throw it away! The harp is possessed.”

“Wait!” whispered the minstrel, “look at the girl.”

Shezael had turned. Her face was changed. Intent and serious, she stared
at the harp, her eyes focused, her lips parted. And suddenly she laughed. Not a
fool’s laughter, the laughter of sheer joy, which there is no mistaking. Then,
coming straight to the minstrel, she lifted the harp from his unresisting
hands. Turning about once more, Shezael began to walk away, as if at last she
had learned the road home.

The woman was alarmed. The minstrel was curious, moved, yet not amazed.
He had half expected something of the sort, had come every day to the temple
for a month, meaning to meet Shezael and her guardian for the purpose of
proving some weird magic he had sensed in the air.

That night, Shezael placed the harp beside her bed. It was the narrow bed
her mother, black-fated Bisuneh, had slept in. Shezael did not disturb the
strings of the harp, but she looked at it till her eyelids fell shut.

Her existence had been like a dream, her dreams sometimes more acute than
her existence. Now she dreamt with a vivid clarity. She became another.

She was a shepherd boy, she had killed a wolf, no, it was a dragon. She
was a king’s champion, she slew giants. She was called Drezaem. She was a
youth, tall, sun-burned, handsome, with eyes of bronze. She was a warrior, yet
she fled into the empty plains. She lay near dead in the cruel heat of the day.
Sometimes she roared and moaned and wept from an intolerable, inconsolable
sense of loss she did not understand.

Shezael woke as the sun woke, her cheeks wet with tears, without sorrow.

She rose and dressed herself. She smiled upon the garden from the window.
She plucked a rose and left it on her grandfather’s knee where he slept in his
chair, a chrysanthemum and left it on the pillow of the sleeping servant woman.

Shezael knew her path as if she had read it from a map.

She took the path unhesitatingly, without a second thought. Hers was the
female portion of the soul, obscure, sensitive to occult things.

The path led her through the morning city, through the tall gate, along
the highway, into the wide world.

She knew her
way by instinct, yet blindly. She had not foreseen or reasoned that it lay
across three lands, a range of mountains, many wide rivers, a great lake.
Neither was she conscious of dangers or necessities. She set forth without
provisions of any kind. She set forth as the metal pin flies to the magnet, the
tide to the beach, for she had never possessed human logic or caution, obscure
Shezael. Only the tug of her lost half-soul drew her.

She left the city and the sea behind, and quickly came on a deserted
track. Night fell and Shezael did not heed it. When she grew very weary, she
lay down and slept on the bare earth, and started up at the first ray of dawn
and went on. Several days she walked, without food, only once or twice pausing
to drink when a stream ran beside her path. A growing weakness barely impinged
on her thought, but at length she could go no farther.

It had happened that a slave-dealer had chosen this track to reach the
nearest town. His men found Shezael lying by the roadside, and set up a
clamour. The slave-dealer called them off. He liked the look of the girl, who
would make an excellent pleasure-slave. He forced broth between her teeth and
lifted her into one of the carts.

It was a journey of four days, and took the route Shezael must in any
case have traveled. Perhaps because she sensed this, Shezael neither cried out
nor attempted to evade them. If she was aware of her captors, it was only as a
helpful agency, bearing her towards her goal.

They reached the town. The market ran up into rich streets lined with
white mansions, and every fourth paving stone was made of green jade. The
slave-dealer set Shezael on a rostrum. The bidding began quickly, but tapered
off as the buyers noticed the girl’s peculiar emotionless staring. At length a
young nobleman stepped forward.

“This girl is witless and dumb. Anyone can see.” The slave-dealer
remonstrated. “Then tell her to speak,” said the nobleman.

This the slave-dealer did, loudly, and to no avail. The crowd of
potential buyers began to mutter and turn away. The dealer raised his whip, but
the young nobleman caught his arm. “No matter. I have too many chattering women
in my house as it is. I will buy her.”