Night's Master (19 page)

Money changed hands and documents were signed. The nobleman led Shezael
to his chariot. When they reached his mansion, he conducted her inside, and
showed her a marble room hung with rose velvet, and had slaves bring her food
and wine.

“This chamber shall be yours. These slaves shall be yours. I set you
free, you shall be my beloved, but I will not own you.” The nobleman took
Shezael’s hand. “I heard of you in a song, a maiden with such hair and eyes.
But can you be as the minstrel said, ‘half-souled’?” As it transpired, it was
not only in the king’s war camp that the minstrel had sung his song of Shezael.

Shezael had been gazing about her, gradually becoming more agitated with
the need to away. Yet, when the nobleman spoke those words, she looked at him
with a terrible profundity. The nobleman realized he was in the presence of
another’s destiny, and so forceful was this aura of fate that he could not
withstand it.

When she walked from the room, he did not stop her, but he accompanied
her. “You must not leave here as you came,” he said. “Clearly you are making a
journey of great need, but to travel alone will put you in the way of danger
again. Come, I will give you my chariot and the three white geldings that draw
it and a groom to drive them, and bread and drink so you shall not starve.”

All this was done. The nobleman, as if in the grip of a spell, did not
regret the loss of his coins, only of Shezael, and her he did not hinder. He
swore the groom to protect her also. The three white horses tossed their heads.

“Which way must I go, mistress?” asked the groom.

But the nobleman said: “She looks towards the mountains—go that way. And
do not return to me till she is safe.”

The chariot journeyed swiftly. It raced along ancient tracks, and crossed
the mountains in two days by the wide pass. But in the valley below robbers
beheld it.

A bow twanged. The groom pitched over the rail, dead from an arrow in his
breast; a robber jumped into the chariot, seized the reins and checked the
horses. Another seized Shezael: “Here is a fine treasure!”

Next the chief of the robbers came. He cuffed them aside, and lifted
Shezael in his arms and examined her. Eventually he said: “This is the
witch-girl the minstrel sang of,” and he set her down gingerly. Instantly she
turned and began to walk away, leaving the chariot, the dead groom, the
dumbfounded robbers. Superstitious, they did not go after her. They had a
robber-god which they worshipped in a cave. His creed declared: “For every
fifty travelers robbed and slain, let one go free. The gods care for excess in
nothing.”

Shezael came to a broad rushing river. The ferryman caught her back from
the brink.

“By my life, you cannot walk on the water, lady. I must ferry you across,
and you must pay me.” But, looking in her eyes, the ferryman said: “Why, you
are the maiden the minstrel sang of. You shall be ferried for nothing.”

The next river had a bridge. Fruit trees grew along the track now, and
berries, which sustained the wandering girl, for she plucked them absently, as
she had been taught to pluck the figs from the tree in the garden of her
grandfather’s house.

Shezael passed, unseeing, through five villages. In the fifth, a woman
ran and brought her a loaf: “You are the maid in the song. Good fortune go with
you in whatever you are seeking, for surely you are magic.”

She had crossed into the third land, over mountains and waters. She
passed along a road, and would have seen, if she had looked, the king’s capital
shining in the distance and, seven miles beyond it, the snow-capped mountain
where the dragon had eaten men, and perished at the hands of Drezaem.

Finally Shezael entered a town on the shores of a vast lake. Here on the
quay, beside the silken water, an old lady was slowly walking up and down with
her servants, and on a golden leash she led a green bird, which now and then
would bark vigorously.

“I see a child with beautiful hair,” said the old lady. “In a moment she
will fall in the lake. Go, one of you, and bring her to me.”

Shezael was brought to the old lady with the barking bird.

“Yes, as I thought,” said the old lady. “She is the maiden of the
minstrel’s song. And truly, I believe she is half-souled, as he said. Can it be
she is searching for the other half? Well, she shall have a boat to aid her
over the lake. Go under the auspices of the gods, my child. And beware the
snares of night.”

Thus Shezael came over the lake and reached the empty plains where
Drezaem wandered in his melancholy anger.

3. Night’s
Sorcery

Drezaem had
lived in the plains many months. He had survived by braining snakes and rodents
with a heavy stone and eating them raw, not thinking to make a fire. For drink,
he found subterranean streams in the caves where he crawled to avoid the midday
heat. On this limited sparse fare he had become gaunt. His hair was more grey
than fair now, his eyes huge and savage. His heart was leaden, he did not
comprehend what caused his grief, had forgotten what began it. Some nights,
under the cold stars he would howl with anguish. and even the wolf would fall
silent, in uneasy respect for his cries.

There came a night like any other, ebony bright with a silver sweat of
stars. As the moon rose, a tall man came walking over the plain before it. His
cloak was black, but his hair blacker: blacker than both, his eyes.

Drezaem had mislaid the notion of men, except as enemies to fight and
slay. He surged up, snarling. But the black haired man dissolved into a smoke,
which came and wrapped itself about the youth. The wild beast faded at the
touch of the smoke. Drezaem’s eyelids drooped, and the murder in him slept.

“Now,” said the black eyed man, handsome as the night, standing at the
young man’s side, “you shall be my son, and I will make you glad again. For you
have lived too long, my infant, like a jackal of the plains.”

Drezaem raised his head. His eyes met the stranger’s eyes. Through the
layers of confusion and mist that clouded his perceptions, the eyes of the
unknown man pierced like two black flaming lights.

“Look here,” said Azhrarn, the Prince of Demons, pointing at a massive
pile of featureless granite about a mile off. Drezaem looked.

The night shuddered. Every surface of the plains resounded as if to the
chord of an enormous harp, and the pile of granite was altered. A palace stood
there now, a marvel of glinting melanic crystal and polished jet, with towers
of silver, roofs of brass, windows of turquoise and crimson which blazed with
lamps. Before it lay gardens carpeted by dark velvet moss, avenues paved with
jewels, black trees sculpted into fantastic shapes, lavender fountains and
purple pools. Clockwork nightingales sang with ceaseless sweetness in the
arbours, black clockwork peacocks with green and blue, real and seeing eyes in
their fans, patrolled the lawns.

“You are in my care, Drezaem,” Azhrarn said. “You will live by night, as
the moon does. This palace I give you. But you shall lack for nothing.”

Azhrarn guided the young man through the gardens into the palace. A
banquet was already prepared and lay waiting. Drezaem needed no encouragement
to gorge himself as he had done in the palace of the king. Perhaps he noticed
this was even better. When Drezaem was satisfied, Azhrarn said: “There is one
last thing you crave. I will remind you. A girl with silver eyes and primrose
hair. Even this I have not neglected.”

Then Azhrarn took up a ewer of alabaster. He opened the lid, and spoke
certain words, and upended the ewer into the air. What poured forth was a cloud
and a glow and a perfume, and these things resolved into a gorgeous woman.

It was not Shezael, indeed not. It was not Azhrarn’s plan that the soul
he had divided should be reunited in any form. Demonaic vengeance had the habit
of becoming a game. Azhrarn, in some magic glass of the Underearth, had seen
Bisuneh shrivelling in her wretched fane, and turned his eye after on the
half-souled daughter, and he observed that weird, random forces were intent
upon her salvation. Intrigued by the sport, Azhrarn had set himself to thwart
them.

The woman poured from the alabaster ewer was one of the Eshva. Her shape
was surpassingly beautiful; she was, too, part of the jestling of Azhrarn. Like
all demon-kind her eyes were black, not silver, yet the lids were painted with
silver, sparkling with silver. Like all demon-kind, her hair was also black,
yet in this black hair were masses of flowers, not garlands but actual growing
plants, sprung invisibly from the strands of hair and from the roots of it.
Pale, pale flowers of greenish yellow, tiny, ever-blooming primroses clustered
thick in those dark tresses as dew upon a leaf.

Drezaem gasped. This loveliness struck even his unwoken senses, as the
eyes of Azhrarn had fathomed his muddy brain.

The name of the Eshva woman was Jaseve. Before, the young man had tired
quickly of a single body, a single face. But the demons were not of that order,
men did not tire of them, nor women either.

Jaseve drew Drezaem into her arms that were like desire itself.

Azhrarn was gone. Drezaem lay with the demoness upon a couch of incense.
He bared her breasts that were like mounds of snow, she bared his breast, gold
from the sun; he uncovered her loins’ black wooded valley even here spangled
with yellow flowers, she uncovered him also and rested her lips against the
burning tower his passion had built for him.

The sun was not rising in the sky, but in the body of Drezaem. The
chariot of the sun, drawn by its scarlet horses, plunged and thrust through the
tunnel of the mansion of Jaseve. But the horses did not, on this occasion, slip
their rein. The eternal time of demons overmatched the human lover. He rode
forever, a white arched bow upon the white crescent of her flesh beneath him,
rode till he was molten, rode till he was fire. Only after many aeons of
agonised bliss did he pierce and shatter the sun, and fall with its fragments many
further aeons down into the ocean of Jaseve.

As Azhrarn
told him, Drezaem lived now by night, as the moon did. He woke as the daylight
fled and the stars solidified in the ether. He would feast then, take his ease.
A thousand unseen servants would tend him, provide whatever he had a wish for
before even he could think of it. When he felt the urge for battle come on him,
giants and warriors would appear at the brass gates, ranting challenges. He
would slay them all gloriously—or seem to—they were illusions. Such red meat
catered to his former tastes. For his other appetites, Jaseve was there. The
sound of her step upon the marble floors was enough to stir him. Gulfs of
pleasure, chasms of victorious violence, these blandishments ensorcelled him
five nights. And when the five suns that followed those five nights were
rising, Drezaem would fall upon his royal bed and sleep till the last color
again left the sky.

In this way he never saw what became of the palace as the sun crested the
plain, never saw what became of his royal bed, the roses crushed beneath his
back, the giants’ heads piked upon his gate. For these splendors and atrocities
were the things of night. The sun struck them and they faded into air, all but
certain solid clockworks made by the Drin. Trees dissolved like ink in water,
towers wavered into smokes, peacocks lay in tarnished heaps. The only walls
then about the sleeping youth were the barren tiers of the granite, his only
shelter a rocky archway. Jaseve was gone to Underearth to avoid the day.
Drezaem lay alone in a sorcerous stupor until the dark should come again, and
Azhrarn should come again and remake the palace about him, and Jaseve pour from
the alabaster ewer with the primroses growing in her raven hair.

Five nights Drezaem woke and orgied, five days he slept like the dead.

And on the fifth day Shezael climbed the pile of granite and found him.

She was thin and pale. The journey had been weary, terrible. The empty
plains were formidable beneath the unrelenting hot sky, and after sundown, the
cold winds blew. Her clothes were in rags, her feet and her hands were
bleeding, yet she had noticed none of it; her pain and exhaustion meant nothing
to her. The goal was still before her. Her instinct led her without hesitation.
The severed soul within her was like an unhealing wound.

Seeing the granite stack in front of her, she had known how close she
was. Her heart had seemed to burst. She ran to the rock and pulled herself
among its steeples, and there she found him, the man who she had dreamed she
was, the man whose flesh contained the other half of what was hers.

And at once she was soothed, comforted. She had no rage or bitterness in
her, and so her answer to the sight of him was not to harm or to snatch, but to
love. She knelt beside Drezaem in love. She kissed him, his lips, his eyes, his
hands. The portion of the soul within him sensed her, but, as the Prince of
Demons had arranged things, so Drezaem slept too deep to wake.

Throughout the day, Shezael sat beside Drezaem among the granite.

The sun went down. In the dusk, a black wolf padded over the rock.

He was not like the other wolves of the plains, which had not come near
Shezael. The eyes of the wolf scorched into the brain of Shezael where few
meanings had penetrated. The wolf was Azhrarn. His gaze hypnotized and
overwhelmed. Shezael could not fight him, and did not try. He forced her from
the side of Drezaem, from the granite place, though the portion of the soul in
her was torn like a mortal hurt. Azhrarn drove her away into the empty night.

Far from the spot, Shezael saw a radiance of lamps woven into the sky.
Shezael stood alone and weeping on the plains. She thought: ‘My beloved is
there. What am I to do?’

She had begun to reason.

Shezael returned, over the track her own bare bloody feet had made when
the black wolf had compelled her thence. She came to a gate of brass with a
variety of hideous heads piked above it. Beyond the gate lay a garden and a
palace, and she knew Drezaem was there.

Shezael set her hand on the gate, but at once a wall of blue fire burst
up all around the garden, and from the fire sprang terrifying shapes that drove
her off with whips.

She lay down in a cave, immobile as a stone, though her blood and her
tears mingled on the rocky floor.

She did not go back till the sun had gone over the sky and almost down
again. She kneeled beside Drezaem where he slept. She had a girdle about her
narrow waist of twisted strands of colored silk. This girdle she now wound
about the wrist of Drezaem.

“I knew him from a single hair tangled in a harp string. When he wakes he
will know me from this girdle I have worn so long. He will know me, and then we
may not be parted.”

And she kissed him and stole once more away.

Night came, and demon-kind. Drezaem stirred upon a heap of satin,
hyacinths for a pillow. And as he stirred, Jaseve stepped near, and she saw the
ragged girdle wound about the wrist of Drezaem, and in a moment she had pulled
it from him and thrown it in a brazier of green fire which consumed it.

Night passed in riot. Dawn walked across the plain.

Shezael wept.

Then again, near sunset, she sought the place where Drezaem lay sleeping.
She took a sharp stone and cut off a lock of her pale hair and hid it within
his shirt.

“He will surely know me from this lock of hair, and then we may not be
parted.”

But when the sun was gone, and Drezaem stirred upon a heap of velvet with
asphodel for a pillow, Jaseve came and smiled, and searched his clothing till
she found the piece of hair and, before he woke, the demon-woman had thrown it
in the brazier.

Another night, another dawn. Shezael in the afternoon, looking on the man
who slept among the rocks.

“Perhaps you will not know me then. Perhaps the half of the soul which is
yours has grown silent. There is no other thing I can leave you. I will come no
more.” Then she leaned and kissed him, his lips, his eyes, his hands, and she
went away to the cave and lay down there, as once Bisuneh had lain down,
expecting only to die.

Night dawned black.

Drezaem stirred upon a heap of furs with violets under his head. Jaseve
stood over him, and searched diligently, and found no girdle, no lock of hair,
nothing of Shezael’s.

But there was one thing, something so small one woman never knew she had
left it, while the other woman, even with demon cunning, never saw.

A silver lash from the eyelid of Shezael had fallen among the lashes of
Drezaem as she kissed him. And when he woke the lash fell in his eye.

The lash did not discomfort him, but it did strange things to his sight.
The miraculous palace trembled and grew shadowy, the delicious form of Jaseve
took on a gleaming awful look, as if phosphorus were brewing in her bones. And
suddenly a feeling of inconsolable loss rushed upon Drezaem, and he knew he had
felt the despair of it before. He put his hand to his eye and rubbed it, and
the silver lash slid on to his finger. As soon as he touched it, he knew what
was amiss with him. His half-soul pounded on the gate of his heart and his
flesh, and he cried aloud. “I must find her.”

And then, too swift for all those snares of the dark to trap him, he ran
into the plains, ran without understanding how he guessed the way, straight to
the cave where Shezael was lying.

Later,
Azhrarn strode across the plains. He strode until he made out two figures
seated on the rock beneath the open sky.

Behind him, the sorcerous palace was gone, Jaseve poured like a rare wine
back in the ewer. The peacocks spread their fans no more on the earth, and the
clockwork nightingales lay unwound in the workshops of the Drin.

Azhrarn called to the two on the rock:

“Turn, Shezael. Turn, Drezaem. I am here.”

And turn indeed they did, without hesitation. Azhrarn saw them in the
clear radiance of the moon.

They were beautiful as two things can only be beautiful which flawlessly
make one whole thing. As their hands fitted together, so did every part of them
seem fitted, the angle of each limb, the curve of her cheek, her breast,
against the straight symmetry of his. Drezaem’s hair was silver, Shezael’s eyes
were silver. Her hair was floating gold, his eyes were burning gold. What had
been bestial in him had grown calm; who had been inert in her had grown vital.
The expressions that passed across their faces were identical, and would always
be.