Night's Master (3 page)

So for a year, Sivesh lived much as before, hunting the wilds of
Underearth, feasting in the subterranean city, going sometimes by night with
Azhrarn over the earth, and at last returning to his flower-wife across the
magma moat. And if he adored her, still he worshipped the Prince of Demons
before everything, all the more because of this last gift which he had given
him. Maybe there was too some spell cast over him when be took her hand, for
otherwise it is strange that he forgot so long and so completely the daytime
world that he could visit it contentedly by night, and could even hunt the
souls of men on the margins of Sleep River.

But the Prince of Demons could not foresee everything, and it was
Ferazhin herself who caused the breaking of the spell. She had come from the
world, though demons made her, and her heart was still the kernel of the seed
that obeys the natural laws, and yearns for air and light.

Suddenly, on the last day of the year, rising from their bed, she
murmured to her husband Sivesh: “I dreamed a curious dream when I slept. I
dreamed I lay in a cavern and I heard a bronze horn sound in the sky and I knew
it called me. So I rose, and I went up the steep stairs of the cavern towards
it. The way was very hard, but at last I reached a door, and thrusting it open,
I came out on to a lawn, and above was an enchanted bowl, all blue, with set in
it one little disk of gold, and though it was so little the disk gave off a
light that filled the land from end to end.”

When Sivesh heard her, his heart seemed to leap and catch fire inside
him, and he recalled at once the dawn when he had seen the sun. It was as if a
shadow had fallen all around him, except in his breast and brain, which flamed.
He looked at beautiful Ferazhin, and she was like a figure of mist. The palace
about them both was dull as yellow lead. He ran out into the city; its splendor
had grown cold, it was a tomb. Then, as he walked dazedly into the streets of
the tomb, he met Azhrarn.

“I see you have remembered the world of clay,” said the Prince of Demons
in a voice of iron. “What now?”

“Oh, my lord, my lord, what can I do?” cried Sivesh, weeping. “The flesh
of my mother calls me from its grave in the earth above. I must go back to the
land of men, for I can remain in the Underearth no longer.”

“So you deny you owe me any love,” said Azhrarn in a voice of steel.

“My lord, I love you more than my soul. If I leave you, it will be to me
as if I left half of myself behind in your kingdom. But I am in torment here. I
cannot stay. The city is a shadow and I am like a blind worm crawling in it.
Therefore pity me, and let me go.”

“This is the third time you have angered me,” said Azhrarn in a voice of
winter. “Consider well whether you wish to leave me, for I shall not any more
set my anger aside.”

“I have no choice,” said Sivesh, “none, my lord of all lords.”

“Then go,” said Azhrarn in a voice of death. “And remember after, what
you have cast away and why, and who it is that tells you this.”

Then Sivesh went with leaden steps to the outskirts of Druhim Vanashta,
and all the way the demons shrank back from him. The great gates opened. A
whirlwind snatched him up and tossed him through the maw of the volcano and out
upon the earth for which he ached.

In this way Sivesh returned to the world of men, and walked with sorrow
under the sun.

3.  The Night Mare

This was the
tragedy of Sivesh: while he could no longer endure to live in the city below,
he knew no other life, and while he yearned for the sun of the world, having left
him, he yearned as much for the dark sun of Druhim Vanashta—Azhrarn.

He had been a prince in a palace, with horses and hounds and a fair wife.
Now he worked for the herdsmen on the hills and in the valleys, driving the
rough goats all day in the heat, sleeping in a tent of hide or a little wayside
house of stones at night. His pay was a slice of coarse bread, a handful of
figs; he drank from streams as the goats did. All this was nothing to him. The
sun was his motive. He watched for its rising, he watched it go by like a fiery
bird, he watched it fall beyond the world and the ravens of darkness gather.
The sun was his joy, his happiness. The herdsmen, as they drove their flocks
across the land, wondered at the strange and handsome youth who spent so much
of his time staring upward. He made no friends among them, though he was gentle
and modest. They thought he might be some rich man’s son who had fallen on hard
times. He said no word of his past, though sometimes in his sleep they heard
him call out a name which some of them knew, and it struck their spirits with
fear. For in sleep, the soul of Sivesh, wandering by Sleep River, stared across
the wild lands of its dreams, looking for the Dark Lord and his hunting dogs.

He discounted all Azhrarn had told him. Sivesh did not believe the Prince
could ever bring him to harm. He loved wholly and with his open mortal heart,
bearing the pain of his loss like a heavy burden he never wished to set down.
Azhrarn, who had loved him also, would bear his loss similarly, and as Sivesh
could never hurt what he loved, therefore neither could Azhrarn. For all his
years in the Underearth, Sivesh’s generous melancholy nature had learned little
of the demon-kind.

One day the herders reached a city, where they planned to sell their
goats in the market place. It was a city of earth and, to Sivesh, very ugly and
terrible. There had been no poverty or diseases, hovels or beggars in Druhim
Vanashta, only rare gardens and slim minarets of metal, while the demon-race
were very good to look on. After a time, Sivesh grew sick. He left the herders
to their bargaining, and walked out of the gates and away to the seashore. Here
he sat upon a rock in the profoundest grief, and presently the sun swam beneath
the water and the night came blowing down from the land.

For a long time he had avoided the night, covering his head with goat
skins and falling swiftly asleep. It was pain to him to recall how he and
Azhrarn had ridden over the earth by night and played their devil-tricks on
humanity. Partly too, he had come to understand the evil they had done in the
world under the cold moon. Confusion and a sense of awful loss beset him. Yet
now he remained on the shore, for it seemed that tonight his heart would crack
in any case. He was almost glad of it.

So there he sat. And the stars grinned like naked daggers. Perhaps Sleep,
the fisher, came to him once or twice then drifted away again, trailing her
filmy net, cheated.

At midnight a wind whispered in his ear. It spoke of a strange music.

Sivesh listened, and roused himself. He heard a curious halting melody,
sad and dreaming; it matched his mood. He looked out toward the sea. He saw a
wonder. The moon had fallen from the sky, and floated there. But then he shut
his eyes, and looked again, and through the pale radiance that surrounded it he
saw an incredible ship. It was formed like a great flower of beaten silver, but
at its center there rose a slender silver tower pointing up into the night, its
roof shaped to resemble a diadem. And in the tower, just beneath the diadem,
there burned a single ruby window. The ship had neither oar nor sail. There was
a movement before it, a glistening of starlight on wet ancient skin, a creaming
of foam: huge beasts were drawing the vessel through the waves as a team of
horses would draw a chariot. What they were—enormous whales, dragons
even—Sivesh could not tell. He stood staring, and as he did so, the ship turned
and came nearer to the land.

All around him the lovely sorrowful music seemed to play. The vast beasts
toiled, the ship went gliding after. Sivesh walked into the sea some distance,
until the breakers burst against his knees. As he watched, the window in the
tower opened wide. Out looked a face.

The weakness of Sivesh was his love for beauty. As others loved riches or
pleasure or power, so he loved this. And so he worshipped Azhrarn, and for a
while Ferazhin the Flower-Born, and so he worshipped the light of fire and at
last the lord of all fires, the sun. Thus he looked up at the face of the
maiden leaning from the tower, and she became the sum of everything.

Having told of so much beauty, how is it possible to tell of her? There
are no words left on the earth in any tongue that will do. Such words vanished
from the world when it shook itself free from the ocean of chaos, in a
cataclysm that reshaped it like one of the balls small children throw in the
air at play.

Yet there was something of Ferazhin in her, and something of Azhrarn
also, and she shone from her window like the sun, and presently, like the sun,
slowly unveiled herself of her draperies, and let her silver nakedness dazzle
inch by inch on Sivesh, till he trembled and fire filled his loins.

Then the great ship turned once more, and began to move away over the
sea, leaving behind it on the water a reflection like a path. Sivesh called
aloud after the vessel—he gazed at the path and struggled out through the
waves. But the heavy sea thrust him mercilessly back, and its cold brought him
to his senses.

He stood on the shore like a man in a trance all through the hours of
darkness, his eyes fixed on the far horizon where the ship had vanished like a
setting star. When at last the sun rose, he had no eyes for it. He lay in the
rock’s shadow and fell into blind slumber.

He woke at sunset and watched all night. The ship passed, far out, two
hours before dawn. He called to her, but she did not turn for land.

The next day too he slept. The herders were looking for him on the beach
at noon, but he did not stir and they did not find him. They had made a profit
in the city and had money to spend. Besides, the youth was strange, perhaps
half-witted. Shortly they went away. When night fell, Sivesh stood on the shore
and waited with wild and hungry eyes. This time he did not see the ship, though
she passed, for he heard the music. He trembled for joy at the sound, and waded
out into the sea until again it pushed him angrily off. Then he wept with anger
at the angry sea. He was quite mad with longing.

He was also bewitched. He, who had seen such spells worked out on others,
had no judgment left to free himself from the enchantment when it fell on him.
And he, who had lived in the City of Demons for seventeen years, still had no
guard against their sorceries.

It was
Azhrarn’s doing. Who but Azhrarn?

The Prince of Demons had spoken truly from the first. What a demon
desired and lost, he would destroy. It was as natural to him as it was to a
mortal to burn the sheets of the sick man after fever, or to bury the dead.

At first, he had been perplexed, this Lord of Darkness, as to how it
should be done. In the days of their companionship he had made the young man
proof against all the weapons and perils of earth. Then Azhrarn remembered the
one thing he had not been able to do.

Presently, the youth went to the shore, and Azhrarn fashioned from smokes
and dreams the magic flower-tower ship. It was a ghost-thing, but like the
mirage men glimpse in the desert which seems as real as the sand all around.
Azhrarn was very pleased with the toy. For a long while he admired his
handiwork, and he looked longest at the phantom woman he had created to ride in
it and capture Sivesh’s heart and mind. Even he, the Prince, felt a half amused
wonder at the beauty he had made. He sent her out upon the sea. He himself, in
the appearance of a black gull, circled high above the shore, and watched the
spell take hold of Sivesh.

Three nights and three days he let the youth suffer his despair and
yearning. On the fourth night, about an hour after the sinking of the sun,
Azhrarn modelled for himself the form of a fisherman, and leaning over Sivesh,
who lay asleep, he sang softly in his ear, in the way of demons.

Sivesh started up. It seemed a coaxing melodious voice had woken him—he
thought the silver ship had come. But getting to his feet he neither saw nor heard
the ship; only an old grizzled fisherman sat mending his net on the shore.

“Did you call me?” asked Sivesh, for there was something about the
fisherman which strangely attracted him and urged him to speak.

“Not I,” answered the man, “there would be no profit in that.”

But his voice was odd, did not seem to belong to him. It had a unique
quality, like the brilliant and marvelously intelligent eyes with which he now
regarded Sivesh. The young man felt comforted by this presence, he did not know
why. He had an impulse to unburden his trouble to the fisherman. Yet he was shy
too; he had never grown used to human men and women.

“A good catch today?” he therefore murmured.

“No, a bad,” said the man. “The fish are anxious and will not rise. I
will tell you a wonder, if you will listen. There is a great silver ship which
haunts the sea by night. I have seen her pass with my own eyes. A maiden sits
in a tower at the center of the ship. She waits for a lover she heard of in a
prophecy, and her foot may not touch land until he claims her. The prophecy
says that his hair will be red as amber and that he will know certain magics of
the Underearth, taught him by a Lord of Darkness.”

The young man turned very pale, and stared at the empty waves.

“Tel1 me then,” he whispered, “if you know the prophecy, how will this
lover reach the maiden in the ship?”

“Why,” said the fisherman, “the story goes that he will have a demon mare
which can run across water, and will therefore ride to her over the sea.”

Sivesh covered his face with his hands. The fisherman, rising, put an arm
about his shoulders and inquired kindly what ailed him. And at the old man’s
touch, which seemed as amazingly thrilling as the voice and eyes had done,
Sivesh felt once more the irresistible impulse to confide his misery.

“I am the one the prophecy spoke of,” he stammered, “destined to love the
maiden on the ship. Already I have seen her, and love her more than my life. I
have, too, lived in the Underearth and there learned some magic, and owned such
a horse as you mention, which can run on water. But I renounced that world to
live on the earth, and now can ask nothing of my Lord Azhrarn.”

“Do not speak that fearful name aloud,” implored the fisherman in
apparent fright, making a sign against evil, his eyes glinting as eyes only
glint with extreme terror, or laughter. “But I will ask you this. Did the Demon
ever give you anything by which you might summon him? For there are mystic
tokens that will call such creatures whether they wish to come or not.”

At once Sivesh gave a cry and fumbled in his coat. Presently he drew out
the little pipe shaped like a serpent’s head which Azhrarn had thrown to him
when first he stayed on earth to see the sun rise.

“This he gave me,” said Sivesh, “and said that it would draw him to me
wherever I might be.”

“Well and good then,” said the fisherman. “But do you not tremble at the
thought of his anger? Or do you think he may be gentle with you after all?”

“I do not fear him. I can think only of the maiden.”

At this the fisherman’s face seemed to melt for a moment, to reveal
behind it another face, all iron. But Sivesh did not see; indeed, he could see
nothing but his dreams. He set the pipe to his lips.

“Wait!” shouted the fisherman, in evident horror, “let me be gone before
you sound. I have no wish to stand here when he comes.”

So Sivesh waited, and the fisherman ran down the shore.

Perhaps, after all, it had been a sort of test which Azhrarn had set for
Sivesh. If Sivesh had been able to resist the enchantment of the magic ship,
and recalled for a moment his love of Azhrarn, and also the power which Azhrarn
possessed which made him so fearful in men’s eyes (since the demons were vain
of their beauty and their power) is it possible that the Prince might have
turned from his vengeance? But the sorcery Azhrarn himself had made had proved
too great. Sivesh remembered only his longing for the maiden and for those
moments set the Prince of Demons at nought. He could, after that, except no
mercy.

Once the old man was out of sight—and did he not run fast for one so
old?—Sivesh again put the pipe to his lips, and blew.

There was no sound, at least no sound that could be heard on the earth.
Then suddenly the air was full of a noise like beating wings, and on the shore
there whirled up a pillar of smoke. There was no form to the smoke. Azhrarn
would never more deign to appear to Sivesh in the fair mortal shape which
demons generally put on and which caused them to be adored and magnified by
humans.

From the smoke came a voice which asked coolly:

“Why have you called me here? Have you forgotten we are parted?”

“My lord, forgive me, I ask one thing only and then I will ask nothing
further.”

“Be sure of that. You shall not dare sound that pipe a second time. What
then do you require?”

“Loan me, for one night merely, the horse of Underearth which once you
gave me. The mare with the mane like blue steam, who can run across water.”

“Never say I am not generous,” said the voice of Azhrarn out of the
smoke. “For this one night you shall ride her. See, here she comes.”

And abruptly some of the dunes of the beach burst open, and out flashed
the demon mare, shaking the sand and soil from her back. Sivesh called to her
joyfully, and recognizing his voice, she trotted to him and let him mount. When
he looked back the pillar of smoke had blown away into the night and the shore
was empty. Sivesh felt then a pang of guilt and sorrow; he had not even given
Azhrarn his thanks. But soon he forgot, and sat patiently at the edge of the
sea, the mare, eager to run over the waves, fretting under him, while the moon
rose and sank and the stars glittered like drawn steel.