Night's Master (8 page)

When they heard this, the Vazdru cried out scornfully though Azhrarn kept
silent. But Kazir’s song was not ended.

He sang a cold dream to the demons.

He sang of how a plague came from the edges of the world and erased from
it all mortal life. Not a man or a woman remained, not a child, not a baby. No
crones creaked over their potions, no princes rode on heroic quests, no armies
made war, no fair maidens looked out from their towers, and no infants cried in
their cradles. Only the desolate wind moaned over the earth, only the grasses
stirred. The sun rose and set on emptiness. And he sang of how the Prince of
Demons flew by in the form of a night eagle, over the noiseless cities and the
deserted lands. Not a light burned in a single window, not a single sail moved
on the seas. And the Prince looked for men. But not one high heart was left to
corrupt, not one rapacious jeweler to make mischief with. And on all the wide
earth, not one tongue remained to whisper in reverence and terror the name of
Azhrarn.

The demons had fallen very still. As the last of the poet’s words drifted
down among them, they seemed frozen in ice.

Kazir stood in the hall of the Prince through that long quiet. Then
Azhrarn said: “I am answered.” No more, no less, and maybe only the poet, with
his sensitive ear, heard in that acknowledgment how the voice of Azhrarn was
chilled and changed—as if with pain, or even fear.

But the bargain had been made, and shortly out from the palace sped one
of the Eshva, and found Ferazhin walking in some shadowy garden.

She entered Azhrarn’s hall meekly, dolefully, in her cloudy veil, her
face hidden.

Azhrarn beckoned her near, and said:

“A mortal has bought your freedom with a tomb-cold song. His soul must go
back through sleep river, but some bird of night shall carry you to the soil of
earth from which you came.”

Ferazhin looked up.

“And shall I see the sun?” she asked.

“Till you are sick of it,” answered Azhrarn. “And he also, your rescuer,
you shall see, for you are to be his.”

But although he spoke low, Kazir heard him, and he called out:

“No, Lord Prince. She has been too long the property of others. I do not
claim her. I bargained with you only to set her free.”

“Yet you love her,” said Azhrarn, “or else you would not have come.”

“Since I encountered her tears set in the collar of silver, I have loved
Ferazhin,” said Kazir calmly, “and now, sensing her near me, I love her more
deeply. But she knows nothing of me.”

However, Ferazhin had turned to look at him, for his voice had the color
of the sun. She gazed at his face, his form, his hair, his eyes, and going up
to him, she saw that he was blind. He had risked flesh and spirit for her, and
asked nothing in return. She loved him at once; how could she not?

“I will come to you gladly,” she said, “and love you for as long as you
will wish it.” Then she went back to Azhrarn, and she said softly:

“Yon grew me from a flower, and I was immortal while I lived in your dark
kingdom. When Kazir grows old, as all men do, let me also grow old beside him,
for I do not want to be other than he is, and when he dies as all men do, let
me also die, for I do not want to be parted from him.”

“When you leave my land and go to walk the earth, you will be subject to
earth’s laws,” said Azhrarn. “You will grow old and you will die, and I wish
you joy in so doing.”

“And after death, shall I be with Kazir?” asked Ferazhin.

“Ask the gods,” said Azhrarn. “All things of earth have souls, even the
flowers that grow there, but you may lose each other in the mists at the
threshold of death.”

“Then let me die in the moment that Kazir dies, so we may go hand in
hand.”

Azhrarn’s coals of eyes grew blackly bright, but Ferazhin, her own eyes
dazzled by her dreams, did not see it.

“Then let that be my gift to you,” said Azhrarn. “In the instant you know
Kazir is dead, you shall die also.”

Ferazhin thanked him. The hall filled with a beating of wings. One starry
bird carried Ferazhin away, up through the bewitched gates, out of the
mountain, to the hills and valleys of the world, while another bore Kazir back
to the river of sleep through which he must return in order to regain his body.

Azhrarn meanwhile stood on a high tower, the collar of Vayi in his
fingers. The Prince of Demons looked to north and east, to west and south,
turning over in his mind the treasures of his realm, but the voice of Kazir came
to haunt him even there, singing of the empty earth and its desolation, singing
of how the Prince of Princes, without humankind, would be only a nameless mole
beneath the ground. And presently Azhrarn crushed the collar in his hands to a
shapeless molten thing, and hurled it down into the streets of Druhim Vanashta
like a curse.

Kazir woke in
the witch’s house near dawn.

“You have slept many days and many nights,” said she, “though, no doubt
it seemed but an hour or so you were in the Underearth.”

All this while she had kept him safe and preserved his body in its sleep
by means of her spells. Now, as he rose and shook off that prolonged slumber,
the woman stood watching at the open door.

Up sailed the sun, the sky ignited like a lamp, and along the plateau a
slender figure came walking with blowing hair the color of that sky.

“I see a girl with wheat-yellow hair,” said the witch, “and a flower
face.”

Kazir went out at once and waited before the house, and Ferazhin came
running toward him with her arms outstretched, laughing with happiness.

For a year then, Kazir and Ferazhin were together, and their days make no
story, for they were good and joyful and without event. They had no wealth, it
is true, and wandered together from land to land as the poet had always done,
earning their food, he by his singing, she by dancing, for she found she could
dance, like a flower in a field in the gentle summer wind. They had no palace
of crystal and gold, yet their hall was wide enough, with its blue roof, its
floors of grass embroidered with asphodel and its great pillars of trees. Both
loved the world, each loved the other. She would tell him all she saw, he would
tell her all the history of things which he could divine by touch, in a stone
or a ruined wall. They coupled thirstily, as do the young to whom love is an
uncharted river. They knew the perfection of content.

Then, one dusk at the year’s end, a boy met them on the road.

He was very young, this boy, and handsome, with large dark piercing eyes.
He came up slowly, as if uncertain. Then he said:

“Can it be that you are Kazir, the blind poet, whose voice cures
sickness?”

“I am Kazir,” Kazir answered. “For the rest, it is not my boast.”

But the boy kneeled down on the roadway, and caught at the hem of
Ferazhin’s dress.

“Lady, I beg you to help me. My father is lying ill in our house and will
let no one come near him—only Kazir he calls for night and day. He says there
was a prophecy in his childhood that he should fall ill and die unless blind
Kazir should make him well with a song. Therefore, persuade the poet to come to
him and save him.”

Kazir frowned. The boy’s words troubled him. But he said: “I will come
with you if you wish.”

The boy leaped up and darted on ahead, leading them. Presently the road
ran by a fine house with open gates of iron. In the outer court a fountain
played, and by the fountain sat a slim black dog.

“Now, if you will, you must come in alone.” the boy said to Kazir, “and
the lady must wait in the court. My father will let no one in the house but
myself, and even I am not permitted to enter the room where he lies.

“Very well,” said Kazir, though somehow he liked this notion very little.
Ferazhin, however, sat by the fountain serenely, and stretched out her hand to
pet the black dog, but it was apparently shy, and ran into the house with the
boy.

Inside, there were many steps, and a door.

“Father,” the boy called out, “I have found Kazir.” When no one answered,
the boy muttered: “He is very weak. Go in and sing to him, and make him whole
if you can, and we will bless you forever.”

So Kazir stepped into the room. Yet he did not sing. It seemed to him
that the place was empty, he sensed no invalid lying near, and suddenly the air
was full of a dark strange incense. It reminded him of other scents that he had
known only once before—when his soul walked through the streets of Druhim
Vanashta.

At once Kazir turned about to leave the room, but something ran against
his legs—it had the form of a dog but, touching it, Kazir knew it for what it
was—demon flesh. Next moment a ringing nothingness came rushing into Kazir’s
brain as the shadowy drug filled his lungs. In vain he tried to beat it off, to
reach the door, to cry to Ferazhin and warn her. Eagles of night smothered him.
He sank down and lay as if he were dead.

Ferazhin started up in the court. There had been no sound to alarm her,
yet abruptly she was afraid. Just then, out of the house came the young boy,
the dog at his heels.

“Ferazhin,” said the youth, “Kazir is dead.”

And the black dog barked.

Immediately she knew them—one of the Vazdru in the form of a boy: while
the inky dog—she stared into its coals of eyes and glimpsed Azhrarn. And the
house was wavering all about her, like smoke. Now everything was gone, house,
court, fountain and the two figures with it. She stood on a hill slope by a
little stream, cold under the stars, and before her lay Kazir.

She ran to him. She did not stop to reason. She took up his icy hands,
brushed with her fingers his closed lids. She felt no heartbeat, heard no breathing.
“Now I know you are dead,” Ferazhin whispered, and as Azhrarn had promised her,
she felt her own hands grow stony, her own heart stop and her breath; her lids
fell shut and she too lay dead beside Kazir.

But Kazir was not dead. He still lived, as the Demon Lord intended.
Gradually the drug of Underearth left him, he stirred and woke. Then he felt
the open hillside, the starlight. Remembering what had gone before, he called
Ferazhin’s name. She did not answer him. The blind man sat up and stretched out
his hand, and so he found her. He held her in his arms and discovered at once
how all the life was gone out of her.

He had known perfect happiness for a year, now he knew perfect sorrow. He
understood the trick, no doubt; perhaps he thought again of the river of sleep
and a journey to Azhrarn’s palace, but then he rejected it, for Azhrarn would
demonstrate no leniency now, since this was his revenge on them. Kazir imagined
the soul of Ferazhin, her flower soul, lost on the foggy threshold of death,
wandering alone, searching and calling out in vain for his. Full of pain as he
was, he shuddered at what her pain and fear and loss must be.

There was a village over the hill, and presently men came along the
slope, going home that way. When they saw the fair blind stranger holding the
fair dead girl in his arms, they were touched with pity and distress. Before
the moon rose, they had dug, by the little stream, a grave for Ferazhin and
laid her gently in it and covered her up, and over her body their priest had spoken
such words of consolation and prayer as he knew. Then they entreated Kazir to
go back with them; any one of them would have been glad to house him and take
care of him, but he would not leave the place of earth where she lay. When they
begged him, he began to sing of his love for her and her love for him, of the
perfect year and the despair that followed it. The notes overflowed his throat
like tears, yet he did not weep, his sorrow was too cruel for weeping. Only the
villagers wept and, understanding, left him to mourn alone in silence.

All night he sat by her grave. A nightingale perched in a tree and made
music, but he did not hear.

Near dawn, he drifted into sleep.

He dreamed.

He dreamed of the sorceress he had met, who had sent him down into the Underearth
to claim Ferazhin, the old woman with the ring.

“Well, so Azhrarn has outwitted you,” said she, “and your wheat-haired
woman lies in the earth. Come, where else shall a flower lie when its season is
done? The Prince of Demons has his magic, so have you, the magic of your songs.
You spent a year with Ferazhin, now wait by her grave a year, if you have the
patience. Bring water from the stream and sprinkle it over the spot, clear away
the weeds that grow there. Best of all, each day sing to her death-mound how
you valued her. Be faithful in this, and who knows how your garden will grow.”

Kazir woke again as the sun was coloring the sky; he felt it on his face,
like the touch of a kind warm hand.

The villagers, concerned for him, had left a little bread and some milk
in a crock. Kazir emptied out the milk—perhaps he drank it, perhaps only poured
it on the ground. He made his way, guiding himself as always with his staff, to
the lip of the stream. There he filled the crock and, carrying it to the grave,
he spilled it, as one would water a flower. Then, sitting down beside the
place, he began to sing again, the first of many songs to Ferazhin beneath the
earth.

“He is sick, the blind one,” the people in the village said.

“His grief has made him crazy. He will not stir from the grave. He
fetches water to it each morning, twice when it is hot, He has worn a track to
the stream from all his passing to and fro. He has built himself a little hut
of clay and leaves. He sings once every dawn, and once every midnight, to the
dead.”

Yet they had not forgotten the power of his music, which had made them
weep for him. A man had an infant daughter who fell ill and would not eat, and
he approached Kazir in the cool of the day, and pleaded that he come and cheer
her with a story or a song. Kazir went. Kazir sang: the child laughed and
became well inside the hour. After that, they often asked Kazir to help them.
Mad he might be, but poet and healer he was, too. They grew very fond of him,
and at times of plenty would have heaped him with gifts, but he would accept
nothing, only a small amount of food, and the right to tend the grave of
Ferazhin.