Delusion's Master (Tales From the Flat Earth) (14 page)

As the moon
rose that night, the magician set sprites on the servant to lash him, and the
fellow ran about wailing. Strong threats were also added, and thereafter no
further tricks were played on the villagers.

But the
servant was not content. His phallus would trouble him a vast amount, rising up
in the hours of the darkness to chide him. Sporadically, the magician might
supply him with illusions that had the appearance and fleshliness of delectable
and amorous youths and maidens, but only rarely did the mage, himself above
such things, remember that his servant was not. A long while in the city, the
servant had subsisted quite heartily on a secret diet of rapes and
terrorisms—which also fulfilled his appetites. Now, in this parochial spot, his
crimes had come swiftly to light, and all his pleasures were forbidden him.

Then one day,
spying (it was all he had left) upon two lovers in a meadow, he beheld the
idiot girl wander by. And soon the lovers, arising from the grass, beheld her
too. From their words the servant found out that they considered her a bane,
and longed that she should vanish.

At this news,
the servant took to following the girl, and soon enough he learned how the
whole village loved her. Shortly a plan occurred to him.

Under the
mansion, in whose upper rooms the magus practised his sorceries, was a system
of cellars, which in turn led into the stone chamber of an underground stream.
Here the servant had frequently wandered, gathering funguses and occult plants
at his master’s direction, and also incising lewd graffiti in the walls, and
doing harm to the harmless creeping things that lived there.

The
resemblance of this subterrain to a prison had not escaped him, either.

Having by now
tracked the idiot quite frequently, the servant had some idea of her possible
wandering and resting places. Waiting until the night of a full red moon, when
the mage was on the mansion’s eastern roof, making lunar calculations, the
servant roved about the countryside, until he came on the girl in one of her
haunts, which was a ruinous hut without roof or door. Slinking in, the servant
eyed her as she crouched beneath her matted hair, and she in turn, poor witless
thing, stared vacantly back at him.

Being himself
foul, her foul condition did not lessen the servant’s eagerness. Wasting no
time, he struck her to the ground, jumped upon her and violently forced her.
Fortunately, his excitement was so imperative that she did not have to endure
his activities for very long.

For her part,
her cries of pain were very nearly abstract, and she did not struggle. She was
so used to the casual ill-treatments of men, and of nature itself, she found
this new brutalization indistinguishable.

When he was
done, the servant shook himself like some large animal emerging from mud,
dragged up his skinny haphazard mistress, and loaded her over his shoulder. In
this way he conducted her to the magician’s house, and without his master’s
knowledge, conveyed her down through the cellars to the rock-cut where the
stream ran. Here, he tied her—she had so often been tied, she made no protest
even at this—to a handy stalagmite. He then raped her a couple more times,
(for, sad fellow, he had been deprived a long while,) after which he serenely
repaired aloft, and presented himself to the magician. He was just in time to
get to work on the heavy machinery the mage inclined to have operated on the
roof. It was an engine of enormous wheels and mechanical pistons, that was
driven both by the brawn of the servant and by an uncanny power derived from
certain radiations of the stars and other ethereal bodies.

As the servant
lugged the levers into position and the engine bellowed, the mage shouted: “In
only another one hundred and nine days and nights, as I judge by the aura of
the moon and the rhythms of the stars, the comet I am expecting will certainly
appear.”

“Yes, master,”
shouted back the servant dutifully. His own mind was on lower things, and most
happily engaged there.

The mage,
however, had reached that peak of pale and shining elevation the intellectual
achieves when some long-awaited mental irradiation is in the offing. And so
indeed it was. In point of fact, the magician’s whole purpose in coming to this
out-of-the-way spot had been to confront the comet. He had learned, from his
studies a few months earlier, that the apparition was due to manifest in that
portion of sky to which the village was adjacent. He had abandoned therefore
all his other projects and hurried to the vicinity. Here, having ordered the
servant to construct the strange machine, the magus was now priming it, for he
planned by its use to attract and trap a fragment of the comet’s emissions.

The servant,
however, had scant care for the mage’s lust, being merry with his own. He
pounded the levers of the machine and cranked it. When his task was done, he
stole once more into the underground cavern, where he pushed stale bread and
vinegary wine into the idiot’s mouth, before bestriding her again with a
master’s pleasure in possession. For he had never owned anything before.

For some ninety days,
then, things went on much in this sort. The servant would go down to the
cellars and so into the chamber below, and there he would satisfy his desires.
Intermittently, he would nourish the idiot girl on remnants of food. For drink,
he graciously awarded her the length of the stream, or what part of it she
could come at, being permanently tethered as she was.

However, after
ninety days, something impinged on the servant’s murky insensibilities. It came
to him that a monthly rite, usual to women, was consistently absent in his
doxy. At first, he hoped her imbecility had affected her womb, but shortly it
seemed to him he could detect the changes about her that attended conception.

The servant
fell then into a dreadful distress. Not, to be sure, for the lady’s sake, but
for his own. Feeble, half-starved and stupid as she was, she would most
certainly not survive the birth of a child, and so he would lose her almost as
soon as he had made her his. Accordingly, he debated with himself on various
methods, and at length he brought wine and made her drink, and then beat her
and kicked her soundly, trusting she might abort the infant, and still live.
Alas, alas, the girl only recovered, and she remained filled.

So desperate
did the servant become that he contemplated inquiring of the magician a method
of curtailment, but by now the one hundred and nine days were almost done, and
the mage had withdrawn into his private cell to fast and meditate, purifying
himself for the mighty spell he intended to work. He emerged only now and then
to examine the engine on the roof, and at such moments was preoccupied.

“Master,”
wheedled the servant, “a poor village maiden was at the door yesterday begging
that you might remedy an unwanted pregnancy for her mother, already blessed
with forty-three children—”

“No, no,”
murmured the mage, “your addition is quite wrong. Forty-
seven
are the
number of syllables of the astral mantra I must recite on the comet’s
dissolution.”

“Master,”
whined the servant, “if I confess to you I allowed a wicked woman, maddened
with her desire to enjoy me, to lead me from the path of virtuous abstinence,
and that now she threatens me with her father’s wrath if I do not alleviate her
condition—”

“What is this
nonsense? The mechanism’s condition is perfect. But you must oil this cog.”

Eventually,
the servant desisted. He began, instead, to take better food to the girl in the
rock-cut, fruit and meat. Even he took her warm rugs to sleep on. Even he
sometimes un-tethered her from the stalagmite, and led her up and down to
exercise her. If she was aware of his novel kindness, she did not show it. Nor
did she seem aware of her pregnancy. When the servant periodically flung her
down and rode her frantically, (desperate not to miss an opportunity, since so
probably he would soon lose her) she gazed at the ceiling of stone, frowning
slightly through her filthy tangled mane.

On the one
hundred and eighth day of the magician’s vigil, the first foreshape of the
comet emerged from a twilight sky.

Now the comets
of the flat earth were of different origins and inclination from those which
visit the rounded world. Some evolved in the mass of chaos beyond the corners
of the earth as then it was, and passing by error, or through some cosmic or
seismic upheaval, into the uplands of the world’s air, were hastily coated by
the instinctive elements of that air with protective particles—for pure chaos
and the standardized atoms of the world could not coexist without some
compromising admixture forming between, to insulate one from the other. These
comets came and went, and seldom revisited the sky, for once they regained the
outer limits, chaos reclaimed them. A second form of comet was that created
solely by tumbling stars, which, each trailing the struck flame of its descent,
for some reason failed to hit the earth, and was thereafter carried back and
forth—by random currents of the atmosphere, or the exquisite sorceries of sky
elementals (who might ride such beacons over the ether). These second sort of
comets might recur in appearance at regular or irregular intervals, circling
the dome above the earth for centuries, until they were utterly burned out. But
there was, too, a third variety, and it was to this group that the magician’s
comet belonged.

In those days,
the sun, which always remained a precise distance above in its journeys over
the earth, moonlike, waxed and waned, thereby creating summer and winter. Every
night, also, the sun, having set, was plunged into the hardly explicable limbos
which underlay the lower regions of earth—those nether depths that were beyond
and below even the Innerearth, Death’s kingdom. This psychic “death” during
every period of darkness would mysteriously revitalize the sun’s disc, so that
every dawn it was able to hurl itself up in the east again and refresh the
world with its light. (The moon underwent a similar process.) However, it would
sometimes happen—perhaps once in a thousand years—that, during its waxing
stage, the sun would rise clad in more vitality than was necessary, or
healthful. This overcharge would then stream off, like steam from boiling
water, sometimes visible as clouds, or else quite invisible, to a mortal eye.
The solar vapor would presently drift up beyond the apex of the sun’s daily
route. Here, in the colder environs of the higher sky, it would alternately
ferment and condense, heat and cool, until at length it grew to be a flamingly
gaseous sphere.

Once fully
formed, the magnetism of the earth would begin to summon this ghostly fireball,
and it would commence slowly falling through months, or even years, downwards,
its hair spreading out behind it to mark its road through the atmosphere.
Without exception, at a point far above the earth’s actual surface, the fiery
gas would once more unravel. The radiation, which at these moments would be
released, was startling but beneficial. The gases themselves would be absorbed
by the earth’s tissue, or else dissipated into nothing.

Such
occurrences were rare enough; the magician had believed himself very lucky in
mathematically and astrologically chancing on one, for there was small visual
forewarning. Only the flung-forward image of the comet might be seen the night
before its arrival, an effect similar to that of a lamp reflecting on a wall.

At the sight
of its preview, the magician was overjoyed.

Not so, the
village. Ignorant of the character of such a phenomenon, they observed the new
weird and bulbous star in the sky without celebration. When, as the night
progressed, it grew larger, their nervousness increased in proportion. When day
dawned, and still the thing was visible, indeed bigger and brighter, and with
its diamond-lit tail in evidence behind it, horror filled every heart.

Some rushed to
bang on the brass-bound door of the mage’s mansion. There was, as ever, no
answer, but after a while the servant appeared coming up the hill. He had been
sent to collect special herbs, and was not best pleased to see the crowd
barring his way, for he had found crowds were seldom personally auspicious.

Yet the
village, in its panic, chose to forget its dislike of him.

“We beg you to
beg your master to come out and tell us,” cried the crowd, “what awful fate it
is that hangs burning over us in the air.”

The servant
yawned with boredom. He knew how the comet would look, and was not afraid of
it.

“Oh, that
thing. It is nothing but some gob of flatulence belched from the sun. It will
be gone by tomorrow, and good riddance.”

The crowd
conferred, partly reassured but indecisive. As they did so, the servant sidled
by and got to the door, which a seal, given him by the mage, swiftly unlocked.

“But wait,”
said a man. “Will you not ask your master to speak to us? Despite your words,
some of us are convinced the object is a terrible force and of malign intent.
Already, from the shock of beholding it, three women have miscarried.”

The servant,
getting in through the doorway, hesitated. His obnoxious countenance convulsed
in profound thought.

“Wait one
moment,” said the servant to the people, and slammed the door in their faces.

After three or
four hours without any further sign from within, the villagers abandoned the
door and rushed home. Here they and their women set about packing their furniture
and clothing and getting their herds together. By midafternoon, the village was
all but deserted.