Delusion's Master (Tales From the Flat Earth) (17 page)

A morning came
that the woman was at the pool once more, cutting reeds there, and her child
nearby lying safe in a basket, or so she believed. The weather was hot, and the
woman worked at her task slowly, singing to herself the while to match the
harmonies of the waterfall. And her mind began to dwell on the wonder of that
fall and how it made music, and on all the wonders that had accrued in the
land, and the rhythm of her knife partly hypnotized her, cutting and cutting at
the gray-green stems. . . . The child, meanwhile, had contrived
to roll from its nest. In among the reeds, then, which to its unfocused gaze
were a senseless jungle, it began to crawl. Up on their reed pillars, spiders
like green marzipan stared down at it from many mulberry eyes which they wore
like caps of jewels on their heads. Smart armored beetles scattered before its
soft hands noisily, clattering their long horns.

The mother,
pausing to rest a moment, glanced up, and caught her breath in horror. Some
fifty feet away, her child was tottering drunkenly at the brink of the pool.
Before she could prevent herself, the woman uttered a loud cry of alarm. The
child started, and lost its balance. The water gave way like treacle to receive
it. Then the surface knitted over, nor did it unravel to show the child again.

The
reed-cutter’s wife began to scream, and would have thrown herself directly into
the pool, but in a moment more a man had dashed from among the reeds, and dived
deep in the water. Without speech, in that mutual telepathy of human passion
which will sometimes occur, the woman knew this stranger must have seen her
child in the instant of its fall, and had rushed to help it. So she ran about
on the bank, sobbing prayers of terror and frustration, and seeing how the
black mud was stirred up to the surface by the man’s activity. Once or twice
his head emerged from the water, slick as an otter’s, but only for a second was
it visible before plunging down again.

Enough time
had by now elapsed that anyone but the mother must have known her daughter to
be dead. But she, of course, would not believe such a thing. At length, grim
proof appeared. The man came forth from the pool once more, but now he carried
something in his arms. It was a bundle, covered all over with water-murk. It
might have been a great clod of mud he had dragged up, and incongruously
offered the mother; save that the distraught expression on his face told
another story.

But the
reed-cutter’s wife did not look at the man’s face, only at the black and
peculiar object he held out to her. And it seemed she did not recognize it, for
she drew away, drew away from the edge of the pool, and suddenly she turned her
back to the water, the man, the bundle, and began to scream again and beat her
fists on the ground.

Just then the
man, the magician’s servant who lived by the pool, heard the bleating of a
goat. There on the farther bank had arrived the little white she-goat, who gave
his own child milk, and the child herself, who was called Flame. The man
hurried to get to shore immediately, not wishing the tragedy repeated. Laying
the dead and muddy infant in the reeds, he climbed onto the bank, and took up
his own offspring in his arms. Soveh, disconcerted by the woman’s screams, and
made wet by this paternal encounter, sent up a howl of disapproval, penetrating
as a thin gold wire.

It pierced the
mother’s ear, even through her own uproar. For it sounded in her head like a
bell ringing out: Listen, listen! It is as you thought. No child of yours could
ever die.

A heartbeat,
and the woman was in the pool, swimming frantically for the area where the man
stood, the girl-child in his arms. He, in surprise, merely stood and watched
the woman, watched her till she too had dragged herself up the bank. And then
she reached out, and snatched the child from his hands.

“You have
revived her—Oh, a thousand blessings on you. And a thousand more from her
father when he hears of it.”

The man, who
had come to live in serene naïveté, was lost for words, as this tune went on,
but eventually he pointed at the reeds where he had set down the drowned child,
and he cried, “Alas, it is
my
daughter you have taken up. Your own child
lies there.”

At this, the
reed-cutter’s wife seemed to become quite mad. Her face shriveled on its frame,
and blood engorged her eyes.

“Filthy
trickster!” she shrieked. “Affecting pretense with an armful of mud to make
believe my child was dead. Meaning to keep my child for purposes of your own.
My
baby, wet from the pool, as I can feel her to be.”

There must
have been some superficial likeness between the two small girls, or surely she
could not so have deluded herself. No doubt both were fair, and of an age. Yet
it seems an odd thing a mother should not know her own young, that which had
budded from her body, which she had fed from her own breasts, and rocked to
sleep, and carried about with her for two years, both in her womb and on her
shoulders. But there is always this: her precipitate cry it was had pitched her
baby in the water. A thoughtless, inadvertently murderous act. Guilt, in those
days, was a wild dog, biting at its own tail. Perhaps this mother wished to be
mistaken before she felt those teeth fasten in her heart.

“Vile robber,”
she shouted. “What evil did you plan? To kill and eat my daughter, maybe. Or to
practice nastier deeds?”

And then, even
as she ranted, she caught sight of a blueish scar upon his thigh. It was like a
draught of strong liquor to her, that sight, for with it memory rushed back to
her—of the rapist and her knife. She knew him in a flash of blood-red hate, and
by that glare, she turned and fled, clutching her burden to her. Its stricken
wails she translated to herself as fear of the devilish man who had seized it.
Not as fear of its abduction by herself.

The man stood
nonplussed, staring at the mad woman. Yet, as she fled, he made to pursue, but
the little goat got in his way. And, looking down at her, he remembered Sunfire
who had played with the goat. And next Sunfire seemed to say in his brain:
“Events will demonstrate how you must bestow our child.” And he recollected,
too, how he had guessed this was to be his punishment. Then he did not go after
the woman, but began to cry, and the little goat nudged him, and he picked her
up in his arms, and wept on her long white hair, his tears like a bitter song,
to the music of the waterfall.

The woman, having
convinced herself, convinced her husband, and next all the village. But when
they went to look for the evil man finally to slay him, he had gone away. Only
the bothy was found, and a few of the clever reed toys Sunfire had made, and an
empty cradle. These, without compunction, the villagers burnt. And by the
firelight, in the reeds at the water’s edge, the spiders and beetles feasted.

And probably,
for a month or so, some might remark to the woman: “How different your girl
looks. It must be her ordeal has left its mark on her. Yet, if anything, she is
the prettier.”

And the woman
smiled. (Though often in the ebb hours of night she would suffer a nightmare,
seeing a tiny parcel of bones, with the green reeds growing through them.)

No longer was
the child called Soveh, which is Flame. She was called the name the other child
had had. That name is not remembered, but lovely she was, and lovelier she
grew. Sunfire into moonflame. She, who might well have been born a monster,
stumbling, ugly and mindless, transmuted by the comet’s light.

But, being so
wondrous, there began to be an apartness about her. Though she was demure and
gentle, her very containment, her very sweetness, coupled to her extraordinary
rarity, placed her inside a shell of crystal. She might be seen, and spoken to,
she might answer and be heard. Yet who can touch through a shell of crystal?
And who can love through one?

CHAPTER 4

Moonflame

The child grew. She was
fifteen. She was beautiful. She was distant, perhaps unreachable.

The other
young ones of the village reacted strangely to her. With the frequently valid
instincts of childhood, they had known from the start she was not one of
themselves. Yet, they had not feared her or disliked her. She was restful,
peaceful in her beauty. If they were unhappy or troubled or hurt and no parent
by, they would go to her, even when she was only three or four years, and
somehow she would comfort and soothe them. They treated with her as if with an
adult, an adult of their own height and age, but wiser than they. In some ways,
as children, they were proud of her. When visitors came, they would be taken to
see the reedcutter’s daughter, she who had been drowned and revived. She was a
sight-to-be-viewed in the village, almost a holy sight, though this they did
not recognize as such, or would not, or could not.

But then she
grew up, and the children of the village began to be obsessed with her. The
girls would sit by her, and speak out their hearts to her, hanging on her calm
replies. The boys would avoid her eyes that seemed suddenly bluer than heaven,
look askance at her fluid slenderness, her platinum-colored veil of hair. They
would think of her as they tended the flocks and herds, as they tilled the soil
or cut the grain or hammered out pieces of metal on the anvil. They would think
of her, too, when they lay over the bodies of other girls, or with the friendly
whores in the tavern that had recently been set up in the mansion on the hill.
But, even as they thought of bedding with the reed-cutter’s daughter, some
innate sense of wrongness would overcome them. It was not that she was
undesirable. It was not that she was anything but filled to the brim with the
promises and forms of delight. Not even that they had seen no passion in her,
for there was a passion about her quite beyond all expression, a passionate
stillness, like that of a closed and sleeping flower, the passion of that which
is waiting to break free, to blossom, to overspill the margins of itself—and
each must ask: Shall I be the one to free her? Yet there was something else, beyond
all this. The shell of crystal, dimly, psychically perceived, in which this
flower lay.

However, human
aspiration is often blind, its motto: I want, therefore I will have. Which in
some cases is an excellent thing, but which, in this case, was mere folly.

The young men
began to sue for the reed-cutter’s daughter in marriage.

The prideful
parents were less aware of their child’s unusual qualities, for they knew only
that she was the best daughter in the world, the loveliest, the most dutiful
and virtuous—and all this they took for granted, since she was theirs, and
could not therefore be anything less than perfect. But now their pleasure in
her was doubled, for here was a proposal for a wedding from the wealthy
blacksmith’s son, and here another from the son of the landowner who possessed
more than two hundred olive trees, and more than three hundred goats. And here
a proposal from all three of the baker’s sons. And here from the vintner’s
young brother. And here—oh, yes, best hide this one—a naughty offer from the
silk merchant’s niece who lived in the town and, out on a drive, had spied the
reed-cutter’s daughter through her carriage window.

“Is this not
wonderful?” said the reed-cutter of his daughter. And very fairly he told her
of each of the young men who had asked for her, extolling their charms and good
qualities. Nor, since he was an honest man, did he praise the wealthiest ones
most highly, but gave all equal measure.

The girl sat,
quiet as a leaf, and her father was delighted at her modesty. Strangely, it was
the beaming mother who grew uneasy and slowly ceased to beam. The mother
thought of the green pool and the dead child who had come back from death,
changed from a corpse or a mere lump of mud, into a living baby. The mother
seemed to see a faint sheen playing over her miraculous offspring, but probably
it was only the summer sun through the doorway. The mother wished to put her
hand on her husband’s arm, murmuring
Say nothing else
. But probably it
was only a mother’s natural fear of losing her daughter.

“Now,” said
the man, at the end of his recital, “you may take as many days as you like to
decide whom you will have. It is a difficult choice, for many of them are fair,
and several are well-to-do. But remember, do not think only of coins. Your mother
and I have been poor, but we have also been happy in each other.”

The girl
raised her head. She smiled on them like a benediction, but she said: “There is
no man I have met that I would wish to live with.”

The father was
shocked. He was a man, and believed men to be fine creatures.

“Come now,” he
said. “That is foolish talk. What better future can you gain than in the role
of wife?”

She had always
been obedient, and gentle. She had always been loving, attentive and calm. She
had been strong, too, and oddly knowing, but they had missed that, confusing
one thing with another. Yet now she said to them, softly, carefully, “I do not
desire to marry. My answer to each and every one is ‘no.’”

Dumbfounded,
the father. He was not a stern man, but anger began to brew in him. When he
could not get another answer from her, he commenced to rant and rave. “You
must,” he said, “You shall.” But, “No,” she said, in a voice like a water drop
falling on a stone, the same drop splashing minute by minute, year by year. “I will
give you ‘no’!” quoth he, and he shut her in the house and would not let her
out. He made her sit among the clay pots by the hearth. And when she still said
“no” to him, he let the woman give her only bread to eat, and water to drink.
He became unlike himself, for he could not understand. His wife wept nervously,
and begged her daughter to see reason. Sunlight stole through the door and
touched the girl on the foot, the ankle, the wrist, and said:
Say yes, and
be at liberty, and we will play together.
Or the scent of flowers entered
and said:
Say yes, and be at liberty, and I will garland you.
Or birds
sang to the girl, and their song said:
Each of us is mated, and joyful in
the mating. Say yes, say yes
. But still she said “no.’”