Delusion's Master (Tales From the Flat Earth) (2 page)

She saw his
eyes turn to saffron-haired maidens with skin pale, like cream, and maidens
colored dark as molasses with hair like smoky fleece. She smelled these skins,
this hair, on him, their perfumes and their lust. Her soul shrank inwards and
grew little. At last her soul grew small enough to fit inside a coriander seed.

Then she
looked at herself in the lotus pools and in the silver mirrors. And she divined
that Nemdur’s child made her hideous, and she began to hate the child. Until
that moment, she had scarcely considered her life, or rather, she had not
considered that she might have any say in her life. But now a great terror
filled her. Huge things had happened to her, and none of them at her ordering.
Exile, love, pregnancy and desertion. Next came her labor. Others had suffered
worse, but who is to say for Jasrin, at that time, the pain and fear did not
appear the most awful ever visited upon woman? Her body seemed split; her brain
was cloven. She was delivered of a son and they laid him on the lion’s skin,
but Jasrin was laid on molten lava. Yet she thought,
I am free of it, and
now he will love me again
.

Nemdur sent
gifts. For his wife, earrings and necklaces of lapis lazuli, for his son, a
jade apple. When Nemdur entered the chamber, he lifted the baby high in his
arms, as once he had lifted the veil of his bride, and Nemdur laughed with
pleasure at his son. He had only smiled at Jasrin. This time, he barely glanced
at her.

In a while, a
woman wandered from Jasrin’s apartments. She had a soul small enough to fit
inside a coriander seed, a brain cloven in two parts. One part said to her:
See
where my husband plays with his son
. The second part said to her:
See
how my husband has eyes only for the child and none for me.

Nemdur gave
the child robes of silk, toys of ivory, an anklet of gold. Nemdur came to
Jasrin’s bed.

“Am I
beautiful?” Jasrin questioned him.

“Beautiful as
a lotus, and you bud beautiful children. Let us make another, you and I.”

“My lord,”
said Jasrin, “I am sick tonight. Do not ask me. Go Instead to one of your snowy
women, or your inky women.”

“Come,” said
Nemdur, “it is you I want.”

Then her
cloven brain put words in her mouth, like honey:

“I have
yearned for you—”

Like aloes:

“But I am the
last you turn to.”

Nemdur saw her
hurt, and he said: “I have been thoughtless and will amend it. But I never
honored you the less.”

“I am just
another of your sluts,” said she.

“You are my
wife and the mother of my heir.”

Then Jasrin
would say nothing else, and she stretched herself out like a stone. When he
could not move her, Nemdur left her. His garden was full of flowers, he had no
need to wait for one. If you had opened the coriander seed at that hour, you
could not have found any longer the soul of Jasrin, for it had shrunk to a
speck no bigger than the point of a pin.

That month,
the shallow waters of the water garden failed and the lotuses died.
There
,
said the second part of Jasrin’s brain,
that is what they have done to you,
Nemdur and Nemdur’s son
.

And the first
part of her brain whispered:
If you had not borne a child, Nemdur would love
you still
.

The child was
sleeping on his lion skin in the shade, and nearby his nurse lay sleeping too,
and all about were scattered the tiny ivory animals that the king had sent the
child, and on his ankle was the golden anklet.

Jasrin
noiselessly took up the nurse’s outer garment that the woman had cast off in
the heat of the day. Jasrin wrapped herself in the garment and pulled its folds
over her head, and next she took up the child in the skin. Then she began to
cry, for the child was innocent and beautiful; but even so he was her enemy.

Jasrin passed
through the palace yards, and no one questioned her, thinking her the trusted
nurse. When she went out and through the city, she became only another woman
with her child carried close. And sometimes indeed Jasrin saw other women with
their babies, and she was sad for them, believing every woman who had borne a
child had lost thereby the love of her husband.

Down wide
streets and narrow, across the great marketplace where the brown camels glared
like lords, and the blue-black figs sweated and the red meat swung and boys
danced to a pipe and a snake rose from a copper urn and spread his heart-shaped
hood. So Jasrin came to the tall enameled walls of Sheve. She did not see the
pictures there of beasts and flowers. She ran out through the broad gate whose
shadow was like black death. She ran into the desert.

About a
hundred paces from the walls, where there was a well, clustered an encampment
of wandering people. Jasrin walked boldly among the tents, and none challenged
her since she was a woman, and in those parts they did not fear women much, or
did not suppose they did.

At last Jasrin
came on a group of several young children and babies sleeping or sleepily
playing together in the shadow of a tent. Nearby a pair of large hunting dogs
reclined, their tawny masks upon their paws.

Now Jasrin was
beyond reason almost, but not quite. It seemed to her that she might leave her
child here undetected, among so many others. And when the mothers came and
found an extra child, no doubt they would take it in, concluding themselves
repaid by the golden ring about its ankle. Once noon was done, the camp would be disbanded, for such nomads rarely stayed long in any place, let alone beside
the cities of the desert country, which they considered devilish and decadent.
By nightfall, then, if not sooner, Jasrin would be free of the thing which had,
so guiltlessly, robbed her of all happiness.

As she was
standing there musing feverishly on these things, one of the dogs raised its
head, snuffing the air, and growled softly at her. Plainly, these animals had
been set to guard the children, and would guard hers as well when she was gone.
Yet the dog’s merciless eyes filled Jasrin with sudden alarm. In a frenzy she
put the bundle of the child from her and let it fall gently on the sand, beside
the other infants. It had not cried; perhaps instinctively it had known her for
its mother, while unable instinctively to guess her purpose.

The dog surged
abruptly to its four slim feet, and now its eyes were hard charred glasses,
fired by the relentless desert sun. Jasrin turned and fled, expecting the dog’s
fangs to fasten any moment in her robe or her flesh, but its growling only died
behind her, though over it she heard all the sleepy children wake and begin to
wail and shriek, as if accusing her, and thus she ran the faster, from the camp
and back through the city gateway. Up the streets, wide and narrow, she ran, and
near the palace she checked, and threw the nurse’s robe on the ground. The
guards, seeing her reenter, stared, for she was the Queen of Sheve and she had
come in without attendants from the streets; but they did not question her.

She went to
her apartments and sat down there. Her head ached, her very mind ached.

Nemdur would
come to her and say: “Our son has disappeared, none can discover him. Do you
think the woman who was his nurse killed him?”

And Jasrin
would answer: “Spare her, my lord. She is demented. She is jealous that she has
no child of her own, for her own child died. . . .”

Noon
had come, and afternoon,
and then the time of redness, the blood-red splashed on the walls, the scarlet
aftermath of the sun changing swiftly to magenta and to indigo, and the stars
appeared, the lamps of the cities of heaven. Jasrin had heard no outcry and no
search through the palace. Nemdur had not come to her.

And then he
came.

He stepped
quickly into the unlit chamber, and for once he did not light the room with his
presence, nor did he speak as she had anticipated.

“Jasrin, my
wife,” said Nemdur, “I have heard three stories. The first is that someone
thieved the robe of a woman as she slept in the garden shade. The second that
this same woman, muffled in her robe against the heat, stole out into the city,
but that she never returned. The third story is that Jasrin, the Queen of
Sheve, came back from the city unescorted, though none had seen her go there.”

Jasrin’s
aching cloven brain could not deal with this.

“These are all
lies!” she cried. “You should whip such liars.”

But Nemdur
said gently to her: “There is a fourth story. Listen, I will tell it you.
Nomads pitched their tents by the walls of Sheve, in order to draw water from
the well outside the gate, and to sell produce of theirs in the market. But a
woman came and left a child lying among the children of the tents.”

“It was the
nurse,” Jasrin blurted.

“No,” said
Nemdur, “for she was that very hour searching for our child, mine and yours,
and she has witnesses to her search.”

“They are all
liars!” cried Jasrin once more.

“There is only
one liar.”

Immediately
Jasrin’s strength went from her like blood from a mortal wound.

“I confess
it,” she said. “The child took away your regard for me. I would send away the child
instead. Do not blame me. I could not help myself.”

“I do not
blame you,” said Nemdur. His voice remained quiet, she could not see his face
in the dark.

“And has the
child been returned to you?” muttered Jasrin.

“Returned,”
said Nemdur, and then he shouted across the chamber: “Bring in my son.” The
doors opened again, and certain servants entered, and one carried a burning
torch, and another a bundle. “Set him down,” said the king, “and let this poor
madwoman behold the fruit of her planting.”

So they placed
the bundle before the Queen of Sheve and unwrapped it in the torchlight.

For a while
she stared, and then she screamed, and the two parts of her brain shattered in
a hundred fragments.

The people of
the tents had known the infant by his gold anklet, and out of respect for
Nemdur and out of horror, they had brought home to him, risking his vengeance,
what was left of his son. For the dogs had torn the child in pieces. Generally,
such dogs would not have harmed a baby, but they were hunting hounds, and they
had scented lion the moment the woman approached. When she had dropped the
child in the sand, wrapped in the lion skin, the dogs had rushed to it. As
Jasrin fled, the dogs had fallen on the skin and coincidentally on the baby
inside the skin. Truly, Jasrin was rid of her son, truly she had conquered her
enemy.

Nemdur showed
none of his grief or his revulsion, nor did he sentence his wife to any
punishment. He put her aside merely, and had her locked in a lavish pavillion
adjoining the palace. He went on sending her gifts, costly hangings, succulent
meats and ripe fruit, jewels. He was good to her, his tolerance was wondered
at. In fact, he would have been less cruel if he had given her instantly to the
executioner. Instead, It was a living death he shut her in, worse, far worse,
than the scourge, the fire, the clean stroke of a sword.

In the third
month of her imprisonment, the month when the king was to be married again,
somehow Jasrin escaped. She was so mad by then that she half believed she was a
bride, that this was the water country, and Nemdur, the bridegroom, was about
to receive her and unveil her for the first time. The notion had obsessed her,
however, that she would be barren, unless she could find a particular magic
token, the promise of the gods to her that she should bear a son. This token
was none other than the body of her child. So she reached the tombyard and
wandered about there, and at length she came upon a gardener. He, knowing her
and seeing no help near, took pity and led her to her son’s tomb, and let her
go in. Finally, those who pursued her came on the scene, and perceived her
sitting in the twilight of the tomb, with the poor body, all gone to bones, in
her arms. In her fragmented mind, she believed she had found the key and symbol
of her security and future joy. But in some wellspring of herself no doubt she
knew it was her frightful guilt she rocked, and her guilt she would not be
sundered from. Repeatedly, those who had come after her attempted to prize the
dead from her grasp. Eventually she had relinquished everything save one bone,
and this they could not get away, try as they would.

So Jasrin and
her bone were removed altogether, to a stone tower in the desert one mile west
of the city of Sheve. And here her living death went on, and the routines of
her madness never varied, her looking for Nemdur, her speech with the bone, her
agony, her fury, her despair, her weeping, on and on. Till all about her grew
also a little mad, catching her sickness, and even the tower was steeped in the
anguish of her insanity, even the trees, the sands, the stars, the sky.

There were then five Lords
of Darkness. Uhlume, Lord Death, was one, whose citadel stood at the Earth’s
core, but who came and went in the world at random. Another was Wickedness, in
the person of the Prince of Demons, Azhrarn the Beautiful, whose city of Druhim
Vanashta lay also underground, and who came and went in the world only by
night, since demonkind abjured the sun (wisely, for it could burn them to smoke
or cinders). The earth was flat, and marvelous, and had room then for such
beings. But it is not remembered where a certain third Lord of Darkness made
his abode, nor perhaps had he much space for private life, for he must be
always everywhere.