Delusion's Master (Tales From the Flat Earth) (26 page)

In other areas
of the temple, sages expounded the meaning of what had happened. They were thought
great men, and most clever, for each one had a different explanation.

Dunizel must
also pass up and down the broad streets of Bhelsheved, carried aloft by her
soldiery, the child in her arms. Then the child was not so still. The child
fretted, disturbed by the fierce noon sun.

When night
came, the city was noisy, not the old noise of reverential songs and
storytelling, but a new noise of dispute and coins. Commerce had come swiftly
on sensation. A few paces from the west gate (not a hundred, no, nor fifty, but
ten) some women and young men had set up a crimson pavilion, and here they sold
their bodies to whoever wished for congress. They, like the sages, had an
explanation: No man should pass into the holy enclosure with venal thoughts,
therefore best get rid of such desires before entering the city.

By night, they
looked for the visit of the god, anxious to lie with his virgin wife. A bough
groaned in the wind: “It is the sound of his wings!” A camel coughed: “It is
the cough of his starlike steed.” A man cried out inside the crimson pavilion:
“Ah, the god is satisfied.”

Yet those who
brooded deeply upon such matters were aware the god had not positively evinced
himself, nor come publicly to own his offspring. The sages had no explanation
for this, nor for the child’s fretfulness in the sun. A god’s creation, though
only a female, should be capable of enduring sunlight. Was not the sun the
ultimate symbol of all heavenly lusters?

In her
chamber, amid new welters of new gold, unknown, unseen by men, Azhrarn did come
to Dunizel. He stood each darkness like a slim black tree growing in the corner
of the room, and he said to her in an iron voice: “Have you relented now? Have
you grown aware now of our time together, which you waste?”

And Dunizel
replied: “My love, my lord, my life, I will not leave your child alone here.”

“You will,” he
said. “It is only a matter of my waiting. Can you bear so easily to be parted
from me?”

“I cannot bear
to be parted from you.”

“Then leave
the brat and come with me. I will make her more fearful than a dragoness. She
will not be vulnerable, I promise you.”

“I cannot.”

“I might take
you with me, whether or not you wish it.”

“Truly. And
will you?”

“No. But nor
will I continue entreating you like your servant.”

But every
night now he would return, and every night their conversation was the same.
They did not touch, though the room grew drowsy, sweet, electric with the inner
reaching out of both of them toward the other. And neither would surrender the
argument.

In its
jewelwork cradle, the child turned its head upon its luxuriant hair to watch
them with eyes like the blue kernel of a twilight sky.

Zharet walked into
Bhelsheved at the same open gate by which she had left it.

She looked
about and saw alteration everywhere, saw it contemptuously and uncaringly. But
she in turn was looked at.

Some power had
come with her. Some power from Prince Chuz, most likely, which he had awarded
her by virtue of their many physical contacts. Amid all the variegated persons
filling the city, Zharet stood out. Young and old at once, emaciated, almost
beautiful, her hair striped through with white and tan. An indefinable scent
clung about her. It was the odor of the aloe bush, caught in her ragged
clothes.

On the street,
they made way for her. The beggars did not ask her for alms. The philosophers
ruminated that here was a crazed mystic out of the desert. Even women might
incline to mysticism, at which time they became wilder and less partial than
males of that inclination.

Zharet walked,
and segments of the crowd walked after her.

The rich
ladies pointed, scornful and jealous.

Zharet climbed
the steps of a modest fane, and stationed herself there, apparently gazing down
at the crowd, in fact through them, to her bitterness. She was not
self-conscious, or actually conscious only of self. Her pain was the center of
the universe. She need not tremble at a crowd.

“Oh deluded
ones!” She suddenly shouted, and her voice carried, flying like a bird, “Oh
worshippers of false gods!”

The crowd
stirred, muttered. Its interest had been caught. It is not always boring to be
criticized.

“Fools!” cried
Zharet. The wind, whining, blew her hair about her; she raised her skinny arms,
and felt Chuz laughing at her back. “This
god
who has sown his seed in
Bhelsheved is none other than that dark foulness, Arch-Demon of the underground
pit.”

At this, cries
answered her cry. Predictably they told her she was a blasphemer, a liar. They
told her they would rend her.

“Rend me then.
Your punishment will still come upon you.”

They told her
the gods would strike her down.

“Let them
strike me,” she shrilled, “if I say anything but the truth.”

Then she
described to them how Azhrarn, the ugliest and most abysmal fiend extant on
earth or under it, had crawled up to the surface of the world, and obscenely
fathered a similar fiend, although in innocuous infant form, on the vilest
harlot who would accommodate him. The crowd was horrified at her apostasy.
Zharet assured the crowd the apostasy was theirs not hers, for they credited a
demon as a god. When she had said all she wished to, she came down the steps
again, and went away through the crowd to find another portion of it to
harangue.

The day
swelled coldly, grew disappointed in itself, and began to dwindle. Zharet had
spoken many times. Her voice was hoarse. Some had remembered her vaguely. But
those who connected her to the seventeen murderesses supposed that, like the
others, she had died, and was here in spirit form to alarm them. A provocative
thought, for surely a spirit might know something they did not.

By the time
the day had reached its edge, there were few who had not heard, or heard of,
Zharet’s wailing.

A well-heeled
lord, who prided himself on the interesting specimens he could claim to have
entertained at his table, sent his slave to ask Zharet to his tent. Zharet
accepted the invitation with hauteur. She went in and sat down among diaphanous
curtainings, a conflagration of lamps, some ten or eleven eminent rhetoricians
and wise men, and thirty eager guests. Whether she was daunted for so much as a
moment was not obvious.

When they
offered her food, she refused it.

“Shame and
anxiety are my meat and drink.”

When they
offered her fruit and wine she declared in her roughened theatrical voice:

“The sweet
grape has become for me the aloe, bringer of bitterness and purging.”

The guests
gorged themselves, listening in fascination to Zharet’s depressing utterances.
At length the host prevailed on her to recount her history. She did. She spoke
fluently of the demon couching, the ecstasy beyond ecstasy, the murder to which
she had been persuaded, her supernatural escape at the hands “Of a great Being,
who pitied me.” She did not mention Chuz by name. Chuz had done something to
her tongue, most probably, to safeguard his reputation. By implication,
however, she made him sound like a heavenly messenger.

“A wonderful
divertissement,” said the lords’ guests, faintly uneasy.

Rumor ran out
of the tent, carried on the evening wind, or by the mouths of those who
listened and came away.

That night was
like a seething cauldron. The ingenuous began to doubt. The sophisticates,
already yawning over the sameness of Dunizel’s child, roused to the hope of
something new. The esthetes debated violently.

A fish was
seen strolling on its fins along the lake shore: Madness was also about.

In the morning
the sun and Zharet rose together and went together across the city. The waves
of the crowd poured up and down. The temple emptied in preference for the more
peculiar show outside. Zharet’s diatribes were taken for preaching.

When day
waned, a famous philosopher sent his slave to ask Zharet to his tent, that she
and he and his fellows might discuss her teachings. She entered the tent and
sternly admonished him: “I am only a woman, and you seek to elevate me to the
intellectual status of a man. But small surprise, since you think a god may be
born in female shape.”

“How astute
she is,” said the men, deeply troubled and gratified.

Night’s wings
closed over Bhelsheved.

The temple was
empty, sacred flames burning bright on its goldwork. On the mosaic floor, near
to the golden throne where Dunizel would sit with the child, someone had
scrawled the symbol which translates exactly as: ?

And, in the
shadow of that darkness, maybe Azhrarn said to her: “They will abuse you. Now
surely you must leave the child and come with me.”

But still she
would not leave the child, nor he consent to take it. But neither would he
force her from the place against her will.

In the
morning, the shout was audible: “Zharet! Zharet the Seeress!”

Zharet answered
the shout in a voice which was raucous now as the raven’s. “I am the aloe,” she
croaked. “Let me be your medicine. I will purge you of your blindness.” She
believed everything she said, even when, as sometimes happened, she glimpsed a
ghostly figure in the crowd, wrapped in a damson mantle, grinning at the ground
like a death’s head with brazen teeth.

But as
Zharet’s third day in the city merged into the third dusk, a third slave came
to her. He was dressed with extraordinary richness and simplicity, yet a
curious shifting, like the play of colored flames—perhaps from the fading
afterglow—obscured his face.

He did not
speak to her, this man, though all about other servitors clamored, begging her
to come to this tent or that. He did not speak, yet his whole stance conveyed
the meaning
You must come with me
.

“Very well,”
said Zharet.

She was not
sure why she had deigned to choose him, he had not even announced his master’s
name. But she felt a quickening. It was stronger than the thirst for fame or
vengeance. As the walls and the lights and the groves and the clusterings of
people were left behind her, she said peremptorily, “Where is the tent of your
lord situated?”

The slave half
turned, and she caught an image of his face. He was handsome. She shivered.
Before she could ask again, the tent was in front of them. It was coal-black,
and like a coal seemed shot with incendiary effulgence. Was this some trick of
Chuz’s devising? She had never really detected who or what Chuz was, other than
her guide, her spiritual aide, to whom, by right of her suffering, she was
entitled. But also she hated Chuz, for he had shown her the uncharitable facts
of her destiny. She glared at the black pavilion, but as she did so some of the
drapery folded away.

Enter
, said the slave, but
still without speech.

Rosy and
somnolent, the lamps in the pavilion, burnishing things of dark metal, pale
marble, heavy silk. Richer than the rich man’s tent, more inspiring than the
tent of the philosopher.

Zharet found
she had gone in. The instant she had done so a bemusement seemed to come on
her. She was reminded of the vision of truth in the garden. A cup was set in
her hand. Before she knew what she did, she had sipped—and choked. Thick gall
was in the cup. No, not gall. The juice of an
aloe
.

She resolved,
mindlessly, to fly the place, and saw one stood before the entrance to the
tent, slender and smiling and beautiful, with a sword of blue steel naked in
his hands.

“But you are
not to die by a sword,” said a voice, gently, marvelously, in her ear. “You are
to die more cruelly. More horribly. You are to die of what you hungered for.
Upon a sword of a different kind, pierced to the soul and shrieking.”

Zharet flung
about again, seeking the owner of this voice. No one was near. It might have been
the voice of Azhrarn. They say it was.

She had,
besides, the space for no more than one swift terrified glance, before a
multitude of hands fastened on her, invisibly. No longer was she the demented
murderess, the haughty seer. She was a young woman, fearing torture. And,
knowing none could hear her, or save her, for clearly she had been brought
among demons, yet she screamed. Maybe she even screamed for Chuz, by whatever
name she had come to know him, which undoubtedly was not the real one.
Undoubtedly, too, the tent had been secreted by magic, or else removed into
some other dimension. Chuz could not have located it, nor did he.

Thus at first
she screamed, at the initial clutch of the torturers, but in a brace of seconds
her screams became very small amazed whimperings, for the hands of the
torturers were caressing her, and the caresses began to produce in her twisting
shudders of irresistible pleasure. And then again she sensed, (thoughtless, by
instinct alone, for the shreds of her reason were already driven away like
dogs), that this pleasure was to
be
the torture. At that she would have
screamed again, but cold voluptuous tricklings and boiling flinchings of
feeling had already closed her throat.