Delusion's Master (Tales From the Flat Earth) (5 page)

And now a
madman built a Tower intended to shatter the floor of Upperearth, and he
planned to lead an army into it. The Guardians of the Cistern of Life he meant
to overwhelm, he meant to steal the Elixir from the Cistern. And worse, he
would cause men, horses, chariots,
humanness
to trample through the icy
tranquility of that celestial country. Sweat and blood and shouting on the
frigid blue pastures, horse dung about the harpstring palaces.

Was such an
event even likely? It is debatable. Few traveled to Upperearth, and they by
curious methods. Once Azhrarn, Prince of Demons, had come there, or would come
there, in a winged ship. Uhlume, Lord Death, had never visited, for then the
gods did not die. The way into Upperearth, besides, was obscure, oblique.
Higher than the moon, beyond the sun. A door that was not a door, an entrance
that did not properly exist. . . . Could Nemdur ever have
breached heaven in such a forthright logical fashion as a Tower tall as the
sky?

And yet.
Perhaps the rude blast of mere
intent
troubled the gods, like the
blowing of a foul wind. Even a man may kill a gnat that has not stung him.

The gods
appeared ineffectual in their effete beauty, but they were not. Their
indifference had, to a great extent, saved men from their supernal abilities.
Now, they did not exchange a word or a glance. Did one lift his head, or
several? Or did the impulse simply flow jointly from all their pure and
bloodless intellects?

Their Will, so
minuscule a speck a grain of sand would hold it, so vast it could engulf the
world, seeped from the nowhere-otherwhere of Upperearth, and drifted like a
feather to the Tower of Baybhelu.

By now, the
journey from the base of the Tower to its temporary summit required most of a
day.

Upon the
topmost tier, beneath the scaffolding that portended the next topmost, King
Nemdur had encamped his court, and one tier down from them, the chariots, the
animals, the soldiery also camped.

The tier where
the court rested was perhaps seven hundred feet square, and a movable garden
had been laid out on it to enrich the slender atmosphere. Huge tanks of water
or soil had been borne to the place, hauled by groaning camels, wretched
horses. Green showerings of foliage sprang from these tanks, and vines, fruits,
blossoms and grasses overhung the lip of the tier that the beasts tethered
below might feed on them. In their upper shade were erected Nemdur’s dark
tents, embroidered with crimson and hung with medallions of gold. From their
looped-back portals, Nemdur’s women peeped out prettily, but they were sallow
and uneasy. In a green bower, beneath a parasol, itself like a giant flower,
Nemdur sat in a carved-bone chair. (His story is packed with bones—of children,
fowls, asses, slaves.) About him his sorcerers crowded and his priests,
divining endlessly, but their hands quivering, their eyes bulbous. They had
difficulty understanding each other now, just as Nemdur had difficulty in
understanding them. Indeed, each who perched on Baybhelu had begun to lack
comprehension of all others. Only on the scaffolding did this not matter. There
the overseers lashed with their toothed whips, the slaves strained at their
tasks like automata. They had never understood each other; nothing was changed.
But yet, everywhere the thin air was thick with blurted sentences without
meaning, and the shutting of deaf ears, such items veiled by magicians’ smokes,
scents of roses and palm oil, and faltering musics. While now and then, above,
a shriek, as another slave plummeted from his precarious vantage. As they
tumbled, hideous joke, they passed the dark Queen of Sheve who was ascending
the long stairs to her lord.

She wore a
gold crescent moon in her smolder of hair—Nemdur had ordered that she wear it,
for soon, he shouted, the Tower would stand as high as the moon itself, and her
white face would burn against the brickwork bright as day. Later, the Tower
would stand higher than the moon. The moon would lie below like a round dish of
milk.

Gold was also
painted on the lids and nails of the queen, and rubies were wound over her
smooth black skin, but diamonds trickled from her eyes.

Nemdur saw her
coming from far off. Gradually her retinue emerged from the mist that was the
land, and grew visible as tiny figures winding up a steep mountain. Now her
chariot climbed through a ring of eagles. Now she could look down and see the
eagles bank and float on their serrated wings a quarter of a mile beneath her
feet. Then she would climb, hidden for a moment, through a ring of cloud like
an unraveling gauze. Sometimes the entourage would pause on the broad terraces
to breathe.

All day,
Nemdur watched them climbing toward him, and as the sun set, a low river of
flame to the west, the second queen of Sheve was carried into the upper sky.

The stars came
out like splashes of quicksilver. The evening wind soared over Baybhelu and the
darkness bloomed grape-black, and the moon commenced to rise.

The Queen of
Sheve stood very still to watch the moon, and she was not alone. The soldiers
and the beasts on the tier below were transfixed in a strange silence. Nemdur’s
court hushed and pointed. A little bell flickered in the silence somewhere, a
woman’s anklet or the bridle of a horse; only these things were heard. Aloft,
the hopeless slaves craned from their ominous skeleton of scaffolding, and the
white radiance of the rising disc limned their gaunt bodies even as it limned
the troughs of bricks, the struts of bones. All now in utter soundlessness.

And then a
sound began. It was like smoke and lifted like smoke. It was the voice of
Nemdur’s dark and second weeping queen. It curled into the sky, dark as she,
dark as the sky, the voice of her sorrow and her beseeching.

“O moon who
governs the tides of the sea, the tides of the wombs of women, the tides of the
brain’s madness, carry my message with you to the door of the gods. By your
pallor I swear I fear them, and by your brilliance I plead for their clemency.
Take away madness from the Lord of Sheve. My soul bows down and my heart sinks
upon its knees, and my mind humbles itself. My blood is water and my flesh is
dust.”

“What does she
say?” Nemdur demanded of one of his sorcerers.

“My lord, I do
not understand you,” gasped the sorcerer.

And Nemdur
reviled the man for speaking in a foreign tongue.

And then the
moon brimmed over the improbable length of Baybhelu and the feather of the
gods’ Will brushed it.

Recall then
that terrible law—the lowly shall be exalted, the ambitious shall be cast down.
Conjure the last vision of Baybhelu, for now it passes away.

The Tower was
so tall, truly it had at no time any warranty to stand. Maybe all that had kept
the Tower upright indeed had been the frantic aspiration of Nemdur, the Tower
being the channel into which he had poured all his strengths, those energies of
life, of sex, of power.

Now, quite
suddenly, the whole edifice vibrated, as if it were a string stretched taut
between heaven and earth, that had been elusively plucked by a master’s hand.

The vibration
was gentle, harmonious, soaking through the core of the Tower, until it reached
the ground. There it became a deep sullen rumble. The rumble flowed into the
arteries of the desert. And then the earth shook.

The earth
shook itself like an animal on whose back a predator has lodged. It spasmed,
curvetted, tossed and writhed, to throw that malignity from its shoulders.
Enormous fissures cracked and gaped. The sands spouted like jets of water or
steam into the throbbing air. Then the noise of tearing cloth, the fabric of
the Tower’s foundations dividing. The cracks in the ground ran on and up the
framework of the lowermost tier. Its bricks shot out, the joints and bars of
palm wood arched themselves like bows and fired off splinters at the stars.

Abruptly that
whole tremendous base glided apart from itself. Away into the dark on every
side the huge walls rushed as if on wheels, and into the chasm thus provided,
falling like an inward-gushing fountain, cascaded Baybhelu.

On the upper
three tiers, the stable, the court, the tier as yet unfinished, the ultimate
madness fastened. Beasts, swept into the moment of panic, flung themselves
forward and leapt into space. The scaffolding of the slaves utterly collapsed,
hurling its human cargo to the levels below. The cracks which spread like a
tide from step to step, from tier to tier, were all at once negated when the
central floors of each terrace began to give. Partly hollow, even as it gushed
down the Tower dropped inwards upon itself, yet casting as it did so its outer
skin away in bricks, in mortar, in screaming whirling figures, flying hair and
limbs.

Such a dew
then was sprinkled upon the desert, and far and wide, over the night-waste, the
shuttered city, twenty villages. Into courtyards as among the dunes, into the
cradles of trees, upon the killing beds of roofs, through apertures, into wells
and dry canals, across the air like shooting stars, all over the board of the
night. Bricks, bodies, jeweled ornaments; flowers from the hanging garden spun
like a bridal offering. Broken swords, vessels of religion and magic, horses
affixed to chariots, a woman’s hand with a bangle sparkling on its wrist, a
parchment which read:
I, Nemdur of Sheve, shall conquer the gods. Who now
shall unremember the name of Nemdur?

For sure, his
name would be remembered, and used—to frighten children with and warn them from
the dangerous path of pride.

When the
thunder and the crying ended, the silence came again, snowing down in huge soft
flakes upon the wounded land.

Nemdur was dead, buried by
flesh and clay and stones and bones. They were all dead, all but one, Nemdur’s
dark queen who had abased herself before the gods. But it is doubtful whether
the gods, impartial and vaguely, almost absentmindedly ruthless as they had
revealed themselves, would have reacted to her supplication, or saved her
because of it.

As the Tower
fell, and Nemdur’s second wife fell with it, an eagle came flying straight into
the turmoil and bore her away with it to the west. Now there were eagles in
plenty in that region, circling the Tower by day. Perhaps this eagle spied the
jewels of the Queen of Sheve, the rubies, the golden crescent, flashing on her
somberness. Then again, she was lovely, most lovely, and it is said that as she
was, so the eagle was: black. And for amusement, sometimes, there was one who
would take on him the shape of a black eagle. Azhrarn, Prince of Demons, one of
the Lords of Darkness.

Whether or not
it was he is unknown. The selective rescue, certainly, was more like the prank
of an Eshva, the unspeaking, dreaming, lesser demons, servants of the Vazdru—of
which Vazdru Azhrarn was one. Nevertheless, someone or thing bore the black
woman to safety, or to a kind of safety.

Near midnight, stumbling alone and dazed across the sand, and occasionally over terrible debris
loosed on the sand, Nemdur’s second wife came to an oasis whose palm trees were
yet standing, and in the middle of them, a yet-standing tower. It was the
prison of mad Jasrin she had reached.

However, no
one any longer guarded the door. Since Prince Madness had entered the walls,
there had been bizarre events. A weird mooning love affair had occurred between
the captain of the guard and Jasrin’s girl attendant. The elder attendant had
browbeaten four of the guard and they had grown like babies, sniveling when she
berated them, cavorting idiotically to please her. The sixth guard had perished
by drowning in the pool. After staring interminably at a torch which, though
lying under the water, continued to burn, he declared: “If a torch may burn
under water, may I not live under it, as the sea people do?” At which he jumped
in and stretched himself on the bottom and breathed the water and died. After
this, the pool being fouled, the inhabitants of the tower had been able to
drink only wine, which had sent them madder than they were to begin with.

At the awful
thunder of falling Baybhelu eight miles away, and the hail of ghastly remnants
which followed, the five guards and the two attendants fled into the desert
uttering an extraordinary clamor.

The insane
former Queen of Sheve, Jasrin, who by that time was the least insane of all the
persons in the stone tower, remained companionless in her chamber, dumbfounded
with fear.

When she heard
a step upon the stair, a distorted ghostly memory of a blond prince or a
rust-haired devil stole over her. Her fear took another direction at the
thought, but she was unsure whether to defend herself or to plead his
friendship. Altogether her memory was unreliable. She had almost forgotten her
husband since Chuz had promised her Nemdur’s destruction. Possibly she had not
wished to suffer further guilt. Most definitely she did not rock a bone anymore
in her arms. She had become for herself a woman with misery in her past, but
all amorphous, nameless. She had never wed, never been delivered of a child,
never conspired with a Lord of Darkness.

In much the
same way, Nemdur’s second wife had also erased the shock and horror of the
collapse of Baybhelu. Something had happened in the desert—what? A sharp pain
in her soul warned her not to search it out. The vile objects which lay about
the desert she avoided with feet and eye and reverie. The flight of the eagle
had faded to a rushing of stars. If Azhrarn had taken her or consoled her or
done with her anything at all, he had removed her knowledge of the event.