Delusion's Master (Tales From the Flat Earth) (9 page)

At the core of
the sacred city, the four roads ended on the rim of the miraculous lake, that
turquoise of water which had seemed the seal of the gods’ approval. And up over
the turquoise arched four white bows of bridges, making ovals with their white
reflections below. The four white bridges met in a diadem of light, the central
fane of Belsheved, which was not of white stone, but plated over, like a
fabulous lizard, with scales of palest gold. The rich kernel of the sweet fruit
of faith.

Men declared:
“See, it is like the mansion of a god.”

But it was
not, for the mansions of the gods were shafts of psychic material which
probably no man could have seen, even had he been able to enter the Upperearth
and gaze thereon.

Standing on
the bridges, which were ornately carved, the golden architecture before them,
the shining orb of water beneath, those who came to worship presently beheld
white robed figures moving, like sprites, through the misty interior of the
fane.

While the
people lived elsewhere, returning to this, the fount of their religion, once
only in a year, some few dwelled always in Bhelsheved, to tend it, and to keep
alive the flames which burned there, and to nurture the flowers which bloomed
there, to the glory of the gods, and to see to all the other esthetic tasks of
the city.

They were
chosen, these few, from a certain type. Somehow, some idea of the physical
appearance of the gods was already current, and had been tailored to mortal
standards. All who served the city were good to look upon, very slender of
build, and of a pale translucence of skin which was perpetuated by the rigorous
fasts, diets and medications of their order. Their hair, both male and female,
was of a general hue, a gold blanched almost to platinum.

Their
characteristics were select, their glances obscure, their gestures flowing.
They seemed sublimely unaware, removed from the roughness, the sheer red meat
of humanity.

Yet, it was
from among the people that they were chosen, those elevated ones. Although the
people deliberately forgot the origin of their priests and priestesses, just as
they forgot that the city had been built by their own wealth, designed by their
own mathematicians and scholars, and imbued with sorceries by their own mages.

When the
priestly servants of heaven approached them, they bowed and trembled pleasantly
with respect and awe.

At the heart
of the golden temple, mounted on the backs of two vast golden beasts that had
the heads of hawks, the fore-bodies of lions and the tails of gigantic fish,
was an altar of translucent sky-colored crystal, in which opaline clouds and
constellations seemed to float. When the temple had been filled with people,
the doors were closed, and in the honey gloom, the astrological altar began to
blaze. The servants of heaven sang in sweet thin voices as they stood
fearlessly between the paws of the two beasts, which would then suddenly open
their beaks and cry, in a brazen resonance:
Who loves the gods shall know
everlasting joy!

Then a second
sun would seem to explode slowly outward from the altar, a glare which must
surely blind, yet did not, for in the midst of it were seen visitations which
came and went. None after could describe what they had witnessed. Some spoke of
the forms of the gods themselves passing luminously to and fro in a sort of
gorgeous fog. Others spoke of scenes of happiness from their own lives
reenacted, or prophecies of good things to come. Some coyly mentioned glimpses
of a paradise, or visions of other worlds. Many wept and many laughed aloud,
and a few collapsed on the mosaic floor where the tightness of the crowd
permitted.

But when the
great brilliancy faded, they gathered themselves, moved dazedly to the reopened
doors, and filed away meekly to offer blood or precious gems or wine in the
glittering temples that stood everywhere about the lake. And through filigree
screens, to half-seen confessors beyond, they would recite their sins and their
apprehensions—which, in those moments seemed unmomentous, easy both of telling
and of future avoidance. For it appeared to them their souls had been washed
clean and sponged with glorious elixirs. So they sawed through the throats of
little lambs and burnt their flesh on blue fires, sobbing at their luck, that
they, and all things, were in the care of the merciful and gentle gods.

The dunes of day drifted
over the sky and were blown beyond the edge of the western earth. The darker
sands of night piled up on the threshold of the sunset, and eventually buried
it.

A young man
came walking slyly, with an oddly hesitant yet urgent step, between the clusters
of the tents. Fires and lamps and stars were blooming on the dusk, and the pale
ghost of the city, like the sail of some anchored ship, rested over the
many-ringed campments. The young man, a youngest brother, had come far from his
own camping place, across the makeshift byways, and far around the city walls,
though keeping always the prescribed one hundred paces out from them. A cloak
was folded around him, though the night was warm.

Presently he
reached a grove of scented trees, where some girls were drawing water from one
of the ornamental troughs.

One by one,
these girls caught sight of the youngest brother far from his own camp. They
saw him to be a stranger, and one or two, for the barest instant, held their
breath, for there had been another stranger who sometimes walked about the
camps by night, but he had been cloaked as if with inky
wings. . . . This one was no one of importance, his manner
diffident, his face muffled, and the maidens began to giggle at him somewhat
behind their sleeves.

At length, the
young man beckoned to one of the girls, and when she approached him, said:
“Pardon my interruption of your duties, but I am searching for the tent of the
satchel-maker.”

“Would that be
Grizzle-Beard the satchel-maker that you mean? Or the other, with the limp?”

“Or,” chimed
in another of the girls boldly, “do you mean old Twisty-Nose, whose wife
resembles a goat?”

The young man
lowered his eyes, and pulled his cloak yet more tightly around him. He seemed
to be carrying something beneath the cloak, perhaps a satchel that required
mending.

“I think it
must be he you call Twisty-Nose,” said the young man. “If he dwells at the edge
of the camp, nearest to the desert.”

“There is no
satchel-maker there,” declared another girl.

“Then I have
mistaken—” began the young man anxiously, and broke off as another girl
interrupted.

“He is looking
for the limping one who pitched his tent farther out yesterday, saying our
noise disturbed his religious meditations. I doubt,” she added, “he will do any
satchel business with you, he wishes to think only pious thoughts.”

“Nevertheless,”
said the young man, “may I ask you to guide me to the spot?”

The girls
tossed their hair at him like a pride of lionesses.

“It is not so
far. Can you not find your own way, a big strong ox like yourself?”

“Alas,” said
the youngest brother, “I am at a disadvantage, being quite sightless in one
eye.”

At this, the
girls were abashed. They might have been expected, in the vicinity of the holy
city, to have behaved better to a disabled man, and indeed spoken more
graciously altogether.

“I will guide
you,” the bold girl said quickly. And she hurried to the part-sighted man, and
took his hand. “It is this way.”

Leaving the
others to their unexpiated discourtesy, the girl led the traveler between the trees
and the tents, and soon into that more isolated area of the camping grounds,
where the shelters were infrequent and scattered.

The shadows
were thickening on the land, though the sky was taking on the lambent sheen of
starshine. The disabled traveler paused abruptly, shifting about—as if
troubled.

“What is the
matter?”

“I had a purse
to offer the satchel-maker and just now I felt it fall from my belt.”

“I heard no
chink of coins.”

“No surprise
in that. My coins are too sparse to make much noise. Please look on the ground,
and see if you can find my money, for I can make out little in the darkness.”

So the girl
bent to the ground, seeking the purse she had not heard fall. As she did this,
the disabled traveler grasped her all at once in a dreadful grip. His hands
clamped over her nostrils and her mouth, oblivious to her frantic clawing and
struggling, until, from lack of air, she grew insensible.

Lions
patrolled the desert. Now one more lion was abroad. It bore the dangling figure
of a maiden, not in its jaws, but across its arms. It had, besides, certain
aids and tools a lion did not resort to—a length of rope, a length of cloth,
another length coiled over and over, the length of a whip.

Out across the
night-stained sands, much beyond the fringes of the various campments, their
lights, their songs, their religion, and farther still beyond the notice of the
gods of Bhelsheved. Here, by a rock, the youngest brother bound the girl with
rope and cast her on the earth. Here he stoppered her pretty mouth with the
ugly gag. And here he uncoiled and flexed that whip of his, that whip which he
had raised against Azhrarn, and which the Prince of Demons had captured in one
hand. Cool lightning had poured up the length of the whip, through the handle,
into the body of the youngest brother, and become a delirium. He had not ceased
remembering it. It had become a sweet torture. Ultimately, a solution
insinuated itself.

He raised the
whip now, and brought it down. At the impact of its wicked edge on flesh,
cutting as a knife, he felt the light—invisible, yet positively experienced in
every nerve—begin to come to him along the swinging bull’s hide. At the second
stroke it sank up through the handle. At the third stroke, pleasure, like a
branch of silver, flowered along his arm, and he groaned.

At the ninth
stroke, with a scream, the youngest brother dropped unconscious on the sand.

Later, when
the moon was rising, he roused, with a ghastly apprehension, a weight of lead
upon limbs and heart. He crawled, as if abject, to regard the object of his
affection. He leaned to her bloody shoulder, but she had died at the seventh
blow, a vital vein severed, before she woke—in that at least her fate had been
kind to her.

As the moon
stole up the sky, spying on his deed, the madman buried his victim in the
dunes, and smeared her blood from his hands with their powders. Tears of horror
bathed his cheeks, he was sickened to his soul. But at the memory of the whip,
and the light which had flowed from it, his pulse quickened, and in despair he
knew he must kill again and again. Such was the visitation of love he had
received, and such the black-haired “god” who had brought it.

As the young
man returned through the groves, he saw a lost child, sleeping under a tree. No
one was near—the brother uncoiled his whip. The child had no space to scream;
its throat was severed at the first blow—again fate was as clement as it could
be, having written such a stern sentence. The brother’s own scream he bit back,
strangling on delight, tumbling into a temporary death of pangs and whirlings,
like great wheels.

This time,
when he came to himself, he vomited. Not pausing to effect a burial, he fled
the spot, concealing his bloody hands in his cloak.

He could not
bear it. He must excuse his irresistible fault. Thus:
A god visited me, and
ordered me to do these things. Not my will but his
. So, weeping and afraid,
but under heavenly orders, the young man hid himself in his brothers’ tent.

The venerable philosopher,
he who had debated with Azhrarn on the nature of the gods, sat brooding through
the hours of darkness.

From
somewhere, some compartment of his brain, or of the night itself, a reverie had
taken him. For though he did not suppose the gods to be stone, as in the
stranger’s malign parable, yet was it not conceivable for the gods to be
present
in a stone, indeed, in all the stones which littered the landscape?

Now, the old
man fancied himself walking across a plain under the moon, and here and there
the stones glowed with a supernatural light, but here and there they did not
glow, and he turned his foot on them. Then a dreadful fear of sacrilege came
over him, and it seemed he heard a voice crying from the stones:
Who treads
on the gods shall know everlasting misery.
After this had occurred more
times than he could number, the philosopher, realizing his error, attempted to
walk always between the stones of the plain. But try as he would, always some
flint or shard came eventually under his foot, and the voice clamored.

At last the
philosopher resolved to cease moving altogether, and there he stood, in the
midst of the plain, fixed, as he supposed, for eternity.

Waking from
this reverie, the philosopher heard a baleful noise and rose, and trod uneasily
across the floor of his tent. Outside, the moon hung, a lamp, pendant from the
ceiling of the sky. By her illumination, the old philosopher beheld a
neighboring stone-grinder sharpening knives out of the hours of his trade from
the goodness of his heart. The philosopher, seeing the sparks bursting off the
stone, was seized by a terrible rage. He flew at the grinder, beating him about
the head.