Delusion's Master (Tales From the Flat Earth) (3 page)

His name was
Chuz, Prince Chuz, and he was this way. To come on him from his right side, he
was a handsome man in the splendor of his youth. His hair was a blond mane
couthly combed to silk, his eye, being lowered, had long gilded lashes, his lip
was chiseled, his tanned skin burnished. On his hand he wore a glove of fine
white leather, and on his foot a shoe of the same, and on his tall and slender
body the belted robe was rich and purple-dark. “Beauteous noble young man,”
said those that came to his right side. But those who approached him from the
left side, shrank and hesitated to speak at all. From the left side, Chuz was a
male hag on whom age had scratched his boldest signatures, still peculiarly
handsome it was true, but gaunt and terrible, a snarling lip, a hollowed cheek,
if anything more foul because he was fair. The skin of this man was corpse
gray, and the matted hair the shade of drying blood, and his scaly eyelid,
being lowered, had lashes of the same color. The left hand lay naked on the
damson robe, which this side was tattered and stained, and the left foot poked
naked from under it. When Chuz took a step, you saw the sole of that gray-white
foot was black, and when he lifted that gray-white hand, the palm was black,
and the nails were long and hooked, and red as if painted from a woman’s
lacquer-pot. Then again, if Chuz raised his eyes on either side, you saw the
balls of them were black, the irises red, the pupils tarnished, like old brass.
And if Chuz laughed, which now and then he did, his teeth were made of bronze.

Worst of all,
was to come on Chuz from the front and see both aspects of him at once, still
worse if then he raised his eyes and opened his mouth. (Though it is believed
that all men, at one time or another, had glimpsed Chuz from behind.) And who
was Chuz? His other name was Madness.

Like Lord
Death, maybe Prince Chuz was simply a personification that had come to be, a
fluid concept that had hardened into a figure. For sure, his appurtenances were
as conceptually they should be. Sometimes he carried the jawbones of an ass,
and when he cracked them, they gave out the braying crazy noises of the living
beast. Or sometimes he carried a brass rattle, and shook it like the sistrum,
and from it came a clatter as if a brain were being shaken into bits. But sometimes,
he wore an overmantle of black-purple, embroidered with splinters of glass
representing malign configurations of the stars. . . .

Jasrin’s six guards had
laid aside their axes. With their six swords in their belts, they crouched at
the foot of the stone tower in the cool of evening, throwing dice. The moon had
risen, one white fruit on the black-leafed tree of night. By her shine and the
flare of a torch sunk in the sand, the guards kept score.

The first man
threw, and the second. Next, the third, and the fourth, and the fifth. Next the
sixth. And then the seventh.

The seventh?

The seventh
man’s dice fell; they were yellow and had no markings,

“Who is this
stranger?” demanded the captain of the six men. He clapped his hand on the
stranger’s shoulder, snatched the hand back with a curse. The seventh man’s
mantle was strewn with bright scintillants that drew blood. “How did you come
here and what is your business?” barked the captain.

The six men
peered, and in the torchlight they glimpsed half a face, the other half hidden
by the cowl of the mantle. A glamorous young man sat among them, his eyes—or
the one visible eye—demurely lowered so the long blond lashes rested on his
cheek. With a closed mouth, he smiled. Then suddenly a white-gloved hand appeared
and in it an ass’s jawbones that clicked, and let out a raucous braying. And
for a second the one eye flashed up, a confused dart of the impossible, before
it was lowered again.

The stranger
did not speak, but the ass’s jawbones spoke abruptly between his fingers. They
said, “The moon governs the tides of the sea, the tides of the wombs of women,
and the tides of the humours of the mind.”

The six men
sprang to their feet. They drew their swords, but also they backed away.
Jawbones which spoke were new to their experience, though not unheard of.

Continuing to
smile, his eye meticulously lowered, the stranger rose. Gathering his blank
yellow dice, he walked straight through the wall of the tower and was gone. A
sound flowed in the air, it might have been a crazy laugh or the screech of a
night bird over the desert.

The captain
pushed open the tower door, and led his men in a search of the stair and the
lower rooms. Soon Jasrin’s attendants, in alarm, ran down, the old woman and
the young girl.

“Have any passed
this way?” demanded the captain.

“No one,” said
the old woman. She started to berate four of the guards, who cowered foolishly
like small boys.

“Your hand is
bleeding,” said the young girl shyly to the captain. For a year, the only men
she had seen close to had been these six, and this was the year she had become
a woman. As she took the man’s hand, she saw he was strong and comely, and he,
as she bathed the wounds the stranger’s cloak had made, realized she was
gentle, and that the moon shone through her thin garment on her gentle breasts,
and all her gentle hair the moon had changed into a cloud of silver.

Outside, the
sixth guard lingered on the sand, amazed, watching the torch which had been
knocked into the pool. There beneath the water its flame burned on, as bright
as day.

In the chamber
above, Jasrin was in her stage of leaning at the window looking toward Sheve.
Dimly discerning the commotion below, she said to the bone: “There are the
messengers to say my lord is setting out. In less than an hour he will be
here.”

So she moved
about, and so she found a young man seated cross-legged on the carpet, half his
face hidden in his mantle, half his body turned from her.

Jasrin gasped,
and held the bone protectively to her.

Proudly and
angrily she said to the stranger: “My lordly husband will soon be with me, and
he will slay you for venturing into my apartments.”

Chuz did not
reply, but again he cast his dice. This time they were black as two coals, and
where they fell, the carpet smoked.

Jasrin
clutched the bone more tightly.

“You will not
dishonor me before my child,” she said.

Suddenly the
bone began to struggle in her grip. It thrashed and wriggled and ripped itself
from her fingers. It tumbled to the ground, and hopped horribly away from her.

“Dogs ate me!”
screamed the bone in a thin high voice. “You gave me to dogs to be eaten.” And
it threw itself into the folds of the mantle of Chuz, as if it sought refuge
from her.

Jasrin covered
her ears with her hands. The tears burst from her eyes though it was not yet midnight, not yet the season for her tears.

But a very
tender melodious voice began to speak to her. It was the voice of Chuz, one of
his voices, for he had many.

“Jasrin of
Sheve is my subject, therefore let her approach me and be comforted.”

And Jasrin
discovered she was creeping to the stranger, and when she was near, he threw
off the mantle with the glass splinters strewn on it. So she beheld the entire
aspect of his face, one half youthfully bronzed, one half haggardly gray, the
rusty hair and the blond, but it seemed to her it was the most natural face she
had ever looked on. Chuz drew her into the shelter of his arms and he rocked
her softly and he kissed her forehead with his strange, strange mouth. And for
the first it seemed to her, as he had told her, she was comforted.

At length,
Chuz, Prince Madness, said to her: “Those who are truly mine may ask a request
of me.”

Jasrin sighed
sleepily. “Then grant me my sanity.”

“That I cannot
do, nor would I if I could. And if I did, sane, you could not bear what you had
done, and what you have become.”

“True,” said
Jasrin. “It is true.”

Then Chuz
produced the rattle of brass and shook it, and he gave a dreadful laugh,
raucous and profane, and Jasrin wildly laughed with him, and she reached for
the rattle, but in her hands it altered to the jawbones of the ass. These she
commenced to clack and to click, till from them exploded a shout: “If I,
Jasrin, must be mad, then make also my husband Nemdur mad. Madder than I. Let
his madness destroy him.”

Jasrin started
in distress.

“I did not say
this thing,” she avowed.

Chuz answered
in another of his voices, high and coarse.

“These were
the words your brain would speak.”

“But in my
heart I love Nemdur still.”

“And in your
brain you hate him.”

“Again,” she
said, “it is true. And will you send him mad?”

“His madness
shall become a legend,” said Chuz. He spoke as a murderer would speak in the
dark.

But this time
they laughed together delicately and low, like lovers. And presently Chuz
vanished.

There were several doors
by which madness might enter any house. One was rage, one jealousy, one fear;
there were others. But Chuz, who could walk through a stone wall if he chose
to, must select his entry into the human soul with more care. Jasrin’s lunacy
had summoned him, or tempted him, or actually evolved him from the shadows. The
impetus of her lunacy was like a psychic fuel, a flow of energy along his quite
incorporeal nerves. Though fashioned as a kind of man, he did not reason like
one. Nor is it necessary to assume that he, the master of madness, was himself
positively mad. Therefore he understood—though understood is an inadequate
word—that it was not enough for Nemdur to glimpse him from the back alone.
Nemdur must meet Chuz face to face, and so encounter destruction. None of this
was like a game to Chuz. It was something like a duty, a service which he
performed with dedication.

What then were
the chinks he spied out in Nemdur, the crevices whereby madness might enter? It
was simple. Nemdur was at the peak of all his life. He was powerful, rich,
handsome and secure. He was proud and lustful, and his appetites were large.
Nemdur the lover of women, the creator of sons, the King of Sheve. Without vast
intellect or imagination, it required a snake beneath the flower to hiss at
him,
Now you are vital, now you are mighty. But tomorrow, tomorrow...
Nemdur
had not really considered that today he was a lion, tomorrow, like his hapless
dead first son, he would be bones.

Chuz did not
exactly take other forms. His art was rather in the way he played upon the
extraordinary form he had, like variations on a familiar melody.

Nemdur met him
first, leaning in a great door of the palace, his damson overmantle wrapped
close. But Chuz did not look particularly like any sort of figure at that
moment, more like the shadow of a coming night. “Who are you?” said Nemdur
angrily. “One who will outlive you,” said Chuz, and was no more. Later a beggar
ran beside the king’s stirrup as he rode out to hunt. The beggar extended a
white-gloved hand, and shards of glass, like the quills of a porcupine,
glittered along his back. “Give me a coin,” squeaked the beggar. “For when you
lie in your tomb what use will your coins be to you?”

As Nemdur sat
idly glancing at a book, leafing through it impatiently to see if it would
please his second wife, who was still new and interesting to him, a wind or a
hand brushed the pages. And there before Nemdur was the story of the hero
Simmu, who had feared Death and elected himself Death’s enemy, and stolen from
the gods a draught of Immortality to save himself and mankind from the tyranny
of decay and ending.

“Some say,”
murmured a voice at Nemdur’s ear, “that at that era, no longer was Death’s
Master the title of the Lord Uhlume, who is the Master of the dead, but that Simmu
bore the title Death’s Master, seeing he had mastered Death—”

When Nemdur’s
dark wife came, walking with white gauze upon her fragrant somber skin, Nemdur
said to her: “Here is a book which has the story of the hero Simmu in it. It is
a trifle, to delight your femininity. No doubt you believe that there is a well
in the sky, with a water of Immortality in it.”

“No doubt I
do,” acquiesced the woman with a sable laugh.

But when
Nemdur lay with her in bed, the glimmer of the lamp made her lovely face into
an ebony skull.

Soon the harsh
yellow winds of the winter season swept over the desert. The sands blew against
Sheve, and the cold frost dripped by night upon her walls and minarets. One
came to Nemdur as he was sleeping.

“In a hundred
years, Sheve will lie beneath the sands of the desert. In a hundred years, who
will remember the name of Nemdur?”

When morning
returned over the edge of the world, Nemdur stood at his high window, gazing
across his city. He had lost his color, and his hands were clenched with anger.
He recalled his dream, how Sheve had been buried under the nomadic sands as if
drowned beneath the sea. He had observed his own ghost wandering the world, and
many were spoken of, but no one spoke of Nemdur.

There came a
sharp sound from the terrace below, like two dice striking the pavement. Nemdur
stared down. No one was there. But now, when Nemdur ate a roast fowl, he
brooded over the bones.