Farther west, the coastline was pleated into the obscurity of night, and the lights scattered there grew few and indeterminate. At length nothing showed but the glimmering, barely audible sea, companioned on one side and gradually swallowed away into a featureless shore.
Presently the salt-fish odor of ocean faded into something saltier and less pleasing, the reek of the marsh.
The boats began to turn inland at once.. The water became
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turgid and scythed off from the oars in a soup of vegetable flotsam. Soon reed-beds opened out before us, glowing unnaturally, not from the lamps of men but the phosphorous illumination of the landscape itself. The current swerved, guiding the sea and the Hessek craft together through a sinuous delta that slowly narrowed into the blackest of black channels. On either side reared up the marsh of Bit-Hessee, which was in essence the child of some older thing, a remnant left aground from the morning of the world.
Swamp rather than marsh, a swamp uniquely deficient in the noises of night birds or small water-life, yet perpetually susurrating. This insidious papery rustling reminded me, against my logic of the movement of vast reptilian wings aloft and similar reptilian scratchings below-doubtless no more than the stirring of the giant reeds and spiny leaf blades. There were insects, however, making an endless chatter. And occasionally a mouthing of bubbles uttered glutinously from the mud-banks where the trees rose.
I thought them palms at first, these trees, but they seemed rather the pylons of primeval ferns. In the faint dungeon glare of the phosphorus, their fibrous stalks, diagonally scaled, soared into a massive invisible umbrella of foliage.
“Ki,” I said.
He looked up over the oars at me.
“Lord?”
“No birds, Ki. Yet I heard Bit-Hessee hunted these marshes for the pot.”
“Birds farther east, lord. Nearer the New City. Hessek hunts there when it must.”
Something flopped in the water ahead of us, and then passed alongside with a treacly wavering of the channel. Just beneath the surface, itself dully luminous, shone a saurian beast, part alligator and part bad dream.
“This swamp is old,” I said.
Ki smiled, an ingratiating smile, but due to the circumstances, tacitly menacing.
“Old as Hessek,” he said.
“And how old is that?”
“Old as darkness,” he said.
The other man, alerted to our speaking, watched me with bright hollow eyes.
“Ki,” I said.
“Yes, lord.”
“Give me my true name.”
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He started slightly, then said, “We are cautious with names.”
“Still,” I said, “you imagine I am he, your black Ungod of the Ancient Faith.” I did not want to delve in Ki’s skull, nor any man’s but my mind was still sensitive from the previous contact, and the images cast up on the skim of his brain were abnormally distinct. “You call him the Shepherd of Swarms. Don’t you?” Ki lowered his eyes, the other man stared; both continued to row as if their arms moved independently. “He’s the god of flies, of crawling things and winged creeping things, of tomb-darkness and worms. That’s what you worship here in your swamp-sink.”
“There has always been the dark,” Ki mumbled, some ritual phrase.
“Shaythun,” I said experimentally, and the faces froze above the rigidly grinding arms. “Shaythun, Shepherd of Swarms.”
No one spoke. The enormous trees went gliding by and the insects sparked and ticked. The reeds, each thick or thicker than a man’s wrist, came down into the channel and the boats pushed through them, causing the tassels of greenbronze, which passed for rush-flowers, to rattle like corrupt metal.
“If I am Shaythun,” I said, “surely I am permitted to say my own name. But why should I be Shaythun? If I am a god, then why not Masri?” I said to Ki, remembering those cries he reportedly gave when first he saw me in the sea, that I was clothed in flakes of light, that I was Masri-Masrimas -the conqueror’s god.
“You make fire and leave it to burn free.”
I thought, That’s true. No Masrian would light an unshielded lamp or even a camp fire without some covering and an invocation, let alone burn an offering on the altar of a cheap floral deity. And, perhaps ineptly, one supposes their Masrimas would not either.
“Why not Hessu, then,” I said to Ki, “your sea god?”
“Hessu is no more. The Masrians drove him out.”
“You have an answer for everything,” I said. “I am Shaythun, then?”
“It is to be proved.”
The reeds parted suddenly. The channel lay open ahead, broadening immediately into an irregular lagoon bounded by swamp growth in three directions, while to the west, about a quarter of a mile away, a fungoid whitish promontory stood
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clear of the salty pool-remains of the wharf and dock of the old city.
As we neared the dock, the skeleton of a ship appeared around the winding bank: a vessel of Old Hessek, unlike the galleys of the Conquerors, narrow and serpentine, green now, and sinking in the ooze. Beyond the dead ship, an avenue of wreckage, the ribs and timbers and rotting prows of countless other hulks, with weeping trees clinging among them. There had been good trade here, it seemed, before the harbor silted up. From this marine graveyard, broad steps clotted with slimy algoid gardens showed the way aboard the land.
The green lantern, extinguished all this while, was rekindled. The boats sidled to the steps and were dragged around among concealing undergrowth. Ki led me up the stair, carrying the lamp.
Black walls shot forward on the lamplight, rubble, slender blind windows. Bats flickered in crenellated gutters, under pointed broken eaves.
In the midst of the ruins, the path snaked downward, and abruptly the charcoal smell of smoke was mingled with the stench of the marsh. The winding street, whose upper stories embraced each other, presently became a tunnel, and into this pitch-black foulness we went.
Unexpectedly the lamp caught a white rat transfixed in its glare, and I called to mind the nickname Bar-Ibithni gave this area: the Rat-Hole.
It was a warren, such as rabbits make for themselves, but noisome in parts as the mansions of foxes. Here and there the tunnels were open to the sky, against which the deserted upper city ruinously crowded or the encroaching stems of the giant trees; mostly the road plunged beneath brick overhang or through the guts of the earth itself, where the hard mudbanks were hollowed out and shored up with stones. Stagnant salt canals roped away in the gloom of it, and the roots of growing things intruded. In this incredible vileness, men lived.
Shadows, crowding against mud walls that gaped with little entrance holes; the mouths of caves, subterranean house cellars, and rooms excavated from the swamp. Not rabbits, not foxes. Termites, rather. Termites who could make fire, and let it burn naked (Masrian blasphemy) in earthen pots by the “doors” of their macabre hovels.
I had never seen quite such degradation or such sinister eccentricity. Hessek had truly gone to earth as the hunted animal will.
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Pale fire caught pale faces. There was not a man there I saw to whom I would have turned my back of choice, and for the women, I would rather lie beside a she-wolf.
I noticed a child on a ledge, who had a plainly gangrenous foot, but who did not cry or fret, only stared down at me with a hatred he must have learned early. Maybe captive Masrians had been brought here before-the children at least would think me captive probably, and in some degree no doubt I was. I reached for the child, an impulse to heal him taking hold of me in my disgust at this hell-pit. For a second I thought he inappropriately smiled before a set of yellow teeth were clamped in my forearm.
Ki shouted, and the four other Hesseks yelled also.
The child gnawed on me like a ferret, and I had a fancy he drank my blood. I struck him thrice on the head before he let go and fell down with a red mouth and rolling eyes. Then I put my hand on his leg above the festering wound. And no healing came from me.
Evidently my nauseous revulsion drove out the benign aspect of my sorcery-not in regard to myself, for I healed instantly of the filthy wound the child’s fangs had given me, but in regard to others. I could have killed the poor little brute with Power, but nothing else.
The Hesseks relapsed into soundlessness. I motioned to Ki to go on, but asked him where he was conducting me.
“Not far,” he said. “A place holy to us. Shall the child die, lord?”
“He’s almost dead now. Be more specific about your holy place.”
“A tomb,” he said, as naturally as another would say, “My neighbor’s house.”
I no longer glimpsed his brain; its turmoil had faded into obscurity, and though I had felt no trepidation before, invincible as I seemed to have become, the dark and stink and misery began with no warning to eat away at me to the point of allergy.