About three minutes later, we reached our destination.
The warren came up against a Hessek cemetery, once exclusive to the city above. A gate of ornate and rusty metal introduced a stone corridor, intermittently lighted by uncovered torches burning in low sallow spurts.
The end of the corridor was blocked by double doors of copper, gone to a bluish talcum with age, which gave onto a rectangular burial chamber hung with draperies of ancient
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cobwebby silk. Against the farther wall of this cozy nest were three couches of scrolled stonework, decorated with green human bones, as casual as you please.
It is not generally delightful to arrive so in the odorous house of death.
“Ki,” I said, “this isn’t the safe place I should want lodging in.”
“I beg your patience, my lord,” Ki said. He lifted aside the fragile drapes. A second room lay behind them, similarly torchlit but empty,
I went through into this room and the drapes subsided, leaving me alone. Ki was gone, and the rest of the Hessek party.
Simultaneously a trick door appeared at the far end of the chamber. Eshkorian stratagem. But through that entrance something approached that stopped me thinking of Eshkorek.
A figure in black came first, a man’s figure, yet crawling on all fours, his head down like a beast, and a leash about his neck. Behind him, holding the leash, was another, also blackgarbed but upright, his bare face patterned over with designs of what looked to be brilliant emerald beads. Last, came a woman.
Her smoky hair was woven with a colony of vipers. Jewelwork they were of polished bronze, yet they looked real enough, and for a moment too real, catching the shifty light and seeming to twist and shiver. She wore a robe of flaxlinen, very thin; the torches soaked through it like water to her silver limbs beneath. At her waist was a girdle that bled with green and scarlet gems.
She halted, covered her face with her hands, and bowed before me. She wore no veils and no paint. When she raised her eyes I knew her. I had reason to.
Leffih.
8
The man-creature on the floor growled. He lifted his face. It was smeared with black markings like those of a tiger, and his teeth were filed to points. His eyes wandered, savage and unhuman. He was in the grip of some possession, induced or
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haphazard, that made him suppose himself a beast. The beast’s keeper, the man with the mask of green beads, spoke to me.
“Welcome, lord. We rejoice you are here, that you came willingly.”
“And did she come willingly, too?” I said.
Lellih smiled, and cold fingers walked on my shoulders. She was indeed beautiful, this girl I had re-created out of senile flesh. Too beautiful, remembering what had gone before, that pristine primal alabaster countenance, unmarked as a new born child’s.
“She is to be our priestess,” the man said, “our symbol.”
“Symbol of what?” I said.
“She was old; you have made her young, strong, and blessed. Hessek is also old.”
“And I’m to make Hessek young and strong, am I? Because I am this devil-god you worship.”
I perceived now that the emerald dots on the man’s cheeks and forehead were not beads after all, but small, shiny mummified beetles, glinting in the torchlight. He seemed to be a priest of sorts, the gem-insects and the man on the twitching leash sigils of his authority. My priest, then, presumably. And Lellih my priestess.
“Even you, lord,” he said, “may not grasp your destiny, the will of the One that is in you. If you permit, we will take you to the Inner Chamber, and discover.”
“And if I don’t permit? You know I can kill you where you stand, and any others who might come for me.”
“Yes, lord,” he said. It was difficult to be sure of his expression through those insects stuck there. I had heard Masrians say with contempt that every Hessek was alike, and in the filtered gloom of the burial place, this seemed to be so. This man was a composite of his race rather than an individual. Stare at him as I might, I felt that, stripped of his devices, I would not know him after.
But it was Lellih who had an answer for me.
“The omnipotent are curious concerning men,” she said. “Go with us and satisfy your curiosity.”
I had not heard her maiden’s voice before. There was nothing of the old Lellih left in her. Her words were elegant. Even the brain that formed the words was changed. I wondered if she actually recalled who she had been, her dismal life as hunchbacked whore and crippled seller of sweets. As to what she said, I could not deny a clammy, reluctant desire
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to see what was brewing, the very sensation that had brought me here.
For all my cleverness, I half believed then that they had bewitched me.
“Well,” I said slowly, “we had better be going.”
The man bowed to me, my priest, then to Lellih, and when he spoke to her I became aware he added the Hessek honorific “yess.”
“You are wise, Lellih-yess.”
She smiled, a smile I did not take to.
The priest went out, she after him. I followed her along another corridor, hot and fetid as only a grave shift could be; and under the growling of the leashed tiger-man, I said softly to her slender back, “Continue to be wise, granny-girl. Don’t try tricks.”
“You wrong me,” she said. “Besides, what should you fear, who are brave and terrible? They tell me you saved the life of a Hragon prince tonight. Is Sorem your lover that you hold him so dear? I thought Vazkor was a man for women.”
Her gauze gown was showing me all it might, but here was one girl I did not want and never would. A sort of loathing came over me at the notion of lying with her. This she did not realize, as I noticed from her mode of walking.
“You made me a virgin, too, just as I asked. And the seal’s intact. Not a man for women, Vazkor?”
“Whatever else,” I said, “not a man for you, lady.”
There is no swifter way to make an enemy of a woman. You may tell her she is a clod or a bitch; as long as you lust for her, it will be forgiven. But say she is the wonder of the world and show her cold loins, and she will hate you till the sun goes out. This I understood well enough, but reckoned Lellih not much, if her people were a little more. It was, in any case, plain honesty, and put to the test would not alter.
She said nothing further, and I, too, kept quiet
There had been a prophecy for ninety-odd years in Bit-Hessee; the priest spoke of it later. Like many a conquered people made slaves, beggars, and outcasts in their own land, they were dreaming of a savior who would redeem them from the oppressor, and reinstate the ancient Empire of Hessek over a million graveyards of dead Masrians. Their former gods, who had failed them, they cast down, even Hessu the sea demon, mythological founder of Bit-Hessee itself. Though Hessek sailors and salves still offered lip service
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and perfunctory offerings to deities of ocean, field, and weather, no scrap of this natural religion lingered over the marsh in the old city. As the metropolis went to ground in darkness, so did its mysteries.
Hessek was aged, used up, decaying. It began to be said that when the barren tree put on green the savior of Hessek would come-a cynical enough maxim under the circumstances, which grew more naive and auspicious as the years of thralldom marched by. Yet Lellih, the barren tree, had put on again her green girlhood. Inadvertently, I had fulfilled their dream with that game of mine, which had used her as its pawn. I had thought, when she came whispering to me of her youth in the Grove, that her gods had put her in my hand. Maybe they had.
The Inner Chamber seemed to lie at the core of the cemetery, accessible via a labyrinth of passages that passed among various boneyards and tomb closets, where piled skulls leered in the half-light and the air was putrid.
I expected some menacing of freakish greeting at the end of the journey, and was not disappointed. An arch revealed to me a large space packed about the walls with black priests and ragged Bit-Hessians, and deserted at its center, where burned a tall bronze tripod lamp of the open Hessek sort. Lellih passed in before me, and the priest with his unpleasant pet. As I entered, a screaming shout emanated from the throng and split the hollow roof in echoes. It had in it the pent-up hysteria I had heard women break into in a death chant among the tribes. I did not like the noise of it much, and missed the words of the cry till they came again. What they were yelling over and over was: Eiullo y’ei S’ulloo-Kem! (“The invisible god is made visible in his son!)