Bailgar grunted softly, and told him to look at my ship, which was going down.
Her face was a golden mask and her hands were also gold.
“I had them speak our rites for you,” she said “I didn’t know which were your own and you could not tell me. Can you rest with that? I’ll do whatever you ask.”
I could not speak-besides, could dredge up no words. I did not know her or where I was. I did not even know it when I died.
5
There was a light.
I had been half aware of it some while-not what it was, its meaning, simply that it was present. In color it was gold, this light, a rich red gold, and here and there flowers bloomed in its path, white and rose and blue.
The light, and the flowers that grew in it, fascinated me.
I had no other sense, only the organs of sight that showed me this.
Gradually the gold broadened, dimming slightly at its perimeters.
It was a roof of flowers, a sky of flowers, and I lay under it.
In a sort of dream that asked no questions, demanded no explanation, my eyes moved over knots of blue corundum, rose crystal, pearls. Flowers made from jewels, and there a
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carved peacock forever spreading its turquoise fan as the light discovered it, a horse of white enamel with its feet lost in the dark.
I could see it now, where the light came from, an aperture a little way down the flowery roof, about a foot above me and level with my breastbone. Instinctively then, still without reasoning or true motive, I set myself to rise and investigate this source of illumination, and found I could not move.
At first you do not believe such a thing. Movement is your right. You attempt it several times, each time thinking, Now. But at last you come to believe it, that there is a heaviness on all your limbs, your torso, your skull, fetters that have soldered you to the earth.
I was more bewildered than afraid. Writhing there, I seemed able to twist a limited distance inside a kind of case, and at each stultified spasm my own flesh seemed to crumble and flake painlessly away. Meanwhile, the glorious light began to fade and as it faded, by contrast, I vaguely ascertained a heap of dull gold beneath, and how the sides of the flowery roof sloped down to it, and they were narrow sides, very narrow. Each of these things was teaching me. I lay quiet, recollecting everything by swift degrees. I recollected who I was and what had happened to me. I put on my manhood and my life with all their obligations of sensation and horror. I was Vazkor, the sorcerer. I had nearly died of the plague, but somehow my healing body was recovered. I lived, I breathed, I was whole. And I was in no sickroom I had ever imagined.
Slowly now, in the last of the light, my eyes returned over the jeweled ceiling above me, the ceiling so low and close to me that its every detail was apparent. My childlike wonderment altered to a measureless fear.
I had dwelt among Masrians long enough to glean something of their customs. I had seen the Royal Necropolis on its southeastern hill, the sugar domes, the gilded stucco.
Yes, Vazkor had survived the plague, but had not given evidence of his survival quickly enough. Now I had the lesson pat.
They had thought me dead. They had buried me alive.
Then my stillness left me.
In a maddened blind terror, I began to call and cry out, my wordless roaring filling the great hollow cask so it rang like a bell, and I tried to haul up my arms, to smash my fists upon the beautiful roof of my prison. All the while I screamed within myself to those gods I never admitted I
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owned, as the gold light vanished on the pitiless staring of the flowers, the peacock, and the white horse.
There was not a vast amount of air in the sarcophagus, only what came in with the sun at that hole in the lid, and thence through the open nostrils and other small vents of what they had bound me in. Shortly, I started to choke and faint and fell back in a muddy swimming of the senses. When the swimming stopped, I was in darkness.
If you seek revenge on your worst enemy, if he has done things for which you believe no punishment sufficient, incarcerate him in a golden tomb, alive.
I do not know how long I lay there, except that I remember the light came and went across the gems twice or maybe thrice. There was no time for me within that box of death. I became a slobbering witless beast, that now and again started into human awareness, to roll and cry and whimper. My seasons were partitioned out in clamor and unconsciousness and the mindless waking stupor that intervened between them.
How I kept my reason is beyond me. If I kept it. For I think the return of intelligence did not actually prove I had not grown insane. Not till some time after did rationality reclaim my mind, and by then I was far from that place and all my deeds in it.
However, my brain did eventually revive, and logic came. It came in the form of a single realization. Something like a madness in itself.
I had not been buried alive, I had been buried dead. Stone dead. Corpse-cold without heartbeat, unbreathing, sustenance for the worms. Yet no worm had fed on me. I was entire, even within this tomb.
It was the final gate, the absolute ordeal, the last magical capacity. What I had part suspected myself of possessing, but never dared to test. Having once decided, the facts showed me it was no more than plain truth. For this was undeniable; if I had lain sick enough to seem dead, waking from that sickness as I did in panic and shadow, starved of food and drink, weighted down and shuttered up with barely the air to keep my senses, surely I must have died then if not before. Yet I lived. I lived.
My thoughts had cleared like water. I was calm and fear fled me. If I could die and return to life, I could do anything. I had no need to be afraid, I had surmounted the ultimate
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terror. There was no bone-dust heap for me, no ignominious mound. There was eternity, and the world.
They had piled a tomb on me. They might have piled on a hill, and over the hill, a mountain. It was all one, and mattered nothing.
I used my Power to free myself. The restraints were done with. It never came so easily. A pillar of glowing energy that fired the case within as the passing sun had never fired it. The jewels shattered, the eyes of the peacock’s tail fell on my breast. Golden hinges melted and iron cracked. The lid of the sarcophagus rose up into sudden vast gulfs of space and crashed down beyond my range of vision.
It was a fortune they had laid on my body, an armoring of bars and plates of enamelwork, onyx and bronze, a silver helm weighted with enormous palm-leaf rays of gold. No living man could have worn it and walked upright. On my skin, inches thick, was a gilt integument. I had been bandaged in metal, buried like a king. I could only give thanks to hasty or rascally workmen that they had not been completely zealous in the labor. Every oversight, every gap in the wrapping, had been a way for air to reach my flesh and my lungs. Without the air, I might have waited here, animate yet unaroused, till my plastering decayed. A hundred years, perhaps, or more.
There was, too, the round opening in the lid of the cask. For Masrian custom dictated that even in death the corpse would wish to receive the beams of Masrimas’ sun.
I split my fabulous armoring by Power. The gold anchors rang as they left me; the skin of gold flaked down in yellow shards.
Stepping naked from my coffin on the floor, as though from some bed where I had slept late, I saw the massive lid on its side a small distance away.
Besides its inner prettiness, it had some outer display about ten feet of gilding, gems and gold. That I had lifted by my will, a thing that would have taken perhaps twenty men to raise in their arms.
This struck me as amusing. Next I looked about, and smiled some more.
Masrian religious faith comprises an odd dichotomy. They tell you that after death the soul journeys to some unworld, ruled by their fire-god. However, since this soul may linger a while before departure, everything is set out in the tomb for its comfort. Whether any Masrian actually and wholeheartedly credits this I had no notion then, or now. Like Sorem,