Delusion's Master (Tales From the Flat Earth) (16 page)

“Oh, yes,”
said the girl. “It is very wonderful.”

“It might have
been more wonderful if I had used you better,” said he. “I am very sorry for
it. But I will take good care of you now.”

“No need,”
said the girl. “I believe I might have birthed a monster, or a deformed thing,
but even my womb received that great fire from out of the sky. Inside me now is
something most beautiful.” Then she sat by the servant, and held his hand. She
was very like a child herself, but an intelligent and trusting child, with wise
thoughts beyond its years. “I was something witless and almost soulless, but I
have been changed. I suspect I must change again, but not yet. Till then, shall
we live here? Until this baby is born. I can barely wait to see her, she will
be so rare. Begun by your body and by mine, but formed in the light of a star.”

“How beautiful
your hair is,” said the servant. “It has the scent of lime trees and cinnamon
trees. What is your name?”

“I never had
one,” said the girl.

“I will call
you ‘Sunfire,’ because of the way your hair has become.”

Presently, the
tawny rat, seeing they had lost interest in him, ran off to his family. Having
been exposed to the comet’s rays, he had come to comprehend somewhat the speech
of men. He boasted to his wives: “Two humans of exceptional good looks petted
me. The man said he would call me Sunfire, for my hair.”

“Oh,” said the
wives, and “Ooh,” and they tactfully licked his whiskers to show they believed
every word.

Later, when
the day waned, they went up again to visit the magician, and ate the supper
which had appeared for him, as usual, by sorcery, and which his dejection had
precluded his eating himself. They were glad to help him out, and eventually
upset the wine jar and fell to singing raucous rat songs of the centuries when
their kind had ruled the world.

The magician,
meanwhile, had returned to the roof.

As the open
spaces of the twilight gave place to the closing vanes of night, he watched the
couple talking softly and strangely to each other, as they walked about the
hill below.

“Just as I
thought,” the mage muttered, observing the servant, courteous and gentle, take
fruit from a tree and give it to the girl. “My despair confounds me!” the mage
added, as he beheld the vague still glow that seemed to emanate from her skin
and glorious hair.

Leaning over
the roof’s edge, the mage called to his servant: “I am going back to the city.
Do you mean to come with me?”

“Dear master,”
said the servant, “if I can be of help, I will gladly accompany you. But then I
would ask that you allow me to rejoin my wife.”

It was spoken
in a tone of such kindness, with such an obvious desire to be obliging, that
the mage was filled with fury.

He turned and
kicked the magic engine, one ringing blow, and stamped to his private chamber.
Here he summoned some sort of flying conveyance, packed his books and
instruments, and promptly vacated the premises.

The lovers did
not see his departure. They were locked, for the first time, in love, amid the
long grasses of the hill.

When the villagers came
back from the caves, driving their herds bleating before them, they found the
land was a little altered. And, as the days went by, the weeks, the months,
greater alterations were come on, and greater yet. Men will fear almost
anything changeable. It is part of the instinct of preservation and defense.
But as these changes were of benefit, or else of charm or grace, gradually fear
melted away.

In all the
region where the comet’s radiation had dispersed, there was not a dead tree or
plant that had not put out leaves and blossoms, not a barren place that did not
begin to mantle itself with seedlings. Fruits had ripened before season, and as
they fell or were plucked, others ripened and burst out in their place. A
mighty harvest overspilled from the earth, and as each stand of grain was
scythed, so another began to grow, and after that, another yet. Three, four or
five times the normal yield of the land was obtained, and for decades after, it
would be so.

There was an
old mine, long eviscerated of its minerals. Five months after the dispersal of
the comet, the first traces of copper and gold were found there.

Blue roses,
those prized flowers of the first earth, were found blooming under hedges,
beside ditches. Orchids emerged from cracks in the walls.

Wild cats no
longer attacked the flocks. Foxes no longer preyed on the chickens. Now and
then, an animal would talk (though generally the substance of its conversation
was unconscionable).

And, as time
went on, unknown trees rose from the ground, with gilded leaves and heady
perfumes. Fish with golden scales were discovered in the streams, the flesh of
which creatures were inedible—though, when they died, they petrified into pure
metal, and their eyes into sapphires.

A waterfall
broke from the rock above the pool where the reeds grew. As the waterfall fell,
it would make music, like the notes of a harp.

Men said to
each other: “If so much excellence came to this place from that light in the
sky, then surely it was not harmful after all.”

The women
said: “If only we had not run away. If only we had looked for good instead of
evil.”

“If only we
had received that flame from the sky also, we too might have flourished like
the land.”

They had
noticed, additionally, that the idiot had gone at last. Heaven had removed the
curse. Heaven had sent the light. They blessed the gods.

Scarcely
observed, totally unrecognized, Sunfire dwelled by the musical waterfall in
company with her husband. Their house was a bothy of stems and mud, the garden
of which was the world beyond.

They passed
their days and nights happily in this garden. Animals ran to them and played
with them. Food leapt out of the soil and from the trees to feed them. The
water sang, and the man learned to sing from the songs of the water, and to
make songs of his own. And Sunfire cut reeds and wove them into fantastic
shapes—delicate boats, fragile birdcages, dainty figurines, and these she left
on the edge of the pool. Women who came here to bathe would pick up these toys,
marveling at the intricacy of their design, and bear them home. Coins and jars
of honey and household articles were left in exchange.

Every morning,
Sunfire would kiss the man as he lay asleep at her side. But as she wove the
reeds, she would talk softly to the child in her womb, “Dear love, I shall
never be as close to you as now I am.”

And at night,
sometimes, Sunfire would walk alone about the pool. She would gaze deeply into
the eyes of the stars. The man would come to her, and ask her, “Are you
troubled?”

“No, there is
no trouble in me, or to come.”

But her soul
and her mind were far, far off, flowing up in the ether like two feathers bound
to each other by a silken thread.

“I think,” he
said, “you will not be with me always. Even now, you are traveling to some
other place.”

She would put
her arms about him, and her hair and skin would glow in the darkness. Moths
would flutter to her as if to a lamp, and the nocturnal wasps who visited the
water-flowers for nectar, would perch on the tips of her fingers. She grew big
with the child, but in a neat and gainly way.

“How I long to
look at you,” she said to the child, the child of rape and horror, which had
become the child of guilelessness and ethereal flame.

One day, when
the man was from their house, gathering wild gourds, Sunfire’s pains began. In
her innocence, the girl was not afraid. The pains had a rightness to them,
which encouraged her, nor were they beyond her capacity to endure. She knew
their origin, besides, and her discomfort was mingled with eagerness. Very
soon, the visitor she had been expecting would be before her. With the
soundness of her animal instincts, she prepared. The light had made her strong.
Her labor was short.

An hour or so
after noon, when the man returned through the young new trees that were coming
up above the waterfall, he heard a baby crying, dropped the gourds he had
collected, and ran for the bothy.

When he reached
the house, all had been put to rights, and there sat Sunfire with her child,
which was no longer weeping, but drinking from her breast.

When the child
slept, they sat and looked at her. Though newborn, she was pale as a lily, and
on her small skull, fine as morning mist, bloomed the palest, most lilylike
hair.

She had three
parents, man, woman and comet. Yet, in her, the shine of the sun had become the
sheen of the moon. She did not glow in the dark as her mother had come to glow.
Only the beauty of the baby glowed. She wrapped her fists about the fingers of
the woman and the man. A drop of milk spilled from Sunfire’s breast upon the
ground, and beamed for a moment like a filmy pearl, before the earth drank it
gratefully down. Later, a flower grew in the spot.

“Soveh,”
crooned the woman. Soveh was the name she had chosen for her baby. The man did
not argue, for Soveh meant flame.

In the
darkness of the dwelling’s corner, the man sat hidden and tears ran down his
face, for he knew his wife would soon be leaving him, and he knew the child was
not meant for him, and he knew that now he was enlightened enough to feel, he
was to be gently and poignantly punished for his earlier wickedness.

But for almost
a year, the parents and the child lived together. Sunfire made toys from the
reeds for her infant. The man made a cradle of the stems. Sometimes they
laughed and sang, and sometimes they were quiet. Sometimes the man and woman
made love, and the child watched them benignly.

But often, in
the pith and core of the darkness, the man who had been the magician’s servant
would wake alone with the child. And going to the bothy entrance, he would see
a candle flame gliding along the rim of the pool, and a second flame reflected
in the water below. At first he took it for witch-fire or phosphorous, but as
the flame moved about, he realized it was no elemental thing, but Sunfire, his
wife.

There came a
night then, when the year was almost done, and he beheld Sunfire walking by the
water, and she was a doll of golden glass, lit within by a silver coal.

At length she
came to him, with regret and with joy, and with a strange inevitable
remoteness.

“You will be
going, then,” he said. He did not let her see his wretchedness, that it might
not spoil her departure.

“It must be so,”
she said. “I shall not, I think, remain much longer in this form. How brief a
time I have been a woman and known it, yet what sweetness I have shared with
you and our daughter. I am sorry to leave you, yet not sorry, for this is my
destiny. The fire of heaven which brought me to life is now reclaiming me.”

“Do you have
no fear?” he whispered, for he could see her bones through her skin like
crystal rods, and blazing constellations had evolved in her eyes.

She said, “A
child is not afraid to grow, nor a river afraid to return into the ocean.”

They went
together into the bothy, and looked at the baby that had been named Soveh.

“I do not
suppose,” said Sunfire, “that our child can live as other children do, or that
her future will be commonplace. You must watch for portents. Events will
demonstrate how you must bestow her.”

“Could I not
keep her, then?”

“No more than
keep moonlight in a cage.”

At that, he
could not stay silent, and he said, “When I am alone I shall die.”

“Do not waste
yourself,” she said. “Live, and learn.”

In the
morning, she was gone.

It is said
that shepherds on the hills nearby caught sight of a woman walking the slopes,
and one exclaimed that she was clad in gold, and another that her clothes were
alight. But a third declared that as the sun came in over the shore of the
earth, a topaz star flew up like a bird and spun away across the sky to meet
the dawn. It was so bright, this star-bird, he could scarcely glance at it, and
yet it had, he said, the shape of a girl all of molten stuff, though she was
also winged like a dove. . . .

There was a woman in the
village, the reed-cutter’s wife. A little more than two years before, she had
gone to bathe and to cut reeds herself at the pool. There the mage’s foul
servant had sprung out on her and she had stabbed him in the thigh. Presently,
as she cooked her man’s supper, the magician’s messenger-bird had come to chide
her, and her husband had stood between her and the messenger and given back a
stern reply to the magician. When the bird meekly withdrew, the woman had gone
to her husband and embraced him. “How brave and clever you are!” she had
extolled him, and they had let the supper she was cooking burn, and lain down
together instead. When the comet appeared over the village, they, with all their
neighbors, had fled. But though the woman was with child, she was not one of
those who had miscarried. She took care, however, that none of the supernatural
rays touched her, and later on, resumed her life in the village with the rest
of the people. At the allotted time she bore a healthy girl-child, declared by
everybody who saw it, to be of superlative attraction. As indeed, then and now,
most new children are declared to be.