it.
AFTERWORD
This was a dream story. I dream a good deal of fiction, but it is mostly very bad fiction. The title was in my dream and the setup, the possessed servant hiring a master and mistress. That and one visual image that has never left me, that of a large upper-class room at midnight swept by a high wind. Its drapes flutter among my thoughts even now.
Some are haunted by ghosts. I am haunted by stories.
THE GOD AND HIS MAN
O
nce long, long ago, when the Universe was old, the mighty and powerful god Isid Iooo IoooE, whose name is given by certain others in other ways, and who is determined in every place and time to do what is good, came to the world of Zed. As every man knows, such gods travel in craft that can never be wrecked—and indeed, how could they be wrecked, when the gods are ever awake and hold the tiller? He came, I say, to the world of Zed, but he landed not and made no port, for it is not fit (as those who made the gods long ago ruled) that a god should set his foot upon any world, however blue, however fair.
Therefore Isid Iooo IoooE remained above the heavens, and his craft, though it traveled faster than the wind, contrived to do so in such a way that it stood suspended—as the many-hued stars themselves do not—above that isle of Zed that is called by the men of Zed (for they are men, or nearly) Land. Then the god looked down upon Zed, and seeing that the men of Zed were men and the women thereof women, he summoned to him a certain man of Urth. The summons of Isid Iooo IoooE cannot be disobeyed.
“Man,” said the god, “go down to the world of Zed. For behold, the men of Zed are even as you are, and their women are women.” Then he let Man see through his own eyes, and Man saw the men of Zed, how they herded their cattle and drove their plows and beat the little drums of Zed. And he saw the women of Zed, and how many were fair to look upon, and how they lived in sorrow and idleness, or else in toil and weariness, even like the women of Urth.
He said to the god, “If I am ever to see my own home, and my own women, and my children again, I must do as you say. But if I go as I am, I shall not see any of those things ever again. For the men of Zed are men—you yourself have said it—and therefore crueler than any beast.”
“It is that cruelty we must end,” said the god. “And in order that you may assist me with your reports, I have certain gifts for you.” Then he gave Man the enchanted cloak Tarnung by which none should see him when he did not wish to be seen, and he gave Man the enchanted sword Maser, whose blade is as long as the wielder wishes it (though it weighs nothing) and against which not even stone can stand.
No sooner had Man tied Tarnung about his shoulders and picked up Maser than the god vanished from his sight, and he found he rested in a grove of trees with scarlet flowers.
The time of the gods is not as the time of men and women. Who can say how long Man wandered across Land on Zed? He wandered in the high, hot lands where men have few laws and many slaves.
There he fought many fights until he knew all the manner of fighting of the people of the high, hot lands and grew shamed of killing those men with Maser, and took for himself the crooked sword of those lands, putting Maser by. Then he drew to him a hundred wild men, bandits, and slaves who had slain their masters and fled, and murderers of many kinds. And he armed them after the manner of the high, hot lands, and mounted them on the yellow camels of those lands, that oftimes crush men with their necks, and led them in many wars. His face was like the faces of other men, and his sword like their swords; he stood no taller than they, and his shoulders were no broader; yet because he was very cunning and sometimes vanished from the camp, his followers venerated him.
At last he grew rich, and built a citadel in the fastness of the mountains. It stood upon a cliff and was rimmed with mighty walls. A thousand spears and a thousand spells guarded it. Within were white domes and white towers, a hundred fountains, and gardens that leaped up the mountain in roses and ran down it like children in the laughter of many waters. There Man sat at his ease and exchanged tales with his captains of their many wars. There he listened to the feet of his dancers as the pattering of rain, and meditated on their round limbs and smiling faces. And at last he grew tired of these things and, wrapping himself in Tarnung, vanished and was seen in that citadel no more.
Then he wandered in the steaming lands, where the trees grew taller than his towers and the men are shy and kill from the shadows with little poisoned arrows no longer than their forearms. There for a long while he wore the cloak Tarnung always, for no sword avails against such an arrow in the neck. The weight of the sword he had fetched from the high, hot lands oppressed him there, and the breath of the steaming lands rusted its blade, and so he cast it, one day, into a slow river where the black crocodiles swam and the river horses with amber eyes floated like logs or bellowed like thunder. But the magical sword Maser he kept.
And in the steaming lands he learned the ways of the great trees, of which each is an island, with its own dwellers thereon, and he learned the ways of the beasts of Zed, whose cleverness is so much less than the cleverness of men, and whose wisdom is so much more. There he tamed a panther with eyes like three emeralds, so that it followed him like a dog and killed for him like a hawk, and when he came upon a village of the men of the steaming lands he leaped from a high branch onto the head of their idol and smote the hut of their chief with the sword Maser and vanished from their sight. And when he returned after a year to that village, he saw that the old idol was destroyed and a new idol set up, with lightning in its hand and a panther at its feet.
Then he entered that village and blessed all the people and made the lap of that idol his throne. He rode an elephant with a bloodred tusk and two trunks; his war canoes walked up and down the river on a hundred legs; the heads of his drums were beaten with the white bones of chiefs; his wives were kept from the sun so their pale beauty would lure him to his hut by night and their fresh skins give him rest even in the steaming lands, and they were gorged with oil and meal until he lay upon them as upon pillows of silk. And so he would have remained had not the god Isid Iooo IoooE come to him in a dream of the night and commanded him to bestir himself, wandering and observing in the cold lands.
There he walked down a thousand muddy roads and kissed cool lips in a hundred rainy gardens. The people of the cold lands keep no slaves and have many laws, and their justice is the wonder of strangers, and so he found the bread of the cold lands hard and scant, and for a long time he cleaned boots for it, and for a long time dug ditches to drain their fields.
And each day the ship of Isid Iooo IoooE circled Zed, and when it had made several hundred such circles, Zed circled its lonely sun, and circled again, and yet again, so that Man’s beard grew white, and the cunning that had won battles in the high, hot lands and burned the idol in the steaming lands was replaced with something better and less useful.
One day he plunged the blade of his shovel into the earth and turned his back to it. In a spinney he drew out Maser (which he had not drawn for so long that he feared its magic was no more than a dream he had had when young) and cut a sapling. With that for a staff he took to the roads again, and when its leaves withered—which they did but slowly in that wet, cold country—he cut another and another, so that he taught always beneath a green tree.
