The New Death and others Read Online Free PDF Page B

pervert," said the
man.
     
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    The Moon Sailed Sadly
Through the Sky
     
    The Moon sailed sadly through the sky
    on trails blazed by the Sun
    remembering ancient chants of praise
    but hearing not a one.
     
    She mourned the passing of the days
    when innocents would die.
    A sacrifice for each new month
    to keep her in the sky.
     
    A heart cut out for each new month
    and laid before her throne.
    The snow lay pristine and unstained.
    The Moon sailed on alone.
     
    She heard a howl from jaws still hot
    and dripping from the kill.
    The wolves that ruled the lightless
woods
    were faithful to her still.
     
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    ++++
     
    The Scholar and the Moon
     
    The evening air smelled of incense and thick,
stupefying plum wine. Masked revelers laughed and staggered through
the cobbled streets of Mayajat, for the night would bring a full
moon.
    The moon ruled the people of the city. Each
full moon brought a new temperament, so that everyone would be sly
and calculating one month, and the next month wrathful and
belligerent. None knew the reason why. Some said that the wombs of
the mothers of Mayajat grew many babies at a time, but that before
birth the strongest one absorbed the others, so that everyone in
Mayajat was born a murderer. The ghosts of these dead siblings,
they claimed, fought to control their slayer, and the moon gave
power to one or another as she would.
    This evening, as on every full moon, all
Mayajenes stayed awake, eagerly awaiting the passion that would
rule them for the month. All Mayajenes, that is, save one.
    The scholar Conwy had always stood apart from
this monthly custom. Of late he found it unbearable. He shut his
window tight, in the hope that the celebration below would reach
neither eye nor ear. Yet light and sound seeped through.
    Conwy wondered why he was different. Perhaps,
he thought, there was some truth to the rumor that he had foreign
ancestry to match his foreign name. This would explain why he
longed to be like the outlanders, and have a soul which was still,
like a sea that knows no tides.
    He believed his name meant 'Hound of the
Plain'. If this was true he was ill-named. His broad nose and
tightly-coiled white hair gave him the appearance of a sheep.
Indeed some whispered that, like a sheep, he had been
castrated.
    Curled in his hammock, cloaked in blankets,
he resembled a caterpillar in a cocoon. The coming hour moved the
rest of the city to frenzy. Conwy felt not as if he was about to be
reborn, but as if he was to be sealed alive in his tomb. Yet, as in
a nightmare, he could not fight or escape. He lacked the energy to
do anything but sleep.
    In a fevered dream Conwy saw the streets
beyond his shuttered window. The masks of the citizens of Mayajat
seemed not to conceal, but to reveal their wearers' true aspect.
Their wine-maddened capering seemed the sober gait of creatures
alien to him.
    Musicians as drunken and leering as their
audience offered raucous praise to the moon. She filled the sky,
swollen like over-ripe fruit. The fish that dwell amid darkness
eternal in the deepest chasms, like maggots in the wounds of the
earth, were no whiter than the moon. Conwy, groaning and soaked in
sweat, writhed in his hammock. Demon-faced dancers filled the
streets, bright as a flock of tropical birds. Cloaks and feathers
and masks reshaped human forms into those of some inhuman kindred,
primeval and unknown.
    And then, like the breaking of a dam, it
happened! In each heart the fluids that control the temperament
suddenly rose or fell in unvaried obedience to their celestial
mistress. In the hearts of men, the hearts of women, those of
infants in their cradles, the delirious and the demented, perhaps
even the rotting hearts of the dead in their graves.
    In his room Conwy awoke with a shriek. Even
with his window closed his voice was drowned in the cheers of the
crowd.
    He rushed to his desk. Frantically he flipped
through one book after another. Where