toward me on all fours, his whole body swaying from side to side, his terrible eyes blazing.
I almost called on the Sybil then. I wanted to ask simply, What do I do now? What now?
But I didn’t. In the end, I alone had to decide what was right, the correct action. Anything I did would please the Sybil. She would weave it into the pattern. Surat-Kemad did not care—
“My son…” The words seemed to come from deep within him, like a wind from out of a tunnel. “To the very end I have loved you, and it has not been enough.”
He opened his huge, hideously elongated mouth. His teeth were like little knives.
At that final moment, I did not fear him, nor hate him, nor did I sorrow. I felt only a hollow, grinding sense of duty.
“No, it was not enough, Father.”
I struck him with the sword. His head came off with a single blow. My arm completed the motion almost before I was aware of it.
It was as easy as breathing.
Blood like molten iron spread at my feet. I stepped back. The floorboards burned.
“You are not my father.” I said softly. “You cannot have been my father.”
But I knew that he had been, all the way to the end.
I knelt beside him, then put my arms around his shoulders and lay with my head on his rough, malformed back. I wept long and hard and bitterly.
And as I did, dreams came to me, thoughts, visions, flashes of memories which were not my own, and terrible understanding, the culmination of long study and of longer experience. My mind filled. I knew a thousand deaths and how they had been inflicted, how a single gem of knowledge or power was wrested from each. I knew what every instrument in this room was for, the contents of all the books and charts, and what was in each of those jars and how it could be compelled to speak.
For I had killed a sorcerer, and if you kill a sorcerer you become all that he was.
This was my inheritance from my father.
* * * *
In the dawn, Hamakina and I buried our father in the sand beneath the house. The black stars were gone. The sky was dark, but it was the familiar sky of Eshé, the Earth of the living. Yet the world was still empty, and we dug in the sand with our hands. When we had made a shallow grave, we rolled him into it, placing his head between his feet in the way a sorcerer must be buried. For a time, Mother was with us. She crawled into the grave with him and we covered them both up.
The sky lightened into purple, then azure. Then water flowed beneath the dock and I watched the first birds rise from among the reeds. Hamakina stood among the reeds for a little while, gazing back at me. Then she was gone.
Suddenly I began to shake almost uncontrollably, but merely from cold this time. Though it was early summer, the night’s chill lingered, and I was almost naked. I climbed up into the house by means of a rope ladder I’d dropped through the trapdoor and put on trousers, a heavy shirt, and a cloak.
Later, when I came down again with a jug to get water for washing, I saw a man in a white robe and a silver mask walking toward me across the water. I stood up and waited. He stopped a distance off, but I could hear what he said clearly enough.
At first he spoke with my father’s voice.
“I wanted to tell you the rest of the story of the Heron Boy. There is no ending to it, I fear. It just…continues. He was not a heron and he was not a boy either, but he looked like a boy. So he dwelt among men pretending to be one of them, yet confiding his secret to those who loved him. Still, he did not belong. He never could. He lived out his days as an impostor. But he had help, because those he confided in did love him. Let me confide in you, then. Sekenre, when a boy becomes a man his father gives him a new name which is known only between the two of them, until the son gives it to his own son in turn. Therefore take the name your father had, which is Heron.”
And he spoke with the voice of the Sybil.
“Sekenre, you are marked with my mark because you are my instrument. All men know that out of the tangle of the world I divine the secrets of their lives. But do they also know that out of the tangle of their lives I divine the secrets of the world? That I cast them about like bones, like marbles, and read the patterns as they fall? I think not.”
And, finally, he spoke with the voice of Surat-Kemad, god of death and of the river, and the thunder was his voice; and he took off the mask and revealed his terrible face, and his jaws gaped wide; and the numberless, fading stars were his teeth; and the sky and the Earth were his mouth; and the river disgorged itself from his belly; and his great ribs were the pillars of the world.
He spoke to me in the language of the gods, of Akimshé, the burning holiness at the heart of the universe, and he named the gods yet unborn, and he spoke of kings and of nations and of worlds, of things past and things which are to come.
Then he was gone. The city spread before me now. I saw the foreign ships at anchor in the river, and the bright banners waving in the morning breeze.
I took off the robe and sat on the dock, washing. A boatman drifted by and waved, but then he realized who I was, made a sign against evil, and paddled away frantically.
His fear was so trivial it was somehow incredibly funny.
I fell back on the deck, hysterical with laughter, then lay there. Sunlight slanted under the house. The air was warm and felt good.
And I heard my father whisper from his grave, gently, “My son, if you can become more than a sorcerer, I will not fear for you.”
“Yes, Father. I shall.”
Then I folded my hands, and slowly opened them, and the fire that I held cupped there was perfect and pale and still, like a candle’s flame on a breezeless summer night.
THE GOLGOTHA DANCERS, by Manly Wade Wellman
I had come to the Art Museum to see the special show of Goya prints, but that particular gallery was so crowded that I could hardly get in, much less see or savor anything; wherefore I walked out again. I wandered through the other wings with their rows and rows of oils, their Greek and Roman sculptures, their stern ranks of medieval armors, their Oriental porcelains, their Egyptian gods. At length, by chance and not by design, I came to the head of a certain rear stairway. Other habitues of the museum will know the one I mean when I remind them that Arnold Böcklin’s The Isle of the Dead hangs on the wall of the landing.
I started down, relishing in advance the impression Böcklin’s picture would make with its high brown rocks and black poplars, its midnight sky and gloomy film of sea, its single white figure erect in the bow of the beach-nosing skiff. But, as I descended, I saw that The Isle of the Dead was not in its accustomed position on the wall. In that space, arresting even in the bad light and from the up-angle of the stairs, hung a gilt-framed painting I had never seen or heard of in all my museum-haunting years.
I gazed at it, one will imagine, all the way down to the landing. Then I had a close, searching look, and a final appraising stare from the lip of the landing above the lower half of the flight. So far as I can learn—and I have been diligent in my research—the thing is unknown even to the best-informed of art experts. Perhaps it is as well that I describe it in detail.
It seemed to represent action upon a small plateau or table rock, drab and bare, with a twilight sky deepening into a starless evening. This setting, restrainedly worked up in blue-grays and blue-blacks, was not the first thing to catch the eye, however. The front of the picture was filled with lively dancing creatures, as pink, plump and naked as cherubs and as patently evil as the meditations of Satan in his rare idle moments.
I counted those dancers. There were twelve of them, ranged in a half-circle, and they were cavorting in evident glee around a central object—a prone cross, which appeared to be made of two stout logs with some of the bark still upon them. To this cross a pair of the pink things—that makes fourteen—kneeling and swinging blocky-looking