Wielding a Red Sword Read online

  The clouds parted to allow a shaft of moonlight down, and the leaves and statues turned silvery. A gentle breeze wafted through, stirring the trees. The smell of the wild came through more clearly, luring him on. The path twisted about, taking him past increasingly intriguing exhibits.

  He paused to examine one statue more carefully. It was a representation of two figures, male and female, both naked, locked in close embrace. In fact they were engaged in the act of physical love. Such representations were common enough in India, but this one was unusually specific. The figures almost seemed to move.

  In fact, they were moving. Mym thought he was being deceived by the play of moonlight, but now he heard the sounds of their exertions. The figures were alive!

  Impossible. Statues did not come to life!

  Yet there was definite sound and movement, as the act progressed. Mym inspected the representation closely, and finally touched the shoulder of the man. It was cold stone. So this was some kind of mechanical device, simulating human mating. Interesting.

  He moved on. The breeze picked up, ruffling his hair. The moonlight brightened. The trees were larger and prettier, and the smell of their naturalness intensified. Now there was sod underfoot, slightly springy.

  He turned to look back, but could not see the castle; he seemed to be in a forest. That didn't bother him; he was pleased with the extent and verisimilitude of this garden. No wonder Rapture had been delighted!

  He came to another statue—and this one was larger, more animated, and more intimate than the first. These could have been real people, and their technique was quite interesting.

  The man turned his head and saw Mym. "Ah, the master of the castle arrives," he said.

  Startled, Mym stepped back. It talked!

  The woman disengaged and sat on the pedestal, dangling her long, bare legs over its edge. She was extremely full-breasted and full-hipped, but slender in other respects. "Come, join me," she invited Mym, opening her arms.

  A concubine? "Who are you?" Mym demanded. Then he paused, surprised, for he had spoken without stuttering.

  "I am Satan, the Incarnation of Evil," the man said. "This is one of My innumerable consorts, each of whom is more luscious and tractable than the last."

  "Satan?" Mym repeated, again amazed at his lack of stutter. "Here in my castle?"

  "Not precisely your castle. Mars," Satan said. "You have wandered from your garden into a section of My realm, where reality is more intriguing. But have no concern; you are welcome here. I have wanted to interview you."

  "Aren't you the occidental figure of evil?" Mym asked. "I have been warned to be wary of you."

  "Indeed I am, and indeed you have," Satan agreed expansively. "My name is Nefarious—and rightly so."

  This was not precisely the approach Mym had anticipated. He had been led to expect a creature with hooves, tail, and horns, who breathed fire. This man was none of these. He seemed entirely human, even to the act he had been performing with the woman. "Why have you chosen to contact me?" he asked, once again marveling at his lack of a stutter.

  "Why, isn't it the neighborly thing to do?" Satan asked. "It is no easy thing to step abruptly into the office of an Incarnation, and it behooves others of us to facilitate your adaptation in whatever ways we can."

  Mym shrugged. "I appreciate that effort. But other accounts indicate that you bear mostly malice to others. As the Incarnation of Evil, this makes sense. So you should be trying to make this more difficult for me."

  Satan grinned in disarming fashion, and the woman smiled. "This shows the importance of personal contact. As you can see, I am not as intractable as others may depict Me. Come, let us converse." He jumped off the pedestal, not at all concerned about his nakedness, and the woman followed. She was robustly constructed, and her breasts bounced magnificently as she landed. What a concubine she would make!

  As they walked, the welkin brightened, not from any dawn but from a surrounding luminescence. The trees glowed, and the ground, and even the three people, as if animated from within. This provided a preternatural clarity of vision, for there were no obstructive shadows. The garden was almost ecstatically beautiful, a true paradise.

  The woman took his arm. Mym glanced at her, surprised. The enhancement of vision applied to her, too, and made of her physical form a thing of perfect splendor. She smiled at him.

  "You like Lilith?" Satan inquired. "She was the model for all the statuary, and she will gladly pose for you, in any manner you desire. She has more experience than any mortal woman."

  So she was of the spirit world; he should have realized. "Thank you; I already have a woman."

  "But not a suitable concubine, here in Purgatory," Satan said. "A man of your stature needs more than one woman."

  "True," Mym said. "But a prince does not take a used woman."

  "Readily fixed," Satan said. He snapped his fingers, and Lilith vanished. Satan snapped again, and a new woman appeared. This one was just as lusciously constructed, but possessed a greater innocence of demeanor. "Lila, here, has never been touched by man."

  Lila smiled at Mym. She was every bit as pretty as the concubines the Rajah had provided.

  Still Mym had a doubt. "But I don't know how Rapture would feel about a spirit concubine."

  "Well, you can ask her," Satan said. "Lila will be available whenever you wish." He waved one hand negligently, and Lila vanished. "How did you like your first day's work?"

  "It sufficed," Mym said guardedly.

  "I understand that you had the privilege of supervising a battle in your own bailiwick."

  "I was trying to end it!" Mym exclaimed.

  "End it? Whatever for?"

  "Because it was pointless. There was no need for men to die on that field; peace had been declared."

  Satan smiled. "Now I can see how that might be construed as an embarrassment. Still, a good battle is a good battle, whatever the circumstances. Why didn't you simply enjoy it?"

  "Enjoy it!" Mym cried. "Outrageous!"

  "How so. Prince? War is an honorable pursuit, and there is much challenge and glory to be had in battle."

  "That is the kind of remark I should expect from Siva," Mym muttered. "War is the root of endless evil. Slaughter, Famine, and Pestilence ride right with me when I go out."

  "Siva—your God of Destruction," Satan said. "I like that. But consider where the world would be if there were no war. We know that mortals have faults; they are dissatisfied with their lots, whatever their lots may be, so they seek to better those lots at the expense of their neighbors. Men take advantage of each other, they steal from each other, they enslave each other and will not give over; whole societies have been enslaved by other societies, or by their own repressive leadership, and suffering is endemic. I know these things, for I receive the souls that are degraded and finally damned by such circumstances. Human beings are not fair to each other; each wants more than his fair share and will take it if he has the power. What mechanism exists to restore fairness to humanity? Reason? Man is not a rational animal, no matter what he chooses to call himself. He remains governed by his selfish emotions. He uses reason only as a means to an end—the end of self-aggrandizement. When reason suggests he is wrong, he dispenses with it and keeps his ill-gotten gains. No, Prince—in the end, there is only one answer, and that is to restore fairness by force. That is what we call war."

  "But war does not restore fairness!" Mym protested, taken aback by this rationale. "It is noted in the spread of unfairness!"

  "Only if abused," Satan said smoothly. "That is why there is an Incarnation of War—to see that it is correctly used."

  Mym thought of his day's work. "I did not handle it well today."

  "You will improve with experience, of course. We all do. No blame attaches to you for that."

  "I would prefer to abolish all war, so that no battles needed managing."

  "Then you would be neglecting your office. Some war is necessary. It is like burning off a fallow field, to cle
ar it of a tangle of brush and to fertilize it with ashes, so as to facilitate new growth. The process of burning may seem violent, but it is in fact quite beneficial. Likewise one must not be deterred by the seeming violence of war; it is but a means to a necessary end."

  "Some means are not justified, and war—"

  "Or like the surgeon's knife, that cuts away cancerous growth. It is true that some healthy flesh must be touched, but this is a small sacrifice in view of the advantage to be obtained."

  "But war is not surgery," Mym protested. "It is butchery! I saw the carnage, today, when—"

  "Anything can be harmful, if it is allowed to proceed uncontrolled. Fire is an excellent example; it can be man's greatest enemy or his greatest friend. One simply needs to learn how to manage it. Likewise the process of cutting; what is butchery in the bad form remains excision in the good form. It is not the agent that is to be condemned, but the abuse, as I said before."

  There was an insidious logic here that Mym distrusted. "I would prefer to abolish war entirely."

  "You can not," Satan said. "Nor would you want to, if you truly understood it."

  "But you will explain my abilities and motives to me," Mym said sourly.

  "Naturally. As I said, it behooves one Incarnation to assist another. You can not abolish war entirely, because it is not a cause; it is a symptom, the tangible manifestation of a more fundamental malady. Only by dealing with that underlying problem can you hope to eliminate war. As it is, all you can do is fan it into greater activity or damp it down, shaping it somewhat to your design."

  Mym remembered the extreme difficulty he had had in turning off the battle between Gujarat and Maharastra; certainly there had seemed to be an imperative to combat that defied common sense. "And what is this underlying problem that I would not want to abolish if I could?"

  "It is the nature of man," Satan said. "Man is not a perfect creature; were he so, there would be no need of Heaven or Hell, of God or Me. Man is a composite of good and evil, and the whole of his existence as a mortal being is designed to determine the extent of those elements within him, so that he can be classified and sent to his appropriate locale in the Afterlife. Naturally his mortal span is rife with tensions and disturbance; it is good and evil that are tugging him this way and that. When men band together in the larger societies they call nations or kingdoms, those larger units assume the attributes of the individuals of which they are composed. There is a fabric of social tension, a pattern of complex and subtle pressures. Inevitably these mount until they manifest in overt war, the most drastic form of competition. You could not stifle that without stifling the society's most effective mode of expression. If all such interaction could be truly suppressed, man would never be properly defined, and there would be no point in mortality. So it is not your position, as the Incarnation of War, to prevent war; instead you want to shape and guide this visible aspect of social stress and use it to reduce social inequities and facilitate the emergence of more effective leadership. You want to fashion war into the truly useful tool for redress of inequity that it can and should be."

  Mym did not trust Satan, but this was a most compelling rationale. "I'll think about it," he said grudgingly.

  "Of course you will, Mars; that is your office. I am satisfied to have helped clarify it for you."

  "To be sure." The ease with which he spoke reminded Mym of another question: "How is it that I am not stuttering, now?"

  "You are visiting an aspect of My domain," Satan explained. "This place is not governed by natural laws, but by My laws. I see no need for a person of your status to be afflicted with an impediment of speech; therefore there is none."

  "But I have stuttered all through life, and in Purgatory too!" Mym protested.

  "That is the difference between life and Purgatory and My realm," Satan said. "There is much I can offer you, and not merely suitable concubines."

  "Offer me—in exchange for what?"

  "Merely amicable relations," Satan said blithely. "Bring Rapture here tomorrow, and I will show her also what is available. She will be delighted."

  "She needs no demons for amorous companionship!"

  Satan laughed. "Of course not. Mars! What she craves is nourishing food—without having to travel all the way to Earth for it every day, depriving you of her company."

  "You have mortally nourishing food?" Mym asked, abruptly interested. "Here?"

  For answer, Satan waved a hand. A table appeared, heavily laden with a sumptuous repast.

  "But the food of Purgatory looks and tastes real," Mym said. "How can we tell whether your food is solid?"

  "By eating it," Satan said. "The truth will become apparent soon enough."

  Mym nodded. Satan seemed to have little reason to deceive him on this score. His offerings were attractive. Pleasant surroundings, the abolition of the stutter, and a way for Rapture to remain with him. If this were truly for the sake of neighborliness, Mym was amenable.

  He turned about and made his way back toward the castle. The shrubbery became more normal, and the statuary became stone; it was like moving from the supernatural to the natural.

  As he entered the castle, he tried an experiment. "H-h-h-hello," he said to himself. Yes, the stutter was back.

  In the morning he touched the Sword and willed himself to travel to Luna's mortal residence, where Rapture was staying. One moment he was standing in the castle; the next he was at the entrance to the house. It was a trifle unsettling to travel so far so readily, but he liked it well enough. He knocked on the door.

  Rapture herself opened it, expecting him. She threw herself into his arms. "Oh, it is wonderful here!" she cried. "I missed you so much!"

  Luna stood beyond. Mym caught her eye, over Rapture's shoulder, and she nodded knowingly. "It is the way of woman," she said. "To suffer pleasure and pain together."

  "I will bring her back soon," Mym sang. Then he touched the Sword, and he and Rapture stood in the castle.

  Rapture disengaged and started for the bedroom, but he restrained her. "Contrary to appearances," he sang, "there is sometimes more on a man's mind than that. I want to show you something."

  Perplexed, she accompanied him to the garden. They walked down the path and into the extension of Satan's realm.

  "But this wasn't here yesterday!" Rapture exclaimed. "There was a wall, the far end of—"

  "True," he said. "But this is special."

  "It must be! These plants are—" She paused. "Did you say something?"

  "Not a thing," he said.

  "You did!" she exclaimed. "You didn't stutter!"

  "I told you this was special."

  "But a moment ago—why did you sing, if you have conquered the stutter?"

  "I haven't conquered the stutter. This is a gift of this garden. Here I can speak normally, nowhere else."

  "Here? What is this place?"

  Satan appeared, with Lila at his side. This time both were clothed. "It is an extension of My domain," he said grandly. "I thought you would like it."

  Rapture turned to Mym. "Who is he?"

  "Rapture, meet Satan," Mym said. "The occidental equivalent of Siva."

  "Siva!" she cried, retreating.

  "And Satan, meet Rapture of Malachite, my betrothed," Mym concluded.

  Satan bowed. "My pleasure, lovely mortal woman."

  "But Siva—God of Destruction and of—"

  "Of sex," Satan finished. "Which brings us to Lila, here, a demoness of My realm. It occurred to Me that your betrothed is short of concubines, here in Purgatory, and if you approve, Lila will be happy to serve."

  Rapture did a rapid reassessment. Western nations had different and peculiar standards, but in India the Rajahs and noblemen were expected to have plenty of concubines, who were subservient to the wife. It would be a sorry Rajah who lacked concubines, and his wife would suffer loss of status, too. People would think he was impotent. On the other hand, this was not India, and it was a trifle early for Mym to be needing a regular
concubine; it would be better for Rapture to get gravid with a son first. Thereafter, it was a relief for her husband to have plenty of concubines; it provided the wife more time to herself. But Rapture was a dependent person, who didn't want to be left to herself too much.

  "Let's let that wait a few months," Rapture decided.

  "By all means," Satan said. He gestured negligently, and Lila vanished; only a faint puff of smoke remained where she had been.

  Mym made no comment, but he was privately relieved. Concubines still made him remember his father's lesson in obedience: they tended to find their heads on spikes when declined. Since Rapture had turned this one down—or at least postponed her—he didn't have to worry about that this time. Also, he was far from ready to trade Rapture off for other women in his bed; he loved her and wanted to make the most of her while the emotion remained high. Evidently she felt the same, and that pleased him deeply.

  Now the table laden with food reappeared. "This is a feast for you, honored Lady," Satan said grandly.

  "But I can't live on—" she protested.

  "Satan says that you can be sustained on this food," Mym said. "Just as I can talk here without stuttering."

  Slowly, she smiled. "Then I can remain here with you, always!" she exclaimed.

  They fell to, and the food was excellent. But privately Mym had a reservation. Satan was doing him favors here, and he did not trust this occidental version of savage Siva not to make some inconvenient claim on him at some later date. But as long as Rapture was happy, he would not interfere.

  Later, alone again, he pondered further. He knew that Satan was tempting him, offering gifts it was difficult indeed to decline. He distrusted this; but, when the alternative was to be without Rapture or to have her unhappy, what choice did he have? So he knew he would not interfere with this offering, but he knew he had to some minor degree compromised himself. How could he ensure that no offering of Satan's subverted his ability to perform his office?

  He wandered the bare halls of the Castle of War, nominally exploring its reaches, but actually exploring his own disquiet. Mym was a prince; he had received expert training in the administrative as well as the physical aspects of government. He knew he was treading on treacherous ground, and he wanted to find some way to improve his position without sacrificing anything he valued. It was not necessary for him to turn down Satan's offerings; it was only necessary for him to shield himself from subversion by them. If he could do that, Satan would not have the leverage he thought he had. But since Satan could withdraw the benefits of the garden at any time, any overt denial would be costly.