Perhaps the gods had made Death. Perhaps men had made him, the shadow of their terror thrown on a wall, a name that had taken on a shape. How long had he existed? Long enough to come, in however strange and opaque a manner, to an awareness of himself. Or to an awareness of what himself must be. And, as he was capable of dispassionate tears, as he was capable of emotionless grief, now he unfeelingly felt the pangs of a hollow disquiet. Not at the notion of life, for life was susceptible to him...but at the notion of a life which was no longer susceptible, life which could negate death. For even Death did not wish to die.
Death's Master is long, taking up like 340 pages of my omnibus edition, and is split into two books, each of which has five named parts; at the end is an epilogue. While the novel does have an overarching plot, following the adventures and interactions of four main characters and the many secondary and minor characters whom they tend to leave worse for wear, each of the ten named parts is sort of like an individual short story, with its own plot and climax as well as developments that lay the groundwork for later parts.
These ten "stories" are somewhat reminiscent of Clark Ashton Smith's or Jack Vance's fantasy tales; like those worthies, Lee has a distinctive writing style, and like Smith's Zothique and Hyperborea stories, and Vance's Dying Earth and Lyonesse tales, they take place in a strange ancient/medievalish milieu and feature amoral or morally compromised characters doing reprehensible things and suffering horrible fates. There are lots of wizards and witches and demons and priests and kings, plenty of ruins and castles and palaces and fortifications and temples, lots of magical spells and a whole bestiary of creepy monsters and conventional animals rendered strange.
Lee is a very skilled writer at the level of the individual sentence, and the book is full of beautiful and horrible bits of poetic prose and striking and disturbing images--a unicorn stamping on a hare and tearing it with its teeth; an ancient witch who bears the form of a fourteen-year-old girl clad only in a girdle of finger bones on a gold chain, each finger the payment she has received for acting as an intermediary between a supplicant and the Lord of Death; a cruel wizard who marches across the countryside, accompanied by a brass cage which walks on its own legs and carries within it the rotting corpse of the king the wizard slew with his sorcery.
Lee's focus on sex has an element of salaciousness or lasciviousness, but there is a lot more to it than that: Lee deals with issues like gender roles, sexual identity, sexual orientation, and the place of women in society; having set her tale in a cruel and decadent fantasy world where not only social norms but the very laws of physics are different than those of our own, Lee is free to offer up outré characters and situations that challenge all our preconceptions and brush aside all our taboos about sex and gender in a matter of fact fashion. Lee presents us with a series of female characters who both embody and radically defy models of the feminine, women who rebel against social and political establishments--but Death's Master is not triumphant celebration of girl-bossery. The women of Death's Master are ruthless and cruel, and their acts of rebellion are selfish and bring destruction and tragedy to themselves and those around them.
We've got Queen Nerasen, a woman who lives like a man, hunting great cats with a spear, defeating her enemies with her sword, enjoying sex with a succession of concubines. But fate, her ambition to rule and her responsibility as a monarch force her to go against her nature and embody what we might call vulgar and maximalist versions of traditional conceptions of the essence of womanhood--she is compelled to have sex with many men and produce a child, and later seizes the opportunity to become the nagging, domineering, wife of a ruler more powerful than she. As she lies in the agony of childbirth, she stifles her screams and vows to take revenge upon all men, to kill her own child if it be a boy!
There's the witch Lylas, a 14-year-old who permitted men to use her body in exchange for sorcerous knowledge; taking up the position of Death's chief handmaiden, she manipulates the politics, culture and history of a town, but two centuries later she is defeated and the social order she built overthrown by perhaps the most central character of the novel, Simmu.
Among the secondary and minor characters, there is a wonton, aggressive prostitute who accosts a good-hearted priest; he asks her "What devil drove you to this life?" and she replies "A devil called man." She later tries to blackmail a hypocritical priest and in desperation he kills her. The princess of an undersea kingdom betrays her people out of love for a wizard--this wizard enjoys her body, loots her kingdom, kills her father and abandons her; another woman falls in love with a hero and helps him steal the treasure from her people's sanctum sanctorum, but with the treasure in his grasp, the hero's ardor for her cools.
The women of Death's Master challenge established orders and as a result their lives are destroyed; many of them are in positions of authority and their rebellion is an act of betrayal of those to whom--by the rules of the established order, at least--they bear some level of responsibility.
Lee's book is bleak, with everybody misbehaving, everybody getting defeated, everybody at the mercy of others or of Fate. The Lord of Death himself is a slave to Fate!
"Death is like the night. He comes when he must, but he does not choose the moment of his coming. He is a slave, too."
Death is of course a central theme of the book, as are efforts to cheat death and stave off death--most of the witches and wizards in the book seem to have taken up sorcery as a profession with the objective of extending their life spans any way they can--including by stealing the life force of others--and there are plenty of animated corpses walking around and people making contact with "the other side." But in the same way the women of the novel who rebel come to grief and bring grief upon others, efforts to defeat Death fail, or succeed only to show that a life without death is no better, and perhaps worse, than a life lived within death's shadow. (Death's Master is yet another piece of speculative fiction that tells you that what you think will be a utopia is not going to make you happy. We've read a lot of these at this blog!)
Death's Master is a great dark fantasy novel that focuses on horror and sex and black magic and which has as a sort of backbone that central theme of women challenging established orders, including norms around the role of women. Lee's writing is brilliant, and her book is chockablock with some of my favorite themes, like suicide, the quest for immortality, and disastrous sexual relationships, and so I loved it.
Five out of five blood-stained unicorn horns!
Highly recommended to fans of weird fiction and those interested in portrayals of women and alternative forms of sexuality in speculative fiction who are willing to accept depictions of feminist and LGBT themes that are ambiguous rather than earnestly affirming.
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If you are interested in spoilers and more examples of how Lee treats Death's Master's various themes, find below my overly long plot summaries of each of the novel's eleven parts, each with a fun representative quote.
BOOK ONE
Part One: Narasen and Death
"I am king of an empty kingdom. But I will show you as much. This you shall learn immediately: That you must remain with me a thousand mortal years. I ask no more, and no less."
Narasen paled, and she was pale already. But she said grimly:
"That is indeed some little while. And what is it that you want me for, that a thousand years are required to satisfy you?"
Nerasen is queen of the city of Merh, a redheaded lesbian, a skilled fighter with a sword and a bold hunter of leopards, which she dispatches with a spear. One day she meets the wizard Issak; Issak declares his intention to have sex with Nerasen, his determination to use his magic to rape her. Issak may have not been such a bad guy as a youth, but the tuition he had to pay to the wizard who trained him in the sorcerous arts ruined him. You see, the fee his master demanded was that the teen-aged Isaak serve as his catamite. The master wizard, through pederastic intercourse, stole Issak's life force, extending his own longevity, and in return ejaculated into Issak his own evil, corrupting the youth, so that Issak today is driven by monstrous lusts.
Nerasen is resourceful and strong, and outwits and defeats Isaak. As the would-be rapist lays dying, Nerasen's spear pinning him to the floor, Issak curses Nerasen. The curses blight her kingdom of Merh--no crops grow, babies are born dead, a plague starts killing everybody, etc. The court magicians read the signs and tell Nerasen that her own fertility represents that of her kingdom--the kingdom will be sterile until she herself brings forth a child. Though she has no interest in having sex with men, she surrenders her body to the desires of hundreds of men of all social classes, but to no avail--the curse prevents her from conceiving.
Nerasen thinks she has found a loophole in the curse--if she has sex with a dead man, perhaps she will conceive. Through the intermediary of Lylas, a 200-year old witch who appears as a fourteen year-old girl, Nerasen meets Death, whose secret name is Uhlume, and they strike a deal. An effeminate teen-aged boy rises from his tomb to have sex with Nerasen; in return, after she dies, Nerasen's soul will not immediately proceed to the afterlife but be trapped in her dead body; her animated corpse will reside in the limbo that is the home of Death for 1,000 years to keep the lonely Lord of Death company.
Part Two: The Crying Child
"Bless the gods, lady, for it is a son," a girl's voice cried.
Narasen whispered: "If it is a man, take it and throttle the thing."
"Tut," said the chief physician, "the girl is a dolt, majesty. It is a female child."
Merh recovers from the blight. Nerasen gives birth to a hermaphroditic child and is murdered moments later by the captain of the guard, Jornadesh, who makes himself king. The unusual baby is interred in the tomb with Nerasen, from which Death snatches her. Two demonesses with snakey hair hear the wailing of the baby and adopt it, naming it Simmu. They raise it for a while, flying around the world with it, feeding it by placing it at the dugs of leopards and other beasts, but then their duties to superior demons call them away, so they leave the baby at a temple, where the child is taken in. Lee ironically dwells on the hypocrisy of the priests, who take vows of poverty, modesty and humility but demand payment for their healing services, collect exorbitant tithes, devour magnificent feasts, and are treated like royalty wherever they go. The temple only takes in healthy and handsome foundlings, and luckily Nerasen's child appears to qualify. The child can conceal one if its sexes so as to appear to conform to the gender binary, and as all women are barred from entering the temple, whose priests have taken a vow of celibacy, so Nerasen's child, named Shell by the priests, takes on a masculine aspect, hiding its female genitalia.
Part Three: The Master of Night
"You have sold out my life, you have killed what is good in me or might have been. You foul and filthy one, you have dragged me into the slime. I did not grieve that you deserted me after the act. I did not grieve at the lies of men, neither at death. But you, accursed and crawling thing, I do not know how you deceived me, but I know this--I will not have you near me."In the desert, a nomad king's favorite wife gives birth to a child with skin and hair of different hue than anyone else in the band, leading to suspicion, envy, and hatred. Fearing her son will be murdered, when the child is five, his mother consults a witch, who uses her magic to make the oddly complected child, named Zherim, almost invulnerable to physical harm and immune to aging. The witch's fee: Zherim's mother's beautiful white teeth are magicked out of her mouth to replace the ancient witch's own brown and rotten choppers. It is worth every molar, though, as when his envious half-brothers try to feed Zherim to the lions some years later, the great cats' claws and fangs are unable to penetrate the boy's skin. Thinking Zherim possessed by a demon, his father the king hands him over to the priests where he becomes friends with Shell. Shell, who is both man and woman, though his female side is hidden, falls in love with Zherim, and is jealous when Zherim, who turns out to be a skilled and generous healer, becomes popular with the common people and later when he is approached by a beautiful harlot.
This part of the novel hits a lot of fetishes. Shell voyeuristically observes a particularly corrupt and hypocritical priest (we know he is a villain because he is fat!) having sex with the prostitute, and then changes to female form to seduce Zherim. The fat priest, the next day, frames Shell and Zherim for the murder of the harlot, whom fatso himself slew when she threatened to blackmail him for money.
Shaken by his coupling with his friend, Zherim despairs of life and is willing to be executed, but Simmu/Shell uses her/his magical powers to rescue Zherim and achieve revenge on the fat priest. (Simmu's powers involve being able to talk to and direct animals, and Lee does a creepy and fun job of portraying the animals' thought and personality.) Zherim, still psychologically broken, and essentially invulnerable to death, flees Simmu and wanders the land, determined to enter the service of Azhrarn, prince of Demons. Finally Simmu catches up to him in a secluded demon-haunted wood by a salt lake where cruel unicorns dance and duel; Zherim succumbs to Simmu's sexual desire again, and they try to summon Azhrarn--a figure arrives who may or may not be the Prince of Demons, but who certainly tells Zherim that Azhrarn has no need of a mortal servant. In a meteor's crater Zherim's feverish efforts to kill himself summon Death, who cannot kill Zherim but can put him into a deep sleep. Thinking her lover is dead, Simmu returns to male form and leaves this grim region.
Part Four: She Who Lingers
"Black cat," said Narasen, "go back and prowl in your crockery city, black cat. You and your cousin Uhlume, you two Lords of Darkness, I spit on both of you." And then, in her fury, Narasen smote Azhrarn across the mouth.
"Daughter," said Azhrarn, in the kindest of tones, "you have not been wise."
And indeed, she had not been. For from her right hand with which she had smote him, the flesh scattered like blue petals, leaving only the bare skeleton behind.
For sixteen years Jornadesh has been king of Merh. He has become fat! Below in the grey world of Death, the queen Jornadesh deposed, Narasen, mother of Shell, figures out how to get back to the surface to wreak her revenge. She stalks Merh in her dead body, which, away from the plane of Death, starts to decay. She summons the spirit of Issak (which arises in the form of a big worm from out of his bones) and with its help inflicts a plague on Merh. The poison that slew Narasen was blue, and the flesh of her walking corpse is blue, and the plague Narasen inflicts on the plants, animals and people of Merh turns them blue as they die.
Meanwhile, Azhrarn toys with Simmu, helping the hermaphrodite forget Zherim and goading Simmu to go to Merh, of which he/she is rightful monarch. When Nerasen encounters Simmu (he is safe from the plague thanks to the demon jewel he wears and the help of Azhrarn) she tries to murder her offspring, but Azhrarn neutralizes her, sends her back to the world of Death.
Part Five: Pomegranate
Outside the mansion, the wild pomegranate trees whispered to each other nastily, and dropped their malignant fruit on the ground for their witch mistress to tread on in the morning. If the trees remembered Narasen, they did not say. But they discussed the moon and wished they could drag it down in their branches, for, being slaves trapped in soil, they resented the freedom of others.
In this brief chapter, Azhrarn takes Simmu to the mansion of Lylas, which sits among pomegranate trees, and we learn how Lylas became the Lord of Death Uhlume's chief handmaiden, as well as a secret Death wished to keep from Azhrarn--somewhere on the Flat Earth lies a well directly beneath a pool of immortality high above, where reside the gods. Should elixir leak from the gods' pool to the well below, humans may have access to immortality, so knowledge of the well, has the potential to render Death obsolete!
BOOK TWO
Part One: The Garden of Golden Daughters
Out of her fourteen-year-old mind burst fourteen-year-old fantasies and she made them real.
This part chronicles the history of Veshum, the desert town near the well of immortality. Lylas, 200 years ago, an exuberant and imaginative 14-year-old, working in the service of Death, created monsters to guard the well, and forced the people of Veshum to build a wall around the valley of the well and to garrison it. Indulging in the childish fantasies of a teenaged girl who never had a real childhood and has had so much transactional sex that her idea of paradise is to live in seclusion as a virgin among friendly animals and fellow virgin girls, Lylas used her magic to create an Eden in the monster-guarded valley and ordered the people of Veshum to send their nine prettiest thirteen-year-old virgins to the valley to serve the well for nine years; at the end of nine years a new crop of virgins would relieve the original.
This tradition endured for over 200 years, but today one of the new crop of virgins, Kassafeh, has an independent spirit and great perceptive power, her mother having kissed one of the angelic elementals who occupy the sky between the Flat Earth and the overworld of the gods before conceiving Kassafeh with her husband. Again disrupting all our preconceptions about sex, Lee offers us in Kassafeh a character who has three biological parents and who bears genetic traits from all three of them. Kassafeh's eyes can see through illusions, and she can tell that much of Lylas's paradise is a fraud, and so she is not thrilled to be imprisoned in the Eden of the valley of the well for nine years, unlike her eight companions, who are totally snookered. (So wondrous is life in the valley for the gullible that many virgins commit suicide when their nine years of easy luxurious service are up, and the rest live in sadness, some marrying and being so dissatisfied with heterosexual life that they murder their husbands and any children they have given birth to.)
Simmu has conceived a hatred for Death, and at the urging of Azhrarn, who stole the location of the well from Lylas's mind and puts the hermaphrodite on the right path, Simmu makes the one-year journey to Veshum. Committing fully to his male form, Simmu becomes a sterling specimen of masculinity--a hero on a quest who is an unbeatable fighting man (he may have no combat training, but he lived as a child among demonesses and animals and has amazing speed and reflexes.) There is a very good magic/action sequence in which Lylas summons a monster from another world (an "afreet") and Simmu must fight it hand to hand and then resort to summoning Azhrarn to aid him--Lylas is hoist by her own petard and joins Nerasen and Uhlumme in the grey limbo world of Death. Equally effective is the tale of how Simmu uses his arcane abilities--including the ability to change sex--to overcome the guardians of the valley and seduce the virgins. Kassafeh falls in love with Simmu and they destroy Lylas's paradise and drink from the Well of Immortality.
Part Two: Death's Enemies
And if he loved Kassafeh, and possibly it was not love he felt for her, it was because she too had something of his animalness, and certainly the beauty of an animal....Tanned, limpid-limbed in slumber, her hair a polish of sunlight raying from her exquisite, not-quite-human face, and he would see in her the gazelle, the lynx, the serpent--his own psychic menagerie. More sister than wife. But he was always eager to couple with her.
Simmu and Kassafeh cross the desert, hundreds of miles, able to survive because they are immortal. On the other side they meet the charlatan and rogue Yolsippa, a sort of comic relief character (he has a peculiar fetish--any woman or girl, or man or boy, who is cross-eyed excites in him a irrepressible lust); Yolsippa steals a drink from Simmu's jar and becomes the third immortal human. Azhrarn enlists the cunning and unscrupulous Yolsippa to be the overseer of a strange project--the construction of a magnificent city of which Simmu will be king. Through the use of sorcery and with the help of demons, Yolsippa kidnaps architects, craftsmen and slave laborers--and horny women to act as the builders' comfort girls--and they carve out of a remote stony region a beautiful city and it is named Simmurad. Rumors of the city spread throughout the Flat Earth, and elite individuals come from far and wide to face tests--the few who pass the tests are given a drop of Immortality elixir and permitted to take up residence in the city. Lord Death attacks Simmurad with plague and famine, but its inhabitants brush off these afflictions. But can they so easily withstand the boredom, the sterility, of a life without risk? Is immortality, as Uhlume tells Simmu, a "trap" that "crystallizes" not only "ambition" but a man's "very soul"?
Part Three: Zhirek, the Dark Magician
"I will not weep...because the sea people, whose eyes are ever full of the salt sea, have no tears of their own to shed."
"Zhirek" is the name taken by Zhirem after he wakes up in the valley of the crater and has a series of wild and crazy adventures on land and under the sea, during which adventures he, who was once generous and kind, becomes aloof and cruel. In a city far beneath the waves, the princess of a callous and cruel race falls in love with Zhirem, and teaches him the sorcery of her people--Zhirem learns not only puissant magic, but to be even crueler than his teachers. Lee's depiction of the perverse and decadent undersea civilization, and the relationship of Zhirem and the princess, is first rate tragic dark fantasy, the vivid images, sad reflections, and powerful poetic passages coming one after another. A highpoint of the novel.
Part Four: In Simmurad
"It is this man, this Zhirek, who has put such doubt, such horror in my heart that I could not any longer blind myself. Our lives are worthless. We are like birds that cannot fly, like roads that lead nowhere, save into some desert."
Zhirek, now a lieutenant of the Lord Death Uhlume, makes his way to Simmurad for a reunion with Simmu. Zhirek has powerful memories of Simmu and seeks a terrible revenge on him/her, but Simmu's memories of Zhirem have all been erased by Azhrarn. Kassafeh and Simmu's relationship has cooled, immortality having sapped their passion, and Kassafeh aggressively pursues Zhirek, generating a sort of love triangle based not on lust or affection, but instead resentment. Zhirek's presence opens Simmu's eyes to the terrible reality that immortality is a curse, and he destroys the elixir so no additional immortals may be created. Zhirek, employing the ocean magic he learned under the sea, then engineers the destruction of Simmurad: the immortals are paralyzed, the ocean rises to cover the city, and the immortals are encased in coral, forced to endure sensory deprivation for eternity. (This was all foreshadowed in Book Two, Part Three.) Zhirek carries the paralyzed Simmu off to torture him; Kassafeh, thanks to her partly angelic blood, is rescued by the sky elementals, and the wily Yolsippa is as well, even though the beautiful elementals are disgusted by his fat body.
Part Five: Burning
"Your terror and your agony will dwell with me through all the years which are to come. I shall run form this spot. I will seal my ears against the memory of your cries, I will writhe and sweat in horror at what I have done to you. So I shall live."
Zhirek inflicts upon Simmu a terrible revenge which cleverly recalls Zhirem's ordeal back in Book One, Part Three. Simmu burns in an eldritch fire for nine years and is reduced to mere cinders, but those cinders live! Azhrarn has lesser demons smith a sort of mechanical body, and the cinders are put into the humanoid machine; Azharn brings this mechanical Simmu to true life by having sex with it! His memory of his life as a hermaphroditic mortal totally expunged, Simmu lives on as a demon, forever, doing the things demons do, namely, going up to the Flat Earth at night to torment people.
Zhirek, also more or less immortal, becomes a hermit who sits still in a desert cave for many decades, sometimes weeping when his memories of Simmu are triggered.
Epilogue: The Traveling House
"Lord Death had taken a wife--a fright, she was, poison-blue with yellow sparks for eyes, and her right hand was a bone. The denizens of Innerearth cast themselves flat in squeamish homage before this horror, and she, proud over-bearing bitch, trampled on their backs."
In the Epilogue we learn the fate of a bunch of secondary and minor characters. The sky elementals tired of Kassafeh and Yolsippa and dropped them back on the Flat Earth. Nerasen has made herself Queen Death, a nagging wife to Lord Uhlume, interfering with his business and setting about refurbishing the grey limbo that is the world of death, building herself a huge palace, planting flowers, etc. (Here we see Nerasen, initially a rebel against all stereotypes of the female, now embodying one of them, that of the domineering wife.) Lylas, once Death's representative on Earth, is now Queen Nerasen's handmaiden.
To escape this irritating domestic situation, Uhlume stalks the Flat Earth. Kassafeh and Uhlume, the last two immortal humans, convince Death to take then on as his intermediaries; Kassafeh fills the role Lylas once played, and Yolsippa is her assistant, driving the black elephants that pull Kassafeh the witch's weird mansion on wheels, a house which travels from town to town and in which she deals with those petitioners bold and desperate enough to seek a boon from the Lord of Death, as Nerasen did so long ago.
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