by Tanith Lee
The Eshva leaned near, and her snake-wound hair brushed the child, so it shivered. Fascinated, the Eshva licked the eyelids of the child, tasting the salt of its tears, and she breathed in its nostrils the demon-breath which was like a perfumed drug. Then the child caught her hand and putting one of her fingers in its mouth, sucked on it.
The demon woman laughed with her eyes. She drew the child up and carried it outside, wrapped in her arms and her hair, and the snakes unwound themselves and peered into the child’s face, but it took no notice of them.
Eastward the demoness sped then, on to the plains of Merh, and after her the other Eshva came, and the cats ran till they could no longer keep up.
A leopardess had her lair in a cave above a high ledge, half a mile from the river. Narasen had never hunted this leopardess, though her mate she had slain. Now the leopardess had coupled elsewhere and given birth out of season, for when the barrenness that had fallen on Merh lifted, it had changed the times of such things. The leopardess slept in her cave and her young slept beside her. It was two hours past midnight, two hours before the sun rose and before she must rise with the sun and go hunting. Yet into her sleep stole a thing which shone and teased and troubled her pleasantly, till she woke.
The Eshva women called the leopardess from her cave, and when she came slinking out into the starlight, they breathed on her eyes and ran their hands over her freckled pelt until she sank down between them. Then they laid the child against her belly, and put the amber beads of her dugs, firm as new fruit with health, into its mouth one after another. The child sucked and clung. Its body writhed gently, tightening and relaxing with each drawing motion of its mouth. The musk-sweet milk filled it, and when it was full, it rolled aside and slept.
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Though the demons might occasionally reproduce, their methods were unusual. Love was their pleasure and their art but their seed was sterile and demon women had no wombs, though all else they had and to spare. Perhaps it might be said, this being the case, that the Eshva who took the child of Narasen from the mausoleum felt some maternal stirring. But maybe it was only as a plaything they took it, as they would steal the panther’s child or the serpent’s. Whatever else, many months they spent with the human baby, these two weird guardians, and though the time of demonkind is not of the same duration as that of mortals, and in the Underearth the world’s years went by in days, or less, or possibly a very little more, even so, it was a long while, the Eshva being as they were.
By day they left the child, but always in some safe spot, or what to them was safe—the high deserted houses of owls, the hollows beneath trees. However, leaving it, they drugged their charge asleep with their pervasive magic, the brushing wings of their hair and their sighs. The child never stirred and no one found it. If a beast chanced on the place, it scented darkness there and went away. At night the Eshva carried the child with them. They fed it on the milk of leopards, foxes and wild deer, and later on herbs and flowers and things that sprang from the earth. And the child, born so strangely, began to grow amid equal strangeness, privy to the wild wanderings and flights of the Eshva, and their wordless language which seemed written on the air in somber lights. In this atmosphere the child’s own eerie peculiarity took on a normalcy, or at least a lightness. Before it could chatter out one word of human speech, the child could charm the bird from the cloud and the snake from under the stone. And though no mortal brain could ever quite fashion the sibilance of demon musings, yet this mortal baby had a knowledge of them, while of its own miraculousness it was in command, and feared nothing of itself. Had it been reared among men there would have been another story to be told.
The child had mingled both parents in itself, an alchemy of the bizarre. The colors of these parents’ hair had been mixed, the red and the blond, to give the child hair the shade of apricots ripening on the tree. The colors of the parental eyes had also mixed, tawny with azure, and made the eyes of the child a saffron-green. Beautiful it was, its mother and its sire having been beautiful. But Narasen, the man-queen of Merh, had lain with a fair, dead and effeminate youth, a match not generally achieved, and here too there had been a mingling, for in its body the infant was neither a man-child nor a girl, but both. A fitting toy for the Eshva to play with.
It was not that they tutored it, the demon women, for they set themselves to teach it nothing. Yet it learned from their proximity. Instinct, the father of all human sorcery, rose untrammeled to the surface of its soul like bubbles from a lake’s floor. All the while, its days were inchoate wakings, dreams and sleep, its nights volatile excursions through the shadows of the world and the burning dream of the Eshva folk. It glimpsed cities spangled with lights and seas of glass beneath a moon of white salt; it observed a desert like snow under this same enchanted moon, it watched a mountain which painted the moon red with its fire. (They had gone far from Merh. It was a much-traveled baby.) It caught brief flickers also from the haphazard areas of men, but it saw men through demon eyes, or very nearly. It danced its own tumbling dance with the black velvet sons and daughters of the panther, in the midnight glades where the Eshva swayed to the music of leaves and wind.
They would have tired no doubt, the demon women, of their charge, or they would have forgotten it. One night, caught by some other whim, they would not have remembered to return to the cover where they had left the child—though they loved it, it was not the sort of love that lasts, the Eshva being the Eshva. Yet, before that inevitable forgetting came, some prince of the Vazdru called them instead to do his errands in Druhim Vanashta, the demon city underground. There many mortal nights could pass in an hour, or less, or a little more. Or, if the errands were complex, the quick years of earth might drift by like sand along a beach. Now even the dreamy Eshva realized they could not abandon a human child so long, for it would die, and since they still cared for it, this moved them.
They had concealed the child recently in an ancient garden. In the blue dusk, white blossoms drifted from the trees to powder the face of the pool. The child sat beside the mossy statue of a boy. Under the moss, this boy of stone played on a pipe, but the ants had nested in his stone hands and walked up and down the pipe, insolently taking the air. The child, intrigued by the stone boy, had assumed its female sex, in order to complement him. A small girl now, the child rested her head on the hip of the stone boy and her apricot hair curled round his feet.
“Now look at this,” said some of the ants, and the child almost heard them, “here is another one of these statues. It is drier, too. But it moves.”
Just then there came from the blossoming trees beside the pool a hideous dwarf. Its bow legs gaped so its belly almost brushed the ground between, and about its loins was a great boastful guard of shining metal set with gorgeous jewels. Its face meantime was like some dreadful mask that had been smashed and re-established without due care. Only its sable hair was beautiful. Now any mortal child, clapping eyes on this horror, would have fled wailing, and no wonder. But this child, being raised differently, had no fear. For the monster was none other than one of the lower demons, a Drin.
“Ha!” said the Drin, smacking his lips at the ants, “if you were down below with me and something larger, we should have a fine time, you and I, you pretty harlots.” (For the Drin enjoyed much love with the insects of Underearth.)
But the Eshva women were coming. They slid across the pool like two dark swans. Seeing them, the child altered itself once more. Its minute organs reversed themselves, one giving way to the other. The process was swift, as a chameleon would rearrange its colors, or a flower fold itself shut at the going of the sun; not, however, quite comfortable, but the initiation was to the child a natural and reflexive symptom of change, no worse than the action of yawning or sneezing.
The Drin, though, took in the child’s exchange of the female for the male with mad ribald laughter. He bowed low to the Eshva and licked their ankles, congratulating them on their unusual find, comm
iserating with them that they must give it up.
The child did not know the speech of the Drin, but yet it sensed something of what was said. The child became aware its companions were to leave it. Human sorrow it had temporarily lost track of. It had mislaid the responses of fright and sobbing. But it stared with its gold-green eyes till the dwarf came and put round its neck a silver chain with a gem set in it that was the match for these eyes.
“See, mistresses,” said the Drin to the Eshva women, “a perfect resemblance. Now it has three eyes, this brat of yours. And there I carved the name, as you instructed me.”
The child looked at the symbol chiselled in the brilliant jewel. It could not read the demon writing, one of the seven languages of the Underearth, nor could it pronounce the name in any language of the earth or under it, yet still it comprehended the name. Simmu, it was, which in the demon tongue meant Twice Fair.
The Eshva came to the child and kissed it. Their kisses were like soft fires and the child’s head swam and it shut its eyes. The Drin leapt about shouting: “Kiss me! Kiss me too!” But the Eshva paid no heed. They bore the child away, leaving the Drin grunting and hopping in the garden.
Some miles westward a temple stood. All around were groves and pastures; within the high walls were gardens and many courts. White birds nested on the roofs, and these birds would fly up at dawn, like smoke from the burning sun. A priesthood served the temple. Their ideals were poverty and modesty, but the building had yellow pillars ringed with gold, and here and there were statues of gods and wise men, with ivory hands and faces and ornaments of silver.
On the steps of this place, in the hour before sunrise, the Eshva women set the child. Some while they smiled, thinking their misty wicked thoughts of mischief brought here in the child’s person. Then they gazed at the child, and wept their beautiful Eshva tears, a farewell.
Seeing them weep, for the first time since it had cried in the tomb at Merh, the child began to weep too.
But the east was paler than it had been, the coming of the light was written there, and birds’ wings opened and closed on the roofs like fans. The Eshva drew away from the crying child. They swirled into a flurry of dark patterns, the patterns of hair and garments, and dissolved themselves and were gone back to the Underearth before the final star melted from the sky.
The sun rose. Presently, four young priests came from the temple and found a child seated on the steps, a naked male child, not quite two years old, with a green jewel round its neck. And the child wept. Nor did it cease crying to look at them, nor respond when they spoke to it, and when they took it into the temple, still it cried. And for days after, it shed water from its eyes and would not be comforted.
Part Three
The Master of Night
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FOR SIMMU THERE began then a time of near humanness, a time of near forgetting. As the tree was dormant in the winter, empty of fruit and leaves, so was Simmu. Spring woke the tree; a spring would come also to wake Simmu, but Simmu’s spring was yet far off.
The Eshva had gone. Their memory followed them, out of the child’s brain. Unremembering the Eshva and the months he had traveled with them, one with them almost, caught up in their dusky glamour, the child unremembered much, though not all, of what he had been and could be. He became apparently simply mortal because all he saw about him now were simply that. He had become already a male and remained so, because all about him now were male. And he mislaid the knowledge that he could be other than male. He was a human little boy, if an unusual one, shed by folk he had no recollection of, as unwanted babies often were, an extra mouth that could not be fed. For sure, the demon name he forgot. The symbol on the Drin jewel was a character unknown among the tongues of men. The priests, who from pious charity took him in, called him a name which meant Shell, because they said he had been found in a sea of tears. They were fanciful, these priests. They had a fancy for the bright green jewel, and accepted it graciously as the fee of those who had abandoned the child. They put it in the temple treasury, among the other loot.
Thus Shell, who was Simmu, grew up in the temple, a foundling. Several were, for the priesthood would take in any that had no blemish and were fair to look at, (the gods could not be expected to adopt the crippled or disfigured), and providing some token payment had been left with the infant, in order to show proper respect and gratitude. And all these young were dedicated immediately to the service of the gods, and to the ideals of poverty and humility, among the pillars ringed with gold.
The children of the temple had their own courts. Here the small ones played and cried and ran about, tended by various lay brothers whose duty it was to watch over them, for no woman was permitted inside the holy precincts. Despite the extreme youth of this nest of babies, particular disciplines were enforced, such as the hours of bedding, rising and feeding, and even the tiniest was taken before the images of the two gods who presided over the children’s courts, and taught to kneel down there and bow their heads, and those who sobbed or giggled were scolded. The two gods were rather alarming to the children. One had a blue face, the other a red face. They wore silver diadems and their lower parts were bestial, the blue one being a tiger from the hips down, the red one a ram. The function of these gods was to do with the weather. The blue tiger controlled the storm winds and the red ram the summer heat. They belonged to an older pantheon than that now generally venerated in the temple, and had been retained as guardians of the children out of an odd mixture of cautious respect and scorn.
The older boys dwelt in the upper section of the children’s courts until they were twelve and initiated into the priesthood. From six years on they would learn to read and write. At ten years they would study from the brown scrolls and dusty books of the great library. Much learning these young priests acquired, concerning histories of the earth, of wars and sagas; of the being of the earth, its strange flatness, like a dish of mountains and seas, ringed by an uncharted substance—ocean or air; of the minerals of the earth and the laws of the earth and its peoples and its creatures. At least, each of these things, in the manner in which the books reported them, they learned. The ritual and lore of the temple they studied also. They read the testaments of revered prophets and messiahs, how they must strive to be modest before the might of the gods, how they must value every man and be kind to him.
Half a mile east of the temple enclosure was the House of Service. Here women were allowed; they came to wash the robes of the priests and to sew new ones, to cook and bake for them. Nearby stood the House of Gifts. Through its gate hunters brought a tenth of what they had trapped or killed, and farmers a twentieth of the land’s yield, and merchants a fifth of the revenue obtained from their goods. Sometimes the rich would bring a gift in order to get a prayer said in the temple, a malachite dish or a chain of pearls. Whenever a wealthy girl was to be married, she sought the blessing of the gods in the Sanctuary of Virgins in a grove half a mile due west of the temple, and the price was the weight of her right hand in gold. Whenever a woman was to bear a child, the husband came and thanked the gods and brought them a jar of wine, and when the child was born, if it lived and was a man, the father would, if he could, dedicate a little shrine to heaven in the child’s name, and the cost of the shrine was a bag of silver, or seven sheaves of wheat or three sheep.
At the five festivals of the year, some of the younger priests would be elected to journey here and there about the countryside. They would bless whoever came to them and heal the sick, and two or three wagons would travel behind them to hold the presents they were given. In the festival at the time of harvest, the high priest himself would go out, riding in a chariot under a canopy and drawn by four white oxen. On that occasion, five wagons would travel behind.
The robes of the high priest were of yellow silk. This signified the power of light and the clarity of day. On the robes were sewn rubies and emeralds, which signified wisdom and love. The younger pr
iests had garments of fine yellow linen, every day a fresh one. In winter they put on outer vestments of wool, lined and trimmed with the yellow furs of desert foxes. They wore their hair long, for they believed it a sin to cut off the hair of either sex, and for a man to shave his face was a worse sin. But they trimmed their beards and used the scented oils from the jars which piled up in the House of Gifts. Each evening the huge inner hall of the temple was laid as if for a feast. The priests would eat and drink, meat and wine and white bread and sweetmeats. Their religion forbade them only one pleasure of the flesh—to lie with woman or man. Anything else they might indulge in. Still, they were esteemed that they ate but a single meal a day, and merely a portion of fruit and bread in the morning and at noon. And once a year, at midwinter, they fasted on fish and cakes, and drank no red wine, only white.
Now and then, one who was sick was brought to the temple, to the Outer Court if he were a man, to the Women’s House by the Sanctuary of Virgins if not. These sick the priests would see to, and their grasp and application of healing was excellent. However, it might be in the middle of dinner that the sick one arrived, and then there might be some delay, and maybe the sick one would die. “Alas, the gods are stern and exacting,” the priests would say. And twice a day the priests would kneel to the gods, and worship them for their generosity and forgiveness.
It was a rich land, and a religious land, and as well, for the temple milked it as a cow is milked.
And amid the richness and the ritual and the religion, Simmu, who was called Shell, grew, almost forgetting, dormant, but beautiful and protean as the winter tree.
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