Night's Sorceries

by Tanith Lee

  As Jyresh came out on to the paved way between the pillars, his feelings had already undergone some change. Something in the manner of the spot, the gardens and their perfume, the gold peacocks, the very silence, had put a kind of spell on him. In no form was this place like anything of his father’s. Just then a figure appeared on the path before Jyresh. It was upright as any of the pillars, though not so tall nor of their shape, and swathed all over in black. It recalled some gigantic bird standing on one leg, and carrying, in the other, a slender staff. It spoke.

  “You must announce yourself to me, who you are and what you desire.”

  Jyresh did so haughtily, not omitting any detail of why he had been sent. (For he presumed he was meant to be humiliated from this point, and refused the state.)

  The figure heard him out. Then it made a curious sound that might have been a hoot, perhaps of mirth. Jyresh loftily ignored such effrontery. He understood very well that, as the lowest of the man’s servants, whether the rest of his history were known or not, he would be prey to every abuse there was. To seem to mind the torment would only increase it. The figure spoke again.

  “If you are intent obediently to serve, go on. There is the house, and in it the one you will therefore wait upon.”

  Thus Jyresh, as this personage drew aside, strode on up the paved way, and as he did so, he heard the staff strike three times on the ground behind him.

  And suddenly every light in the palace was fired, and such a radiance broke from the stones, it was like a sunburst. At every door and every rooftop cressets burned, and in between, three hundred windows.

  Jyresh stood in wonder. As he did so, a rush of wings overhead caused him to glance into the sky. A huge bird, rather like a heron, was passing over the garden, and straight in through one of the open bright casements of the palace it went.

  The young man continued along the path, took the steps, and himself went in under the portico. The entrance of the house was also open wide, and beyond lay two halls giving on to each other. They were decorated with artful sumptuousness, and Jyresh was beset by doubts and bewilderments. Within a pair of doors wreathed with gold and inset by precious mosaic, lay a third hall whose floor was like a polished coal.

  In the room’s center a fountain played from a basin of clear green glass, and the columns of the room were clad in living vines, among the flowers of which birds busied themselves. At the room’s farther end, a couch rested on a dais, and on the couch lay a being which now lazily upraised itself to look at Jyresh.

  Jyresh turned to stone. For a moment he did not know whether to run for his life or if it were better to draw the short blade in his belt, since on the couch sat one of that nation of black leopards, a panther, with eyes of flame.

  After a moment, the Panther parted its jaws.

  “Come nearer,” it said distinctly to Jyresh. “I am not as young as I was, and cannot see you well at such a distance.”

  Bemused, Jyresh did as he was bid, but only halting again still some yards from the couch.

  “Fear nothing,” said the Panther. “I have dined. Besides, I believe you to be my guest. It would be uncivil therefore to spring upon and rend you.”

  At this Jyresh gave way to laughter. The Panther looked on him with evident disapproval.

  “Pardon me, sir,” said Jyresh. “But never in my life before have I met with any beast that had the power of human speech.”

  “There I will correct you,” said the Panther. “It is possible that you have met with such beasts more than once, but apparently they did not deign to favor you with their conversation.”

  “Sir, I shall not contradict your wisdom. I laughed only in amazement. Is your master a magician that he has trained you in the mode of talk?”

  “Master?” inquired the Panther. “I am master here.”

  Jyresh would have laughed again, and was barely able to subdue himself. “Pray tell me then,” he murmured, “if it can be you that is my father’s friend and associate? For if so, there is more to the old man than I had suspected.”

  “I will tell you only this,” said the Panther, “I have been informed of the wish of your father, that you are to be made the lowest of all the servants, and so learn something to your good. I must add that I am at a loss. In this house everything is seen to by magic, and those that dwell here pass their lives in other ways than service. There is nothing for you to do at present. However, I will give the matter thought. Tomorrow you may have another audience with me, and we will discuss the problem further. Meanwhile, be free of the palace. You have only to ask, and all will be granted you. Save in the area of women, for there are no human females upon the premises. Those females that there are, including my own wives, you must treat with respect.”

  “My lord, you are too gracious, I will abide by your commandments. May I only ask, aside from your wives, what other females I might chance to encounter, in order to equip myself with the respectfully proper address?”

  “Aside from the Pantheresses, there are some Tigresses and feminine Hyenas and Foxes, a Pythoness, and a harem of Boas. There is also a pious sisterhood of Wolves devoted to the worship of the moon, and innumerable ladies of the winged sort you have already met. Greet all, or not, as you choose. Aside from ordinary courtesy nothing is expected of you. You are ignorant of our ways.”

  Having said this, the Panther lord lay down again and closed his eyes in dismissal.

  Doors at once flew open on a richly appointed corridor, and Jyresh, like a man in a dream, left the chamber.

  • • •

  By proceeding through those doors which opened before him, Jyresh reached a suite of rooms whose restrained opulence outdid all others he had ever seen or been told of. Here, in a bath of turquoise, Jyresh was laved and anointed with gentleness and precision by unseen minions. And after this, these invisible djinns of the house served him a feast of food on dishes of gold. That night he lay down in a bed of heavenly softness. Above was a canopy on which representations of the stars shone, and over which a simulacrum of the moon passed. When he woke, an image of the sun rose on the awning and in the window, too. Jyresh left the bed, was attended as before, fed on delicacies and arrayed as a prince, and then, returning through a succession of opening doors, was once more in the presence of the Panther.

  On this occasion, this lord was not alone. His court was about him.

  His Panther wives sat or reclined on their couches in earrings and collars of gems, his councillors stood by, and they were Tigers, Apes, and one old Bull of great sagacity to whom all deferred. Throughout the hall, on all sides, were animals of many kinds, and of an assortment not generally found in harmony. Lions conversed with Lambs, Gazelles strolled up and down with Wolves, while in an alcove a Fox played chess with a Goose.

  The giant Heron, who stood below the dais, now rapped with his staff three times on the floor.

  Jyresh approached and bowed ceremoniously, gazed on by a multitude of beautiful and bestial eyes.

  “Youth,” said the Panther to Jyresh, “we have been debating your arrival and your father’s wishes. It is in my heart always to provide help where I may. I have consulted the learned Bull there, and decided to send you out to the care of the Pigs who live in the gardens.”

  “You mean, my lord,” said Jyresh, “you wish me to tend a herd of swine?”

  The Panther refolded his paws. “That is not my meaning. However, the Pigs are better able than I to explain matters to you, for they are great philosophers. You may go at once. My steward, the Heron, will conduct you to the place.”

  Audience was plainly at an end. The beasts turned from Jyresh to one another, resuming courtly chat.

  Following the Heron (which bounced solemnly along on one foot, carrying its staff of office in the other), Jyresh soon passed outside the palace. Descending through the gardens to the south, they presently entered a wild region. Over-hanging h
illsides tumbled down to mossy ravines. Ancient trees bound with creepers closed the ways, and on their ebony trunks might be seen the scoring of huge tusks. Jyresh, who all this time had gone on in a sort of baffled, laughing dream, now began to misgive a little.

  “Sir Heron, pause a moment,” said he. “These pigs of your master’s seem of great size.”

  “So they are, but you need not be anxious. We are peaceful here and do nothing any harm. Even the meats and fruits of your supper last night, and on which you energized yourself this morning, though highly nutritious, were things of illusion. Our magic is mighty. We have no need of violence. My lord jested ironically when he postulated making a dinner of you. Not a hair of your head is at risk.”

  Jyresh was not entirely reassured. He was about to put another query to the Heron when there came a loud crashing and thrusting through the undergrowth. Out ran suddenly three milk-white Boars, with eyes like partly molten gold. Jyresh thought his last seconds had come, and fell to his knees.

  “Does he pray?” inquired the third of the Boar. “We will not disturb him till he is done.”

  “Sir,” said Jyresh, “I have only a knife with which to defend myself. But I am outnumbered any way and will not resist. If you intend to kill me, I ask that you do so swiftly. I have only so much courage, and do not wish to show myself up by a display of fear.”

  The Heron gave one of its hoots. The Boat who had already spoken now went up to Jyresh and gazed into his face. “We offer you no injury.”

  Jyresh, beside himself, blurted, “But I have hunted and slain your brothers—though I will say they were far smaller than you and did not talk to me.”

  “It is the way of your kind to kill things, even things which can talk,” said the Boar. “But get up now. The pious she-Wolves have brought us the message of our lord the Panther, which the Finches relayed to them. You are to be in our care. Come, then.”

  So Jyresh got up (bemused and foolishly grinning again), and went with the three white Boars into the overgrown wilderness south of the garden.

  • • •

  All morning Jyresh traveled with the three Boars. At noon they had entered into a deep and elder forest that lay within the estate of the Panther lord, and here lived the herd of Pigs, the Boars and their wives, and all their children, on the banks of a grape-green river. As Jyresh approached he was struck quite abruptly by the uncanny scene. The entire herd was snowy white and golden-eyed, and as the shafts of the noon sun played down on them through the thick arras of the trees, they moved about or rested against one another, couth and clean and shining, and all the while conversed in low, well-modulated voices.

  Now surely this is not a dream, thought Jyresh, and his laughter and perplexity, also his fear, left him together. Truth, when it comes so strangely, cannot at last be mistaken.

  The Pigs made him welcome when he arrived among them, with very slight commotion. They had chosen a different way than that of the court.

  “It seems your father had a preference that you should sleep on the bare ground and live simply,” remarked the Boar who had from the first spoken to Jyresh. “There will, however, be no need for you to sweep the floors of the forest, for the wind does that. Nor will you have to carry away any slops, for it is only the races of men, or of beasts men take captive, who require to make such messes. But a simple life indeed will be yours, though you may share what we have, including our portion of magic. Like the court of our lord the Panther, we are magicians, just as we, too, have human speech and some human manners.”

  And now that Jyresh had got over the barriers of reason, he was next able to sit down among the Pigs—who kindly summoned for him out of the air good homely food and fresh water—and ask them questions. They answered him with perfect composure and willingness. In this way he learned the curious facts of their being.

  It transpired, or so they informed him, that the animal kingdoms, as with the kingdoms of men, had gods, but that the gods of animalkind were of necessity sympathetic to their physical creatures. (The gods of the Flat Earth, it is to be recalled, had long ago spurned men. Though Jyresh was ignorant of this, he did not argue the point. He was also young, and the gods of mankind had not yet begun to intrude much on his mind.)

  Mostly the beasts of earth were born, existed and died in the natural fashion to which men were accustomed. These animals did not possess each an individual spirit, as in the case of humankind, but were all part of one collective spirit, that of the godhead itself. This sent itself forth a thousand thousand times over, like filaments of some enormous heart-brain—separate from yet psychically attached to the germinating fount. In this way, the animal gods, of whom there were as many as there were animals, and indeed as there were birds, fish, reptiles and insects, experienced at one instant countless earthly lives—and simultaneously the eternal life of the deity.

  However, now and again, a beast deity might send out a psychic filament so imbued with the spirit of the fountainhead that it was exceptional. The animal so ensouled would be unlike others of its race. And since the beast-gods were, in their god-state, capable of human understanding, or its equivalent, these higher animals, nearest to the god, would tend to excel in the world in human as well as animal genius. They could talk and intellectually reason, they could become philosophers and artisans, mages and sorcerers. At the same time, all animal ferocity and human-like barbarity fell from them. They led pure if sometimes frivolous and esoteric lives, and for the sake of form would band together in imitation of the mode of men, having an elected lord, systems of justice and society. They might then even dress in human garments, observe human customs or flighty forms of thought or religion—as had happened with the she-Wolves who worshipped the moon—albeit as a white wolf. Or others might turn aside to become hermits, as for example seven owls who individually inhabited the forest and spoke no word, only sitting night after night mapping the imaginary progress of the stars which, this being the era of the earth’s flatness, never of course moved.

  These experiences, variable and eccentric, were also valuable to the animal gods, although after death the higher-spirit filaments, as with the lower, would be reabsorbed into the maker.

  All this the pigs told Jyresh as he sat among them on the banks of the grape-green river, and all this he believed. And, as they spoke to him, the young man perceived in a fleeting second how differently the souls of men went about an education and longed for the savage simplicity of this other. To be a cat, a hound, a horse, or a shining milk-white Boar—

  “It is said,” added the Boar who always spoke first to him, “that men may sometimes take on, for a short while, the bodies of beasts. Not as the magician or the shape-changer will do it, but after death, to achieve an extra labor or knowledge; in the same way that now and then a dead man will remain as his own ghost, or seem so to do. But there are none among us of this persuasion.”

  • • •

  Thus then it came to be that the rich man’s prodigal son lived some months with philosopher Pigs in a forest.

  The summer, which was dim and green among the trees, turned slowly to the colors of tinder, and the river ran brown as malt, with the burned black and purple irises staring at its edges. The cold came, and mist bloomed through the forest like breath upon a mirror. The Pigs removed into some tall caves that overlooked the water. By their magic they brought Jyresh braziers in which scented logs blazed, and cloaks of fur that was not the fur of any living thing. Frost stood in daggers on the ground, with slender flowers encoffined in them. The Pigs warmed themselves with friendliness, or at the fire of Jyresh. They told weird tales of princes and damsels of their own people, but since their kind did not coerce or corrupt, had no ambition, took love as a matter of fact not fate, and never killed, the tales were unexciting.

  One day, the young man thought to himself, / shall go back to the real world. There I shall love and hate and sin and grieve. But for now, I am conte
nt.

  And, as the cold wind drove its flails along the river, he lay to sleep beside his friend the white Boar, his head upon the Boar’s flank, and in a calm quiet comfort no human thing had ever given him.

  2. How Sharaq Was Served

  Now, needless to say, the Panther lord was not the former associate to whom the rich man had meant to send his son. A vagueness in directions, some samenesses and changes in the landscape, had misled.

  The mounted messenger, better primed and bearing the fatal letter, had gone by another road and soon out-stripped dawdling Jyresh. In four days, the man reached the mansion of Sharaq, a wealthy merchant.

  Sharaq, certainly, had once shared business ventures with the father of Jyresh, but for a number of years there had been no correspondence of any sort between them. On getting, therefore, a missive from a lathered messenger, Sharaq racked his brains in alarm, trying to remember. Then, reading the preposterous letter, as may be supposed the merchant was not greatly pleased. Unlike the talking beasts of the Panther’s palace (who had learned the stipulations for penance solely from Jyresh’s own lips), Sharaq felt himself insulted and put upon.

  “Who is this oaf, trading on some slight former dealing of ours, who wants to palm off his pest on me? What a doltish scheme it is—have I no better matter to use up my days? Yet, since I am currently unsure of the old wretch’s status, I had best be party to his plan and accept the young wretch. Curses on both of them!”

  Accordingly, he left word with his retainers that they were to look out for a stranger, a young man of good family, approaching on foot.

  Next day, Sharaq’s steward directed his master to a window of the house. There below, on the long path through the vineyard, might be seen a solitary striding figure, clothed in male attire.

  The merchant put his crystal spyglass to his eye.

  “Why, what an effeminate youth is this,” he cried, prepared to find fault and finding it. “See to what length he has grown his hair, it billows out under his headcloth. And the hair is black, which my elderly nurse always used to tell me meant bad blood. His garments conversely are white, and so quite unsuitable for an extended journey. He is barefoot—an affectation. Go down at once,” Sharaq added to the steward. “Intercept him and bring him to me. He will need a firm hand.”