Night's Sorceries

by Tanith Lee

  Only the king matured and lived through an old age (for which he was highly respected and revered.) Then, by the power of fire and magery, he returned renewed. In that way there had been no king but Kurim in all recorded time. But there were no complaints on the subject. Inasmuch as a king was required, he fulfilled the post estimably. They had hopes, too, of the queen, no children having been born in the sun world for several lifetimes.

  All this static ease and unchallenged idle optimism began to prey on Pereban, so that soon he could not bear it. He was the product of a dangerous and troublesome world, where babies were regularly produced in blood and pain, men and flowers faded and were cut down. As icy Dooniveh had distempered him, the moon’s sun unnerved him utterly.

  The day was never changing, and all things else.

  He took to wandering about the stainless, litterless streets, where the people wafted by like blown kisses. He next went out into the landscape, where the fields and orchards and vines grew of themselves and invisibly harvested themselves. In parts he came on those who had abandoned city life for the pastoral. But their habitat was not much different. They were youthful and fair, childless, long-living, and the food and drink appeared on their tables in a manner baffling to Pereban.

  One day of the Day—for the priest measured his time by his periods of sleep—he happened on a crystal cottage in a crocus wood, and there sat two old people on a bench. He saw that they were old from their lassitude, though in looks they were as fresh as he; fresher, not having his cares.

  A large salamander stalked the clearing, pulling rosy pears from the trees to eat.

  Pereban paused, and greeted the couple.

  “Have you,” he inquired, “heard tell of the king’s wife, the queen of the city?”

  “Just so,” said they, polite but yawning.

  “I, like that woman, am a stranger here.”

  “Ah, yes.”

  “I do not understand your world, nor how you live.”

  “We are regretful.”

  “How is it,” said Pereban, irked to outcry, “that you do nothing, yet are fed and clothed and kept in luxury?”

  “So might all men be kept,” said the old man, stroking the salamander with unlined hands, “if they wished it.”

  Pereban stared in anger. He did not know why he was angry. It came to him at last that, unable to regain the true earth, he was furious on behalf of it. Why should mankind toil and suffer, and these ones exist like the never fading lilies in the fields?

  The old woman seemed to sense his confusion and his wrath, watching him through her shining, smooth-lidded eyes.

  “Stranger,” said she, “it is known here that other worlds exist, and plainly you are a being of one of these. I do not presume to help you, but I will reply to your question. Some choose hardship, to acquire lessons from it. All men, even of your world, might live as do we, for matter is mutable, or how do magicians play with it? If your world is harsh, as I believe that it must be, be sure that you and your brethren have in some form chosen its thorny paths, in fact invented them. Here, we are indolent. But do not despise our sloth and happiness. At this time it is what is best for us. Yet we know at length our souls go from us, and maybe are reborn into less certain climes.”

  Pereban glared on her, and then his fury left him. Tears ran from his eyes. He averted his head. But the salamander came and licked his tears from his face with a gentle tongue aromatic with pears.

  “He weeps. In the cold lands below they do this,” said the old man. “But I think the cold shore is not his home. Can it be he is of that earth the stories mention, flat as a plate upon a chaos-sea?”

  Pereban evaded the lizard’s consolation.

  “Do you know then of the earth?”

  “Without doubt,” said the old man. And the old woman said, “Ah, he is sick then of wishing to go back.”

  Pereban fell at her feet. The gorgeous young old woman caressed his hair.

  “Hush. You must seek Kurim the king. He is the magician, for he can grow old and die and return through the fire. He will listen to your plea and discover some means to free you of our land.”

  An hour following this dialogue, Pereban was running through the woods and over the hills toward the city of the sun.

  He had been gone far longer than he knew. Nearing the suburbs, he beheld decorative colored smokes springing up, while bells, bangs, and booms shook the ground.

  Idune the queen, protected and soothed by sorcery, had borne twin infants, a boy and girl. These offspring of royal love would be fertile, as most of the sunworlders were not. Already petitioners clustered in hundreds about the palace, waiting audience to stake their claim to coition, some incredible amounts of hours in the future. Between whiles they sang and feasted.

  Pereban was not able to approach.

  In resignation, he joined himself to the rear of the petitioners. Hours passed, seventy-seven of them.

  • • •

  “You are welcome. Your name?”

  “Pereban, sire.”

  “Speak then, of your reason for wishing to wed my daughter, and of your qualifications for becoming the father of her children.”

  “Sire, that is not my purpose.”

  King Kurim and Queen Idune sat in chairs of gold above a golden pool where floated lotuses of jacinth. In a cradle close by the twin babies slept or dandled their toys. Should they not be concerned that their future marriages hung in the balance? In the land of the sun all was beauty and pleasure; they had no need.

  Pereban turned to the queen.

  “You do not remember me, Madam?”

  Idune observed him sympathetically, for she now had a heart.

  “Pardon me, sir, but I do not.”

  Pereban heaved a deep sigh. He turned again to the king, and related all his adventure, including the mishap with the winged horse, for by now shame had given way to self-experience.

  At the end of the recital, Kurim and Idune looked askance at him.

  “It seems that I do recall one man came with me on my journey,” Idune murmured. “And that to his advice I owe my present glad estate. Forgive me, Pereban, that I mislaid you for a moment.”

  Pereban bowed, frowning and biting his lip.

  Kurim the king said, “I have long credited the substance of such a world as Pereban describes. And that I am a magician he acknowledges. Allow me some hours to review the problem. If it is in my power, sir, you shall be liberated.”

  • • •

  He had ridden a winged horse, and an up-diving moon whale. Now it was to be a lizard of gold.

  This salamander was not real. It had been made, and in a leaping shape, its pointed face foremost, limbs tucked in and tail outstretched. Upon its back, a fixed seat with great straps of metal. Pereban had been secured within it.

  “The sphere, in which our worlds rest enclosed, travels once in each of your time units through your chaos-sea. This idea is not novel to me,” had said the king. “Calculations have been advanced. We will send you forth only while this sphere—which to you, you say, is your own world’s moon—is above ground, in the air. The salamander will seek one of the vents of the sphere that lie, you explain, above the sky of Dooniveh, and by which you first entered. The salamander will open the vent by use of a sorcerous rune inscribed upon its forehead, here.”

  Pereban, mad with dreams of home, nodded. Now, strapped to his seat, the crazy flight before him, he doubted all—the calculation to avoid chaos, the opening of the lunar vent. Even so, he was drunk with longing. Let him attempt, or finish.

  Far down upon the earth of the sun, fire toiled and flashed. Its heat was mounting. The riding-lizard was no more than an enormous firework. It must be set off. Like a shooting star—unknown here—and rushing upside down, it would cleave the vapors of the sun, the mists of cold Dooniveh, would breach the shell of th
e moon—or not. Freedom or death.

  Pereban the priest flung back his head. He closed his eyes and prayed to no gods at all, but to some element of the universe or of his own self, which might hear and heed. As you will.

  And then the fire cracked, sizzled. A huge flare coruscated all about him. The golden salamander lurched and launched itself.

  Upward.

  The sky was yellow, was boiling cloud—it ripped open, scalded, fell away— The sky was gray, blind, it dashed and simultaneously froze. Something dark tumbled upon him. A roof, the moon’s ceiling. The lizard tore like a dagger toward some mark. An impact. Machine and man were riven. I am dead! Not so.

  No, death was not this. There was a vault of coolness and blackness, and sprinkled over it a million diamonds—it was heaven, it was the heaven of the earth, with the stars on its face like loving tears.

  Pereban shouted aloud, and the lizard turned over. It pointed its pointed snout toward distant nothing, the unseen land. It plunged.

  “So I shall die after all upon the rocks of the earth’s breast.”

  Pereban sobbed and laughed. And fell, slower and more slowly. Until, like a giant dented metal flask, misshapen and spoilt and unrecognizable, the salamander dropped into a wreath of cypress trees beside a river. Caught in their branches, it shivered and was still.

  Pereban, smelling the cypresses, the water, the night wind and the starlight, said, “Earth, my beloved, I will not resent whatever stricture you put on me. A tiger may come and devour me, or a serpent bite me, a plague seize me, a man cut my throat, for they are the citizens of my world. I open my arms to all, the fine, the good, the dire, the bad. I am home.”

  • • •

  Now they say he went to search thereafter for his own town under the parasol of the mountain. But by then the goddess Azhriaz had received a reprimand from the actual gods, and her City and many of the lands of the City were destroyed, Pereban’s birthplace with them. So then he went elsewhere to live his mortal life, and leaves the tale by this gateway, and no more is known or said of him.

  But there are others who say most of the tale is anyway a lie. And these sources stress that the moon of the Flat Earth was not as Pereban’s narrative suggests, but only a silver disc, changing its shape at the shifting reflected shadow of the world. And they declare that Pereban, having ridden into the sky on the back of a horse with wings which the Vazdru bred, ended that first fall in an earthly gorse bush. The rest of the fantastic yarn, say they, he later invented, to cover his nakedness and his embarrassment. But all storymakers are liars, and the world now is round, and not as it was. Who can tell?

  Now after the casting down of her city, Azhriaz fled the rage of the gods (if they were capable of raging). Several were her ventures then. She lived, too, for a while as a child, and then her tutor and guardian was the priestly healer Dathanja.

  At last the Demon’s daughter renounced her immortality in favor of True Life—the body’s death, the soul’s continuance. Then she was Atmeh, “Soul-Flame.” And having found once more her lover, Chuz, knew a time of unclouded happiness, it is said.

  But her father, Azhrarn, Prince of Demons, displeased at the failure of his plans (and by other matters), cast her off, and cast off with her all humanity, saying he was done with it for ill or good.

  Yet, being what he was, it may not be supposed he lost all interest in the earth.

  Black as a Rose

  THE DESERT SPREAD like a huge lion, sleeping, and by day its hide was the color of powdered turmeric. But by night the moon paled its flanks to ash, the color of dead dreams. Very little grew in the desert, save for the sand, which proliferated constantly. Here and there a well of smudgy water, a tree of thirteen leaves, might entice the infrequent wayfarer. The native creatures were few and stirred mostly after sunfall.

  Somewhere in the west of this waste there lay a ship.

  How it had come there, in the midst of the sand, even those who had seen it could not decide. The general opinion was the vessel had been stranded millennia ago, when a sea then occupying the region soaked underground by magic. The ship was of an ornate mode, carved and gilded, with a lily prow and a stern like a fish’s tail, having two masts and triple banks of oars. And some odd property either of the spell or the ship itself, or of the desert dusts in concert with such things, had totally mummified the hulk, even to its two sails, turning it into a galley of salt.

  Below, a long pool of clear water was colonnaded by tall palms, and fringed with thickets of locust trees, fig and lilac.

  At this place, several ancient tracks and highways had once converged, but the sands had mostly eroded them. A small shrine to a stone god stood above the oasis. Between the shrine and the ship of salt, sequestered in a garden, was the green-eyed house of Jalasil.

  Before her death, the mother of Jalasil, who had been a sorceress, set on this house many protections, that her only daughter might live there in security. And this Jalasil had done until young womanhood. She was tended by three old servants, who had been her mother’s, and seldom saw any other being. Meanwhile she employed herself with the library of books and the life of the garden. Though sometimes she would sit for hours of an evening, gazing through the tourmaline panes, now to the east and now to the west, the north or the south. Green-eyed like her house, Jalasil was neither happy nor unhappy, yet now and then, at her gazing, she would take up her harp and invent brief songs in a minor key.

  • • •

  Across the desert came a band of nomadic young men.

  In these days the teachings of the priest-magician Dathanja had started a new vogue in certain quarters of the earth. His creed, both cosmic and precise, had a flexible simplicity which, usually, was soon harnessed and complicated by his devotees, or those who had picked up some smattering. The young nomads had, not one of them, ever seen him, or heard his parables first hand. They had come to a grasp of the physical liberty he conveyed and to the wandering and mostly possessionless state he typified. Too, they had some kindness, creativity and healing to impart, and did so, while none of them had ever committed evil, or—more to the point—ever feared evil. Yet their souls were younger than the soul of Dathanja, which had lived in any case two lives in one.

  The leader of this group bore the name Zhoreb. Like Dathanja himself, he was dark of hair and brow, a fact Zhoreb had not failed to notice. Beside that he was tawny from the sun, with eyes the shade of some inundating river. He walked with the courage and pride which health and intelligence may bestow, and his comrades followed him gladly, as pleased by his qualities as by their own.

  They went where the land itself led them. Finding a hill, they would climb, a valley—descend. Coming on the remnant of a road in the sand, they took it.

  By day they strode, resting only at the sharp peak of noon, where they could in the umbra of a rock or tree, or else merely under their own mantles.

  When night closed earth and sky, they made a fire, for they gathered dry plants and husks as they came on them, and sat under the vast arch of desert heaven packed with fruiting stars and a moon near and huge as a cartwheel, but shadowed like a skull. Here they drank hoarded water and ate such eatable stuff as had been found, while the eerie hymns of animals arose for miles about on every side. Then they told each other stories, and mused on the reality (or otherwise) of life and the world. And sometimes, being young and high-spirited, they ran races or performed acrobatic feats, or played at other competitions of skill both physical and cerebral.

  At the third dusk in the desert, as they were settling themselves by the decayed road under a tree of only seven leaves, one of the company remarked, “See, Zhoreb, there is a fellow traveler.”

  Then Zhoreb got to his feet again, and looked away over the ashy dunes. And sure enough, against a rising moon, one came toward them.

  “He is clad all in black. Yet,” declared the young man who had spoken formerly, “he
has no priestly look to him.”

  “His hair is blacker than the night. Are those the stars themselves caught in his cloak?”

  “The cloak beats slowly, like two wings of an eagle.”

  “Perhaps,” said Zhoreb, “a mage.”

  “And listen,” whispered another, “how quiet the desert has grown. As if the wolverines and jackals held their breath to hear—”

  “Sir,” called Zhoreb boldly, “you are welcome to join us at our fire. We have little to eat, but will gladly share with you what we have.”

  The figure paused a short distance from the road. The moon now stood behind his head, making his face difficult to discern, but for the somber flash of two black eyes. Black as the eyes of Dathanja they were, and much blacker.

  “Since you invite me so courteously,” said the stranger, “I will sit down with you. For your food, another feast awaits me where I am going before sunrise. I will not, therefore, trouble yours.”

  His voice was so thrilling, so melodious, and held such extraordinary power, that even Zhoreb hesitated at it. But one of the band, the youngest of them maybe, broke into a merry laugh. “Why, here is a boaster! Pray tell us, sir, where in all this wilderness and night do you intend to feast?”

  Just then the stranger moved and stepped onto the road. The fire caught him in a glass of gold. He had the beauty and the presence of a king, or that a king should have. And all the night was his, no wonder it fell silent at his approach, or sought to feast him.