by Tanith Lee
• • •
Night covered the world, and in the garden of Jalasil the lilacs and the myrtles were gray, and every petal of the vermilion roses—black.
Wake, said the night to many things of the desert, the phantasmal owls, the wolf-faced foxes. Yet, Sleep, the night said to humankind, where it came on them in their sandy shelters, by rocks and wells, or in a silk-hung bed.
“I cannot sleep,” said Jalasil. “Night is too restless. It rings with unheard sounds. It speaks in my ear saying words I cannot recall. The moon gapes at me. The shadows are so thick. Under my lids colors surge and fade. I ache. I cannot be still. I can never sleep.”
Then she did sleep, and dreamed Zhoreb lay beside her, staring at her with his riverine eyes.
She woke and wept and did not sleep again.
• • •
Before sunrise, said the little sister, the young men had vacated the oasis. When she went down to fetch the water from the fountain, all trace of them was gone. Such a pity. They would be journeying that way, said the elder sister. Their leader had told her so. A town lay there, ripe for them, no doubt.
“Our lady is behaving oddly,” confided the elder sister later to the little sister. “I do not know how to make her out. She will eat nothing, only drink wine and water. She sits with her harp in her arm, but makes no music.”
At noon, when the sun was a spike driven from the sky into the earth, three quarters of the house succumbed to snoring. One quarter, Jalasil, with her veil over her head, went out of her gate and took the incoherent track which led toward the days’ distant town.
As she walked, the sun smote her and the sand glared up into her eyes. Her feet were scorched, and she shivered.
I must go to him and sue for forgiveness. Surely, surely I have wronged him, and spoken uncouthly to him. That is the fault. Let me put it right.
It happened that there had been some contention, for the very first time, among the young men. Most of them had valued their sojourn at the oasis of the ship, the good food of the green-eyed house. “Fasting and abstinence may also be used to enchain,” they quoted at Zhoreb. But he was determined. Supper was avoided, and in the pallor of false dawn they arose and left the place.
Before the heat of the day, however, they took refuge in a gulley by the road, not many miles from the oasis, for arguing had slowed their pace. Here one of the brackish wells contrasted with the memory of the pool’s clean water. And they began again to grumble at Zhoreb, at which he finally lost patience.
“Return if you will,” said he. “But for myself I shall not.”
Then they wished to know why this was.
After some persuasion, he told them.
“The woman there, having nothing better to do, meant to play at love-matching me. It is no vaunt. I was embarrassed at it.”
Zhoreb’s company looked at him under their lids.
“Well, but,” said one, “you have not been immune to women.”
It chanced in the way a stone will tumble, or a leaf, that Jalasil at this instant had come upon that stretch of the track. She knew of the gulley and had even tended toward it, thirsting but confused as for what her thirst might be. So she had caught the murmur of their talk, and so she had gone nearer, thinking only to hear the voice of Zhoreb, a drink she craved more than any water.
And thus she spied on him a third time, unseen, and heard this:
“Girls I have had and not regretted, but they were my choice. She guesses me fruit on a tree and reaches out her hand.”
“But Zhoreb,” cried another of the band, “was she then so uncomely?”
“Not to notice either way. Certainly no beauty to be her excuse. She has two pale green eyes like a cat’s, and no other feature of importance. But worst of all, she stares with those eyes like a hungry vampire. You know the kind of woman, who would split one’s bones for the marrow.” And at that they laughed, and so did he. “Therefore, let us get on when the sun leaves the zenith.”
“You shake lest she pursues you?”
“Hush,” said Zhoreb, though he laughed yet. “I have said too much.”
“Not at all,” said Jalasil, although she spoke only to herself. “It is proper you should say such things to cure me.”
But she was not cured. She wandered away across the sand until, being clear of the spot, she sat down in the shade of a solitary boulder.
“Zhoreb,” she said, “I loved you, I love you still. The one you say you met with was not Jalasil. For if you had met with her, you would not at least have despised her. But you met some other dressed in my skin. And I, some other man dressed in the skin of Zhoreb, who was kinder and more generous than he.”
Then the day went on, and she knew the young men would have left the gulley, and she considered returning to the track, and to her house. But she thought, All regions are now alike, for love and happiness are in none of them.
She thought: Even if he had kept himself aloof, yet been a friend to me, this would have contented me.
But then she thought, No, it is his love I wanted.
And soon the sky turned red, and redder, and then the sky turned black and the moon came up.
How cold it is, thought Jalasil. How the wind whistles and whines through the rock.
At last she did return along the track, through the darkness. Once a wolverine crossed her path. She smiled upon it sadly. Why did the gods make me a woman? What does such a beast know of love?
At her house, Jalasil encountered some outcry, but she put it aside. She went to her bedchamber and lay there, in darkness. She could not bear a lamp, for her eyes had been dazzled by the sun. Even in the black, red petals fell across her vision. And in her ears ceaselessly rang and whined the sounds of the wind through the rock, but now they were inside her head; she could not elude them.
She yearned to die, but had not the courage to accomplish it. She yearned to live, and knew this was to be denied her.
My days are to be only this. Before, I did not know it. (For she had come to realize she had cherished some flimsy hope of change all this time.) He is all the world, and the world goes from me.
But somewhere in the night, over the restless lights and sounds, the notion came to her that at some hour her love, too, would burn out, and then she would be cold and bitter as the moon. The desert she should be then, sand, ashes.
• • •
The days passed, and a month or two they carried away on their backs.
A silence had come on the green-eyed house. It had never been noisy, yet it had been animate. Now the old porter-boy sulked in his lodge, the two old sisters tottered about or sat like two sticks leant on a wall. The youngest thing in the house had begun to warp and wither. They could no longer draw sustenance from a Jalasil warm and resinous, and suitably active at her tasks and recreations. They had found her out to be an unemployed and hollow-eyed and grieving hag, on whose forehead now, abruptly, a single vertical scar appeared between the brows, who walked with no lightness, who had all the ailments of one twice her age—aching and tingling in her joints, cloudy vision, hearing which heard such sounds as did not exist, an insomnia, a quarrelsome appetite—and since they found her to be this, and so could no longer think her a child, it came on them in turn that correspondingly, they, too, had aged. It seemed to have happened in three nights. An evil spell.
“What is to be done?” said the sisters. “If only her mother were here.” And then they spoke of Jalasil’s mother, which helped them recapture younger years. They put Jalasil, her sickness and sadness, away in a closet.
Along the garden, the roses shed their blood.
• • •
Just before dawn, the old little sister, disgruntled from a dream, went to fetch water early. As she came down through the oasis, she saw a woman standing by the shrine of the stone god.
This woman was tall, and
remarkable to look at in some not quite explicable way. For she was clothed only in a coarse robe and her feet were bare. Yet a wave of black hair sprang around her, burnished as the locks of some empress. And the long nails of her hands had been painted with silver.
“Now what are you wanting?” said the little sister, irascibly. “If you have come begging, you must get to our kitchen yard an hour after sunrise. Perhaps we may have some scraps for you.”
The woman laughed. The little sister almost dropped her jar in fear.
“So you think me a beggar?”
The little sister frowned, squinted. The black eyes were haughty as a king’s. She had none of the modesty or passive decorum of her sex, this female.
“Whatever you are,” quavered the little sister, “I have no time to stand gossiping here.”
“Nor I, indeed,” said the woman. “Do you see that ugly glare in the east?”
The little sister looked. She descried the forecast of dawn.
When she turned about to tell the woman as much, no one stood there at all, save the ancient stone above his altar.
“May the gods preserve me. It was a demon!” exclaimed the clever little sister. And she spat on the earth and rubbed in the spit with her toes, made various signs, and wailed some gibberish she had learned in her infancy.
The manifest of a demon in the oasis provided the sisters—and the porter, who did not credit the tale, and enthusiastically berated them—with a busy and useful day. All about the house went the old women, sprinkling certain herbs and laying occasionally some talisman. Every orifice of the house, doors and tourmaline windows, they dolloped with nasty mixtures. Even the panes of their mistress’s chamber were seen to. (Jalasil, seated like the blind and deaf, seemed not to notice.) “A blessing her mother was a witch,” they said to each other, “and taught us a thing or two.”
“Bah!” shouted the boy and shook his stick.
“Just like a man,” said they. “Ignore the brute.”
All told, much harmless pleasure that day gave them, and when the sun westered, the sisters huddled in a room above the kitchen, peering from its windows this way and that between vivacious fright and complacence. “It cannot get past the safeguards should it return. It will try to make a bargain. On no account must we speak to it. I recall one story of an elderly person who asked a demon to be made young again. And the demon said, ‘That I refuse, but you shall get no older.’ And struck her down.”
“But I recall the story of a hideous one that the demon transformed to such beauty the whole world ran mad for love at the sight of her,” said the little sister. “Even lions and tigers,” she added, saucy as ever.
“Less of your squawking,” ranted the porter below. He had left the gate and gone in to the kitchen, though he denied this was on account of the demon.
Presently the sun went down. The sky shone like wine in a golden bowl, then became pale like rosy ink in a bowl of platinum. And then the sky was the color of distilled lavender, and a cool breeze ran lightly through the garden as a cat, turning the heads of the flowers as they drooped.
“Oh! Oh, look and see!” screamed the little sister.
There, quite within the safeguards, in the garden, the black-haired woman stood, the demon, wrapped in a mantle on which the stars were coming out exactly as they did in heaven.
“Open your window,” said the demon to the sisters, although perhaps not in words. (They were aware of a wondrous music; noiseless.)
“By no means,” said the elder, “open the window.”
They opened it, and leaned out chittering.
The woman looked up at them, her white hands and face seeming to glow and float upon the gathering dark, like the white flowers of the garden.
“Listen well,” said she. “You will conduct me at once into the presence of your mistress Jalasil, who lies this very moment drowning in despair upon her couch.”
“What do you want with our poor girl?” cheeped the sisters.
“To give her,” said this demon, “her heart’s desire.”
“This is a trick,” said the sisters. “We must resist these blandishments. We must not stir.”
So they scuttled down and the little sister conducted the demoniac being into the house and upstairs to Jalasil’s chamber, with the elder sister preceding them to announce an arrival.
Jalasil did lie as predicted, tossing on her divan in a cold fever.
“Madam,” said the elder sister, “one has come to comfort you.”
The night-haired woman with the kingly eyes entered the room. Where she stood, starlight and moonlight seemed to coalesce in a curtain of crystal.
Go out now. Be gone.
Out went the sisters, gone they were. Down to the kitchen and the porter, to crouch among the pots, muttering and clicking amulets.
The woman stood in her crystal curtain and beckoned to Jalasil across all the hills of oblivion.
“Return to the earth,” said Azhrarn. (He might take any form, had taken this one.) “Come here, straying, limping heart. Do not make me impatient, waiting.”
Then the essence of Jalasil seemed to fill her like water. It brimmed up to her eyes, and she opened them and saw; her ears, and she heard clearly. She sat up on her couch, staring, not knowing where she had been, where returned, who was there with her, and hardly recollecting, for that matter, who she herself was.
“Jalasil,” said Azhrarn, in the woman’s voice.
Jalasil recollected everything. Her face became a scarf of pain.
“Yes,” said the Demon, musingly, looking at her. “These are the true lessons of love. Desolation, anguish, misery. Have you learnt them well, Green-Eyes?”
Jalasil could not speak. She moaned. A thousand speeches, ten thousand songs, lived in that one note.
“Well, then,” said Azhrarn, “what reward do you say you merit, for becoming such a scholar in this school?”
Then she did reply. She wept. “He will never feel love for me, and him only I love, and that forever. He is all I want and all I may not have. The agony of this does not abate. It eats me away. I am poisoned. If only he had loved me!”
“He shall.”
Silence.
Then: “Do not mock me,” she said. Yet her eyes suddenly burned. Azhrarn was, even in disguise, what he was. She believed him. None, hearing him answer in that beautiful and appalling voice, could have doubted.
“There is some magic in you,” Azhrarn said, “the legacy of your mother. I have devised for you a sorcery which, having been performed, will bring you this man, as a dog is brought to a bitch. Loins and heart, mind and flesh—all yours: Zhoreb, upon your leash.”
Jalasil only breathed. The last of her strength seemed to leave her in that exhalation. Her head drooped as the heads of flowers before they fall.
“Give me this, if you are able. In return, what? Do you want my soul? It is yours.”
“Your soul. Find a way to place it in a handy casket, I will take it with me.”
“What, then?”
“To assist you,” said Azhrarn, “is payment in itself.”
“Yes,” said Jalasil. Her condition was so heightened, she saw with more than sight. “It is a wicked deed, to suborn the will of another. And you are Wickedness, are you not?”
The woman made no comment. She said only, “I will tell you the sorcery whereby to gain your heart’s desire.”
Jalasil waited wearily, pale and stern, to hear.
“Descend to your garden. Search out there the season’s final rose. Cut the stem. Cut a finger of your left hand. Give your blood to the rose and let it drink. Say these words: There exists in Zhoreb no love for Jalasil. Therefore believe in the love of Zhoreb for Jalasil.”
Again, silence.
“And is that all?” said Jalasil.
“What more would you have? T
ake the rose to your chamber. Set it on your pillow. You will see a change. In seven days, he will be at your gate.”
“Supposing that you lie?”
“You do not think I lie. Repeat the spell. Let us be sure you have it right.”
“The final rose from the garden. Cut it and cut myself, the left hand’s finger. Give the rose to drink my blood. Say, ‘There exists in Zhoreb no love for Jalasil. Therefore believe in the love of Zhoreb for Jalasil.’” The fever had deserted her. She added in a deathly voice, “Yes, you do not lie.”
But she was alone in the chamber.
Soon, Jalasil left the room. She descended and sought through her garden like a ghost. The sky was dark now, the moon in a cloud. She detected the rose not by its shape or color, but from its scent. She cut first one thing, then the other. She gave the rose a drink full of the poison of love. She said the words.
She returned to her bed, and let the rose lie on her pillow. She plunged asleep, was buried there, woke at sunrise. And on the pillow lay the rose, not faded, but black as coal.
• • •
Where he could, he ran; where the terrain made precipitate speed impossible, he advanced by great strides. As he went, he flung back his head and sang, or whistled the piping tones of the desert wind over. Even by night, while he could, he went on. The animals of the waste fled from him or hid from him. When he stretched himself exhausted on the ash of the sand, he dreamed of her. The dunes became her body, the fine dust silvered through his fingers like her hair. In the wells, he saw, sleeping and waking, her eyes. Where he could, he ran.
He had been in a town—some conglomeration of buildings—they had halted there, he and the band of young men. There had been falling out and abrasions. Some slackened, and Zhoreb beheld them as they succumbed to the wiles of the town, to patrons who took them up, fed them and soused them with strong drink, exploiting their abilities as if they were street magicians. Yet others of the fellowship, too staunch in their views, going against a priesthood there, had been offered stoning and fled. Zhoreb went about his business, as he saw it to be, quietly. He healed, he addressed the crowds in the market. He did not speak against the town temple, which was less corrupt than others he had been shown. He waited out the squabbles, seductions, runnings off. One did not, in the teaching, enforce help. He waited to see if any union of the fellowship might be retrieved. For himself he would not deny, for denial was itself a snare, that he was no longer light, but merely restless. He experienced again and again a curious discomfort, as if he had left unfinished some vital act. Putting his hands upon the shoulders of an old man to ease his rheumatism, Zhoreb glimpsed all at once the fearsomeness of a world all of whose beauties and foulnesses, joys, triumphs and ailments were the creations of untruth. Nothing was real, and for that very reason, illusion had made itself into granite, the better to fake what it was not. To move these granite blocks, such as illness or pain, was simple— but then, the amorphous abyss lay revealed under one’s feet. As the cripple straightened his arms, crying out that he felt warmth, then that his hurt had left him, Zhoreb for a second knew all the terror of one adrift in compassless space. I have been a child at play with fires, some voice said within him. Now I see it burns, how can I dare?
