by Tanith Lee
The wagon master of the caravan was, nevertheless, a steadfast man. Seeing they should not be free of the place at sundown, he gave orders for lamps and torches to be lit. “Since we fear to sleep in such a spot, we will make on, keeping the while sensible watch.”
Now there were among the travelers some religious persons, and these privately decided on an additional precaution. Which was, to prepare an offering to the elementals of the quag, and leave it by the causeway. They therefore put together a roast that was to have supplied their supper, some wine and figs and confectionery, six copper coins and one of gold, and a prayer of goodwill inscribed on parchment. The collection was then done up in a bleached sack, its pallor selected the better to apprise resident frights of its position. Slipping aside from the caravan they deposited the bribe among the mud and mosses below the path. The sun was just parting from the sky, and in that darkening light, the offerers pondered the shape of their sacrifice. “It has,” said one, marking himself with a protection, “the look of a dead infant.” “Tush!” said a second. “Hush,” said a third. “They are lighting lanterns, let us not drop behind,” gabbled a fourth.
Day died, and all color left the land. The torchlit caravan lumbered forward like a huge animal hung with blazing eyes. Out on the swamp a hundred other phantom caravans, eyed by silver lamps, commenced wiggling back and forth.
As it chanced, several of the religious persons had by then progressed up the line on their mules. They intended to fall in with the wagon master and perchance comfort him at supper, their own being gone.
They had scarcely exchanged polite greetings, however, when the first man let out a cry.
“In the name of all gods, wagon master, halt the caravan!”
The wagon master regarded him impassively. “Why so?”
“Because I and my friends made an offering to the evil spirits here, miles back and an hour ago—and see where said offering lies ahead of us, at the roadside! They have flung it in our teeth. Heaven knows what will follow.”
Then the caravan was halted, and some altercation occurred. At length the wagon master, armed with stave and torch, but unaccompanied, strode to investigate the pale, sack-like huddle.
He leaned down, straightened up.
“Poor thing. Not a fool’s sacrifice, but a dead child.” And raising his voice, he informed the caravan.
“Worse and worse,” said the religious ones, shaking in their boots. “Fiends have changed our wholesome votive into an immature corpse.”
But the wagon master only called for spades to cover the sad remnant over.
It was as the spades began their labor that the dead child moved, and by rotating itself, showed them its revolting scars and deformities, its innocence, its great eyes—and veil of lovely hair.
Though the flits had attacked her thoroughly, she was by now, through all the repeated stingings of earlier times, and the eating of stung lizards, immune to flittish bane. It had drugged but not curtailed her. Yet, singlemindedly thinking her execution seen to, the sisterhood had carried her to the world’s edge (the outer limits of the quag) and thrown her away there by the foulest object they could see, a causeway built by men. Having much of their own then to do, they had hurried off at once.
“Child,” breathed the wagon master with horror and tenderness, but he spoke in the tongue of humankind. She could not understand.
5. Ezail and Chavir
They might have named her for her hair, which in the sunlight was the color of marigolds. Her hair was the dower she brought to her new life, but she had been received without thought of transaction. Later, she herself offered the bounty, explaining eloquently, if with very few words, that the vast billowings of that silken veil hung heavy on her, that it suited her to have them lopped, every third month, to her shoulders—for, from her seventh year, if left to itself, the hair went on growing, to her knees, to her feet, and farther, till it lay along the ground. Besides its pigment, its marvelous softness, luxuriousness and luster, it exuded a faint radiant perfume. These glories lasted indefinitely in the shorn locks as with the growing ones. Indeed there was, in a box of the wagon master’s, a tress from the child’s second year with him, and it was as perfect on her seventeenth birthday as at the minute of its cutting. Tractable, too, the hair could be woven into braid, or gummed for fringework. Sold, it went for the enhancement of wealthy garments or the caparisons of costly steeds. Those who bought it did not know its source, yet often it was called Angels’ Fleece, or Ethereal Threads. By her hair one knew, unknowingly, what she might have been. But not only by that.
The wagon master, who accepted her, unreferenced, from the swamp, shortly carried her to the town which was his home. To those who inquired, both in the journeying and the town, as to what he meant by it, he said only, “She came in my road. The gods put blossoms at the wayside. We may pluck them, if we desire.” “But,” said general opinion, “that is no blossom. It is an accursed misbegetting, doubtless exposed by aggrieved parents.” “My house lacks any feminine being,” said the wagon master. “You cannot mean to breed up that for such use—” “I shall neither breed nor use. She must grow and be of and for herself. But she shall do it under the shelter of my roof.”
The fact was, the two wives of the wagon master, both of whom he had loved dearly, were a decade dead of the plague. His unborn offspring had gone with them. At that time he had felt much bereft, and taken to the caravan trade, leaving his house where it stood. When he was in it, after, he would hire only male servants, and for his solace, he came to value boys. While in the line of business he met merchants and drovers, and priests and lordlings. It was as if he feared the plague might cling about him yet, to harm that other sex he liked the best and knew the least.
But the child changed all that.
Seeing she was so tiny and so young, he straight away engaged a nurse for her, and later on he purchased an infantile slave girl and freed her, to be the child’s companion.
All who had to do with the child at first proximity turned gray with loathing. In seven minutes that had gone to pity. An hour more and they were appeased, or intrigued, or only dumb. In seven days they were playful and full of brightness. They were hers.
You could not say exactly how this happened. Something in her eyes. Something in her manner. She was a hunch-backed little dwarf thing, who moved like a seawave, like the bird in flight. She was malformed and disfigured and perhaps mentally mostly a simpleton—who had the scent of white flowers about her, who had an infrequent voice with the chime of pale gold. Her fool’s gazes were full of some wisdom intelligence would obliterate. As he had said she should, the wagon master, she came to be. She was. She did not fret or strive. No one had ever seen her discontented, testy, seen her afraid, ardent, bewildered, eager, weeping. She would smile, but only in the way a leaf turns to the sun.
She was, she grew. She grew up. The household grew with her. She learned the habits of human society, and if she did not copy, respected them. She learned the language human society spoke in those parts, and occasionally uttered it.
The first time she cut her own hair, she took it to the wagon master. It was the evening she was nine years old, for he reckoned her birthdays from the night of her finding, and he had brought her as he always did a gift, a necklace of amethyst beads. She set the wonderful hair before him like a coil of gilded rope. She smiled. She said, “Too heavy. Sell it, could you not?” Then she sat down to play with the beads, smoothing and sometimes kissing them, or holding them up to catch the pulsing clarity of dusk. Patently, living in his house, she had heard of commerce. But what a plan! (Going to look again upon the perfect tress of her second year, the plan’s value began to nag at him.) He recounted the tale to partners of his.
The canny one said, “Do it. I never saw such stuff. It is magic and will pave the paths with money.” The other said, “You had best obey her. She is so beautiful, you can hardly refu
se.” “Beautiful!” cried the wagon master, shocked and shamed to hear another air his own thought. “Yes,” said the partner, “this strong wine of yours has loosened my tongue. But I will stand by my choice of description. Beautiful.” And then this man quaffed more of the wine and looked up at the starry sky (for they lay out at their dinner on the summer roof of the house, and it was midnight). “I will suppose that all humankind have souls, a condition which, when sober, I do not hold. And the soul of that one you found beside the causeway shines through her skin like flame through a broken lamp. Can I see the lamp then, its flaws and ill-making, with such light in my eyes?”
“But the hair of her head,” added the canny one, “there you see the flame burning free of the lamp.”
He thought of her, the wagon master, when he was hundreds of miles off upon the routes of the caravans, in the courtyards and camps, in the dust and havoc, when robbers threatened, tolls were officious, animals or men fractious, when he was tired, when he recalled the ghosts of his wives. He thought of her burning in his house like a lamp in a window. He was past his prime, or he would have wed her—not to lie with her or possess her in any sort, but to secure her, to draw her further into his heart. But it was unnecessary. Some instinct kept him from it. Though love her he did.
And then, when she was about thirteen, it began to be that he would take her with him as he journeyed, and the companion-girl and the nurse also, and it fell out that after all he had a wagon full of women on the roads; and soon enough other women were allowed among the travelers, merchant’s wives and concubines, priestesses, goatmaids and ladies. These sometimes drew him aside.
“Who is that dwarf-girl? Such a gentle smile she gave me. And her hair is fit for a goddess.”
“That is my daughter.”
“And what is her name—for I should like to speak a word with her.”
“We name her Ezail.”
Ezail: Soul.
It happened that on a certain night of a certain journey, when Ezail was fifteen years of age, the wagon master had a curious dream.
The caravan had wended all day across a great bare plain, but come near sundown to a haven of groves and villages. Here a lake floated in the earth like a glimmering spell, and cream-colored oxen drank there under the cedar trees. Ezail had not gone with the wagon master on that journey, for he had reckoned it would be rough venturing, all of it like the plain, and rougher caravanserai by night. Seeing otherwise when the twilight flowered upon the water, and the oxen drinking in the shadow of the cedars’ reflection, he was sorry. “I will tell her how it was,” he said. But when he slept, someone stood before his tent. The wagon master got up and went out to him. It was a young man wrapped in a magenta cloak. His chiseled profile was such that the wagon master took him for a prince, and stared at his moon-yellow hair and the gilt lashes of his downcast eye.
“Sir, how may I be of help?”
The handsome prince did not reply. Only, he drew the hood of his cloak about his face, so its left side was invisible.
“If it is your wish, my lord, to join this caravan, I vouchsafe we can accommodate you.”
Then the prince laughed. For a moment it was the most offensive row the wagon master had ever heard—next it was the most charming sound of his experience, more a melody than amusement. But as he laughed, the young man’s teeth sparkled very oddly.
The wagon master stepped back a pace. In his dream he thought, / must be wary.
“Not essentially,” said the prince. “I am at your mercy. For I have come to ask of you your daughter’s hand.”
The wagon master was so flurried he said at once: “I have no daughter.”
“Yes, but you do have a daughter. Soul-flame Ezail.”
Then the wagon master did not know what he felt. He felt too much. And disgust and sorrow, jealousy and irony, contempt and flattery and fury were not unmixed in it.
“You cannot,” said he at length, “mean what you say. For she is—she is not made for the forms of marriage.”
“You say,” murmured the prince, “she is not made for love.”
“Indeed . . . I will say that.”
“For death, then.”
The wagon master’s feelings rushed and froze into one. He was terrified.
“Do not curse her, she has borne enough. Curse me, if you must.”
And then he caught the glint of an eye. A horrid eye, tinted all wrong.
“You mistake me,” said the eye’s owner, turning away from him a fraction more. “Love and death are the games we play, while we live.”
The wagon master burst out, much to his uneasy surprise:
“But you, lord, live for ever. Death can be nothing to you. Let alone love.”
In that instant, the moon winged up over the cedar groves. It cast the lake in white mirror. It smoked through the figure of the princely one, through his hood and his hair and his body and his gorgeous cloak on which were sewn, in splinters of glass, the constellations.
“I insist I am a mortal,” said the transparency, “as are you. But is this my dream, or is the dream yours? Do I dream you? Do you dream me? Ah, now, before one of us awakes, pledge me Ezail. I care nothing for her physical deformities. I, too, am deformed. This left side of mine, hidden in my mangle, oh, it is a sight to make you run howling mad, I do assure you.”
“Then do not dare imagine I would let you have her.”
“You could not keep her from me,” said the prince, or the fiend, or whatever he was, “if she willed it so.” But the moon, streaming through him, was washing him away. He spoke only once more, in a vocal noise like thin gravel sifting through a sieve of brass. “I do not care for this dream. Waken, you, and let me waken. I have three more years to grow to man’s estate. I am a king’s son by one of the lesser wives. I have no birthright. My destiny is to roam and rave beyond the walls of my father’s house, to make of myself a sort of hero. Trust me, I have no margin for madmen’s dreams.”
At which he vanished. But where he went, for a moment the wagon master thought he saw another country in the night, a walled palace on a high hill, the lattice of a window and a chamber beyond where someone lay tossing and groaning in a dream.
But that, too, faded away, and the wagon master also turned away, and found himself upon his mattress in the tent. Where, like any sensible man, he blamed the date wine and the bare plain, the oxen drinking in the twilight, the aroma of cedarwood, and fell asleep once more. And rising at dawn, the dream was only like a healing bruise. He had rubbed it better by noon.
• • •
Chavir commenced in the king’s High House, where he was the king’s thirty-third son, which did not augur well for him. His hair was raven black and his eyes the blue of turquoise. But in that, too, he had somewhat erred, for black hair was considered unlucky in those lands, while blue eyes were hardly known there.
The mother of Chavir had believed herself barren, for though a lesser wife, at one season she had been a favorite of the king’s leisure. Often called to his bed, her womb chose to ignore his efforts. Thus she had recourse to an old wise woman who now and then visited the women’s courts. The witch probed the king’s lesser wife, asked pertinent and impertinent questions, and finally removed from her robe a casket.
“Since you are willing to add your mite to the ninety-seven others, of both genders, already or about to be making clamorous the king’s palace, put in this cask your right hand, and draw therefrom, without one glance, the first object your fingers shall encounter.”
Then the lesser queen, with a thrill of nervousness, did as she was told. What came into her grasp was a small square thing, hard and cool as a river stone.
“Dice?” queried the beldame in apparent interest. “I have never seen a die plucked out before. Are you sure you did not put it there yourself?”
“What would be the point in that?” retorted the
lesser queen irritably.
“What is the point of anything?” unhelpfully returned the witch. “Flesh is dust, life unreal, an illusion, a play we are at.”
The queen tapped her foot and frowned.
“Shall I then summon my slave and contrive for you the illusion that you are being struck upon your dust by an unreal rod?”
“You must please yourself,” said the witch with an air of indifference. “Do not, however, in such a case anticipate my advice.”
“There shall be no rods, real or unreal. But two cups of honey beer and a ring of gold.”
“Then you may take the die, reduce it to granules, drop these in liquid, and drink the brew when next you are sent for to attend your husband.”
This the queen did, having the die, which seemed not unlike amber but was more friable, crushed in a mortar. The grains she kept to hand and swallowed at the appropriate hour. Her subsequent rapture in the arms of the king was unduly extreme, and soon enough she found herself with child.
It then turned out the king lost his appetite for her entirely, and in due course the baby was born, a son, to no special effect. And even the pleasure of the mother faded. The child, though handsome, was blue-eyed, black of hair, and sufficiently elusive in his behavior some said he was touched in the mind. He had the tendencies of a cat, liking much slumber and contrary exercise. Before her son was five, the lesser queen gave up on him, and took lovers. Being come on with one of these by the king’s steward, she was gone before her son was seven.
A disgraced satellite of the court, the boy continued life’s journey, rather impeded by the cosseting and niggling, tutelage and tantrums, amorous overtures and pranks of an idle harem, several educating scholars, and most of the soldiers of the king’s High House.
By fourteen years he could or would neither read nor write, nor fight, nor fornicate. He would nevertheless insult anyone within an inch of murder, sing birds from branches, speak poetry to pigs, and offer smiling verbal poison to his superiors. He could also climb trees to a height unmentionable. He could dream such dreams that waking was an interruption. Such was his strength and presence, additionally, he could seem in repose a grown man, and a sagacious one. And could appear, when in vitality, to be a warrior, the proper heir of kings, and possibly a sorcerer. But he was not exactly any of these. If anything, he was a cultured lynx in human form.
