The Last Hieroglyph
Page 36
MORTHYLLA
In Umbri, City of the Delta, the lights blazed with a garish brilliance after the setting of that sun which was now a coal-red decadent star, grown old beyond chronicle, beyond legend. Most brilliant, most garish of all were the lights that illumed the house of the aging poet Famurza, whose Anacreontic songs had brought him the riches that he disbursed in orgies for his friends and sycophants. Here, in porticoes, halls and chambers the cressets were thick as stars in a cloudless vault. It seemed that Famurza wished to dissipate all shadows, except those in arrased alcoves set apart for the fitful amours of his guests.
For the kindling of such amours there were wines, cordials, aphrodisiacs. There were meats and fruits that swelled the flaccid pulses. There were strange exotic drugs that aroused and prolonged pleasure. There were curious statuettes in half-veiled niches; and wall-panels painted with bestial loves, or loves human or superhuman. There were hired singers of all sexes, who sang ditties diversely erotic; and dancers whose contortions were calculated to restore the outworn sense when all else had failed.
But to all such incitants Valzain, pupil of Famurza, and renowned both as poet and voluptuary, was insensible.
With indifference turning toward disgust, a half-emptied cup in his hand, he watched from a corner the gala throng that eddied past him, and averted his eyes involuntarily from certain couples who were too shameless or drunken to seek the shadows of privacy for their dalliance. A sudden satiety had claimed him. He felt himself strangely withdrawn from the morass of wine and flesh into which, not long before, he had still plunged with delight. He seemed as one who stands on an alien shore, beyond waters of deepening separation.
“What ails you, Valzain? Has a vampire sucked your blood?” It was Famurza, flushed, grey-haired, slightly corpulent, who stood at his elbow. Laying an affectionate hand on Valzain’s shoulder, he hoisted aloft with the other that fescenninely graven quart goblet from which he was wont to drink only wine, eschewing the drugged and violent liquors often preferred by the sybarites of Umbri.
“Is it biliousness? Or unrequited love? We have cures here for both. You have only to name your medicine.”
“There is no medicine for what ails me,” countered Valzain. “As for love, I have ceased to care whether it be requited or unrequited. I can taste only the dregs in every cup. And tedium lurks at the middle of all kisses.”
“Truly, yours is a melancholy case.” There was concern in Famurza’s voice. “I have been reading some of your late verses. You write only of tombs and yew-trees, of maggots and phantoms and disembodied loves. Such stuff gives me the colic. I need at least a half-gallon of honest vine-juice after each poem.”
“Though I did not know it till lately,” admitted Valzain, “there is in me a curiosity toward the unseen, a longing for things beyond the material world.”
Famurza shook his head commiserately. “Though I have attained to more than twice your years, I am still content with what I see and hear and touch. Good juicy meats, women, wine, the songs of full-throated singers, are enough for me.”
“In the dreams of slumber,” mused Valzain, “I have clasped succubi who were more than flesh, have known delights too keen for the waking body to sustain. Do such dreams have any source, outside the earth-born brain itself? I would give much to find that source, if it exists. In the meanwhile there is nothing for me but despair.”
“So young—and yet so exhausted! Well, if you’re tired of women, and want phantoms instead, I might venture a suggestion. Do you know the old necropolis, lying midway between Umbri and Psiom—a matter of perhaps three miles from here? The goatherds say that a lamia haunts it—the spirit of the princess Morthylla, who died several centuries ago and was interred in a mausoleum that still stands, overtowering the lesser tombs. Why not go forth tonight and visit the necropolis? It should suit your mood better than my house. And perhaps Morthylla will appear to you. But don’t blame me if you return with a nibbled throat—or fail to return at all. After all those years the lamia is still avid for human lovers; and she might well take a fancy to you.”
“Of course, I know the place,” said Valzain…. “But I think you are jesting.”
Famurza shrugged his shoulders and moved on amid the revelers. A laughing dancer, blonde-limbed and lissom, came up to Valzain and threw a noose of plaited flowers about his neck, claiming him as her captive. He broke the noose gently, and gave the girl a tepid kiss that caused her to make wry faces. Unobtrusively but quickly, before others of the merry-makers could try to entice him, he left the house of Famurza.
Without impulses, other than that of an urgent desire for solitude, he turned his steps toward the suburbs, avoiding the neighborhood of taverns and lupanars, where the populace thronged. Music, laughter, snatches of songs, followed him from lighted mansions where symposia were held nightly by the city’s richer denizens. But he met few roisterers on the streets: it was too late for the gathering, too early for the dispersal, of guests at such symposia.
Now the lights thinned out, with ever-widening intervals between, and the streets grew shadowy with that ancient night which pressed about Umbri, and would wholly quench its defiant galaxies of lamp-bright windows with the darkening of Zothique’s senescent sun. Of such things, and of death’s encircling mystery, were the musings of Valzain as he plunged into the outer darkness that he found grateful to his glare-wearied eyes.
Grateful too was the silence of the field-bordered road that he pursued for awhile without realizing its direction. Then, at some landmark familiar despite the gloom, it came to him that the road was the one which ran from Umbri to Psiom, that sister city of the Delta; the road beside whose middle meanderings was situated the long-disused necropolis to which Famurza had ironically directed him.
Truly, he thought, the earthy-minded Famurza had somehow plumbed the need that lay at the bottom of his disenchantment with all sensory pleasures. It would be good to visit, to sojourn for an hour or so, in that city whose people had long passed beyond the lusts of mortality, beyond satiety and disillusion.
A moon, swelling from the crescent toward the half, arose behind him as he reached the foot of the low-mounded hill on which the cemetery lay. He left the paved road, and began to ascend the slope, half-covered with stunted gorse, at whose summit the glimmering marbles were discernible. It was without path, other than the broken trails made by goats and their herders. Dim, lengthened and attenuate, his shadow went before him like a ghostly guide. In his fantasy it seemed to him that he climbed the gently sloping bosom of a giantess, studded afar with pale gems that were tombstones and mausoleums. He caught himself wondering, amid this poetic whimsy, whether the giantess was dead, or merely slept.
Gaining the flat expansive ground of the summit, where dwarfish dying yews disputed with leafless briars the intervals of slabs blotched with lichen, he recalled the tale that Famurza had mentioned, anent the lamia who was said to haunt the necropolis. Famurza, he knew well, was no believer in such legendry, and had meant only to mock his funereal mood. Yet, as a poet will, he began to play with the fancy of some presence, immortal, lovely and evil, that dwelt amid the antique marbles and would respond to the evocation of one who, without positive belief, had longed vainly for visions from beyond mortality.
Through headstone aisles of moon-touched solitude, he came to a lofty mausoleum, still standing with few signs of ruin at the cemetery’s center. Beneath it, he had been told, were extensive vaults housing the mummies of an extinct royal family that had ruled over the twin cities Umbri and Psiom in former centuries. The princess Morthylla had belonged to this family.
To his startlement a woman, or what appeared to be such, was sitting on a fallen shaft beside the mausoleum. He could not see her distinctly; the tomb’s shadow still enveloped her from the shoulders downward. The face alone, glimmering wanly, was lifted to the rising moon. Its profile was such as he had seen on antique coins.
“Who are you?” he asked, with a curiosity that overpowered his co
urtesy.
“I am the lamia Morthylla,” she replied, in a voice that left behind it a faint and elusive vibration like that of some briefly sounded harp. “Beware me—for my kisses are forbidden to those who would remain numbered among the living.”
Valzain was startled by this answer that echoed his fantasies. Yet reason told him that the apparition was no spirit of the tombs but a living woman who knew the legend of Morthylla and wished to amuse herself by teasing him. And yet what woman would venture alone and at night to a place so desolate and eerie?
Most credibly, she was a wanton who had come out to keep a rendezvous amid the tombs. There were, he knew, certain perverse debauchees who required sepulchral surroundings and furnishings for the titillation of their desires.
“Perhaps you are waiting for some one,” he suggested. “I do not wish to intrude, if such is the case.”
“I wait only for him who is destined to come. And I have waited long, having had no lover for two hundred years. Remain, if you wish: there is no one to fear but me.”
Despite the rational surmises he had formed, there crept along Valzain’s spine the thrill of one who, without fully believing, suspects the presence of a thing beyond nature…. Yet surely it was all a game—a game that he too could play for the beguilement of his ennui.
“I came here hoping to meet you,” he declared. “I am weary of mortal women, tired of every pleasure—tired even of poetry.”
“I, too, am bored,” she said, simply.
The moon had climbed higher, shining on the dress of antique mode that the woman wore. It was cut closely at waist and hips and bosom, with voluminous downward folds. Valzain had seen such costumes only in old drawings. The princess Morthylla, dead for three centuries, might well have worn a similar dress.
Whoever she might be, he thought, the woman was strangely beautiful, with a touch of quaintness in the heavily coiled hair whose color he could not decide in the moonlight. There was a sweetness about her mouth, a shadow of fatigue or sadness beneath her eyes. At the right corner of her lips he discerned a small mole.
Valzain’s meeting with the self-named Morthylla was repeated nightly while the moon swelled like the rounding breast of a titaness and fell away once more to hollowness and senescence. Always she awaited him by the same mausoleum—which, she declared, was her dwelling-place. And always she dismissed him when the east turned ashen with dawn, saying that she was a creature of the night.
Skeptical at first, he thought of her as a person with macabre leanings and fantasies akin to his own, with whom he was carrying on a flirtation of singular charm. Yet about her he could find no hint of the worldliness that he suspected: no seeming knowledge of present things, but a weird familiarity with the past and the lamia’s legend. More and more she seemed a nocturnal being, intimate only with shadow and solitude.
Her eyes, her lips, appeared to withhold secrets forgotten and forbidden. In her vague, ambiguous answers to his questions, he read meanings that thrilled him with hope and fear.
“I have dreamed of life,” she told him cryptically. “And I have dreamed also of death. Now, perhaps there is another dream—into which you have entered.”
“I, too, would dream,” said Valzain.
Night after night his disgust and weariness sloughed away from him, in a fascination fed by the spectral milieu, the environing silence of the dead, his withdrawal and separation from the carnal, garish city. By degrees, by alternations of unbelief and belief, he came to accept her as the actual lamia. The hunger that he sensed in her could be only the lamia’s hunger; her beauty that of a being no longer human. It was like a dreamer’s acceptance of things fantastic elsewhere than in sleep.
Together with his belief, there grew his love for her. The desires he had thought dead revived within him, wilder, more importunate.
She seemed to love him in return. Yet she betrayed no sign of the lamia’s legendary nature, eluding his embrace, refusing him the kisses for which he begged.
“Sometime, perhaps,” she conceded. “But first you must know me for what I am, must love me without illusion.”
“Kill me with your lips, devour me as you are said to have devoured other lovers,” beseeched Valzain.
“Can you not wait?” Her smile was sweet—and tantalizing. “I do not wish your death so soon, for I love you too well. Is it not sweet to keep our tryst among the sepulchers? Have I not beguiled you from your boredom? Must you end it all?”
The next night he besought her again, imploring with all his ardor and eloquence the denied consummation.
She mocked him: “Perhaps I am merely a bodiless phantom, a spirit without substance. Perhaps you have dreamed me. Would you risk an awakening from the dream?”
Valzain stepped toward her, stretching out his arms in a passionate gesture. She drew back, saying:
“What if I should turn to ashes and moonlight at your touch? You would regret then your rash insistence.”
“You are the immortal lamia,” avowed Valzain. “My senses tell me that you are no phantom, no disembodied spirit. But for me you have turned all else to shadow.”
“Yes, I am real enough in my fashion,” she granted, laughing softly. Then suddenly she leaned toward him and her lips touched his throat. He felt their moist warmth a moment—and felt the sharp sting of her teeth that barely pierced his skin, withdrawing instantly. Before he could clasp her she eluded him again.
“It is the only kiss permitted to us at present,” she cried, and fled swiftly with soundless footfalls among the gleams and shadows of the sepulchers.
On the following afternoon a matter of urgent and unwelcome business called Valzain to the neighboring city of Psiom: a brief journey, but one that he seldom took.
He passed the ancient necropolis, longing for that nocturnal hour when he could hasten once more to a meeting with Morthylla. Her poignant kiss, which had drawn a few drops of blood, had left him greatly fevered and distraught. He, like that place of tombs, was haunted; and the haunting went with him into Psiom.
He had finished his business, the borrowing of a sum of money from a usurer. Standing at the usurer’s door, with that slightly obnoxious but necessary person beside him, he saw a woman passing on the street.
Her features, though not her dress, were those of Morthylla; and there was even the same tiny mole at one corner of her mouth. No phantom of the cemetery could have startled or dismayed him more profoundly.
“Who is that woman?” he asked the money-lender. “Do you know her?”
“Her name is Beldith. She is well-known in Psiom, being rich in her own right and having had numerous lovers. I’ve had a little business with her, though she owes me nothing at present. Should you care to meet her? I can easily introduce you.”
“Yes, I should like to meet her,” agreed Valzain. “She looks strangely like someone that I knew a long time ago.”
The usurer peered slyly at the poet. “She might not make too easy a conquest. It is said of late that she has withdrawn herself from the pleasures of the city. Some have seen her going out at night toward the old necropolis, or returning from it in the early dawn. Strange tastes, I’d say, for one who is little more than a harlot. But perhaps she goes out to meet some eccentric lover.”
“Direct me to her house,” Valzain requested. “I shall not need you to introduce me.”
“As you like.” The money-lender shrugged, looking a little disappointed. “It’s not far, anyway.”
Valzain found the house quickly. The woman Beldith was alone. She met him with a wistful and troubled smile that left no doubt of her identity.
“I perceive that you have learned the truth,” she said. “I had meant to tell you soon, for the deception could not have gone on much longer. Will you not forgive me?”
“I forgive you,” returned Valzain sadly. “But why did you deceive me?”
“Because you desired it. A woman tries to please the man whom she loves; and in all love there is more or less deception.
“It cannot be,” averred the poet. “I fear to repeat the disappointment I have found in other women. Yet at least I am grateful for the hours you gave me. They were the best I have known—even though I have loved something that did not, and could not, exist. Farewell, Morthylla. Farewell, Beldith.”
When he had gone, Beldith stretched herself face downward among the cushions of her couch. She wept a little; and the tears made a dampness that quickly dried. Later she arose briskly enough and went about her household business.
After a time she returned to the loves and revelries of Psiom. Perhaps, in the end, she found such peace as may be given to those who have grown too old for pleasure.
But for Valzain there was no peace, no balm for this last and most bitter of disillusionments. Nor could he return to the carnalities of his former life. So it was that he finally slew himself, stabbing his throat to its deepest vein with a keen knife in the same spot which the false lamia’s teeth had bitten, drawing a little blood.
After his death, he forgot that he had died; forgot the immediate past with all its happenings and circumstances.
Following his talk with Famurza, he had gone forth from Famurza’s house and from the city of Umbri and had taken the road that passed the abandoned cemetery. Seized by an impulse to visit it, he had climbed the slope toward the marbles under a swelling moon that rose behind him.