by Mike Allen
Yet still Razved feared nothing. As his hands swept over the crystal curves of a phantasmal yet actual shape, as he drowned in the silver notes of a song that had, as yet, no words, as he began to ride in the primal race of desire, not one qualm interrupted Razved’s intense and scalding pleasure. For it did not trouble him she was all of glass, and that she flamed with shades of flowers and gems, and her tongue was of glass, her lips and hair, her little feet that gripped him, glass that kissed, caressed, and sang in ecstasy. Even her centre, the core of her glory, that too, where now he lay, fixed and explosive as a sun, that was formed of glass. And it rippled and embraced and grew molten, better than any human vessel; wine and darkness; jasper, asphodel: fire, ash, sand.
2. The Second Fragment
That very morning they had entered the expanse of the terrible desert known as the Vast Harsh, Jandur the glass-seller received an omen. He did not, at the hour, much consider it, but later it came to him he had been awarded one of those useless portents the gods tended to throw before mankind. What the omen presumably was, had been a solitary black vulture crouched on a sycamore, which weirdly held upright in its beak a shard of glass. This caught the light and flashed, amusing many who saw it. But they, and Jandur, soon forgot, since a mile or so later the desert began.
There lay before the caravan now countless miles of that inimical landscape, which separated the more abundant lands from the towns and cities of the north and east. And though provided with all necessities, none of the travellers viewed the desert prospect with much joy. The Harsh was famed not only for its personal cruelties, but for those of various men driven out there, and making their desperate livelihoods by the robbery and murder of passing human traffic. Well-armed guards had joined the caravan at Marah, the last town on the desert’s edge.
The Harsh opened to receive them, grinning.
Jandur journeyed glumly among the rest.
By day the caravan wended, though sheltering sometimes at noon, when the predatory eye of the sun centred the sky. Once there it turned both heaven and earth into a furnace any glass-maker might have valued. Perhaps, thought Jandur then, the gods also are glass-makers. The earth is their kiln and we, mortals of silicious sand, suffer, turn and burn in this sunfire, and likewise the flames of pain and sorrow, in order to become creatures as pure and beautiful as glass.
But really he was well aware that people rarely grew beautiful or pure through suffering and burning. Normally ill-treatment made them worse, and wicked. Those that did achieve virtue no doubt might have become just as wonderful, even if they had not had to suffer, or to burn.
At night the caravan spread itself out like an exhausted yet demanding beast. It lit torches and fires, cooked its meals, sometimes told stories or danced, frequently bickered, argued, or even came to blows. Above, the myriad stars blazed bright. If each were a glass, thought Jandur, what a fortune they would make for those that formed them. But alas, when they fall, he added to himself, seeing one which did, they shatter.
Jandur had himself never made a single piece of glass. He only sold glass, but that in quantities. In the very next town they would come to, which was called Burab, and which still lay ninety days and nights across the Harsh, Jandur’s brother-in-law had charge of the family’s second glass-makery. He was a quarrelsome brute, dark red from heat; and scarred all over with the white bites of burns. But Jandur had already enough stock, and thought he would not need to trouble his brother-in-law. Which thought cheered Jandur in the desert, even when jackals howled, or the dust-winds blew.
* * *
Despite the reputation of the Harsh, they met no robbers. Probably any robbers spied them first and found their numbers, and their armed escort, off-putting. Meanwhile, on a certain evening, they reached one of the few oases that served the waste.
This was a poor enough specimen. A handful of spindly trees led to a well no bigger than a washtub, the margin spiked with black rushes that discontentedly chittered.
Leaving his servant to go for fresh water, Jandur dismounted from his mule and took a walk among the stunted trees. The sun was already low and veiled in sandy gold, and a reluctant breeze smoked along the dunes. The impromptu caravanserai was being settled for the night, cookfires breaking into red blossom. Jandur went up to a little rise, idly following the prints of some now-absent, small desert animal. From here he looked about at the world, as mortals did and yet do, both pleased and displeased with it, suspended in the quiet melancholy of dusk.
“Where is the glass-maker?” shouted a baleful voice behind him.
“I do not know,” muttered Jandur. But he turned nonetheless.
And there on the rise with him perched a most ungainly and uncouth female figure. She was clad in a mantle of vulture feathers. More, her long and ragged hair, lucklessly dark as was the hair, they said, of demons, was stuck with other such feathers. On her wrists and at her long, thin neck were ornaments of what Jandur, not illogically, concluded to be vulture bones. She smelled of vultures too, a smell that was of chickens, and of carrion.
If he had been going to admit to an acquaintance with glassware, perhaps now he thought better of it. But this was all in vain. For she announced immediately, “You are he. You are the one named Janpur or Jinkor, a glass-maker and vendor of such.”
“What, assuming I am he, would you have with him?” inquired Jandur.
The female ruffled her feathers. It was difficult to be sure, when she did this, if rather than a mantle, they were not actually growing from her skin. “I am Morjhas. I perambulate the desert. I have no trepidation in the Harsh, for my powers bring me all I need.”
She was a witch. Jandur nodded politely.
But she reached forward and thrust her skinny talon of a finger at his breast. “Come you with me. I will show you a strangeness. I am bound to do this, for my talent carries with it a certain onus. A strangeness, I say. And what you do thereupon I shall advise you.”
“I may not leave the caravan,” protested Jandur. “If you are often here, you will know the place abounds in villains.”
“What care I for villains? They are all afraid of Morjhas—and rightly. Those who annoy me,” she added, fixing Jandur with a tar-black eye, “regret it. If you behave, you will be safe enough in my company.”
* * *
They flew.
He had not, and maybe he might have done, expected this. But the bird-hag lifted him straight off his feet and bore him away. He suspected he screamed, but none heard him over the din of the caravan; twilight doubtless screened the view. And she—she spread her wings and rushed both of them on.
However, they did not travel a very great way. The ‘strangeness’ Morjhas meant to reveal lay only some half mile from the camp.
At first, having been landed, Jandur gaped about him.
No trace of sun remained, only the huge translucent violet dome of nightfall, where they were lighting the million cobalt, ferrous, and pewter cookfires and torches of the stars.
The vulture witch pointed with her eldritch claw.
“See there. ”
Some sixty or seventy paces off rose a mesa, scorched black by weather, and below, as elsewhere around, lay sand, slightly patched paler or darker, denoting seemingly depth, variance of consistency, or only shadows.
“At what do I look? That rock?”
“Hush, fool. Look and listen and learn.”
So there they stood, and the night gathered all about, glowing as always in such open places, yet also black behind the stars. And coldness came too, for the desert, even the Vast Harsh, presented two faces, furnace by day and iceberg by night.
Jandur was frightened, but not out of his wits. He stared at the patch of sand below the mesa that his unwanted guide had indicated, and in a while he started to note a disturbance in it. A dust devil appeared to be at work there, but one which did not move from its origins. And after a time, the motes which circled upward and round and round commenced also to shine.
“Is it a g
host?” asked Jandur in a whisper.
“Hush,” said the witch.
And exactly then the spinning busyness began to chime. An eerie carillion it was, bereft and lorn, like the cries of the wolves and jackals which prevailed in the desert. Yet too it had profound beauty, an insistent music. Like a song it seemed, lacking words, though once perhaps words had belonged to it, a song of longing and loss that only a poet might create, and a human throat emit.
This uncanny and emotive recital continued for several minutes. Then came the night wind, and breathed on the spot, as a mother might with a weeping child. And the song ended, and the dust of the sand drifted down. It slept, whatever it had been, whatever it was. And silence returned, composed of the shift of the dunes, the sigh of the flimsy wind.
Morjhas spoke. “There, then.”
“But what then?” asked Jandur.
“I cannot tell you. I, even I, do not know. But it cries out, does it not? I cannot ignore that cry, nor shall you.”
“But what am I to do with it?”
“Fool of a fool, son of fools to seventeen generations, father of fools and grandsire of imbeciles!” ranted the vulture-witch. “Are you a glass-maker? Gather up the sand there, take and make it into glass, for glass is made with sand and fire. Take it and shape it and see what then it does—for long enough it has lain and lamented here, unheard by any but myself and now you, O fool.”
“Take and make—” cried Jandur in horror, for he did not want any part of this scheme.
“Take and make. For my powers are generous and I must be kind in turn to the tragedies of the Harsh. But you I will punish if you fail in this. Heed me, Jumduk, if so you are named. Either scoop up the sand there and have it worked, or I will send my minions to smash every item of your saleable glass, even within the cosy caravan. I will begin, O fool, with a certain mirror—” here the vulture held up her wing and gave a screech, and from far away—about half a mile in fact—the appalled merchant seemed to detect a glacial splintering. “I will smash all and everything, until you have dug up that place of sand which sings and sobs. Go now. Hasten back to the camp and get your slaves and your spades, for with every second you delay, another delicacy breaks. Be assured also, that if the sand is not then rendered to glassware before three more months elapse, I will break anything you may have left, or thereafter acquire! You had best believe this.”
Jandur was uncertain if he had only gone mad, but he credited every word. He bolted for the camp, and endlessly along the route as he ran, he heard the shattering of glass—the whole while becoming louder and louder.
* * *
Indeed, Jandur’s bivouac lay in some confusion, when he reached it. People stood about amazed, and bits of glass lay around sparkling prettily in the firelight, but there was a deal of shrieking and praying too. “Vile winged shadows fell upon your wagon, Jandur!” some explained, hurrying gladly to convey bad news. “We heard the vandalism upon your wares but dare not enter! No other among us is attacked—only you, poor Jandur. Whatever can you have done to incur this supernatural wrath?” While as a background to their verbiage, yet other breakages sounded.
But Jandur paid no heed. Seizing his servant, two spades and some sacks, Jandur pelted back again, now on foot, across the desert. Regaining the spot where the dust had lifted and sung, the two men dug and transposed sand for all they were worth, until they had filled the sacks.
No sign of the vulture-witch remained, and truly the general site was so unremarkable that, saving the mesa, it was probable Jandur would not have found it again. A large dug hole now marked the dunes. Yet soon enough the sands would refill it.
“Hark,” said Jandur. “Does it seem the wrecking has ceased?”
Presently he and the servant were agreed, any noises of destruction had stopped.
They trudged back to the caravan then and loaded the sacks into the wagon, where there was now some space for them, Jandur having lost a fair portion of his most valuable goods.
* * *
No other event of any moment befell the caravan, or Jandur, until they had entirely crossed the Harsh, and reached the town of Burab.
Jandur went, albeit with no delight, to the house of his brother-in-law Tesh, the glass-maker, which lay behind the smoking chimney of the makery. Here Jandur’s sister, Tesh’s wife, greeted Jandur with affection tempered only by her husband’s censure. Tesh himself banged in and out of the place, upbraiding Jandur for the loss of his goods— “A witch broke them? Ha! A likely tale. Your donkey of a servant packed them improperly, either that or you lost them at gambling. What a simpleton you are, Jandur. Your father must whirl in his grave at your incompetence.”
“Nevertheless,” said Jandur, gravely, “I have collected in the desert a most fascinating sand, and this I would request you put to use instantly. Fashion some fresh articles that I may sell them in the great city markets.”
Tesh was not the man to be given orders by such as Jandur. He made a colossal fuss, shouted at his wife, tried to kick the dog—which eluded him without effort, being well-practiced in the skill—and rained curses on the earth in general. However, since Tesh had had no items in the original wagon-load, and might now get profit from future sales, he eventually complied, making out that he did Jandur the sort of favour that was known, in those parts, as a ‘Full day’s holiday, with a feast at its end’.
Jandur then retired exhausted to his bed. The caravan would not quit Burab for some while, and there was time enough. The sand had filled three sacks to the top, and he expected several pieces to result. Unease he put from him. If the sand were possessed by some supramundane force, Jandur himself had had no choice but to take it on. What the resultant glass might be, or do or cause, Jandur did not permit himself to consider.
The next morning the chimney of the makery gouted, as always, thunders of smoke and sparkling cinders.
Jandur busied himself about the town, buying presents for his sister and the dog.
Evening fell and the smouldering chimney cooled. A little after the regular hour, in came Tesh—both Jandur and Tesh’s wife jumped up in startlement.
The red-hot man was pale as one of his burn-scars, and glassy tears trembled from his eyes.
“My darling wife,” said he, and she so addressed almost fainted with the shock, “can you forgive me for my temper and my foulness?”
“Are you ill?” she cried in panic. “What ails you?”
“Alas,” wept Tesh, and gentle as a lamb he went and knelt before her, burying his face in her skirts. And when the dog came worriedly to sniff him, Tesh, without looking, stroked its head and murmured, “Poor boy, you shall have a bone, you shall have a dish of meat. I will buy you a collar that reads: Faithful Under Duress.” After which his words were drowned in his tears.
As she embraced this strange, new-made husband, Jandur’s sister said urgently to Jandur, “Go to the makery and see what has gone on!”
And Jandur did as she asked, his mind buzzing between curiosity, amusement, pity—and sheer fright.
The makery was a significant and hellish area. It rose up on many levels, that were dominated by the dark yet fiery hulks of kilns and braziers, and silvered stoops and founts of water, and all the while the crackle and bubble, the trickle and shiver, the rush and gush and whoosh and push—things altering, melting, expanding, blooming or dying. And always, even now, the ebb and flow of fire flickering on walls and roof, the glycerine rivering and drip of molten glass, the stench of hot metal and clay and combustion, and gaseousness, the nasal glitters and sumps of stone-dust, silica, calcium, and black natron.
Below on benches sat Tesh’s work-gang. One was nursing a blowing pipe, three or four some smallish empty moulds. These fellows seemed bemused beyond speech. At a table sat one though, who was polishing little beakers with the rubbing stone. He glanced up and said to Jandur, “I will tell it. There has been a peculiarity here. Either you have brought us bad luck—or good luck. We are not sure as yet.”
Jan
dur put a substantial coin before the man. “I hope you will all take some wine to comfort you. But for now, go on.”
“The sand,” said the stone-rubber, “when emptied, was only enough for a single slight item.”
“But it had filled three sacks!”
“So we thought, too. But opening and emptying them, all that was there was this miniature amount. Be sure, Master Tesh ranted he would waste none of his other sand to pad it out, and next he made oaths worthy of the demonkind. But by then he must make something else of it than vulgar language, so we set to work. Then, when all goes in the crucible, a wild scent comes from the mix.”
“A scent of what?”
“Of women’s sweet skin and garments and young clean hair . . . so then we are all afeared, but Tesh rants on, so on we make. Then when he comes to blow the piece, soft light shines up above the brazier. Like green iron, or the rose-red that comes from glue-of-gold. But Tesh blows on, and then the vessel comes from the fire and is finished and firmed with a speed not very usual.”
“What had been made?” demanded Jandur.
“One slender goblet with a flower-like drinking-bowl.”
“And then?”
“Master touches it,” put in one of the other men. “And his face goes rapt, as if he saw the gods. And then white. And then he staggers out to his house.”
Jandur collected his wits. “Where is the goblet?”
“He took it with him.”
When Jandur pelted back in at the house door, he halted as if he struck a buffer of some sort.
For there sat his sister, with Tesh adoringly leaning on her, and the dog with its head on Tesh’s knee. And Jandur’s sister sang in a light and lovely voice, an evening song. And in her hand Jandur beheld a glass drinking cup, no longer than a woman’s hand, and full of mutable colours, as the stone-rubber had said. But just then the servant girl came in, and singing, Jandur’s sister handed her the cup.
