He could never imagine her more perfect than she was at that moment.
Later, she was in his arms and they spoke words of love. Later still he sat with his memories, and it seemed he had lived out his life with her, in the shop at the end of the narrow lane, in the city, and that he had grown old. Still Mirithemne was with him. He vaguely remembered how it had been otherwise, but he was not sure of it, and this troubled him.
He vaguely remembered that he had a son called Venda. He was old. He was getting confused. He would ask Mirithemne.
* * * *
In the darkness, in the night, Venda made his way up a narrow, sloping street that ended in a stairway, climbed the stairway, and came to the wall which separates the lower, or outer part of Ai Hanlo from the inner city, where dwell the Guardian of the Bones of the Goddess, his priests, his courtiers, and his soldiers. Venda could not go beyond the wall, but he could open a certain door, and slide into an unlighted room no larger than a closet, closing the door behind him.
He dropped a coin into a bowl and rang a bell. A window slid open in front of him. He could see nothing, but he heard a priest breathing.
“The power of the Goddess fades like an echo in a cave,” the priest said, “but perhaps enough lingers to comfort you.”
“I don’t come for myself,” Venda said, and he explained how he had watched his father go into a courtyard with an old lantern and vanish in a flash of light.
The priest came out and went with him. He saw that the priest was very young, little more than a boy, and he wondered if he would be able to do anything. But he said nothing, out of respect. Then he realized that this was a certain Tamliade, something of a prodigy, already renowned for his visions.
They came to the courtyard and found the lantern, still glowing brightly. The priest opened its door. The light was dazzling. For a time Venda could see nothing. For a time they seemed to walk on pathways of light, through forests of frozen fire.
They found Talnaco Ramat sitting in the mouth of a cave, with the lantern before him, its door open, the light from within brilliant.
“Father, return with us,” Venda said.
“Go away. I am with my beloved.”
Venda saw no one but himself, his father, and the priest, but before he could say anything, his father reached out and snapped the door of the lantern shut.
The scene vanished, like a reflection in a pool shattered by a stone.
* * * *
They found themselves in the courtyard, standing before the lantern, which rested on the bench. Again the priest opened the little door, and the light was blinding. The priest led Venda by the hand. When he could see again, they were walking after his father, up the road to the Sunrise Gate of Ai Hanlo. His father hurried with long strides, bearing the lantern. Its door was open. The light was less brilliant than before.
“Father—”
“Sir,” said the boy priest. “Come away.”
Talnaco stopped suddenly and turned to the priest. “What do you know of the ways of love, young man?”
“Why—why, nothing.”
“Then you will not understand why I won’t go with you.”
“Father,” said Venda softly.
Talnaco snapped the door of the lantern shut.
* * * *
“If you want to get another priest, do so, but it won’t do any good,” the boy Tamliade said.
They stood in the courtyard, in the darkness, in the night. “It’s not that,” Venda said. “What do we do now?”
“We merely follow him to where he is going. He has gone far already.”
The priest opened the door of the lantern. The light was dim. It seemed to flow out, like the waters of the river, splashing over the ground and between the trees.
Again they stood by the riverbank. An imperial drontha went by. Boatmen poled a barge.
Venda followed the priest. They came to a cave, where lay the blackened, shriveled corpse of an anchorite. They passed through the dark forest and eventually into Ai Hanlo, along a narrow street, until they came to the shop with the wooden sign over its door.
The door was unlocked. The two of them went quietly inside, then up the stairs until they stood before the door to Talnaco Ramat’s workroom.
Venda rapped gently.
“Enter,” came the voice from within. They entered, and saw Talnaco seated at his workbench, polishing a lantern. He looked older and more tired than Venda had ever seen him before.
“Father, you are in a dream.”
His father smiled and said gently, “You are a true son. I am glad that you care about me.”
“None of this is real,” the priest said, gesturing with a sweep of his hand.
“Do you think I don’t know that? I have lived out my life suspended in a single, golden moment of time. It doesn’t make any difference. Mirithemne is with me.”
He glanced at the empty air as if he were looking at someone.
“This thing you think is your beloved,” the priest said, “is in truth some spirit or Power, some fragment of the Goddess which has entered your mind through the lantern, like a moth drawn to a random flame. It is without form or intelligence. Your longing gives it a certain semblance of a shape, but it loves you no more than do the wind and the rain.”
“Perhaps I am in love with the mere memory of being in love. Perhaps…in my memory now, I remember two lives. In one my wife was called Kachelle, in the other Mirithemne. In both, I had a son, Venda. Both are in my memory now. How shall I weigh them and know which is the more true?”
Venda looked helplessly at the priest, whose face was expressionless.
“I am tired,” said Talnaco Ramat. He rose, taking the lantern, and walked slowly out of the room. The light was very faint now. They followed him to the courtyard. By the time he set the lantern down on the bench, the light had gone out.
The priest snapped the metal door shut. Then he and Venda led Talnaco home. He was delirious with fever.
“He is burned by the spirit,” the priest said. “There is little we can do.”
They sat by Talnaco’s bedside, as he lay dying. Venda wept. Toward the very end, the old man was lucid.
“Do not weep, son,” he said. “I have known great happiness in both of my lives.”
“Father, was there ever someone called Mirithemne, or did you imagine her?”
“She is real enough. She’s probably old and ugly now. I don’t think she ever knew my name.”
Venda wept.
At the very end, his father said, “I have found the greatest treasure. It was worth the struggle.”
Venda did not answer, but the priest leaned forward, and whispered, “What is it?”
“A smile. A touch. Whirling leaves. A single moment frozen in time.”
THE STORY OF A DADAR
It was in the time of the death of the Goddess that the thing happened, when the Earth rolled wildly in the dark spaces without any hand to guide it, or so the poets tell us, when Dark Powers and Bright drifted across the land, and all things were in disorder.
It was also in the open grasslands that it happened, beyond the end of the forests, where you can walk for three days due south and come to the frontier of Randelcainé. All was strange to me. I had never been there before, where not a tree was to be seen, anymore than I had been to a place where there are no stars. All that afternoon, my wife Tamda and I drove our wagon through the familiar woods. Slowly the trees began to seem farther apart, and there was more underbrush. I remember how the heat of the day faded quite quickly, and the long, red rays of the setting sun filtered between the trunks, almost parallel to the ground, giving the undersides of the leaves a final burst of color before twilight came on. The trees ahead of us stood in silhouette like black pillars, those behind us, in glory. Above, little birds and winged lizards fluttered in the branches. I reflected that these things had always been thus, even in the earliest times, when the great cities of the Earth’s mightier days stood new and shining, and
other gods and goddesses, the predecessors of the one which had just died, ruled the sky. Those ancients could just as well have been seeing this sunset and this forest through my eyes.
Then a wagon wheel sank axle-deep in mud, and I didn’t have time to reflect on anything. The two of us struggled and gasped in pained breaths that we weren’t young anymore. If only our son were still with us.… But he had gone away to serve the Religion. What is religion when your wheel is stuck?
When at last the wagon rolled free, stars peered down between the branches. The night air seemed very cold. We sat still, panting, until Tamda had the good sense to get our cloaks, lest the chill get into us.
So it was that we emerged from the forest in darkness. At first I was hardly aware that there were no more trees. It seemed merely that there were more stars, but then the moon came up and revealed the vast dark carpet of the plain rising and falling before us. Imagine a fish, which had always inhabited the dark and narrow crags among the rocks at the bottom of the sea, suddenly rising up, into the open wonder of the sea itself. So it was. Overhead the Autumn Hunter was high in the sky. The Polar Dragon turned behind us, and the Harpist was rising. By these signs we knew our way. Neither of us wanted to stop for the night. I suppose plainsmen feel the same way, their first night in the forest. So we pushed on and shortly before dawn reached our destination.
The village glowed on the plain like a beast with a thousand eyes, reclining there, alive with torches. We would never have found it otherwise. The houses were all curving humps of sod, hollowed out and walled with logs. Had they not been lit, we would have passed them in the night, thinking them little hills.
We were expected. Everyone was awake and waiting. A man in a plumed helmet took our horse by the bridle and led us to a building larger than all the others.
“Are you Pandiphar Nen?” asked the chieftain who stood at the door.
“Yes. You sent for me,” I said. “You understand, then, that I do not heal broken bones, or cure any sickness which can be cured with a herb or a little spell?”
“Yes, I do, or I would not have sent for you.”
“The price is high.”
“Please, bargain later. It is my daughter, sore afflicted. She has…left us. Her mind is in darkness, far underground.”
Tamda and I climbed down from the wagon seat. I got my bag out of the back. We were shown inside. The house had but one room, and a fire burned in the middle floor. The smoke hole wasn’t large enough, and the air was thick. On a pile of hides to one side a maiden lay, her eyes open, but her gaze distracted. She did not seem aware of us. She rolled her head and muttered to herself. I listened for a moment, catching a few words, but most of it was strange to me.
“Put the fire—out,” I said to those who had come in with us.
“And leave us alone.” This was done. I waited for the smoke to clear.
Then I made a mixture of the ground root of the death tree, the water of life, common flour to hold it all together, plus other ingredients, including something called Agda’s Toe. Agda was my master, to whom I had been apprenticed when I was fifteen, some thirty years before. Then I had believed he had an infinite supply of toes, which could be regrown whenever he cut them off and sold them to pharmacies all over the world, but of late I had had my doubts. He never took off his shoes in public.
I ate a spoonful of the mixture and washed it down with wine. I sang the song of the false death, with Tamda at my side to make sure that I did not truly die. She would hold my wrist and take my pulse, counting one heartbeat a minute, and listen for a shallow breath about as often. If I got into trouble she would shout my name and call me back. She alone had this power.
I departed. At once my awareness was out of my body, sharing that of the girl. I saw through her eyes. Tamda and I stood absolutely still, distorted out of shape, like tall sculptures of glowing jade. The room was full of a white mist, and in it swam things like the luminous skeletons of fishes, and some, like impossible herons made of coral sticks, walked on a surface below the floor, wading in the earth. They sang to me, trying to lull me into sleep within a sleep, but I paid them no heed. They were common spirits of the air. I had seen them many times before.
I turned inward. Indeed, the girl’s soul was far beneath the earth. I had a sensation of sinking a long way in thick, muddy darkness before I had an impression of a hunched shape, like something carven out of rough, dirty stone, embedded in her.
I began to draw the spirit out. Literally, I drew it. By a trick known only to healers, I was both deep inside the girl’s soul and in my own body. I was aware as my hands took up drawing paper and charcoal and began to sketch the image of the spirit. When I was a child I had always had an urge to draw things in the dirt, on walls, hides, scraps of paper, any thing, and my father always boxed my ears and told me not to waste my time. But when I began to draw things he had seen in his dreams, and things others saw in theirs, he understood my talent. Everything after that, even my apprenticeship to Agda, was a refinement of technique and nothing more.
I knew what to do from much experience. As my hand moved over the paper, I wrestled with the thing inside the girl. Soon I saw it more clearly, a frog-like king clad in robes of living marble. He had long, webbed claws like a beast, but his face bespoke vast intelligence and age. I understood him to be a creature from some earlier age of the Earth, trying to return now that the Goddess was dead. His eyes seemed to speak to me, saying, “Why should I not have this girl, and walk beneath the sky again?”
“You shall not have her,” I said in the language of the dream, and as I spoke, my hand completed the drawing. Then my body got to its feet, stood over the girl, and with a pair of tongs reached into her mouth, pulling out first my spirit, then the other. It was like flying up out of a mountain through a little hole in the top, into my own hand.
“Pandiphar Nen,” said my wife, and with the sound I came into myself. I was whole and fully awake. The white mist and the things in it were gone. The task should have been over. The second spirit I’d extracted should have melted into the air now that I had captured its image.
But the stone king was standing before us. Tamda screamed. It turned to stare into my eyes, and its gaze caught me as surely as any prey is ever charmed by a snake. I was helpless.
“Dadar,” it said. “Know that I was placed here to bring this message to you from worlds beyond the world. I am sent by your creator. Know that you are a dadar, a wizard’s shadow and not a man, a hollow thing like a serpent’s skin filled with wind, pretending to be a serpent, deluding itself. The master shall make himself known shortly, and then you shall be sent on the task for which he made you, his dadar.”
Then, howling, the creature went through the closed door of the house like a battering ram, scattering wood and screaming at the villagers outside.
I was in a daze, only half aware of anything.
“Let us get away from here,” Tamda was saying. “They’ll think we’re witches. Hurry, before they regain their courage. Forget about the payment.”
“I don’t understand,” was all I could say. “It wasn’t supposed to happen like that.”
She gathered our things and bundled me into the back of the wagon. No one interfered as she drove away from the village.
* * * *
The wagon rattled around me. Sunlight burned through the canvas cover. I lay in the stuffy heat, thinking.
The problem, and the reason I felt so much dread, was that I did understand what had happened. My spotty education was more than enough to include everything I needed to know. Some wizard had directed me, his dadar, into that village for his own ends. I knew full well what a dadar was. The world has never been thick with them, but they have been around since the very beginning. They are projections, like a shadow cast by a man standing before a campfire at night, but somehow the shadow is given flesh and breath and a semblance of consciousness. Hamdo, the First Man, made one. He had shaped with his hands the egg from which all mankind
was to be born, but while he slept by the River of Life, a toad came along and swallowed it. Then a serpent swallowed the toad and a fox swallowed the serpent, and was in turn devoured by a lion, which fell prey to a bull, which was eaten by a dragon, which in turn was swallowed by an Earth Thing for which there is no name, which before long found itself residing in the belly of a Sky Thing which remained similarly nameless. Therefore Hamdo climbed the mountain on which the sky turns, charmed the Sky Thing to sleep with his singing—for he was the greatest of all singers—and then, on the mountaintop, he made a dadar of himself, and put a feather in one of its hands and a burning torch in the other. He sent it inside the Sky Thing to make it regurgitate the Earth Thing, the dragon, the bull, the lion, and so forth. From inside the toad it cut itself free, rescuing the egg. Things were different in those days, I suspect. Animals don’t eat like that now. But the dadar was still a dadar, a reflection in the mirror of Hamdo.
More recently, the philosopher Telechronos spent so much time brooding among the ruins of the Old Places that he nearly went mad. He made a dadar for company. It became his leading disciple.
And a king of the Heshites was found to be a dadar. The priests gathered to break the link between the dadar and its master, lest some unseen, malevolent wizard lead the country to doom. The link was broken and the king crumbled into dust. A dadar is an unstable, insubstantial thing, like a collection of dust motes blown into shape by the wind.
Thus I feared every sound, every movement, every change in the direction of the wind, lest these be enough to unmake me. All the confidence I had gained in the years of my life ran away like water. I was nothing. An illusion, even to myself. A speck of dust drifting between the years.
I wept like a child abandoned in the cold and the dark.
The Darrell Schweitzer Megapack: 25 Weird Tales of Fantasy and Horror Page 4
