by Tanith Lee
Sometimes the girl looked at them as if she pitied them. She did not want slaves by her, yet they might not leave. But who would guess if she pitied them? And she would not say.
She entered Underearth as a tiny child, though seeming already older and more formed than a human infant. Exposed to the aura of Azhrarn’s kingdom, she fell for a while into a kind of daze, and then years came upon her like whirlwinds, twisting and pulling at her, speeding her growth so rapidly that sometimes her skin itself was torn by her bones, and her dark blood—demon’s blood—ran and gushed on the ground. When it happened, she cried out, she screamed, for she had a voice to use for this. In the length of seventeen mortal days—hours, moments, in the Underearth—she grew to be some seventeen years.
At this time, the Eshva had attempted to console her. They had soothed her, caressed her, brushing her with their hair, drugging her with their perfumed sighs. When the terrible process stopped, accomplished, and did not resume, still for a while they seemed to wish to divert her. But she became an icon then, awake yet sleeping. A closed door. And gradually the Eshva dropped away from her like moths with broken wings.
They wandered the island, her servitors, her fellow prisoners and exiles. Their noiseless ennui and wretchedness soon embued every valley and height of it. She was, after all, Vazdru, a princess. The leaden nothingness she had succumbed to bruised and damaged them. They paled, they faded.
She, too, sometimes traversed the island. But even as she walked, she slept. Somnambulist, she would hesitate on the brink of some precipice, from which, being what she was, no doubt in any case she could not fall. Or, hearing the music of her cliff in the distance, she might turn her head. But when the mist about the island thinned a little, and the Eshva would creep gracefully down to the shore and stand there, gazing to the sea beyond, she did not stir.
No doubt, too, she had learned many things without any tutor, had been born, even, with knowledge denied to humankind. No doubt too and too, she did not know what knowledge was, or its value. Nor what she herself was or might be. That she remembered her beginning, the mother who had told stories to her while she was yet in the womb, the awful death of that mother, her own first abandonment to men, her second to the island, so much is unarguable. Yet even these memories did not seem to move her to any expression. Even if she was aware of it, she did not know what she was. How then could she express anything?
She lay on her royal bed in the Underearth, three days away, or three thousand years away, from Druhim Vanashta. Perhaps she even felt, like the dim echo of some gigantic exploding star, the resonance of Azhrarn’s mourning. But if she did, it gave her nothing, it asked nothing, it turned its face from her.
And so she was—or so she was not.
3
“HE IS NOT a bad son,” said the widow. She wrung her hands and paced up and down. “Those that speak of him, speak well. But then they were afraid of the master he serves. They will not speak ill of my son for fear it should seem they speak ill of Prince Lak. But they look askance. Do you hear much from your Oloru, they say, and their eyes say, He is a cheat and a deceiver, a buffoon of the court who practices all its vices.” She sat down in a chair. Her elder daughter, who had heard her mother pacing and come in to comfort her, now took the widow’s hand. “But I say this,” said the widow, “it is a weakness in him. Only a weakness. Do we blame a man who is born without sight, or a man whose leg is broken and who walks crookedly thereafter? Why then blame a boy whose spirit is unable to see and whose nature has been warped? Can he help it any more than the poor blind man or the unlucky cripple?”
“There, there, Mother,” said the daughter, who was young and fair and golden, somewhat like Oloru himself.
“You are a good girl,” said the mother. “Both good girls. But oh, my son.”
In the window the sky was black and many-starred though the moon had gone down. It would not be dawn for two hours or more. Away beyond the walls of the old house, the ancient forest (the same in which Prince Lak now hunted) could be seen raising its spears and plumes to the sky. Nearby, a ribbon of road turned against the trees toward the city. Along that very road a year since, Oloru had traveled. Wellborn though poor, he meant, he said, to find some great lord who would be his patron. And he had found one. He had found Lak, whose vile hungers and bestial unkindnesses overtopped the misdeeds of all his fellow princes put together.
“Oloru should have stayed at home with us,” said the mother. “He was happy with us.”
“Perhaps he is also happy now,” said the elder daughter, sadly.
His letters had given them to think so. He did not mention what he did at the court of the magician, but only the rich food and fine clothes, and always he sent extravagant presents.
“It was the forest,” said the mother in a whisper now. “The forest is to blame.”
The elder daughter glanced at the window and made a little sign against evil enchantment.
It was a fact, a month before Oloru had undertaken to seek his fortune in the city, there had been a strange incident, though not a rare one for those who lived in the periphery of the forest. Even by day, the wise did not venture there, but Oloru, the widow’s only son, had always scorned such superstition. Now and then he would hunt these woods himself, and bring back game, for which the house was grateful enough. Then came an afternoon when their servant, the only retainer left to them, hastened home alone. Oloru had gone out with him at sunrise, but somehow they had been separated in the trees. Then the servant had searched all morning, and long past noon, but could not discover the young man or any trace of him. At last the servant returned to his mistress the widow, in trepidation.
A few terrible hours then passed in the worst perplexity and distress. Though she dared not venture into the forest, the mother stood at her gate, and the two fair daughters and the servant with her. There they stayed, praying or weeping or silent, or trying to reassure each other, or calling Oloru’s name vainly, shading their eyes against the westering sun and gazing at the trees as if by desperation alone they could draw him forth again. The sun began to go down in a curdle of fire, the road, the house, the waiting figures, all were dyed red, and the trees all black with their tops seeming to burn. Suddenly something moved out from the blackness into the redness. There on the road, walking toward them, was a fifth figure, that of a young man. Oloru.
The household flew toward him, laughing and crying at once. And he too began to run toward them, his arms outstretched.
Then, there seemed to come a curious check. The widow and her daughters faltered and stopped still; the servant drew up with a muttered oath. For himself, Oloru also halted. He lowered his eyes and next his head with a modest shyness.
The mother stared at him. What was it? Was this her son?—yes, yes, who else but he? Her own Oloru that she had thought lost to her. Although—She looked and looked, and her heart beat loudly enough to deafen her and to muddy her eyes, so in the end she thought it was only that. Then she ran forward again and embraced him and he in turn embraced her, and said, “Mother, pardon me for alarming you so. I mistook my way. But as you see, I regained a path and have come back to you.” And while he spoke his bright hair brushed her cheek and it seemed to her she knew him, of course she did, he was her son.
Yet to the sisters also, and to the servant, there had at first seemed something not right, something bizarre. Later, the elder girl had a dream, and in the dream the left side of her brother’s face, as he returned out of the forest, was covered by a half-mask of enamel, and when he drew it off, his own face under it had changed to that of a decaying and horrific male devil. The younger sister also had a dream in which the eyes of her brother had become like the sunset, black and red, and she woke up shrieking. But these dreams were soon forgotten, for there was nothing amiss with Oloru, it was only their troubled fancy. He was as he had always been, golden and handsome, and full of jokes and poetic reveries.
It seemed to them they loved him more than ever in that m
onth, after thinking they had lost him. And then he left them for the city and the magician-lords, and was lost to them in truth.
Presently it was the mother’s turn for nightmares, and often she would rise and pace about, and if her daughters heard her they would come in to comfort her. And she would say, “He is not bad.” She would say, “It is a weakness.” And she would say, “It is the forest’s fault. The forest is to blame.”
Now the elder daughter rose and said, “I will light another candle; this one is almost out. Let us be as cheerful as we can. Who knows, he may tire of that other life.” The mother sighed deeply.
Oloru’s elder sister went to fetch a second candle. As she did so she passed the window, and happening to look out she gave a sharp cry.
“What is it?” exclaimed the mother.
“There—by the well—a great pale animal with ghastly eyes—”
The mother hastened to look. Huddled in the window, the two women stared down at the courtyard. The gate was locked at night, and surely nothing could get in. Nevertheless, there beyond the stone curb of the well, something moved.
“Even by starshine I saw it,” said the girl. “As if it glowed of itself.”
“Lift up the candle,” said the mother. “Let us see this thing and be sure.”
So the feeble candle was lifted, and a little more light fell into the yard. Around the well at once and out of the shadow of a tree which grew there something swiftly came, and the girl parted her lips to scream.
But, “Oh, the blessed gods,” the widow said. “What were you thinking of? It is your brother.”
And there under their window stood Oloru, looking himself like a prince, his eyes fixed on them, more beautiful than all the jewels with which he was dressed.
Soon the whole house was roused and down in the antique pillared hall with Oloru. It was a sad place, this hall, for there were not enough servants now to keep it as it should be kept, and all the best things had been sold years since. But a good wine was lugged up from the cellar, and a host of candles fired.
“I cannot stay with you long,” said Oloru. “But I will return shortly. Then he will be with me.”
“What can you mean?” cried the widow in horror.
“What you think I mean? I intend to bring Lak Hezoor the magician home with me, to be our guest. He will sit here and we will dance attendance on him. He will see my two sisters and lust after both of them.”
The sisters shrank. The elder said, uncertainly, “Do you jest with us, brother?” But the widow cried, “He has gone mad!”
Oloru laughed at that. He flung up his arms, and looked some while at the spiders’ webs in the rafters. “Do you not trust me, dear Mother? I, your only son?”
A cold breath seemed then to blow through the hall. The candles felt it and sank. The women felt it and they trembled. But then Oloru brought his gaze down from the rafters and he said gently, “It is perilous, this enterprise, but I must do it. Once it might have been done another way, easier, and more gaudy. But as things are now, I require such means as you.”
“What are you saying?” asked the widow.
Oloru seemed puzzled. “I hardly know. But this I will promise—no harm shall come to any of you, I swear. What shall I swear on?”
The three women eyed him in dismay and fascination. At last the mother said, “Swear on your life.”
“My life? No, on something better than that. I will swear it, by the power of love.”
The candles straightened up. The coldness went away as if it had heard enough.
“What are we saying?” asked the mother. “This is all nonsense.”
“No, Mother. Never was a fact more sure.” And he sprang to his feet. “Now I leave you. By midmorning we shall be here, I with that monster, and all the parasites who cling about the monster, and the dangerous fiends that wait on him. Be ready.” And he darted out of the hall through the door into the courtyard. When they hurried after him he was nowhere to be seen. The elder sister stole to the opened gate. “What is that creature which runs into the trees?” But the night and the forest were very black. It might have been nothing at all.
Lak Hezoor the magician-prince woke from his stupor and turned about on the cushions. There in the entry to the tent stood a shape, pale and dark, whose eyes seemed cast from far millennia of nights and stars. Lak Hezoor spoke at once a word of power, to detain this visitor, for he sensed a supernatural quality. But even in that instant it was gone.
“A demon,” said Lak Hezoor. “One of Azhrarn’s tribe. Or did I dream it?”
“A dream,” said a charming voice. “What would demons be doing here?”
“Sorcery attracts them. It is well known.”
“But there has been no sorcery.”
“The forest stinks of it. Besides, tell me what I am, Oloru.”
“My master,” said Oloru, who was seated by him on the cushions. “Sun of my life. And a mighty magician. I perceive my error, glamorous lord. Of course the demons follow you as sheep the shepherd.”
Lak Hezoor only grinned at this banter. Plainly Oloru had not seen the demon, lacking the ability or else asleep . . . or only intent on playing with a curious brass toy he seemed now to have about him, a sort of rattle, which he shook up and down.
“Where did you come by that?”
“In the forest, master of masters.”
“What were you doing there, my child?”
“Giving back to the earth what the earth had earlier given me. How changed was the wine I returned her!”
“Well, it will soon be daylight,” said Lak Hezoor, and he began to fondle the hair and body of his companion.
“I wonder,” said Oloru, “how my kindred do at home. I wonder how it is with them.” And then he said, “Imagine I am prostrate on the road at your feet. Imagine I say: She, and she, are my sisters. One is fifteen and one thirteen years of age. Both are virgin.”
“And is that true?” said Lak Hezoor with lazy interest.
“Quite true. And the house is an hour’s journey from this spot.”
“And do they resemble you, your sisters?”
“We are mirrors to each other. Except, I think the younger girl is palest and fairest of the three.”
“Why tell me of it?”
“To give you a moment’s diversion.”
“You have done so.”
The brass rattle, set aside, went rolling across the gorgeous tent, and it made an uncanny, unpleasing noise as it did so, as if it were full of the crumbs of smashed wits.
Oloru’s mother and sisters may also partly have believed they had suffered some communal dream. The emanations of the forest might facilitate such things. Nevertheless, in haste and some fear, they prepared as best they could for the influx of unwanted guests.
The sun was halfway toward the zenith when, as Oloru had warned them would happen, the trees spilled over in a great cavalcade. A few minutes more, and the hunting party of Lak Hezoor was hammering on the gate.
The mother and her two daughters kneeled in the courtyard as Lak Hezoor looked down at them from the height of his horse and his omniscience.
“He speaks well of you,” said the prince to Oloru’s sisters. “He says you are virtuous and have never known a man. Are the men in these parts eyeless, or eunuchs?” This was his supreme courtesy to them, since Oloru was his favored one.
They went into the house, and the women trembled so they could hardly walk.
“My lord,” whispered Oloru, “if it were possible to leave your attendants, and the rest, outside . . . You see how my sisters shake.”
“I thought that was for me.”
“No, my lord. They are distracted by their terror of your slaves. Remove this distraction, then they will palpitate in terror of you alone.”
Lak Hezoor was much amused by this, in the stone house with only an old servant, an old widow, two maidens, and maidenly Oloru who swooned at the sight of a sword, what need for devilish guards? So he packed his servitors
out again, and his distempered court, which had wanted to come in and work havoc. The doors of the house were shut upon the intimate party of six.
For some reason, probably its novelty, it had come to the prince that it joyed him to be civil. So he sprawled on a couch and made idle chat with the widow and her daughters. (He treated with them as if with a brothel keeper and two of her whores.) Food there was in plenty, for the hunt had been well provisioned. The splendid wine, the only wealth of the house, was added, and Lak drained it like water. Oloru too set himself to please. His jokes were wholesome but most droll, and his verse sharp as vinegar. Even his anxious sisters found they had an appetite for the good dinner, and sometimes laughed, though they looked sidelong at their brother, too, seeing how well he understood his master. As the afternoon lengthened, and the sun began to turn its face toward the horizon, Oloru took up his lyre and sang to them. The songs were not ribald, they were all of love. And once he sang of the blind poet Kazir, of his journey through the River of Sleep into the Underearth, where he won Ferazhin Born-of-a-Flower, by matching his heart with the malign intellect of Azhrarn.
