by Tanith Lee
And those many hundred who had come to see and who watched, not comprehending any of it, were filled by terror and amazement, though not, let it be said, by grief.
8
POSSIBLY the tale of the stallion was untrue, or exaggerated. Generally only the warrior in battle chose to ride an ungelded horse, and then not always, for they were intractable beasts. Perhaps there was some other cause for King Qurob’s guilty fear and self-immolation.
Whatever it was, there he lay still, on his face, drifting downstream and turning the brown water red.
Several thousands of people watched his corpse on its way, lining the banks to do so, or staring out from high roofs and balconies. And where the harbor was, the birdlike ships were lying with their wings noon-folded and dipped, but men climbed up to the mastheads or hung over the sides, looking out for the throat-cut king of the city. Word had gone fast through Nennafir. ‘‘And is it the lord?” they cried. “What reason has he to kill himself, the ingrate, when I, with so many good reasons, estimably cling to life?”
But if Qurob heard he gave no answer, as he went drifting by on his face.
And some said, “He was a bad master. But who is next may be worse.”
Qurob had left many sons, and daughters, lust being his pastime. Some of these were children, but others older. And there were some of twenty-five years and more, that he had sired when he was the heir. These might be expected to squabble and the kingdom not to be the better for it.
Then, far down the river, various sightseers thought they caught another sight, that of a man in an orange robe, walking over the water where there was no bridge. Still others spied him on the quays. He was a beggar, a rich lord. He played a pipe of jade, or merely stood musing, gazing downstream. . . . Fate had come to Nennafir.
A few miles to the west, the river loosed itself into the sea. In that direction the tiered merchant vessels of the city were rowed, and from that direction they returned, some heavy-laden, some light and with the promise of gold. Now, seaward, westward, there seemed to be a sort of fierce flash, either on the water, or just above it in the sky. There came a great radiance suddenly, a second sunrise, and from the wrong place, which brought the people of Nennafir in hordes to their windows and into the streets—or else sent them burrowing to hide in fear. And silence fell, expectant and terrible. Those who had come to watch the floating of their corpse king were due for superior wonders.
The light in the sky turns soft and flowerlike. A day-moon, not a sun. Only look, it is nothing horrible or fearsome, no sea monster out of the depths raging inland, no animate lightning. It is something lovely and fair, something that makes a beautiful music, and the glow on it is rainbows, and the glimmer of colors on the wings of birds and the backs of big fish leaping.
“A ship!” exclaimed a thousand voices.
It was a ship. But oh, such a ship it was.
It came upriver, between the banks of the city, gliding. And as it came, Qurob’s cadaver slipped down under the water and was gone, from sight and from mind.
Tall, the ship, seven tiers of it, so it should not be able to stay upright or to move, and many, after, declared that indeed it did not rest utterly on the water, but a little over it, on a cloud of bright air. Yet seven oar banks turned, and the tips of their long spoons stirred the river.
It was the shape of a colossal lily, the ship, with a myriad down-folding petals, but the prow was the head of a slender dragon which came out from the flower with looking eyes and parted jaws. What woods had gone into the making of the ship it was not easy to tell, for every inch was plated by poured silver and hammered gold, so it blazed on and dazzled everything that gazed at it. Transparent bubbles like ghost-suns hung over the ship, and rays rang from the golden oars. Multihued, the birds came and went through the sheen of it, and the fish sported in its wake. It had no sail, and no one on its decks, and no cry from within of any directing the oars. Only music played, with no source. It soaked into brain and limb. The listeners felt a delirium fasten on them, they longed to spring about and dance, and quantities did so, clapping their hands and shouting joyfully, although there was no reason for joy, more for suspicion and alarm.
“Only see,” said children in the crowds of Nennafir, “there is a lady on the ship.”
It was a fact; the only living thing to be seen was up in the prow. A crown of gold spiked from the dragon’s head, and there in its circlet stood a beautiful woman, also clad in gold, small as a doll, her long black hair about her.
“That is a mighty sorceress,” said the crowds, to their children.
But others kneeled. “A supernatural thing,” they said.
Up in the fence of gold, the golden woman did not move, yet her eyes seemed to touch every face and mind.
Then she lifted up her left hand—only that, a gesture remote, out on the river, high in the air.
And the ship stilled, the oars lay like teeth in a burning comb. The birds settled, the fishes sank, and the music died.
But the architecture of the city shifted, groaned, and cracked. Tiles scattered from the walls. Nennafir trembled, with fright or pleasure. And from their places there rose up the white stone cats of Nennafir, yawning and snarling in their carven throats.
Jumping from their high roofs and slinking off their plinths, they loped through the panic-stricken streets. At the river’s edge, where the people shrank from them, they gathered with creamy fire in their stone eyes, bowing to the ship.
Then the light of the ship went out. Where it had been began a huge wave, brown for the river, with crystal veins and swirlings of gold and silver, and it swept over with the dragon’s head still staring in it, and the golden crown and the supernatural sorceress, and curled down on the land. The multitude fled screaming before it, thinking to be drowned or broken.
Thus, on the emptied river quay, Azhriaz stepped out of the burning wave, and stood in a circle of bowing stone cats.
The poets and scholars would say this, that there she waited, her eyes blue as the sky, her hair the night, dressed in the sun, her skin the moon. And the city fell on its face to worship her, knowing at once that a being of Upperearth had descended.
She was plainly a daughter of heaven, of the etheric regions.
Her name, when they learned it, carried a strange echo, but they would not decipher it. And the ways of gods were beyond the questioning of men.
As she walked up through the streets of Nennafir toward the palace (where already certain of the heirs of Qurob had set to, to stab, strangle, and poison each other), her footsteps indented the paving, which thereafter shone. For decades these footsteps were one of the marvels of the city, and worked miracles. They faded in the end. She had no attendant on her walk but the white stone cats, thirteen of them, which hedged her round jealously. And the awe-smitten people deliriously followed, some yet singing and clapping their hands, some pale and in a trance, some flushed with anxiety.
The soldiers at the palace gate were moved to throw down their spears and kneel. They understood no man opposes the will of heaven.
The doors of the palace opened of themselves.
The gleaming footprints of Azhriaz passed over the court and up the stair and into the halls within.
So fair she was, the poets wrote, who could look at her and not know her for a goddess?
Azhrarn had said: “I will give them a god to adore. Let them discover what it is to be ruled by such.”
BOOK TWO: Azhriaz the Goddess
Part One: Matters of Stone
1
IN A BONEYARD of a desert, men were laboring to uproot the slim tall stones the winds of time had sculpted there.
The desert was all of stone, pale and faceless. Its dusts had turned to dust and to a dust of that dust, until they vanished altogether. Now there was a light white powder from the chiseling, and as each of the pillars fell, though the pulleys steadied it, tiny shards flew off into the air.
A road ran over the desert yard to a city which, bein
g a vassal, was about to make its septennial tribute. Precious metal and jewels, herds of beasts and slaves, these were the offerings of this city. But it was requested to send also materials of building, so a forest of trees had been cut down, and here the forest of stone was tumbling likewise.
“Behold this pillar now,” said the overseer to his newest gang. “One of the oldest in this haunted nasty place. The wind has howled by it a thousand years, I should not be surprised. And now it must fall to please the Witch-Goddess. Well, they do a lot of building there, I gather. Strike away.”
“What is that mark there, high up, like a huge black eye?” asked one of the gang, a comely youth desirous the overseer should notice as much.
The overseer did so. “Well, my boy,” said he, “there are holes in some of these stones, and sometimes something fills up the hole. And then time passes and the filling marries with the stone, and turns to a stone itself. Some animal,” said the overseer, taking the youth aside, “crawled in there, centuries ago, and died, and became one with the stone. I never knew a hole,” said the overseer, inviting the youth into his tent, “that did not, usually, eventually get filled up with something.”
The rest of the new gang toiled on in the heat of the day. Their mallets and axes bit into the stone, and their saws ate away at it. In the midst of the afternoon, the stone swayed. The ropes tautened as the pillar teetered in their grip; it swung sideways and plummeted, and the ropes pulled it up before it could beat on the ground and shatter. When the stone was loaded on the cart, two or three men climbed in to look at the black opacity that curved out from it. They rapped on the darkness, to see if it would yield some interesting thing, but it did not oblige them. Their utensils made no impression.
To the city then, this stone, with the others. And then into the caravan of tribute, and away eastward, a journey a year and a half in length, to the wide lands of the Witch-Goddess. Of whom the city heard much, though she had never been seen there.
She had risen in the east like a second sun. Three decades this city had known of her. She was eternally young, the Witch-Goddess, always lovely. Cruel and pitiless she was too, and warlike, and a magician. She descended from heaven, and the seas and rivers divided themselves before her. She landed at a place called Nennafir, the Flower of the River Bank, and made it hers in three hours. And then, in three months, she turned the armies of flowering Nennafir outward to conquer the world, in three thirds—and in three years it seemed she had made a good beginning. From coast to coast, isle to isle, the mountains, the valleys, the towns, the cities—one full third, perhaps somewhat more. Only the wastes, or remoter lands, had she, so far, ignored. Where her legions did not go with their brazen tramp and bloody steel, where her magic did not fly like a honey-throated, jet-black bird—kissing blade, killing song—the word of her went, the gossip, and that was enough. There had been others like her, it was true. There had been a witch-queen once who subdued many of the lands of the earth and seduced many others, Zorayas, who was now a legend. But Zorayas, for all her might, glory, villainy, beauty, was mortal. This one was a god. To defy her was not merely death, but blasphemy.
A hundred stories were told of her, or seven hundred, or seven thousand. Some were lies, or other tattle (of such as Zorayas and her kind), which were caught up like flotsam in a tide. Some of the stories were real enough. But the deeds of conquest and omnipotence have a sameness, as does the exposition of most evil.
The caravan of tribute ran on, through its initial months of traveling, eastward, and soon the tales lay so thick about it the wheels of the carts and wagons could hardly move for them, and the carriage animals stumbled and perished—stuck and stifled in the swamp of a living myth.
In the third month of the journey, the way became physically congested, by other caravans from other places, all foaming into one enormous channel, as if the dams of countless waters had given way.
All roads now led to Az-Nennafir.
Mere city it was no more, but a metropolis covering so vast an area, thirteen gigantic kingdoms might be sunk in it. A city large as a country, and thereafter a country sprawled through one third of the discovered earth: Empire.
Men sickened, too, coming even to the periphery of that spot. The emanations of its sorcery, though long months and endless miles away, filled mortals with wild emotions. Some men fell subject to fits and to fevers—they danced in their sleep, slept as they walked. The hale declined and the sick grew well. There was a vapor of madness everywhere. And the land changed.
First came a passage through mighty mountains, and the mountains were bald and shone in the distance like pale silver. Nothing grew on them, no tree, no blade of vegetation. Those that passed up and over them saw they were of a grayish granite that in some parts had turned to a kind of mirror. The sun pierced through them, or the moon by night. Beyond the mountains, rolling plains of savage grass, the stems of which were thick and green. The grass was sweet, and brewed in a vat made a green wine which, drunk too often, turned men’s wits, or blinded them. Birds drifted over the grasslands on enormous wings, flying parasols of darkness. Sometimes they stooped and took some animal from its cover, or a child—for herders lived on the plains, in huts of grass, clothed in grass, playing on pipes made from the grass stems, and strange in the head from breathing always the grass scent.
Other lands followed, steep and steepled, low as trenches, desolate, populous. There was a sea over which a bridge had been built, and supported partly, it must be, by sorcery. Its legs were sunk down deep into the bedrock under the water. Many days on the bridge the caravans must go, seeing only ocean on either side of the high parapets, or the spurling sea-sky overhead. And seafowl rose before the caravans in a white wind. Or sometimes huge creatures were sighted in the water, swimming by.
In the sixth month of the land voyage east, the towns and cities lay on the ground as thick as locusts, each with only a short stretch of free land between, and over this land the cities fought for possession, but the caravans passed, inviolable, since they carried tribute to the Witch-Goddess. There was not a city now, a town, a village, that did not have a temple dedicated to her, and her looming statues arose on the highways. They were all unalike, yet all similar, white as snow or ice, the hair of black—ebony, agate—the eyes of blue—great sapphires, or blue emeralds—and the offerings made before the statues lay there and decayed; even the birds of the air would not steal from her, or the coneys or the foxes. Heaps of fruits, and vials of perfume and amphorae of liquor, and on the white stone altars the bones stuck up like drawn swords through the rotting carcasses of sacrifice. The dizzying stench of all this filled the atmosphere everywhere around. Sometimes priests were at the altars. Flames burned and smoke lifted, through the loud hymns of praise. It had a blue robe, her order, blue for the eyes of the Goddess, a blue like no other blue on the earth. By night in those lands, you saw the fires of offering burning on every side, dotting the darkness, which otherwise glowed faintly with the lamps of the crowded cities, or glared where one of them was on fire.
In the ninth month of its traveling, the caravan which carried the desert stones—along with those other caravans which had traveled a smaller while, or a greater, but a trek of nine more months still before them all—came to the edge of the country known now as Az-Nennafir, the heartland of the Empire of the Goddess.
No man had ever gone on this expedition more than once in his life. Once was enough. And in most families, the onus of the adventure was passed from father to son, a destiny that could not be avoided.
The outskirts of the heartland of the Goddess, locked in sorcery, were mostly empty. Here were deserts, of a sort. After the teem of the cities, it seemed all life had hidden itself. There were many differing accounts of these regions, and probably they did differ vastly, from one sector to another, for of the large numbers of men who approached, each saw only that landscape he traveled through, and, undoubtedly, so much was sufficient for him.
The stone-bearing caravan, with
its companions, then, came in over a rocky precipitous height, and down into a hollow smooth as burnished copper in the dawn. Long pans of metallic ground lay before them, some with pools of metallic water in them, where none would drink, not even the thirsty animals. Days they moved on the face of this geography, under a sweeping sky. When the nights came, there were curious shapes in the heavens—not to be confused with clouds; vague misty forms that went to and fro, ghost-giants, or phantom gods. Stars shot from their moorings—if they were stars. Some crashed on the land, rushing over the encampments of the travelers, lighting the sky with dreadful colors bright as noon, making a sound of screaming, or tearing cloth. Where they fell, over the dim metallic hills, there would come thunder and a blast of fire, and out from that place would roar a sudden brief gale, hot as a furnace, blowing the tents from their pegs and men off their feet, and smelling of essences that had no name.
A month or two then, in this odd environment, unsafe with falling stars. And then the desert of metal gave onto a desert of blue sand under a drenched blue sky. Fountains sprang here from boulders of violet quartz. The water and the blueness refreshed and did no harm—or seemed to do none; who could be sure? (No man, they said, goes that road and returns as sane as he went. They were resigned to it, mostly, having no choice.)
Another month or two in the blue deserts, track of time already being somewhat approximate. And then a white desert, where streams of milk ran from boulders of alabaster. And next, black pastures running black beer—or ink; best be careful when drinking. And then pure water, a land of it, a lake going from the foot’s edge to the horizon, with here and there tangle-haired water-forests or primeval trees in which fish nested, flopping from out the lake to tend round eggs like opals, sitting upon them and panting gently, with solemn wintry eyes. A causeway led over the lake. It stopped at a wall.
