by Tanith Lee
The wall had become visible some miles off, and even those who had heard of it had stared. It was a wall of tiles, enameled with winged beasts or tailed beasts—it went up and up, and up and up. It seemed to hold off the sky.
The caravans crowded the causeway, piled against the wall. The day had melted into the lake, and the fish dived from their nests and played, gleaming, in the water. The moon had come up, unseen beyond the wall, in the east. She lifted higher and higher until she could crest the wall. When this happened, the tiles whitened, and a door appeared, unlocked by moonlight seemingly, gradually gaping wide. The caravans went through, to the last wheel and pack animal, and the last man. After which, the wall closed itself.
It was pitch dark inside the wall, for the moon had now got over the top of it and lay outside to please the fish in the lake.
But a glowing road lay on the inner side, a road like golden fire. They saw it coil and wind away before them. Wearied out, yet obediently they took this road, and were laved in its flaming aura, which seemed to give no light above or to either side, but which nourished them furiously. The exhausted animals pranced and trotted and galloped. The tired men laughed and cried them on.
So they raced toward the city thirteen kingdoms vast, and entered it.
There was an opinion it was not, after all, sorcery, that made Az-Nennafir the way it was, but rather the fantasies of mankind concerning the place.
Those that returned (not all did so) murmured of size and hue, and the manner in which things were contrary, and, too, of a beauty which had upset them, driven them forever insane in little ways. Or huge ways. Dull men sometimes became poets, or hanged themselves, after Az-Nennafir, but that was the least of it.
The sun there is blue, they said. It is like shimmering dusk at midday. This is due, they said, to a canopy of sapphire which overpanes all the kingdom—the Goddess-dom. Or it is a gargantuan lens set in the sky. Or plain magic. Here and there a hole has been manufactured in the canopy, lens or magic, and under this the sun is to be found in an oasis of fiery brightness.
By night, there are seven moons, of various largeness and shade, and varieties of stars—they are clockwork, or sorcery, or both, and they may be seen to move, slowly, in wonderful formations, occasionally passing each other, when—if they touch—they make a melodious chiming.
All growing things excel there. They attain uncanny burgeonings, and tower in the air. There are rose trees whose roses are so great a girl may recline in them. The petals are waxy, but they exude a perfume sufficient to render one unconscious. Cedars there are which reach the height of a hill, or small mountain, and the lower moons, passing through them at night, scatter their boughs to the earth, frosted with peculiar incandescence. The buildings, meanwhile, are as tall, or taller. There are stairways which it requires a whole morning to ascend. There are spires which vanish from sight into the blue sunshine—they have stained-glass windows in them which stretch down to the ground, as broad as three gateways, but above growing narrow as a beaded thread.
And while the returned travelers speak or write or screech or babble of this, someone or other, not properly fearful, may ask: “But did you look upon the Goddess? Did you gaze at Azhriaz, the Daughter of Upperearth?
And one who had returned might answer in this way:
“After we had journeyed some months through the built country of the City of Az-Nennafir, we came to the bank of a little brown sinuous river. Oh, it was a good quarter mile across, the river, yet all the things about had dwarfed it utterly. Nevertheless, on the farther bank, there went up an edifice which was a temple-palace of the Goddess. The priests came, and we laid down our tribute. It was weighed and counted, but I hardly heeded what went on. I stared only at that edifice, which might contain her, she that holds us in thrall. Now, she is cruel and pitiless and indifferent (which we have learned, through her teaching, the gods are to mankind—and indeed, have not the lessons of our lives ceaselessly informed us this was so?). We know she may strike us dead with a look, or send any one of us to a hideous torture, which has happened in the past, yes, to those who fear and reverence her. While to ask her for anything is without point; she will not grant the boon. And as for pleasing her by prayer or by oblation, the gods take no note, nor any pleasure in such, though omission they may punish. Yet, she is supernal and she is among us, and none, I think, stands at the entry to one of her palaces and does not dream he may catch a glimpse of her.
“Well then. Certain of the towers of the palace soared so high they dimmed from my view. On others, the blue sunlight trickled like rain. Three of the white stone cats of the city, big as elephants, prowled on the farther bank, before a flight of steps more than three hundred in number, and every tread laid with a mineful of sapphires. And above the sapphire stair was a golden terrace, and above that were two golden doors—each itself the height of a king’s house, cellar to roof, out here in the ordinary world. And on the doors was written her name in symbols so beautiful one could not bear to look at them.
“By now the crowds on the bank, where the tribute was being weighed and counted, had swelled to a million persons or more. Suddenly a trumpet sounded, out of the very ether. Such a silence fell that a man might think himself deafened, save he hears the tumult of his own heart.
“There came a perfume, then, that all the swooning roses of that miracle of cities could not rival, and the waters of the river turned to gold and silver, and fishes of jade sprang up in it, and azure lilies bloomed. The great doors of gold with the name Azhriaz upon them opened softly as two butterfly wings. And there was a blue fire burning between them. And out of the fire, she came.
“Perhaps I may find words for all things in the City, but for her I can find very few. There is needed a new language to describe her. She is very beautiful, as the statues show her, dark and pale, with eyes of the sky. But she is the Goddess, and so human words can never be enough. She wore a silver garment, but it was also gold. Such jewels lay on her breast and arms and in her ears, upon her feet and fingers, at her waist and in her long hair, that seeing them, jewels ceased to mean anything at all. She wore a high diadem of gold, set with diamonds, and from it floated a veil colored like a blush, sprinkled too with diamonds as if with water drops. Her arms she held outward from her body; the nails of her hands were long, and white as snow. On the palms of her hands were gold and silver patterns, or they may have been infant stars. Her feet did not rest on the ground, not even on those sapphire steps. She stood in air, and a soft gleaming cloud curled under her soles. Her hair spread out like rays of a black sun. She was a vast distance from us, yet by her power she was close enough one saw her blink, and when she did so, there was a flash of fire, as if her lids struck sparks out of her eyes.
“Then, she spoke. Her voice was low, and sweet as music. I heard it in my skull, but not in my ears. She said: ‘Do you know me?’ And falling on our knees and our faces, we cried out that we did, and we worshiped her. Some thrust knives into their flesh, others slew themselves, or cast themselves down into the river, where the fish ate them, and we saw it and applauded. I myself slashed off my left hand—see the stump. That was my first offering. I felt no pain, only ecstasy. But it was not enough to give her. I was about to plunge the dagger in my breast when again she spoke. She said: ‘Remember, to the gods you are nothing. To Azhriaz, the Goddess, you are only grains of dust or sand. You do well, however, to sculpt our images from stone, for stone we are, we, the gods—stone that cannot be broken, stone-hard-handed, stony of eye and mind, having stones for hearts. Yes, the gods are stones, and you are sand. So it is and always shall be. What then is your answer to heaven?’ And we loved her and groveled down, and swallowed the delicious mud of the river bank. That was our answer. And once more I raised the dagger to give her my life, but I felt her whisper in my soul: Not that. And she told me what it was she desired, without desire, of me. And so, I have returned and done her bidding. That which I am satisfied she carelessly required and has forgotten. Go to m
y house; you will discover there my wife and children, murdered for a sacrifice.
“Blessed be heaven, and the Goddess-on-Earth.”
2
THERE WAS a boy who had traveled with the caravans west to east, and had charge over the pale stone pillars from the boneyard desert. He came on the journey because his father, who should have had the mission, died of the fear of it a month before. The boy was not in happy mood, and worn down himself with fright. It was not surprising he should often have bad dreams throughout the journey. However, it seemed to him the dreams were worse when he lay near one particular stone, and that when he slumbered distantly from it, the dreams were flimsy, or did not come at all. There was nothing remarkable about the stone, except it had a black blemish at one end. What then did the boy dream, lying near the stone pillar with the black blemish? He dreamed someone flung him into a fire, or else he dreamed that it was he who did the flinging of another, and the victim was one he loved, though he never saw who it might be, nor, waking, had he ever loved any with such intensity. Then again, there was one dream where the pillar stood upright and became a slender dark-faced man, in a robe of white, who touched the boy, and the boy mourned, for he wished to die and he could not. And there was also a dream when he beheld a city tinted like swans and blood, and the sea covered it and turned it to coral.
He was an ill-educated boy; he knew next to nothing of the legends. The living legend of the Goddess-on-Earth had, let it be said, somewhat overset the balance in these matters. But if he had known more of the old tales, he might well have said to himself, “Why do I dream the dreams of Zhirek the Magician, he that killed Simmu, or meant to do so, and gave Simmu’s city of Simmurad to the seas of the earth’s eastern corner?” But, unknowing, the boy only said to himself, “Alas, this journey!” And moved farther away from the pillars of stone.
So the caravans came in, like wrecked shipping, on the shores of the marvel of Az-Nennafir.
And at last on the bank of the brown river then, with the gigantic spectacle of the temple-palace over the water, under the spectral shadows of seven moons, expecting to be maimed or die in the morning, and all around the tribute of a hundred lands, and their people—every one of them with much the same thought as he—the boy climbed up on the supine stack of columns, and slept that night lying over the very damned stone, from sheer defiance. For what could a dream do to him worse than Azhriaz the Goddess?
But a dream came which was not like any of the others.
It seemed to the boy he woke, and he lay all alone on the river bank, under a gentle sky with a single crescent moon and some mild singing stars. And nearby, through the blue water flowers, a woman walked. She was veiled, yet she seemed to have a radiance on her. He thought: It is she. But in that moment the woman came up to him, and he looked into the deep clearness of her eyes, and understood no goddess—for the gods were unloving—would look so kindly on a human thing.
“Lady,” he said, “what is it you want of me?”
“I will tell you a riddle,” she replied. “You must try to guess its meaning.”
Then the boy forgot it all, his father’s death, the journey, the place, and the delirious horror to come. He smiled and sat waiting attentively.
“There is,” said the woman, and her voice was beautiful to hear, “a casket set with fabulous gems, glittering and hard. And within this casket is a casket of gold, and within that casket a casket of silver. Open these three in turn, and you will find a casket of crystal, and inside the casket of crystal one of pearl, and within the pearl a box of velvet. And within the velvet an exquisite jewel. But within the jewel, what?”
The boy thought. He said, “Inside so many rich wrappings, only something more rich can lie.”
“Ah, you must read with your heart and not your wit,” said the woman, so tenderly tears started to his eyes. “How rich is the body of any mortal creature, yet under its fine covers, there is only bone, and only bone remains when all the jewels of the flesh are gone. Bone, and one other item, better than the rest, but unseen. Now, open the six rich caskets, gaze into the jewel. There you will find a child, weeping.”
The boy sighed, comprehending nothing, save that this did not need comprehension.
“Get up now,” said the woman quietly, “and cut the rope which binds the stone you lie over. At dawn, when the priests come to examine the tribute, this one pillar will roll away and fall into the river. Do not let it distress you. You shall go home safely.”
The boy turned eagerly, and with his knife he cut the rope which secured the baleful stone to its fellows. When he looked again for the woman, she was walking away along the bank through the flowers. Though it was a dream, a night breeze had began to blow, and a wing of her hair was tossed shining from under her veil. And this hair, though young as she herself, was whiter than the moon. But the boy was unversed in the stories. Her white hair told him nothing.
Dawn came, green and turquoise, lifting its blue cornflower of a sun.
The river bank roused, the boy with the rest, recollecting nothing of what he had dreamed.
The priests of the Goddess came over the river to shore on a raft of gold, and the oars rowed by themselves. The priests, in the robes of that blue like which there was no other, chanted in a shrill groan, and bells rang, and incense smoke, blue on blue on blue, unwove into the sapphire-lidded sky.
The tribute of the many lands was laid out like a market, oddly quiet, and the blue priests passed silently amid the tribute, weighing, counting. Among them were both old and young, and there were female orders, priestesses of Az-Nennafir, but in truth they each wore the same face, ageless and lacking a gender. They had given their spirits to Azhriaz, or to the ethos they recognized by her name. They had relinquished all identity, and gained in lieu of it no other thing. Pithless gourds. They worshiped, knowingly, the indifferent hatred of heaven.
But all this while, the vaster part of the multitude gazed only across the river. They wondered if she would appear to them. She did not always do so. For all the swarms of people who came to her City, only a fraction witnessed her. The majority were bitter all their lives, cheated by being spared.
Six white stone cats, big as elephants, patrolled the farther bank. The jewelry of the stair glittered like a glacier. The high doors of gold did not quiver.
The boy who had had the dream was also gazing, his heart in his mouth. He was aware a priest came by him, eyeing the scores of white natural columns, bundled there like huge posts. As the thin hand of the priest reached out to one of these bundles, its topmost column, resting some thirty feet in the air, suddenly leapt free. It flew outward like a live thing, and then came hurtling down. The priest, making no move to avoid it, raised his arms and shouted aloud: “Azhriaz!” And the column struck him in the chest; as he fell it ground over him and on, toward the river.
Other men scrambled to safety; only the flowers were in the column’s path, and did not stop it. That stone from the desert one and a half years away dropped into the Goddess’s river, and the water gushed upward and poured down again, but the stone, having gone under, re-emerged, and lay afloat on the surface like a long white bone with one black knot in it. The boy, still remembering no iota of his dream, had flung himself flat to wait for death, but the priests took no notice of him. One cried in a great voice: “An omen! The gift itself rushes to meet the Goddess.”
But they did not attempt to fish out the pillar, bizarrely floating there and, borne now despite its weight—which did not seem inclined to sink it—to drift with the current downstream.
And that was all. Presently the boy, shaking with trepidation, got up. The portion of tribute he had been in charge of was declared in order. The golden doors of the temple-palace did not open, and the Goddess did not appear. No attempt was made to salvage the dead priest who had allowed the pillar to crush him. It was thought offensive to treat the sick or to display pomp in funerals, since punishment through illness and death was the casual will of Upperearth. Corpse
s were dragged by the heels and hair to pits, and burned there. And in a while, some did this office for the priest. Others came to deal with the treasures of tribute, and soon the bank was empty, but for all the people and their much-lightened beasts and wagons, and their hearts—emptied also.
The boy stood and sobbed with raging disappointment, one of countless others. He wished to swim the river and immolate himself on the sapphire steps. He shivered with resentful ire that he had not been asked to murder or to die for her. Nor was he alone in this seizure.
And it was months after, on the tedious journey homeward, that his hysterical craving gave way to a sulky gladness. And it seemed to him then that he had seen her, all alone by night, but that was in a dream.
3
SOME QUANTITY of air there must have been, trapped in the sealed cavity of the pillar stone, to keep it afloat. Unsinking, it wended through the blue day on the river. The flowers of the bank brushed it and sought to detain it, but it slipped easily from each embrace, though showered by petal-tears. Spangled flies pursued the stone, wanting to alight, but found the texture not to their liking, buzzily discussed it to its detriment, and flew away. And as the day declined, and dusk began to purple the river, the pillar came between great gardens on the shore, and here armored crocodiles of prodigious size slunk from the reeds, and approached it. “What manner of beast is this?” they sinisterly mumbled. “It moves as we do, graceful and leaden, but where are the jaws of it? It has only one dull eye.” And they snarled their teeth of white and yellow, and closed up their lazy-lidded hellish gaze, and rowed away on strong spiky legs.
But the blossoming rushes of the gardens, whose dusk-colored lily heads stood up from the water, had made a net beneath the surface. Here they caught enormous jewels that were sometimes thrown in the river, unwary fish of startling girth, and the corpses of men who had sacrificed themselves to the Goddess through drowning. Now, the net caught the pillar of stone, gently, and held it fast as chains.
