Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4
Page 28
How long this spree lasted he could not be sure. But after a while, he began to take note of things and to reason again, and he grew once more dissatisfied, and yearned for the expression, and the limits, of a fleshly container.
How to get one? He might invade the physique of some other, but who could guess what battle would ensue? To find some corpse and occupy that was not to be relished. Another means occurred to him.
He came on a city soon, and that city was Tirzom Jum upon its cliff, beneath its dome—though at the hour he did not know its name, nor care.
Invisible and weightless, he skimmed about the place, and when he wished to, seeped in through the dome itself, and blew around the upper streets.
Now it seemed to Tavir, who in the dream was not Tavir, that he had been formerly a prince, handsome, and schooled in sorcery. Therefore he concluded he must be again a prince, handsome and a sorcerer, for old habits die hard. And to excuse this sameness he remarked to himself that he could be all that again and do differently with it—as before, let it be whispered low, had he not rather wasted his gifts?
Presently Tavir-not-yet-Tavir beheld a gorgeous girl carried in a litter. Black as night she looked to him, with reseda hair. Such a mold could only make handsome sons—
He followed the girl. He dared even, intellectual air current that he was, to sit in her lap and murmur Oh, dear Mother! to her from time to time. Then, however, the litter came to a mansion, and the girl was borne in. Who should greet her in an inner chamber but a stooped fellow, princely black and green as she, but missing most of his teeth and those remaining as black as his hide, while his hair was streaked by white. Worse, he looked on the girl and said: “Good day, Wife. I have been reading in my library—which is, as you know, my only pleasure—and the sage says this: ‘How privileged the bride that her husband has not deflowered.’ Are you not then gratified that I have laid not one finger on you, and that you will stay a virgin all your years?”
“Whatever you will,” said the girl, listlessly.
But Tavir—and so he shall henceforth be called, for so he had now determined to be—Tavir flew up in the air like a wax bung out of a shaken bottle, and hitting the chamber roof, exclaimed: “Never, on my life!”
The aged pedant sucked his un-nice teeth and squinted at the ceiling. He was a sorcerer, naturally, and had detected something amiss.
“Can some air-inhaling fish have got in?” inquired he.
“Old fool!” raved Tavir from above. “I will show you what a fish it is!” And flapping down he gave the old man a sound blow. And though not corporeal, his shot had the strength of passion behind it, so the pedant leapt and clutched his nose. Waving a stick of carved black vitreous from some submarine lava flow as cooled now as his own, he cried: “A haunt! Some fiend let loose by others’ careless conjuration. Have I not warned you before, Wife, that you must curb your witcheries. I am the husband and I will work the magic. Go to your apartments in disgrace, and peruse there the improving books I have sent you!” At which the lovely girl shrank and trembled and crept from the room. Tavir pursued her, pausing only to inflict upon the old pedant another savage blow. Leaving him howling, Tavir rose with the princess up through the house into some demure little chambers of great richness.
“Hush, Sweetheart-Mother,” he consoled the virgin-wife, flitting affectionately about her. “There are other men in this city.”
He remained concerned at her dejection until, having locked her doors by both key and charm, the black princess proceeded to arrange a spell upon the floor. And when the genie of it appeared, she stamped her foot and railed at it with some spirit. “Did you not promise me a handsome husband and a handsome son?” screamed she. “Where are they, pray, and how much longer must I endure this wait?” The genie looked abashed, but Tavir, ever resourceful, dashed into its open mouth, and by cleverly manipulating the big tongue against the palate and fangs, in proper rhythm with its attempt to speak otherwise, caused it to announce: “It shall be done. By tomorrow’s sunset, Fate shall rap the door.”
Then, leaving both genie and princess dumb with amazement, Tavir dived out again and so through a succession of closed windows, and through the city to find himself a suitable sire.
This deed was not so very taxing for Tavir. He merely selected from among the highest of the high princes of Tirzom Jum the wealthiest, best-looking, and most accomplished specimen, luckily wifeless. This prince was disposed to walk in his gardens, and Tavir accompanied him.
“You suppose,” said Tavir, unseen, unheard, invidious, “that you are happy. But you are not. Here you are, and no one by. Can it be your scholars and your friends now bore you? That your concubines no longer wake your pulses? But you are wise. This is safer. Go out into the city, you would find your heart’s desire.”
Now, though he was a mage, Tavir’s father (and there is no use denying that is what he would become) was young, and did not always measure every act or idea. And so, sensing the import of Tavir’s wheedling, the prince came to believe these fancies sprang from a sort of sorcerous intuition. And thus this educated and astute young man let himself be led like a bull by the nose.
Out into the city he therefore went, and so came, in a sea-green sunset, under the window of Tavir’s mother (and no use denying that, either).
“Do not look up at that casement,” exclaimed Tavir to his princely father. The prince naturally at once looked up at it. “Beware,” insisted Tavir. “Your heart’s desire lies in prison within. See her, and you are lost. Best leave the spot instantly.” Tavir’s father accordingly lingered in the street, beset by strange emotions.
Tavir then flew up the wall and into the room of the princess. He found her in the process of tearing to bits and burning the improving literature given by her spouse. Hastily blowing a white smut or two from her face, Tavir propelled the lady to the window: “Do not dare look out into the street. Your fate is below—”
So she reached the window and looked down with a wildly beating heart, and there she saw the prince looking up in much the same condition.
Soon she puts her hand to her brow. The prince starts forward. “Madam, are you unwell?”
“Quite well,” she answers. It is a lie. The sword has gone in her heart. As for him, never was fish more hooked.
Just then a series of appalling crashes, thuds, and yowls shock through the house. Tavir is about other business, chasing the aged pedant around his library and hurling books and scrolls at his venerable head, now and then getting in a hearty bite with incorporeally impassioned teeth.
“Save me!” cries the pedant.
“Madam,” says the prince in the street to the princess in the window, “you are the moon clad in black pearl, your casement is the east and you rising in it to give me light. I would say more about this, but I think your household to be in some trouble—” And so saying, he goes to the house door and thunders on it.
“Oh, fate,” faintly says the princess.
The pedant’s alarmed servants have already drawn the bolts and let in the prince, who rushes upstairs to the old fellow’s assistance. Flinging wide the barriers of the library, the prince strides in.
“It is a conjuration—a fiend—” shrieks the pedant, perched on a bookshelf and batting volumes with his stick.
The prince utters an admonishing incantation. Tavir, who is not of course at all affected by it, with a parting kick, desists.
“My rescuer,” says the old man.
“Her father?” asks the young one.
“Whose father?”
Prudently the prince falls silent.
At this moment the princess comes hurrying into the room, having combed her glorious hair and donned an attar of sea blossoms, to sink in a helpless swoon in the arms of the young prince.
“She is my wife,” the pedant introduces her.
Much too late.
Mischief-maker Tavir, soul on the loose looking for harbor. Less to do now the wheel is rolling of its own volition.
“I have lain in wait whole hours behind the fifth column in the annex where it sprang on you with the hot water,” says the prince. “I have gone into each room, intoned the incantation, and burned rare incenses.” Doubtless this is why he is so out of breath, and the virgin-wife out of breath for a similar reason, having dutifully followed him.
But it seems the young couple have a furtive glance. Why has the elemental never struck at them?
Well, Tavir has done a thing or two in that quarter. He has said to him, “Do not touch her. One touch leads to another.” He has said to her, “One touch of his hand and you are will-less. Run away.” And the young prince has touched her and the princess has not run away. And after much persuasion, denial, acquiescence, doubt—on both sides—and not even a prayer to aid them, since their kind does not reverence the gods, Tavir has had the smug joy of seeing them embraced upon a couch of spilled potions and unsaid exorcising spells.
And after this, all air and aspiration, Tavir keeps watch. While, all ire and perspiration, the old pedant does likewise.
And one night the princess is agitated, and Tavir peers in at her womb, as the pedant peers in at a window. Tavir’s gaze passes easily through black pearl flesh and heart-of-apple bones, and sees in the sweet and secret inner room, a bud no larger than an eyelash’s tip. The view of the pedant is impeded by a lattice.
(Mine, quoth Tavir, staking claim to what he has seen, unimpeded by anything, so all the wandering entities, wisps, and psychic wiggles in the cosmic crowd scene should be aware who owned the vacant lot.)
But the princess is revealing her delicate condition to the prince, who clasps his inamorata, and swears to protect her. “By a spell of my mother’s,” adds the prince, “I might rid you of this burden.”
Rid? Burden? crows Tavir inaudibly, hitting against the ceiling once again.
Unwitting ally, the pedant chooses this moment to fall through the lattice.
“Villain!” says he to the prince, who is helping him up. “Did I not all this while suspect it was you yourself set that fiendly thing on me, to gain entry to both my house and my wife?”
And stick awave, he is howling now for his retainers, and so forces the lovers to flee into the night of sea-murmurous Tirzom Jum. From one rich house to another, richer, they go. And at the threshold of the second, the princess says to the prince, “Long since a genie divined for me that I should bear a son. It is fate.”
Which leaves the way free for love and birth, and the bruised, battered, bitten old husband to instigate legal proceedings. And this, after some to-do, he does.
Worse than all other hurts, that one.
Spitting and choking with rage, the toothless pedant, before nine judges: “I divorce her, the ingrate. I divorce her, the slut. I divorce her, and the craven thief is welcome to the baggage.” After which he went home to his mansion.
Tavir, who was by now nearing the end of his dream and vaguely guessed as much, had intended to hasten straight back to his mother—having decorously overseen the divorce. She was at this time big with the fine garment destined to be his. At any minute, it seemed to the anxious expectant child, the interior call might reach him. Then he must rush in and rouse the foetus from its soullessness, blend with it, and pass out with it to seek the light of life. Yet, something made Tavir stay awhile with the pedant, to see what he would do, and he had done indeed, only as imagined.
There he sat in his library, huffing and muttering, referring to this sage and that one on the inconstancy of women, their worthlessness and wickedness. Until, all at once he laid the books aside and tears rolled from his eyes, so the watching soul was astonished at it.
“Alas,” said the old husband. “Now I am alone. Was it not enough that I must suffer the shame of impotence, which even my magic could not cure, then that I must meet her and love her in old age when I repelled her? Yes, bad enough, this. And the harsh means and words I used to conceal my shame and the lies I told her and the scrolls I misquoted, bad, too. But now she is gone, and I am a laughingstock, and will die loveless. I deserve no better, and no better did I get.”
Then Tavir, having had all his own way, was also ashamed. He approached the pedant quietly, and even so, from intuitive memory, the old fellow braced himself for some pinch or nip. But Tavir said at his ear, “Hush. Do not grieve. There is no death. In fifty years you will be younger than you are today, and there will be many loves to comfort you. Let her go; she deserves a life. Read your books and revel in your learning. Who knows but next time you may be the handsomest of all men—or,” and here Tavir slyly smiled, “the prettiest of all women.”
The pedant staunchly sighed, wiped his eyes, and selected a book of lore.
Then the calling sounded for Tavir, and leaping up he darted away—but even as he did so, he woke.
9
AFTER SHE had listened to all this, seated with her chin upon her hand, Azhriaz awarded Tavir a rare courtesy. She drew from a table a jar of sea-colored wine and poured it into two glass goblets. The wine was, or seemed, quite real. Maybe one of the rabble, who admired her as a quaint animal, had brought her the gift.
“A truth for a truth?” inquired Tavir. “You seem to say that you believe my dream is a reality.”
“Perhaps.”
“Because of this dream,” he said, “I learned the unfairness of treating with others as if they are only shadows. “
“And so pity cuckolded spouses, and catch down-plummeting slaves in the street.”
“And reckon none should be held in our city against her will.”
“I might leave at once,” said Azhriaz carelessly. “Save, like you, I begin to dislike the shedding of mortal tears and blood. I will not make war on Tirzom.”
“Nor will your demon servants, who are no altruists at all. Did they not tell you? You are a prisoner here.”
“Unproven,” said Azhriaz. But she poured the wine from her goblet on the floor, untasted, while in the goblet of Tavir the cool liquid began to bubble and smoke.
Tavir put the wine aside. “One other thing,” he said.
“I thought,” said she, “you would be all night coming to it.”
“Upon your ship, which the lords here have taken from you, there is a sorcerous impression. Of a journey eastward. Of a human city smothered in sea.”
“Simmurad. Where the immortals who defied Lord Death were turned to coral, even as they lived, and left to brood forever on the fact.”
“And in my dream,” began the Prince Tavir.
“You were at first confined alive inside a limestone case, in a sea-surged palace.”
“Can it be,” said Tavir, “my soul, refusing to be held within the stagnant immortal body, escaped it, and came here for rebirth?”
“What are souls? I have no soul,” said Azhriaz. “I am Vazdru, an immortal myself. Nor did the immortals of Simmurad, either, have a soul left between them. Immortality devours the spirit, fusing it with the flesh.”
“Is such a doctrine false?”
Azhriaz said, “Rather say to me what you mean to say.”
Tavir glanced at the bubbling wine in momentary irritation, and spoke a word to it, at which glass and contents shattered into thin air.
“I am curious to look on Simmurad,�
� he said. “But though my parents are entombed and I have no kindred to whom I must defer, the conventions of Tirzom and the edict of the king would not favor me in such travel. I should be prevented, and perhaps taken for an enemy of the state. Yet, now there is your sorcerous ship, capable of such speeds our own magicians are surprised. Once aboard, who could catch up with me?”
“My ship will not obey you.”
“So I guessed. Nor are you able to approach it.”
“I might,” said she, “take on some illusion and go there at once, unseen by the guards of your king.”
“There are other guards about the ship than fleshly ones. They would detect you. You know it, and have not gone there. Only a prince of the city, such as myself, could subdue the magics of Tirzom.”
“I do not know,” said Azhriaz, “that I am inclined to leave this charming domicile. I am quite comfortable. No. Let your princely brothers keep my ship they cannot use. I will stay here and live quietly.”
“What is that sound?” asked Tavir, turning toward the outer door.
“Another hapless slave falling to the street? Go out and catch him.”
But this was not the fall of a slave. Some other thing bore down on them, with a taut, rumbling drone. Presently the upper levels of Tirzom Jum quivered underfoot and all about. The foundations of the black palaces were vibrating above, and the street of the white-skinned house trembled as if in fear.
Then came a frightful booming impact. The walls of Azhriaz’s building, of which she had just spoken so much praise, collapsed—as did those of a thousand other dwellings. The atmosphere itself had addled. Draperies and cups, things literal and phantom, burst through the air.
The outer wall having ceased to be, Azhriaz might look forth, and directly into the street, where a scene of mingled terror and astound went on, all under a peculiar light. Upward from the thoroughfare the palace-sides ascended their four hundred feet; beyond the dearly lit stars within the dome, and after these, and that, the sea, in which soft night had lain but lay no more.