Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4

by Tanith Lee

  “He has followed us because we led him to some spot he wished to come at,” said Tavrosharak, after a swift thaumaturgic calculation. “This I perceive clearly now. And therefore, as we have led him here, we also have been led. Something has pulled us hither. Come, dear Zhirek—that is, dauntless Dathanja—you, more than I, the sun-beast has trailed. You more than I, therefore, were drawn here. The miracle is yours to claim. Dare you refuse it? You are a mighty healer, all compassion. Oh best Dathanja, go up the mountain and render aid or counsel. I promise I shall be close. At your shoulder.”

  Dathanja had not attended to any of this, but to the flight of the Malukhim he had. And now he felt an inexplicable hand laid on his heart and mind, which hand, before, had only beckoned. Dathanja had been aware that something drew him. He had not and did not resist. Only the weak need fear and avoid temptation. And possibly to this man, now, there was a serene happiness in each surrender, since no longer thereby could he lose himself.

  He murmured, a syllable only. And then he lifted as if he too were winged, and went after the angel, shadow behind flame.

  The summit of the mountain was a cone, beaten to translucence by weather and the sheer proximity to heaven. It refracted the afternoon, and abetted, like a mirror, the other conflagration which went on beneath. There was a natural terrace, tined with thin copses of rock. In this unlikely cradle, buzzing and flashing with strange emissions, lay a battered shattered thing, part melted silver on a huge crushed cage of bronze and steel, its sides stoven in, its design unrecognizable. Yet all about the area, a mile or more, lay shapes and shards and chips and crystals of freakish formation, and wide spilled stains that tingled with eccentric colors, sheens, and odors. Over all throbbed a kind of effulgent pulse, which every so often erupted. Yet these antics, visible as they had been from thousands of feet below, were nevertheless growing more feeble with every minute.

  The Malukhim Ebriel had alighted eastward on one of the rocky tines, and with folded wings and golden mask of face, looked down on the monstrous wreck. Dathanja, in turn, stood to the west, under the cone, and there surveyed the scene.

  Tavrosharak, speeding up the mountain now saddled athwart a quirky dragon, called instructively to them both: “Behold, it is some mighty magic craft which has foundered, maybe fallen from the air. Beware a detonation.”

  It was, of course, the demon ship of Azhriaz the Goddess, not dropped from air but somehow ejected from ocean, chaos-riddled, wholly defunct.

  Tavrosharak, sensitive to his own advice, circled the peak cautiously. Ebriel maintained the vantage of the tine. Dathanja, after an interval, moved forward.

  In the shade of the ruined hull, not to be seen at once, if at all, one might (or not) visualize a series of curves and angles, proportions, densities, that could belong to the figure of a man. And having discerned that much, that could belong also to the figures of two others, neither men.

  Under the frame, among the scintillant debris, a beggar sat on the ground. He was swagged solely in a ragged orange cloth, and his brown shaven cranium was bowed. Across from him there crouched a snarling lizard, large as a tiger and tinted like one. This mounted guard, it would seem, upon the man, and upon the girl who lay between them, her head resting upon the man’s knees, while he smoothed her forehead, and quietly tidied the coiling flood of her night-black hair.

  She breathed, the girl; you might see it, if you leaned close. This Dathanja presently did. The beggar did not try to prevent him, nor the lizard. It only glared outward at the angel on the rock, and lashed its tail at Tavrosharak’s circling dragon.

  But through the lids of her eyes, the blue irises were scarcely burning. Her face was far away as a note of music sounded from the cold shores of the moon.

  “Azhriaz,” said the beggar. “Soveh, Sovaz.” But he got no answer, and seemed to await none. To Dathanja, in the way of a king, the beggar added, “Did she summon you then? Somewhere within herself she has remembered you. Or forgotten. Forgetfulness might summon, too.”

  “I see now how beautiful she is,” said Dathanja. “Can that be because some of her beauty has left her.”

  “Or some of his fear has left the one who sees.”

  King Fate, Fortune’s Master, raised his vibrant voice and called to the Malukhim: “Ebriel, you white eagle, you also see what you require—that there is no Goddess anymore. Is heaven content?” On his rock Ebriel shifted one wing, whitely, that was all. “Shall I inform you,” inquired Kheshmet, “of what became of Yabael your brother, in the sea, when the tidal wave, vomited from chaos, struck him?” Kheshmet laughed, a slow, red-golden noise. “Destiny overtops even angels. For that one was borne into chaos just as the sun, his mother and father, is borne each evening. And chaos remade Yabael before expelling him, despite the will of the gods upon him. He has since come forth again, into a distant ocean, and there he blazes and runs on in his pursuit, which lacks now only a quarry. He is a fiery streaming orb, chaos and matter, sun and liquid, a long-haired comet of the seas. And he will haunt there awhile, coming and going over the water-skies of the sea peoples. They will tell their times and seasons by him, as men have done by the comets of heaven. That is the fate of Yabael, the sun-vulture, the holy runner.”

  Ebriel spread his wings. Yellow his mane, like wheat; asphodel and cream and topaz was he. And that, it would appear, was all he was.

  Kheshmet continued to stroke the midnight hair from the girl’s brow under his fingers. “Ah, child,” he said.

  “The wicked are eternally children,” said Dathanja softly. And he stepped back again, as if to go away.

  That crucial moment, the invented dragon of the sage-mage launched itself against Fate’s pet, the snapping giant chameleon under the wreck. It was with a squall and a vast flapping that the dragon came, Tavrosharak yet affixed to its swooping spine, while the lizard rose with bladed claws to meet them.

  Supposing there was no time or breath for a spell: “Help, merciful gods!” yelled Tavrosharak, who kept old-fashioned ideas.

  But Kheshmet only said, “Hush,” in a voice mild as the rustle of a parchment. And the lizard shrank down and down until it was the size of a nutshell, and the dragon came undone and was no more. With the result that Tavrosharak fell onto the terrace, nor elegantly. And lying bruised before Kheshmet, Tavrosharak bemoaned the injustice of a world where beggars might also be choosers, attain magic knacks, and use them on their betters. Meantime, the egg had slipped from the mage’s grasp and its silken wrapper, and spun on the terrace madly. Cracks spread across its surface.

  “It is hatching, prematurely. Whatever misshapen mistake will now emerge, it is the fault of this orange one. All my labor gone for nothing,” groused Tavrosharak.

  Then the egg split. The bits of shell sprayed out fine as seafoam, and from the center a lotus flower, winged by petals, flew in the air. Damson-colored the lotus was, with veins of clearest gold. It fluttered to the girl who lay on the rock, and settling and rising and settling, light as down, it touched her forehead, the lids of her eyes, her lips, her two breasts—and the heart beneath, it must have touched that too, for suddenly she sighed, her fringed lashes stirred on her cheeks, and she whispered to the lotus in a little, little voice, “If I were a child, I would weep.”

  But the lotus darted up and smacked King Kheshmet smartly on each ear. And as Fate’s fingers reached for it, the magenta flower crumbled into a magenta flour, that showered over him and flossed his bright garment. Fate clicked his tongue, and smiled, with half his mouth only.

  The girl who had been the Goddess Azhriaz opened wide her eyes.

  She looked at Kheshmet’s half-smile, and smiled herself, sadly and silently.

  “There,” he said, “you have woken up.”

  “So I have,” she said. These were the accents of a young woman, of a Vazdru, yet it was the tone of a child, the very one he had compared her to—this was not Azhriaz the Goddess. It was not Sovaz, the sorceress mistress of the Prince of Delusions.

  �
�Soveh,” said Kheshmet, using the name of her babyhood. “Little Flame.”

  “Where is my mother?” said the child-girl-woman, staring at him in abrupt mistrust. A darkness took her face. “Oh, she is dead. Now I remember. I cried out to her, but she could not hear. She is beyond the world. She would have come to me if she could.”

  She lay under the torn ribcage of the ship, physically flawless. But the wounds of chaos were on her, for all that. She had had, from the first, almost, the body of a girl of seventeen, and she had lived in it for nearly half a century. But nevertheless, she was now what she had always been and never been, a child of seven years.

  And this child, brushing aside the forest of her own hair impatiently, said, “Where is my father? I want my father. He will care for me.” And then her eyes, the blue of the soul of night behind the seal of day, her eyes—that had looked on torture and murder and death and destruction—her eyes, so lovely, so incongruously pure—they came to Dathanja. And the laughter of a child’s sheer gladness dawned on her woman’s face. She sat up quickly, and got to her feet, and holding out her hands toward him, she ran forward. Until Dathanja turned to ice, turned to Zhirek in front of her. That halted her.

  “Why?” she said. “Why?”

  “What does she want from me?” Dathanja said.

  “You well know,” said Fate, taking the lizard into his hand, like a coal to warm him. “It is a humorous error, such as the gosling may make, waking up beside the cat, and thinking the cat its dam or sire.”

  “Tell her otherwise,” said Dathanja, as he stood before that wondering child’s frightened gaze. Black-haired Dathanja, black of eye, clad in black, and pale, handsome: ciphers of the demon country.

  “You must do it,” said Kheshmet. “She is a child. She thinks she is your daughter. She thinks you are another.”

  “I am not Azhrarn,” said Dathanja to her, she that had been Azhriaz, who had had her soldiers carry him to her, in a city large as a continent, a pavilion where a third of the earth had seemed to bow down at her name.

  And she shook her head, but once more stretched out her hand to him.

  “She is a child,” said Kheshmet, again. “She does not take you for him, perhaps. It is not necessarily as simple as that. But for one of the demon race, surely she does take you, or for one like herself, half demon, half human, an immortal. And for the instigator of her life.”

  “She has hated him always,” said Dathanja, “that one who fathered her.”

  “Regard her,” said Kheshmet. “There is the hatred. Look.”

  She stood weeping, a weeping child, crying to her father very low, asking what she had done, why did he not love her, why had he shut her from him, abandoned her, alone and lost in the bitter world.

  And Dathanja, who had come so far in his journey of Self, was rooted to the spot, a stone again.

  Then a wind blew cold across the mountaintop, and from the clouds, a weeping rain came down. In the rain, the figments of men, angels, rocks, allegorical Lords of Darkness, seemed dissolved and swept away. There had been a valley in deep rain, a gray rain of the heart, too. Zhirek recollected, and with it, all those who had wept in their turn through him. And Dathanja went to the small girl who kneeled on the mountain in the weeping rain and wept, and he too kneeled, and taking her into his arms, he comforted her. He knew nothing of her as a woman, but only as a child seven years old, who clung to him, for it had taken her half a century to find him, to be loved, and to love.

  And as he comforted this daughter never born to him, he learned, and he comforted himself, held in his own arms with her. The one he had been. The one he was.

  2

  LIKE A SEED dropped in untended soil, where conceivably nothing would come of it, so the change in the world. Out of sight and out of mind.

  Suns rose and set, cities rose and were cast down. The moon sailed the ether and the ships of men the seas. Time stalked over the world, shaking her hair, disturbing everything. Seasons budded, bloomed, withered. The caravans of days tirelessly set out, and the caravans of humankind, the chariots, the wagons, and the walkers. All with their cargoes of merchandise, and lives. And night, the black hyacinth, closed their eyes, or black Uhlume the Beautiful, he closed them.

  A palmful of years passed. How many years fit in a palm? In a child’s palm—say then, three.

  What it is to be a child. The astonishment of it. All things so curious. What is that? What is that? Tell me. Teach me. Let me learn.

  In the lands they went through, sometimes she was pitied. So gorgeous she stopped the heart, so lovely the birds sang for her, and the clouds uncurtained the skies—and she a fool, retarded to the age of seven years, or maybe nine years. A bright child, it was true. But still a child. They compared her to legendary Shezael, the half-souled, fair, oblique—unfinished. Though in the places where black hair carried a stigma, they looked uneasily upon both of them, the infant-woman, and the adult man, her guardian. Some heard her refer to him as her father, though he looked barely old enough to be such, and besides plainly he was a priest of some wandering order, and should be chaste, or if ever unchaste then at least circumspect. There was too, in the company, a disgruntled magician (an uncle, perhaps?). Few took to him, since he seemed always irascible, and was in the habit of sorcerously venting on bystanders his inner discontents. Luckily the priest, a healer of extraordinary facility, and also himself a sorcerer, would put right what this hasty mage put wrong. Then again, there was another often of the party. Cracked like the girl and the old uncle, it would seem, for he would walk always considerable yards behind, as if he had quarreled with them, and later sit on some boulder, observing what the healer did. And when the healer had completed his task, after him again went this other fellow, who, it must be admitted, was as fair as the girl, though in a different way, all gold for her snow and jet and sapphire. However, several got the impression that he was humpbacked under his mantle. Oh, they were a strange crew, the four of them.

  And over and around those countries they took their way, engendering health and entertainment and—best of everything—gossip. Through the kingdoms, and across earthscapes that were in themselves rather novel and unvisited. Or which, possibly, had come to be so from that iota of chaotic change each devotedly forgot.

  And eventually, they came into a land where there were slate-skinned elephants upon the roads, and haughty camels with vermilion tassels about their heads. A parched wind blew, for it was the season of crisp bronzy withering, but along the bronze-brown hills white palaces stared on the turquoise sky. The folk of this region had no unease at black hair, for they were themselves a black-haired race, and with a black that was almost blue. The light-skinned among them were the color of ivory, and the dark among them the color of cloves. The land was railed by mountains, and parted by a mighty river, where played hippopotami like air bladders, and lotuses grew.

  Now the sorcerer-priest sometimes told stories to the crowds which gathered about him. One day as he did this, the daughter of the prince of that area happened to be going by in her litter. She was dark as sandalwood and haughty as any tasseled camel, though she had a charming human face. Having heard a rumor of these itinerants, led by a healer-teacher, she ordered her bearers to bring her where she could hear the tale.

  When the priest concluded, the prince’s daughter called to him loudly, “That is all very well, but if you are a sorcerer, you should also perform tricks. Do so.”

  The priest, turning his black eyes upon hers, replied, “All the earth is a magic thing. Only glance into the tree that shades us. See how the wild figs have ripened there, and how the leaves cover it. And once, this tree was only a seed hidden in the untended soil. Beside such sorcery, madam, any trick of mine would be a frail matter.”

  Then the prince’s daughter, annoyed, stamped her bangled foot hard on the ground. At once the earth unseamed itself and out of it there reared suddenly a most terrifying snake. Red as dying fire it was, with the fangs of a leopard. It towered up o
ver the prince’s daughter, even as the crowd jumped aside shrieking, and opened its jaws to bite off her head.

  The priest spoke to the snake in a language unknown in that country. But the snake, which understood many tongues, most of them forked as its own, swung itself about and, seeing who addressed it, bowed itself down three times over.

  “O Magus,” said the snake, “I know you by your elder name. One of my kin you slew, long ago, under the wasteful waters men call Ocean.”

  “I am contrite for that,” said the priest.

  “I see that you are,” said the giant snake. “But your debt is to your own kind, and you have slain, too, enough of them. May I not decapitate this one uncivil maiden who rudely stamped just now upon the roof of my dwelling?”

  “Forbear,” said the sorcerer-priest.

  “Because you bid it, I must reluctantly obey,” said the snake, and frowning between its cat’s eyes, it dropped straight down into the ground like a rope, and the earth sewed tight again.

  Then the crowd, which had hesitated to run away, once it found the priest to be the situation’s commander, vehemently acclaimed him. And the prince’s daughter threw herself at his ankles.

  “I am dear to my father,” said she, ‘‘and he will reward you for saving my life.”

  “I will take no reward,” said the priest.

  “Winter is coming,” said the prince’s daughter. “The leaves will blacken and the fruit become husks. Winged dusts will scour the hills and valleys, and frosts will gnaw on them. Rains will fall. Let my father build for you, for he will do so, a palace, and install there a hundred servants to wait on you, and yours,” and here she graciously indicated the carping old uncle, who—lost in a tome—had not troubled even to get up, the mantled other up the slope, and the idiot girl.

  Then the priest softly laughed. His laughter said, if any had been able to decipher it, Such palaces and such service I have had as might shame emperors, and could have them again. Here, where the wild fig tree grows, I might cause the very wind to build with bricks and raise a mansion to confound all others. But if I do not do it, and yet still refuse you, it is from a stamping pride like your own.