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

by Tanith Lee

  And so he said to the princess, “Not a palace. But some more modest shelter I would accept.”

  Then he too looked down, and saw the girl who was a child gazing at him intently. When the snake had come from the earth, she had stayed by him, and taken a sharp flint in her grasp, perhaps to defend him. Now she let go the flint, and he took her hand.

  Seeing this, the princess asked if the woman was really a simpleton, as the rumor had it.

  “Not so. She has become a child. She was an empress once.”

  “Fate is fate. Nothing is sure,” prosaically appended the princess, as she tiptoed over the snake’s roof to her litter.

  On the banks of the wide river, then, where the shrinking autumn sun cast bars of amber, there came to be a stone house. The brown shore ran into the brown water, and the hippopotami took their mud baths beneath the house wall. Roses grew there, and vines, and now and then a long-legged crane would pass daintily between, or there would fall a furry dew of bees.

  Every morning, shortly after sunrise, Dathanja would leave the house and go up the bank to the spot where another of the wild spreading fruit trees gave shade. From this vantage he might see some miles along the river, and over the land on either side, away into the morning haze from which pierced the tiaras of the mountains, sparkling now with snow. A white city or two he might also discern on either hand, and the white town of the princess’s father, and his palace of painted windows.

  Sometimes a multitude already waited for Dathanja about the tree. He was famed; men would make expeditions to reach him. All day long, through the whey of morning, the cinnamon of afternoon, into the deep-dyed dusk that quickly gave on night, he would heal and he would debate, for some came to him for a decision even in argument, or to have a prophecy explained which had foxed them. And he sent none from him at a loss, or empty. His patience was boundless, and his strength seemed likewise.

  Frequently the girl he called Soveh was with him, and in the early day she would lean by his knee. But she disliked the midday sun, and to elude it even climbed the tree and hid in the branches. Persons healed there, and drunk with wonder and relief, might come away also with a memory of a white flower looking down through the dark leaves, upon the triumph of hope.

  At other times, she played along the bank, or swam in the river, for she had forgotten how to walk on water, and to swim was all the instinct left her. Under the river, among the stems of the lotuses, she met the hippos, graceful as swans in that element, who did her no harm, and occasionally let her ride—unseen by mortals—on their backs. When darkness came, Soveh would make garlands for herself and for Dathanja, all clung with fireflies, and so light him homeward to the stone house.

  In those weeks, the watcher of the blond mantle was seldom come on. “He must keep to the house,” the people of the neighborhood said, “Only let him come out again and show us his unusual hair, which is the color of the summer grain.” But it began to be said that one of the two sorcerers had summoned to their service a huge golden bird, for such had been seen, flying over the sky at dawn, or threading the swift sunset, and others declared it had made a perch for itself atop a hill across the river.

  For the magician uncle, he too kept from sight, though his carping might be heard from the upper room of the house, as he pored there over his weighty collection of magegoria. “Pray do us no harm, Uncle,” said the cattle-herders, between amusement and earnest, as they drove their charges by under the window.

  While the priest and the child discoursed below, or ate their simple meals, or were silent together, they too could make out—if they so desired—that muttering in the upper room. And it might chance a whirlwind would be dragged in there by a spell, or some other undomestic item, and the stones of the house would rattle, so at length Dathanja must go out and repair them. (The child was not afraid. The upheavals interested her, and in return she sometimes threw garlands, figs, or mangoes in at the upper window.)

  But the sage-mage Tavrosharak, reborn out of drowned coral (twice), he paid no heed. He would have nothing to do with humankind anymore. He had taken up residence in the humble house because said house had occurred, but the upper room was filled to crowding with costly furniture—subtracted from palaces by air-borne devils. And amid it all, Tavrosharak lived, hemmed in by valuables, and served each dusk a fabulous repast whipped from under the very lips of kings. And to his unhuman minions neither would Tavrosharak speak, but sent them about by other means. He would give words now to none, save to his own reflection in a silvered glass, and to this he did talk, and conversed long with it. But even with that he sometimes fell out, and then would not speak to it for days.

  Along the margin of the shore, the lotuses had turned to twilight mauve and to magenta. Elsewhere they closed their cowls like hermits; shriveled. The sun waned and a bleak wind breathed upon the earth.

  Dathanja saw the color of the lotuses below the house, and how they did not die. But Soveh the child, playing among them and swimming between their stems, only took them for another aspect of all life, which was a constant novelty to her. They did not, therefore, cause her hurt or aggravation, as to Sovaz or Azhriaz they would have done, being recollections of Chuz. And she had not questioned herself if, by the lotus that broke from the insane egg, he had found some way, even inadvertently, to bring her consciousness out of the nothing where it had wandered. Or if this act, as with the coloration of the plants in the river, were random, or chosen, of one who once had been her lover.

  The winter came, riding his sere chariot. He flung before him the flowers and fruits, the leaves, the birds, the new-mown days.

  A dust wind blew. The shutters of the stone house were bolted fast, as were the ornate panes of all the palaces. Like sticks of brittle sugar, the reeds. The hippopotami had made for themselves long caves in the mud, and slept there, or floated in the river, somnolent, with their round eyes fast locked as any shutter or pane. And the winter frogs, and the lizards, and the grasshoppers, crept in by night to the shore of the fire. Sometimes the sick or weary, seeking Dathanja, were also let in to share the lower room. They went away singing, through wind and frost, careless now.

  It was the end of the third year.

  The child played by the hearth, making paper garlands for all the frogs and lizards there, and their little eyes were like row upon row of bright beads. Dathanja sat and looked at this, and put aside the precious book he had been reading, which the prince’s daughter, along with much else, had given him.

  “How old are you, Soveh?” he asked the child in the woman’s body.

  “I am seven or I am nine or I am eleven years of age,” said she. “For you told me.”

  “What have you learned?”

  “Only to be alive,” she said, and she laughed, and hung a paper garland on the toe of his shoe. (For the princess, seeing him barefoot, had given him shoes, and sometimes Dathanja wore them.)

  But the lizard for whom the garland had been intended came and pulled it off and gave it to Soveh again, stretching out its neck for the token.

  Across the river, in the west, a star rose, and later it flew over the roof. But Tavrosharak had squabbled with his mirror again and it was quiet in the upper room.

  It would seem Dathanja, priest, healer, sorcerer that he was, must know some witchcraft that could have cured Soveh of all her delusions. Or maybe he had attempted it, but the effect of chaos proved obdurate. Or, he had not attempted it.

  One by one, the creatures at the hearth allowed her to adorn them, and reminded her when she omitted to do so. They knew, it appeared, she was not only a retarded girl. And the hippopotami, they knew. Why not, when she breathed water as she rode upon them under it?

  And the lotuses had found out or been told, blooming on through the gales and the nights of ice. And even some of the servitors that the mage-sage called up, they had guessed, and glared down through the floorboards at her, while they were before him.

  And the angel also, that knew, keeping its watch upon them
all.

  3

  ONE DIM veiled morning, Soveh was under the house wall, playing a game of hers with small stones she had collected. It was a complex game, involving rulers and ruled, armies, citadels, and ominiscient strokes of fate—those few who had chanced to ask her to explain her childish hobby had been mostly astonished, and sometimes discomposed.

  As she played she sang, in a voice so beautiful the very air seemed hushed to listen. The sun, not long risen, sent its rays through the stripped trees along the shore, and over the river, polishing as it went the islands of four or five floating hippos. Every night the sun descended into and sojourned amid chaos. It touched the child-woman, who had also entered the Un-ness beyond the world, with a musing finger.

  Your grandmother, your mother’s mother, said the sun, once wedded my light. It is already in your bones, and your soul knows it, my power and the powers of chaos and nonmatter. There is no need to hide.

  Soveh won a city with a legion of small brown pebbles. I am not ready to believe you, yet, said Soveh’s averted head.

  Just then, Dathanja came out of the house, and Soveh ran up to him. “Here is the king of all the stones,” she said, and gave to him a pebble of a strange and natural stripe, opaque black, transparent blue, a beautiful thing she had saved for him. Dathanja took the pebble, and next her beautiful face between his hands, and he kissed her quietly on the forehead. “What have I taught you, Soveh?” he said. “About the seasons,” she said, “and dark and day, and why trees grow, and where the sea is. And how to be loved.” Dathanja said, “Yes, that is true. You have learned that very well. But do you know then what you have taught me?” The child looked at him, and the woman smiled. Neither knew the other, but both were for a moment before him. Dathanja said, to both of them, “You have taught me how to take. It was the hardest lesson, the longest missed, and I learned it from you in three seconds.”

  In the house Tavrosharak might be heard saying to the silvered glass: “Do you not agree that it is impossible to live in such squalor, or to bring the intellect to bear upon deeds of occult science, when there is this constant raucous hubbub under the window?”

  Then Dathanja laughed, and the child, and they walked together up the bank toward the tree, where today only the slim gilt figure of Ebriel was waiting—who, at their approach, opened his wings and drifted like a daffodil hawk into the sky.

  “How golden he is,” said Soveh. “Is he our enemy, or a friend?

  “I do not know,” said Dathanja. “Nor, I think, does he, now.”

  “There is a white O behind his head. Is it a cloud that is so round and burns so coldly?”

  Dathanja paused and looked at the orb of light in the sky, across which the Malukhim had now flown. At last Dathanja said, “That is the moon, which has risen by day, and follows the sun over the sky.”

  (Now, it is said that such a thing had never happened before, that the moon of the flat earth dawned only after the sun had gone down. Or, if ever it had happened, it had been in the chaotic primitive ages, before reason ordered the world.)

  In another moment, however, the white orb disappeared inside a true cloud, and meanwhile some wagons and carts drawn by bullocks began to come along the river shore, filled by those who sought Dathanja, and behind these, riders on blue elephants. The day’s work had begun.

  But the day was dark, and most silent. So soundless it was that the speech the healer had with his patients, and the debates he had with those who wished to be tutored by him, seemed the only attest to life for miles. And then again, from time to time, clear as a clarion, you could hear Tavrosharak upbraiding a solitary cricket for the din it made in the vine under his window.

  “Healer,” said one of the debaters seated on the ground before Dathanja, “this is a curious day. How thick the panes of it.”

  “The atmosphere,” said another, “is charged as if with lightning. Some event is due. Should we fear? Should we entreat the gods for clemency?”

  “Why should you entreat them?” said Dathanja.

  “Because perhaps our sins have made them angry.”

  “Sin,” said Dathanja, “does not anger the gods. It is we who anger ourselves by what we do amiss. When you do wrong, ask forgiveness of yourself, for it is yourself you have harmed far worse than any other man, and that in proportion to your crime.”

  “Say then,” said one of the debaters, “I kill my own brother. Surely that is a worse sin against him than against myself?”

  “Not in the least,” said Dathanja. “For, though your sin in wrenching from him his selected life is very great, he will have another life. While you have sullied for yourself that life which is your own, as if you had taken up mud and slime and rubbed them into your garments, and you must live on in that muck until conclusion and rebirth. Nor will you be free of the stain even then, till you have toiled and striven to cleanse it.”

  “Ah, Master,” said the man, “by these words we know, as we have been led to believe, that you are without any sin.”

  “I am the most sinful among you,” said Dathanja. “My soul is thick with the filth of foolish terrible evils.”

  Those who heard this gasped and protested. Finally one who had come riding there in silk and velvet on an elephant said to Dathanja, “How then, priest, do you dare to invoke healing, or to offer solutions to those events which perturb us?”

  “He,” said Dathanja, “that drinks from the poisoned well and dies there, do they not leave his skull on a post to warn other travelers from the water? Or, if he survives, will he not know, best of all men, which wells to avoid, and better than those who have never tasted the poison, nor swallowed it down?”

  “Do you say then that all men must first do evil that they may learn how to do good?”

  “There is no ‘must,’” answered Dathanja. “I say only that, in most cases, this is how it will fall out. And as with individual men and women, so with mankind itself. Until at last the cruel and selfish stages of infancy and adolescence are finished with, and the peoples of the world—which may not then be any world we should recognize, for the date is far off—these peoples shall be, all of them, grown to adult estate, in heart, spirit, and mind. In which time, which shall doubtless be time’s end, there will be no villainy done, no ambition vaunted, no struggling one with another. Nor will it grow from innocence or ignorance, that era of compassion and mildness, but from an enduring knowledge gained by example and experience. And then, in that ultimate time, before the last of the suns sets and the last of the stars goes out, and the endless adventure of existence removes itself to some other finer course, then the gentle, the good, and the knowing, they and they alone, those that we shall come to be, shall inherit the earth, before the earth is no more.”

  A profound quiet now lay upon the slope above the river, under the tree. It had kept its leaves, the wild fig, though they were worn thin.

  “Yet,” said the rider of the elephant, “you, a sinner, you have said, say all this too, and are weightless as those leaves over our heads. How can you walk upright, how can you speak so blithely, if your deeds are as you say?”

  “Once,” said Dathanja, “there was a merchant, who owed money to many other merchants in the town. He kept mighty ledgers, and pored over them day and night. So intent was he upon how much he owed, and so carefully did he groan over the accounts, that his trade was ruined. He was near to becoming not only a debtor, but an impoverished debtor. There came one to him then, and said to him, ‘Throw away your books, and go out into the town and earn your gold, for you are talented and will soon be rich again.’ ‘But,’ said the merchant, ‘how am I to remember to whom I owe these debts, unless I keep note of them?’ ‘Do only this,’ said his adviser, kindly. ‘If you see any that lack, or if any apply to you for funds, where you have it, give it them. In that way those in need you will sustain, and those you owe you cannot help but repay.’ And so the merchant burned the ledgers and forgot them, but going out he earned much gold, made himself the debtor o
f everyman, and did great service for all. And lightly did he walk, that man, having so simplified his life.”

  “But for sure,” cried the elephant’s velvet rider, “there are some bad men abroad, and to do good turns to them would be idiocy.”

  “Yet,” said Dathanja, “if you would punish them, then you must keep note of their names and carry the long list with you, always taking it out and consulting it, wherever you go.”

  “But if I do kindnesses to a wicked man, he will make a fool of me. He will grind me like grain between the millstones.”

  “Does he,” said Dathanja, “make more of a fool of you by supposing you a fool than you make of yourself by wasting your time and effort in the constant striving to return ill for ill? A hungry man who finds a fruit tree may eat some of the fruit. It is perhaps sour, or perhaps deliciously sweet. Either way, the matter is soon discovered and the man may go on with his journey. Conversely, he may halt under the tree for an hour with his stomach crying to him for food, deciding if it is worth biting at the fruit, since it may not be to his liking. Each has his own life, and came to this place to live it. The easier his dealings with other men, the more time is left for his own pursuits. Now suppose,” said the priest, “you sat here by the water, where you had come to think or dream, or contemplate the world, or to sleep. And a man came to you and struck you in the face. What then?”

  “Why, I would jump up and clap him back, twice as hard as he had struck at me.”

  “And thereupon he would strike you most hardly yet, and you would strike him more hardly, and so on, until one had maimed or killed the other. And say you are the victor and he lies prone, then you must fly justice or the revenge of his family. Or you must gain a way to recompense them. And all this while you have been fighting, planning, or flying, you have spent your energy that you had meant to use on your own account. Now, when the man struck you, if you had only said to him, ‘Strike me again for good measure, I have no quarrel with you,’ perhaps he would have struck you, or perhaps not, but the affair would have been finished with, and you at liberty to go on as you wished.”