by Tanith Lee
Then a prostitute said to Atmeh, “But what of such as we, who sin day and night?”
“What you do,” said Atmeh, “is not a sin, unless you think it so. And then it is. For who can say they do anything wrong by giving joy to another? And is it less noble to ask money for joy than to ask money for oil or silk or spice? But if you think always, Oh how I sin, and so despise yourself, you lessen and wound mind and heart, and there is no worse crime on earth than to sour the sweetness in yourself. For the sweetness comes from the soul, which no act of the body ever can, at the last, corrupt.”
As she spoke and discoursed, however, Atmeh became aware that someone, a mantled shadowy figure, sat far out at the edge of the large crowd that had gathered. And now and then he partly raised his head, and it seemed to her that under the hood his hair was like the sheerest gold. But he never addressed her, or came near, and finally the night waned. In the first ray of sunlight, Atmeh looked for him, that recalcitrant figure, and he was nowhere to be seen. As for the bud on the stem, it had crumbled into air.
That day Atmeh left the town. She walked through a valley thick with new wheat, and the lion flirted with the grain and played with her, just like a dog, certainly.
Beyond the valley there opened a wide paved road. No sooner had Atmeh alighted on it than a young man stood at her side, of perhaps three and twenty years, well favored, and clad like a prince, though his fair hair was his greatest glory.
“What now?” inquired Atmeh, walking on.
“O mistress blinding-bright,” replied the young man, bowing to the earth, then falling into step with her, “there lies before you, three miles distant, an arrogant city. Do you journey there?”
“Not at all,” said Atmeh, but she laughed.
“That is a shame,” said the young man, laughing also, “for my master—”
“Who has heard of me,” said Atmeh, “for I am famed and illustrious—”
“And also you are blessed and revered everywhere,” embellished the young man, “and therefore my master—”
“Trusts I will pause, linger, hesitate, and delay in this city,” said Atmeh. “That he may then elect to meet with me there. Or not. Or he may arrive and not exchange a word or look with me. Or he may arrive and greet me, and next abscond. Woe and despair,” said Atmeh, and she laughed again. “In token of which,” she added, “what?”
“This,” said the young man, and he held out to her a lotus of the palest clearest honey amber, on a stem of damson-colored quartz.
Atmeh took the lotus. It had a fragrance; the sunshine lay in it like a fish of flame within an orb of fire.
Then Atmeh wept, only for a moment, but her tears fell into the heart of the flower—and the amber and the amethyst were gemmed by sapphires.
“You may,” said Atmeh to the young man, “pat this lion.”
The young man did so. The lion kissed him fondly.
“I will tell my master,” said the young man, “that you accept his gift. And that I was kissed. If not by you.” And he was gone, into utter nothing—but the lotus gleamed and refracted in Atmeh’s hand, and its perfume filled the day.
It was something more than three miles to the city, but Atmeh came to it at length as the sun was westering. Its towers and tiers rose up in the gold-leaf air—but Atmeh had seen many cities, and ruled over one that had been to cities as a year is to a day.
Yet this city was grand, and arrogant as the messenger had promised.
So, to get in, Atmeh, who might have put on herself the presence and adornments of an empress—if not a goddess, from consideration of the gods’ thin hides—and stormed the gates by her glamour, Atmeh turned herself into a dove, and the winged lion into a winged lion as small as a dove. And together they flitted in over the mighty battlements whereon were done in enamels just such doves and lions with wings, but each of these was the size of an elephant.
As the sun set and laved the sprawling city, its temples, its palaces, and its warren of slums, Atmeh the dove sat upon a high cornice and gazed about. Honey and amber was the light, and damson the aftercolor that soaked upward from the east.
She flew down to the steps of a temple. Here, by day, there was a market. Now the commerce ceased, and brazen bells boomed out from above, summoning men to honor heaven. In the shadow of a painted column, Atmeh transformed herself again into a girl, and the lion resumed its size. None of the worshipers noticed this, as they hurried up the stair, on their way to plead with and bribe the marble images they thought were holy and might be persuaded to listen. Nor did they feel compelled to turn aside and ask this female figure, subtly clothed in blue, her dog at her feet, to help them instead.
It grew dark under the temple’s heavy brow, and the sky filled with purple and stars. And then a man came walking up the stair, also cloaked in purple, with stars upon and in the folds of it. He reached the column, and casting off his hood, leaned down toward the woman there. And he regarded her. Somewhere a lamp was lit in the portico above, or else some other light had found their faces.
“It was not so very great a while,” he said. “Do you remember me?”
“You? Who can you be?” she said. And she raised her face and her arms to him, and he, taking hold of her, drew her up. Any who saw them then might have been startled by their beauty, and by something more about them, beautiful also. But none saw them, only the paintings on the column, and the birds that nested under the temple roof, and the flame in the lamp there, and all the stars of the sky.
“Say my name,” he said.
“Oloru,” she said.
“No, that is not my name.”
“Perhaps you are like another,” she said, “a prince. But they say he is also ugly—”
“Never with you,” he said. “How could anything be ugly, in your company? That one, half hideous, half deformed, when he approaches you, he grows handsome. Even his eyes, both of them, are golden. Look, do you see?”
She whispered his name. Only he heard it. His face was matchless either side, as all his body was (and the stars on his mantle were stars—not jabs of cutting broken glass). He also smiled. Chuz, she had whispered.
“But you are called Atmeh,” he said. “How you have changed. Where are the tricks you worked on mankind? The lands are littered with those you have healed, and those who teach as you taught them, these philosophies of the undying mortal soul.”
“Let us not talk of that. Tell me rather how it is I met you three times over disguised on my road, and why you teased me, appearing and disappearing, referring to yourself as ‘master.’”
“I have served my term for Azhrarn the Marvelous,” said Chuz, laconically. “Am I not therefore again my own master?”
“None to rule you now.”
“Save only you.”
They drew yet closer then, and their mouths touched as the mouths of lovers will.
They had been parted five or six decades, half a century, a little more—not long. But at their kiss, curious events took place. The birds started from the roofs and began to sing, as if to greet the dawn. And the bells rang in the temple top with no one at their ropes. And elsewhere mirrors turned to icicles, or melted, emerald necklaces were frogs—
“What is this madness?” the citizens exclaimed. “Some enemy is playing a joke.”
And others, looking up from their high avenues and roof pavilions, pointed and said, “Now what is that? Some huge bird, or a bit of blown washing—”
“It is,” said a child, “a man and a woman seated on a velvet carpet, and a lion flies beside them.”
“Nonsense,” its elders told the child.
And in the temple top one of the bronze bells whirled off in a shower of fireworks, and roses rained, and all the unlit lamps were kindled.
“Some noble is holding a feast,” said the elders.
How mundane life was. Only another evening, like all the rest. For even so soon the world was growing skeptical, and sensible, and sound, and blind.
But not for
them, this dark of experience and reason. Unreasonably he and she, on the cloud of a carpet, magicians up in the air, lovers least reasonable of all—the world a garden through which they passed. Through which they might pass forever. Or not, as they chose.
2
THEY JOURNEYED then awhile together, or they left off rambling and made their home, now in a cottage, now in a mansion. They were wandering entertainers, musicians and story-makers, they were a lord and his courtesan, a queen and her warlord, or they were two cats, one black, one yellow, two birds of the sky, two lights that shimmered over marshes and woods by night. And there are the tales, too, of a black-haired man and a blond girl, for both were now shape-changers. . . .
And a year and a day, or one long elemental day that was a mortal year, this they spent together. They asked very little of each other, except to change stones into gold, to walk through walls for amusement—small things. If the gods noticed them at this date is not recorded, and probably they did not. And if any other paid them attention, he did not provide evidence of it. Azhrarn, the instigator of their woes, he had slept then woken, and his waking was more of a sleep than the sleep. Mortals were nothing to him. And of similar worth such royalty as Lords of Darkness. There had come to exist a saying in those times: He does not look at us. Those that said it hardly knew what they meant. But demonkind knew, and came up on the world like the moon, and toyed with them all the more for it.
But for the lovers, they were happy. Happy even after a mortal fashion, for they too understood their idyll could not last beyond its season. This was the bitterness of joy, that it must end, or else grow stale. Dunizel herself had written as much, in the desert shrine of Bhelsheved.
So, then, a scene may be pictured. A day like many others, gilded. A meadow curded with flowers, mountains along the sky’s blue hem, far away yet visible, like the foreshadow of parting.
Atmeh is, on this day, a king’s youngest, loveliest daughter. Eye-blue her dress, flowers in her hair. At her throat a collar of electrum set itself with a strangely wrought flower, amber, amethyst (which, they moot, may have been made for one Lord of Darkness by the Drin-folk of another). Before Atmeh stands a bold winged lion, looking as if it had stepped directly from the enamelwork upon some mighty city gate—whereas in fact such enamels have been inspired by sights of such animals as the lion.
The lion purrs as Atmeh sings in its ear. Then Atmeh claps her hands, and with a flaunt of great pinions, the lion tips itself up into the ether, soars, becomes a tiny daylight star, and is gone.
Atmeh sits down upon the earth to plait a garland of yellow flowers.
A tree nearby opens, and lets out Chuz, a poetic warrior captain mailed and purple-fringed. But the sword in the scabbard at his side is a mauve-eyed serpent waiting only to be drawn to terrify bystanders.
Chuz kneels by Atmeh. He is so handsome, so unlike himself as legends have him to be, you are not entirely sure it is not, after all, Oloru come back again. Yet he is certainly too fabulous for Oloru. Too absolute. Mortals never have this look, of flashing fire made cool and everlasting.
“Where have you sent your lion?” Chuz asked, as the girl set upon his golden hair the golden garland.
“Where it wishes. We have said farewell.”
Chuz reclined. He lay down, and his head rested upon her lap. He looked up at her. No mortal woman, with such a lover by her, could have said farewell in turn to him. Atmeh was not yet mortal.
“Tell me,” she said, as she gazed down upon him, “what I desire to be told.”
“And what is that?”
“You know it.”
“And did you,” he said, “facilitate my return to you, only in order to get from me the information?”
Atmeh gazed upon him.
“Oh, tell me,” she said.
“That you may grow old and die, and this exquisite skin, this hair, these bones, your eyes that are the sun twice over if the sun became the sky—that all this may decay, end, feed soil, and slugs. For that? My reward for telling you, to see you ruined as your mother was?”
“You did not,” said Atmeh, “slay my mother. That I know. I knew when I forgot to hate her. When I loved her again, then I knew. But not how it came to be.”
“I will tell you that,” he said. “If you wish.”
“Be wary,” said Atmeh, “for if you do tell me that, you confirm the means to my own mortality. You note, I am already aware of it.”
They had dressed as humans. Like two humans they rested together in the meadow, mountains about, heaven above, and earth below.
But how did he describe for her the death of her mother and his portion of it, and his guiltlessness—when for that guilty crime Azhrarn had insisted Chuz be punished? Not in words, surely. In a glance. By a method of silent speech even the Vazdru and the Eshva had not coined. Those that came after, however, had only words, nor now the words of the flat earth. Be patient, be attentive, the storyteller cries. Never more needful, these virtues, than now.
In the era of Bhelsheved, it had happened Azhrarn’s blood had spilled in the desert there, three drops. Chuz had come on them, or sought them, and taken them up and hidden them. Out of motives of mischief or admiration or vindictiveness or all of these, and yet other promptings. For if the intellect of such as Azhrarn is awkward to gauge, how much more alien the brain of Madness.
But there is also this. By removing those three polished obsidian drops of unearthly ichor, Chuz kept them from the grasp and plots of men.
Now presently Chuz stood on the lake of Bhelsheved, and offered to Dunizel, in a courtly way, an amethyst die, which Azhrarn refused on her behalf. And after that, the die, one of a pair of dice, maybe, had been found by an insane sect who worshiped stones. And then the die—acclaimed as a radiant stone—was put into a leather bag about an old man’s neck, and venerated as a god. But presently again, when Dunizel had been brought out before the angry people as the harlot of demons, and they debated on how to execute her, and if they dared, Chuz had tried to retrieve the amethyst. A scuffle ensued. Dice, pebbles, and other objects dashed from the robe of Chuz. A shout went up that stones were being thrown at the accursed woman, and so other stones were thrown, with lethal intent. Under Azhrarn’s protections, nothing harmed her until, along with all the debris, someone chanced to pick up and cast at her one of the drops of Azhrarn’s blood. And that being the only item which could pierce his safeguards on her, it killed her outright.
Finally, when the child—Azhriaz—was alone in the fane, Chuz appeared again and proffered her, infant that she was, the amethyst, the very clue, it seemed, to her mother’s murder. And Azhriaz did not accept the jewel. Not until Azhrarn had had his revenge on Chuz, not till she was a woman and alone, did Dunizel’s daughter take the amethyst from that lotus in the swamps by the river delta. And then ever after she wore it in a little cage of silver at her throat.
She had begun to guess, or knew all of it. Chuz told her freshly, and for the first, in the silent incomprehensible speech, or by a glance, or by nothing save his agreement that she learn.
Perhaps he had cared for Dunizel, or for Azhrarn. Perhaps he had been proud, and not liked mankind to get power over a fellow prince. Or it had been just the madman’s pernickety wish for tidiness. Chuz, finding them, kept safe the drops of blood. He stored them inside the die of amethyst. It was an eccentric jest, then, to offer Azhrarn’s own property to Azhrarn, through Azhrarn’s lover, and to be refused, spurned, put off. Then, as the storm gathered over Bhelsheved, Chuz, madly forcing the issue, bringing down the roof on Azhrarn’s schemes, even mistrusting himself (well advised), gave the fateful jewel away. He gave it to the stone-worshiping madmen, his subjects. And the old man stowed the amethyst in a leather bag, from which he never would have allowed it to be taken for any base use. But, oh, Fate—if not Kheshmet, his essence, the happenstance from which Kheshmet had evolved. Prior to the jewel, the old philosopher had kept in his leather bag an amulet of gold. Gold, that was inimical to the demons
, and to demon tissue.
The echo, the ghost of the gold, in such naked proximity, worked upon the drops of Vazdru blood. They began to move inside the die, to seek an exit. And Chuz, sensing that, in turn tried to regain the amethyst, and was unable. By the moment the die was scattered with other objects in the fray, a single demoniac drop had broken free from its prison. A nameless hand seized it, and flung it for a pebble. It did the very thing Chuz had not meant it to. And Dunizel, though not the soul of Dunizel, perished.
Two drops of blood remained inside the die. They had stayed there, and were there to this minute, protected by silver, about the neck of Azhrarn’s daughter.
“By which you confirm,” said Atmeh now, “that they are also the means to my death. As with my mother. That power laboring against itself, diamond cutting diamond. If I absorb that immortal energy changed to black stone, it will wear away my immortality. I will live long, and grow old at length, and finish. And thus I shall be free.”
“But as you also know,” said Chuz, “I sealed the amethyst. Only my will can give those drops of death to you.”
“Or,” she said, “the mere action of gold.”
And she raised the collar of electrum with the lotus set in it. Under that, in the hollow of her throat, lay a golden acorn on a chain of gold. The gold had silvered; she had worn it some while.
“The die is here, within the gold. I believe it has already completed its task. But I was always half mortal. It was necessary to me, to learn from you and from no one and nothing else, that you did not kill my mother.”
“Throw the bauble away,” said Chuz. “Perhaps I lied.”
