by Tanith Lee
undissolved, this one piece had nestled like a child, washed out by blood under the hand of the dying
Roman, thrust by him into the broken socket of the Medusa, his warning, all he could give, a jewel that
was an eye - the utuk fell crackling, and met the shield, the eye, the gem, roared - like wind or fire - and was gone.
The Jew bent a little, leaning on the shield after his battle, to see where the jewel-fragment lay, erupted from its setting of eleven centuries. The shield seemed battered at last, brittle, like clinker. And for the jewel itself, it was like a cinder rendered up from the common hearth.
Haninuh spoke a Word over that cinder. Then he spoke a Word to the chamber and the blackness. To
God he could not speak. For this, there were no words.
The embers of a morning lay in the green tines of the cedar tree. It seemed a dove was murmuring there. "Oh that you were my brother that nursed at my mother's breast. When I should find you I might kiss
you, it would be no shame. I would bring you into the house and there feed you on fruit and quench your thirst with wine. His left hand under my head, his right hand caressing me, he will teach me love."
Raoulin's lids lifted. Beauty sat by the bed and looked at him with gentle sombre eyes. In colour, no blacker than his own.
"Who is this," she said, "coming out of the desert, leaning upon her love? Under the tree I woke you; let it be as the place where you were born."
He was so weak he could not move, could not even speak to her. But he had never thought to see her again. He attempted, and failed, to find some means to offer her his voice.
She shook her head, and touched his lips with her fingers. Upon the bed itself a striped cat stared at him, pitiless, guileless, angelic, and kneaded his feet.
He slept once more, comforted under their gaze.
Folded in a parchment, corded with seven charms, the amulet, or what remained of it, was buried in a clod of earth the size of a boy's hand. This then was packed into a box of horn, and that box into another of iron. Between the two boxes was a space, where an alchemical substance, being intruded, began of itself to burn. The iron box was closed, and put into a tablet of lead.
The whole was then carried to the midnight bank of the river, half a mile below Our Lady of Ashes, and thrown far out by the mighty arm of Liva. The tablet sank.
It sank, perhaps, to the mulch of the river's bottom, to wait once more, now for the deterioration of its containers, horn and iron and lead, earth, air, fire, and water. To wait out the river too, maybe, until that vast elder Leviathan of Paradys should shrink to a few puddles under some future sun. By then, the life of the amulet might also be eroded. If not, in that unpredictable to-come, some wandering one in the dry river-bottom would stoop and take up a lustreless stone, curious, and find the Devil still kept his court in the world. But possibly that day would never be.
For Raoulin, he was a very long time ill in the house of Haninuh. But being excellently, and cleverly and lovingly, tended, recovered before winter sealed the City in its orb of ice.
In the spring letters went from Raoulin to his kindred at the northern farm. But then the happiness turned like cream. For Raoulin had set himself to become a Jew by faith, conceivably more orthodox than his mentor. The reasons that he gave were unhelpful, for the actual spur had risen in him as fiercely and insatiably as young blood.
(Perhaps too he remembered a Christian priest under the Sacrifice, who had turned from him in his hour
of horrible need.)
But his family cast off Raoulin. That was that.
Among the scholars of Haninuh's fraternity, this scholar found more than enough to study, and took to these new tutors, these new arcane formulae, with greed. For themselves, the Jews were kind to him. Even in Paradys, in their hearts, they reckoned their way was the only one, and had grown used to the insults and cruelties this knack provoked. For the gentile who approached them from the night, innocent, quietly asking, they could not but feel some wondering affection. As he grew in stature among them, they came to speak of their foundling with pride.
By then, of course, he had wed Ruquel, Haninuh's exquisite daughter, under the canopy.
These two knew together more happiness than most, less pain than many. They seldom spoke of death. Like the draining of the river, such things were the concern of God.
