by Tanith Lee
Thus, I left him, in that black darkness rasped by the music, disfigured and drowning in the waters of some drink that bore him further and further away from everything, intimately alone with the miasma of his depression, just as he wanted it, a convict in a prison under a lagoon.
There was no rule which stipulated he must desire to be rescued by me, or even that he should desire rescue in any form or from any quarter. Plainly he found the reminder of rescue (my presence) subtly demeaning. I was, at this time, the yardstick of his failure and helplessness. Whatever had occurred, the ordinary, the paranormal, he wanted to be above it all, or at least to leave all of it behind. Best for him would be the chance that he should save himself. If he could, he would. He might.
Unplanned, I have filled this essay with emotion. But emotions, it seems to me now, provide the key signature to the whole concerto. Let them stand then, along with the strange facts.
The truth of the ‘fossil’, and the metamorphosis, have remained secret, and various safeguards put into operation in the Tenebris area. The reports that ships have gone missing are treated now inside a wholly altered frame of reference.
Cimarin Haine is supposed to be living, somewhere, in seclusion. Her friends are dispersed, each with a small unique lapse of memory. Before it was taken from them, they were very much angered, the flowers of the vilyo, to lose this little, intense part of their reality. One did not blame them, but they had no option. Arro alone did not protest. Or so I am told. By now, he believes he left his wife, and that is all. I see his name, the professional name, sometimes, among the neons of the cities. He acts with talent, awareness, and often with great finesse. The condition of his private life, or the privacy of his private soul, are unknown to me.
BLACK AS A ROSE
There are now five books in my series about the Flat Earth, that universe presided over by indifferent gods (who made mankind as a mistake), teased and tortured by demons whose prince, Azhrarn, the beautiful shape-changer, lives by day in a city of jade and steel underground, and by night prowls the world like a black wolf.
The fifth book (Night’s Sorceries), like the first (Night’s Master), is an interconnecting set of short stories, out of which the following is taken.
It’s unnecessary to know the books to read ‘Black as a Rose’. The characters, other than Azhrarn himself, and Dathanja the priest, are unique to it. Otherwise it is only needful to believe that Azhrarn has a very firm, subtle and complex grudge against Dathanja, and anyone therefore cleaving to his cult.
The desert spread like a huge lion, sleeping, and by day its hide was the colour of powdered turmeric. But by night the moon paled its flanks to ash, the colour of dead dreams. Very little grew in the desert, save for the sand, which proliferated constantly. Here and there a well of smudgy water, a tree of thirteen leaves, might entice the infrequent wayfarer. The native creatures were few and stirred mostly after sunfall.
Somewhere in the west of this waste there lay a ship.
How it had come there, in the midst of the sand, even those who had seen it could not decide. The general opinion was the vessel had been stranded millennia ago, when a sea then occupying the region soaked underground by magic. The ship was of an ornate mode, carved and gilded, with a lily prow and a stern like a fish’s tail, having two masts and triple banks of oars. And some odd property either of the spell or the ship itself, or of the desert dusts in concert with such things, had totally mummified the hulk, even to its two sails, turning it into a galley of salt.
Below, a long pool of clear water was colonnaded by tall palms, and fringed with thickets of locust trees, fig and lilac.
At this place, several ancient tracks and highways had once converged, but the sands had mostly eroded them. A small shrine to a stone god stood above the oasis. Between the shrine and the ship of salt, sequestered in a garden, was the green-eyed house of Jalasil.
Before her death, the mother of Jalasil, who had been a sorceress, set on this house many protections, that her only daughter might live there in security. And this Jalasil had done until young womanhood. She was tended by three old servants, who had been her mother’s, and seldom saw any other being. Meanwhile she employed herself with the library of books and the life of the garden. Though sometimes she would sit for hours of an evening, gazing through the tourmaline panes, now to the east and now to the west, the north or the south. Green-eyed like her house, Jalasil was neither happy nor unhappy, yet now and then, at her gazing, she would take up her harp and invent brief songs in a minor key.
Across the desert came a band of nomadic young men.
In these days the teachings of the priest-magician Dathanja had started a new vogue in certain quarters of the earth. His creed, both cosmic and precise, had a flexible simplicity which, usually, was soon harnessed and complicated by his devotees, or those who had picked up some smattering. The young nomads had, not one of them, ever seen him, or heard his parables first hand. They had come to a grasp of the physical liberty he conveyed and to the wandering and mostly possessionless state he typified. Too, they had some kindness, creativity and healing to impart, and did so, while none of them had ever committed evil, or — more to the point — ever feared evil. Yet their souls were younger than the soul of Dathanja, which had lived in any case two lives in one.
The leader of this group bore the name Zhoreb. Like Dathanja himself, he was dark of hair and brow, a fact Zhoreb had not failed to notice. Beside that he was tawny from the sun, with eyes the shade of some inundating river. He walked with the courage and pride which health and intelligence may bestow, and his comrades followed him gladly, as pleased by his qualities as by their own.
They went where the land itself led them. Finding a hill, they would climb, a valley — descend. Coming on the remnant of a road in the sand, they took it.
By day they strode, resting only at the sharp peak of noon, where they could in the umbra of a rock or tree, or else merely under their own mantles.
When night closed earth and sky, they made a fire, for they gathered dry plants and husks as they came on them, and sat under the vast arch of desert heaven packed with fruiting stars and a moon near and huge as a cartwheel, but shadowed like a skull. Here they drank hoarded water and ate such eatable stuff as had been found, while the eerie hymns of animals arose for miles about on every side. Then they told each other stories, and mused on the reality (or otherwise) of life and the world. And sometimes, being young and high-spirited, they ran races or performed acrobatic feats, or played at other competitions of skill both physical and cerebral.
At the third dusk in the desert, as they were settling themselves by the decayed road under a tree of only seven leaves, one of the company remarked, ‘See, Zhoreb, there is a fellow traveller.’
Then Zhoreb got to his feet again, and looked away over the ashy dunes. And sure enough, against a rising moon, one came toward them.
‘He is clad all in black. Yet,’ declared the young man who had spoken formerly, ‘he has no priestly look to him.’
‘His hair is blacker than the night. Are those the stars themselves caught in his cloak?’
‘The cloak beats slowly, like two wings of an eagle.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Zhoreb, ‘a mage.’
‘And listen,’ whispered another, ‘how quiet the desert has grown. As if the wolverines and jackals held their breath to hear — ’
‘Sir,’ called Zhoreb boldly, ‘you are welcome to join us at our fire. We have little to eat, but will gladly share with you what we have.’
The figure paused a short distance from the road. The moon now stood behind his head, making his face difficult to discern, but for the sombre flash of two black eyes. Black as the eyes of Dathanja they were, and much blacker.
‘Since you invite me so courteously,’ said the stranger, ‘I will sit down with you. For your food, another feast awaits me where I am going before sunrise. I will not, therefore, trouble yours.’
His voice was so thrilling, so me
lodious, and held such extraordinary power, that even Zhoreb hesitated at it. But one of the band, the youngest of them maybe, broke into a merry laugh. ‘Why, here is a boaster! Pray tell us, sir, where in all this wilderness and night do you intend to feast?’
Just then the stranger moved and stepped onto the road. The fire caught him in a glass of gold. He had the beauty and the presence of a king, or that a king should have. And all the night was his, no wonder it fell silent at his approach, or sought to feast him.
‘Where?’ he said, and smiled a little on the youngest who had mentioned boasting, so the boy himself grew moon-colour. ‘Why, under your feet.’
Then he passed by and sat down among them, across the fire from Zhoreb. And Zhoreb sat in some haste. And after this, for an interval, it was so noiseless there the flames had a sound of breaking bones.
But the stranger, having turned his rings — and magnificent rings they were — upon his lordly hands, the nails of which were very long, squared, and enamelled silver, glanced toward the desert and said, coaxingly, ‘Go on with your music, my children.’
And at that such a tempest of nocturnal howls and screechings and whistlings and chirrups burst from the sands, for some thirty or sixty miles in all directions, that every one of the priestly band of Zhoreb jumped in his skin, and almost out of it indeed.
‘And now,’ said the stranger, returning his regard to Zhoreb, ‘let me delight in your philosophical debate.’
‘My lord,’ said Zhoreb, who did not know fear or evil, yet fancied he espied them, ‘you are, by your appearance and your state, surely the superior in knowledge. How shall we presume? Let us rather, my lord, attend to you. Or keep dumb.’
Then the man laughed. (A rill of velvet able to slice steel.)
‘You are of the wise, Zhoreb. Is that then through the teaching of your mentor?’
‘The teachings of Dathanja are imperfectly known to us. Yet we value his example.’
‘Do you so? Yet, at his inception, he was a simpleton, and a perpetrator of enormous wrongs. This you will also know, doubtless.’
‘It combines with the sum of his message.’
‘Which is?’
‘My lord,’ said Zhoreb, lowering his riverine eyes from the eyes of the stranger, which were not like eyes at all, but like the sky or some space beyond the sky, blacker and more bright. ‘My lord, I beg to be excused from delivering to you my faulty rendition of the whole and remedial testimony of that man.’
‘But you have expounded it to others.’
Then Zhoreb, caught between his faith and his astuteness, fell. He chose faith. He said, ‘The basis of the doctrine is purely this: we enchain ourselves. Even in fetters of iron we might be free, but in gossamers, more often than not, we load ourselves, put out our own eyes and break our own backs. For, though he had performed wickedness, Dathanja was able to cast out his own sins, to be free of them, and so to sin no more, being free to do good. And there is none that may not change himself, whatever he has done, or become, or is.’
‘Thus?’ said the stranger. ‘How you do astonish me.’
And again a silence — the length and breadth of the desert as it seemed, as if every creature and every grain of sand had gone to granite.
Then Azhrarn (and not one of them by now, being educated, did not realise but that Azhrarn it was) made a mild gesture to the fire which altered to the starkest white, as if ice leapt and burnt there.
Pretending not to heed it, even while the young men drew away, Azhrarn said, ‘In gratitude for your frank admission of faith, the reckless bravery of which act is to your credit, I will myself offer you a parable.
‘Supposing,’ continued Azhrarn, ‘a man comes upon a ship in the midst of the desert. Probably he will immediately think to himself, “Behold, once there was an ocean upon this land which the Sea People, who are sorcerers, dispelled for some mischief. All was destroyed save this one vessel. Stranded here, it has fossilised and remains an object of wonder, a visual tract upon the impermanence of things.”
‘But suppose again,’ murmured Azhrarn, ‘that in truth the ship had been set in the desert at the notion of some magus, who preserved it there against the sand and the wind, and gave it also the semblance of antiquity. And he did this for no reason of any consequence, except maybe to cause a man, observing his work, to review the evidence and draw a false conclusion.’
The fire fluttered, blushed, resumed its proper hue. Across the acres of the dunes, a hawking owl mewed at the moon.
None dared speak after Azhrarn had spoken, but for Zhoreb, though some minutes he did not. Then, sensing the Demon’s eyes on him, Zhoreb said this: ‘Your instruction, my lord, shall be much valued. All the more so since it is yourself who give it.’
‘And what is your comment upon my instruction, O student of Dathanja the Priest?’
Zhoreb considered. Then he answered, ‘In the land of my childhood there was a saying, as follows: “The black rose does not anywhere grow. Therefore let us fondly believe in the blooming of the black rose.”’
Azhrarn was standing some way off. The wings of his cloak beat slowly, and the stars hung in its threads or feathers.
‘Where I shall feast presently,’ said Azhrarn, ‘black roses are woven in the garlands. Enlighten them therefore in your childhood’s land: the black rose blooms. No longer believe in the black rose.’
And having told him that, Azhrarn vanished and only a dark and flaming cloud was there, which sank at once into the earth.
Now at long last, Zhoreb’s band started up and ran about in dismay. But Zhoreb sat where he was and fed three twigs into the fire.
‘Zhoreb — what shall we do?’
‘There is nothing to be done. Demons exist.’ And then Zhoreb smiled and added under his breath, ‘Therefore we need not believe in them.’
Jalasil, having gazed long through moonlit tourmaline, lay sleeping in the burning morning.
The elderly woman who was now her body-servant, entered and, beginning to arrange her mistress’s toilette, announced, ‘My little sister, going to get water at the fountain, found a company of young apostles in the oasis.’
‘They are welcome,’ said Jalasil, listlessly, for she had experienced strange dreams at sunrise.
‘My little sister says they are a fine bevy of young men. They were marvelling at the ship of salt and had not even seen this house behind the locust trees.’
Jalasil’s body-servant was a lady some eighty years of age, and her little sister was just seventy-three.
‘Madam,’ added the elder sister, ‘may it please you to send food to these worthy lads, or better yet, to permit us to serve a meal for them in the kitchen. They are holy men, and it is a great time since preachers and storytellers visited the place.’
‘Yes,’ said Jalasil, under the web of her light hair, fine as frayed silk, which the woman combed with sandalwood, and still under the heavy weight of dreams. ‘It is three years since any passed this way. And who they were, I forget.’
‘Only some meagre merchant and his poor slaves. And before that, two pot menders who had words with the boy.’ (The boy was the porter, an adolescent of sixty-nine summers.)
Soon it was arranged over a tray of ornaments — all of which Jalasil declined — that the elder and little sisters, and the boy if so disposed, should invite the travellers to a supper.
Later, Jalasil learned that the social event would go on in the open air, for though they did not spurn the comforts of four walls, the priestly travellers, wherever possible, did without them.
Accordingly, at sunset, down the path to the pool went the two old women, veiled, as was thought proper either in those parts or in their youth, and the boy leaning on his stick.
Jalasil, who had given slight heed to any of the matter, was glad enough they should have what novelty was available.
But, as the evening advanced, the stars broke out of their prisons. Lamplight and fireflies gleamed in the weft of the thickets. She grew restless. At
length, donning a veil herself, Jalasil also descended from her house.
The air was still and tinctured with the spices of the desert, and the salad freshness of the oasis and its water. The fireflies flickered in golden strands, just as sometimes they strung themselves among the flowers of Jalasil’s garden, inducing in her nostalgias for which she had no name. In the pool, which now came visible between the fig trees, lights of four or five lamps extended.
But under his shrine, amid the crickets’ strumming, the faceless stone god was blank, offered no counsel, and the young woman in kind paid no attention to him.
She stole to the darkest edge of the water. She was by nature retiring, and it did not occur to her to flounce among them as the owner of the spot. Instead, where the lilacs grew and a fountain sprang from a rock, composing herself, Jalasil looked on.
The priestly nomads sat with the old people of the house, eating and drinking and exchanging pleasantries, as if they were all of one family. (Which the nomads’ teaching would in any event perhaps have said they were.) Now and again one of the young men would tell a story or anecdote, in meaning religious, or not. But as Jalasil stood herself by the fountain, it fell Zhoreb’s turn.
Now when he began to speak, Jalasil looked at him with keen attention. The lamplight made him out to be of gold, and the shadows addressed themselves to his hair and eyes and clothing in order that the gold might show to more advantage. It seemed to Jalasil that she had seen Zhoreb on many previous occasions. This unnerved her, for she had not often seen any save her household. And of those strangers who infrequently passed through the oasis, none she had looked on had ever struck her as memorable. So then she could not think how she had ever seen him or heard his voice, which told the story of Dathanja as he himself had been told it as a child. And eventually it came to her that perhaps she had seen him when she slept, that she had chanced on him in her dreams.