by Tanith Lee
“How I long to look at you,” she said to the child, the child of rape and horror, which had become the child of guilelessness and ethereal flame.
One day, when the man was from their house, gathering wild gourds, Sunfire’s pains began. In her innocence, the girl was not afraid. The pains had a rightness to them, which encouraged her, nor were they beyond her capacity to endure. She knew their origin, besides, and her discomfort was mingled with eagerness. Very soon, the visitor she had been expecting would be before her. With the soundness of her animal instincts, she prepared. The light had made her strong. Her labor was short.
An hour or so after noon, when the man returned through the young new trees that were coming up above the waterfall, he heard a baby crying, dropped the gourds he had collected, and ran for the bothy.
When he reached the house, all had been put to rights, and there sat Sunfire with her child, which was no longer weeping, but drinking from her breast.
When the child slept, they sat and looked at her. Though newborn, she was pale as a lily, and on her small skull, fine as morning mist, bloomed the palest, most lilylike hair.
She had three parents, man, woman and comet. Yet, in her, the shine of the sun had become the sheen of the moon. She did not glow in the dark as her mother had come to glow. Only the beauty of the baby glowed. She wrapped her fists about the fingers of the woman and the man. A drop of milk spilled from Sunfire’s breast upon the ground, and beamed for a moment like a filmy pearl, before the earth drank it gratefully down. Later, a flower grew in the spot.
“Soveh,” crooned the woman. Soveh was the name she had chosen for her baby. The man did not argue, for Soveh meant flame.
In the darkness of the dwelling’s corner, the man sat hidden and tears ran down his face, for he knew his wife would soon be leaving him, and he knew the child was not meant for him, and he knew that now he was enlightened enough to feel, he was to be gently and poignantly punished for his earlier wickedness.
But for almost a year, the parents and the child lived together. Sunfire made toys from the reeds for her infant. The man made a cradle of the stems. Sometimes they laughed and sang, and sometimes they were quiet. Sometimes the man and woman made love, and the child watched them benignly.
But often, in the pith and core of the darkness, the man who had been the magician’s servant would wake alone with the child. And going to the bothy entrance, he would see a candle flame gliding along the rim of the pool, and a second flame reflected in the water below. At first he took it for witch-fire or phosphorous, but as the flame moved about, he realized it was no elemental thing, but Sunfire, his wife.
There came a night then, when the year was almost done, and he beheld Sunfire walking by the water, and she was a doll of golden glass, lit within by a silver coal.
At length she came to him, with regret and with joy, and with a strange inevitable remoteness.
“You will be going, then,” he said. He did not let her see his wretchedness, that it might not spoil her departure.
“It must be so,” she said. “I shall not, I think, remain much longer in this form. How brief a time I have been a woman and known it, yet what sweetness I have shared with you and our daughter. I am sorry to leave you, yet not sorry, for this is my destiny. The fire of heaven which brought me to life is now reclaiming me.”
“Do you have no fear?” he whispered, for he could see her bones through her skin like crystal rods, and blazing constellations had evolved in her eyes.
She said, “A child is not afraid to grow, nor a river afraid to return into the ocean.”
They went together into the bothy, and looked at the baby that had been named Soveh.
“I do not suppose,” said Sunfire, “that our child can live as other children do, or that her future will be commonplace. You must watch for portents. Events will demonstrate how you must bestow her.”
“Could I not keep her, then?”
“No more than keep moonlight in a cage.”
At that, he could not stay silent, and he said, “When I am alone I shall die.”
“Do not waste yourself,” she said. “Live, and learn.”
In the morning, she was gone.
It is said that shepherds on the hills nearby caught sight of a woman walking the slopes, and one exclaimed that she was clad in gold, and another that her clothes were alight. But a third declared that as the sun came in over the shore of the earth, a topaz star flew up like a bird and spun away across the sky to meet the dawn. It was so bright, this star-bird, he could scarcely glance at it, and yet it had, he said, the shape of a girl all of molten stuff, though she was also winged like a dove. . . .
There was a woman in the village, the reed-cutter’s wife. A little more than two years before, she had gone to bathe and to cut reeds herself at the pool. There the mage’s foul servant had sprung out on her and she had stabbed him in the thigh. Presently, as she cooked her man’s supper, the magician’s messenger-bird had come to chide her, and her husband had stood between her and the messenger and given back a stern reply to the magician. When the bird meekly withdrew, the woman had gone to her husband and embraced him. “How brave and clever you are!” she had extolled him, and they had let the supper she was cooking burn, and lain down together instead. When the comet appeared over the village, they, with all their neighbors, had fled. But though the woman was with child, she was not one of those who had miscarried. She took care, however, that none of the supernatural rays touched her, and later on, resumed her life in the village with the rest of the people. At the allotted time she bore a healthy girl-child, declared by everybody who saw it, to be of superlative attraction. As indeed, then and now, most new children are declared to be.
A morning came that the woman was at the pool once more, cutting reeds there, and her child nearby lying safe in a basket, or so she believed. The weather was hot, and the woman worked at her task slowly, singing to herself the while to match the harmonies of the waterfall. And her mind began to dwell on the wonder of that fall and how it made music, and on all the wonders that had accrued in the land, and the rhythm of her knife partly hypnotized her, cutting and cutting at the gray-green stems. . . . The child, meanwhile, had contrived to roll from its nest. In among the reeds, then, which to its unfocused gaze were a senseless jungle, it began to crawl. Up on their reed pillars, spiders like green marzipan stared down at it from many mulberry eyes which they wore like caps of jewels on their heads. Smart armored beetles scattered before its soft hands noisily, clattering their long horns.
The mother, pausing to rest a moment, glanced up, and caught her breath in horror. Some fifty feet away, her child was tottering drunkenly at the brink of the pool. Before she could prevent herself, the woman uttered a loud cry of alarm. The child started, and lost its balance. The water gave way like treacle to receive it. Then the surface knitted over, nor did it unravel to show the child again.
The reed-cutter’s wife began to scream, and would have thrown herself directly into the pool, but in a moment more a man had dashed from among the reeds, and dived deep in the water. Without speech, in that mutual telepathy of human passion which will sometimes occur, the woman knew this stranger must have seen her child in the instant of its fall, and had rushed to help it. So she ran about on the bank, sobbing prayers of terror and frustration, and seeing how the black mud was stirred up to the surface by the man’s activity. Once or twice his head emerged from the water, slick as an otter’s, but only for a second was it visible before plunging down again.
Enough time had by now elapsed that anyone but the mother must have known her daughter to be dead. But she, of course, would not believe such a thing. At length, grim proof appeared. The man came forth from the pool once more, but now he carried something in his arms. It was a bundle, covered all over with water-murk. It might have been a great clod of mud he had dragged up, and incongruously offered the mother; save that the distraught expression on his face told another story.
But
the reed-cutter’s wife did not look at the man’s face, only at the black and peculiar object he held out to her. And it seemed she did not recognize it, for she drew away, drew away from the edge of the pool, and suddenly she turned her back to the water, the man, the bundle, and began to scream again and beat her fists on the ground.
Just then the man, the magician’s servant who lived by the pool, heard the bleating of a goat. There on the farther bank had arrived the little white she-goat, who gave his own child milk, and the child herself, who was called Flame. The man hurried to get to shore immediately, not wishing the tragedy repeated. Laying the dead and muddy infant in the reeds, he climbed onto the bank, and took up his own offspring in his arms. Soveh, disconcerted by the woman’s screams, and made wet by this paternal encounter, sent up a howl of disapproval, penetrating as a thin gold wire.
It pierced the mother’s ear, even through her own uproar. For it sounded in her head like a bell ringing out: Listen, listen! It is as you thought. No child of yours could ever die.
A heartbeat, and the woman was in the pool, swimming frantically for the area where the man stood, the girl-child in his arms. He, in surprise, merely stood and watched the woman, watched her till she too had dragged herself up the bank. And then she reached out, and snatched the child from his hands.
“You have revived her—Oh, a thousand blessings on you. And a thousand more from her father when he hears of it.”
The man, who had come to live in serene naïveté, was lost for words, as this tune went on, but eventually he pointed at the reeds where he had set down the drowned child, and he cried, “Alas, it is my daughter you have taken up. Your own child lies there.”
At this, the reed-cutter’s wife seemed to become quite mad. Her face shriveled on its frame, and blood engorged her eyes.
“Filthy trickster!” she shrieked. “Affecting pretense with an armful of mud to make believe my child was dead. Meaning to keep my child for purposes of your own. My baby, wet from the pool, as I can feel her to be.”
There must have been some superficial likeness between the two small girls, or surely she could not so have deluded herself. No doubt both were fair, and of an age. Yet it seems an odd thing a mother should not know her own young, that which had budded from her body, which she had fed from her own breasts, and rocked to sleep, and carried about with her for two years, both in her womb and on her shoulders. But there is always this: her precipitate cry it was had pitched her baby in the water. A thoughtless, inadvertently murderous act. Guilt, in those days, was a wild dog, biting at its own tail. Perhaps this mother wished to be mistaken before she felt those teeth fasten in her heart.
“Vile robber,” she shouted. “What evil did you plan? To kill and eat my daughter, maybe. Or to practice nastier deeds?”
And then, even as she ranted, she caught sight of a blueish scar upon his thigh. It was like a draught of strong liquor to her, that sight, for with it memory rushed back to her—of the rapist and her knife. She knew him in a flash of blood-red hate, and by that glare, she turned and fled, clutching her burden to her. Its stricken wails she translated to herself as fear of the devilish man who had seized it. Not as fear of its abduction by herself.
The man stood nonplussed, staring at the mad woman. Yet, as she fled, he made to pursue, but the little goat got in his way. And, looking down at her, he remembered Sunfire who had played with the goat. And next Sunfire seemed to say in his brain: “Events will demonstrate how you must bestow our child.” And he recollected, too, how he had guessed this was to be his punishment. Then he did not go after the woman, but began to cry, and the little goat nudged him, and he picked her up in his arms, and wept on her long white hair, his tears like a bitter song, to the music of the waterfall.
The woman, having convinced herself, convinced her husband, and next all the village. But when they went to look for the evil man finally to slay him, he had gone away. Only the bothy was found, and a few of the clever reed toys Sunfire had made, and an empty cradle. These, without compunction, the villagers burnt. And by the firelight, in the reeds at the water’s edge, the spiders and beetles feasted.
And probably, for a month or so, some might remark to the woman: “How different your girl looks. It must be her ordeal has left its mark on her. Yet, if anything, she is the prettier.”
And the woman smiled. (Though often in the ebb hours of night she would suffer a nightmare, seeing a tiny parcel of bones, with the green reeds growing through them.)
No longer was the child called Soveh, which is Flame. She was called the name the other child had had. That name is not remembered, but lovely she was, and lovelier she grew. Sunfire into moonflame. She, who might well have been born a monster, stumbling, ugly and mindless, transmuted by the comet’s light.
But, being so wondrous, there began to be an apartness about her. Though she was demure and gentle, her very containment, her very sweetness, coupled to her extraordinary rarity, placed her inside a shell of crystal. She might be seen, and spoken to, she might answer and be heard. Yet who can touch through a shell of crystal? And who can love through one?
CHAPTER 4
Moonflame
The child grew. She was fifteen. She was beautiful. She was distant, perhaps unreachable.
The other young ones of the village reacted strangely to her. With the frequently valid instincts of childhood, they had known from the start she was not one of themselves. Yet, they had not feared her or disliked her. She was restful, peaceful in her beauty. If they were unhappy or troubled or hurt and no parent by, they would go to her, even when she was only three or four years, and somehow she would comfort and soothe them. They treated with her as if with an adult, an adult of their own height and age, but wiser than they. In some ways, as children, they were proud of her. When visitors came, they would be taken to see the reedcutter’s daughter, she who had been drowned and revived. She was a sight-to-be-viewed in the village, almost a holy sight, though this they did not recognize as such, or would not, or could not.
But then she grew up, and the children of the village began to be obsessed with her. The girls would sit by her, and speak out their hearts to her, hanging on her calm replies. The boys would avoid her eyes that seemed suddenly bluer than heaven, look askance at her fluid slenderness, her platinum-colored veil of hair. They would think of her as they tended the flocks and herds, as they tilled the soil or cut the grain or hammered out pieces of metal on the anvil. They would think of her, too, when they lay over the bodies of other girls, or with the friendly whores in the tavern that had recently been set up in the mansion on the hill. But, even as they thought of bedding with the reed-cutter’s daughter, some innate sense of wrongness would overcome them. It was not that she was undesirable. It was not that she was anything but filled to the brim with the promises and forms of delight. Not even that they had seen no passion in her, for there was a passion about her quite beyond all expression, a passionate stillness, like that of a closed and sleeping flower, the passion of that which is waiting to break free, to blossom, to overspill the margins of itself—and each must ask: Shall I be the one to free her? Yet there was something else, beyond all this. The shell of crystal, dimly, psychically perceived, in which this flower lay.
However, human aspiration is often blind, its motto: I want, therefore I will have. Which in some cases is an excellent thing, but which, in this case, was mere folly.
The young men began to sue for the reed-cutter’s daughter in marriage.
The prideful parents were less aware of their child’s unusual qualities, for they knew only that she was the best daughter in the world, the loveliest, the most dutiful and virtuous—and all this they took for granted, since she was theirs, and could not therefore be anything less than perfect. But now their pleasure in her was doubled, for here was a proposal for a wedding from the wealthy blacksmith’s son, and here another from the son of the landowner who possessed more than two hundred olive trees, and more than three hundred goats. And
here a proposal from all three of the baker’s sons. And here from the vintner’s young brother. And here—oh, yes, best hide this one—a naughty offer from the silk merchant’s niece who lived in the town and, out on a drive, had spied the reed-cutter’s daughter through her carriage window.
“Is this not wonderful?” said the reed-cutter of his daughter. And very fairly he told her of each of the young men who had asked for her, extolling their charms and good qualities. Nor, since he was an honest man, did he praise the wealthiest ones most highly, but gave all equal measure.
The girl sat, quiet as a leaf, and her father was delighted at her modesty. Strangely, it was the beaming mother who grew uneasy and slowly ceased to beam. The mother thought of the green pool and the dead child who had come back from death, changed from a corpse or a mere lump of mud, into a living baby. The mother seemed to see a faint sheen playing over her miraculous offspring, but probably it was only the summer sun through the doorway. The mother wished to put her hand on her husband’s arm, murmuring Say nothing else. But probably it was only a mother’s natural fear of losing her daughter.
“Now,” said the man, at the end of his recital, “you may take as many days as you like to decide whom you will have. It is a difficult choice, for many of them are fair, and several are well-to-do. But remember, do not think only of coins. Your mother and I have been poor, but we have also been happy in each other.”
The girl raised her head. She smiled on them like a benediction, but she said: “There is no man I have met that I would wish to live with.”
The father was shocked. He was a man, and believed men to be fine creatures.
“Come now,” he said. “That is foolish talk. What better future can you gain than in the role of wife?”