by Tanith Lee
“Ah,” said he, in a most musical voice, “so you guess?”
“I do not guess your name, lord,” said the girl. “But the air ripples like a stream before you.”
“I will tell you who I am. I am your lunacy,” said Chuz, Delusion’s Master, Prince Madness, one of the five Lords of Darkness. “For you are mad, my dear, in following this vocation. Even your goodness is a craziness. But then, all the very good are mad, just as the very wicked are mad. In fact, there is hardly any difference between the holy and the profane, save in their ideals and their deeds. Both are fanatics. Both are ruthless. Tomorrow you will be sent to your temple. Before long, your fate will find you out. Do you wonder what it might be? No,” added Chuz suddenly, “do not look at me. You have glanced, inspect no further. I understand the temptation is strong, but I would not have you any more than a fraction my subject. I will accordingly muffle my face.”
“For that I thank you,” said the girl. “Sensing your power, I comprehend you are generous.”
“It is not my motive to enslave you. Another will come to you in due course. Which may be his madness, I believe, a delusion beyond all others he, though not I, have achieved in the world. Would you have his name? Best not. My third cousin, three times removed through the black dynasties of night. Less kin to me than a lizard is, but nearer to me than one grain of sand to another. And you will know him, too. I think you are mad enough, my darling, to pity him a little. And how he will stare at that!”
The edge of the cloak, damson-colored as the sky now was, brushed like a long wing over the dusty roof before her. She saw the stars of it were bits of broken glass. And she heard the rattle of dice in the moment that he vanished.
Those who questioned her after were perplexed.
“It was perhaps the temptation of a demon, which failed,” they said. “Or can it have been an occult proclamation, some messenger of the gods?”
Whatever it was, next day they conducted her to salt-white Bhelsheved, to the hibiscus towers, the lake of turquoise mirror that matched her eyes. She was a priestess. They named her Dunizel, Soul-of-the-Moon.
In her bubble of crystal, now she floated by others in similar bubbles, (yet not the same, not at all), everyone magically adrift in the currents of the heavenly city, that Upperearth-on-Earth.
Friendships were rarely made here. Inner joys were woven, introvert candles kindled, divine eccentricities. Religion was the flower, and they the bees which visited and revisited, their sole purpose to make spiritual honey with which to sweeten the sourness of the outer world. Bhelsheved the beehive.
So, in her calm, waiting loveliness, her iridescent steely innocence, she dwelled for three years. Until the scent of somber fire came to her in the night, and she knew the wicked thing burning there like a lamp of black flame. And coming out, she found him, Azhrarn, whom Chuz had named her fate.
CHAPTER 5
An Image of Light and Shadow
The sun had come up over the world, and Dunizel, Moon’s Soul, had been returned to the blossom garden by the sacred lake of Bhelsheved. And he who had lain over her, yet not with her, the marvelous weight of him, not in the least heavy or oppressive, yet of a substance that had seemed to combine with her own flesh, he had gone back to his city of Druhim Vanashta, underground.
That demon metropolis, lit eternally by the light of the Underearth, which was neither sun nor moon nor stars, yet most like starlight—though brighter—bright as a sun composed of shadow—and yet milder—more like the moon, yet not the moon, for colors palely glowed and swarthily smoked there. . . . Did Druhim Vanashta seem fair to him, when he reentered there, into its lambency and its altered time?
The towers were still as tall and slender, still as fantastically ornamented, the lacelike parapets still holding their arrow shafts of burning jewels, the windows their multi-hues of glass and crystal and corundum. The walls still rose like blades, or curved like half-closed wings. The brass and silver, jade and porcelain and platinum were still purely wonderful to behold. The gardens and the parks of spangled black, where fish sang in the filigree trees and birds swam in the pools and flowers chimed like bells, had not altered, would never alter, never could. And the glamorous citizens passed up and down there, bowing, obeising themselves to Azhrarn, each one fabulous, his subjects, all of them in love with him, for demons seldom served anything they did not worship, and Azhrarn they worshipped and to spare. It is pleasant to be loved.
But to love—
Demons did little in the paltry way of men. Their passions, as they themselves, were like the sheerness of great lights. They had probably invented sexuality, physical love. They could not have invented such a thing if love itself had not been to them some sort of key to the world’s heart. But fire consumes, eating itself with what it feeds on.
Once, he had taken another, as a child, even into the demon city, had watched him grow there like a plant, like a young tree, and, at the first Azhrarn had said to him: “I do not give my love lightly, but once given it is sure.” Which was not quite exact. Inventories of the liaisons of Azhrarn might be drawn up, some of them very light, very casual, the stuff of a mortal year, a day in Druhim Vanashta. But love has many houses, many countries. All exist, then and now, and for as long as what lives can see and feel and think. For love is, too, a product of thought. While it seems to destroy reason, yet nothing that cannot in some mode reason, can ever love.
Azhrarn went about his city and about its gardens and outer environs, in the changeless morning-evening, dawn-dusk of Underearth’s sublumination.
Those who saw him, responding to his moods, as always, sensed in him an obsession with everything, and with nothing, or with something other than that underground place. They had been aware formerly of his cold anger. They had been primed to serve him in this anger, and had already done so when the sorcerous tower of blackness and lights had risen in the desert. Yet now the princely caste of the demons, the Vazdru, said one to another: “Our lord no longer requires our service. He has happened upon something which he will engage alone.” And knowing, by a sort of empathy, what that something must be, they knew also the sharp gorgeous jealousy of their kind.
Even in attainment, to love may encompass pain. Beyond the moment of fulfillment, who can ignore other moments that lie in wait, moments of doubt, of unlucky possibility? Truly, most of Azhrarn’s lovers, (mortals), had betrayed him—not, it is sure, by cleaving to another in his stead, since such was virtually inconceivable—but rather by disappointing him, failing him, ceasing to surprise or entrance him. Or by hankering after some other thing and wishing for it as mightily as they wished to keep his liking. And as love’s supreme law is that nothing must be of such value as itself, that hankering of theirs each time lost them his regard, and, usually, their lives. For demons tended to kill those who failed them, less from vengeance than a desire to tidy up the trailing loose ends of an affair. (Rotten food is not cherished, but burnt or thrown away.)
At the center of the garden of Azhrarn’s palace, a fountain played, a fountain of red fire that was neither hot nor illuminating, yet most beautiful for all that.
He seated himself on the sable lawn by the fountain, Azhrarn the Prince of Demons. The jet and topaz wasps played about the transparent flowers, and sometimes he watched them. His people did not directly approach him, but once an Eshva woman went by, one of the handmaidens of his palace, feeding the gentle winged fish in the trees from a silver basket. Azhrarn observed the woman, who, like all of demonkind, was superlatively lovely. He examined her loveliness with pleasure, but it seemed he equated her with the flowers and shrubs of the garden. It became clear from his glances at this Eshva, that if he visualized a woman, it was Dunizel he saw.
How strange it was. The sun could sear him to ashes; Dunizel was the child of a solar comet. Perhaps, not strange at all.
But days and nights were passing on the earth. Seven days, and twice seven days. A month passed. Two months, and a third month began.
&n
bsp; He had not gone back to her. He had sent her no sign. Though the time of his lower world was unlike that of her world above, yet he could measure both, and match them to a second. He knew how long ago he had left her. Thus, he thought of her, but did not seek her out. Could it have been he was reluctant, thinking she would disappoint him, her attraction less, waning like the moon? Could it have been some other thing he doubted, some aspect of himself? No easy matter to interpret such a heart and brain as his. But he did not go back to her until the midst of the third month.
That night there was a full moon over the earth.
The blossoms were long finished in Bhelsheved, and the leaves of the garden hung heavily as bronze. White pillars in the walks were like the teeth of bone combs tangled in the hair of the darkness.
There was no sound anywhere. No wind to stir the trees, or the water, or to blow the husks of flowers or the little drifts of dust along the colonnades like whispers.
In their bare blanched cells, the priests and priestesses dreamed, waking or sleeping, of religious ecstasy, and the gods, their fair hair washing around them like some silver overflow from their brains. Here and there in a fane, a sacred lamp was burning, some priest or other standing tranced beneath. In the heart temple of Bhelsheved, poised above its lake, vague glimmers came and went, the leftovers of magic and reverence, lingering after the fact, like footprints in sand. Till another sorcery quenched them.
At the heart of the heart of Bhelsheved, a black fire burned and went out.
Azhrarn looked about him silently. There was nothing readable in his face or manner. Only he himself was apparent.
He walked the length of the temple, past its stupendous altar mounted on the backs of the two gigantic beasts of gold. He did not, demon that he was, care for the gold of the temple. (He had manifested upward, from beneath the lake, rather than through the golden walls of this building.) Yet he paused by the beasts, for seated between the paws of one of them was Dunizel.
Before her on the ground was a sheet of parchment, and sometimes she would trace particular symbols over it with her fingers. But she too was tranced, far off within or without herself, in some esthetic kingdom of the mind.
Azhrarn walked closer, but he kept his shadow at his back so it should not fall on her. His step was noiseless. He was visible—yet invisible. Only the glamour of what he was might have been detected, like a sound just beyond the level of human hearing.
He stood near to her, and he gazed into her brain.
She might have imagined herself abandoned by him. She might have turned her reveries, therefore, to other things, to her gods, indeed, as was expected of her. That would have been pardonable, though he would never have pardoned her for putting him aside more than a moment, even in her dreams.
So he stared through white hair, and whiter skin, and whitest bone, through the metaphysical casings of thought, and saw with her inner eye.
A great stillness came upon Azhrarn then, almost a quiescence.
It was for him like looking into a mirror, looking into the mind of Dunizel, for there he was, drawn in the colors of darkness, on the panels of her dream.
For though she saw the gods—each of them was Azhrarn. Some were female and some male, some exquisite children, some exotic animals, but each was Azhrarn, each and all. And if she saw a sky it, also, was Azhrarn. And the seas were Azhrarn, and the earth.
He himself, looking at other things, had suspended his belief in them. But she believed and saw, clearly and merely through the medium of Azhrarn. He had made all things real for her, by imbuing the nature of all things. He had become for her all things, the life, the essence of the world.
Perhaps, if her meditation had been apart from him, or simply anguished, or—worse—trivial, he might after all have avoided her, punishing her for failing him. She had not failed him. She had made him God.
So he put out his hand and laid it softly on her beautiful head which had become his temple.
When the pilgrims came to Bhelsheved, and walked the gleaming, sorcerously sandless roads that led into it out of the desert, the city sang to them. This was because hollow chambers lay under the roads, which the reverberations of so many footfalls above stirred up into echoes, a silver thunder. Only at the perimeter of the city did these chambers end, and coming onto the last stretch, the echo-sound ceased, adding to the amazement of the crowd. But the touch of Azhrarn sent its resonance through the body of the girl, a note which did not die, but woke new echoes, echo upon echo, song upon song.
She came from her trance gently, as if from summer water to a summer lawn. Her eyes fixed on Azhrarn, and she smiled at him.
He took his hand from her head, but looked at her still a long while, unspeaking.
At last she said to him: “Do you wish me to bow down to you? Or do you understand my homage goes beyond obeisance?”
“Do not,” he said, “bow down to me.” And then he said, “I have been from you some time, by mortal reckoning. Did you suppose I would not return?”
“But,” she said, “you never left me.”
He knew it was as she said, both for Dunizel, since she had retained his image in her soul, and for himself. When in the Underearth, yet truly, he had been with her.
He leaned and lifted her to her feet. All humankind responded to his caress, but he was attentive, seeing her response to it, as if he beheld his own influence for the first.
“There is something I shall say to you,” he said, “but not yet. I will take you traveling tonight. Do not be afraid.”
“If I am with you,” she said, “I shall fear nothing.”
“Like all your priesthood, you are a magician. Yet you are more than that. Shall I show you what you are?” (He had always known, or he had swiftly discovered, her genesis.)
“Will this fresh knowledge alter me?”
“Perhaps.”
“Do you wish me altered?”
“No.”
“Do not tell me, then, or show me. Show me only what will keep me as you desire me to be.”
Azhrarn was amused, disturbed, maybe, at this abjection which was not abject. Demons relished flattery and service, and knew their weakness.
“You will negate and deny yourself,” he said, “if you seek only to please me.”
“I am more than my body and brain and ego and spirit,” she said. “I am my love for you. Nor will I negate and deny my love.”
Azhrarn did not reply to this, but he wrapped her, as if it were in a swirling of the starry night, and they were drawn down into the lake under the floor of the temple—and he was a black fish with meteor eyes, and she a silver scale upon his forehead. And then the fish leapt upward. He was a black eagle, that familiar shape of his. And she was a light upon his breast—no white feather, but a white flame.
She saw, even as a burning flame, even knowing what he had become and what he had made her, and she felt joy at his power, and her joy made her brilliancy more brilliant, a fire that seemed to have flowered from his heart. Possibly it even hurt him, this sun-related moon-ember held fast against his flesh.
The night sky burst about them, as the water of the lake had burst. Currents and streamers of starlight, wind, and the intangible ether, parted and poured by. The moon had gained the peak of heaven. The world shone below like a heap of somber crystals.
Mile on mile he carried Dunizel as a white fire. She saw lands and waters come and go beneath them, living cities in their spider webs of light, ruined cities that slept in their draperies of shadow. In a forest built of the night, he came briefly to rest above a bending and ancient tree. And in this tree, a rose-colored bird, luminous as an afterglow, perched quietly on a bough, and now and then it raised its head, and uttered a single note of song that was like the striking of a beautiful clock. And later, as the moon began to descend, the black eagle carried Dunizel over the quilted surface of a sea, and settled on the mast of a phantom ship. Two hundred oars churned the water, and the sails of fine membranous fabric turned thems
elves to the wind, and the wheel also carefully turned this way and that, as if some hand guided it, but no one was aboard, no man, no ghost even that was discernible. He took her also to a remote sarcophagus, and flying in through a high-up opening, dropped down to where there stood a wonderful jewel, between five and six feet in height, and in color blue-purple. At first there seemed no form to this jewel, but gradually you might discover it was a statue which depicted a young man and woman embracing. Their long hair mingled, and their garments, and their arms were wrapped fast about each other with a wild fierce tenderness. Underneath the statue was a tablet of marble, engraved with two names, and beneath, the words:
These lovers, due to die at the hands of enemies, and being both magicians, transmuted themselves, by the arts of magic, and of love, into this jewel, which is the shade of love. Pity them. Or be envious.
And when the moon was setting, the eagle glided to a vast meadow where night-blooming flowers grew taller than a tall man. In the dark the flowers were gray, but their scent was like the sweetest and most costly incense.
Here, Azhrarn put on again his masculine shape and restored Dunziel to her human form. And here they walked together, not speaking, between the slender stems.
At last the stars lowered the wicks in their lamps, the tides of night began to ebb away along the beaches of the morning. It was that hour before the dawn when each thing seemed to hold its breath. And overhead the gray flowers closed their wings like sleeping birds, and even their scent grew silent.
Azhrarn spoke, at length, in that silence.
“At our first meeting, I wounded you, and healed you with my own blood. Do you remember this?”
Smiling, she said, “Did you think I should forget?”
“I have never lain with you in love, Dunizel. Do you understand that, for demonkind, carnal love requires no excuse? It is our pleasure, skill, recreation, nothing less, or more. We quicken no living thing from congress. Procreation, with us, necessitates more thought, and greater intent.”