by Tanith Lee
Neither blood nor any other liquors attended the passage of the child. It had been altered in itself, becoming strangely amorphous and flowing, changing—yet unchanged. Had it been perceivable as it evicted itself from the chambers of the maiden’s body, the process would have been revealed as quite unnormal. Narrow and sinuously flexible, the baby negotiated the way, causing no harm either to itself or to what had contained it. Presently, suddenly, it emerged, unnaturally legs first, which in its case was perfectly natural, rather as a cat will fall upon its feet. As the lower limbs came from the body of the mother, they assumed reality and acceptable contours. Next a torso, bland and unblemished. The arms were upheld, in the position of a swimmer poised to dive, the head thrown back. No stain disfigured the child. No natal cord connected it, just as no placenta had contained it in the womb—there would be no afterbirth. It dropped neatly into the hands of the Eshva women, who sighed over it, so that the perfume of their breath was the first—misleading—flavor it knew of the outer world.
The child was white of skin, and long-haired, the hair being the burnished black of midnight oceans and skies; the hair of Azhrarn. Nails, tiny and unflawed, were evident on its hands and feet. Teeth, whiter than salt, glinted between its parted lips. Not having employed the natal cord, it could acquire no navel, its belly was as smooth as a pane of alabaster. It would not, in any event, have looked exactly mortal, the child. The closed lids, heavily fringed, were an astounding molten blue from the eyes which waited beneath. It had turned out to have something, after all, of its mother.
Dunizel, as she hung in the air above herself, examined the child, unstartled but surprised by it, pleased by it, and ineffably sad. It was lovely; it was not human.
It had not cried, nor did it ask to be fed. Maternal milk was unessential to it, and Dunizel had known these fluids of nourishment had not gathered in her breasts. But now the child was to be offered its initial sustenance.
A silken rope, a snake, wound itself about the arm of one of the Eshva women. It lowered its head, kissing her, and where its head rose up, it left a printing in the flesh, the mark its two long teeth had made. Dark as ink, demon blood welled from the two little wounds.
The demon woman put the wounds against the lips of the child. Not opening its violet lids, silently, the child drank blood.
Oblique though she was, surely through the heart of Dunizel then, there might have shivered, like a falling leaf, some intimation of the alien, the unconscionable. Not lessening her emotion, becoming part of her emotion, as sadness itself had come to be. She the jar of her god, (as Bhelsheved was the jar of gods), the elected citadel for this ultimate magecraft, this witchery. But she herself as far from the core of it as now she seemed from her own fleshly frame. The jar does not need to credit or comprehend the wine which is stored in it.
But now the magic flax soothed even her detached soul asleep. She saw the child had been laid down in the midst of the flax’s burning, illumined, at peace, her long hair, black as jet and loosely curling as a fleece, poured through the mysterious flames.
No longer the child of Dunizel, to which she had related stories. His child now, and only his, of whom he had said: “Do not think I will have regard for this creature. I will make her strong and terrible, and then I am done with her.”
CHAPTER 3
The Aloe
It was a scene without compromise. The rocks fell sheerly from both sides into the gully of a long-dead watercourse. Sand ran in the gully, in tactless imitation of water. Once a pool had spread, which now was a dry cracked paving. In the paving, bitterly there grew a bitter aloe bush. Some moisture, or memory of moisture, had sustained it, and though the winter had stripped it of fruit and leaves, it huddled over itself and grimly lived.
The bush, the gully, the rocks, the desert beyond, all had their story to tell, quickly and totally and without words. It was possible to survive in such a place, but the price of survival was very high.
There was nothing gentle there. Even the wind scraped the face.
There was nothing gentle there, certainly not she who dwelled there now, in the lee of the rocks.
Her tan hair was whitened by dust, and her face, which was young, scored by dust and the winds, and other inner unkindnesses, looked old.
She had been in the region less than a month, but already she had become a part of the area. She might have been there centuries. Might have been born there.
In the morning, she would climb the rocks on the north side, and go up into the desert. A thin muddy spring persisted half a mile from the gully. Here she would drink, unless on that day the sands had choked the hole. If she could not clear the hole again with her fingers, as was sometimes the case, she did not drink. A miniature lizard might be sighted. She had grown skilled with a sling made from her girdle, and using the sharp flints she had found on the gully’s bed, she would kill the lizard and afterward eat it. Such meals were unappetizing, and frequently she did not bother with them. The small deaths angered her, too, for she had killed a man with a crystal pin, and killing anything reminded her of that deed and its uselessness.
During the day, Zharet sat beside the aloe bush, or if strong winds blew, she crept among the broad cracks in the rocks. The days passed with speed, for she spent them in brooding on how things might have been if the promise had been fulfilled; on how things were since it had not. Occasionally she revisualized that glimpse of the dark garden, the woman who was not herself, the knowledge of choice and love and the bearing of a divine child. Or she would recall the dream of rapture when the god had possessed her. Then she would lift her head and scream at the sky, many, many times.
Now and then, she received a visitor.
“Good day,” said Chuz. “Are you happy to be free?”
“Why do you mock me?” Zharet cried. “What do you want of me?”
“I am unsure. I think I have gone mad,” said Prince Madness, and threw dice in the air like a delighted small boy.
The aloe definitely went mad, and began to put forth leaves, which the wind eradicated.
When Zharet slew one of the lizards, then Chuz might appear, seated like a piece of murky twilight on the ground, or walking over the horizon. He seemed to admire her aptitude with the sling.
“I explained,” he said. “You must be patient.”
“I am patient,” she said, tearing her garments with her teeth.
“I will make music and you shall dance,” said Chuz. He shook a brass rattle which sounded like a sistrum. Zharet danced, against her will yet frenziedly. And the graceless idiotic display made her feel better. At length she fell on the sand in the gully floor.
“What do you wish?” inquired Chuz.
Zharet did not speak, did not need to, for an ass’s jawbones had now appeared and brayingly spoke for her, her innermost desires.
“I would wish to chain him and lash him with seven instruments each of which had tails of white-hot steel. I would bind him to a wheel which rolled across the sky and through the blazing emissions of the stars. I would rip out his heart and show it him.”
“You shall,” Chuz said.
At that, Zharet did speak.
“That cannot be, since he is a god.”
“It is a fact, you may not harm his body. It is his psychic frame which shall be chained and lashed and bound to a wheel and scalded, and his psychic heart which shall be ripped out. But he is not a god,” said Chuz. “Have you not yet fathomed who he is, that lord of tricks and lies?”
Zharet raised her head. She stared in the face of Chuz. Both sides of it were being shown to her, the ultimate mask of insanity, and she did not blink, her eyes like those of the lizards she killed.
“Who, then?”
“Azhrarn. Do you recall? The monster from the sewer under the earth.”
Zharet was outraged. She would not have been misled by that, have suffered ecstasy at the urging of—that.
“No,” she said.
“Come now,” said Chuz, “all the
lands of Bhelsheved have been deceived. He is a powerful demon. Do you suppose he cannot put on a handsome shape when he requires to? Only consider,” said Chuz, stroking Zharet’s hair tenderly, “would the true and actual god have chosen another than yourself?”
Zharet now stared through the face of Chuz. She pondered.
“All Bhelsheved is in error,” said Chuz, “yet already there are doubts. The child has been born.”
Zharet started.
“Is he fair?”
“Just so. But not a boy-child, a daughter.”
Zharet frowned. It had seemed to her the child of a god would be a son, one who should be a hero and king of the earth. Among her people, women were taught to regard themselves as something less than men. How could a god choose to manifest his holy seed in female progeny?
“Bhelsheved,” said Chuz, “is troubled as you are, by the gender of the baby. Also troubled by other matters. A dream of the last festival of worship, of a dark tower jeweled with lights, a shadow-shape that granted certain aspirations. Strange goings-on,” said Chuz. “Young women violated, unable to identify their attackers. Rich men dying abruptly and in quantities, leaving their fortunes to their heirs. Men bellowing their love of plain or ugly or repulsive but always simpering girls. Sicknesses and cripplings. These things, in and out of the white city. Azhrarn has been busy.”
Zharet rose to her feet.
“Go to Bhelsheved,” said Chuz. “Be a seeress. Tell them what you know. Warn them, the hapless dolts, squirming in his net. Recollect the story: How the Prince of Demons sought to destroy the world, but the gods sent him packing. Be a servant of the gods, my tan-haired dear. Send him packing also, this monstrosity who so beguiled you and made you wretched.”
Zharet began to walk, steadily up the rocks, almost thoughtlessly forward, unerringly in the direction of the city.
Chuz laughed softly. His awful eyes were fixed on her back. The jawbones spoke to him.
“Azhrarn should not have refused the gift to his child. Azhrarn should not have set himself against me.”
Chuz drew the mantle over the foul side of his face; he gazed at the sand, lowering his eyes. He was now beautiful. He himself murmured: “Sweet Azhrarn, who plays at usurping my title, I have no quarrel with you, I make exchange. Barter is not war. Be then yourself Delusion’s Master. And Chuz shall be the Bringer of Anguish, the Jackal, the Evil One.”
Enter Bhelsheved now. One might not have recognized it. There were crowds everywhere, within and without. Men in fine garments, wealthy women in litters, paraded up and down with their pets on gemmed leashes and their ungemmed slaves. It was no longer blasphemous but fashionable to be seen here at the proscribed time. Vendors had crept in surreptitiously and currently sold fruit and wine and sweetmeats, and sometimes little dolls of carved wood representing the holy mother and her child. (Most of these carvings had had to be altered. Prepared in advance, they had each depicted the child as male.) Fresh caravans constantly arrived. Travelers from a long way off had come to see the miracle. Camels bawled through the groves, donkeys vociferated. Such animals were bought and sold. Bhelsheved had become a marketplace. Papers, rinds and dried dung rattled over the pastel streets where only sand or leaves or blossoms had formerly wended. The sorcerous winds of the city failed to blow these items away, perhaps not distinguishing them. The smoke of roasting pastries and chickens had stained the white walls of the fanes. Fish were being trapped in the lake and put into transparent bladders full of water to carry home as souvenirs. The poor gambled in the porches of temples. They begged the gods’ pardon at every throw. It gave them a strange pleasure. Some asked the opulent ladies or philosophers for money: beggars.
The priesthood generally were seldom seen. They had gone to ground, rather, to heaven, locking themselves in their cells, pining and starving and sinking into long deathlike swoons of disillusion. Only tradition had kept the city inviolate. Tradition was a chameleon. It had not needed an army of enemies or thieves to destroy Bhelsheved. Or at least, not yet.
In the heart-temple above the lake, Dunizel would come to sit in a tall golden chair that had been made for her, between the golden beasts before the altar. She came there often, since she was called for often. Whenever she was absent, a clamor gradually went up. They yelled for her and for her child, a passionate demand. When she and the child appeared, they were worshipped. The child was very quiet, scarcely moving on Dunizel’s knees. A guard had been marshalled to keep back the mob which strove always to touch her. These soldiers lost their footing on the heaps of gifts on the floor, skidding in grapes, bangles, the broken eggs of rare birds.
In other areas of the temple, sages expounded the meaning of what had happened. They were thought great men, and most clever, for each one had a different explanation.
Dunizel must also pass up and down the broad streets of Bhelsheved, carried aloft by her soldiery, the child in her arms. Then the child was not so still. The child fretted, disturbed by the fierce noon sun.
When night came, the city was noisy, not the old noise of reverential songs and storytelling, but a new noise of dispute and coins. Commerce had come swiftly on sensation. A few paces from the west gate (not a hundred, no, nor fifty, but ten) some women and young men had set up a crimson pavilion, and here they sold their bodies to whoever wished for congress. They, like the sages, had an explanation: No man should pass into the holy enclosure with venal thoughts, therefore best get rid of such desires before entering the city.
By night, they looked for the visit of the god, anxious to lie with his virgin wife. A bough groaned in the wind: “It is the sound of his wings!” A camel coughed: “It is the cough of his starlike steed.” A man cried out inside the crimson pavilion: “Ah, the god is satisfied.”
Yet those who brooded deeply upon such matters were aware the god had not positively evinced himself, nor come publicly to own his offspring. The sages had no explanation for this, nor for the child’s fretfulness in the sun. A god’s creation, though only a female, should be capable of enduring sunlight. Was not the sun the ultimate symbol of all heavenly lusters?
In her chamber, amid new welters of new gold, unknown, unseen by men, Azhrarn did come to Dunizel. He stood each darkness like a slim black tree growing in the corner of the room, and he said to her in an iron voice: “Have you relented now? Have you grown aware now of our time together, which you waste?”
And Dunizel replied: “My love, my lord, my life, I will not leave your child alone here.”
“You will,” he said. “It is only a matter of my waiting. Can you bear so easily to be parted from me?”
“I cannot bear to be parted from you.”
“Then leave the brat and come with me. I will make her more fearful than a dragoness. She will not be vulnerable, I promise you.”
“I cannot.”
“I might take you with me, whether or not you wish it.”
“Truly. And will you?”
“No. But nor will I continue entreating you like your servant.”
But every night now he would return, and every night their conversation was the same. They did not touch, though the room grew drowsy, sweet, electric with the inner reaching out of both of them toward the other. And neither would surrender the argument.
In its jewelwork cradle, the child turned its head upon its luxuriant hair to watch them with eyes like the blue kernel of a twilight sky.
Zharet walked into Bhelsheved at the same open gate by which she had left it.
She looked about and saw alteration everywhere, saw it contemptuously and uncaringly. But she in turn was looked at.
Some power had come with her. Some power from Prince Chuz, most likely, which he had awarded her by virtue of their many physical contacts. Amid all the variegated persons filling the city, Zharet stood out. Young and old at once, emaciated, almost beautiful, her hair striped through with white and tan. An indefinable scent clung about her. It was the odor of the aloe bush, caught in her ragged clothes.
Zharet walked, and segments of the crowd walked after her.
The rich ladies pointed, scornful and jealous.
Zharet climbed the steps of a modest fane, and stationed herself there, apparently gazing down at the crowd, in fact through them, to her bitterness. She was not self-conscious, or actually conscious only of self. Her pain was the center of the universe. She need not tremble at a crowd.
“Oh deluded ones!” She suddenly shouted, and her voice carried, flying like a bird, “Oh worshippers of false gods!”
The crowd stirred, muttered. Its interest had been caught. It is not always boring to be criticized.
“Fools!” cried Zharet. The wind, whining, blew her hair about her; she raised her skinny arms, and felt Chuz laughing at her back. “This god who has sown his seed in Bhelsheved is none other than that dark foulness, Arch-Demon of the underground pit.”
At this, cries answered her cry. Predictably they told her she was a blasphemer, a liar. They told her they would rend her.
“Rend me then. Your punishment will still come upon you.”
They told her the gods would strike her down.
“Let them strike me,” she shrilled, “if I say anything but the truth.”
Then she described to them how Azhrarn, the ugliest and most abysmal fiend extant on earth or under it, had crawled up to the surface of the world, and obscenely fathered a similar fiend, although in innocuous infant form, on the vilest harlot who would accommodate him. The crowd was horrified at her apostasy. Zharet assured the crowd the apostasy was theirs not hers, for they credited a demon as a god. When she had said all she wished to, she came down the steps again, and went away through the crowd to find another portion of it to harangue.