by Tanith Lee
“The soul is a magician,” she said to him, “and this you know. But my soul more than another’s, since I am the comet’s child. And because your blood once mingled with mine. For a space, I can put on the seeming of flesh, but only for a little while, for the hours of one night. Even my soul, which loves you and draws its strength from love, can do no more than that. If you would send me away at once, you have only to close your heart to me. If that is your desire, I will not grieve at it. I will leave you without regret, and love you always.”
“Your body is mirage only,” he said. “Do you think me such a poor mage I would not know that?”
“My body is composed of love. Love me, and you, even you, will tell no difference between illusion and reality, for in this case they are one.”
Then he touched her face with his hands. His touch, like notes of music; she grew at once more vivid, sure and real. No human man could have possessed her as she was. But neither she, nor her love, nor her lover, were human.
“The time is too short,” he said. “One mortal night.”
“No, for you are the master of time. One night may be a thousand years. I fear the joy I will know with you.”
“Fear rather the parting beyond it,” he said, and it was as if he told her that he himself feared that parting.
“There is no parting,” she said. “I am always with you, and I shall be with you, as now, once more in some other age. But do not destroy this place. For without this place, you might have gone by me in the darkness. Put out the light of Bhelsheved, and there may be then some other place, in some later time, where you may not find me.”
Azhrarn looked at her, at her face held between his hands; then he bowed his head and kissed her. The earth all about seemed to tell from that kiss that his determination to destroy had been relinquished. Love and hate thrown in the balance, love had outweighed everything, as once before, long ago, and that time he himself had died.
Her body, that was more soul than flesh, meeting with his that was of supernatural atoms, light with dark, their mouths meeting, their hands, even their hair entwining, binding them, caused to flow away from them a delirious ambience as if from the glow or heat of a fire.
The whole area responded, throbbing to that inaudible resonance. Lands also lived. This one had been promised annihilation, and love had woken there instead.
The storm melted, sighing. Stars poured through, seeming to rain upon each other. The scale of love ascended through the earth and away from the earth. Time ceased, as in Druhim Vanashta time had ceased. One night became a thousand years. One act of love became all acts of love, past, or of the future.
And yet, it was as nothing to that other love which might have passed between them.
While in the heart-temple, on its golden chair, unremembered, too small to climb down, the Demon’s daughter, wide awake, aware of the currents and the waves of love spinning in the night, and how it was not part of them.
The dawn came to Bhelsheved, as it seemed, reluctantly, and shyly, and pale, as if after many years of sunlessness. The city, opening to that sunrise, had a pure and almost formless look, like something very new, or else something which had been washed clean of all its past, the accretions that had grown up on it. The storm winds had swept the dirt from its streets. The naked trees were like dark silver. Even the desert was serene and stroked with color by the sun. Like a woman who has known a peerless and encompassing love, so the land lay, and so the sun flowed up over the land.
The priesthood had emerged from their cells to stare at the sky. Those remaining by the walls gave thanks to the gods. And the caravans which had been running headlong from the city, driven by terrors they scarcely comprehended, had stopped still in their tracks. They had been spared the retribution of the night. Heaven had protected the righteous. Fooled by the dawn that followed the night of love and sorrow, they had got the story wrong again, and wrongly they would tell it, for a number of years to come.
Nonetheless, Bhelsheved that day stayed mostly vacant. Merely an ancient beggar, scavenging about the four streets, and apparently perturbed at the lack of rubbish, who reached the temple door and unhopefully peered in.
Huge and empty the temple seemed. Only the vague glintings of the morning water of the lake went over its walls, and dappled the sides of the enormous beasts that framed the altar.
Then two turquoises, two twilights, ignited in the midst of the tall throne that had been the harlot’s chair.
The beggar started. In the gloom, he could make out no other thing. Suddenly, he recalled the demon child, and squeaking, he hastened from the temple.
On the bridge he caught a glimpse of a young nobleman in a damson robe, but the beggar did not care for the look of him, either, and did not pause to whine for coins.
No one else came near the temple all that dulcet day, though Chuz hung about there, and now and then fish walked out of the lake on their fins.
At sunset, Chuz entered the temple and crossed the mosaic with a cat’s-paw tread. He came up to the chair where, throughout the day, the blue-eyed child had lain on its belly, staring at him through the doorway.
Chuz was attired somewhat differently. On his left foot he wore a shoe, and on his left hand a glove of smooth purple cloth. The left side of his face was masked by a half-face of the blondest bronze, a face that matched the fleshly handsome side exactly. His hair was concealed. He was now a most beautiful, if quite abnormal sight.
“Pretty child,” said Chuz, to Dunizel’s daughter, Soveh, “I will conduct you from this uninteresting fane.”
The child, Soveh, lowered her eyes, much in the manner of Chuz himself, though not for the same reason.
“Should you not,” said Chuz, “wish to behold your inheritance? Do not be alarmed. I will shield you from the dregs of the sun, though it is almost out. I waited until sunset, from courtesy to you. I regret your mother and father have been called away on business. As your uncle, I propose to adopt you. In token of good faith, here is a gift.”
The blue jewels came up again, and focused on an amethyst one. It was the die.
Soveh did not take the die, but she regarded it, and as she did so, Chuz regarded her, and it might be noted that both his extraordinary optics were covered by sorcerous lenses of white jade, and black jet, and amber, that precisely mimicked a splendid pair of natural eyes. From a slight distance, one might be deceived entirely. Chuz had come out in his best, and no mistake, to woo the daughter of Azhrarn.
But still she did not take his gift, though she glanced at him occasionally, without mistrust or trepidation, while the day’s last spangles perished on the threshold.
“This is most hurtful,” lamented Chuz eventually. And, perhaps intending to provoke her, he turned his back to her. And found himself face to face with Azhrarn the Prince of Demons, who had that instant come up through the lake and the floor to stand seven paces away.
Chuz did not seem abashed. He smiled delightfully, and the bronze mask smiled with him in complete coordination.
“Well,” said Chuz, “I am not, it transpires, to play uncle after all. And I thought you had forgotten her, despite what it cost you to bring her about.”
Azhrarn’s face was hard to be sure of. Cloud seemed to enfold him. But his eyes smote through the cloud. Few but Chuz would have been ready to meet them.
“You and I,” said Azhrarn, “un-brother, un-cousin, are now also un-friends.”
“Oh, is it so? You sadden me.”
“Oh, it is so. And you shall be saddened, even if I must hunt you over the world’s edges to come at you.”
“I see you condemn me out of hand. You suppose I incited the stone-worshippers deliberately to attack me, that my toys might be scattered and the lethal thing with them. Yet who permitted the whip to cut his palm and the three drops of his blood to fall and change to adamant?”
“Chuz,” said Azhrarn so quietly he was barely to be heard, yet not a mote of dust that did not hear him, “find a deep cave and bu
rrow into it, and there listen for the baying of hounds.”
“Do you think I shake at you?” Chuz said idly. “I am only the world’s servant. I have done my duty. And you, my dear, have known madness. Did you relish it?”
Azhrarn’s face came from the cloud; it was the face of a black leopard, a cobra, a lightning bolt.
“There is a war between us,” Azhrarn said. “And I have done you the kindness of informing you.”
“I admire you too well to wrangle.”
And like a wisp of vapor, Chuz was gone, though somewhere an ass brayed wrackingly, three times.
Then Azhrarn stood looking at the child he had made, and dismissed, and at length returned for. He had been a careless and unaffectionate father, and now he was a remote and frankly fearsome one.
But when he stretched out his pale ringed hand to the child, without hesitation, she set her own hand in it.
“Your name,” he said to her, “shall be Azhriaz. All shall know you are my daughter. And each of the petty kingdoms of the earth will belong to you, and you will rule them in the way of what you are or what you shall be.”
And then the temple was filled by blackness, and in that blackness he too was gone, and he bore her away with him. And it is said pieces of the moon fell that night and crashed upon the world.
But out on the wide plains of the desert, in the remaining calm of the afterglow, Prince Chuz was walking to and fro over the silken dunes that were still lined with rose, as if the loving dawn had come back again that never could come back.
A little to the east of him, a star had darted out, and sometimes he looked at the star, but he was waiting for another, and presently she arrived.
She walked across the dunes toward him, and her blowing hair was the color of the desert, and her garments were sewn with gold, but the star shone through her forehead. Like Dunizel, this was a ghost.
She was far from the old tower, was Jasrin, the tower she had haunted, and far from the city of Sheve where once she had been Nemdur’s queen. And although she was not a soul, but only the lost reflection of one, yet she seemed somewhat astonished to find herself so removed from those known landmarks. But then, seeing Chuz, she recognized him with gladness and unease, and she checked, and just the evening wind moved on about her draperies. And then she lifted her hand and in it there was a bone, the bone of her child which she had inadvertently slain in her envious insane love of her lord.
“No further, Jasrin,” said Chuz. “For you may give me the bone now.”
Jasrin, or that essence of Jasrin that the apparition was, hesitated there, musing. Memories of hundreds of years of penance may have come to her, a self-imposed and inadvertent penance, when her ghost had lamented, going on with the deadly routine of longing and guilt and misery that had been her life. Perhaps even a memory that the bone had also fled her, as happiness had, fled to Chuz, accusing her of her crime against it. And that this, therefore, was merely a ghost of the bone, as she herself was a ghost of a ghost. And did she now sense her imprisonment was done? Jasrin, who had loved Nemdur and killed her child out of that love. But now another woman had come to Sheve, and loved there a lord more exalted than any king of the earth, and had in turn, by protecting his child, herself been slain. The balance.
“Madness redresses all balances. Give me the bone,” Chuz said again. And Jasrin came to him and held out the insubstantial thing, and Chuz took it from her.
And Jasrin smiled, or that paring of her which was stranded there, that smiled, and smiling she was no more. The bone had vanished in the instant she let go of it; that Chuz had finished the gesture of acceptance was simply politeness.
Thereafter, he strode on, his mantle, dyed like the evening, flapping around him, and his blond hair now slipping almost boyishly from its concealment, though the other less appealing hair kept modestly from view. As he strode, the ass’s jawbones spoke to him.
“Love is everywhere, and the death of love,” they clicked and muttered. “And time, which is built of the histories of death and love. Death and time I concede and acknowledge.”
Chuz, forgetting his eyes, like half his face, were also masked, lowered them.
“But what,” demanded the jawbones, with sinister insistency, “is love?”
About the Author
Tanith Lee was born in 1947, in London, England. After non-education at a couple of schools, followed by actual good education at another, she received wonderful education at the Prendergast Grammar School until the age of 17. She then worked (inefficiently) at many jobs, including library assistant, shop assistant, waitress and clerk, also taking a year off to attend art school at age 25. In 1974 (curious reversal of her birthdate) DAW Books of America accepted 3 of her fantasy/ SF novels, (published in 1975/ 6), and thereafter 23 of her books, so breaking her chains and allowing her to be the only thing she effectively could: a full-time writer.
Since then she has written 77 novels, 14 collections, and over 300 short stories, plus 4 radio plays (broadcast by the BBC) and 2 scripts for the TV cult UK SF series Blake’s 7. Her work, which has been translated into over 17 languages, ranges through fantasy, SF, gothic, YA and Children’s Books, contemporary, historical and detective novels, and horror. She was awarded the prestigious title of Grand Master of Horror 2009. She has also won major awards for several of her books/ stories, including the August Derleth Award for Death’s Master, the second book in the Flat Earth series.
She lives near the South East coast of England with her husband, writer-photographer-artist John Kaiine. And two tuxedo cats of many charms, whose main creative occupations involve eating, revamping the carpets, and meowperatics.