by Tanith Lee
“Wait,” said Uhlume, “till you have seen everything.”
They walked on, and Narasen, the leopardess, the daring, despite her terror of the aura of Uhlume, watched him with contempt and scorn.
There was a palace of granite. It had no beauty. Tall columns of rock upheld a roof of shadow. There were no windows and no lamps, but it was not dark within, at least, only a tepid darkness. In a hall, a granite chair, without ornament, waited for Death to sit in it. Death sat. He leaned his chin upon his hand. He stared into the hall’s void, and, without sorrow or any noise, the tears dropped from his lashes. This was the symbol of himself which he had become. So the gods, or the nightmares of humanity, had made him. Melancholy despair amid the waste of stone.
And then Narasen heard music. It startled her; she spun about. Through the many archways into the hall, men and women were advancing and the music stole in with them, drowning the roars of the feeble wind. As the men and women filled the hall, a change occurred there in the blink of an eye, and nothing was the same.
The hall was hung with purple, scarlet, magenta, and gold. Candles bloomed, the floor was laid with mosaics of dragons, and golden lamps hung down between the pillars of carved and gilded cedarwood. The roof was a cupola of a million fragments of translucent jewels, blue and red and green and violet, and black and white striped doves flew about under it, turned to flying rainbows from its colors. On tables of painted glass lay a feast of food and drink. Death had not moved from the stone chair, but now it was a chair of gold. A bloody banner hung behind him. The many lights gleamed on his collar and rings of gold and all his white garments glinted with silver and gems. A circlet of rubies held back his long white hair, and across his knees rested a scepter of ivory whose head was a silver skull. King Death he surely was. Narasen took him in, and he said to her and to her alone, and only she heard him: “It is the illusion they make, these men and these women. They pretend they are my court and I am emperor. None of it is real, bits and pieces of their memories of the world and the world’s riches, which they recreate here by their presence and because they cannot bear the Innerearth as it is.”
“And how can they work such magic?” asked Narasen coolly.
“Because their souls live, though their bodies are dead, and the souls are yet in the bodies. All these are they who have made the bargain with me to remain a thousand years. The soul is a magician. Only living flesh hampers it.”
“And you, Lord,” said Narasen with sharpness, “who keep them here to make this entertainment for you. Can you not find such stuff on the earth?”
“The earth is not mine,” said Uhlume, “though I am the earth’s. I am often there, but on business.”
Narasen turned aside, and she moved through the men and women whose bodies were dead, but whose souls Death had trapped in them. The bodies had remained entire since even the worm, decay, which ate dead men in their graves, did not dare venture into Death’s personal territory. The bodies had kept their years also, what age they were at the moment of death, though this did not seem to hinder them, and they were sprightly enough. Some, too, were young, had died young of a malady, and some had died young of a wound—and these wounds were still to be seen, though excellently camouflaged. A young soldier, who had perished at a sword’s end, wore a golden rose over his heart. Another who had expired when a stone pierced his eye, had an eye of sapphire—and seemed to see as well with it as with the other. Beneath a pillar sat a woman who was very pale, for she had lost her life in childbirth and much blood had left her. In her lap she nursed a little tiger, no larger than a child, and presently she gave it her breast and it sucked gently and she smiled. At the center of the floor, two old men with grizzled beards had crouched to drink and throw dice; their laughter was that of young men.
Uhlume had come to Narasen’s side.
“There is no pain here, and, despite the age of the body, no sense of age and no weariness. Neither is there wine; they have invented it, yet they taste the wine and enjoy it and will shortly be drunk. This land is a blank parchment where anyone may write what they wish.”
Narasen believed him. The wine and the food were not real, neither souls nor dead bodies had need of it, and the glamourous furnishings were not. The birds under the rainbow cupola did not exist, the tiger cub was the fantasy of she who mourned her child, left behind in life.
“And do you reckon me,” said Narasen, “such a soft fool as these? Do you think I shall sit and pine for the world I have lost, and make its images come to intoxicate me or to amuse you till my thousand years are done? No. I will tell you now, for all your dreary kingdom, when I am here, you will get no pretty mirage from the mind of Narasen.”
“You could not bear it otherwise,” said Uhlume.
“We shall see,” said Narasen. “Perhaps you will turn bored with me, with your performing bird which will not sing. Perhaps you will set me free before my thousand years are done.”
“Never dream it,” said Death.
“I dream as I please,” said Narasen, “and never for your entertainment, my Lord.”
The face of Death had no expressions. However, as once before, something seemed to journey across that face.
“Yet I perceive you have agreed to the bargain,” said Death.
“This much the illusion did; it reminded me of Merh and the beauty of kingship. Yes, I have agreed.”
Narasen beheld a hallucinatory window. It revealed a park of flowers and trees and evening hills and shining rivers under a new moon like a pale green bow. And Narasen laughed, remembering the barren deadlands as they actually were, which now she foresaw she could tolerate, seeing that would be to fight the will of Uhlume, Lord Death, who was formed as a man.
Next second, all was gone like smoke into the dark. Death and she were returning swiftly to the earth.
4
The witch had left her mansion, and slunk about the orchard of poisonous pomegranate trees. She was restless with envy of Narasen, for her high-handedness, and because at this moment Narasen journeyed with Uhlume.
At the age of twelve, this witch with the blue house had been adept and sly. She learned from mages and sorcerers two years, selling her body in the streets to get coin, or to the sorcerers themselves. None tricked her as Issak had been tricked, she was devious and quicker than foxes. She took the name of Lylas. When she was fourteen, wandering home late from some orgy of an obscure sect over the hills in the hour before dawn, Lylas the witch had met Death. It was at a place where the ground was unloved, a place of thorns, and nearby three men had been hanged. Lylas had been well schooled, and she knew a thing or two more than most. She paused under the creaking gallows when she recognized the ebony Lord in his white clothes, and into her shrewd and youthful brain there came an inspiration. It was an inspiration of the sort to set heart banging, teeth jittering, hands cold and mouth dry. It was of the sort which comes only once, and must be harkened to and acted on—or let go and ever regretted. Lylas chose not to regret. So she went up to Death and addressed him humbly.
They talked a little while, she and he, till the sky burned at its eastern edges, and the swinging shadows of the hanged men turned to a brackish red on the path below. Then Death and the maiden concluded their bargain, and he took something from her which was her pledge and he promised her another thing, and then she went on a journey in his name, and afterward she did as she pleased with time to spare. For the witch in the blue house had lived well over two hundred years, and she would live for many more, and she had aged not a day, not an hour, not a minute beyond her fifteenth birthday.
But now, in her jealousy, she prowled about, and tore the fruit from the wild trees. Till abruptly a tree to the right of her cracked open as if a huge axe had split it, and out stepped Uhlume with Narasen at his back.
The witch bowed to Uhlume till her hair swept over and over the roots of the pomegranates.
“It is
agreed,” said he. And to Narasen he said, “You understand the token I must be given.”
Narasen did not answer, and the witch said, sweetly, to conceal her spite, “My honored elder sister must give me in keeping for this mighty Lord the third finger of her left hand, or at least what is severed at its highest joint.”
“I am ready,” said Narasen, and she drew off the rings from her finger.
Indeed, she had noted among the soul-inhabited corpse people of Death’s court, that each was missing this portion of a member, as the witch of the blue house had been. (Lylas wore each finger bone about her waist on her golden chain, and when the debt was paid, and the soul and the body had gone down into the Innerearth, then the witch was free to take that particular bone and grind it in powder and drink it in wine. It was the magic property of these ivories, these binding seals on Death’s treaty with decay and incarnation, which had preserved the witch’s youth so long. And for her part, she acted as the intermediary, drumming up, as it were, custom for Death’s secret trade.) She ran forward eagerly to take the bone of Narasen.
Uhlume touched the third finger of Narasen’s left hand, and the finger lost its feeling to the second joint. When the knife of the witch flashed greedily in the gloom, Narasen experienced no pain. And no blood left the wound.
“It is done,” said Lylas.
“So it is,” said Narasen. “And now, how long must I wait?”
“How impatient she is, my Lord,” sniggered Lylas.
Narasen said: “I have paid for the wares and now I seek delivery. And I will ask one further thing, mighty Lord of the Dark. That he should not have been too long in the ground, this bed-mate I am to have.”
“I am just in such matters,” said Uhlume, “and have marked down your preference. Return to the edge of the cedar forest, no farther. Tomorrow night our bargain will be kept.” Then Uhlume glanced toward the witch, where she leaned on a tree, grinning behind one hand, with the bloodless finger of Narasen pinched in the other. “Instruct the royal woman in the lore of what she must do, as you have been tutored.”
Lylas bowed down again to the soil of the orchard.
“Your handmaid obeys you, Lord of Lords.”
Death turned and vanished, sinking in the earth like steam.
Lylas crept forward and pressed her lips to the spot where he had stood, taking care Narasen saw her. Narasen gave no heed, for her limbs were suddenly water, and her brain full of beating wings, and, iron-cold to her spirit, she chafed her seven-fingered hands for warmth.
5
The sun had risen above the forest of petrified cedars. Its arrows had not pierced the black spreading canopy; the sun had gone away, and the blue dusk had followed. And the dusk permeated the forest as the sun had not been able to.
The crimson pavilion of Narasen was erected on a rise among the outlying trees. A torch flared before the pavilion, and a short way off burned the campfire of her soldiers. Here six men sat. The fire glinted on their eyes and teeth, and on the games they played with small plaques of painted wood. They were not easy. Their curses were soft and they seldom spoke otherwise. Two more of their number, sentries, patrolled around the perimeter of the camp. But the last pair of the ten had deserted the night before, sneaking off from the meadows about the orchard of the witch, not liking the glimmers and whispers that came from there.
Inside the pavilion, Narasen waited. She had everything in readiness. Even her own self she had made ready, casting dread aside, and fixing her thoughts on Merh. Before her was a cup of strong dark liquor, but she had scarcely tasted it. Beside the cup was a wooden box.
In the cedar forest, a sentry started, and stared about. But it was three black lizards running.
Before the fire, a soldier muttered:
“I am not sure I reckon her my queen and ruler. First she acts the man and lies with women, then she is a whore and spreads her legs for all the rams of Merh. Now, she courts the dead.”
But the captain of these soldiers struck this one in the mouth and bade him shut it.
“She has done as she must,” said the captain, “to save our land.”
His eyes said: She is a bitch and a harlot and a sorceress, but she pays me still my wages.
• • •
The youth was barely sixteen when he died. His brother killed him on the very day that Narasen was riding back, toward the cedar forest. The blow had been an accident; the brothers were quarreling. The elder was sturdy and rough, and worked hard as an ox in their father’s tannery. The younger was lazy, the elder said, and preferred to wander by the river where the flowers hung over, gazing at their faces in the water, showing the young brother how he also might gaze at himself. “You are a girl, and have a girl’s silly ways,” bellowed the elder brother, and forgetting—or maybe not—that in his hand he held a sharp knife for cutting hides, he struck his kinsman on the arm. The knife went deep and unbarred the vital vein. Blood poured on the tannery floor; the younger brother shut his eyes at once and fell down, and very soon he was dead and white as cold marble.
The village wives sobbed as they prepared the tanner’s son for the grave. There had never been a youth so handsome, they said. They washed his bloodless body and combed his yellow hair. They hid the wound in his arm by binding it with a silk bandage. “Death is cruel,” said the women, inaccurately.
The villagers carried the youth to the walled yard of stone tombs on the hillside. The elder brother tramped behind the bier. He had rubbed lemon in his eyes to make them redden and water. No one had seen him strike the blow. He had told the village the younger brother had stumbled against a bench and cut himself this way on the knife which had been lying there.
They laid the youth on his bier inside the tomb, and shut the door. The priest and the kinsfolk stayed to keep one night’s respectful watch.
Two hours before midnight, the tomb door opened and out came the tanner’s dead son. Bloodless he still was, and on his head the wreath of flowers the women had made him. Glancing neither left nor right, he trod the path between the horrified watchers. Right to the stone wall of the graveyard he went, and there a white gust of wind whipped from the black night and bore him away. The kindred prayed, the priest fainted. The elder brother flew howling, and drowned himself in one of the tannery vats.
• • •
It was midnight. The soldiers sat like rocks now, as if petrified along with the cedar trees. The fire had sunk, and the torch was smouldering before the pavilion.
A wind blew through the forest, out of the forest and through the camp, scattering the rosy clinker of the fire, giving back movement to the garments and hair of the petrified men. Then the wind was gone.
Out of the forest, after the wind, a figure came walking.
Slowly, as slowly as the figure walked on its road toward them, the soldiers rose. They moved back, but the way they made was wider than it needed to be to let pass this slight boy with the garland about his head and silk about his arm. The soldiers moved backward till their spines met the cold spines of cedar trunks or till they lost their footing. And there, where they were stopped, they froze. The boy stepped on till he reached the queen’s tent.
Narasen, seated before the scarcely tasted cup and the box of wood, looked up at a stir of the crimson cloth entrance to the pavilion. But she kept where she was, and narrowed her eyes to see what Uhlume, Lord Death, had sent her.
After a moment, she let out her breath and smiled.
She left her seat then and, going to the apparition, observed him minutely, and next touched him.
“Why,” said Narasen, “your master deals well with me.”
She led him to the tent’s center and, malleable as a very small child, he let her lead him. He had no will, save Death’s, and now her will, who had bargained with Death. Narasen gazed at him again, and circled about him, and gazed once more.
Certainly Uhlume had
noted her preference, as he said, and certainly he had been just. There was no appearance of the dead here. All was sweet and whole, indeed pleasing to each sense, of touch, smell or sight. The blue eyes were open, somewhat glazed, but only as if with sleep or wine, swimming rather than vacuous, and the movements were like those of one in a trance, languorous and extremely pliant. But not in that alone had Uhlume been just. This youth, who in life had been more girl than man, had had a girl’s beauty. His contours were slender, but rounded rather than angular; no harshness intervened. Despite the mortal pallor, the two buds on his breast were faintly colored still, the color the witch’s mouth had been, dawn’s first warm shade, which was the color of his mouth also. His face was fully a maiden’s, a virgin’s face, beardless-smooth, delicately shaped as something fashioned rather than born. And about the face the long hair was spun, a topaz flowering from his ivory flesh, and the flowering hair was crowned with flowers as if for a feast or a wedding.
Narasen persuaded the body of the youth, by pressure and by direction, that it must lie on the rugs. This done, she took up the wooden box the witch had given her, and opened it. Within was coiled a plaited cord, and this cord Narasen now drew across the quiescent male flesh before her, over shoulders and torso, between the fingers of the slim hands and over the passive loins. After that, swiftly she threw the cord aside.
The cord struck the tent’s floor just beyond the lamps, and from the half glow there, came a flicker like an unsheathed blade.
Narasen stretched herself beside the body of the beautiful young man, and set her lips to the face that was like the face of a virgin girl.
“If your body remembers anything,” said Narasen, “suppose I am some man you have loved. Suppose I am he. I do not abuse you. It is your lover who kisses you thus.”
Then she kneeled above him and leaned and caressed his body, her hands and mouth upon his skin that was scented yet with clean unguents and incense and the lingering fragrance of life itself.