by Tanith Lee
Yolsippa, noting the tableau, broke in with his usual indelicacy.
“And I, amazing lord?”
“And he?” Uhlume asked Kassafeh.
She, half lying in the circle of his arm, whispered: “Oh, let him come with me, if he is able. He can guide the elephants—that is, if you will permit me elephants?”
• • •
By night, the Lord Uhlume strode across the plains and hillsides of the world. He was often there now. He passed like a black note in the silence, the white notes of his hair and cloak played at his back, and sometimes a green-faced nightmare might scamper after him, though generally he walked alone.
Of course, he had not wed Narasen, but that she queened it in the Innerearth was true. Her palace had been built, and hung with thieved lamps of golden filigree. Those descending now and then forgot Death, and ran to her, begging favors. Queen Death. The extinction of Simmu’s sunlight had refurbished her own brilliance, as if she had fed upon his body, or his soul, and in some measure also, on Uhlume.
It was not, presumably, that Uhlume had not powers enough to quench her, merely that he had never turned to them. Maybe her challenge defeated him by its sheer improbable audacity, as from the first it seemed it had. Or was it only that to Uhlume, whose spirit spanned eons, the challenge had no permanent significance—the sting of a bee, a few million years—an instant—of rancor.
Whatever it was, it transpired that he surrendered that small kingdom, Innerearth, in favor of the other, greater one, the living world, where Narasen could not go. And here he walked, up and down, and round and about.
And sometimes, as the world’s sun bled out its life, the Lord Uhlume could hear the faintest of sounds, that of a loom muttering somewhere in the deep jar of the dusk.
Painted by starlight, the plain had a marvellous softness and shady luminescence. Upon the hill, the lacquer doors beyond the torches stood open, and the silky lilac-red of the doorway smiled out into the dark.
Kassafeh rose from her loom. She did not kneel; her obeisance and her worship were all there in her eyes instead, which melted through amber and hyacinth to the blackest of blues.
No chair of bone for Uhlume in this house. It was Kassafeh who sat, and he, Lord Death, who lay down and rested his head in her lap. The fatigue of a thousand centuries had caught him up. Why not?
And as he rested there in silence and she with gentle fingers smoothed his forehead, the strange flat earth went on about its business through the night.
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