by Tanith Lee
Until another voice spoke to her, clear and direly melodious.
“You are a fool, Yezade.”
And spinning about she found herself after all not alone. For there on a branch perched the fire bird, shining dimly as a distant ocher star.
“What does this mean?” said Yezade, and she strove still to be bold.
“Perhaps it means,” said the bird, “that Kolchash, who is no magician, but nevertheless possesses access to certain sorcerous powers, does not like to be cheated in the matter of wives.” And then the bird spread wide its wings, and stretched out its neck at her, and there was something so fearsome in this that a great wave of horror splashed over Yezade and in it she submerged, despite her will. And she clutched up her cast veil and turned about and fled. She fled through the spiteful forest, which scratched and bit at her and caught her feet and flung her over, so it came to seem she tried to rush through huge panes and breakers, through the jungle of night itself that came to life and smote her and mocked at her. Until in the end the earth gave way beneath her and she fell, deep down into an abyss, into a nothingness.
And here she swung, and did not see the sunrise, which soon enough took place above her, nor the day which next passed over the forest in a green eyelet that showed high up. Nor this day’s ebbing again to a twilight.
Nothing Yezade saw or heard or felt or knew, or even dreamed of. Though perhaps she did dream that the tangled creepers which held her far down in the pit murmured, “Sleep, sleep, while we cradle you so carefully,” and the rock, on which she had struck her head in falling, replied, “Sleep? Yes, I saw to it.” But in the distance was another voice which said, “Kolchash does not like to be cheated.”
And then the new night had come, to the forest, to Yezade, and to all other things on the Flat Earth.
3. The Second Night: Lovers Met and Marred
While Yezade had been sleeping all day the sleep of ensorcelled and stunned unconsciousness in a hole in the ground, Marsineh had slumbered with exhaustion under a tree.
Unknown to her, during the heat of noon, a spotted lynx and her child had passed by, pausing only to sniff the flower-like scent of Marsineh’s hair—for she had flung off the boy’s headcloth. And later, as the sun slipped west behind the forest canopy and the golden green of afternoon cooled to a green turquoise, an old stag, whose branched antlers seemed grown out of the wood itself, stayed half a minute to look at her, before he stepped on huge silent feet away.
But Marsineh slept deep in the arms of sorrow and did not wake, though once she cried softly in a dream, and a butterfly like colored paper sipped her tears.
Cooler and darker turned the great wood, for the sun went down. Between the vast pillars of the trees the aisles were hung with dusk.
Marsineh woke. She was chilled, but what did that matter? Somewhere, through the wild lanes of the wood, Dhur would be turning for his pleasurable inn, having forgotten altogether the runaway boy. And elsewhere the riding-ass would be cropping the grass, if no carnivore of the forest had devoured it— And Marsineh wept again, for Dhur’s forgetfulness and the imperiled ass. Until, in the midst of her tears, she heard a most beautiful sound—or she smelled a most marvelous perfume—she was unsure which, or even if it might not be something else. . . . In any event, she was compelled to dispense with crying and look about and listen intently.
The forest was by now utterly quiet and completely still, and also entirely black, save for some phantom gossamers of starlight that had somehow come floating down from the tree-tops.
Marsineh did not dare to speak aloud or move, for fear.
Just then, the darkness seemed to gather itself, all in one spot, before her and, detaching itself dark from dark, drew forward. Marsineh caught her breath in frightened wonder.
There, not three feet away, and leaning down to look into her eyes, was a pale and extraordinary face. It was, unmistakably, that of a young man, but so handsome, framed in such black, black hair, and with eyes of its own of such a black and luminous fire—that Marsineh could not bear the gaze. It was as if a piercingly sweet pain shot into every nerve. She recoiled, and perhaps would have taken flight. But in that instant, the fabulous creature reached out a hand, whose pale long fingers touched her cheek more lightly than the earlier butterfly, and yet she felt the touch all through herself, as if her veins ran silk. It healed her, this touch, of all terrible human things, of grief and puzzlement, of fear and decorum. Even, it healed her pains and stiffness. So that when both hands came now and persuaded Marsineh to get up, up she rose and stood before him, so near the slender strength of his whole body, which seemed garbed in shadow, leaves and stars, that she had no choice but to lean on him. And then he stroked her hair, and this was as if a master-musician played upon amber strings, it was music. And then he breathed or sighed, and the incense of his breath, better than and different from any perfume of the world, intoxicated Marsineh. So then she said, in the arms of this stranger, “Oh, you must be a god of the forest, you are so beautiful. Oh, I hear what I say and am amazed by it. But I care nothing now for any human man. I care nothing now for anything. Only for you.”
Then the god of the forest touched Marsineh’s closed eyes with his lips, and when she opened them, she found she saw the nighttime woods as if by the sheerest brightest moonshine. For everything seemed steeped and soaked in a feral lovely light that was not light at all. The trunks of the trees stood clear, each laminated rib was visible. Above, every leaf glittered as if in dry and diamond rain. The night flowers dashed the grass with spilled sequins. Marsineh raised her hands, and her skin was crystal.
“Come with me now,” said the young man, yet he did not speak to her at all.
With him she went.
They moved between the skeins of the forest with the ease of the air itself. Where the starlight poured into the glades, there blazed the sheen of silver mirrors. Black and white badgers gamboled round their feet. A snake glided from a pool to follow and caress them.
There was a bank mattressed with a velvet panther-skin of moss, where briar-roses opened their white cups and filled the night with musk, and primroses had formed a coverlet under the pillared canopy of vines on which the savage grapes clustered like agates. Here he led her, and here drew her down. Here she lay with him, the unmarried bride, her second bridal-night that was her first, in the arms of one whose name she did not know, whose voice she had not heard, learning the joyous deliriums of love, without a protest, without a thought.
• • •
A little before the dawn he left her. She sensed a shrillness in the wood, before ever the light showed itself: It was this he did not care for, unweaving his flesh from hers. But he left her with an unvoiced promise—of continuance, return. He left her dressed in the petals of roses, in vine leaves and in shade, with pale flowers through her hair. She, too, had grown silent, learning from his eloquent muteness. She did not need to cry after him, Oh how I adore you, my lover and my love. Indeed, it was not mere love he had brought her—it was Love, the rhythm of the world. He left her, they were not parted. She could not remember her name (let alone any other’s), nor who she was. The forest was her home and had entered, too, into her soul. She laughed without a sound to see him vanish like a blade sheathed in the scabbard of the sinking night. She curled herself to slumber among the primroses and the fern.
• • •
Yezade had wakened, like her sister Marsineh, as the day fell down asleep. But Yezade’s emotions were her own. The curious terror of the nacre pavilion, the headless doll of Kolchash—her frantic spell-bound flight from the cold-eyed bird of fire—but too well she knew she had dreamed none of it, though her head ached from the blow of the rock.
Sorcery there had been, and set against her. Now she lay in the tangled vegetable web and saw the night above, in the eyelet. She resolved she must climb up to it. So, setting her narrow hands and feet into the stony sides
of the pit, and gripping the creepers, she did at length, with much difficulty and some hurt, bring herself out again to the open forest.
After the darkness of her prison, the night wood appeared vast and most adequately lit. Yezade lifted her head and snuffed the atmosphere for magic, like an amber fox emerging from its earth. But the night seemed empty now. What she had fallen foul of had lost interest in her. Nevertheless, Yezade muttered a small protective mantra, another of her mother’s legacies.
Kolchash had proved himself to be, in his own right, a powerful magician. And it seemed to Yezade that she had been ensorcelled from the start not to have seen the awful mocking game he played with her. For had she not devised and sent the dream to Marsineh which scared her from the marriage, and had not Marsineh retold this dream to Yezade, in all its detail? Finding then this detail exactly repeated—save for a slender disparity here and there, for example that the perch of the uncanny bird, gilded gold in the dream, was silver in the fact—should Yezade not have queried the manner in which life so blatantly imitated her art?
Where was the monstrous Kolchash now? Gone in pursuit of Marsineh, no doubt. That then, was their business. Yezade had no resource to spare any longer for sentiment. Meanwhile, she herself was outcast and desolate, her mother’s prophecy had misled her, and had she been any other she would have sobbed, but instead she stamped her foot and frowned her aching brow.
Just then she heard an odd sound rise out of the forest’s deeps. It resembled the mad braying of an ass—and in that second Yezade recalled stories that were told of these woods, that elementals haunted them, and devilish things— But she had been frightened enough, and now she only turned her back upon the noise, which swiftly died away. And hearing instead the quiet song of running water she went in that direction, for she was thirsty.
Now, Yezade was no witch, but her mother had been one, and some inheritance had vaguely passed to her of it, along with the several charms, learnt parrot-fashion, which she could wield. And so, as she was going toward the notes of the water, abruptly she checked herself, petrified beside a tree and strove to be one with it. And this, before she knew why she must.
A glade lay beyond, rimmed by grasses high as a child of seven years. And suddenly, between and above the grass, there moved three or four or five flickering and glowing fires, of smokiest azure, most unreal and palest purple. Around and about they danced, mingling and eluding, until all at once they brightened and faded—and there instead were some beautiful and human-like beings, still moving in a graceful flickering dance across the grass.
Their skin was white, like starlight, if starlight were to become flesh. Their long hair was the black of midnight clouds. They were garbed in a black which was also silver. They came and went in their dance, male and female, young as youth and old as time. In their burning midnight eyes was a mysterious dreaming look. They were those that men sometimes called the Children of Night, afraid to title them otherwise. They were demonkind. Yezade knew them immediately, for her mother had warned her of them, and Yezade remembered, though she had not perfectly believed. Yes, demonkind, and of the wandering, speechless caste of the Underearth, the Eshva, which name, in the Demon Tongue, meant: Those that separately shine.
How brilliantly they shone now in their unearthly darkness. And Yezade stared on them and felt her heart grow scorched and little with a wordless longing, a lust of the spirit, which countless mortals, seeing them, had felt before her.
And then there occurred another happening, more fearful and wonderful still.
Far down the glade there was a noiseless explosion of light, and the ground itself erupted. From the midst of it there came leaping up three horses, black and bright, with manes and tails of blue sparks, and on their backs three lords, alike as brothers of one birth, yet dissimilar as were and are the stars, when closely examined. And they were black and pale as those others, the Eshva, who had been dancing there, yet where the Eshva shone, these blazed. And again the watcher knew them, for they were princes of the Vazdru, the high caste of the demons, and now Yezade was purely terrified.
No sooner were they above ground than they reined in their steeds and looked about arrogantly, while the Eshva, their admiring servants, obeised themselves. Then, one of the Vazdru spoke, and his voice was beauty-and-fear-in-love-with-one-another.
“Our Lord Azhrarn is done hunting, then. He has found her?”
“It seems so,” said the second, no less lustrous, no less deadly.
“That pair of lovers has had its season; they are due to be parted,” said the third, and he was the same.
But, having said this, they seemed not at ease. They toyed with rings on their fingers, and chided the moon for her childish slenderness.
At last, the first said, “An old quarrel, it is better settled. And there is none can match our lord, Prince of the princes.”
“Yet,” said the second, “the woods are perfumed by madness.”
“And, more fragrantly, by the recreations of demons,” said the third.
Then they returned their horses’ heads, and as if a fiery wind rose from the earth, they galloped away between the trees. In that moment, too, the Eshva disappeared.
Yezade fell to her knees. She had understood nothing of what had been said. But she had been accorded a frightening recognition. The voice of the third of the Vazdru was known to her, since she had heard it only the night before. It was with this voice, melodious and dire, that the ice-eyed bird had addressed her and sent her into headlong flight. She had thought herself only the enemy of a mighty magician. To find she had engaged the enmity of a Vazdru almost killed this wise girl on the spot.
“My mother,” said she reproachfully, “where have you led me?”
And quickly she found a hollow tree and hid herself in it, and there she stayed for the duration of the demoniac night.
• • •
Now the dialogue of the Vazdru had referred to those two lovers, Chuz, Delusion’s Master, and Azhriaz-Sovaz, the Prince of Demons’ daughter. (The very hero and heroine fantastically described at the Turtle Dove Inn.)
Azhrarn had sought and found them out, to punish and cleave them asunder. And all the length of that vast forest away, epic events went on, whose story is related elsewhere. But, as the proximity, however distant, of those two supernaturals had filled the woods with strangeness, so the sorceries increased when the Eshva had entered there and loitered. And the Vazdru also, attending on their Prince, dropped back a fraction from the theater of his wrath, and wrought their own wickedness and mischief in the forest—rather as warriors played chess before a battle. Only the intensity of Azhrarn’s thought and mood held them off from doing more. His rage distracted them from their pastimes, as his anguish had done and would do again and again (till they turned and snarled at it like lions under a lash). But the distraction meant that much of what they did in this place was left unfinished, and as well for humankind it was.
Something had already gone on, concerning the wedding of Kolchash, and something else to do with the beauty of Marsineh and an Eshva youth, wandering in the burning dream of night, who had found her sweet to his desire. And something else and other there was still to be, from the fringes of the demon presence that threaded the woods.
Only dawn might balk the demons, daylight was their death. But certain of these antics they set in motion, even the sunrise did not always cancel them. . . .
4. The Second Day
Dhur, drifting up on a tide of sleep, thought himself in the comfortable inn. But if so, the bed had grown grass in the night, the cup of wine turned into dew and spilled, and the curve of the fair singing-girl’s hip was unyielding as a boulder.
Dhur opened his eyes, and looked upon the woods with a grievance. “May the gods take note,” said he, “that it is my kind heart brought me to this predicament.” The gods, of course, did no such thing.
The young man st
retched, and taking out a packet of bread and meat and a flask of wine, broke his fast. The green sunlight anointed him and the smell of flowers drifted up from the grass. Nearby a tribe of conies, discounting him, breakfasted on violets, or played. Since boyhood, Dhur had hunted in these woods, and did not fear them or even to be lost in them. If he should meet with an angry wolf or a lynx, he had about him bow and spear and knife. For superstitious tales, he did not credit ghosts, ghouls, sprites or demons. Such were the fodder of poets.
He had begun, during his first day’s hunting, to be troubled by a recollection of the town. He had started to consider the bizarre wedding of a neighbor’s daughter to the rich old Kolchash. That very evening, after a day of no sport at all, the idiot boy had come to him, escaped from the service of this Kolchash. Dhur had teased the boy and left him to keep up with the hunt. But the boy had been lost, and the ass—the property of Dhur’s father—had been lost, and—moreover—the hunt had failed again. Not an animal presented itself. Save once a young doe with her fawn, who seemed to be aware she must not be pursued by men of honor, for she went slowly across their path, seemingly nodding to them as she did so.
As the day waned and they turned back toward the inn—knowing the routes of the forest nearly as well as the streets of their town—Dhur took it on himself to drop aside and seek the lost boy riding the ass. And not to spoil their fun, he had sent his companions away to the Turtle Dove, with instructions each to drink an extra cup and proffer an extra kiss on his behalf, should he not return in time.
(And as he was doing this, it came to him to wonder a little, why he bothered to search for the boy—who doubtless had simply run off again—when he had vowed to the fellow he would do no such thing. And Dhur thought, too, of how he had pretended to the boy, when the subject was broached, that he, Dhur, did not much recall any Kolchash, or any wedding. . . . Now why had that been?)
Being so sure of the forest, not afraid of it, Dhur felt no unease and only a little chagrin when the sun set and night descended. Once he heard an ass braying, and rode in that direction, but search as he would and clearly call as he sometimes did, not a trace did he uncover of the wretched boy. Then Dhur grew melancholy, which was not quite unpleasant. He made a camp among the trees, lit a fire and ate his supper, while his tethered horse cropped the fresh grass. Dhur fell easily now to thinking of a girl he half remembered, a well-born girl who had charmed him, but he had not paid her proper heed and could not now recall who she had been. Some rich man’s daughter, it went without saying, for she wore figured silk and had gold on her wrists. But her hair was warm as flame. . . .