by Tanith Lee
Thus he called for more wine, and lightly asked the tale, saying all curious things interested him.
Then the merchants told Jyresh the following story.
The rich man had had one son, who was a wastrel and seemed intent on squandering his inheritance. Finding he could do nothing with the boy, the father sent him to an acquaintance of his, with the request that this man, a merchant named Sharaq, should starve and ill-treat the son and give him besides menial and degrading tasks to perform, having him beaten when he failed at them. This Sharaq did, for he was a harsh master, and the boy ended in rags in the pig sty, eating the leavings of the swine. But it chanced that Jyresh—for this was the prodigal’s name—then somehow gained some powers of sorcery, and these he abruptly turned upon the merchant Sharaq, causing him untold harm and distress and being very likely to destroy him, and so it might have happened, except that the swine, frightened by the sorcerer’s behavior, ran mad, and before he could save himself, trampled Jyresh to death.
Then Sharaq vowed to have vengeance. Leaving the boy’s body for the pigs to devour, and taking not a servant with him, Sharaq rode night and day until he reached the rich man’s house. Striding into his presence, Sharaq cried—and this was verbatim, for many had heard him at it—“You have inflicted on me the curse of your son’s sorcery. But I am not to be demeaned. Listen well. I have killed him, your brat, and fed his remains to beasts. Now I bring this for you.” And with these words, Sharaq drew a knife from his mantle and cut the rich man down. Then the merchant fled and none had seen him since, but in his house, they said, his servants continued to live, making free of all, like kings.
For the rich man, he lay dying, and so his own people found him. As he perished, he shed great tears, but not for himself. His thoughts were all of his son. “It is my fault he has been slain, my injustice to him it was that brought this horror about. Sharaq is a madman, for my Jyresh had learned no spells, for all the books he read. His death is on my very soul. How shall I rest, knowing it is through me my only child has lost his life? And all he knew of me at the last was my cruelty and my wicked foolishness, and not how dearly I loved him always.”
And then the rich man called his scribe and ordered that, as he died without any heir, his servants should take their own prescribed reward, but all the rest of his goods should be sold, and replaced in jewels and coin, in the rarest parchments and volumes, in the most costly furnishings and garments, and this hoard—useless—be buried in the tomb with him, along with the keys to any other caches of wealth that were his. For the house, it should be razed by fire, and the lands let go to waste. “Since I have been so much in the wrong,” he said, “in putting these things before human love and compassion, they shall be ruined, or locked in with death, as an example, before gods and men, of their worthlessness. Rather I had been a beggar and kept my son alive,” he said, “or rather I had suffered murder seven times that he might live.” And so the rich man closed his eyes altogether.
And everything was done as he instructed, the house burned, the land given over to a wilderness, and the hoard secreted in the tomb—the door of which was most securely locked that no robber might ever break in.
When the merchants had finished their tale of the rich man and his prodigal son, they bade their companion refreshing slumbers, and left him, for it was late.
Jyresh himself rose, and went out into the night.
The moon had turned westward. The stars, the flowers of heaven, glowed with a final brilliance.
Leaving the town, Jyresh crossed the fields beyond, and at length climbed a hill, sitting down there lost in conjecture. Such a compendium of fact and fantasy he had heard that his brain would not sift it through. But the phrases that his father had supposedly spoken at the end, these engaged both heart and mind. For just as he, Jyresh, too late had come to remember his childish love, so it seemed the father had remembered love also, and also too late.
As he was sitting in this way, the wheel of this reverie turning slowly and heavily around and around in his mind, Jyresh turned around and around on his fingers those rings he had taken from the white tomb. And it came to him, the nearness of that tomb to his father’s lands, and how the hoard tallied with the description the storytellers had given. And he thought suddenly of the sturdy tomb door, which had been readily opened, and the blue-black crow which had said to him, “Greetings, my son.”
And when he had thought of it, Jyresh raised his head, and before him on the hill, against the waxing eastern sky, there stood his father.
He was dim as smoke, the dawn star shone through his sleeve; he held fast his cloak against his breast, as if to hide some mark there. But he gazed at Jyresh, and spoke.
“It was I, in the form of the crow, who directed you to enter my tomb and take from there what rightfully is yours. Sharaq lied, and you live. My fortune has come to you. I think you will not squander it, after all.”
“Father,” said Jyresh, “I cannot tell what I shall do hereafter. But what of you?”
“I,” said the ghost, “am free as the air. Only regret has bound my awareness to the world a little longer, and my wish to look one last occasion upon you, as your father.”
Then Jyresh would have gone to the ghost and embraced it, but it was incorporeal and could not allow him to get close. Jyresh bowed his head once more. “I do believe,” said he, “that your fortune, let alone squandered, will not be spent by me. I have come to like other things—pillows of grass, the world for my house, the brotherhood of beasts and men rather than sour lusts and silly jests. If I live as a poor man and a wanderer, will you forgive me? Will you forgive me, dear Father, after all your care, if I leave your riches in the ground, and go on my journey without them?”
At that the ghost smiled, and now the dawn star had risen high enough it lay on the transparent cheek.
“Jyresh, you see where meddling in your life has brought me. You must choose your path. But I will wish you well on it.”
Then the cocks began to crow in the town beneath the hill, and the birds chorused in the fields, and a pale yellow poppy colored the east. Like the dark, the rich man’s ghost melted away.
Jyresh watched the sun come up. Then, he took the embroidered pouch of coins from his belt, and hung it on a wild fig tree.
As he walked down the slope, he shed from himself the more cumbersome items of clothing, the rings and mantle, the white boots, the rosy pearl. He left them where they dropped.
Presently, coming to a stream, he kneeled and drank, and the bright water trickled through his fingers as the bright jewels of the rings had done.
And then it half seemed to him that he heard the birds, which twittered in the wayside bushes, singing this:
He squanders garments on the soil,
He squanders every gem and pearl,
And through his hand lets waterfall—
He squanders it, he squanders all—
The prodigal! The prodigal!
At last, cheated of love by Wickedness and Fate—so it seemed to her—Sovaz bowed to her father’s design.
Then Azhrarn made her the Goddess-on-earth, Azhriaz, who ruled over a third of all the world, in a sky-touching city of miracles and cruelties. Here, at his command, she tutored mankind in the stony indifference of the gods, by her example.
In those years too, some of the Vazdru princes, seeing she was also a demon like themselves (though she could endure the sun, as they could not), went proudly to court her. And she spurned each one, saying she had a prejudice against her own race. Which astonished and irked them, for the demons, in their beauty and arrogance, were unused to any that said No.
Dooniveh, the Moon
1. The Mare’s Egg
NINE OF THE Vazdru wooed her, they said. They said the last of the nine was the Prince Hazrond.
Of all the Vazdru, after Azhrarn, the stories reveal Hazrond to have been, among that fa
bulous company the most handsome, the most glamorous and rare.
So he stood in the courtyard of his platinum house in Druhim Vanashta, under the earth, knowing as much and musing. Amid the agate-colored trees of the court was a basin of cold green water, and in this Hazrond could conjure images of the lands above. It was a night of full moon up there, and in the way of demons, earthly moonlight inclined Hazrond to inspiration. Presently he left the court and the palatial house, passed through the glories of the demon city, under its towers of crystal, brass and steel, its minarets of silver, its windows of corundum, and expired himself via a volcanic chimney onto the surface of the world.
The courting of Azhriaz, daughter of Azhrarn, Prince of Demons, the Master of Night, had been as inevitable to the Vazdru as was the moonrise to the earth. They must woo her because she had been fashioned and was there. One by one they sought her then, in their pride and splendor, one by one she turned them down. And meanwhile the offerings they had taken her (less to please her than to demonstrate their own worth), incredible jewels and sorcerous toys of Drin-work, these lay abandoned on her doorstep. Or else had been cast aside in Vazdru rage upon the thoroughfares of the goddess’s City, where much havoc spread from them. But in this affair of a gift, a seed of perverse reasoning had rooted in the intellect of Hazrond. They have compared me to her father, his reasoning said to Hazrond, therefore, as her sire did, I should create some marvelous hybrid, some exquisite monster—as she is—and give it to her. For in this way he could both praise and insult her, a dichotomy most appealing to a Vazdru.
The night was young, little more than a girl. She stretched smiling over the sky, gazing down upon Hazrond, holding the silver mirror of the moon in her hand.
“And is she as fair as you?” Hazrond inquired of the night. “This Azhriaz? Or does she not deserve her name?” For he had never seen her, the one he wished to have for a lover.
As he walked over the darkness then, musing still in the inspiration of the moon, he came on a valley deep between high mountains, and here wild horses were grazing. And now and then the stallions gave battle to each other, or they raced along the valley two by two.
If a mortal had approached, they would have shunned him, or perhaps come to attack him, for they were fierce as lions, these herds. But as the Vazdru walked among them, they lifted their heads, clean-carven as the heads of chess pieces, and stared with the pools of their eyes. Some of them stole after him as he went by. And one of these was a beautiful virgin mare, black as the night. Becoming aware of her, Hazrond paused.
Now the horses of the Underearth, themselves black as the blackest night, with dusk-blue manes and tails, were the darlings of their masters. They could run over any sort of terrain below or above, and over water, too. While for beauty of proportion and for fire of spirit, they had no match. And yet, when the glance of Hazrond rested on this earthly horse, he saw at once she was a celebrity of her species, a goddess among mares. So he stretched out his hand, and crooned to her, and she came at once and laid her head on his shoulder.
An Eshva would have crowned her with flowers, leapt on her back and ridden her all night. But a Vazdru must first have called the Drin, and had bridle and saddle and trappings made for the horse—and then he would not deign to ride her himself, but would have given her as a gift to some mortal he fancied.
Hazrond said to the mare, “I have watched you racing, my dear, winged by the night.” And the seed of reasoning burgeoned. “Come with me then. I will make you a legend among your kind.”
So he passed up the valley away from the herds, and into the boulevards of the mountains. She followed him, over the rocks and among the slender plants that grew there, through the gradations of height and time, until they reached a plateau.
Above, on three sides, the topmost peaks ascended, nearly symmetrical as spires. It was a place for eagles. And Hazrond, speaking or singing certain phrases of the Vazdru High Tongue, that which they used in their sorceries, fashioned a type of impulse, and sent it flying up among the peaks. That done, he waited. And the mare, ensorcelled by his presence, his brief caress, stood on the plateau a hundred paces off, still as a stone.
At length a piece of the night itself lifted from the third, the highest, peak. It circled, looking for the sun, maybe, before dropping down the air, conceding another summons, even less resistible.
The Vazdru wove a charm then, of voice and breath, power and will. It brimmed the plateau and ran over like water into the valleys beneath. The live things there were electrified. Herbs opened their buds, rodents scuttered through their chambered cities in the rock—the spill of magic slipped by, and the birds of the lower levels sang out, and fell silent again in awe. The horse herds, too, were disturbed and sped away over the pastures of the dark. The spillage reached the valley floor, sank into the earth to astonish worms and beetles, and was no more.
But high on the plateau, the magic lake gathered and contained, and through its currents, never breaking free, the black mare wheeled and galloped, and the black eagle stooped upon her—and at a final word of the Vazdru, they were one.
It may have seemed to her, perhaps, the mare, that she mated with the ebony rush of the midnight wind. And to the eagle that he mated, too, with that rushing force which all day long would fill his broad sails and bear him up. But to Hazrond, who looked on at their union, they were a single creature, four-legged black speed upborne under two black flames fanning and beating. The emblem of what should come from this: A horse with wings.
• • •
The great plateau was her pen, fenced in with posts and intricate chains the Drin had wrought. The grass grew thick and the creamy clovers sprung for her, and fruit trees let down their fruit, out of season, to tempt her velvet mouth. The Eshva women were her handmaidens, this goddess-princess of the horses. They soothed her and gave her their lawless love; they hung her with purple daisies and, when she allowed it, twined their pets, those love-drunk silver serpents of theirs, between their black manes and hers.
Looking deeply into her, they might see, under the skin, in the pelvic cage, a symbol written as if in starlight on the rose of her womb. She had been mated through sorcery, and by sorcery her body must be trained to retain, to bring to life, the unnatural wonder that now went on there.
Weeks passed. How slowly she moved now, the mare, seemingly irresolute at herself, how she was.
She grew so heavy. She lay on her side under the trees, scenting the approach of pain the tiger, staring this way and that. The afternoon went in a blaze. The sun bled. Twilight staunched the sky, and as the first stars stood out on it, the white stars of the Eshva stood on the plateau. They breathed their perfume into the nostrils of the laboring mare, and over her eyes pressed their leaflike hands. She slept, and felt no hurt, and soon, easily, carefully, a terrible object came gliding from the labyrinth of her fleshly mechanism. It was a huge oval egg, the shade of polished slate, smooth as marble, hot to the touch as a burning coal.
Two Drin waddled down the plateau, their repulsiveness framed in the sable beauty of their curling hair, and gilded by straps and adornments of unbelievable craftsmanship. They dragged in a sack the uprooted fence. They carried a harness of black steel set with black diamonds.
The Eshva moved aside. They leaned to each other like frail stems, gazing in each other’s eyes to avoid having to see the eyesore of the Drin.
The Drin smacked their lips, no more. All were on the Vazdru business of Hazrond. The two dwarfs grasped the egg and placed it gingerly in the harness, setting it just so, though it burnt their hands. Then they vanished away with it, off the plateau, into the ground. The egg, sorcerous and marked with Hazrond’s seal, his property, was able to go with them, through the barriers, soil, psychosm, down and down.
The Eshva stayed to console the sleeping mare, to comb her mane, to heal her with their touches and their presence. When the sun rose they would be gone, and she, risi
ng up at liberty, would shake herself, sprint end to end of the plateau, roll in the fading clover like a foal. After which she would pick a way down to the valleys, and seek the horse tribes. These, in spite of—because of—a quicksilver scent of demons on her, would take her in. She would become again a drop in the ocean of the herds, tidally sweeping in their earthbound flight through endless channels of grass. She would know the weight of stallions, the companionship of her kind, the seasons of weather and age. She would be barren always.
• • •
In a platinum pagoda beneath Hazrond’s court of agate-colored trees, the mare’s egg rested. It lay in the cradle of the harness. Sometimes it rocked a little. It gave off continuous heat, which grew more intense with every timeless second that went by. The vicinity of the egg crackled and shone.
Drin tended it uneasily, if not with terror. They feared what was in it. They feared what might be in it would displease Hazrond. He would come and go, questioning them. He would bring wands of jet and ivory and blue iron, and tap the shell. Once even he brought a wand with a golden point, and when he was done with it, flung it from him in allergic anger.
The Drin watched the egg, coaxed it, reviled each other, and each prepared stories about the negligence of the other attendant Drin, in case the egg should be stillborn.
In the demon city meanwhile, a particular clique of eight princes met in an onyx garden, and discussed Hazrond and his secret scathingly. “He is a fool. He should learn by our example, that beautiful one.” “Even Azhrarn the Beautiful,” murmured another, “lacks judgment.” For at that time there was ill feeling against Azhrarn among the Vazdru, to do with his obsession with mortal ventures. But when the words were said, the onyx bushes cringed flat to the lawns, and the princes drew their mantles round them, parted and strode away.