by Tanith Lee
The land itself seemed to have erupted to form some hundreds of blond warriors in white mail, girded with swords of steel. And to make for them a multitude of low-slung silver chariots drawn by dray packs of albino hounds. It had, too, flown up lengths of ivory to become white banners embroidered with devices of whitest azure and anemic yellow. It had darkened to silver trumpets in the hands of trumpeters turbaned in gray silk with plumes like smolder from their brains. It had lightened again to drums and drummers in ashy dappled skins. And lastly the white landscape had flowered into three gigantic snow-white bears walking on all fours, on the backs of each of which rose a seat of white gold under a parasol like a blue poppy. And three grand personages occupied these seats, the foremost of whom was now alighting by a ladder of steps. Like his bear, he was clad in white furs, and from his crown and chin poured venerable white hair only a tint whiter than that of the blond young warrior captains and the childish pages who assisted him. More certainly the crags of his face betokened he was an old man, and one accustomed to putting himself in the right. On his head was a diadem of bright daffodil gold. (By contrast the other two grandees, upon the second and third bears, were garbed in griseous furs and had on their worthy skulls diadems only of the ubiquitous silver.)
The old man of the gold came over the marble shore until he stood with his shoes in Pereban’s ribs. The old man bowed, placing his hands before his face in a ritual manner. Then he leaned nearer and touched lightly the lobes of Pereban’s ears, and his lips. “Lord, as predicted, you have fallen from the sun.”
Pereban had by now reached a delirious stage of stupidity, and was inclined to find fault.
“Not at all,” said he.
“It was observed, lord,” sternly corrected the old man. “You were witnessed, like a mote of fire, in your descent. Besides, by your golden hair we know you.”
Pereban, wanting to quarrel further, could now only shiver. His teeth chattered so wildly that some of the chariot-dogs apparently imagined he was snarling at them, and began to growl in reply.
“Sun Lord,” said the old man, “see how you are, and today it is almost summer here. What are you but a being of the sun?” And he signaled to a pair of pages who ran forward and offered Pereban a robe of fur and golden tissue. When the young man had been helped into it, a moonstone flask of cordial was held to his mouth. He drank. The cordial, though watery to the taste, in a moment revived him extraordinarily, his veins filled with vital heat, and he opened wide his eyes and stared on the assembly in mingled alarm and disbelief.
“My faculties are restored, yet I am dreaming still. It is not a dream.”
“It is not. You are here to accord with our prophecies,” censoriously yapped the old man.
Velvet footwear was being eased upon the feet of Pereban, and velvet gloves upon his hands.
“Where is my crown?” said Pereban, eyeing the old man’s headpiece; such myths as the priest had ever heard had begun to advise him. If he arrived in answer to some portent, he could expect the best.
“Later, you shall be anointed as the king. Will you deign, lord, to share my seat upon the animal?”
Pereban did so, and went aloft onto the bear very nimbly after another swig of the cordial. The old man creaked up after him.
“How fortunate it is,” said Pereban, “that we speak the same language.”
“Not at all,” said the old man, “that was seen to by magic when I tapped your ears and mouth.”
The ladder of steps was removed. The bear grunted and turned with a lolling gait back along the shore. The drums and trumpets began again to sound. In the ocean of ink and milk the whales were going down.
“Where now?” asked Pereban blithely.
“To the Shining City.”
“On! On!” cried Pereban waving his arms, smiling about him, annoying the moon-bear, inebriated on moon-wine.
• • •
The old man of the gold, whose title was Lord One, proved a great authority on all things, and throughout the journey, which lasted perhaps some earthly hours, on and on he droned. Now and then Lord Two, or Lord Three (the second and third elders on the adjoining bears) would call out some wavering crotchety instruction or anecdote. “Pay them no heed,” recommended Lord One. “They are both of them senile. I, though older and having reached my thousandth year, am, as you perceive, in my prime.”
Pereban did not believe this assertion. Lord One was undoubtedly no more than ninety years of age, and the other dodderers looked scarcely more, probably less.
Meanwhile the procession, the white bears at its head, had passed up a terraced slope that seemed to have been shaped by the same ogre’s implements as had quarried and burnished everything else, and so gone into a defile of the mountains.
A wind blew through the defile, sounding it like a pipe, and the upper peaks of the mountains seemed to smoke. Lord One told Pereban that this was a blowing off of the dry frost which gathered there in winter and spring. “In summer comes a great heat,” said he, “and as you will notice, at this time of the year we go about almost naked, in one robe of fur alone.”
“The outside of the disc, however,” said Pereban, who had contrived for himself perpetual access to the moonstone cordial, “is boiling hot. Why is that?”
“Of what disc are you speaking?”
“The lunar disc, wherein we now are.”
“What nonsense,” said Lord One. “There can be no outside. I see you seek to test me. There is only this land, this sea, and the orb of the sun that was your home before you fell.”
“As you desire,” said Pereban. For in his term as a priest in the temple, he had learned that it was less wearisome not to contradict cant.
“This land where you have come down, or to where you have been dropped, is the land of Dooniveh. And the sea of Dooniveh encircles it. And presently you shall, having entered through the ring of the mountains of Dooniveh, reach the Shining City of Dooniveh.”
“There to be made the king of Dooniveh?” prompted Pereban.
“Provided that you fulfill the condition,” said Lord One.
“Which condition?”
“On that I shall, for the moment, remain silent,” said Lord One. He continued however to make sounds on all other subjects available. From his vociferousness, Pereban tried to garner facts.
Dooniveh—the world inside the moon—comprised an ocean and a single land mass, that on which they now traveled. In the iridescent gray sky of Dooniveh there presided the one solitary object—its sun. This circled round land and sea in a sideways girdling motion. It never waxed or waned, and never moved across or under the terrain in order to sink or rise, as did the satellites of the Flat Earth. (As did, for that matter, this very moon itself.)
But the moon’s sun was a feeble flower, in Pereban’s opinion. As it went by the land, it would arrive beside the mountaintops and so above the city in their midst, and then they declared summer, the natives doffed all but one thick fur robe and some ten or so undergarments, and praised the benign warmth of the weather.
A year in Dooniveh endured for a month, and each had four seasons.
Summer lasted seven days, days at that without a night. It was preceded by a seven-day spring during which the sun approached over the ocean and drew inland, and was followed by a seven-day autumn, when the sun wandered off again, continuing overland and back out to sea. In winter, which was a period of a little more than seven days, the sun was at its most distant point from the land mass, taking its road over the waste of waters, discernible from shore as a flickering pinprick in darkness. For then there was only night and extreme cold.
It now occurred to Pereban that, although the scale of time was rather different, and the sighting of the effect not exactly similar, these internal passages of a sun accounted for the changing of the moon’s shape as regarded from the earth. Dooniveh’s summer was full moon, the lat
e days of spring and the early days of autumn—as the sun approached nearer and nearer or drew off farther and farther—must correspond to new, quarter, and half-moons. The earthly nights of no moon coincided with Dooniveh’s winter nadir; the moon-sun was at the far side of the sea, and so at the inner back of the lunar disc. (In other words, the moon was yet present in the earth’s heaven, but for all purposes lightless.)
Obviously the outer surface of the moon possessed some sorcerous quality, which directed the cool, frail inner light outward on the earth in a glow and heat—
If only the moonlanders had been more aware of their situation, what strange metaphysics and lunargraphics might they not have discussed with the visitor.
For example, a book of Pereban’s temple explained how, every worldly morning the moon sank into the ocean of chaos, and rose from it again every worldly night with vigor refreshed. Perhaps the chaos-bath was the very thing which so polished up the outside of the moon. But at the idea of the globe, in which he now was, gliding down the sky of earth, as it now must be, and plunging into the abysm, Pereban turned giddy. Allied to which the book had proposed that chaos was inimical to true matter—and so how was the plunge to be survived?
Just then, passing between two conical peaks, the procession emerged from the defile, and there below lay Dooniveh’s Shining City, under its sun, which fortunately distracted Pereban’s mind.
The city seemed made of ice, such as Pereban had sometimes beheld atop the parasol mountain of his birthplace. The smooth white terraces and towers were semitransparent, and pastel hints of color flushed them through. The sunlight caused the city to shine indeed, in a cold and slippery way. Pereban’s instinct divined at once that artistry might be found there, but that it would be hard ever to get warm.
Such is the reward of my hot and inartistic sin, thought he, with uneasy complacence.
A chill highway led to the city walls. Trumpeting and drumming, down it they went, casting a reflection as if in a frozen lake, and entered under a grand archway.
From icy balconies along the route, damsels with pale hair looked upon Pereban with opal eyes. They did not tempt him, though they were fair.
The streets of the city were broad, and often there ran by a canal of sluggish black water or white, with strange fish embedded in it, waiting for the fluid to unbind.
As for the buildings of the city, these seemed to be really all one building, cut up into stacks and slices by canals, streets and squares. At length the procession had wound itself into a huge court, where stood some trees like no tree Pereban had seen before, tall and thin and having no branches, yet out of the pole-like trunks stuck clusters of glimmering golden fruit. Beyond stood another slice of the city. Lord One, who all this time had talked on and on, enlarging each subject by philosophic digressions and aphorisms, indicated two blue doors. “The palace. We are arrived.”
How silent the city seemed in that moment when the drummers and trumpeters, the marching chariots and beasts—and the Lord One—all ceased making a noise together. Not a sound, but the mountain wind piping, and now and then an odd little plinck from the fruit on the trees.
Pereban’s sense of adventure, the taste of fear and wine, left him. Full of trepidation, he dismounted from the giant bear and was conducted into the palace.
• • •
They prepared for him a divan of bloodless silk, in a room like an ice cave, warmed by fires of ashen blue. The fashion was, in Dooniveh, to mimic the lush midsummer cold. Beyond the windows of thin silver, the frost-laden summer wind wailed and meowed like cats fighting.
Pallid, if charming, servitors brought Pereban, on trenchers of nearly invisible glass, watery moon foods, and in likewise cups, likewise moon wines. There was also set before him a dish of moon apricots from the pole-trees outside. The yellow fruit was apparently made of metal, and having attempted to penetrate or peel it, Pereban left it alone, only slipping one fruit into the sash of his robe against the chance there might be some utility in it.
Lords Three, Two, and One perched close by.
Pereban, his unsatisfying meal finished and his wine cup full, was brooding again on the proximity of chaos, when Lord One interrupted.
“Pray tell us something of your own country, which is our sun.”
Pereban replied: “Do you know nothing of that venue?”
“Nothing whatsoever.”
“Then we are united in that.”
“How can this be?”
“As I rushed downward,” said Pereban deliberately, “I lost all memory of my beginnings and now do not recall anything of my home.” (Here, Lords Two and Three glanced furtively at each other.)
Lord One opened his lips to commence another monologue.
But at this point furtive Lords Two and Three broke in with shrill cries.
Lord One held up his hand for quiet.
“They reprimand me,” said he, “that I have not yet explained the conditions of kingship. This I am loath to do, as it touches upon my personal honor. And would touch on theirs, too, if their desiccated state had not destroyed all feeling.”
At these high words, an altercation resulted. But a moment later the doors of the hall were opened, and seven attendants entered. They were white-clad in garments fringed by gold. The three lords fell instantly silent, and averted their faces.
“Sun Lord,” said the first attendant to Pereban, “you must come with us now.”
Pereban drained his cup and rose. Once again, old stories and myths were in his mind. For surely some ordeal would follow, whereby these people would determine his right to the rule of Dooniveh. He did not want it in any case, but having nowhere else to go, went forth consenting.
The latest route led down. The corridors turned to rock, lit by lamps like stabs of ice.
“What a splendid summer day,” said Pereban, gyrating with the cold. The attendants paid no heed to his pleasantry.
At length they came to a great door of iron, and here halted. The first attendant bowed, his hands before his face.
“Sun Lord, you must open this door and enter the place that lies behind it. There the queen of this city is sleeping, as she has slept some seven hundred years, guarded by a fearful beast. Overcome the beast, wake the lady, and she will be yours, and with her the Shining City of Dooniveh.”
“Just as I thought,” murmured Pereban. “And if I had a choice they might make a garland of their doors and beasts and sleeping queen-ladies. But as it is—” said Pereban, “I embrace my fate.”
The attendants bowed themselves away.
4. The Sleeping Heart
The door was some thirteen feet high and had about it neither a handle nor any visible lock or keyhole. Nevertheless, Pereban advanced, and pushed and heaved at it, and smote it some forceful blows, at which it resounded like a gong. When he had recovered from its booming, he tried to grip the heavy panels and elicit movement, but could get no purchase. After that he stood away, and summoning from his priestly training some esoteric passwords of opening, proclaimed them. The door did not even quiver. Then Pereban kicked it.
“This is a punishment,” he said at last. “I did not thrash myself enough with the thorns. I wished to escape the enclosure of the mountain temple, and here I am shut up in a moon.”
Then he threw off the fur robe and used the metal apricot, knotted in his sash, to beat himself.
Chastisement comforted him with its habitude. Although he knew the gods were indifferent, yet he had come to believe they still reckoned such practices correct among mortals. Besides, the exercise warmed him more than the robe had done. And, all the while, old teachings of the temple entered his mind. One phrase in particular recurred to him, which had been written in an elder book penned before the revelations of the Goddess. This went as follows:
“He that seeks a thing and does not truly desire it, finds it not, though it be put into
his hand. Yet he that seeks the most rare thing in the world, truly wanting it, shall discover it, though a hill has covered it over.”
(Well and good, said Pereban, and beat himself more vigorously.)
“And in this same way, coming to a door, how many shall find it closed. But he that truly would enter there need only knock thereon, and the door shall be opened.”
When these sayings had gone through his mind a sufficient number of times, and when he was in a sufficient glow, and his arm tiring, Pereban put on his robe again, tied the sash, stowed the apricot, and turned back to the door.
“And do I truly wish to enter?” inquired Pereban. “Punishment or destiny, I can only proceed. So much I accept.” And then he knocked mildly on the door and said, “Open, if you please.”
The door opened.
Another might have given a shout of laughter, or curses, but the young priest had by now composed himself. He passed through the portal of iron with a calm tread and looked about him.
The environment beyond was a long chamber tiled by crystal, in which flickered faint lamps. The illumination seemed unreal and phantasmal, as if the room were filled by water. Nevertheless, Pereban advanced, and soon he came to an avenue of white pillars. At the end of the row lay a basin of inky liquid. The other side of the basin was a couch draped in silver and hung with gold. Did something lie asleep there? Even as he strove to see it, the whole of the floor between the basin and the couch quaked up. And there was a fearful beast, as promised, a colossal white dog larger than a lion, with the horns of a bull, eyes like wheels of fire and teeth like those of a crocodile. And having noticed Pereban, and slavered and growled, it made toward him.
But Pereban, who had nothing with which to defend himself, frowned at the dog, and thought again of his dealings with the door.