by Tanith Lee
“Where?” he said, and smiled a little on the youngest who had mentioned boasting, so the boy himself grew moon-color. “Why, under your feet.”
Then he passed by and sat down among them, across the fire from Zhoreb. And Zhoreb sat in some haste. And after this, for an interval, it was so noiseless there the flames had a sound of breaking bones.
But the stranger, having turned his rings—and magnificent rings they were—upon his lordly hands, the nails of which were very long, squared, and enameled silver, glanced toward the desert and said, coaxingly, “Go on with your music, my children.”
And at that such a tempest of nocturnal howls and screechings and whistlings and chirrups burst from the sands, for some thirty or sixty miles in all directions, that every one of the priestly band of Zhoreb jumped in his skin, and almost out of it indeed.
“And now,” said the stranger, returning his regard to Zhoreb, “let me delight in your philosophical debate.”
“My lord,” said Zhoreb, who did not know fear or evil, yet fancied he espied them, “you are, by your appearance and your state, surely the superior in knowledge. How shall we presume? Let us rather, my lord, attend to you. Or keep dumb.”
Then the man laughed. (A rill of velvet able to slice steel.)
“You are of the wise, Zhoreb. Is that then through the teaching of your mentor?”
“The teachings of Dathanja are imperfectly known to us. Yet we value his example.”
“Do you so? Yet, at his inception, he was a simpleton, and a perpetrator of enormous wrongs. This you will also know, doubtless.”
“It combines with the sum of his message.”
“Which is?”
“My lord,” said Zhoreb, lowering his riverine eyes from the eyes of the stranger, which were not like eyes at all, but like the sky or some space beyond the sky, blacker and more bright. “My lord, I beg to be excused from delivering to you my faulty rendition of the whole and remedial testimony of that man.”
“But you have expounded it to others.”
Then Zhoreb, caught between his faith and his astuteness, fell. He chose faith. He said, “The basis of the doctrine is purely this: We enchain ourselves. Even in fetters of iron we might be free, but in gossamers, more often than not, we load ourselves, put out our own eyes and break our own backs. For, though he had performed wickedness, Dathanja was able to cast out his own sins, to be free of them, and so to sin no more, being free to do good. And there is none that may not change himself, whatever he has done, or become, or is.”
“Thus?” said the stranger. “How you do astonish me.”
And again a silence—the length and breadth of the desert as it seemed, as if every creature and every grain of sand had gone to granite.
Then Azhrarn (and not one of them by now, being educated, did not realize but that Azhrarn it was) made a mild gesture to the fire which altered to the starkest white, as if ice leapt and burned there.
Pretending not to heed it, even while the young men drew away, Azhrarn said, “In gratitude for your frank admission of faith, the reckless bravery of which act is to your credit, I will myself offer you a parable.
“Supposing,” continued Azhrarn, “a man comes upon a ship in the midst of the desert. Probably he will immediately think to himself, ‘Behold, once there was an ocean upon this land which the Sea People, who are sorcerers, dispelled for some mischief. All was destroyed save this one vessel. Stranded here, it has fossilized and remains an object of wonder, a visual tract upon the impermanence of things.’
“But suppose again,” murmured Azhrarn, “that in truth the ship had been set in the desert at the notion of some magus, who preserved it there against the sand and the wind, and gave it also the semblance of antiquity. And he did this for no reason of any consequence, except maybe to cause a man, observing his work, to review the evidence and draw a false conclusion.”
The fire fluttered, blushed, resumed its proper hue. Across the acres of the dunes, a hawking owl mewed at the moon.
None dared speak after Azhrarn had spoken, but for Zhoreb, though some minutes he did not. Then, sensing the Demon’s eyes on him, Zhoreb said this: “Your instruction, my lord, shall be much valued. All the more so since it is yourself who give it.”
“And what is your comment upon my instruction, O student of Dathanja the Priest?”
Zhoreb considered. Then he answered, “In the land of my childhood there was a saying, as follows: ‘The black rose does not anywhere grow. Therefore let us fondly believe in the blooming of the black rose.’”
Azhrarn was standing some way off. The wings of his cloak beat slowly, and the stars hung in its threads or feathers.
“Where I shall feast presently,” said Azhrarn, “black roses are woven in the garlands. Enlighten them therefore in your childhood’s land: The black rose blooms. No longer believe in the black rose.”
And having told him that, Azhrarn vanished and only a dark and flaming cloud was there, which sank at once into the earth.
Now, at long last, Zhoreb’s band started up and ran about in dismay. But Zhoreb sat where he was and fed three twigs into the fire.
“Zhoreb—what shall we do?”
“There is nothing to be done. Demons exist.” And then Zhoreb smiled and added under his breath, “Therefore we need not believe in them.”
• • •
Jalasil, having gazed long through moonlit tourmaline, lay sleeping in the burning morning.
The elderly woman who was now her body-servant, entered and, beginning to arrange her mistress’s toilette, announced, “My little sister, going to get water at the fountain, found a company of young apostles in the oasis.”
“They are welcome,” said Jalasil, listlessly, for she had experienced strange dreams at sunrise.
“My little sister says they are a fine bevy of young men. They were marveling at the ship of salt and had not even seen this house behind the locust trees.”
Jalasil’s body-servant was a lady some eighty years of age, and her little sister was just seventy-three.
“Madam,” added the elder sister, “may it please you to send food to these worthy lads, or better yet, to permit us to serve a meal for them in the kitchen. They are holy men, and it is a great time since preachers and storytellers visited the place.”
“Yes,” said Jalasil, under the web of her light hair, fine as frayed silk, which the woman combed with sandalwood, and still under the heavy weight of dreams. “It is three years since any passed this way. And who they were, I forget.”
“Only some meager merchant and his poor slaves. And before that, two pot menders who had words with the boy.” (The boy was the porter, an adolescent of sixty-nine summers.)
Soon it was arranged over a tray of ornaments—all of which Jalasil declined—that the elder and little sisters, and the boy if so disposed, should invite the travelers to a supper.
Later, Jalasil learned that the social event would go on in the open air, for though they did not spurn the comforts of four walls, the priestly travelers, wherever possible, did without them.
Accordingly, at sunset, down the path to the pool went the two old women, veiled, as was thought proper either in those parts or in their youth, and the boy leaning on his stick.
Jalasil, who had given slight heed to any of the matter, was glad enough they should have what novelty was available.
But, as the evening advanced, the stars broke out of their prisons. Lamplight and fireflies gleamed in the weft of the thickets. She grew restless. At length, donning a veil herself, Jalasil also descended from her house.
The air was still and tinctured with the spices of the desert, and the salad freshness of the oasis and its water. The fireflies flickered in golden strands, just as sometimes they strung themselves among the flowers of Jalasil’s garden, inducing in her nostalgias for which she had no name. In the
pool, which now came visible between the fig trees, lights of four or five lamps extended.
But under his shrine, amid the crickets’ strumming, the faceless stone god was blank, offered no counsel, and the young woman in kind paid no attention to him.
She stole to the darkest edge of the water. She was by nature retiring, and it did not occur to her to flounce among them as the owner of the spot. Instead, where the lilacs grew and a fountain sprang from a rock, composing herself, Jalasil looked on.
The priestly nomads sat with the old people of the house, eating and drinking and exchanging pleasantries, as if they were all of one family. (Which the nomads’ teaching would in any event perhaps have said they were.) Now and again one of the young men would tell a story or anecdote, in meaning religious, or not. But as Jalasil stood herself by the fountain, it fell Zhoreb’s turn.
Now when he began to speak, Jalasil looked at him with keen attention. The lamplight made him out to be of gold, and the shadows addressed themselves to his hair and eyes and clothing in order that the gold might show to more advantage. It seemed to Jalasil that she had seen Zhoreb on many previous occasions. This unnerved her, for she had not often seen any save her household. And of those strangers who infrequently passed through the oasis, none she had looked on had ever struck her as memorable. So then she could not think how she had ever seen him or heard his voice, which told the story of Dathanja as he himself had been told it as a child. And eventually it came to her that perhaps she had seen him when she slept, that she had chanced on him in her dreams.
Just then, Zhoreb concluded the unusual history of Dathanja, and, glancing about at his hearers, added, “And in the manner of this ideal we strive, though even that not too onerously. For piety itself may be used to make a chain about the soul.”
“And does this then indicate that you are free also to enjoy yourself with women or men, as your appetite prompts?” inquired the little sister of seventy-three, who was inclined to be saucy.
But Zhoreb laughed. “Lady,” said he, “there is no ban on love.”
And when he replied in this way, and looked smiling round, Jalasil’s heart seemed to cry out within her—Ah! I could tell you—
“For love,” said Zhoreb, “is the clue to all life, of the body and the spirit both.”
As he said this, his eyes seemed to fathom the lilacs. They seemed to meet the eyes of Jalasil and to fire up, so she saw their color, which was of green like her own, and of a river’s brown and silver, too, the colors of that which, brimming, would slake and make flower a desert.
Jalasil was filled by fear. Her heart beat and her limbs were leaden. But quieter than a ghost she went at once away.
• • •
Early the next day, at dawn, Jalasil—not having rested a moment of the night—summoned her body-servant.
“Well, and did the traveling men enthrall you?”
“Madam, it was a treat to be sure.” And the servant spent some minutes in describing the interest she and her sister and the boy had had, and how it had benefitted them.
“I am rejoiced for you, and only sorry your entertainment lasted but one evening.”
“No, madam, there you would be wrong. For these good men have agreed to linger by the pool another day and night, being parched of the sands.”
“Then they are not gone,” said Jalasil.
Shortly after noon, when three quarters of her household snored, Jalasil began to pace about the chambers. And she said to herself, I have never seen that man before, he is nothing to me. Let me steal down now, for they will be slumbering under the trees. Probably I shall not be able to tell one young man from another.
And she felt great uneasiness as she considered this, and was loath to go, so her limbs felt heavier than lead and iron together. Yet she went for all that. Down the path from the house, swathed in her veil, Jalasil crept like a thief.
Most of the nomad fellowship reclined in the shade under the locust trees, but three of their number, of whom Zhoreb was one, had elected to bathe and swim at the pool’s lower end. It was a private spot in the normal way, screened round by the trees and bull rushes. Jalasil stole upon it like a lioness. And before she knew what she did, she stared through the screen.
So she saw Zhoreb, to his thighs in the shallows, and naked.
His hair was wet and fell about his face and neck in blackest coils. The drops of the water starred his tawny body like pearls across dark ivory. The gems of his breast were like cinnabar. From his shoulders to his waist he seemed carven, so flawless was the proportion. At his hips he was straight as flesh ruled between two lines, and sheathed in the black hair of his loins the serpent of his manhood lay, blind, innocent, and sleeping. Just then he turned, unaware of any scrutiny, to pluck a pod from a branch above. In his back, the spine and ribs flowed under the skin, like a river under ivory.
Jalasil fled.
• • •
“What you have told me concerning these holy men has impressed itself upon me,” said Jalasil to the elder servant woman. “He that you say recounted the life of their teacher—send for your sister to fetch him to me here at sundown. I would hear the story, too.”
“Why, as you wish, madam,” said the woman, puffed to find her praise so influential.
But then her mistress seemed to grow instantly sick. She was pale and trembled. Nevertheless, she bathed and had her hair combed afresh with sandalwood. She put malachite on her eyelids and dipped her nails into rosy lacquer, and, having seen a man in his nakedness, dressed for him in a gown like a butterfly’s wing.
• • •
Zhoreb entered a chamber of the green-eyed house. It looked on a garden, where vines and roses grew, and the lilacs of the oasis in more constricted forms. The air was sweet with the flowers, and from other aromatics.
On a couch sat the household’s mistress, turned a little from him, seeming to read a book with covers of thin jade.
“Lady,” said Zhoreb, “I and my companions thank you for your bounty, the dinners of your kitchens and the freedom of the water. What may I do in return?”
Jalasil set by her book, as if reluctantly—for she kept her eyes only on it. “I would hear something of your philosophy.”
So then Zhoreb, seating himself at her invitation on the couch which faced her own, began to speak of all those things his faith entailed. He was most eloquent and besides, in dealing with a woman both arrogant and shy, he exercised tact and mildness. But he wooed her with his words also; he strove to penetrate her heart with the light of the teaching. For, like many who think they have found the one true key to life, he wished it given to all the world.
And as he spoke, he was gladdened to see that Jalasil became responsive. She commenced to look at him, at first doubtfully, and then searchingly, and soon with some intensity. And when he made humorous allusions, she laughed delightedly as a child. And when he discoursed upon the darker aspects, she was anxious. Two or three times her eyes filled with tears. Zhoreb believed he had moved her, which he had, and so helped her—which he had not. Unfortunately, as he urged her so winningly, supposing he led her to consciousness, it seemed to her he exerted himself to such heights because he had discovered something in her which had charmed him. And his clearness and brilliance appeared to sparkle up from the same wild fount by which she was brightened. An interplay of energies wove between them like a fiery net. Then Jalasil was able to meet his eyes, to mingle her eyes with his without fear but with a terrible excitement. And meanwhile, struck by the virtues of his mind and spirit, she saw him to be not merely handsome of person, an object of desire, but admirable, a tutor for her ignorance. In short, she fell deeply in love with him. But as she did so, the morning waned, noon passed overhead, afternoon settled, and Zhoreb, despite a plying with fruit, confections and wine, started to feel rather tired under this relentlessly seeking gaze.
“Well, madam,”
he said, “I must leave you now. The day is drawing on.”
At once Jalasil was flung from her pinnacle to a freezing depth.
“Pray remain and dine with me. I must give adequate return for your kindness and your lessons. For I shall treasure them.”
At that Zhoreb, who, it must be remarked, had been flattered by her attention, his success, seemed to hesitate. As if, in the tiled floor, he suddenly beheld a pit concealed under a shawl.
“Alas, madam,” said Zhoreb, “it is the custom of my fellowship to take our evening meal always together.” This was a lie. He did not like to tell it, and blamed her at once for forcing him to do so.
Jalasil, unaware of her crime but sensing his coolness, averted her eyes again and said, “Perhaps then you would return to the house later in the evening, at an hour which is convenient to you. You will pardon my request, I know. You have divined we are starved here of informed conversation.”
Then Zhoreb did see the trap and checked at it. He felt a dim anger, for it seemed he had been sported with, made a gull. It was not life’s truth this idle silly woman wanted.
“I will return if you wish,” he said very coldly. “But may not then linger. At dawn tomorrow we must be on our road, my brothers and I.”
Jalasil’s heart started up and fell down. At the same moment she felt the sting of his look she could no longer meet. Her cheeks burned. She thought, He judges I have propositioned him. So then she entirely averted her face and said haughtily, “By all means. Do not trouble then. Go as and when you please. Shall I send you money by the servant?”
“We take no money,” said Zhoreb in a voice of whips.
“Oh, then it must be given you in kind?” asked Jalasil. “Like the dinners.” For now she was hurt enough she must strike back.
But “Madam,” said Zhoreb, in a voice of scorpions, “I beg you, have them serve us no food or drink tonight. We have indulged too freely in the shackling greeds of the body. The figs of the trees and the water of the pool will suffice, and they will cost you nothing.”
And on such a parting, he left her.