by Tanith Lee
My love, my constant moon, within your light
I see that changeable other scale the height
Of sky, and know we shall be long-lost to her sight
In those far futures of the moonlit night.
And then the old woman murmured, “Beloved, that is not true of you. Do not forget, this is just a foolish form you took, to complement my own. It is not true of you.”
“Of all things, beloved. And maybe even of the moon. Passing over the mirror of some lake, she may one night look for her own self in vain.”
But after a few minutes, Atmeh said, so very low Flaxen scarcely made out the words, “It will be soon. Let us be going. I must not darken this kind house.”
Then Flaxen resolutely said, “Lady, if it is a fact your final hour is on you, do you think I would turn you out upon the hill to die?”
Through the rose and scarlet, the sapphire distances of those eyes were casting their last look on a mortal face.
“I know you would not. But one will come to meet me on the road. He must not enter here, believe me.”
And at these words, Flaxen felt coldness creep all over her. Without knowing why, she acquiesced.
The old man got to his feet. He leaned and lifted the old woman in his arms. You could not make out how he could do it, nor with such ease. But her little skull in its worn hood rested on his shoulder, her worn webby hair lay over his breast, and bending his head he kissed her. And then he looked back at Flaxen with a wicked fox’s grin.
“I sense a madness in you, Flax-Hair. A madness to see what is to be seen. Follow us, then. But for your own sanity’s sake—since the baskets overflow—do not come near.”
And in that way they went from her house, and along the silent village street. Not a single lamp shone there. Above, the herders’ fires were out, and overhead the stars and the moon masked themselves.
Flaxen Unluck stood hesitating in her door. But then even her compassion grew skittish, for this night was like no other. And keeping back as he had told her, still she followed the old man with the old woman in his arms.
• • •
After about a mile, the goat-track came on to the brow of a hill and up against a tree. Here a figure stepped from the night. He, too, was garbed like a beggar, in odd yellowish tatters apparent even in darkness. His head had been shaved and he leant on a rotting staff.
“Greeting, un-relative,” said he to the old man. “Is that my un-niece you bear? It is time then.”
“Be wary,” said the old man, “one patters behind me who has had such a life she will spit in your eye, should she fathom your name.”
“But you have been busy since at your games, you two. Come morning, I imagine she will praise me instead.”
And this bizarre exchange concluded, they went on together, and over the hill and down into a black hollow beneath. Here they stopped, and Flaxen, alert to old Oloru’s warning, lay along the rise to watch from afar.
Shortly her skin was clammy, she was agitated and became afraid, although she could discover no reason. Then, as if broken by an earthquake, the ground itself, there in the hollow, was flung open like a colossal door.
Out from the dark into the dark came a night-black man clad in a moon-white robe.
Flaxen hid her face in the turf. If she had supposed the gods ever listened, she would have prayed. For she knew exactly who stood now not seventy paces from her. It was King Death.
Nothing was to be heard, save for the wind which blew sometimes over the hill. The company in the hollow did not speak, or else some wall had come between their voices and her mind. Curiosity forced Flaxen to look again.
And, as she did so, the moon also uncovered her face to see.
It was Death who held her now, that frail stick of a mortal old woman. He held her, and she had put one arm about his neck, as if in love and certainly in utter trust. To her lips he held a cup. It was of bone. She drank from it.
Flaxen gazed. The strangest picture filled her brain, so vivid that for a moment it blotted out the uncanny tableau. She saw a young man lying on this same hillside. A lion had mauled him as he guarded the flocks. The villagers were calling for him over the slopes, but he, in his agony, did not hear. Then there leaned above him a man, a man who was Death, and the husband of Flaxen caught at Death’s mantle. Death said, “It is sure, you cannot live long enough to see her again.” And then he lifted the dying man and gave him a sip from a cup of bone, and the agony left her husband’s face. He said, wistfully, “Why, you have given me a drink of the beer she brews. How can this—?” But then he sank back as if he slept. And so the villagers found him, sleeping in death, alone on the hill.
“Death the comforter,” said Flaxen.
“And unkind Fate,” said the shaven beggar in yellow who had come up on her and now stood at her side.
Flaxen glanced at him, then back into the hollow. The moonlight once more was fading. There was a glimpse of a sleeping girl couched on a veil of midnight hair. A young man, all gold in the silver light, sat by her in silence. Death was gone. The earth was shut. And then the moon closed itself again away.
“I will see you to your door,” said the beggar in yellow. “You know you know me, though we have never met. But do not spit on me. Tomorrow you will become my most fervent disciple.”
Thus they walked back together to the village, the beggar-king, Fate, and Flaxen. She barely noted him. She felt all empty, not as if she had been robbed of anything, but rather as if she had been rinsed clean. If you had asked her who she was, she would have been hard put to it to say. And reaching her house, she only knew it because a nightingale was sleeping on the chair and a lotus grew in the hearth.
Fate, having seen her in, sauntered off up the street. Reaching the cinnamon tree, he dissolved, and was gone.
Flaxen lay down on her bed. She dreamed of an old woman who died and became young. Perhaps an hour before sunrise, she also dreamed that a chariot thundered over the sky above her roof. A man clad all in black and black-eyed as the dark, cracked a diamond whip above blue dragons. Something told her, even in her dream, it was not sensible to stare at him, and so she turned her face into her pillow. For all that, she heard the daggers on the chariot-wheels mincing the air to bits.
• • •
The dawn promised fine, and Flaxen opened first her window to emit the visiting nightingale, and next her door to see how the world went.
Then she sat in her doorway to comb her jasmine-pale tresses. Only fifteen years of age, and having property—the well-appointed house of a deceased aunt—and being besides a virgin and something of a beauty, Flaxen did not object to the admiring eyes and polite words of the young men wending up to the pasture, or coming down in turn from the hills.
She was popular and thought lucky, was Flaxen. Nothing she did ever went awry. Her cows were proud and full of cream, her herb garden put the rest to shame.
Basking there in the sunshine, not a member of that village knew that every memory had been changed in the night, or that Flaxen had herself been changed entirely. Yesterday was only yesterday, and last night nothing much had happened.
This morning, though, there was to be an event. Up the village street bounced a huge, fat frog.
“Fate defend me,” cried Flaxen, giggling, for she knew Fate would.
But nevertheless the coppery frog bounced right on and past her and plumped itself splat on her hearthstone. Where, in the blink of an eye, it altered to a round copper pot.
Flaxen clapped her hands with pleasure. But not surprise. Life had been so good to her that a domestic miracle of this nature was only to be expected.
But the mortal soul of Atmeh was deathless; nor was it done with earthly life.
The Daughter of the Magician
1. The Butterfly Trap
LORD RATHAK’S new bride wore satin and sorrow. The young g
irl had been vowed to a temple, which prospect she infinitely preferred to the demands of matrimony. But her father had then thrown a banquet and it chanced he had, at the peak of the drinking, allowed two or three choice guests to peek through the screens into the women’s court. And one of these chosen, the magician Rathak, had espied there herself. “Who is that one?” said he. “She is easily the fairest.”
“That is my youngest daughter, Shemsin. A dreamy girl. I am persuaded to give her to the Temple of the Three Goddesses. It is no daft thing to keep the priesthood sweet.”
At this, Rathak had remarked, “By all means cut your blossom, but do not then cast it into a pit. Give the Goddesses some other. I will have that one.”
Such was the power and influence of the magician, far greater than anything the temple could muster, that Shemsin’s father quickly agreed. Thereafter, all former plans were thrown to the winds. A fortune was lavished on the betrothed maiden. She, having learnt early the futility of protest, resigned herself to wretchedness for, though murmurs of men entered the court of the woman, only the worst things were said of Rathak, from whose dark brain black deeds took their being. He was the familiar of fiends and had trafficked even with demons. His temporal sway sprang from the fear the king of the city had for him. Those who were his friends, and obedient, prospered. But whole graveyards had been stocked with his enemies. It is my own grave I go to, thought Shemsin. They dressed her and crowned her with jewels, and the bridal procession bore her away to the house of the groom.
It stood on a rocky promontory some miles outside the city walls. Though the surrounding lands were lush, this area inclined to barren stones. Below the promontory, however, on three sides, there lay an uncharted swamp, perpetually smoldering with vapors like some great cauldron. So enringed by quag and rocks, the magician’s mansion was not easy to come at, though it might be seen far off from all directions. An imposing home it was, with domes of red bronze and black-green enamel, having to the north side a looming, bulging tower of brass.
The procession arrived and wound its way up a rocky road to the brazen doors. These flew open by magic.
Within there yawned a courtyard of black marble with a window-roof of blood and emerald.
Here Shemsin was wedded, with all legal forms, to Rathak Black-Wits, and glancing in stupefaction and awe into his face, Shemsin’s bones turned to water. For no one had warned her that, as well as being a bad man he was also a handsome one, with hair as red as the roof glass and eyes as dark as the marble.
• • •
When dusk bloomed over the mansion’s heights, uncanny spangles began to flirt over the swamp. Shemsin, led to a chamber in the brass tower, saw across the parapets the stony descent into the night and the ghostly luminants at their dancing. She no longer knew what she felt. She had begun to make allowance for the appurtenances of the house, since they were his . . . the curious screeching of unknown things in the mansion vaults, the line of horned skulls along a battlement. . . . He was her husband. She must not prejudge.
In a seven-sided chamber of spicery and musics, Rathak received her.
He kissed her mouth. “Dear wife,” said he, “you must know I loved you at sight.”
He gave her a green floweret to smell; its scent intoxicated her. He gave her black wine to drink, she sank against him.
“I have hoped, but not believed that one such as you existed, my Shemsin. You see, dearest girl, there is an ambition I have. And you shall help me to it.”
He carried her to a bed red as poppies, rubies, fires. It stood within an unfinished circle marked with powders and strange gems, which, now within, he closed by the exhalation of a vial that steamed and flamed.
Shemsin lay naked on the bed, burning white into its redness, for her hair was very pale, her skin like snow.
Rathak caressed her, with his hands and lips, but firstly with a wand of basalt.
Acres below, the monsters howled in his cellars; spans away the phosphorus pranced in the swamp. Shemsin was lost. She raised her arms to implore him.
“Wait, my swan. Soon I shall be with you.”
Then she beheld, drifting in the air, a glassy bubble. She did not know what it was, or care what it was. She cared only that he should embrace her. She cared only that he should invade her, deliver her—
“Presently, my swan, my moon-girl.”
And then she saw the air was full of butterflies. They flew here and there, everywhere. They were transparent as silk against a lamp.
Rathak spoke the words of a spell. He drew himself upon her. He moved upon her like the sea upon a shore. She was the beach and he the ocean. She was crushed, she was torn. The waves ran through her. She leapt and cried to touch the sky and touched the sky and fell back, dead.
“No, Shemsin. You are not dead. You are alive. You are doubly alive.”
“Do not send me away,” she moaned. But it seemed to her the bed went drifting down. It came to rest far under the ground. She heard the monsters scream and turned upon her face and slept.
Sleeping, she saw inside herself a bubble of glass that now held captive a butterfly. The wings flicker-tapped on the glass until they grew weary. A chrysalis formed about the butterfly, confining it, so the wings could not move.
“Forgive me,” whispered Shemsin to the butterfly trapped in the glass.
But in the tower of brass, Rathak Dark-Brain was planted now on a great plate of gold inside many new circles of symbols, powders and talismans. He was not quite as Shemsin had seen him, but for all that he intoned the words of an invocation and smote about with wands.
Beyond the protective circle and the golden plate, the floor cracked. Up heaved a hideous dwarf with a head of black hair for which many a woman (or a man for the matter of that) would have done murder. He was clothed solely in a metal kilt of exquisite smithwork, from which arose three enormous phalluses of silver, sprouting jade leaves and coiled by zircons. A Drin.
“Master,” said the Drin, with a smirk that told you the title was not wholly sincere.
“Loutish little one,” replied Rathak with adequate disdain. “I may say, it is accomplished.”
“Is it?” asked the Drin. He jigged from foot to foot, then raised the left of these to nibble a toenail. He peered at Rathak. “Then you are on your path. Where is my share of your happiness?”
“A moment. I have employed your advice. But you were to have performed your own part, and are due to prove its value. That first.”
The Drin pouted, lowered his foot.
“Master, you are ever cautious and erudite. Let me remind you that my caste has no truck with such matters. Therefore I must apply to others of demonkind, bribing them with bewitching presents from my own forge. (For that you are in debt to me.) It then chanced a mighty prince I serve heard of your needs. He took it on himself, much to my astoundment, to make sure your way. It is no trouble to the Vazdru to enter that place. And now,” added the Drin, squirming with vainglory at the quality of his demonic associate, “this mighty lord stands in the psychic anteroom. He will, if you have sufficient courage, enter here and confirm your success.”
Rathak might well have trembled, but he controlled and concealed his nervousness if so. “Does such a lord,” said he, “require my invitation?”
At this, the air folded aside like a curtain. Into the chamber there stepped a dark, tall and slender man of such impossible handsomeness the false beauty which Rathak had donned for his wedding, was made, beside it, a figure of fun.
“Azhrarn?” murmured Rathak, dropping to his knees (with a swift glance as he did so to verify the circle was intact).
“His shadow,” answered the Prince Hazrond. “I am sometimes taken for him, though never by those who have seen his manifestation for themselves.”
“Excellent prince,” said Rathak. He paused obsequiously. He continued: “Am I to believe that one, there, when he te
lls me you have concerned yourself in my business?”
“Believe it.”
“Then—it is as good as done.”
“Not quite, magician. You share in a common human mistake. The soul does not enter a woman’s womb at its quickening. It comes later, when the child is grown, to fill and wake it and so send it forth.”
“Then—?”
“In the foggy mire beyond the earth, I met your quarry. Being ready to return it was a simple affair to stay it in its incorporeal thickets, this butterfly.”
“And it is she?”
“Neither he nor she, nor anything at present. But it was hers. It has all the proper marks. The soul that once inhabited the form of ebony, milk-crystal and sapphire that was Azhriaz, Night’s Daughter.”
Rathak shut his eyes. He was, as he knelt there, a monument to avarice. Then, he said, “But—I do not anger—him?”
Hazrond, smiling like the dawn of dark: “No. What does he care? He made the flesh she was. The spirit she made herself. It is only a soul, one of billions, of which, mage, even you possess an example, if somewhat soiled and uncombed.”
Rathak’s mouth twisted. He said hastily, “I am glad my small wickedness pleases you, lord. But tell me, if you graciously will, if the magic I performed did as it was supposed to.”
“Your swan-white wife is with child. The seed within her, at your magic and connivance, has sent out a thread of inexplicable substance and unapparent light. This, at its farther end, enters the place beyond the world, the thickets of that border country, and has netted there your butterfly. At the elected time that one soul must come to the body of the infant you have created.”
At these words, Rathak lost some of his control. He let loose a bestial cry.
Hazrond turned his head and spat. The spit burned with a marvelous violet flame. The Drin darted forward and vented some spell upon it, trying to keep the essence intact, in order to make a jewel of it, no doubt—but the incendiary saliva of the Vazdru vanished. The Drin stamped his foot and glared upon Rathak. Of Hazrond, also, no trace remained.