by Tanith Lee
• • •
The gate beasts sang for the last hour of the day, the sun declined, the sunset birds fled over the sky. In the golden chalice of the afterglow, before the gates should close, one more traveler entered Jhardamorjh. It was a handsome man in the splendor of his youth, his hair a black mane couthly combed to silk. To come on him from any side was to be struck by his looks. On his tall and slender body was belted a robe of rich magenta, on his feet were blanched leather shoes. But no sword was at his hip, and though his blue eyes sometimes blazed like the edges of knives, they could also turn smoky, dulcet.
Out of the dusk the women of the city swam to him on tides of perfume, veils and voices. He put them away with a gentle hand like a whiplash.
He was offered wine. He poured it on the paved streets.
“A libation to your gods. Who are they, here?”
The women smiled secretively, some glanced toward a high hill of terraces, woods, columns, on the west of which an ebbing flicker of the sun yet played, like one golden star.
When hungry, he took fruit from the trees of the parks. The gardeners, who also watched there by night, remonstrated. It did not charm them to find a beautiful young man lying in the carefully tended boughs absorbing their decorations. But the foreigner vanished like a snake through the branches.
In Jhardamorjh, every seven years, there was elected a new council to judge the Exaltation. Word came to these fellows. On the very eve of the choosing, a stranger was within the walls who did not go on as the stranger should. Soldiers of the city went with torches to seek him. The tramp of their feet was harsh on the avenues, for no one was abroad that night. Even the visitors, drugged by attentions, slept in the depths of gardens. The wild dancers, the girls between fifteen and twenty-three years, lay upon their backs, sleepless, conning the future.
The soldiers found Chavir seated on the steps of a fountain. This was at the center of the city, up against the mysterious hill. Coming to the hill’s base, Chavir had seen it, too, was ringed by a great wall, more than seventy feet high. In this, though he had prowled about it, no gate was visible. There was no sound in that spot save for the evening breeze upon the trees of the height, the whisper of its waters, and the louder plashing of the fountain on the ground nearby.
Then presently came the soldiers’ clank and the sputter of torch grease, and the question:
“What, O youth, is your errand in this city?”
Chavir lowered his eyes, his look was clandestine.
“To rest from my adventures.”
“You vaunt yourself. What adventures were these? We hear you will not even show courtesy to parched ladies. You do not carry the steel or iron of a warrior.”
“I have never,” said Chavir, raising eyes of smoke, “lain with a woman, nor fought with a man.” He smiled. “Nor, for that matter, fought a woman, or lain with a man. There are other deeds. I fled the wrath of a king to whom I would not bow, and ever since, for a year or so, have gone through many lands as nimbly as daylight. But here and there some loved me or took against me, or a lord’s dogs followed me from fascination, or a cutthroat attempted my life and something in my manner caused him to rush, screaming, away. Or I have tamed panthers, or answered riddles through which other men, not answering, were put to death. And I have found an odd knack for this thing, or that. I have seen temples built or towns burning, or mountains that roar or seas that change in the cold to glass. None of these things can compare, however, with the curious dreams that come when I sleep. I shall not recount them to you. Suffice it to say, in some form I do not comprehend—nor am I disturbed that I do not—my dreams have brought me to your city.”
The soldiers stood and stared.
Their captain said, “Tomorrow is a sacred day. You must not take it hard, but I think it best you should have your ease in jail, until tomorrow’s sun has set.”
“As you please,” said Chavir. “Do you desire to bind me? I warn you, there is sorcery I have acquired, or have always owned, by which I am inclined to undo bindings.”
The soldiers scoffed and made a din in the street. Three strode upon Chavir, took him between them and put on his wrists fetters of steel. Chavir lifted his arms and the fetters uncoiled and plopped to the paving with a clatter.
“It seems I am a breaker of chains,” said he. “But nevertheless I will go with you to prison, and remain there until tomorrow’s sunset.”
The soldiers had fallen back in outrage and dismay. The captain stood alone and faced Chavir.
“It is a madness to trust you, yet there is no choice. We march now to the jail. Follow us if you will.”
Then they turned about and marched, and Chavir followed them on his blanched leather soles, looking with eyes of harmless knives.
• • •
Before the dawn, in an hour of amethyst, the girl who had danced with a tabor left her bed and put on her dress of gold. How it shone, and how its scented fringes rippled. They were themselves magical. This maiden’s doting aunt, journeying to Jhardamorjh for the Exaltation, had bought them from a sharp female among the caravans. “Made from the hair of angels!” declared the female and consequently the aunt. “Long ago,” the aunt alone had added, “I missed my chance at the choosing. For, as you know, niece, I was born half the world away, and we were ignorant there. But who knows, your beauty may win you the ecstasy and the honor, and your kin the glory.”
All across the city, the maiden knew, other maidens rose and bathed and were anointed and clad themselves like queens. The golden girl flung open her casement. “Let it be me,” said she to the city and the sky. But all over Jhardamorjh a thousand windows, balconies, featured maidens who said just the same.
Then the sun flung open his window, and from a thousand doors and tent flaps, and other exits, issued a thousand varieties of human flower, each attended by her servants and her family, each grasping firm one part of a broken clay tablet.
There was a spacious square among the towers of basalt; here the choosing was to be. A fountain plashed close by under the flank of a mighty wall, seventy feet or more in height, that encircled a wooded hill. (On the steps of the fountain lay two broken fetters and the pit of a damson, but no one noticed these.)
The crowd in the square was packed close, while elsewhere men and women filled the upper stories and the rooftops. And from the press, as if from fields of grass, the tall slender flowers were raising heads of gilt and honey and auburn and henna and chrysanthemum. . . .
The council of judges mounted a platform at the middle of the square. Then a long tub of bronze was lugged up there. It was closed by a plate of lead, with several iron locks and some twenty or thirty seals of wax, which must all be undone—and they could have employed for that, to save them time, a handsome young man reposing that morning in the prison, with all its locks off the doors and lying on the flagstones. But they had no recourse to Chavir. They opened the seals and locks laboriously and elaborately in the sight of the crowd. Total silence prevailed throughout.
The plate when off revealed heaps of clay half-tablets. They were daintily stirred by blindfolded slaves.
Then a man came through the crowd leading a black stallion yearling, and a second man with a wicker cage in which there stared and stamped a tabby eaglet.
The first judge of the council addressed animal and bird in this manner:
“Say—how many tablets shall be drawn?”
Then the yearling tossed its head three times, and the eaglet flared its stubby wings once, twice.
“The number is, for every man, five.”
Then each of the council rolled up his priceless sleeves and, a hood having been cast on his head and over his eyes, every man was led to the tub, thrust in his arms like a washerwoman, up to the elbows, and clawed and scrabbled, till he had pulled out, every one, five broken tablets.
And since the number of the council itse
lf that year amounted to ten persons, at length fifty of these tablets lay out on the platform.
Horns and drums sounded. Then the names of the chosen fifty were exclaimed.
At every name shrieks arose and bodies fell down fainting. Then immediately there was a swirl and eddy through the crowd. The maiden came forth alone. She came forth as if dazed and dazzled, and drifted like a sleepwalker to the platform, and mounted it.
When all fifty maidens had been named and their tablet portions verified, a noise of misery swelled over the square from the throats of those who were missed. The youngest, who knew that in seven more years another chance would be offered them, did not take it quite so ill. But those late in the seventeenth year or more were beside themselves. Some tore their garments and hair. Some forced their way from the crowd and threw themselves out before the judges, exhibiting their claims to beauty without any particular restraint.
But it was a fact, the fifty already selected were in themselves such matchless articles, they could not it seemed be transcended.
Eventually outcry subsided. Heavy lacquer screens were erected on the platform. Noble women came and examined, behind these screens, the chosen maidens.
The sun meanwhile, perhaps himself desirous to pry, lifted above the screens and dropped his inflammatory light down on the examining couches. It was noon.
The screens were removed. Every maiden had been certified as flawless.
There they waited then, fifty young jewels of the earth, each clamoring in her thundering heart to desert that earth and to go instead—to what?
Here is the truth. Not one of them could have said. The stepped hill which was always there, the rites which were always behind or before them, the sacred ambience which was ceaselessly referred to, mooted, and murmured of, none was ever explained, not by any, for no one knew. None inquired after it, either, save for strangers, who were fobbed off. It was a Wonder. It was a Holiness. It was eternally present in the life of Jhardamorjh. But it was unknown. And in this way, many had come to believe, in inner chambers of the brain, that they had been granted knowledge. That it was this thing or that thing. And now and then a secret cult had sprung up in the city, implying access to the answer. But such were quickly suppressed as heresy. To the maidens of the city it came to represent what might be expected, given the era, their youth, female station and female tuition.
The maiden in the fringed dress of gold, therefore, she stood upon the platform among the chosen fifty, secure in the certainty that the witchcraft on her own tablet had ensured its picking up, spinning every second fresh witchery on her own self, like a spider in a web: Now choose me again.
For it seemed to her she did know what lay under the rite. Exaltation was a marriage to a god. The god of the city, who dwelled upon the hill. The hill passed through, by some fabulous means, into an otherworld, a kingdom of heaven. And there he was, the divine husband. The quality of their union and its condition were supreme enough that only seven years of human life could endure the onslaught. But what did that matter? In seven years her gloss would have faded in the world, she would be a hag of twenty-three, and past the chance of choice. Besides, if he loved her, would not the god give her immortality in the upper lands? She would become a goddess after her mortal death, forever young, forever fair—and, if he had truly loved her, forever his.
Now choose me again. From so many dreaming spirits and shouting minds.
The three mystics of the council, who had fasted, spent the night in deep thought, inhaled incense for breakfast, now approached and went wobbling up and down the line of maidens. Sometimes the hands of these men twitched, or their brows. Sometimes they might halt and gaze upon one girl with dilated pupils, and she would turn paler than pale and clench her fists.
The third mystic came to the girl in gold, the girl who had danced, and who had marigold fringes on her dress. He came to her and having done so, did not move away. He stood before her like a swain smitten with love. And the golden girl met his gaze. Her eyes branded choose me into his skull.
At last, he left her, he went to his chair on the platform and leaned on the arm of another man for support, but did not sit.
The crowd marked this, and made noises of approbation and disapproval.
And, perhaps swayed a little by the decided action of the third mystic, the first and second mystics gravitated toward the girl in gold, and presently they also turned from the line without another glance, and went to their chairs.
Already tears like drops of glass, tinted by the kohl and paint upon their petal lids, were sliding from forty-nine pairs of eyes. Already forty-nine flowers were wilting. But one flower was straighter on a stem of steel, with steely fire, not water, in her eyes.
And then the first and second mystics, as the custom was, got up again and pointed to the girl they had chosen, the golden, steely girl. And going back to her, took her hands and led her forward. And in that instant she, too, wept in transport as forty-nine others moaned and toppled and showered downpours of despair.
And the third mystic, who should now go to the Exalted, and proclaim her, flung out his arms and cried in an insane voice:
“No! Not she! Not she! It is the other who is there, where she is. The other is the chosen! The other one!”
At this, a further silence crashed upon the scene. It was so quiet, you might have heard a hundred tears drop.
The council and the brother mystics pressed toward the dissenting third.
“What are you saying?”
“What can you mean?”
The third mystic composed himself with some hardship.
“I do not have any idea of what I mean, or what I say. I know only this. As I stood by that girl, I saw another girl. She was tall and pale as a white lotus. Her eyes were like the light itself. She was mantled in hair the color of tawny golden flowers, and from it exuded a scent that dizzied me. She is the Exalted. None, seeing her, could doubt it. Even if her tablet had not been plucked, if she had come before us we must have chosen her. But when I looked again and saw her led out, there was only a lovely girl like all the rest. Not she I had seen.”
The council was nonplussed. The crowd, recovering itself, began to create a great effect.
“Come, we must have order,” insisted one of the council. “Let us abide by the choosing. The girl in gold is the Exalted.”
And many agreed with this.
But the third mystic, who it seems was genuine among his calling, cried again: “No, not she! You fools,” he said, looking upon the whole throng with contempt, “can you not perceive a vision was given me. Can you not understand—another than I has made this choice.”
And at this monumental pronouncement, silence stole yet again over platform and crowd, and over the high roofs, into the sky.
All looked upon the golden girl, not as they had looked formerly. She fell on her knees, weeping now in fright. So unbridled was her distress that even some of her vanquished rivals were moved to go to her, to offer comfort. They saw besides she, too, like them, had missed her chance.
The third mystic also went back to her and observed her gravely with his unfocused eyes.
“Damsel, I am sorry to have wounded you. But I cannot go against Fate, or truth. Tell me, do you know who it can have been I saw in place of you? Have you some sister maybe, sick or hidden in your house? Or in another land? For if so, we must send for her.” The girl only wept. The silver rain of it lay in the golden fringes of her clothes. “See,” said the mystic, slowly, “the fringe upon your garment—that is the very hair in which she was mantled. How can that be?”
At these sentences, which carried by the acoustics of Fate or truth all over the square, the doting aunt of the golden girl gave a dreadful screech. She could not help it. Nor, when some hundreds of persons turned upon her to ask her reason, could she contain it.
“Among the markets of the caravans I
found an impish maid, who sold me these fringes, calling them Angels’ Fleece. But another told me they were the hairs of the maid’s own mistress, which were so excellent they often sold them in this way. And though the mistress had never been seen by my informant, yet he showed me her wagon. And it lies now outside the city, near the village of the Crooked Street, for they would not come in to the choosing.”
• • •
When the wagon master heard the rumbling, he took it for thunder.
“But a moment ago the sky was clear.”
And he went out of his tent to see.
And he saw the thunder was not in heaven but along the ground.
It was all Jhardamorjh, running toward him through the fields.
He cursed, and called the men he had about him to his wagon. There, with stares and drawn blades, they waited.
The crowd began to arrive. At its forefront, the council came, guarded by its soldiers. But the ocean of faces was not hostile, the gestures were open and bemused. The wagon master found himself gazed on. He did not care for it. “What is it you are wanting,” he said, “that your whole city needs to come ask for it?”
Then humbly and kindly, congratulating and praising him, the council told him what was wanted, but they spoke in the antique tongue of the rite. He grew angry, and they checked themselves, and humbly, kindly, congratulatory and praising, said it all again. And the crowd garnished the request with applause.
“You are mad,” decided the wagon master. He stood across the entrance to the wagon. “My girls are not beauties. The one you talk of is”—and here he stammered, for it went against his heart to speak it—“is . . . crippled, and hunched. And if you tell of her hair, that is her only finery. She is a dwarf, and like a child—and dear to me as life.”
The council staggered, smitten. They turned to each other.
“Let us see,” said one who had a mystic’s face.