Night's Daughter

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  'Then you will indeed take me back without harm to Sarastro?"

  "Pamina," said her mother, "can it be that you have not yet guessed the truth? As you and Tamino are bound, so Sarastro and I are the two faces of power, Light and Darkness, Night and Day, Truth and Falsehood, Life and Death. I would have had you renounce him; he has bidden you to renounce me; both of us were testing you, and now you must rise above the false division between the darkness and the day." Again she stretched her hand to Pamina. "Come quickly, child, while still there is time to make the choice."

  This was the most painful test of all; was not this what she wanted most to believe, that somehow she could choose to follow Sarastro's truth and yet not lose the mother she still painfully adored? How persuasive it seemed, that all this was one more complicated test, to see if she could know the ultimate truth; that her mother and Sarastro were two facets of the truth, the light and the darkness intertwined, and there was no need for these terrible choices.

  "Quickly, Pamina. Take my hand."

  But the hand of the Starqueen was still smooth, unwrinkled, giving the lie to the illusion of age and sorrow which she had put on— yes, put on to beguile me —and Pamina shrank back.

  "Sarastro has told me nothing but what I can see for myself to be truth," she said, "and you have told me lie after lie. What of the sacrifices, Mother? Should I reign over a world drowned in blood? What—" Another memory she had deliberately put away, once more surfaced within her. "What of Rawa, Mother? Why did you send her to sacrifice, after promising me her safety?"

  "Rawa?" The Starqueen frowned, and to Pamina this was even more dreadful, her mother did not even remember, among the thousands of sacrifices Rawa was just one more. "What are you talking about, child?"

  "My nurse. When you gave me Papagena's life, you sent her away. I did not know then that it was to sacrifice."

  "Oh. The Halfling bitch. She was Kamala's nurse too, I seem to remember. That one. I had forgotten her name." The Starqueen was quiet for a moment. "Why not? There are Halflings enough. I would have gotten you a dozen dog-halflings if I had known you wanted them."

  Pamina started to say, But I loved her, and suddenly knew that to her mother the words would be meaningless. And that was worst of all. If the Starqueen could not understand that she had loved Rawa, of what worth were her own protestations of love?

  Her mother was still facing her, that lying hand outstretched, and yet Pamina had not the courage to face her and refuse to come. In her mind already she could hear the furious cry, see the thunders of rage, the towering majesty of the Starqueen, and she shrank, shrank down. Never to have to see that fury again, never to hear the thunders of that wrath. Never to have to choose.

  I can change myself; these are the Changing Lands indeed, and no one returns from them unchanged. She could change herself to the bird-form and fly free—

  But once before she had escaped into flight, and her mother had flown beside her, a great cloud-bird, entreating and cajoling her to abandon Tamino. She could not escape that way, into her mother's very realm.

  She felt a sudden passion to become a tree; to feel her feet send out roots, stretching down into the good earth, to spread her arms and feel them sprouting branches and leaves; the birds, good and evil, might nest in her branches, but she need never listen to them nor hear any of their beguilements, need never know the terrible mystery of choice. Tentatively she dug her toes into the sand, feeling all through her body the tingle of growth as they spread into the desert sand, seeking out water. She spread out her arms, fiercely willing them to send out shoots, to put on bark and leaves—

  "Stay here, then!" cried the Starqueen, in that sudden fury which had been the torment of Pamina's childhood and girlhood, and suddenly she towered to the sky, thunder flaring from her voice and her spread hands. Pamina cowered among her leaves, trying to will herself deaf and dumb and passive, silent forever and immune to that pleading

  Defeated, then. Numb. The Starqueen had won, and she had failed the test of Fire, retreating to frightened passivity, as she had always willed to do. Something in Pamina wanted that. Something in her had always wanted to be blind and deaf to her mother, but the real Pamina had fought back, as she had struggled in the darkness against the terrible creature. Was she to abandon the fight now and allow her mother's lies to triumph? In Sarastro's realm she had learned another way.

  There was no retreat now into Earth; with regret, Pamina thrust out her hands, seeing her leaves drift sadly to the ground, wrenched her roots painfully from the earth and felt herself stand unconnected on her human feet. She drew a long breath, feeling the fire of defiance fill her lungs.

  She cried out, "No! I love Tamino, and I will stay with him!"

  Her mother was still towering over her, blazing with the gems and beauty of the Starqueen. Her laughter was like summer lightning, a fierce manic sound.

  "Tamino! Do you think he wants anything of you except the power of a marriage to Sarastro's daughter? Why, you sorry little fool, he bargained with me for you, Pamina. Did you not know that he was in my kingdom and in my power, and it was I who sent him to rescue you from Sarastro? But when Sarastro offered him more power than I had—or so that fool Tamino thought—he abandoned me because he thought Sarastro could offer him more!"

  "It isn't true," Pamina cried out in fury and terror. "It isn't true!"

  Yet she should have known. She was her mother's daughter, tainted, evil throughout, what could Tamino possibly want of her except the power she held as Sarastro's daughter?

  "You who talk so much of truth," said her mother scornfully, "still you fear it, I can see! Well, truth you shall have, Pamina. Keep silence now, and listen while I test your precious Tamino and you shall see how deep is this"—she paused, with the terrible smile Pamina remembered from her childhood—"this love of which you are so certain."

  She gestured. Pamina, with her own newfound powers of sorcery, recognized the gesture just too late to move free of its influence. She stood in a bubble of darkness, hidden, powerless, and struggled in vain to move, to speak, to make herself known. And then, slowly dawning before her eyes, she saw Tamino.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  EVEN as he realized, with a dreadful sense of apprehension, that Pamina had disappeared, and that he was alone with Monostatos, Tamino had his sword out and ready. For once he felt prepared for what was to come. His father's son had been extensively trained as a warrior, a fighter, and now that he had Monostatos before him, actually within sword reach, he had no fear. But where were the sorcerer's weapons? Monostatos stood before him, empty-handed and mocking. How could he strike an unarmed man? Confused again, Tamino hesitated, and Monostatos, with a little flash of light, moved to the edge of the little grove of bushes. Surely he could not have run so far? Holding his sword, Tamino ran after him, but mocking laughter filled the ruins, and once again Monostatos was standing a dozen feet away, taunting him from a distance.

  "Stand and fight, coward!" Tamino yelled.

  "With your weapons? You'd like that, wouldn't you?" Monostatos was shrieking with laughter. Out of nowhere a whip of fire lashed Tamino's forehead. Stung, he threw up his arms to shelter against it, hearing the jeering cries of the sorcerer.

  "What have you done with Pamina?" he shouted.

  "Wouldn't you like to know? Throw down your sword, and perhaps I may tell you!" Another whip of fire descended, this time full across his face, barely missing his eyes. Shouting, furious with the burning pain, Tamino rushed blindly at Monostatos, flinging himself on the magician, eager to come to grips with him, but he stumbled over a bush and measured his full length on the sand. Wordless with fury, he howled, as whips of fire fell, one after another, lashing, burning the tunic from his back. He rolled into a ball to protect himself against them, thinking desperately that this was an Ordeal of Fire indeed—but was it the kind the priests had intended?

  Slash after slash of fiery pain rained down on him. There must surely be something he could do again
st it. And Pamina, where was she, what trials of this kind was she facing alone? The thought of Pamina, helpless against this wicked man, or Halfling, or snake, or whatever he was, infuriated him more than his own pain.

  He jerked himself to his feet, ran toward Monostatos, and caught him unawares; this time the sorcerer barely managed to escape in his sudden flash of light. Tamino made a feint with the sword; the sword vanished in a burst of white-hot fire, burning Tamino's hand. But Tamino ignored the searing pain and grabbed a handful of Monostatos's hair. Somehow he knew that the sorcerer could not do his disappearing trick if Tamino was actually touching him.

  His sword was gone. No matter. Now he actually had his hands on the vicious Monostatos, he did not need it. He jerked the man's head back, his other hand at the Halfling's throat. He could feel the dry, warm, not unpleasant scaliness there which marked the serpent-halfling.

  "What have you done with Pamina? Speak, and I may spare your wretched life!"

  Under his hand the scaled throat writhed, reared upward; under his very touch a dragon roared, and Tamino recoiled as it reared above him.

  He had a swift and terrible sense of dejd vu. Surely he had been here before, when first he came into these Lands and the dragon had come against him. Had that too been Monostatos? In that flashing moment of memory he had a quick impression of the man in the ruins: taller than Monostatos, and with a noble and melancholy face... not Monostatos, then. These were the Changing Lands, and for a moment Tamino, before the crawling terror in his veins, the atavistic horror of the Serpent felt by all children of the Ape, longed to shrink down into something tiny, too tiny for a dragon to see or kill—

  Instead, suddenly feeling the flaring fire in his hand and the power of fire bursting through him, he opened himself to that power, crying out—he never knew what; but the pain that seared his hand made him aware that the sword was in it again. It had not been burned up in white fire. That was illusion, as the dragon itself must be partly illusion. He struck down hard with the sword where Monostatos would have been most exposed, breast unshielded against the sword, and saw the flash of light. Monostatos, in human-form again, was standing at the edge of the ruins. Then he vanished.

  Tamino slowly lowered the sword. On some deep level of awareness he knew that he had not conquered Monostatos; he had only driven him away on the physical plane. The sword in his hand bore long silvery streaks, as if the metal had melted and been somehow reforged. He shuddered as he looked at it. Ordeal by Fire indeed; and as he looked at the still raw, seared, throbbing wound in his palm, he knew it was only beginning.

  In the tension and fury of the battle with Monostatos, he had not been fully aware of the agony of the burn. Now he gripped his wrist with his other hand, as if somehow the very pressure could ease the dreadful burning pain. He heard himself moaning aloud in the agony of it, and plunged toward the spring which Pam-ina had commanded from the rock to wash the grime of the sandstorm from their bodies. Pamina. Where was Pamina? He wanted to cry aloud for her in his despair, as he remembered—surely it had been in another life, a million million years ago—Papageno howling Papagena's name. There was nothing in the world but this pain and deprivation, the screaming pain in his hand. He plunged toward the spring, thrust out his hand, and sand raked the burn, with a pain that made all that had gone before seem like pleasure.

  He cried out, as he had called to his sword, as Pamina had cried out striking the sand: "Water!"

  There was time for a moment of despair, a moment of silent agony and dread—would he die here in the Changing Lands, burned to a crisp by dragonfire?— before he felt it flooding over his hand, cooling and soothing the pain: cold water, icy cold. But not the desert spring Pamina had commanded from the rock. He was lying in the water full-length, as it soothed his burned hand and the scars of the fiery whips on face and neck and back, and, lying near him in the pool was the otter-woman.

  Then it was not Pamina, alone, who had developed the powers of sorcery. He himself was a sorcerer, a sorcerer like Monostatos. And for a moment he felt revulsion at what he had become. He had been afraid of Pamina, when first he had seen her transformed magically into a great eagle. Now he feared himself. For a moment he wished that he was in his father's lands, that he had never come into this world of deviltry and wizard's powers. It was corrupting him too. What had he become? Would he be no better then than Monostatos?

  He had never asked for these sorcerous powers. He could not believe that they were anything but evil. He had been given them, unbidden, unasked. The words of Sarastro and of the guide rang with wicked irony in his mind, "Nothing is asked of you but that you shall remain your best self at all times."

  Was this then his best self, that he should call down fire to burn his enemy as he had himself been burned? It was a frightening riddle.

  His soaked garments were weighing him down in the pool as they had weighed him down in the sea among the dolphins, and he supposed the remedy was the same. He dragged himself wearily to the verge and sat on the grass, pulling off his drenched tunic and trousers.

  As he fumbled with the wet clothing, his fingers lingered a moment on the cord at his waist. Only a little while ago—yet how long ago it seemed!—Pamina had playfully untied this cord. That had started everything that had happened.

  No, to be fair, it had started when he had begun to desire her. Damn these Ordeals, which aroused desire within a man's loins and punished him for yielding to that desire! Unfair, he thought bitterly, it was unfair as everything that had happened to him in Sarastro's kingdom was unfair.

  He untangled the wet cord. Water and Fire had burned away all but memory of that desire. Would he ever feel a man's desire again without the terror of what had come between them? Tied to the cord was the magic flute.

  He looked at it, bitterly. Was he supposed to play it again and yell for help from magical Messengers once more? He was tired of being acted upon; he wanted to act for once on his own and in his own name. The guide had told him: in the Ordeals of Air and Water, he had learned that he could not always be in control. Was he never to be in control again? He laid the flute down by his side, and turned his attention to spreading the wet garments on the grass to dry.

  Where had the grass come from? They had been in the sand desert, and now he was in the jungly rain forest where he had seen the otter-woman. She was submerged in the pool, only her eyes and her sleek dark hair visible, but her intent dark gaze made him uneasy.

  How dare she look at him like that, anyhow? He was a man, and he had been stared at quite enough by Halflings in the last few days. Monostatos, arrogant brute, had dared to lash him with whips of fire in a sorcerer's duel in which Tamino had never intended to engage, and had provoked him into retaliating in kind. He felt used, bruised, burned, naked before the eyes of the Halfling woman.

  He said roughly, "Why are you staring at me?"

  She ducked beneath the water, and before her fear something ugly stirred in the back of his mind. These Halflings who continually bested him, chivied him about, Monostatos with his whips of fire, the dolphins who had forced him to give way and abase himself. .. he was a man, he was finished with being harried about by these Halflings.

  She was a woman. The Ordeals had surely not been intended to deprive him of manhood, and the test here, perhaps, was more subtle than he had thought. The simplest of the metaphors of Fire was simply sexual; and now, feeling it rising again within him, he took up the flute and played a single note.

  It has power over the Halflings. I can make her come to me. Perhaps the test was only this, that where everything seemed to conspire against him to rob him of manhood, of power, of the will or desire, to take the initiative, at that point he should assert his own strength and prove the power of Human over Halfling. Then indeed would he prove dominion over the final element of Fire, the lust he felt burning in his body.

  He blew another tentative note on the flute and a third. The otter-woman, her eyes fixed on his, slowly crawled up from the water as th
e separate notes merged into a little tune. Why was she looking at him like that? She was of the miserable Halfling-kind, like Monostatos she would outrage and attack him if he did not maintain his power with the flute. He kept playing while she moved, slowly and with obvious reluctance, up the bank. She was naked. Good—now she had paid for his humiliation before the dolphins. She lay passive, spread out before him. Her body was not a woman's body, not quite, but it was female and as raging lust stirred in him, he did not care. The fire was burning in him, a fire of rage. She was not Pamina—

  Pamina. To protect Pamina he had been willing to play the flute, to exploit the Halflings; even for that it had been forbidden, and now he would misuse it this way? With a cry of despair he flung the flute aside and covered his face with his hands. What had he done, after all this time, to fail at the last like this? The otter-halfling woman still lay, spread-eagled numb and passive, her eyes wide with terror. He gestured to her, without turning, to go. He muttered, "I won't hurt you. Go! Go—" and, remembering what the Dolphin-kin had said to him—"go, sister."

  He stared in horror at the flute. What had it almost led him to do? He had been told it was a very powerful magical weapon. Now it had turned in his hand and almost betrayed him. At the moment, if he had not been afraid to touch it again, he would have flung it into the pool.

  His clothing, blood-soaked and scorched from the fiery whips, still lay in damp wads on the grass, but he struggled into it anyway. How vulnerable and mean his nakedness now seemed to him. From the far side of the pool he could still see the otter-woman watching him distrustfully. He did not blame her. He wouldn't trust himself either. He had never felt so miserable and ashamed in his life. He tied the woven three-colored cord about his waist, struggling with the clumsy wet strands. He didn't deserve them.