by Tanith Lee
The Master Physician spoke.
“I doubt you can do more with her than soften her flesh a little with some oil or balm, such as Tincture of the Princesses. For her teeth, perhaps an artificial set of ivory or whale-rib. The breasts might be cut and padded with membrane, but there is a risk of infection and this practice has grown unpopular.”
“Sir,” I said, “don’t presume to teach me cosmetic medicine.” The ponderous old wretch was unaccustomed to plain arrogance in others, and could not collect himself sufficiently to reply. I said, “The woman is eighty years. I mean to make her young, a girl. And without recourse to any such rubbish as you mention.”
Affronted, he dropped his spyglass. An usher bounded to retrieve and hand it back to him.
Lellih meanwhile screeched, “Tell the frog to sew up his jaws. He shall see, he shall.” And she drew the attention of one sleek young man who had attracted her notice to the straightness of her spine, she, who had gone crooked from birth till I healed her.
At last I inquired if they were satisfied, and the physicians drew away, shaking their heads, smiling, gesticulating, saying I was deranged, every man tense as a bowstring. I had a stool brought and set Lellih on it. She would keep up her chatter; I put her in a trance, as much to have peace as because I thought she might feel pain at what I did. I motioned the assembly to stand as close as they wished to me, and to her. The Master Physician had stopped looking through the topaz, and leaned forward in his chair so far that he was almost out of it.
I placed my hands on her little skull. I thought, as one does suddenly when there is no road back, Maybe I shall find now I cannot do it. But something in me struck the hesitation aside. You are a god, Vazkor, son of Vazkor. And you do this thing not only to make a path to a witch’s hiding place, but to prove to men what has come among them.
I had never completely felt the true pride of what was in me before, not even when I had turned the storm, had walked on ocean. Hubris had mingled with surprise that day. Now, it stood alone with me.
I was flooded with a surge of Power, of life itself. I felt the flood sear from me into Lellih under my hands, bright as a bursting sun.
Not intending it, unguarded, I glimpsed her brain, the squawking crows in their mind attics, the dusty cerebral mansion of an old woman’s soul. Then the light had scattered the dust and crows. I drowned that inner room with it. I gave her my Power for that instant, let her feed from it, and felt the dying tree tremble in its bark.
The nearest physician uttered a cry, and actually ran backward.
Lellih’s skin was crackling and twisting like paper in a fire. In the prosaic seconds before the sense of glory came on me, I had never anticipated anything this showy, the flesh sloughing from her like plaster from a wall. Her left hand appeared first, like a pale flower pushing up from dead roots. One perfect woman’s hand with almond nails and a lotus palm.
“Stop,” the nearest physician, no longer so near, shouted. “This is a blasphemy. Stop, you will kill the woman.”
I kept my fingers on Lellih’s head, and watched him till he dropped his eyes and averted his whole person in fright. I could feel her thin hair lifting by its roots under my fingers. The left breast, rounder than it had been, juddered with a heartbeat quick as a sparrow’s. Her flower hand lay on the yellow twig of her knee, which gradually peeled like a split chrysalis to let out the firm new limb of a girl.
Abruptly she rose to her feet, leaving me, going forward, stepping out of herself like some strange woman-serpent rearing from the expended skin.
I had never in my life seen anything that abhuman, that terrible. It thrilled me; I had made this happen.
The physicians were shouting and pressing away from Lellih as if she carried plague, yet were unable to take their eyes off her.
Her hair was growing up, spilling from her skull like black water from a fount, thick black Hessek hair, girl’s hair. Like gray scales the old body rained into dust on the mosaic. Her back was white and smooth rising from its vase of white ample buttocks. She moved, I saw the outline of one breast, perfect to its candied tip. The profile was polished alabaster, black eye, a mouth to entice bees, white little teeth. She looked over her shoulder at me. It was an unexpected face, alluring, yet cold as unheated metal, the colors too fresh, unlived in.
She was young as the world before the world knew men.
One of the physicians went on his knees. She turned to look at him, as if he offered homage to her, which indeed perhaps he did. And as she turned, her eyes rolled up in their sockets. She fell forward without a sound across the wings of the jade horse in the mosaic.
It was known all over the Palm Quarter by sunrise; all over the city by noon. A crone changed by magic into a maiden in the Hall of Physicians.
She lay in a stupor in a room of the second court, by the porphyry wall. She lay there five days.
I half thought a mob from the Commercial City might come to the gate, but they did not. They were afraid of the devil-sorcerer Vazkor.
* * *
I had meant to kill Charpon simply in order to be sure of transport; I had most definitely killed Long-Eye by making an assassin of him. Presently I should have to fight and kill Sorem, one of the Hragon princes, a youth I had barely spoken with, a youth who reminded me of my own self. All those things came about through my Power and my quest, my cowardice and pride, my inability to strike a balance in myself between man and mage. And still, I had used Lellih in yet another of these games of mine, these random games that resulted in self-fear and guilt.
Those five days when she lay insensible, I had other matters to handle, for I must visit the rich about the Palm Quarter, heal their ills and garner their coins. These sophisticates did not fear me. They welcomed me, hungry for something different. It was a gaudy drudgery. The fine houses, the costly furnishings, the whining of fat patricians whose Hessek slaves—all Masrians, it seemed, had Hessek slaves—lay in half-starved heaps about the lower kitchens or scurried to obey, with purple whip-scars on their necks.
Besides this, no word came to me of the woman I sought, the sorceress. I would lie awake in the nightingale nights of eastern Bar-Ibithni, and I would tell myself I had mistaken her, the smell of evil that I believed an indication of her presence. It was the city which was rotten, that and my deeds in it. The glory had paled. Any sunset, no matter how glamorously bright, means the sun is going out. And with myself, also, a period of inner dark had followed the light. I seemed trapped in my own careful plan.
I had been waiting, too, on edge, for Sorem’s formal challenge. By the aristocratic code of honor, a certain season of days must elapse from insult to battle, so the participants might burnish their skills and see to their affairs. This time of pause was now over. I had noted that the rumor of Sorem’s altercation with me had flickered out in the city. Some dampening force had clearly been at work there, hushing up the business. The Emperor’s men, perhaps. It scarcely mattered; I should have to meet Sorem, finish him. At least on this occasion it should be clean and with a blade. I would keep to their ludicrous code because I was surfeited with magic, sick of myself.
Then, the challenge did not come. No band of jerdiers with set faces slinging some parchment scroll on the floor and marching out. I wondered what kept him, if he had been forbidden this duel.
There was a silly woman, the wife of one of my patients. She had been sending to me constantly. She was pretty enough, and she wrote in delicate Masrian script, unlike the picture-writing of Hessek, describing how she would die and see that I had the blame for it if I did not tend to her. Her servant, a foxy fellow with an earring, informed me that I should find her in the white pavilion of her husband’s house, and, wanting distraction, like a fool I went. She was dressed in true Masrian style, skirts of flounced brocade and a jacket of beadwork, and where there was not gauze or silk or sleeve or flounce, there were bracelets, necklets, rings, and ribbons.
It would be easier to strip a porcupine.
I stayed with her till the red shadows of afternoon turned to blue on the white lattices of the pavilion. She told me I was cruel not to care for her when she had betrayed her husband in order to pleasure me. It was the sort of stuff countless stupid girls had meowed in my ears since first I began to lie with women. She told me, too, that I was not a god, as her Hessek slaves had said, but only a man, and would wish for her again. I did not need her lessons.
I went back to my rooms, hoping for some tidings there of any sort.
There were tidings.
Lellih was gone.
Lyo stood in the court. He said, “She slipped out at dusk, they say. But there’s a man gone also, one of your sailor guards.”
I asked him who. He told me the man was called Ki. The name nagged me till I remembered Ki was the Hessek Charpon had imprisoned below deck because he swore he had seen me walk on the ocean. I had had the story from Kochus.
“Another thing,” Lyo said, “at your door.”
He held up before me a black crow, or the corpse of one, its neck severed to the spine. It was some while since I had seen a bloody carcass, and obviously this had not been slain for its meat.
“Why that?”
Lyo winced.
“The Hesseks say it is a token of the Old Faith. An offering.”
“To whom?”
“To you, lord,” he said, “to you.”
I did not instigate a search for Lellih. She had shown my powers to the Physicians Hall. It was enough. I did not need her value as a peepshow, despite what I had said. Something in what I had done unnerved me. I was almost glad the proof was missing. Where she had gone and what she did, I did not speculate on. Only the memory of that half-turned face—that primeval, virgin, wicked face—disturbed me, that and the dead crow left at my door. Sacrifice to a god. Not Masrimas, for whom they slew white horses at the midsummer festival, but some darker effigy, the Ungod of the Old Faith. I questioned Lyo briefly. A Seemase, he could tell me little. The Hesseks, when I spoke to them, gibbered and muttered. The vanished Ki, they admitted, might have known how to tutor me in the ancient religion of Old Hessek.
I sat in a chair and surrendered my mind to a black wasteground of profitless reflection. My past and my chaotic present ran before me, and the unanswered question of my future.
5
A brazen bell rings in the Masrimas Temple of the Palm Quarter at midnight. I heard it struck, and roused myself, and heard another thing. The black dog was barking, for a carriage on the lonely midnight road had halted at my gate.
One of the Hesseks came into the court and rapped for me at the door.
“There is a rich woman in the first courtyard, lord. She gave us gold so we should let her in to you.” He showed me the chain of money and grinned nervously.
I imagined it was my doxy of the afternoon, risking her lofty name and her husband’s indulgence in pursuit of me. For a moment I meant to pack her off, but, aimless as I had become, thought better of it. If her scented flesh and pigeon’s chatter could come between me and my mood tonight, all to the good.
I told the Hessek to bring her, and sat down again to watch her rustle in, full of pleas and threats and endearments, her skirt of flounces scraping the doorway.
The lamp was burning low, yet when she came, there was no mistaking it was another than the one for whom I had looked.
She was tall and she held herself, moreover, very straight, with a pride unusual in a tall woman. Her garments were black, and she came into the red light like a fragment of the dark outside, and for all her flounced Masrian skirt with its fine beaded sweat of gold drops, she was veiled like a Hessek woman, even her eyes. I could see only her hands, long, slender, hard brown hands, like a boy’s, so that for a second I wondered, Bar-Ibithni being as it was. Yet I could tell she was a woman, even veiled, her breast hidden in the drapery, and when she spoke, I could not miss it. A somber, smoky voice like the color of the lamp.
“You are Vazkor, the man they call the sorcerer?”
“I am Vazkor, the man they call the sorcerer.”
She seemed, from her tone, accustomed to prompt replies and obedience in others. Yet now she hesitated. There was a little bracelet, a snake of gold, on her right forearm, which flickered the light as if she trembled. But then she said, clear and steady, “I hear you deal honestly, if the payment you receive is high enough.”
“Are you in need of healing?”
“No.”
“What, then, do you require of me?”
“I want to know what price you put on a man’s life.”
I had risen, intending to adopt Masrian courtesies belatedly; now I set my hand to the lamp to brighten it.
“It would depend on the man,” I said. “Some men come very cheap.”
I heard her draw in her breath slowly, to steel herself. I already knew what was coming. The flame leaped up yellow under the rosy crystal, and she said, “Sorem, Prince of the Blood, son of our lord the Emperor Hragon-Dat.”
The light did not pierce her veil after all.
“Sorem’s life is obviously dear to you, madam. Why do you reckon it in jeopardy from me?”
“He has challenged you by the code to fight him. You will use some device or some trick, and kill him, and he is too honorable and too proud to see this. I ask you to avoid the fight. I will pay what you suggest is necessary.”
“And what of my honor, madam? Am I to acquire the name of a craven? He promised me I should if I did not meet him.”
“You barter and sell your magic, if such it is,” she said contemptuously. “You cure a man for a chain of coins, and leave him to die if he has none. What is one name more?”
“You’re unjust to me, lady, and ill-informed. As to Sorem, I can do no other than he’s bound me to.”
She stood there a moment like stone and then, in a theatrical, angular gesture, again oddly like a boy’s, she gathered the veil up in handfuls and thrust it off.
And so I saw her.
Her hair was black and curling, shiny as glass, piled on her head Masrian fashion with pins of polished blue turquoise. She had no other jewels save for the little snake on her arm, only the flawless copper of her skin, which came from the black case of the beaded jacket like honey from a jar. She was slim, but slim like an iron blade, her hips and waist narrow as her hands were narrow, except at the rise of her breast where the terrain was altered, half revealed by the Masrian bodice, two full amber slopes powdered with gold dust like pollen, which spangled in the light as she breathed.
But her face was something else again. I vow I looked at it and thought her ugly one whole second, confronted by those aquiline features, her age, which was some years in excess of my own, the black anger that masked over her eyes; nothing soft anywhere. Then everything was changed; I saw the beauty that this face really was, beauty like the point of a knife.
“I do this that you may discover who I am.” She had been like a lightning bolt to me, yet no revelation came with it.
“I assume you are the mistress or the wife of Sorem,” I said. At that she smiled, not in any womanly way, but sardonic as some prince forced to be courteous to his enemy. Through the kohl and the black lashes of that extraordinary gaze, the lamp found out blueness.
“It appears you also are ill-informed, magician,” she said. “I am Malmiranet, the cast-off of the Emperor, but still blood of the Hragons for all that. Sorem is my son.”
“I beg your pardon, madam. I didn’t realize I had a royal woman in my house. Be seated.”
“And you be damned,” she said, fast as fire. “I am not here to play empress with a dog from the backlands. Tell me the price of my son’s life and you shall have it. Then I will leave.”
Her eyes were surely blue, but dark as sapphire, darker than his. The looks that shot from them would wake a
man part dead.
“You go the wrong way around this, madam,” I said quietly. “You presume me a jackal and a wretch and a fool. You will make me one, then there’ll be no reasoning with me.”
“Don’t tutor me.”
“Nor you me, madam. I have spoken with your son. He won’t thank you for the shelter of your skirts.”
She made a gesture that said, “This is irrelevant, unimportant, providing he lives.”
“And if I refuse?” I said, as I had said to him.
“There are ways.”
“Have me murdered, Lady Malmiranet, and the whole city will say your son did it out of fear. Besides, I wonder what assassin could overcome me when I can kill a man with my mind alone.”
She observed me unansweringly, but her hands were trembling again. I could smell her perfume now in the little room, a faint incense, smoky as her voice. Suddenly she dropped her lids and the words came out broken.
“Do you think I estimate my son a coward that I came to you? If he were that, you might have him. It is his bravery I fear, and your sorcery. If you can do one fifth of what they say, he will die. Why does a sorcerer want this duel? The notion of honor amuses you. Very well, let him believe you ran from him. What do you care for such a thing? You are a man, and young. Use your powers to make yourself a lord elsewhere, and let Sorem live.”
I went up to her, this empress who had fallen from her high station for some reason that was beyond me, seeing her as she was. True, she was not quite a girl, but that face, carved so purely and without compromise, would never have been a girl’s face. For the rest, even this close, you would need to be witless or blind to pass by. Her brows were nearly level with my own. I took her hand, the hand with the snake wrapped above it. The palm was hard from riding; the hand of Sorem could not be that much different.
“For you, then,” I said, “he lives. I forego the dubious sweet of killing him.”