by Tanith Lee
He had always known, or been always capable of knowing. Two abortive hunts, in Underearth and out of it, had yielded no “kill.” Yet he let the matter of vengeance rest. Let the matter of escape slip. . . . Now, though he cared no more for her, Vasht it would seem had had some power to wake in him the old true rages, spites, lusts, certainties, schemes, of his beginning, that somber primeval “dawn” he had mentioned, shadowy sunrise lacking a sun. So Azhrarn thought now of Chuz, and of a child which was his, whose face he did not or could not recall, only the eyes. And presently three of the Eshva were summoned to him in the shapes of three smoky doves. “Go,” said Azhrarn, “and find me that.”
Far and wide, the Eshva flew.
They may have been some of those formerly sent to serve Azhriaz-Sovaz on the island of the hollow stone, and this a form of expiation—since they had allowed her to leave that place without so much as a sigh of warning, so intellectually recumbent had they grown there. (Catching his sickness?) It is not recorded that Azhrarn punished any one of them. But they, leaving that sphere of uselessness, altering, may have wished to be punished, or simply to atone.
Far and wide—
Well then, for some while, many a blue-eyed dark-haired girl was scared or lured away into the night, lost there, later found, or not found. . . . “Oh where is my daughter—sister—bride? Have the demons stolen her?” It must have been an emblem of theirs, this faulty diligence in searching. Surely they grasped, even if they had not themselves attended her before, that only one could be the daughter of Azhrarn, and they would know her at once.
She was well hidden. They would not find her out. Even they. For what was she but archsorceress, their mistress as Azhrarn was their master. As for that other, crazy Chuz, lord of craziness—for a great while he had kept out of sight behind his own immaculate blind.
Search then, on and on, they must and did, and chased the black-haired maidens in the woods, and the handsome lack wits, or men having discrepancies in their looks, one side of the face beautiful and one deformed. The Eshva were saying by all this, See, we are searching. Leaving no stone right side up.
In Underearth, Azhrarn stood by a window of emerald, and through it saw a green-winged thing fluttering. But all winged things—all things—were green, seen through that window. Azhrarn did not waste much time upon the sight.
On a stand in that room there was, or came to be, a book, in size one quarter of the height of a tall man. Its covers and papers were of thin pure bronze, and decorated with strange gems whose names are no longer recollected. Azhrarn approached and spoke to this book. At the words, the pages strayed apart, and turned themselves, and stopped. Azhrarn glanced into the book, where it now lay open. The images that were shown there could mean nothing to one unversed in them. Yet Azhrarn instantly turned from the view, disgusted, apparently, by the ease of divination.
While to three shadowy doves, flying high up under the moon, there must have come some special instruction. For they dived suddenly, as do hunting gulls upon their prey, down into the well of the world.
2
MANY TALES were told of that return of the Demon’s child onto the earth. These tales bear all a similarity. It is like a snake’s dancing, or a beautiful sword which knows it was made not for beauty, but to harm. Also, it is like a baby playing with her toys, and each toy a man’s life, or a town burning. And the teasing malign mischiefs have too a sort of immature hurt and anger in them. It is to be remembered, though she was seventeen years old in her form, her cunning and her learning were surely older, and over all, the blossom had been forced. Within herself, she was still a child that had yet to grow. Or had she ever been such a thing as a child? She was never positively ovum and seed, only dark light, magic and will—and the fierce love of two others, which had seemed to exclude her consistently.
So stories gathered like flocks of birds about her.
But there is another tale, which says she did not do so much, not then; that in her own way she lived quietly. And perhaps there is some truth, too, in that, or why had she been so difficult for the Eshva to find?
“There are supernatural creatures in our woods,” they said, in the surrounding villages and towns. Why? How do you know it? “Travelers have been set on. One came here in a lather, he had seen starry lights which followed him.” “And another woke up from a noon sleep in a glade, to find he had the ears of an ass!”
Sometimes, when the wind blew, exotic aromas flowed on it out of the wood, or the sound of music or bells. Animals avoided certain parts of the wood, or else wilfully ran off to them. Seven merchants, riding hard for a town just before nightfall, declared an object—which might have been a velvet carpet some fifteen feet up in the air, with two dim shining figures seated on it—had whizzed over their heads. Some girls who went out one dawn to gather edible fungi, arrived at a break in the trees and saw suddenly, as if it broke through the sky with the sun, a high magnificent house of white marble and flashing gold. But even as they stood astonished, the mansion disappeared, and all they could make out was a little old ruined cottage on a slope half a mile away.
Supposedly then sometimes a cottage, sometimes a mansion, the dwelling place of Oloru and Sovaz. On cold nights, a fire on a rough hearth with a copper pot suspended over it, crooked shutters fastened closed, a straw pallet under fleeces—or a towering hearth with stone pillars, scented braziers and swinging lamps, magic food conjured to an inlaid table, a bed five yards across and canopied with silver tissue. And in summer, a herb garden with wild roses, a park with fountains springing at the skies.
One afternoon, late in the day, when the sun had entered the western quarter and the air was plum yellow, a traveler came up through the woods and paused to look at the cottage on the slope. The trees fell away around the incline, so the old tipsy cottage roof showed plainly. Still, something in the yellow air deceived, for there would appear to be a second outline behind the first, several roofs where there was one, each taller, and all glittering.
Now seldom did travelers take this track, since it lay in the wrong direction for the nearest towns of the region. But those who might have ventured here, seeing the mirage, would have rubbed their eyes, sworn, and hurried off. This traveler, seeing it, laughed.
Sounds carried in those parts.
Far up in an arbor of ivory, on a flat roof girded by golden railings, a young man and a young woman raised their blond and sable heads.
“What strange bird is that?”
“Not a bird,” said Oloru, “an orange beetle, which is crawling up from the trees toward the house.”
Sovaz gazed from her roof’s pinnacle. She frowned. Presently she descended three marble stairways in her silks and came to open a warped wooden door in a home-spun dress.
There on the sunken doorstep sat a man. He was clad in a beggar’s garment of dull reddish orange, much stained and rent, a fold of which he had drawn over his bowed head. Beside him lay a beggar’s bowl, curiously gilded, and in his hand he held a staff of greatly rotted wood.
Sovaz did not speak, she waited. After a moment the man murmured, “Alms, kindness, succor.” His voice was beautiful, yet unknown. Sovaz said nothing, though she stood as still as the hidden marble. “Be charitable to me,” said the beggar. “Who knows but one day your lot may be mine and you too must go entreating pity through the world. Once I was a king. Now regard me. Alms, succor, kindness.” And then, very low, he laughed again his startling laugh, which was like the cry of some wild bird. “Who, after all,” said he, “can escape cruel fate?”
Then Sovaz grimaced—had she been a cat, you would have said she laid flat her ears and hissed at him. She stood aside and flung open the wooden door, which almost fell off at the impact, and which altered to a silver door set with golden images.
“Poor destitute,” said Sovaz mockingly, “enter my modest abode.”
Then the man got up and passed into the house.
It was all grandeur again, with glassy floors, and pierced by rays of
light daggering through it from the large windows. On a stair of marble sat Oloru, idly striking chords on a lyre. When he had regarded the traveling beggar, these chords came very sour. Oloru said, “Can one go nowhere to evade one’s wretched relations?”
At this the visitor raised his head and the fold of cloth fell back from it. He was altogether a strange sight. Tanned, as if in a vat, from much journeying in various weathers, his head was like a bronze icon, for it was shaved of all hair. The bizarre robe he wore now seemed the rich color of the blood orange, and you saw that every stain upon it formed a most intricate and pleasing pattern, just as did every tear in it, as though each had been skilfully painted on or cut out. The begging bowl was not merely gilded, it was evidently gold, and dappled with somber jewels. His staff of rotten driftwood, too, was elaborately carved and had budded dark gems, and up it ran a slender ginger lizard, to perch on his shoulder, and look about with eyes of fiery jasper. The eyes of the man were rimmed with gold, blazed with it; their hue was not to be seen, nor was it easy to meet his gaze—indeed, more trouble than it was worth.
Oloru sighed, and lowered his lashes. Chuz said, “Unwelcome, uncousin. Or are you an unbrother to me? I am inclined to forget.”
“Our relationship is often deemed a close one,” conceded the traveler.
“Why are you here?” said Chuz by means of Oloru, and he threw a golden die at the lizard, which caught it in its mouth.
“Do not feed my pet,” said the traveler, and extracted the die, which, in his grasp, turned to ash and sifted to the floor. His nails were golden also, and very long. The lizard rumbled like a tiny lion, balefully, at Chuz. “Why am I here? Why not? I must pass everywhere at all times. You see me in this place. Others concurrently perceive me elsewhere. And even you have not left the earth particularly sane by your apparent retreat. Some essence of you, too, mad Prince Chuz, roves and roars the world about.”
During this exchange, Sovaz had stood to one side, watching and listening. Now she spoke again.
“I know you,” she said, “and do not know you. A beggar king? You named yourself, did you not, at the door?”
The man turned and inclined his head to her, smiling. A golden diadem evolved upon his hairless burnished skull. The lizard looked up at it and purred like a kitten.
“Which name did I use?”
“Fate.”
“Then I am Fate.”
“King Fate, one of the Lords of Darkness,” said Sovaz, and she swept him a scornful bow such as some young warrior might have made him, though every line of her was woman. “A gentle reminder that even I will not elude you?”
“Oh, come. Have you spent so long with him, and learned nothing? I am only the symbol of the name. Like poor exhausted Death, tramping about the earth with his carrion baskets, longing to get back to the quiet soft arms of his handmaiden, Kassafeh. Or like that very one, there, who has gone mad himself to prove he exists and is real, not only a symbol. While under our feet this instant there prowls another, your own father, Wickedness. But he was always different. He firstly existed, and then took on the rôle. We humble others the rôle itself has created.”
“What nonsense is this peculiar fellow talking?” inquired not Chuz, but Oloru, languidly. “It seems he presumes on the maxim ‘Enough is never enough.’”
But Fate, if so he was (and so he would seem to be), looked at Sovaz and said, “He is close behind you.”
“Who is that?”
“Azhrarn. Who else.”
“Fate warns me of my fate. Does unhumbly rôle-playing Prince Wickedness wish to kill me?”
“How could he? How could he wish it?”
“You are mistaken,” said Sovaz. “He has no interest in me.”
Fate looked about. Politely, he examined the hall of the wondrous mansion, touching the tapestries and crystal cups. The tiny lizard mewed and jumped down to chase sunbeams on the floor. And here, leaving the aura of its master, it took on the tints of sun and floor, becoming nearly transparent, for it was changeable, too, a chameleon.
“Are you then,” said Sovaz to Fate, “Azhrarn’s messenger?”
“Do I, a king, with my own kingly business to attend to, seem likely to perform duties for another?”
“Discuss your own business with me, then.”
“I am here,” said Fate simply and not unkindly. “You have glimpsed me. And that is all which is needed.”
And so saying, he summoned the lizard again to his staff, and moving into a dagger of westering light, he became one with it, and vanished.
After the sun had gone, and nightingales sang in the walnut grove which stood always, cot or palace, beneath the house wall, Sovaz left the arms of her lover. She paced about in a gallery of columns open on one side to the night. How intently the stars gazed at her over the tree-tops. How wildly the nightingales sang, as if something had disquieted them, with ecstasy or fear. Presently, silently, Sovaz called her lover back to her. She put her hand on his shoulder. Her eyes said, There is no rest for me. Let us walk out in the darkness.
So they wandered through the woods, where the black foxes came to play about them, and the night flowers glowed and sent up their perfume. And sometimes, by starlight, the two wanderers cast five shadows. But later, three of the shadows vanished, though there went a faint sound through the branches, like wings.
Coming at length into an avenue of ancient trees, Sovaz and Oloru saw a town spread below and before them, out of the wood.
“We will go down. We will see what humankind does with itself in the last hours before dawn.”
Oloru smiled chidingly. (Humankind?) But then there was only a ghostly jackal which ran at her heels, grinning. Sovaz paid no heed, nor did she assume herself any feral form. Her own skin was too unfamiliar to exchange itself for others.
The barricades of the town were shut, but there was a herders’ gate which Sovaz breathed upon, and it opened itself.
Down the streets, then, the woman walked, with a jackal loping after her. She had sorcerously re-formed her apparel—or maybe she had only put on fresh apparel in the ordinary way—to the garb of a young man, soft boots on her feet, her hair wound in a cloth, a long knife at her belt. It was Oloru who, when he should choose to resume human shape, would be found in an embroidered robe and pearl- fringed slippers.
The lamps burned low in the town or were put out. Here and there a sleepless window, or the inflamed eye of a tavern.
I might, Sovaz considered, float upward like a leaf and look in at all these sleepers. I might slip in under doors, between the narrowest lattices, revel in their sins, virtues, absurdities—and be gone like the night breeze. Or I might take the being of a nightmare, and cause them to wake screaming. Or seduce, or thieve, or kill. More, the whole town I might stir to havoc and panic, to madness—and then he would forget himself, my beloved, and remember himself, and help me at the work.
Overhead the stars massed thickly. So many had come out tonight to look on Sovaz, the Demon’s daughter, with their concentrated stare.
But why, thought she, why do it? Is the only challenge in the world to be greed and viciousness? Is the only satisfying power the power of the ascent over men, the only dream, ambition? And must the alternative to greed, evil, ambition—be only sluggishness?
At which she felt a gloved hand smooth her cheek. “Sluggishness? Is that the name you call our love?”
“Our love,” she said aloud to Chuz, who for a second in the person of Oloru walked at her side, “our love rocks the world. Yet what a little event is our love.”
Chuz laughed, like a jackal barking. Oloru said plaintively, “You will smash my heart in fragments.”
“You shall be shaken then, and what a pretty sound you will make, like a temple sistrum.”
And at this point they reached a wineshop door and Sovaz walked in there, as if it had been all along their destination.
The guests who remained were mostly sleeping, their heads on their arms, or their feet on the tables.<
br />
Sovaz seated herself in a dark corner, and Oloru with her. A wine server approached them sullenly. “Wine, young . . . sir?” he asked Sovaz.
“The wine here,” said Oloru melodiously, and loudly, “is fit only as a purgative for pigs.”
“True,” said the server. “But do you wish it or not?”
“However,” continued Oloru, more loudly still, “there is logic to that. Since all these slobbering swine in here seem due a spewing.”
This caused some reaction throughout the room. The server backed away and scurried out of an inner door.
“Who calls me slobbering swine?” demanded a burly villain.
“Not I,” said Oloru, with winning grace. “I doubt I should dare. But someone more truthful than I is sure to have done it.”
And standing up again he drew from his sleeve the lyre, and strummed it lightly.
“Lovesome pig,
Bold and big,
All the poets will vie
In creating a shy
Little ode, by and by,
To your charms in the sty—
So be patient, since I
Think it wrong
To make song
To a pig.”
Drawing out a notched cleaver, the subject of this fancy now rolled from his table toward Oloru, who, naturally, shrank away.
It was Sovaz who stepped between them and said: