by Tanith Lee
When the first moon of Az-Nennafir’s night flew upward from the east, and the first dance of the first stars began across the sky, the stone lay still, white and grave, among the crowns of the purple rush iris.
And the water sipped and lipped the pillar. The water said: Taste, drink of me, hard desert thing. Be wet as never before. The river can dissolve, in time, almost anything. I will lick you away, and you will become water, too. Taste and drink, as you are tasted and drunk. Soak up the river’s wine as it melts you. I am full of death and life. I carry the magic of this metropolis like an artery. I know black caverns where neither the sun nor the moon ever shine, but they are light as day to those that dwell there. And I know lairs of weed where little creatures swim about that are like tiny lions and horses and cattle, but with fishtails, and where there are tall shells that scuttle on fringed spider legs. And I know where the crocodiles go to die, and their bones have made a temple of calcium, but their eyes only crystallize and become lamps of pale green topaz. And I flow in and out of everything that pauses or that passes here, through its very body, and so learn all its secrets. Flowers grow far down that no man has ever looked on, not even Azhriaz the Goddess has looked at them. They have no color, here, but if they were brought up into the light, they would be found to have a color never seen before on the earth. And there is a place where there exists an invisible race of insects, who build complex cities of their own in the slime. And there is a forest of dead women’s hair, where ferns grow that sing in female voices. Ah, then, said the river to the pillar of stone, when you become one with me, we will travel together and all these things you will see and know. But it may take a short while, a few hundred years. Be patient. Taste and drink. Soak up the river’s wine. . . .
High as sky, the temple-palace on the river bank in Az-Nennafir of the Goddess. Few have entered it, and of those that have, fewer come away, to tell. Yet the moonlight of seven moons falls now in through the painted and stained windows. What does the moonlight see?
The outer precinct is a hall of jewels. Every gemstone of the earth is represented in it. There are columns built of butter-yellow beryls and beryls yellow as a cat’s eyes, or greenish as the eyes of crocodiles. And there are columns of crimson faceted corundum and polished corundum of dragon-red. There are blue columns also, of transparent aquamarine, that seem to hang suspended, and jade and emerald columns that seem to grow like trees or spouting waves frozen in viridescent ice. The walls have scenes depicted on them, made all of these jewels, and others, and the floors are a jeweled mosaic. The ceiling has seven carbuncles in it larger than cartwheels, of bloodiest green and most astringent violet . . . The moonlight spins and grows giddy and hastens through a half-open door into an inner precinct, which is of gold.
There is a carpet in this room, on a floor of gold so malleable it is runneled and pitted like mud. The carpet is made of the wool of golden sheep, so it is said. Golden swords, each the stature of three brawny men upon each other’s shoulders, uphold a canopy of golden disks. Gold, gold—the eyes are numbed and see all things golden. Even the candles are gold in golden sconces, and burn with a sheer gold flame. The moonlight flees through a lattice of gold lace, into a room of silver.
Aloft, a silver web. Beneath, the floor is a pool—of fluid silver, boiling and bubbling. Silver bridges cross the silver pool, but the moonlight falls in love with the silver room and falls fainting with desire into the molten liquid.
Imagination, or hearsay, must go on alone.
Up a stair of silver flanked by silver gryphons, to a silver door with a silver keyhole, and through that into a room which is crystal. Part milky the walls, and part lucid. You may look up into the sky—so close, for all the while, the enormous rooms have subtly ascended. Stars dance on the roof of this one, twirling their skirts of tinsel. In crystal columns, which are slim as a girl’s arm, crystal water seems to play, and sometimes fish—that have no visible bodies, only crystalline spines and little crystalline skulls and bright, bright eyes—flit about there.
Beyond and above the crystal room lies a room hollowed from a single pearl. Heaven alone knows (if it bothers) what monstrous oyster could have been afflicted by what horrific boulder of grit to produce a result so large. Smooth, the pearl room, and slightly flushed, but with no furnishings, save another long stair—each step of which is, too, a single pearl, but, of course, infinitely smaller. The stair ends at a pearl-crusted door; these pearls are only the size of hand mirrors. The door is firmly shut, and will not yield to pressure, to a demanding cry or to a courteous knock.
So far, there have been glimpsed no attendants. Sometimes priests may be found on the outer stair of this sacred house, but they do not enter even the room of jewels, though they have spied it. In the temple-palace, hordes of human slaves of all the peoples of the conquered world-third may be supposed to come and go. Yet, in this succession of chambers at least, they have left no evidence.
Nevertheless, by the door of pearl, something waits. It is not to be looked on, has no form, makes no sound, gives off no odor. But it is there. A guardian. And by night, surely other things come to pass within the door of pearl?
They say she has supernatural handmaidens and pages more beautiful than any mortal. Gorgeous, as she is, and with black hair, though they do not have her eyes. They tend her only after sunfall, being children of the night.
But by day or by night, oh what splendors must manifest inside that inaccessible room—
The room within the jewels, the gold, the silver, the crystal, the pearl—was bare. It was built of nothing important, it would seem to be constructed of wattle, and the floor was wood. Fat candles burned prosaically on iron spikes. There was a window half a mile up from the ground, that saw only sky, but the wooden shutters were fastened by iron bolts, and the sky, also, was shut out.
A girl of seventeen years sat on the floor, drawing on the wood, with a wand of ocher, strange symbols. She wore a gown of vermilion velvet, as if she were cold in the hot night. Her black hair made her veil and diadem both. Her eyes were sapphires; she had no other jewel that was to be seen: Her beauty was enough.
Three and thirty years—at the very least—she has ruled a third of the earth. And she is seventeen still, the immortal Goddess Azhriaz.
Azhriaz finished her work with the wand of ocher, and taking up instead a wand of brass, she struck the near edge of the drawn symbols three times.
Smolder burst there.
In the smolder stood a man of brass, with brazen hair and batlike wings. His feet were the claws of an eagle and he had one eye only, set at the center of his forehead.
“I am here,” said he.
“Speak,” said she.
“There is nothing new,” said the brass man. “I have searched about and looked diligently and long. Cities burn and men die, as ever. And, as ever, they call out your name and worship you.”
“Go,” said Azhriaz.
And the smolder perished and the brass man with it, draining down into the floor.
Then Azhriaz took a wand of leprous turquoise and struck the symbols three times with that.
And a second smolder shot out, but more like water than smoke.
There was a bluish man-being, with two alligator tails for legs, and he was horned like the young moon.
“I am here,” he said.
“Speak,” she said.
“There is nothing new,” said the bluish man. “I have searched about and listened and pried. Harvests are reaped, of corn and flesh. And men sing always hymns to the Goddess.”
“Go,” said the Goddess.
And he went.
Then she took a wand of ivory and smote with that.
Steam blustered.
A white horse with the head of a woman cavorted in the drawing.
“Here I am,” said she.
“Speak,” said Azhriaz.
“There is nothing new,” said the woman-headed horse.
“Go,” said Azhriaz—
—
And the apparition went.
Then Azhriaz the Goddess took a rosebud, a bud of Az-Nennafir, large as a caldron, and threw it among the symbols. There came at once the slow explosion of a rose, the bud unfolding, the flower like a flaming torch, blooming, full-blown, stretched on its veins like a sunshade—till the layers of it shattered.
And from the heart of the rose there stole a coil of rose-red incense.
From behind the incense appeared a beautiful maiden child, clad only in saffron hair, but her eyes were the heads of two snakes.
“Am I here?” asked the child with her rosy mouth. “You are,” said Azhriaz. “Now tell me of my love.”
“Oh,” said the child, “your love. I have seen him fleeing over hills when none ran after. I have seen him screaming at the heat of the moon and lying parched under the sun to be cool. I have seen him pluck thorns and dress and garland himself in them till his blood made streams on the ground. I have seen him eat poison and vomit it forth. I have seen him squealing and hopping through the years, and men curse him and shun him and fling stones and blades. And after the sun goes down, sometimes some come to him like slender dark shadows, and tease and torture him, setting the night flowers to sting him and the forest hares to bite him. And later these shadow ones spit in his face, and their spit is like a holy blue flame.”
“I would spit upon him, too,” said Azhriaz, but she held her side as if a knife cut into her. “And does he remember ever that he is a prince?”
“Yes. Then he is worse. Then he makes himself crowns of rusty nails.”
“And does he ever remember the lovers Oloru and Sovaz?”
“No. Once he passed two lovers in a field, a man and a girl, he fair, and she raven-headed. But they started up in fear of him. Then he only climbed a tree and tore the leaves with his teeth, laughing. He does not remember Oloru. He forgets Sovaz.”
“Go,” said the Witch-Goddess.
But the child lingered.
“Give me a night of time to wander the world,” said the child with snakes for eyes.
“I will give you nothing. Go, or I will blast you, and with those powers you know I have.”
“Yes, you are very powerful, exalted mistress. But give me only then one half of the night to wander, for I am weary of that region wherefrom you summon me. I watch mad Prince Madness at your bidding, and I glimpse the world and I long to enter the world with all my essence, not merely with that little wraith of me that is your servant.”
“I am pitiless,” said Azhriaz. “Have you not heard of it? I am pitiless even to the pitiless. You shall have no night and no half night in the world.”
“Give me then but one hour, Mistress of Madness and Delirium, and I will lead you to a spot downriver where lies a white stone from a desert that the rushes have captured fast. And the stone shall charm you, for it holds the dream of one who once spoke aloud a curse against the Prince of Demons.”
Azhriaz lifted her head. Her face was a dagger. She said, carefully, “Azhrarn, Lord Wickedness, is my peerless father, and I his obedient heir.”
The child shrank at the voice of Azhriaz and at her look, but still the child said, “I heard the river singing. The river sang as it caressed the stone. I only tell the truth.” Azhriaz rose. She stood and gazed upon the child, who said plaintively, “Give me an hour in the world, and I will guide you.”
“I need no guide,” said Azhriaz, and she clapped her hands.
At once the ocher markings on the floor blew in the air and the child with snakes for eyes was caught up by them and dashed away, back into the psychic junkyard from which she had been sprung.
Azhriaz stood alone in the bare room high in the sky. In her look were thirty-three years at least of arrogant dominion, of the sea-waves of war and encompassing unkindness, and of an unremitting chastity. Demon women had no wombs. The womb of Azhriaz, also a mortal woman’s daughter, was now a closed dumb winter fruit of ice. She had taken to herself mage-craft, battles, an empire, but no lover, since Chuz.
Yet she was seventeen years still, as on the eve of their parting. And still she was a weeping child, within the sparkling jewel of sorcerous might.
She glanced at the shutters and they clashed wide. Azhriaz took on the form of a somber moth—she was long since accustomed to such changes.
Between the mountainous peaks of the City she beat her way, past the stupendous colored windows with bold lights behind, and the darkened panes that reflected back the moons. To such calumnies as were practiced all about, she paid no heed, as she paid no heed to the suicides and butcheries perpetrated in her name, and seemingly at her instruction.
Her parchment wings were strong, but presently she settled on the water of the river, a black swan with one hyacinthine ring of plumage at her throat.
In this guise, she caught the strand of the river’s song which pertained to the pillar of stone.
She followed then that strand, and came to the net of the rush iris.
One by one, the moons were going down in the west, and they lit bright pathways on the river. In the shadows the iris crowns showed black as the swan herself, but the stone was pallid.
Azhriaz moved up along the length of it, until she reached the curving blackened blemish. Here she felt the pulse of something pounding slowly and insistently on and on.
It is a heart, the heart of Azhriaz informed her.
The sorcerously embued water, washing the pillarbone, stony dry so long, had already worked magic on it. There had come about a loosening, the rock letting go what lay in it—or what lay there letting go the stone of its hiding place.
Like an insect prisoned in white amber, the being in the stone. Yet alive, in certain ways, since unable so far to be dead.
And there was the scent of a madness grown luminous and calm through its brush with eternity.
The swan came close and touched the eye of the stone with her nacre beak.
There was neither crack nor crumbling. There was a sigh. In the water a further darkness flowed like blood. A cavity showed in the white, and the stone, losing balance, turned over.
It lay face down among the irises, and then, its buoyancy and its soul quite gone from it, mourned by a storm of bubbles, the pillar dropped down and down to the river’s floor.
And the last of the sinking moons was able to describe, adrift in the rushes’ net and three handspans underwater, the naked body of a man, white as the stone, but for the black hair flowering at his loins and pillowing his head and shoulders.
His eyes were shut. The lids of them said, Do not waken me, clear as if it had been printed there. The lips were firm; the nostrils waxed and waned, breathing the water with no trouble.
He had known the depths of water before, and perhaps recalled it. But he did not stir.
And the last moon fell, and when it had fallen, Azhriaz took her own form, and stood in the dark on the river.
There was a desert place, where even the powders and the dusts had ground away to nothing. This was the site he had chosen for his exile.
He had climbed one of its pillars of stone, and entered a fracture there. He sat down on the bone floor and he bowed his head, and so he stayed for many years.
By day the sun beat in at him, by night the blue winds. He ate only what came to him, which was the air; he drank the dew, the infrequent rain. He lived because deprivation could not kill him, any more than a spear or a sea or a flame. But he became a blackened wire and his beauty left him.
Men visited him, and birds of prey. Both stubbed their intentions on the walls of his invulnerability and despair. Death came to him only in sleep, those fearsome sleeps the Lord Uhlume had granted him in return for erstwhile service—slumber like a tomb. And this way of sleeping wiped his brain clean of everything at last. Even guilt and anguish and agony of mind were gradually spent, and almost forgotten.
Then one night demons came to taunt and seduce the hermit in the fractured stone. And in their vicious play, perhaps only by accident, he discovered a curious
redemption from blame. The splinter of steel he had driven in through his invulnerable heart was, he discovered, only a nightmare. Where he had spread venom, gardens flourished. His curse became a blessing.
Then he wept. He wept away the final vestige of himself. And when that ended, he curled himself within the stone. The blackness of the deeds he had done sealed him round, but it was charred and vitrified, with all the energy gone out of it, though it lay heavy on him as most rubble does.
Invulnerable, stone-dead, he lived, lived on, while the hurricanes of centuries blew by.
Till they hacked down the pillar and brought it to Az-Nennafir, and a boy dreamed Dunizel came and told him to cut that one stone free, and the stone rolled into the river and among the rushes. And so lay there until Azhriaz came upon it.
The boy who dreamed had not known the legends. But Dunizel, the priestess of Bhelsheved, had known esoteric lore, and most myths, both veritable and false, and she had related stories to her child in the womb. Azhriaz was schooled.
Azhriaz stood on the river now, like a tall lily. She wore after all one jewel—a square of amethyst inside a little silver cage, fastened on a hair-fine silver chain. It reposed and warmed between her breasts, but now she had plucked it out, and held the jewel to her lips, as if she kissed or requested council. Then she let go the jewel again and the velvet covered it.
“You may sleep no longer,” she said to the pale, dark man under the surface of the river. “That is over.”
The closed lids of the eyes said to her: What is over? I may sleep for ever. I am unknown.
“You breathe the water,” she said. “Any peasant who ever heard the tale, would know you. You are the one made a pact with the people of the sea, and broke the pact, but not before you had learned their magic.”
Then his eyelids raised themselves.
They had been once but were no more the sky-reflecting color of the oasis, those eyes. Now, they were black.