by Tanith Lee
For the fish-ship, it too rocked, its great speed slowed, it slewed, it bucked and rolled and went hugely toppling downward through those deaf deeps of the waters.
5
HAVING walked many months and miles, Dathanja, black of hair and eye, and clothed in black, and barefoot, reached a land of woods and waterfalls and valleys. He had, as he went by, seen the periphery landscapes of the Goddessdom. Various highly tinted deserts equipped with smashing meteors, a selection of seas with bridges over them, plains of intoxicant grass—such as these had met his gaze. The altars too he looked at, and the delirious worshipers. He heard the ceaselessly repeated philosophy of the uncaring gods, just as in the City. He did not deny it. Memory, fragmentary and transparent as a painting on broken glass, informed Dathanja of old rites and prayers—which had brought only disillusion and grief. It was another life. He did not dwell upon it, though inevitably it tutored and guided him.
In due course he moved beyond the boundaries of that domain. Then there began to be, at long last, only the usual anomalies of human thought and religion. And thereafter, more primitive ground, lonely of mankind.
Eastward. The dawns out-combed their yellow hair. The sunsets hurried. The earth had a youth about it. It cleansed Dathanja’s soul, or so it seemed to him. He had not often tasted calm—a serenity that was not embittered loss of feeling, numbness passing for peace. What secret lay behind this cool and quiet state? So, he reached the land of watered, wooded valleys.
Between one valley and the next, on the hillside, at the mouth of a waterfall, there stood an ancient shrine. It was not devoted to any particular god, nor, perhaps, to the gods at all. None tended it. Trees and shrubs rooted in its court. Birds housed and discoursed in the roof. The hurrying sunset had commenced and slid down the waterfall in its haste to be away.
Dathanja entered the court, and seated himself on the ground to eat a feast of gathered roots and fruit. He had been a wanderer in the former life. He had had no need to prepare himself for this journey. To some, the habit of itinerance is ordinary.
The dusk came, the night came after. Stars unfastened windows in the sky and began their watch of the earth.
On a paving stone, Dathanja built and kindled a fire. He, who had been a mighty magician once, and would bring the elements at a snap of his ringed fingers. He who might have produced a palace from the hill.
As the flames played together, Dathanja beheld a woman standing the other side of the light. He took her, firstly, for Azhriaz, who had met him at irregular intervals on his trek, a thing so astonishingly fair he did not find her beautiful. (She was a demon, too, and of all the races he distrusted their kind the most.)
However, this was not Azhriaz, either in disguised person or projected form. This was a human girl, humanly fair, so he recognized as much.
“Do you see me, Dathanja?” she superfluously asked him.
“I see you,” he said.
She had the later summer’s hue; roses, malt. Behind her was another, taller, and a man, who said, “And do you see me, Dathanja?”
“I do,” he said.
The man came from the shadow. He had the hue of kingship; metals and dyes. Behind him—
“And that one also,” Dathanja said. “I see him.”
But the third was wrapped in the dark, and he had no hue and did not speak.
“Which of us is to begin?” inquired the summery girl of the kingly man.
“I,” he said. And she stepped away. “It is not,” she muttered in her hair, “always so.”
But the tall man moved to the fire and beckoned Dathanja. “You must come with me,” he said. And Dathanja must.
They were high up then, above the shrine, and the fire looked tiny as a sequin.
“Ah, Dathanja,” said the kingly one, mockingly affectionate. “You have disappointed me.” And he seemed many men at once. He was sometimes like a priest in costly yellow robes, and sometimes like an azure-bearded king. Or sometimes he was demoniac, and took on a Vazdru air. Or else he resembled Dathanja himself, save his features were rather altered and his eyes were blue, or green. But whatever or whoever he might be, he came to rest on a ridge and Dathanja with him. “Such power was yours, beloved,” said the kingly one, coaxingly. “Do you not recall? Emperors went in fear of you. The very oceans did your bidding. Do this! you told them: It was done. And your sorcery is still spoken of. Your unspeakable cruelties, your mighty deeds. Ah, do you not even recall a mite of it?”
“Yes,” said Dathanja, in a low, clear voice. “I do recall.”
“Acquiesce,” said the man. “I will give all back to you. You shall be again Zhirek the Dark Magician, and rule men, and make a new legend.”
And at this, the kingly changeable one unrolled the night like parchment, and there lay—illusion or truth—the kingdoms of the world, its seas. And men kneeled to Zhirek, or to Dathanja. And sorcery came like a perfumed wind, and cloaked him round. He might do anything. His brain took flight with the sciences he had once kept like his dogs.
“Acquiesce,” the kingly one repeated. And he was now most like Zhirek. He was Zhirek, and he cajoled Zhirek. “Take your glory back again. Be again a mage and a lord, so that every footstep of yours is written of.”
Dathanja looked at the illusions or realities of his earlier life, and of his proposed future, and a terrible pang, like pain or pleasure, cut through his heart. Before it faded.
“No,” said Dathanja.
“Ah, beloved,” said the tempter. “Do you reject this summit because it is a sin?”
“Is it a sin?” said Dathanja. “I only know that this I have done. It is past.”
“And you will walk powerless in the world, the butt of every accident, at the mercy of men? You?”
“I am at no man’s mercy save my own,” Dathanja said. “My apologies I offer you, for you do not tempt me with this.”
The man shrugged and he laughed, and he was gone. Dathanja sat before the fire in the courtyard.
“Which of us, now?” inquired the girl, of that figure still wrapped in obscurity. He did not reply. “Then it is to be me,” she said.
She moved to Dathanja’s fire, and when she was near, the glow of it was netted in her hair, wetted her bangles, and soaked her thin garment so all the shape of her was to be seen, and she was well made.
“Ah, beloved,” said she. And he was in the fire with her.
Like a drum the night pounded, red and bright, black and red. Sometimes her hair was of a watery sheen, sometimes an apricot shade, she was a sea-princess, she was a girl who danced with unicorns. And sometimes she was a youth, her breasts flattened to hard pectorals under his hands, her loins upflowering where a full-fleshed anemone had closed him round. They writhed upon the bed of fire, and her hair streamed out along the earth. Her limbs clasped him, fierce as a lioness, yet her fingers came and went as soft and slight as grass. Her waist made motions like a snake, her mare’s pelvis galloped. They plunged together through the fire into another fire beneath. The stars were whirling through his brain, and at her core a silver star tipped now the spear he rode upon. And into him in turn the silver sped, and quickened in a shivering wire, along the thrusting of the lance, through the taut shield of the belly and the striving groin, to the sacrum, where the atom of eternity lay buried in the spine. And he held her fast, though now she sobbed aloud and struggled and was transformed—to beast, to sprite, to conflagration and to waterfall. He held her by her snake’s waist, by her thrashing limbs, drowned in her mouth and carried upward on the curved wave of her abdomen and her breasts flowered upon their flowers—riding the winged horse of lust, blinded, slain, born, disemboweled by ecstasies, until the silver probe pierced the atom of eternity itself, and the water of life was flung forth.
The winged spasm fell through the dark and shook Dathanja from its back. He lay beside the fire.
“You have betrayed yourself. You have shown weakness and need. Your soul lay naked as you suffered the fit of pleasure. You have
sinned.” This is what the girl said, out of the dark.
But it was Dathanja who laughed now. “That” he said, “is not a sin.” And turning his shoulder to the fire, and the still-waiting, still-unseen, third figure (for the tall man and the summer girl were gone), smiling, Dathanja slept.
Yet, in the hour before the dawn, Dathanja roused, and sitting up, beheld the third figure seated across from him, by the ashes of the fire, against the starless sky.
Robed and hooded in white, handsome black-skinned Death, the Lord Uhlume, regarding the mortal man with immortal opal eyes.
“You must forgive me,” said Dathanja after a while, “if I say that all this I believe to be a delusion. Fantasies sent to aggravate or dissect me, by another, or conceivably by my own self. And this being so, you also, lord king, are a figment of my mind. It seems to me Uhlume, who was kind to me in his own way once, and once my master, would not put himself to the bother of this visit.”
The vision of Death—Dathanja was correct—responded.
“It may be you are wise. Nevertheless, I am your third and last tempter, and as such, I have validity and you must listen.” (And Dathanja must.) “You have lived out your years of invulnerability, that blessing-curse awarded you by witchcraft long ago. Like everything of the earth, sorcery decays, or it is altered. Centuries have passed, and you have slumbered, and you have woken, and you are not as you were. It is the residue of your own lost magery that keeps you currently from harm. While you consign yourself to safety, safe you will be. But the armoring enchantment was sloughed within the pillar of stone. Should you desire otherwise, Dathanja, than for comfort, now you may be harried and hurt. Now, if you choose, you may die.”
Then Dathanja sat in silence, looking into the face of Death, or of Death’s image. At length Dathanja said, “Can it be so?”
“A dozen means of proof lie all about,” said ‘Death.’
Dathanja considered. Zhirek, a world of time before, had searched a valley for slicing stones, had drunk from the morbific water of it, had sought to hang himself on its tree and to throw himself down from its overleaning height. To no avail. Now, Dathanja reached out one hand, and taking up a raw flint from the courtyard, he stuck it in his arm. And the flint wounded him. His blood flowed crimson. “I am glad of it,” he said. And he closed his eyes, and the calm within him seemed to flow outward with the blood, to surround him, and to comfort him, as the barrier of invulnerability had not. “Then,” said Dathanja, “the last temptation is certainly to die. And it is a cunning one. But, Death, I have learned. Men, too, are as immortal as the gods, and as invulnerable as Zhirek, who was dipped in the well of flame. And therefore it does not distress me to remain alive a little longer. For he that I was fled wickedness and did good only out of fear, and then fear overwhelmed him and he did only wickedness. My debts are many, but wickedness has no more sway over me. I have used it up. I am not, therefore, afraid to live.” And opening his eyes, Dathanja saw that Death too—or death—had left him, and the long and passionate dawn began.
Going out of the shrine, Dathanja went to the waterfall, and cupping his hands, he caught the water and drank. Presently a deer approached with her faun, and he offered them the water, and they too drank from his hands. The faun allowed him to smooth its dappled head. Untroubled, the mother ate the moss that grew on the rock. And Dathanja remembered Simmu, youth and maiden, calling the deer and the hares to race with him, communing with birds and serpents.
But Simmu was no more, and Zhirek, the invulnerable sorcerer, was no more. It was Dathanja who soon strode away into the morning.
6
DARKNESS had its abode in the depths of the sea. Nor did it dwell alone there. These uterine cellars teemed with life, yet it was a life that existed lightlessly for the most part, and when light came upon it, the stranger was unwelcome.
Light rays entered the upper floors of the great trench in a gentle blush. There came a swirling and lashing, as of a legion of whips, and larger entities, like huge black ghosts, blundered softly away. But the light sharpened. It would not be held back, or avoided. It pushed through the water and the dark, and suddenly the sea deeps burst to visibility. A forest lay along the top tiers of the trench. It was composed of a million tendrils, oil-black. And in the forest perched fish nests of flaxen floss, and their makers—finnily sprinting to conceal themselves—were each like a rainbow prism. The huge things which had already careered into flight, they were enormous slothful sacks of billowing skin, and where the light sluiced over their bodies, they glimmered acid-blue and bronze. Farther down the steps of the trench the illumination, striking like a bell, showed beds of oceanic flowers, hot coral and rose, chill melon-pale or sour melanic green, all slamming their portals in dismay, and here or there on them a slim startled creature like a gold-leaf worm, bolting a last morsel of grazing before it dashed from view.
Behind the light and the upheaval, a monster swam.
It seemed most like a whale, of giant proportions. Smooth as a silken egg, and, seen by its own corona, of a sea-washed silver. The mouth of the whale gaped slowly as it swallowed the water. Everything was sucked in, helplessly—fish, fish nests, loosened tendrils, grazing worms, and straying flowers. Yet, from the stem of the giant, a crystalline defecation almost spontaneously shot them all forth again in a tremendous gush. What tales these animalcules might hasten home to tell. How they had been eaten by a whale, flailed through its guts, and emerged unscathed once more into the mothering ocean. The whale, meanwhile, never ceased to ingest the sea, and to expel the sea in drafts of purest flatulence.
Above the maw of it, two eyes beamed wide, both round and bright, but one only with a black vertical pupil in it.
So the unconscionable thing went on, staring and causing affright and picaresque heroics along the trench.
Now and then its one vertical pupil moved, and even crossed from one eye into the other. Azhriaz (the pupil) looked out upon the water world which the lamps of her ship revealed to her.
When the blast of annihilation rocked the ship and plunged it downward into these deeps, she was stunned, her brain, like the ship, whirling. Then she had called on Chuz inadvertently, and even once almost cried out a word which had no meaning for her (which word was “Father”). Soon enough the deep-sea ark steadied. Then the Goddess arose from the bottom of it and shook off her feebleness.
She would not consider her City, wiped like dirt from the earth by an angel rag. She would not consider how she rode under the waves. She stood before the casement eye of the fish-whale-ship and frowned upon submarine marvels. Nor would she consider these. She was alone. She was a Goddess. This was the sea. Well, well.
The craft progressed, when not by means of preset mantras, through an engine in its entrails, Drin-built, which gasped in fluid and expelled it, so making for a tireless forward propulsion. Within the hub was a palatial suite, to which the Drin had pretentiously added examples of their finest or most obtuse smithery. This included, ringed about the main chamber, a series of grotesque silver heads. Like the whale, these breathed. And by breathing, gulped away the stale air, puffed out, suitably scented, the reviving gases of the dry land.
Whatever the submarine sailor wished, she had only to demand it. A quantity of genies seemed to have been hammered in with the rivets. Should she need a sumptuous repast, music, one more satin pillow for her couch, these attendants supplied the item. They additionally guided the vessel and maintained it. Azhriaz was asked to do nothing, either with her magic or her wits. Sometimes, her new servants might be glimpsed: tinted wisps, bodiless spirals of smoke, protruding delicate hands, or half-seen childish faces. Whatever were they? Efflorescences of Vazdru science, or the uncouth Drindra in the process of refinement—it was not to be guessed.
The sea had its own masters. . . . Fate had warned her, if she had even needed such a hint. Though she had cast illusion on it once, now she was the ocean’s uninvited guest.
“Why,” said Azhriaz imperiously, to her part-se
en servitors, “do these depths have color? They are always in the dark.”
A genie flittered forth.
“O Mistress,” said it, “the sea-folk are magicians. They came beneath millennia since and learned to prosper here, after a spat with the gods. It was they, then, who made the vegetation colorful.”
“Again, why?”
“Because the sea peoples value lights. They go about with them, and then they can admire the colors, which they enticed for this purpose.”
When she slept, after her questionings, banquets, on silk and satin, she dreamed of cities flattened and the death of men. Not Vazdru dreams, not artistic. She woke screaming. She called the genies and had music, or stood in the eyes of her ship, regarding the water, and put sleep from her like a faithless friend.
They say she traveled in the sea for a month or a year.
The oceanic trench continued for a time. It was a sort of valley of the region, and mountains soared above and beyond it, cliffs of aqueous purple granites, out of whose steep caves weird fish-mammals peered, and mooed at the ship, unheard. The crests of these stupendous mountains, thousands of feet overhead, might break the sea as little islands.
The ship had turned already eastward, as much as the valley permitted. Azhriaz had not given any direction, but the earlier ship of oars and sail had been bound on an easterly voyage; its spirit, held in this one, bore the impress still, and the genie crew humored the motive. Eventually the floor of the valley-trench sloped upward. The ship accordingly ascended.
Between the shadowy heights appeared, then, a cup of glowing water, into which the ship propelled itself. Azhriaz, in the whale’s sinister eye, presently saw she had come upon a city of the sea peoples.
There were many of these, and most of them different. This one lay in a honeycomb of grape-green sunlight, that seemed to spill straight down through the thick tons of ocean aloft. It was a black and iridescent city, very tall, with enormous arches and apertures set stories up. Black shapes that might be sharks hovered in its “skies,” and here and there some chariot or other conveyance sparkled as it soared across the aqueducts.