by Tanith Lee
“Go back to them, then,” said Azhriaz. “I will let you.”
“Permit me to stay,” said Tavir, gazing at her. “I am an outcast now. Permit me to stay, for your loveliness is some solace to me. But permit me also to grieve.”
“To you I am ugly,” said Azhriaz. “As you are, in my eyes.”
“This I do not credit,” said Tavir. “For all the while I told you of my dream, you looked at me with excessive attention. And for yourself, any man not sightless would acclaim you.”
“But you are grieving,” said Azhriaz. And seating herself beside him she found an interest in an earring of his, which was green agate. So interested in it indeed did she become, she took the earring into her mouth, and so, too, the smooth dark lobe of his ear, and with her teeth she measured all the balance of it, how the earring was made, and next how the ear was made, and how they fit one into the other, and with her tongue she described for herself the ear, so finely channeled like some black shell, even with a pure black sea cave in it—and against her eyes lay his sea-green hair so she might think she lay upon a bank of fresh green grass, spiced with the spring of earth. And as she did these things, her hands found out his throat, which was like a column of black marble, but with a heart-sound drumming in it, and wide shoulders and strong arms the same, warm marble, and hands which caught at her hands, and letting them go, encircled her. And the hands of each moved upon the other then, as if they both would form the other out of water, or from clay.
Then they lay down together, firstly he black upon her whiteness and in turn upon the blackness of her hair, but in a while, she lay above him, pearl above jet above jade. Then sometimes he was a black bow upon a white bow reflected beneath him, or she a white moon’s crescent over the black crescent of a night-time world.
Now he had been an immortal, or thought so, and was at least a mage. But she was solar comet and midnight, and a demon, her only lover a Lord of Darkness, and for all her chasteness, she was Vazdru, and the Vazdru had invented love.
In the first phase of his pleasure, it seemed to Tavir that he rode a chariot of flame toward a gate of flame, but passing through the gate, he became fire itself, and yet rode on. And now he was winged, and he flew across the sky. He was the winged sun, and he held the earth in his arms, and that was the second phase of his pleasure, but the earth kissed him with perfumed lips, and drew him down by her silver hands. He plunged, and was a levinbolt, he was a sword that clove a city to its core, and his hair blew backward in the whirlwind’s rush and his winged body blew from him—he cried out in an agony of joy and drove to the earth’s center, the third gate, to die there—but did not die, nor was the flight ended.
Then, he held her still, by an effort of his brain, and he gasped upon that pinnacle, forgetting everything, even to his name, his nation, his sorcery. “Truly,” he said, “you are a goddess,” but he spoke only with his mind, for he had no breath for words upon that height. “This chase you lead me is for gods, not men. Let me fall, Azhriaz.”
“Not yet,” she said, and her eyes were cruel with love, all the earth’s skies in them, and her hands moved on him, and at each touch each inch of skin, each bone, became a living separate thing which followed her in frenzy, and he could not remain.
So they traveled, and clung together, and wept, as in the terror of the city’s death. And they were in ocean and in air, in the heart of the world, and the womb of fire, and deeper yet they passaged on, and going in at a fourth gate, and a fifth, and through a sixth, it came to Tavir that he was no longer anything, but All, earth, sky, sea, the sun, the moon, the day, the dark, love and death and quietude and war, innocence and erudition, immortal, finite, damned, forgiven, and delivered. And far away he heard his own cries flying under him like wild birds, and far above he felt his shadow smite the golden roof of his brain—but between, his soul flung free.
Thus to the seventh gate they came and through the gate they sped, locked and silent now, and scarcely moving in the body, while all else shimmered and spun, faster and more fast.
Tavir, Tavir no more, felt that his heart had ceased to beat, the clockwork of his flesh had stopped. And even Azhriaz was gone from him, or had become for him not only All and Everything, but Nothing, beautiful and utter.
Then came the eighth gate, and in the gateway he was stayed. Before him and within him boiled the total dissolution of all worlds, all space and time. He would no longer resist, yet he was reined, chained, anchored there. He yearned and strove to burst into a million shards, into stars and suns, into new worlds, a cosmos, the last scream of ecstasy, which none would hear, half formed upon his lips—but yet, but yet, the fetters would not let him go.
Then came a gentle murmur within him, a caress far lighter than a leaf. And he was still once more, ceased to travel, to strive, and only waited. And from infinity, unsought, the ninth gate itself came upon him, rushing through space, like a wave which breaks, and he broke, shattered, and the universe was born of him.
Senseless, wrung and cleansed, he lay in the arms of Azhriaz and did not know he lived, and was only a man and a mage. Nor did he grieve any longer for anything.
But Azhriaz lay quietly, and perhaps she did grieve. For to the demons, who imparted such pleasure, pleasure had not the value of the shock it rendered mortal fiber. It could not stun them, nor surprise. And so it was for them a little less.
So she lay with her lover, thinking well of him. But her tears fell again, with none now to comfort her.
The fish-whale-ship dazzled on, having nowhere else to go but drowned Simmurad, one more city that had been cast down.
Through sea and time the vessel ran, quick as thought, or only quick as a great fish-mammal breathing in and out. And often now its glowing eyes had each a watching pupil, Tavir being one, Azhriaz the other. Or else the pupils were away, practicing the arts of love—not only in the demon climacteric, but in various delightful human forms. (And the first terrible grandeur was never quite repeated; such things seldom are, since after the first all must be compared to that first, and besides, as is sometimes the way of the most accomplished lovers, Azhriaz was thereafter more and more easily bored with ecstasy.) And they discussed and debated, too, and played games of learning. And they squabbled. All of which was of interest to them.
The genies meanwhile flitted about and saw to the luxurious rudiments of living.
And beyond the skin of the ship lay the sea, always.
But the sea they now went through, Azhriaz and Tavir, began to have an emptiness, not merely of fish and aquatic beasts, but of all robust things. Huge forests of weed and coral grew there, it is true, massive flowers bloomed, the currents ran, but each with a kind of deadness. And where they might glimpse a fish, it shone like a tinder, and all the rest seemed flat and cold against the slight ignition.
It had lain in the farthest east, Simmurad, and lay there yet, at the world’s dawn corner.
“Will the vengeance of heaven seek me even there?” Azhriaz asked her sleeping lover. “And does Dathanja wander the sunken streets under the water, looking at what Zhirek did for Death?”
“O Mistress, tomorrow, when the sun above rises, we shall come to Simmurad.” So the genies announced, in concert, journey’s end.
Simmurad, once the red rose, cameoed from crimson rock and white mountainside. Simmurad, an anemone now, bottled in brine.
They came to it in the sea-dawn, sea-dyed morning that had been rose-dyed when the city stood on land. Yet it was most often dawn here, even now, the prolonged sunrise of the easternmost edge.
The demon ship entered the city slowly, barely breathing, eyes wide and both attentively pupiled.
The gates of brass had long ago come down. But in any event, traffic might advance over the walls, as the tide had done. The high towers, and the higher mountains, the ocean covered all their heads. And the vast plazas and the terraced walks, the parks where ever-living deer and leopards had sported, they were no more than bowls of water. Not only everlasting imm
ortality, but mere life had gone from Simmurad. Its proper colors had been washed out, so the glimmer of outer sun, or even the lamps of the ship, did not wake them. And the stone itself, endlessly mouthed by the water, had worn away. Not a monument or a carving was distinguishable. The pristine columns and spires, they were like melted candles.
From a mass of kelp and primeval fern, an unburnished dome or two stubbed forth. By a matted doorway was the stump of an obelisk. Centuries before, there had been letters in this pylon. A message was, after some pains, still to be discovered there. It read:
I AM SIMMURAD.
HEREIN FOREVER, DUST.
“Is it always so,” asked Azhriaz, “that men must be ridiculed by their own legends?”
Tavir stared silently.
Azhriaz said, “This wonder is finished, and we shame it to gaze on it. We will depart.”
She was angered, and disappointed, in many dissimilar forms. But Tavir said: “Humor me, and the recollection of my dream. Let us at least remain here until one day and night have gone by. To do less is to add another shame to the place. Besides, it was a long journey, and beyond is world’s end, at the eastern edge. Only chaos lies over it, where men will not or cannot enter. In the face of such a symbol, it is only correct to linger, before turning back.”
“I would not stay another minute,” said Azhriaz.
But, to humor him, she did not urge the ship away. They continued to patrol the avenues all that long, weary morning and dismal afternoon, looking on desolation, and the vanquishment of human ideals. Nothing was to be seen that lived, for even the most embryonic fishes of that deep kept aloof or had been scared from the vicinity by the ship. Only a facsimile of life, their own bold shadow, moved beside them on the rotted walls, or sometimes some splinter of a bloodless jewel might leeringly wink at their lights.
No man strode or swam about the streets. Not even a ghost cared to haunt the ruin. Sigh then, as the songs exclaimed, for the decline of Simmurad.
And Tavir himself, for the princes of Tirzom were accomplished, had summoned for himself a lyre, and sat there melancholically singing in the fish-ship’s left eye.
“The glory is crumbled in dust,
the swords of delight sheathed in rust,
And off from the precipice thrust,
the scapegoats and saviors fall dead.
Behold now the wreck of our lives,
the honey spilled out from the hives,
The pageant of Hate and his wives,
in their garments of choler and dread.
Beseech then no gods—they are blind;
destroy that poor hope of the mind,
Kneel rather to stones in the wind
and ask them for music and bread.
We have woven our dreams for a cloak,
our bright towers we have mortared with smoke.
It is Death, it is Death we invoke,
and the wolves of his pack we have fed.”
At which Azhriaz, turning to speak to him in unfriendliness, started. For where Tavir had sat, all sea shade and dark, was another young lord, pale, gold-haired, in a damson garment, with gloves—
But before even she could catch her breath to curse him, the vision faded. Unreal, thought she, less friendly yet. He roams elsewhere, cackling and cawing. But I take due note. Surely the apparition implies my lovesome lover, touched by the dawn-decline of Simmurad, is making a pet of madness.
Therefore she did not upbraid Tavir, but she keenly observed him. Of course, he will in some way betray me, abandon me. When I look for a shield, or a brother, to defend my back, all they that swore to be beside me are gone off on errands.
“There are knives in your looks,” said Tavir. “Knives of fairest sapphire. But still knives.”
“If my eyes do not please you,” said Azhriaz, putting her hands tenderly about his neck, “close them with your kisses.”
This Tavir willingly did.
Their amorous dalliance concluded the day, and seemed to put out the sun. Sunset was so swift in that region, one moment the sea was green, then ashen, then black.
Azhriaz, who had held Tavir as a flower holds its own shadow, now let him go and pretended to sleep. She had sensed, even in the pangs of his rapture, a restless energy that was not wholly appeased.
Presently, as she had supposed he would, Tavir, despite the most adoring of parting embraces, left the couch, and went away through the suite. The sorcery of Azhriaz was always unhampered within her ship: She stole after him smaller and less visible than a mote of that glory-dust he had elegized.
Soon enough, he stood next the ship’s skin and craved of it an exit into the sea. And the ship, commanded by Azhriaz to obey him, did so. In a short while more, Tavir was speeding through the blackness of the drowned city, airlessly and effortlessly breathing in the manner of the gilled princes of Tirzom, and accompanied only by a tiny glow of phosphorus, which he had enchanted from the water to light his path.
Azhriaz was filled by anger, and the unhappy satisfaction of being in the right. She took up her own sorcery, with two or three sharp words besides, and clad herself, still little as a mote, in a second mote of air. Then she sprang after Tavir and the receding light.
If Simmurad was sad by day, how much more depressing in its robe of night. It was no place for poets, though songs had been made because of it. True despair is only a blank wall; there must be rage or foolish hope, or at least a shout, to make anything of it. But Simmurad. Oh, Simmurad.
Yet Tavir swam on, and Azhriaz went after. She foresaw his quest. Of course, he went to find the one he had been, or believed he had been, if his dream were a fact.
So, in an hour or less, they came again to that dissolved obelisk, and passed through the tangle of sea wrack (Tavir hacking the way) into the citadel.
There had been a domed vault, a floor of mosaic and silver. Fountains had played, and at great tables, the nightly feast of the immortals. . . . Now the water feasted. All was blurred by water. And a tainted severe light fell, from high up, like a rain through rain, where luminous filaments embroidered the dead choked windows.
Caught by the unmerciful gleam, here they were, the immortal ones of Simmu’s city. They had won their slice of eternal life by feats of wizardry, wisdom, or exotic cheek, surgeons and mages, artists and courtesans, the luscious, the cunning, the unhinged. Now, they were white coral. Simply that. For these miniature builders of the seas had been industrious over the centuries. No longer was any shape recognizable, not a feature, nor a gesture. They were limestone blocks. Where now the flaunting dreams? The water washed away, the coral makers built. Soon, even the legend would fade, and those that came here seeking it—they would find melted stones, a few lumps of the coraline detritus of the sea. They would say, Simmurad, that was some lie we were told. There is no Simmurad, was never such a place. Nor Simmu, and no theft from heaven of Immortality for men, no heaven either, no life eternal. Only this and here and now. Only what we see and can put our hands on. Would there not, otherwise, be evidence?
Tavir, having come in, let his torch die. He moved as if he swam in sleep, about the limestone pillars. It seemed he did not especially remember any one of them. Should he seek for one in particular, how would he find it?
There was a means.
Suddenly a voice spoke out loudly, there in the sea—through which, unless sorcerously aided, you could hear nothing at all—sorcerously then.
“Well,” it said, “is liberty good? Pray tell me of it. I forget.”
Tavir, quite naturally, turned and stared about.
“Here I repose,” said the voice. “On your right hand—” And it directed him zealously on how it should be come at. Tavir followed the instructions, and after a minute he hung in the water by a pillar of coral resembling exactly all the rest.
“How is it you can speak?” asked Tavir, himself not with his vocal cords, but through the mechanics of sea magic.
“Speak? Who says I speak?” retorted the voice. “I impart
my thoughts by an effort of magicianry, as do you. Do you forget also? I am a mage.”
“By my query I meant to inquire,” said Tavir, “if I am you and you are me, how is it I am here and you are there, and we have dialogue?”
“Tush,” said the coral block testily. “It seems certain that when I waned to youth again, as you, I gained in silliness what I relinquished in years. Pay attention. For this is the mighty theosophic paradox which I, and other genius sages that the monster Zhirek trapped here, long since grasped. All men possess souls which are immortal. But some men prefer longevity or eternality of the body, seeing that with each new life we are forced to undergo once more the idiocy of birth, childhood, and unknowledge, not to mention the discomfort of physical demise. For example I, that am you as you were when me, joined the immortals, partaking of a drop of the divine Elixir. Now, it is thought,” prated on the block, “that in a mortal made immortal, the soul infuses the flesh. This may be the case. However, by petrifying the flesh to stone, Zhirek, in his overcleverness, separated the soul in each of us once again from the earthly atoms—for no soul can ever be bound indefinitely, being itself a fabulous thing. Therefore my soul flew out—as, for a truth, did all the souls of all those prisoned in Simmurad. And, getting itself reborn, it became the dweller in the body of one Tavir, prince of Tirzom Jum, and of a scheme of colors, I will say, strikes oddly on my eye.”
“But you,” said Tavir. “If you are not me, who, upon the bones of our two mothers, are you?”
“Your former body being immortal, it lives still within the coral. It is a wise sage yet, and has, to boot, the full legion of your former memories, which you, in your greenness, have forgotten. It is the body, therefore, which speaks so graciously and intelligently to you, and which calls itself I. As I shall continue to do.”
“Upon my life—or on one of them,” said Tavir. And fell silent.
“Tut, tut,” said the immortal body reprovingly, “if only you had your sagacity back, you would not waffle in this way.”