by Tanith Lee
“They are daughters to be proud of,” said the Sun. “One shall light my way in the morning; she shall be the Morning Star. And another, who is a little darker, she shall walk behind me at sunset to close the doors of the west—and she shall be the Evening Star. But the fairest of them I will keep by me at all times, for there is not yet any situation vacant that is good enough for her, though there may come an age when that may happen.”
But the Moon covered her face and said, “All is proved against me. I was peevish and dishonest and have done wrong. For he would not let me in the garden, and he did not even, finding me there, remember who I was. And, worst of all, I loved him again, as once long ago, and could not remember our quarrel.”
Then the Sun, hearing that, went to the Moon and kissed her.
“I had no right to shut you out. You are my beloved, and only the distance that is always between us made us enemies.”
However, the gods pronounced judgment for all that, for they were not invited lightly into any affair.
The Moon they allowed to keep her gorgeous robe, and even to wear it, but not often. And they decreed that she must hereafter endlessly alter her shape in the heavens, shrinking and enlarging and shrinking, as she had done when she tried to get out of the garden by stealth, in order that men recollect she was inconstant, the lady of secret lust, and thieves. But this they added, that since the Moon and Sun were reconciled with each other, and only distance had made them enemies, at particular times they might meet, there in the sky, before the gaze of mankind and all the world, and that at these infrequent meetings the Moon should stand before the Sun as he kissed her (which undoubtedly he would do), so that his beauteous and great light would be dulled. And so they reprimanded the Moon’s sulky deception and the Sun’s vainglorious pride.
As for the two chosen daughters, they came to be the Morning and Evening Stars, and they greet their mother joyfully when they see her in heaven. But the third daughter is still waiting for her appointment. For the garden, it passed from Being as such wonders did in the maturing of the world.
But the Sun and the Moon have stayed close friends, and so we have seen them to be. For it was the privilege of men, by this midday shadow, to know that the lovers had embraced each other over men’s heads. That darkness was only their kiss.
Now who could be churlish enough to be afraid of that?
And even as Dathanja closed the story, the moon swam from the sun, and the light of day shone out again, and the birds sang, and the hippopotami frisked in the river.
5
THE SUN, having displayed his kingly face again, rode westward and vanished.
The crowd upon the river bank arose and also went away, pointing, with intimate irony, to the evening star, as she walked sedately after her father, to shut the doors of a yellow sunset.
The priest and the child turned toward their house. The child, who had been very silent since the passing of the shadow, said to him at last, “If the sun can be a darkness, cannot darkness be a sun?”
Dathanja said, “It would depend upon the form of the darkness. It would depend on many things.”
“Most youthful Father,” said the child, “it is not possible for me ever to thank you for your goodness to me, nor did you do it to be thanked. But I have sat at your feet and listened. I have learned. And the whole earth has spoken to me. Also, my own heart. Such excellent teachers I have had. And when the shadow left the earth, the shadow that was on me, this too drew away. Here I am. No longer Sovaz, or Azhriaz. No longer Soveh, your child.”
The crepuscule had come. The land was blue, and the river, and in her eyes the blueness of every dusk the world had known. And in his that regarded her, every black night which followed.
“I am glad for you,” he said.
“For the sake of that gladness, for a little while,” she said, “let us remain as we have been. For each grows up, as you have told me. But the moon, changing her shape, is still the moon, and just so with love.”
So he took her hand, as he had done in her three-year childhood, and they walked together along the river bank where the lotuses still burgeoned, to the house.
Not a lamp was lighted there, not even in the upper room, which was also noiseless.
“He has argued with the mirror again,” said the girl, and she and Dathanja burst out laughing.
In the midst of the laughter they held each other close, and he said to her, “We should not laugh at him,” and they laughed, and she said, “No, we should not,” and they laughed more.
“Oh little girl, I rejoice you are yourself at last.”
“Am I myself? Who is she? But I think no longer am I another’s, not even yours, my kinsman, my kind lord, who cared for me.”
“What now? You will leave me now?” he said.
“And you,” said she, “will be pleased to be left. To your work, and your princess who gives you shoes—”
“Oh little girl, how do you know that?”
“Oh dear friend, my father-brother, the whole land knows. Even the frogs talk about it. ‘What did he with her then? they ask. And the grasshoppers tell them.” At that they laughed all over again. And flirtatiously, by sorcery, they each of them lit the lamps of the lower room, so the flames winked up out of the darkness like spring flowers. And then they lit the fire on the hearth, blew it out, lit it, and they were both children, she and he, who had lived and died and lived, each in their own fashion, a girl of seventeen whose years amounted to almost half a century, a man perhaps in his twenty-fifth year, who had known whole centuries intact, and numberless.
“Let us,” repeated the girl, “not speak for a time of parting. Though you have wintered in this region, yet you are and will be again a wanderer. And I—I must seek my life under every stone, upon each pinnacle, within the shade and shine of the earth, and elsewhere. . . . But not yet. We have the last days of winter still. And I will be a dutiful daughter-sister to you. I will be a girl of the village and the town, and cook your food and mend your clothes, set flowers by your pillow, and sing to you. If in return you tell me still your stories, and hold me in your arms as you have held me, asking nothing but the love of a child.”
“Here are all the lizards and frogs, waiting by the rain-jar, to be let in,” said he. “Shall I allow them to come to my hearth, when they have been gossiping all this while with the grasshoppers concerning myself and the princess?”
“Shame them by overlooking their faults.”
So the assembly of frogs, and other creatures of the bank, were permitted the warmth of the fire.
Then, by the firelight under the lamps, the man and woman ate a rustic supper, augmented by two pitchers of wine ensorceled out of the vaults of a nearby potentate.
And later they slept, in their allotted separate places, which were close enough together. Neither experienced desire for the other. It had not been their fate to be lovers, though to love.
Dathanja dreamed that he was seated on a hillside with a maiden whose hair was the color of apricots. They spoke and laughed together, while she fed wildfowl of the air, and slender reptiles from under rocks, out of her hands. And later they lay, he and she, in the blazing grass, in love. Below, on a plain beside a lake of clear water, unicorns were dancing, white and rose and gold. Somewhere a bell rang from a distant temple’s tower, and leaves sighed as they opened.
And Zhirek, as Simmu relaxed her clasp upon him, and he his own of her, kissed her flame of hair and said to her, “Have you punished me enough, have you been sufficiently revenged on me?”
“You yourself punished yourself, and avenged me. And such things are, anyway, a silliness.”
“The priests are liars?” asked Zhirek.
“Yes. All but one.”
And soon they joined in love again, in love of love. And at that time, love was enough.
But the Vazdru Goddess-girl, Sovaz-Azhriaz-Soveh, she dreamed this:
There was a blue mountain above a green valley. Buildings grew up in the valle
y, the stalks of towers. There was a temple, blooming from the mountainside, row upon row of pillars, and the stairways of roofs ascending. Aromatic smokes traveled from its courts, straight as ruled lines in the sublime summer air.
But high up, near the mountain’s summit, was a small shrine made of blue marble, so like the sky it might be missed altogether. Here an old priestess dwelled, and very old she was. “Three centuries she has seen out,” the pilgrims said to the dreaming girl, as she climbed the path with them. “But she is tired now. Tired by all her wandering. She is a healer and teacher, and a prophetess. Decades she has resided here. Kings come to her to explain their visions. Queens come and ask that their destiny be told them, or the meaning of portents. And though she is ancient, this woman, as one of the great snakes that dwell in the mountain’s core, yet she can make herself to seem a young girl, satin-skinned and fleet as a deer. Why,” they added to the dreamer, “have you sought her out?”
“I would have her explain a dream to me,” the dreamer said.
And then she was within the mountaintop that lay behind the shrine. Enormous columns rose, glossy as milk, and vapors from the cavern’s throat, some perfumed and some acrid. An elderly woman, all wizened and bent, a crone, sat on a ledge, and she caressed the diamond-shaped head of a serpent, which head alone was the length of a man’s foot.
“Do not trouble about the snake,” she said, in a voice like a dry old leaf, so faint, yet audible as is a tiny noise within the ear.
“Snakes I have never feared,” said the dreamer, and going near, she stroked the snake also. And looked up into the priestess’s face and into such blue, blue eyes, her own were filled by tears.
“What is your name?” said the girl to the crone.
“It is Atmeh.”
“Why did they name you that?”
“None named me but myself. In the land where I was reborn, and where I was a child, I had another name. But in the language of that country my name, which meant a petal of the fire, had another meaning, which was spark of life, and the word for this, in that tongue, was Atmeh. Thus, when I set out to find myself, I took that name to be my own. Ah, young girl, pretty dreamer,” said the ancient priestess, “one day we shall meet, you and I. Go now, and find your life.”
And Azhrarn’s daughter woke up, there in the house by the brown river shore. She looked at once at her companion, as he slept, seeing his beauty and his youth, his age, his sorrow, and the recompense of knowledge—all that upon his slumbering face.
She would not have woken him, yet she yearned to tell him of her dream.
But even as she sat there undecided, the house door rushed inward with a terrific crash—and woke the entire world, it seemed.
6
IT HAD SWUM for miles, and years. Beneath the sea, in the long depths under the dark green hills, whose crowns were islands, and on the surface also, under the blister of sun and glister of moon. Tall ships had sighted it, and called after it, thinking to effect a rescue. Or they had avoided it, supposing it to be what once it had been. And the huge fish of the aqueous abysses had tried to detain it, or fish-girls with cool green lips and eyes like stars that had drowned. But on and on it swam, indifferent, determined. And sometimes even it went in circles, searching and not finding. And sometimes it crawled through subterranean channels. And sometimes it rested, whole hours at a stretch, before it crawled or swam on again. So at last it reached the mouth of a river, and swam up that. The waters altered from the tones of ocean to a tawny glass, now and then blackening with night. Rime lay over the river, where enormous bladders floated with closed-up eyes. At length the swimmer broke from the water among the ice-cold stems of lotuses, and so came to a house, and flung wide the door.
And there it stood, the body of Tavir, a prince of Tirzom Jum, spangled with wet, and with the seaweed still upon its shoulder.
The body of Tavir had not decayed, not in three years and more. Perhaps the cataclysm—chaos, which touched even angels—had done something to the fibers of a corpse that lay so close to the shock. Or else, its link to the immortal magician had preserved the discarded flesh. To the girl and the man Tavir’s body gave no attention, though both were sorcerers, and greater than that.
It prowled across the floor to the stair, and up it went, and giving there the second door, that of the upper room, a mighty shove, strode into the chamber of the mage.
Tavrosharak had been seated at his table (pilfered from a king’s library and laid with books and curios obtained in the same spot). He had been long silent, but now he leapt up, oversetting some bizarre unuseful experiment, so holes were burned in the table’s wood, and in the very atmosphere.
“Pay heed,” said Tavir’s body.
“I will,” said Tavrosharak, although he made a pass or two and uttered a mantra or three that should have rid him of the apparition, and failed.
“I am no ghost,” said the body. “I am the whole skin, and the physical soul—the ego of Tavir. You lured me to you, sensing your liberty would shortly come, and claimed back the spirit-soul out of me. But I had lived. I had been a mage, like you. And I am young, as you—when you acquired your immortality—no longer were. Now,” said Tavir’s body, “Simmurad is no more. It is destroyed, for the Fire ran through it, and then a fearsome fiery wave that ran the other way. Where fire and unmatter met in water, a red sun was born, that dashed away. And I was galvanized to pursue it, awhile. But then, my mind awoke in me, and I remembered you. So I sought out you instead. And here I am before you.”
“What do you want?” quavered the sage-mage, still flapping about in efforts to effect some spell of riddance, ineffectually.
“A soul,” said the body. “Yours, mine. That which I had.”
“And what of me?” howled Tavrosharak.
“What of you? Look at the life you have given our soul, shut up day and night, dabbling and dithering, hating all men. What will you learn in here but what a fool you are? Come,” said Tavir, black, beautiful, a lord of the sea, shining green of hair and eye, “come, dear soul, back to the one who truly values you. See in me what you will gain. And consider what you have lost, with him.”
“Stay, dear soul,” gabbled Tavrosharak. “I will mend my ways. We will go out and change men into stones and stones into sheep, and overturn the whole earth—”
“Come, dear soul,” coaxed Tavir, “and we will enjoy the loveliness of the world, and try to repair the pain of it. We will found a city under the sea where the ocean peoples shall live at peace together. All the teaching of the priest Dathanja, which the one who traps you has overheard—and dismissed—but which you have pondered on, all that we will try, and bring to bear upon our future life together.”
The mage-sage sat abruptly down in his chair. He gave a grunt, and from his parted lips spun flame. It was a soft fire, barely visible. But Tavir opened wide his arms to receive it.
“There is,” said Tavir presently, “a goddess in this house, and the teacher, who has such skill. But also this body I have now will not live forever. I must be swift. No distraction. And so—farewell without greeting—”
And Tavir spoke his own mantra for a disappearance, soul-possessed and so a magician once more. And was gone.
Meanwhile, the body of Tavrosharak, soul-empty, sat hard as coral in the chair, and it muttered: “How am I to work upon occult science with such a disturbance?” And it called a whirlwind in at the window simply to berate it. For the immortal flesh of the sage had kept much of its mage-craft, even soulless, and did so still, and, too, its irritated personality, that needed no soul to fuel it. So there it sat, and would sit for centuries, grumbling and complaining, studying and disparaging the books, quarreling with itself in the mirror, and performing feats of annoying sorcery.
And the cattle herders going under the window three hundred years hence, when trees had rooted through the floor and roof of the house, and the shores of the river widened almost to the door, would still say in propitiating voices to it, “Pray do us no h
arm, Uncle.”
7
THE WINTER, who had lain hard upon the earth so long, pressing her down, having his will with her, left her suddenly with only a chilly kiss, and mounting his branch-bare chariot, he stormed away.
Pale gleaming days, like zircon drops, came to the earth, and clothed her in filmy yellows and wild greens. To the brown land they came also, bringing robes of a denser dye, setting fire to flowers, sprinkling the fields with whispering fringes. On the trees the heavy leaves sprang out. The hippopotami washed off their mud and fought each other in the river. The elephants, breaking their tethers, screamed and stamped among the hills by night.
The prince’s daughter, the princess, cried in her painted bed. “Now he will leave me.” But it seemed he would not, yet, though he did not promise her all time.
The girl who had been Dathanja’s daughter walked on the shore, and took the last winter lotuses for a garland. Against her throat, in a little silver cage, a mote of amethyst constricted their color. (Even chaos, toucher of angels, had not been able to melt that gem. Or had avoided doing so.) Its influence had been with her then and since, for good, for ill. And she had had her days of madness, surely, simple and a child?
A white ibis stalked among the stems. It bowed as it passed her, and uttered a weird cry. Atmeh.
For the earth knew the name she had chosen for herself, the name which meant hereabouts Flame, or Flame of Life.
One other too, maybe, knew of her rebirth and her naming.
And she looked with more than sight across the brown river, away toward the land’s boundaries. The snow had dissolved from the mountains where they rose, afloat like jeweled ships in the sky. Beneath, on one single hill, one dot of asphodel snow. The Malukhim, unfolding his wings.