CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 2: More Tales of Beauty and Strangeness (19 page)

Tanith Lee

1. The Third Fragment

That very afternoon a caravan had entered the city. It had journeyed from the Great Purple Sea, which lay far to the west and was so named for the preponderance of purplish weed that massed its waters, and at certain seasons dyed them. After the coast, the caravan negotiated many lands. It had crossed serpentine rivers, dagger-like mountains, and finally the Vast Harsh Desert, renowned for waterless and unobliging terrain. Small wonder then that the caravan might be supposed to bring with it much valuable stuff, not to mention travellers’ tales, whose vividity was matched only by their tallness.

Prince Razved stood on a balcony of his palace, staring out over high walls and lengthening shadows, to the marketplace.

“Oh, to be merely a merchant,” sighed the Prince. “Oh, to have no destiny but the discovery of new things, adventure and commerce.”

He did not mean this. What he actually meant, and partly he knew it, was that he yearned to be freed from the direly irksome situation into which Lord Fate had thrust him. For though he ruled the city, he might enjoy neither it nor his full power in it. A single awful obstacle kept him always from his rights.

Just then a voice arose at his back. It was wild, quavering, and disrespectful.

“Are they
here
? Are they
near
?”

The Prince clenched his jaw and his fists. He paled white as fresh ivory. Young though he was, the weight of extra decades slumped upon his shoulders.

There in the chamber behind the balcony stood a filthy and dishevelled old man. Two hundred years of age he looked, and the colourless thin wires of his hair rained round his face, which was like that of a demented hawk. He was mad as the word, and none could help him. Now too he began to weep and scream. Razved locked his fists together behind his back, and bellowed for assistance.

It came instantly in the person of three men, frenzied with dismay, who rushed into the room, where they flung themselves on their faces before the Prince.

But Razved only said to them, in tones of steel, “He has got out again. How has he done this? Are you not meant to care for and contain him?”

“Mighty Master—only a moment was the door undone—”

”Only ever is it undone for a moment,” replied Razved, his tone now composed of stifled rage and black despair. “Or it is the window-lattice. Or some other pretext. Take him away.
Hide
him from me. If you transgress again, you will meet the doom those of his last retinue suffered.”

Whispering shrieks of terror, the jailor-retinue leapt to their feet and gathered in the mad old man, bearing him instantly off, crying and calling, along the corridor to renewed detention.

But Razved could not rid himself of the memory of the encounter, which had been so often repeated through countless years. He strode to another chamber. There he donned a disguise he sometimes employed when wandering about the city. Razved believed none of the citizens had ever penetrated this. And although, of course, many of them had, and did, none were recently foolish enough to confess to him.

As the sun burned down behind the palace, the Prince also descended. Before the first star blinked, he was in the marketplace.

* * *

Soon the whole market, infused by the caravan and lighted with torches, was like a lamp against the blue night.

Razved strolled from place to place, forgetting for a while his plight. He beheld an indigo snake of extreme size and patterned with gold, that danced to the intricate beat of drums. It twisted itself into hoops and spirals, coils and knots, that each time seemed impossible for it ever to unravel—yet always it did so, rising and bowing to the crowd. They threw coins which the snake caught in its mouth. And there was a silk from the edge of the Purple Sea, coloured with the purple weed-dye, and this material seemed to burn with sapphires in the shadows and rubies in the torchlight. Also Razved tasted bizarre fruits with thick cream skins, that had no juice but gave up the flavour of honey. Elsewhere stood books the height of a man and twice his width, with covers of hammered bronze, and pages of blond wood incised with silver—but often what they said was nonsense. Or there were birds which could recite poetry in the voices of beautiful boys or women, tiny exquisite models of temples and shrines cut from green pearls, wines which were black and scented with roses, swords both straight and curved, in the blades of which were supernaturally written spells of invincible power . . .

After a while Razved grew weary. He sat down by the booth of a seller of glass, and drank some black wine.

Behind him the Prince could hear how the glass-seller was complaining, some tale of half his wares, including the most expensive mirrors, being broken, the fault apparently of a vulture-like desert witch. Razved paid little heed, only thinking,
The man does not know his luck. He has only loss of
trade, and poverty to fear. While I—
And once more he clenched his fists, pondering how the full rule of the city might never come to him, nor the title of King. Dwelling too upon the awful haunt of the insane old man in the palace.
I shall never get
what I am owed. I shall never be free of
him.
Would not death
be preferable?

But despite his bitter thoughts, Razved was not yet ready to make the close acquaintance of Lord Death. And presently he turned his head to glare at the complaining glass-seller.

At once the man broke into smiles. “Best sir, what might I show you that may tempt? It is true, many of my finest articles were destroyed as I travelled here, but even so certain elegancies remain which, though quite unworthy of your discerning gaze, may yet briefly amuse you.”

Razved yawned. He passed a jaundiced look over a surviving mirror so liquid it suggested a tear from the full moon, and a curious magnifying glass that stared back at him like an elemental eye.

“Well,” said Razved, with unencouragement, “what is your finest
remaining
piece?”

The glass-seller, whose name was Jandur, bowed his head as if in thought. He had heard rumours concerning the city, and of a strange delaying fate which hung over its King-in-waiting. Jandur had also been told that sometimes this Prince went about the streets in disguise, but was easily recognizable, the disguise being a sloppy one and the Prince himself equally brooding, ill-tempered, and unmissably regal in his manner. Yet those who gave away their recognition, the rumour added, were normally found deceased not long after. Jandur now guessed that here sat the very man. To be cautious was therefore prudent. To make a
sale
, however, must be a prize. Besides, there was too another matter.

“Wise sir,” said Jandur, after a moment, “one item there is that I feel inclined to show you—though I am uneasy at doing so.”

“Come,” snapped Razved, “your task is to sell, is it not?”

“Quite so, intelligent sir. My unease rests on two counts. Firstly, I hope you will pardon me—but I perceive from your garb you are neither rich nor high-born—”

Razved seemed coqettishly pleased. “You speak honestly.”

“—yet,” continued cunning Jandur, “what strikes me forcefully is a great refinement of spirit and judgement immediately apparent about your person. Because of these qualities I would wish to reveal a treasure. Yet again—”

“Yet again!” Razved had now risen and was impatient to be shown.

“—I am loathe to part with the thing. It is charming, and unusual beyond all my other wares, yes, even those exquisites smashed to bits amid the desert sands of the Vast Harsh.”

“Come,” said Razved, with a dangerous glint in his eye. Life had baulked his wishes, this pedlar should not.

Jandur gauged all perfectly and now exclaimed, “You shall see the wonder! Pray follow me, illumined sir, into the back premises of the booth.”

* * *

In the dark beyond the light beyond the dark, then—that was, the shadowed space inside the lighted market and city, which themselves rested in the dish of night—the ultimate inner brilliance shone. It was very small.

As Jandur lit the candle to display it, Razved peered.

What did he see?

“Only that?” he said, in ominous disappointment.

The object was a little drinking vessel, about as tall as the length of a woman’s hand. The stem was slender, and the cup wide, like the bowl of an open flower, but it would hold, Razved believed, less than three gulps of wine. “And this is your most astonishing vendible, is it? Your brain must be as cracked as your broken mirrors.”

“Pray examine the item.”

Razved sullenly reached out, and wondered somewhat why he bothered to do so. But then his fingers met the texture of the glass. As they did this, the candlelight caught all the vessel’s surfaces, and for a second it seemed to the Prince he held in his hand a mote of softest living flame—it was like phosphorescence on water, or like fireflies glimmering on a marble trellis. The colours of the goblet woke, shifted and merged, now dawn-pink, now flamingo-red, next a limpid golden green. Not meaning to, not knowing quite what he did, Razved touched his other fingers to the lip of the cup. Instantly there came the sweetest and most poignant note of music, slender as sheer silk passed through a silver ring. And in that moment, standing in the cramped booth, Razved felt within his hands not the glass of a vessel—but two perfect breasts—crystalline, silken—that sang back against his palms, while on his lips he tasted the glass-girt wine of a longed-for lover’s kiss.

Jandur, who had predicted with some cause an intriguing result at contact, stepped swiftly forward, and steadied both Razved and the precious goblet, though Jandur wrapped the latter in his sleeve.

Razved seemed nearly in a swoon. Jandur sat him on a bench, and replaced the foremost treasure of his stock safely out of reach.

“What occurred?” eventually Razved asked. He no longer had the voice of a Prince, he sounded like a child. “Is the cup ensorcelled?”

“I cannot definitely tell you,” Jandur answered. It was a fact, he could not.

“It is—
what
is it?”

“Alas. I cannot say. Mystical and magical certainly.”

“Does it affect all—who—touch it?”

“In various ways, it does. Some weep. Some blush. Some begin to sing.”

“And
you
,” said Razved, with another warning note suddenly entering his voice: that of jealousy, “what do
you
feel when you take hold of it?”

“Fear,” Jandur replied simply.

“Ah,” said Razved. “It is not meant for
you
, then.”

For a while after this exchange, neither man spoke or moved. Jandur stood in the dark beyond the candle, thinking his own thoughts. The Prince, still physically overwhelmed, his manhood urgently upright and his blood tingling and thundering, slumped on the bench. At length however, he bethought himself of his status, and drew himself together.

“Well, an astonishing trifle,” said he, with the most ludicrous dismissal. “But what price do you set on it?”

Jandur now realized his peak of cunning bravado.

“I will confess, sir, I am so taken with admiration for your natural gifts that, while acknowledging your obvious penury, I believe you may after all be able to summon the amount. For surely such a man as yourself will have
another
admirer from whom you will command the present of the vessel—an admirer even more smitten than I. The value I require is seventy sevens of white gold.”

Razved snorted piggishly. He now cared, it seemed, less for his deception. “You are astute, glass-vendor. Just such a sum was handed me by a lover, in order I might buy myself a trinket.” And reaching into his poor man’s apparel, he drew forth a bag and spilled the contents at Jandur’s feet. “Wrap the thing in a cloth,” he commanded in a feverish undertone.

Jandur, ostensibly ignoring, even stepping on the spilled money, did as he was bid, he himself taking great care not to touch the goblet once. In a few more minutes the King-in-waiting had hurried from the booth, and any who noted his rushing figure, saw it fly off around the high outer wall of the palace.

But Jandur sat down on the bench and murmured a prayer of thanks to a god of his own country—both for the riches Razved had given him, and for his release from proximity to the glass goblet.

* * *

Deep in the dark thereafter, Prince Razved repaired alone to his most isolate chamber. Not even the moon might look in, save through the sombre vitreus of thick windows clad in gauze.

Dark was in the flagon, too, the black wine aromatic of roses, which he had had his servants bring him.

The haunting madman had been locked away, shackled tonight for good measure. Not only were merchants prudent, after all.

Razved, bathed in hot water and spices, clad in loose and sensuous garments, unwrapped at last the goblet. Holding it only through a piece of fine embroidered cloth, he set it on the table by his couch.

Despite the lack of light, even so the faintest and most mellifluous tinctures of colour began at once to flutter to and fro in the glass. They were like birds in a cloud, or fish in a ghostly pool. Dilute crimson melded to opalescent rose—to amber—to emerald. All this—just from his touch through cloth, his hungry gaze upon it.