Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 (24 page)

It was a fact; the only living thing to be seen was up in the
prow. A crown of gold spiked from the dragon’s head, and there in its circlet stood
a beautiful woman, also clad in gold, small as a doll, her long black hair
about her.

“That is a mighty sorceress,” said the crowds, to their children.

But others kneeled. “A supernatural thing,” they said.

Up in the fence of gold, the golden woman did not move, yet her
eyes seemed to touch every face and mind.

Then she lifted up her left hand—only that, a gesture remote, out
on the river, high in the air.

And the ship stilled, the oars lay like teeth in a burning comb.
The birds settled, the fishes sank, and the music died.

But the architecture of the city shifted, groaned, and cracked.
Tiles scattered from the walls. Nennafir trembled, with fright or pleasure. And
from their places there rose up the white stone cats of Nennafir, yawning and
snarling in their carven throats.

Jumping from their high roofs and slinking off their plinths, they
loped through the panic-stricken streets. At the river’s edge, where the people
shrank from them, they gathered with creamy fire in their stone eyes, bowing to
the ship.

Then the light of the ship went out. Where it had been began a
huge wave, brown for the river, with crystal veins and swirlings of gold and
silver, and it swept over with the dragon’s head still staring in it, and the
golden crown and the supernatural sorceress, and curled down on the land. The
multitude fled screaming before it, thinking to be drowned or broken.

Thus, on the emptied river quay, Azhriaz stepped out of the
burning wave, and stood in a circle of bowing stone cats.

The poets and scholars would say this, that there she waited, her
eyes blue as the sky, her hair the night, dressed in the sun, her skin the
moon. And the city fell on its face to worship her, knowing at once that a
being of Upperearth had descended.

She was plainly a daughter of heaven, of the etheric regions.

Her name, when they learned it, carried a strange echo, but they
would not decipher it. And the ways of gods were beyond the questioning of men.

As she walked up through the streets of Nennafir toward the palace
(where already certain of the heirs of Qurob had set to, to stab, strangle, and
poison each other), her footsteps indented the paving, which thereafter shone.
For decades these footsteps were one of the marvels of the city, and worked
miracles. They faded in the end. She had no attendant on her walk but the white
stone cats, thirteen of them, which hedged her round jealously. And the
awe-smitten people deliriously followed, some yet singing and clapping their
hands, some pale and in a trance, some flushed with anxiety.

The soldiers at the palace gate were moved to throw down their
spears and kneel. They understood no man opposes the will of heaven.

The doors of the palace opened of themselves.

The gleaming footprints of Azhriaz passed over the court and up
the stair and into the halls within.

So fair she was, the poets wrote, who could look at her and not
know her for a goddess?

Azhrarn had said: “I will give them a god to adore. Let them
discover what it is to be ruled by such.”

BOOK TWO: Azhriaz the Goddess

Part One: Matters of Stone

1

IN A
BONEYARD of a desert, men were laboring to uproot the slim tall stones the
winds of time had sculpted there.

The desert was all of stone, pale and faceless. Its dusts had
turned to dust and to a dust of that dust, until they vanished altogether. Now
there was a light white powder from the chiseling, and as each of the pillars
fell, though the pulleys steadied it, tiny shards flew off into the air.

A road ran over the desert yard to a city which, being a vassal,
was about to make its septennial tribute. Precious metal and jewels, herds of
beasts and slaves, these were the offerings of this city. But it was requested
to send also materials of building, so a forest of trees had been cut down, and
here the forest of stone was tumbling likewise.

“Behold this pillar now,” said the overseer to his newest gang.
“One of the oldest in this haunted nasty place. The wind has howled by it a
thousand years, I should not be surprised. And now it must fall to please the
Witch-Goddess. Well, they do a lot of building there, I gather. Strike away.”

“What is that mark there, high up, like a huge black eye?” asked
one of the gang, a comely youth desirous the overseer should notice as much.

The overseer did so. “Well, my boy,” said he, “there are holes in
some of these stones, and sometimes something fills up the hole. And then time
passes and the filling marries with the stone, and turns to a stone itself.
Some animal,” said the overseer, taking the youth aside, “crawled in there,
centuries ago, and died, and became one with the stone. I never knew a hole,”
said the overseer, inviting the youth into his tent, “that did not, usually,
eventually get filled up with something.”

The rest of the new gang toiled on in the heat of the day. Their
mallets and axes bit into the stone, and their saws ate away at it. In the
midst of the afternoon, the stone swayed. The ropes tautened as the pillar
teetered in their grip; it swung sideways and plummeted, and the ropes pulled
it up before it could beat on the ground and shatter. When the stone was loaded
on the cart, two or three men climbed in to look at the black opacity that
curved out from it. They rapped on the darkness, to see if it would yield some
interesting thing, but it did not oblige them. Their utensils made no
impression.

To the city then, this stone, with the others. And then into the
caravan of tribute, and away eastward, a journey a year and a half in length,
to the wide lands of the Witch-Goddess. Of whom the city heard much, though she
had never been seen there.

She
had risen in the east like a second sun. Three decades this city had known of
her. She was eternally young, the Witch-Goddess, always lovely. Cruel and pitiless
she was too, and warlike, and a magician. She descended from heaven, and the
seas and rivers divided themselves before her. She landed at a place called
Nennafir, the Flower of the River Bank, and made it hers in three hours. And
then, in three months, she turned the armies of flowering Nennafir outward to
conquer the world, in three thirds—and in three years it seemed she had made a
good beginning. From coast to coast, isle to isle, the mountains, the valleys,
the towns, the cities—one full third, perhaps somewhat more. Only the wastes,
or remoter lands, had she, so far, ignored. Where her legions did not go with
their brazen tramp and bloody steel, where her magic did not fly like a
honey-throated, jet-black bird—kissing blade, killing song—the word of her
went, the
gossip,
and
that was enough. There had been others like her, it was true. There had been a
witch-queen once who subdued many of the lands of the earth and seduced many
others, Zorayas, who was now a legend. But Zorayas, for all her might, glory,
villainy, beauty, was mortal. This one was a god. To defy her was not merely
death, but blasphemy.

A hundred stories were told of her, or seven hundred, or seven
thousand. Some were lies, or other tattle (of such as Zorayas and her kind),
which were caught up like flotsam in a tide. Some of the stories were real
enough. But the deeds of conquest and omnipotence have a sameness, as does the
exposition of most evil.

The caravan of tribute ran on, through its initial months of
traveling, eastward, and soon the tales lay so thick about it the wheels of the
carts and wagons could hardly move for them, and the carriage animals stumbled
and perished—stuck and stifled in the swamp of a living myth.

In the third month of the journey, the way became physically
congested, by other caravans from other places, all foaming into one enormous channel,
as if the dams of countless waters had given way.

All roads now led to Az-Nennafir.

Mere city it was no more, but a metropolis covering so vast an
area, thirteen gigantic kingdoms might be sunk in it. A city large as a
country, and thereafter a country sprawled through one third of the discovered
earth: Empire.

Men sickened, too, coming even to the periphery of that spot. The
emanations of its sorcery, though long months and endless miles away, filled
mortals with wild emotions. Some men fell subject to fits and to fevers—they
danced in their sleep, slept as they walked. The hale declined and the sick
grew well. There was a vapor of madness everywhere. And the land changed.

First came a passage through mighty mountains, and the mountains
were bald and shone in the distance like pale silver. Nothing grew on them, no
tree, no blade of vegetation. Those that passed up and over them saw they were
of a grayish granite that in some parts had turned to a kind of mirror. The sun
pierced through them, or the moon by night. Beyond the mountains, rolling
plains of savage grass, the stems of which were thick and green. The grass was
sweet, and brewed in a vat made a green wine which, drunk too often, turned
men’s wits, or blinded them. Birds drifted over the grasslands on enormous
wings, flying parasols of darkness. Sometimes they stooped and took some animal
from its cover, or a child—for herders lived on the plains, in huts of grass,
clothed in grass, playing on pipes made from the grass stems, and strange in the
head from breathing always the grass scent.

Other lands followed, steep and steepled, low as trenches,
desolate, populous. There was a sea over which a bridge had been built, and
supported partly, it must be, by sorcery. Its legs were sunk down deep into the
bedrock under the water. Many days on the bridge the caravans must go, seeing
only ocean on either side of the high parapets, or the spurling sea-sky
overhead. And seafowl rose before the caravans in a white wind. Or sometimes
huge creatures were sighted in the water, swimming by.

In the sixth month of the land voyage east, the towns and cities
lay on the ground as thick as locusts, each with only a short stretch of free
land between, and over this land the cities fought for possession, but the
caravans passed, inviolable, since they carried tribute to the Witch-Goddess.
There was not a city now, a town, a village, that did not have a temple
dedicated to her, and her looming statues arose on the highways. They were all
unalike, yet all similar, white as snow or ice, the hair of black—ebony,
agate—the eyes of blue—great sapphires, or blue emeralds—and the offerings made
before the statues lay there and decayed; even the birds of the air would not
steal from her, or the coneys or the foxes. Heaps of fruits, and vials of
perfume and amphorae of liquor, and on the white stone altars the bones stuck
up like drawn swords through the rotting carcasses of sacrifice. The dizzying
stench of all this filled the atmosphere everywhere around. Sometimes priests
were at the altars. Flames burned and smoke lifted, through the loud hymns of
praise. It had a blue robe, her order, blue for the eyes of the Goddess, a blue
like no other blue on the earth. By night in those lands, you saw the fires of
offering burning on every side, dotting the darkness, which otherwise glowed
faintly with the lamps of the crowded cities, or glared where one of them was
on fire.

In the ninth month of its traveling, the caravan which carried the
desert stones—along with those other caravans which had traveled a smaller
while, or a greater, but a trek of nine more months still before them all—came
to the edge of the country known now as Az-Nennafir, the heartland of the
Empire of the Goddess.

No
man had ever gone on this expedition more than once in his life. Once was
enough. And in most families, the onus of the adventure was passed from father
to son, a destiny that could not be avoided.

The outskirts of the heartland of the Goddess, locked in sorcery,
were mostly empty. Here were deserts, of a sort. After the teem of the cities,
it seemed all life had hidden itself. There were many differing accounts of
these regions, and probably they did differ vastly, from one sector to another,
for of the large numbers of men who approached, each saw only that landscape he
traveled through, and, undoubtedly, so much was sufficient for him.

The stone-bearing caravan, with its companions, then, came in over
a rocky precipitous height, and down into a hollow smooth as burnished copper
in the dawn. Long pans of metallic ground lay before them, some with pools of
metallic water in them, where none would drink, not even the thirsty animals.
Days they moved on the face of this geography, under a sweeping sky. When the
nights came, there were curious shapes in the heavens—not to be confused with
clouds; vague misty forms that went to and fro, ghost-giants, or phantom gods.
Stars shot from their moorings—if they were stars. Some crashed on the land,
rushing over the encampments of the travelers, lighting the sky with dreadful
colors bright as noon, making a sound of screaming, or tearing cloth. Where
they fell, over the dim metallic hills, there would come thunder and a blast of
fire, and out from that place would roar a sudden brief gale, hot as a furnace,
blowing the tents from their pegs and men off their feet, and smelling of
essences that had no name.