Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 (28 page)

At that he smiled, though he did not look at her.

“I am the one who is stone-born,” he said. “And unwillingly.”

“So be it,” she said. “Then who am I?”

“Some woman,” said he, “from that king’s house I see upstream.

“You have been a long while out of the world in your pillar,” said
Azhriaz. “Tomorrow you shall meet with the king of this city. Do not seek to
evade the honor.”

“Everything is nothing to me,” he said. And now his open eyes also
appeared closed. “I shall not evade, I shall not seek.”

Then Azhriaz burned brighter than a moon—and was gone into thin
air.

But he, who had named himself, in one of the seventy tongues of
men,
Dathanja,
waded up from the river to the bank, where the flowers overtopped him and the
trees flared thousands of feet toward stars that danced in patterns. And
paying no heed to any of it, he sat down there and bowed his head, as if
meaning to stay so for many years. But that was not to be.

4

AT
DAWN, a detachment of the soldiery of the Goddess came to the flower gardens by
the river. They were clad in the blackest mail, every scale of it limned by
white-gold. In the helm of every man was set a precious stone, and great plumes
poured upward as if from the war-smoke of their brains. Their eyes glittered
also from that fire, furiously empty. Like the black horses, the manes and
tails of which were dyed to red, puce, white, and bronze, they had been bred
for combat and for little else. They waited, in their lofty barracks, day and
night, for the summons to go out and take another third of the world. They told
each other how it would be, who should be killed, what cities would fall. Now
they rode down on the naked man in the garden, and grinned at him and gathered
him up among the plumes, caparisons, weapons.

They carried Dathanja along the banks where pilgrims and
tribute-bringers—such tribute came endlessly—stared in awe, or failed to
notice. Some were imbibing the water of the river, thinking it a cure-all,
which sometimes it was, or it gave strange abilities, or hallucinations, or
sent men witless. Or it did nothing to them, and then they sulked.

At the sapphire stair by the temple-palace there were priests, who
progressed with the soldiers up onto the golden terrace, and around it, and so
to a ramp of pocked and pitted marble which slid up into the sky along with the
palace roofs.

At the foot of this ramp, the priests stopped still and chanted.
(The naked man seemed to frown contemptuously a moment, before both the frown
and the contempt faded.)

Then the soldiery made a dead set at the ramp and cantered up it,
the brass-shod hoofs of their horses screeching and striking fire. In the midst
of the charge one of these men was unsaddled. He whirled to his death on the
golden pavement far below without a sound, his arms opened wide as if to
embrace fate. The pitting of the marble ramp had been occasioned by countless
rushes of this kind, and many warriors died, both ascending and going down.
This was one of their means of sacrifice to Azhriaz, when battle was
unavailable.

At the top of the ramp, high above the City, there was a platform
laid with alternating blocks of ebony, malachite, and orange jasper. And about
this checkerboard there waited human and bestial examples of the countries of
the conquered. The men and women were of surpassing beauty, fair, or copper
color, or black, and arrayed like princes. And there were leashed animals of
unusual sort, camels white as milk and having three humps, two-headed lizards,
winged serpents, turtles carapaced with shields fit for giants, and older than
the oldest hills. Braziers burned with scented fire—to which the winged
serpents were sometimes taken to drink. Damsels plucked music from instruments
like sickle moons.

Walking their war-steeds through this living forest, the soldiers
who bore the naked man came at long last—for it took most of an hour to cross
the platform—to a pavilion made of polished bones. Within it was a chair of cut
glass, smooth as water, and guarded by two adamant wolves, having each three
golden living darting eyes.

In the glass chair sat Azhriaz the Goddess.

Her robe was scarlet, and spinels burned in her hair. Gold was
strewn on her like fallen blossom, and she was gloved in gold. It had been
noticed long since, curious phenomenon, that the gold worn by the Goddess, however,
would insidiously alter over a period of time, becoming harder, cooler, more
like silver.

The soldiers gazed long at her, then staggered away, drunk on the
sight. Some ran across the platform and flung themselves down, falling between
the sky-scraping towers with cries of satisfaction. They had left Dathanja at
her feet.

“Look up, Dathanja, O Unwilling Birth of the Stone,” said Azhriaz.
“Look up, and see the woman from the king’s palace.”

Dathanja looked up.

“Guess now,” said Azhriaz, “who is king here.”

And she raised her hand in its golden glove—already silvered as if
with the faintest frost—and all the slaves, human or creature, fell prone to
reverence her. And to the sudden stillness of that high place came drifting the
praise song of all the thousands of priests of all the countless temples of
that metropolis, even from a hundred miles off.

Dathanja looked at her for a great while. There was a quality to
his look that demonstrated a firm concentration of the mind. The glamour of
what he gazed on did not distract him. And seated before her now on the rugs of
the pavilion, naked as he had come from the pillar, he neither vaunted nor
sought to conceal his body. He wore it as a garment.

Eventually, he said: “They call you a goddess. But you are not of
the generation of Upperearth, I think. You have about you the quality of
another race whose land lies in the opposite direction. Yet they shun daylight,
and here you sit, blue-eyed under the sun.”

“How wise you are, Dathanja,” said Azhriaz. “Do you hear the name
my priests are crying?”

“Yes,” said Dathanja. “By your name then, I know you are his
child.”

“How wise, how wise,” said Azhriaz.

“He got you on a mortal, or you could not endure the day.”

“Oh, a blue-eyed mortal, with day in her very flesh and soul. But
now,” said Azhriaz, “enough of she that I am. Tell me of him you are.”

“I have told you. I am a newborn infant. I am an unmarked stone
sloughed by stone.”

“Zhirek,” said Azhriaz. “The Dark Magician. Invulnerable,
terrible. Simmu’s lover and Simmu’s murderer. Zhirek who learned the magic of
the sea-folk. Zhirek who offered my father his service. But my father said to
him, ‘I need no service of yours.’”

“That was a former life,” said Dathanja in a low and almost silent
voice.

“Let us see.”

And removing the silvered golden glove from her left hand, she
showed him a dagger, which next she threw into his heart. But the dagger fell
broken on the rugs. He was unharmed. Then she took a cup standing by her and
gave it him. “Drink this poison.” He took the cup, and drank, and set the cup
aside. Azhriaz kicked the goblet, and where the wine in it ran out, a fearsome
scorch seared along the ground. But the man was not affected. And then Azhriaz
took the glove from her right hand and touched the head of the three-eyed wolf
at her right knee. It came alive, every inch of it, and padded to the man and
gaped its jaws for his throat. But something pushed the wolf aside, and it
rolled away and went back to the chair and grew instantly rigid again, all but
its three eyes.

“Behold now,” said Azhriaz. “This way Zhirek was, for his mother
had him seethed in a sorcerous well. . . . And this way you are.
How is that?”

“Azhriaz,” he said, “it is to me a memory—less visible, far less
actual, than the glass of your clever chair. For I am done with Zhirek.”

“The earth rings yet with tales of his arrogance and wickedness,
nevertheless. In remembrance of that, you are well suited to my City and my
Empire. And now I am sure of this: Unless you had consented, the soldiers would
have had some problem to bring you here. Thus. You were willing.”

Then Azhriaz rose and clapped her hands.

The pavilion dazzled into the sky and vanished. The crowds of
beasts and humans also disappeared, either spirited elsewhere or canceled,
never having existed at all. The checkered platform remained, void, with the
smothering gentian sky hung over it, and the City round about too bright to
gaze on, and the towers going up as it seemed to very Upperearth, to illustrate
how the gods were mocked.

Then two huge creatures came flying, like doves.

“They are my slaves, as all things are in this place,” said
Azhriaz. “Go with them, if you wish. For if you do not desire it, I will not
tussle with you to see if my magic can crush yours—between strong powers such
fights are so tiresome,” said Azhriaz, “even Lords of Darkness do not engage in
them, as I have witnessed.”

The dove things alighted, and cooed to Zhirek who was Zhirek no
more, gesturing how they would bear him kindly through the air to some
wonderful prospect.

“And if I go with them, what?” he said.

“You shall be a prince here. You shall enjoy the luxuries of
Az-Nennafir; its learning will be at your disposal, and its dower of
curiosities.”

“And by night, the living image of Simmu will be sent to me,
perhaps?”

“If you desire it.”

“I do not. Simmu is no more, and no more anything to me. But it
would be a demon’s trick.”

“I am no demon,” she said, “but a Goddess-on-Earth.”

Dathanja, who had been Zhirek, regarded her. He said, “Yes, you
are a goddess. So strung with riches and enchantments you might as well be
destitute. And so beautiful you might as well be faceless.”

“You are wise, as I said,” replied Azhriaz. “Do not be too wise.”

And she was gone, but for a second, a slender dragon filled the
whole sky, and the City whispered in its stones.

Dathanja
lived then some months of his new life at Az-Nennafir of the Goddess. He had
been once before in a tall, tall city, the prize of a woman, but that was in
the former life, and besides, beneath an ocean. It may have seemed to Dathanja
that Azhriaz put no watch on him, that he might proceed where and how he
wished. But he must know also that since every person and being of the City,
its every brick and tile, even the waters and dusts of it, were hers, she might
at any time have news of him, if she was inclined. But it was a place of
wonders, and some of these he inspected. He walked the thoroughfares like other
men, and for weeks wandered far afield on its hills of marble and through its
obelisk woods. He spoke to travelers who came there, and no one stayed him. He
watched unhindered, and uninvited, the orgies and revels, the sorceries and
dramas and festivals that were its daily and nightly fare. The extravagant
sacrifices he saw, and how easily death claimed them. He came to be known by
sight, himself, for some mark of hers had been left on him, to protect him from
annoyance, or only in the way a favorite dog is given a collar. For himself, he
remained grave as the stone, and though the lensed sun tanned his skin, no
other hue of him was altered. Black of hair and blacker of eye, and in plain
clothing of black, this way he went. Yet he walked barefoot as Zhirek had
always done.

None, asking or learning his current name, addressed him by the
old one, and perhaps they did not know it. Neither did the determinedly
lascivious women and men of Az-Nennafir approach him, nor any tricksters, nor
any sage or scholar or poet. And this was not solely the mark of their Goddess
on him, but some branding of his own. Dathanja did not entice lust or hate or
love, as Zhirek did. No one begged compassion of him, or sought to adore him,
or cast him down. And when, rarely and in seeming error, some might speak to
him, his calm stony eyes drove them off, as once his invulnerable fearful flesh
had driven off the spears and lions.

There was an avenue of statues, each representing the
Witch-Goddess, and to one side of it, high up, was a grove of olive trees,
higher themselves than a house of ten or twelve stories, and with leaves like
tarnished water. Dark ferns flourished below, whose heads would brush the ears
of elephants. Golden fruits scattered the ground that had fallen from no tree,
and which, after a space, hatched out butterflies.

At the center of the grove had been built a shrine to the Goddess,
where every dawn young women and young men would come to pour, from vials, the
blood or tears of those they had injured during the night. The butterflies fed
on these substances, and immediately turned black, and flew awhile, then
drifted down and died. But from the little corpses would presently spread a
golden stain that, as the day wore on, hardened and rounded, until by night it
had become once more a fruit of gold.

To this grove Dathanja found his way, and here he came to sit, day
after day, and sometimes to sleep on the grass under the ferns. He watched the
eternal circle, how the fruit hatched, how the butterflies flew about, how the
blood and tears were splashed on the shrine of Azhriaz and the butterflies fed
and blackened and fell down. How there came to be again golden fruit, and again
the fruit hatched butterflies. On and on, the cycle toiled, around and around,
and never ended.