Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 (42 page)

It had been captive all this time, here in the wood of weed, and
had never granted access, or a hint of its secrets, to Tirzom Jum. But flee it
could not, nor come to the demoness, until, at the chime of destruction, the
guards themselves, and all their magical accessories and provisos with them,
fled cityward, or away to more secure climes. Now, released, and ever sensitive
to the mistress it served, the ship came quick as a pulse through the weeds.

“I shall accompany you,” said Tavir.

“Once the way is open, I believe I cannot prevent you.”

So they swam to the porelike door the ship now offered, and in a
few moments were inside the belly of it, among the fragrances and breathing
carvings.

And while the angel still stood over the city’s ruins, the great
fish flashed away.

In less than an hour, some countless areas of distance lay between
Azhriaz and Tirzom.

Tavir
sat on a couch and grieved. Azhriaz would grieve no more.
Men
are fools,
she
thought,
and their magicians worse, and demons and gods more stupid than
the stupid. Had I warred with them from the ship, I might have harmed the city,
or their city done some ill to me. But I would soon have gone from it, and so
the hunter would not have wrecked it for my sake. The thing that wished me
slain slew them and liberated me.

The genies had appeared in large numbers, as if to greet Azhriaz,
or inspect her. She marshaled them to create soft music and to serve wines and
dishes for a feast, all to tempt Tavir. But Tavir brushed the genies aside, and
turned from the food and drink.

“These are no illusion,” said Azhriaz. “Here, all is real. Or so
we must suppose it.”

“How can I drink, or lie listening to songs, when some thousands
of my brothers are dead or dispossessed?”

“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
immortality, 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