Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 (48 page)

Tavrosharak, sensitive to his own advice, circled the peak
cautiously. Ebriel maintained the vantage of the tine. Dathanja, after an
interval, moved forward.

In the shade of the ruined hull, not to be seen at once, if at
all, one might (or not) visualize a series of curves and angles, proportions,
densities, that could belong to the figure of a man. And having discerned that
much, that could belong also to the figures of two others, neither men.

Under the frame, among the scintillant debris, a beggar sat on the
ground. He was swagged solely in a ragged orange cloth, and his brown shaven
cranium was bowed. Across from him there crouched a snarling lizard, large as a
tiger and tinted like one. This mounted guard, it would seem, upon the man, and
upon the girl who lay between them, her head resting upon the man’s knees,
while he smoothed her forehead, and quietly tidied the coiling flood of her
night-black hair.

She breathed, the girl; you might see it, if you leaned close.
This Dathanja presently did. The beggar did not try to prevent him, nor the
lizard. It only glared outward at the angel on the rock, and lashed its tail at
Tavrosharak’s circling dragon.

But through the lids of her eyes, the blue irises were scarcely
burning. Her face was far away as a note of music sounded from the cold shores
of the moon.

“Azhriaz,” said the beggar. “Soveh, Sovaz.” But he got no answer,
and seemed to await none. To Dathanja, in the way of a king, the beggar added,
“Did she summon you then? Somewhere within herself she has remembered you. Or
forgotten. Forgetfulness might summon, too.”

“I see now how beautiful she is,” said Dathanja. “Can that be
because some of her beauty has left her.”

“Or some of his fear has left the one who sees.”

King Fate, Fortune’s Master, raised his vibrant voice and called
to the Malukhim: “Ebriel, you white eagle, you also see what you require—that
there is no Goddess anymore. Is heaven content?” On his rock Ebriel shifted one
wing, whitely, that was all. “Shall I inform you,” inquired Kheshmet, “of what
became of Yabael your brother, in the sea, when the tidal wave, vomited from
chaos, struck him?” Kheshmet laughed, a slow, red-golden noise. “Destiny
overtops even angels. For that one was borne into chaos just as the sun, his
mother and father, is borne each evening. And chaos remade Yabael before
expelling him, despite the will of the gods upon him. He has since come forth
again, into a distant ocean, and there he blazes and runs on in his pursuit, which
lacks now only a quarry. He is a fiery streaming orb, chaos and matter, sun and
liquid, a long-haired comet of the seas. And he will haunt there awhile, coming
and going over the water-skies of the sea peoples. They will tell their times
and seasons by him, as men have done by the comets of heaven. That is the fate
of Yabael, the sun-vulture, the holy runner.”

Ebriel spread his wings. Yellow his mane, like wheat; asphodel and
cream and topaz was he. And that, it would appear, was all he was.

Kheshmet continued to stroke the midnight hair from the girl’s
brow under his fingers. “Ah, child,” he said.

“The wicked are eternally children,” said Dathanja softly. And he
stepped back again, as if to go away.

That crucial moment, the invented dragon of the sage-mage launched
itself against Fate’s pet, the snapping giant chameleon under the wreck. It was
with a squall and a vast flapping that the dragon came, Tavrosharak yet affixed
to its swooping spine, while the lizard rose with bladed claws to meet them.

Supposing there was no time or breath for a spell: “Help, merciful
gods!” yelled Tavrosharak, who kept old-fashioned ideas.

But Kheshmet only said, “Hush,” in a voice mild as the rustle of a
parchment. And the lizard shrank down and down until it was the size of a
nutshell, and the dragon came undone and was no more. With the result that
Tavrosharak fell onto the terrace, nor elegantly. And lying bruised before
Kheshmet, Tavrosharak bemoaned the injustice of a world where beggars might
also be choosers, attain magic knacks, and use them on their betters. Meantime,
the egg had slipped from the mage’s grasp and its silken wrapper, and spun on
the terrace madly. Cracks spread across its surface.

“It is hatching, prematurely. Whatever misshapen mistake will now
emerge, it is the fault of this orange one. All my labor gone for nothing,”
groused Tavrosharak.

Then the egg split. The bits of shell sprayed out fine as seafoam,
and from the center a lotus flower, winged by petals, flew in the air.
Damson-colored the lotus was, with veins of clearest gold. It fluttered to the
girl who lay on the rock, and settling and rising and settling, light as down,
it touched her forehead, the lids of her eyes, her lips, her two breasts—and
the heart beneath, it must have touched that too, for suddenly she sighed, her
fringed lashes stirred on her cheeks, and she whispered to the lotus in a
little, little voice, “If I were a child, I would weep.”

But the lotus darted up and smacked King Kheshmet smartly on each
ear. And as Fate’s fingers reached for it, the magenta flower crumbled into a
magenta flour, that showered over him and flossed his bright garment. Fate
clicked his tongue, and smiled, with half his mouth only.

The girl who had been the Goddess Azhriaz opened wide her eyes.

She looked at Kheshmet’s half-smile, and smiled herself, sadly and
silently.

“There,” he said, “you have woken up.”

“So I have,” she said. These were the accents of a young woman, of
a Vazdru, yet it was the tone of a child, the very one he had compared her
to—this was not Azhriaz the Goddess. It was not Sovaz, the sorceress mistress
of the Prince of Delusions.

“Soveh,” said Kheshmet, using the name of her babyhood. “Little
Flame.”

“Where is my mother?” said the child-girl-woman, staring at him in
abrupt mistrust. A darkness took her face. “Oh, she is dead. Now I remember. I
cried out to her, but she could not hear. She is beyond the world. She would
have come to me if she could.”

She lay under the torn ribcage of the ship, physically flawless.
But the wounds of chaos were on her, for all that. She had had, from the first,
almost, the body of a girl of seventeen, and she had lived in it for nearly
half a century. But nevertheless, she was now what she had always been and
never been, a child of seven years.

And this child, brushing aside the forest of her own hair
impatiently, said, “Where is my father? I want my father. He will care for me.”
And then her eyes, the blue of the soul of night behind the seal of day, her
eyes—that had looked on torture and murder and death and destruction—her eyes,
so lovely, so incongruously pure—they came to Dathanja. And the laughter of a
child’s sheer gladness dawned on her woman’s face. She sat up quickly, and got
to her feet, and holding out her hands toward him, she ran forward. Until
Dathanja turned to ice, turned to
Zhirek
in front of her.
That halted her.

“Why?” she said. “Why?”

“What does she want from me?” Dathanja said.

“You well know,” said Fate, taking the lizard into his hand, like
a coal to warm him. “It is a humorous error, such as the gosling may make,
waking up beside the cat, and thinking the cat its dam or sire.”

“Tell her otherwise,” said Dathanja, as he stood before that
wondering child’s frightened gaze. Black-haired Dathanja, black of eye, clad in
black, and pale, handsome: ciphers of the demon country.

“You
must do it,” said Kheshmet. “She is a child. She thinks she is your daughter.
She thinks you are another.”

“I am not Azhrarn,” said Dathanja to her, she that had been
Azhriaz, who had had her soldiers carry him to her, in a city large as a
continent, a pavilion where a third of the earth had seemed to bow down at her
name.

And she shook her head, but once more stretched out her hand to
him.

“She is a child,” said Kheshmet, again. “She does not take you for
him, perhaps. It is not necessarily as simple as that. But for one of the demon
race, surely she does take you, or for one like herself, half demon, half
human, an immortal. And for the instigator of her life.”

“She has hated him always,” said Dathanja, “that one who fathered
her.”

“Regard her,” said Kheshmet. “There is the hatred. Look.”

She stood weeping, a weeping child, crying to her father very low,
asking what she had done, why did he not love her, why had he shut her from
him, abandoned her, alone and lost in the bitter world.

And Dathanja, who had come so far in his journey of Self, was
rooted to the spot, a stone again.

Then a wind blew cold across the mountaintop, and from the clouds,
a weeping rain came down. In the rain, the figments of men, angels, rocks,
allegorical Lords of Darkness, seemed dissolved and swept away. There had been
a valley in deep rain, a gray rain of the heart, too. Zhirek recollected, and
with it, all those who had wept in their turn through him. And Dathanja went to
the small girl who kneeled on the mountain in the weeping rain and wept, and he
too kneeled, and taking her into his arms, he comforted her. He knew nothing of
her as a woman, but only as a child seven years old, who clung to him, for it
had taken her half a century to find him, to be loved, and to love.

And as he comforted this daughter never born to him, he learned,
and he comforted himself, held in his own arms with her. The one he had been.
The one he was.

2

LIKE
A SEED dropped in untended soil, where conceivably nothing would come of it,
so the change in the world. Out of sight and out of mind.

Suns rose and set, cities rose and were cast down. The moon sailed
the ether and the ships of men the seas. Time stalked over the world, shaking
her hair, disturbing everything. Seasons budded, bloomed, withered. The
caravans of days tirelessly set out, and the caravans of humankind, the
chariots, the wagons, and the walkers. All with their cargoes of merchandise,
and lives. And night, the black hyacinth, closed their eyes, or black Uhlume
the Beautiful, he closed them.

A palmful of years passed. How many years fit in a palm? In a
child’s palm—say then, three.

What it is to be a child. The astonishment of it. All things so
curious. What is that? What is
that
?
Tell me. Teach me. Let me learn.

In the lands they went through, sometimes she was pitied. So
gorgeous she stopped the heart, so lovely the birds sang for her, and the
clouds uncurtained the skies—and she a fool, retarded to the age of seven
years, or maybe nine years. A bright child, it was true. But still a child.
They compared her to legendary Shezael, the half-souled, fair,
oblique—unfinished. Though in the places where black hair carried a stigma,
they looked uneasily upon both of them, the infant-woman, and the adult man,
her guardian. Some heard her refer to him as her father, though he looked
barely old enough to be such, and besides plainly he was a priest of some
wandering order, and should be chaste, or if ever unchaste then at least circumspect.
There was too, in the company, a disgruntled magician (an uncle, perhaps?). Few
took to him, since he seemed always irascible, and was in the habit of
sorcerously venting on bystanders his inner discontents. Luckily the priest, a
healer of extraordinary facility, and also himself a sorcerer, would put right
what this hasty mage put wrong. Then again, there was another often of the
party. Cracked like the girl and the old uncle, it would seem, for he would
walk always considerable yards behind, as if he had quarreled with them, and
later sit on some boulder, observing what the healer did. And when the healer
had completed his task, after him again went this other fellow, who, it must be
admitted, was as fair as the girl, though in a different way, all gold for her
snow and jet and sapphire. However, several got the impression that he was humpbacked
under his mantle. Oh, they were a strange crew, the four of them.

And over and around those countries they took their way,
engendering health and entertainment and—best of everything—gossip. Through the
kingdoms, and across earthscapes that were in themselves rather novel and
unvisited. Or which, possibly, had come to be so from that iota of chaotic
change each devotedly forgot.

And eventually, they came into a land where there were
slate-skinned elephants upon the roads, and haughty camels with vermilion
tassels about their heads. A parched wind blew, for it was the season of crisp
bronzy withering, but along the bronze-brown hills white palaces stared on the
turquoise sky. The folk of this region had no unease at black hair, for they
were themselves a black-haired race, and with a black that was almost blue. The
light-skinned among them were the color of ivory, and the dark among them the
color of cloves. The land was railed by mountains, and parted by a mighty
river, where played hippopotami like air bladders, and lotuses grew.

Now the sorcerer-priest sometimes told stories to the crowds which
gathered about him. One day as he did this, the daughter of the prince of that
area happened to be going by in her litter. She was dark as sandalwood and
haughty as any tasseled camel, though she had a charming human face. Having
heard a rumor of these itinerants, led by a healer-teacher, she ordered her
bearers to bring her where she could hear the tale.