Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 (35 page)

For the fish-ship, it too rocked, its great speed slowed, it
slewed, it bucked and rolled and went hugely toppling downward through those
deaf deeps of the waters.

5

HAVING
walked many months and miles, Dathanja, black of hair and eye, and clothed in
black, and barefoot, reached a land of woods and waterfalls and valleys. He
had, as he went by, seen the periphery landscapes of the Goddessdom. Various
highly tinted deserts equipped with smashing meteors, a selection of seas with
bridges over them, plains of intoxicant grass—such as these had met his gaze.
The altars too he looked at, and the delirious worshipers. He heard the
ceaselessly repeated philosophy of the uncaring gods, just as in the City. He
did not deny it. Memory, fragmentary and transparent as a painting on broken
glass, informed Dathanja of old rites and prayers—which had brought only
disillusion and grief. It was another life. He did not dwell upon it, though
inevitably it tutored and guided him.

In due course he moved beyond the boundaries of that domain. Then
there began to be, at long last, only the usual anomalies of human thought and
religion. And thereafter, more primitive ground, lonely of mankind.

Eastward. The dawns out-combed their yellow hair. The sunsets
hurried. The earth had a youth about it. It cleansed Dathanja’s soul, or so it
seemed to him. He had not often tasted calm—a serenity that was not embittered
loss of feeling, numbness passing for peace. What secret lay behind this cool
and quiet state? So, he reached the land of watered, wooded valleys.

Between one valley and the next, on the hillside, at the mouth of
a waterfall, there stood an ancient shrine. It was not devoted to any
particular god, nor, perhaps, to the gods at all. None tended it. Trees and
shrubs rooted in its court. Birds housed and discoursed in the roof. The hurrying
sunset had commenced and slid down the waterfall in its haste to be away.

Dathanja entered the court, and seated himself on the ground to
eat a feast of gathered roots and fruit. He had been a wanderer in the former
life. He had had no need to prepare himself for this journey. To some, the
habit of itinerance is ordinary.

The dusk came, the night came after. Stars unfastened windows in
the sky and began their watch of the earth.

On a paving stone, Dathanja built and kindled a fire. He, who had
been a mighty magician once, and would bring the elements at a snap of his
ringed fingers. He who might have produced a palace from the hill.

As the flames played together, Dathanja beheld a woman standing
the other side of the light. He took her, firstly, for Azhriaz, who had met him
at irregular intervals on his trek, a thing so astonishingly fair he did not
find her beautiful. (She was a demon, too, and of all the races he distrusted
their kind the most.)

However, this was not Azhriaz, either in disguised person or
projected form. This was a human girl, humanly fair, so he recognized as much.

“Do you see me, Dathanja?” she superfluously asked him.

“I see you,” he said.

She had the later summer’s hue; roses, malt. Behind her was
another, taller, and a man, who said, “And do you see
me,
Dathanja?”

“I do,” he said.

The man came from the shadow. He had the hue of kingship; metals
and dyes. Behind him—

“And that one also,” Dathanja said. “I see him.”

But the third was wrapped in the dark, and he had no hue and did
not speak.

“Which of us is to begin?” inquired the summery girl of the kingly
man.

“I,” he said. And she stepped away. “It is not,” she muttered in
her hair, “always so.”

But the tall man moved to the fire and beckoned Dathanja. “You
must come with me,” he said. And Dathanja must.

They were high up then, above the shrine, and the fire looked tiny
as a sequin.

“Ah, Dathanja,” said the kingly one, mockingly affectionate. “You
have disappointed me.” And he seemed many men at once. He was sometimes like a
priest in costly yellow robes, and sometimes like an azure-bearded king. Or
sometimes he was demoniac, and took on a Vazdru air. Or else he resembled
Dathanja himself, save his features were rather altered and his eyes were blue,
or green. But whatever or whoever he might be, he came to rest on a ridge and
Dathanja with him. “Such power was yours, beloved,” said the kingly one,
coaxingly. “Do you not recall? Emperors went in fear of you. The very oceans
did your bidding.
Do
this!
you told them: It was done. And your sorcery is still spoken of.
Your unspeakable cruelties, your mighty deeds. Ah, do you not even recall a
mite of it?”

“Yes,” said Dathanja, in a low, clear voice. “I do recall.”

“Acquiesce,” said the man. “I will give all back to you. You shall
be again Zhirek the Dark Magician, and rule men, and make a new legend.”

And at this, the kingly changeable one unrolled the night like
parchment, and there lay—illusion or truth—the kingdoms of the world, its seas.
And men kneeled to Zhirek, or to Dathanja. And sorcery came like a perfumed
wind, and cloaked him round. He might do anything. His brain took flight with
the sciences he had once kept like his dogs.

“Acquiesce,” the kingly one repeated. And he was now most like
Zhirek. He was Zhirek, and he cajoled Zhirek. “Take your glory back again. Be
again a mage and a lord, so that every footstep of yours is written of.”

Dathanja looked at the illusions or realities of his earlier life,
and of his proposed future, and a terrible pang, like pain or pleasure, cut
through his heart. Before it faded.

“No,” said Dathanja.

“Ah, beloved,” said the tempter. “Do you reject this summit
because it is a sin?”

“Is it a sin?” said Dathanja. “I only know that this I have done.
It is past.”

“And you will walk powerless in the world, the butt of every
accident, at the mercy of men?
You?”

“I am at no man’s mercy save my own,” Dathanja said. “My apologies
I offer you, for you do not tempt me with this.”

The man shrugged and he laughed, and he was gone. Dathanja sat
before the fire in the courtyard.

“Which of us, now?” inquired the girl, of that figure still
wrapped in obscurity.
He
did
not reply. “Then it is to be me,” she said.

She moved to Dathanja’s fire, and when she was near, the glow of
it was netted in her hair, wetted her bangles, and soaked her thin garment so
all the shape of her was to be seen, and she was well made.

“Ah, beloved,” said she. And he was in the fire with her.

Like a drum the night pounded, red and bright, black and red.
Sometimes her hair was of a watery sheen, sometimes an apricot shade, she was
a sea-princess, she was a girl who danced with unicorns. And sometimes she was
a youth, her breasts flattened to hard pectorals under his hands, her loins
upflowering where a full-fleshed anemone had closed him round. They writhed
upon the bed of fire, and her hair streamed out along the earth. Her limbs
clasped him, fierce as a lioness, yet her fingers came and went as soft and
slight as grass. Her waist made motions like a snake, her mare’s pelvis
galloped. They plunged together through the fire into another fire beneath. The
stars were whirling through his brain, and at her core a silver star tipped now
the spear he rode upon. And into him in turn the silver sped, and quickened in
a shivering wire, along the thrusting of the lance, through the taut shield of
the belly and the striving groin, to the sacrum, where the atom of eternity lay
buried in the spine. And he held her fast, though now she sobbed aloud and
struggled and was transformed—to beast, to sprite, to conflagration and to
waterfall. He held her by her snake’s waist, by her thrashing limbs, drowned in
her mouth and carried upward on the curved wave of her abdomen and her breasts
flowered upon their flowers—riding the winged horse of lust, blinded, slain,
born, disemboweled by ecstasies, until the silver probe pierced the atom of
eternity itself, and the water of life was flung forth.

The winged spasm fell through the dark and shook Dathanja from its
back. He lay beside the fire.

“You have betrayed yourself. You have shown weakness and need.
Your soul lay naked as you suffered the fit of pleasure. You have sinned.” This
is what the girl said, out of the dark.

But it was Dathanja who laughed now.
“That”
he
said, “is not a sin.” And turning his shoulder to the fire, and the
still-waiting, still-unseen, third figure (for the tall man and the summer girl
were gone), smiling, Dathanja slept.

Yet, in the hour before the dawn, Dathanja roused, and sitting up,
beheld the third figure seated across from him, by the ashes of the fire,
against the starless sky.

Robed and hooded in white, handsome black-skinned Death, the Lord
Uhlume, regarding the mortal man with immortal opal eyes.

“You must forgive me,” said Dathanja after a while, “if I say that
all this I believe to be a delusion. Fantasies sent to aggravate or dissect me,
by another, or conceivably by my own self. And this being so, you also, lord
king, are a figment of my mind. It seems to me Uhlume, who was kind to me in
his own way once, and once my master, would not put himself to the bother of
this visit.”

The vision of Death—Dathanja was correct—responded.

“It may be you are wise. Nevertheless, I am your third and last
tempter, and as such, I have validity and you must listen.” (And Dathanja
must.) “You have lived out your years of invulnerability, that blessing-curse
awarded you by witchcraft long ago. Like everything of the earth, sorcery decays,
or it is altered. Centuries have passed, and you have slumbered, and you have
woken, and you are not as you were. It is the residue of your own lost magery
that keeps you currently from harm. While you consign yourself to safety, safe
you will be. But the armoring enchantment was sloughed within the pillar of
stone. Should you desire otherwise, Dathanja, than for comfort, now you may be
harried and hurt. Now, if you choose, you may die.”

Then Dathanja sat in silence, looking into the face of Death, or
of Death’s image. At length Dathanja said, “Can it be so?”

“A dozen means of proof lie all about,” said ‘Death.’

Dathanja considered. Zhirek, a world of time before, had searched
a valley for slicing stones, had drunk from the morbific water of it, had sought
to hang himself on its tree and to throw himself down from its overleaning
height. To no avail. Now, Dathanja reached out one hand, and taking up a raw
flint from the courtyard, he stuck it in his arm. And the flint wounded him.
His blood flowed crimson. “I am glad of it,” he said. And he closed his eyes,
and the calm within him seemed to flow outward with the blood, to surround him,
and to comfort him, as the barrier of invulnerability had not. “Then,” said
Dathanja, “the last temptation is certainly to die. And it is a cunning one.
But, Death, I have learned. Men, too, are as immortal as the gods, and as
invulnerable as Zhirek, who was dipped in the well of flame. And therefore it
does not distress me to remain alive a little longer. For he that I was fled
wickedness and did good only out of fear, and then fear overwhelmed him and
he did only wickedness. My debts are many, but wickedness has no more sway over
me. I have used it up. I am not, therefore, afraid to live.” And opening his
eyes, Dathanja saw that Death too—or death—had left him, and the long and
passionate dawn began.

Going out of the shrine, Dathanja went to the waterfall, and
cupping his hands, he caught the water and drank. Presently a deer approached
with her faun, and he offered them the water, and they too drank from his
hands. The faun allowed him to smooth its dappled head. Untroubled, the mother
ate the moss that grew on the rock. And Dathanja remembered Simmu, youth and
maiden, calling the deer and the hares to race with him, communing with birds
and serpents.

But Simmu was no more, and Zhirek, the invulnerable sorcerer, was
no more. It was Dathanja who soon strode away into the morning.

6

DARKNESS
had its abode in the depths of the sea. Nor did it dwell alone there. These
uterine cellars teemed with life, yet it was a life that existed lightlessly
for the most part, and when light came upon it, the stranger was unwelcome.

Light rays entered the upper floors of the great trench in a
gentle blush. There came a swirling and lashing, as of a legion of whips, and
larger entities, like huge black ghosts, blundered softly away. But the light
sharpened. It would not be held back, or avoided. It pushed through the water
and the dark, and suddenly the sea deeps burst to visibility. A forest lay
along the top tiers of the trench. It was composed of a million tendrils,
oil-black. And in the forest perched fish nests of flaxen floss, and their
makers—finnily sprinting to conceal themselves—were each like a rainbow prism.
The huge things which had already careered into flight, they were enormous
slothful sacks of billowing skin, and where the light sluiced over their
bodies, they glimmered acid-blue and bronze. Farther down the steps of the
trench the illumination, striking like a bell, showed beds of oceanic flowers,
hot coral and rose, chill melon-pale or sour melanic green, all slamming their
portals in dismay, and here or there on them a slim startled creature like a
gold-leaf worm, bolting a last morsel of grazing before it dashed from view.