Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 (49 page)

When the priest concluded, the prince’s daughter called to him
loudly, “That is all very well, but if you are a sorcerer, you should also
perform tricks. Do so.”

The priest, turning his black eyes upon hers, replied, “All the
earth is a magic thing. Only glance into the tree that shades us. See how the
wild figs have ripened there, and how the leaves cover it. And once, this tree
was only a seed hidden in the untended soil. Beside such sorcery, madam, any
trick of mine would be a frail matter.”

Then the prince’s daughter, annoyed, stamped her bangled foot hard
on the ground. At once the earth unseamed itself and out of it there reared
suddenly a most terrifying snake. Red as dying fire it was, with the fangs of a
leopard. It towered up over the prince’s daughter, even as the crowd jumped
aside shrieking, and opened its jaws to bite off her head.

The priest spoke to the snake in a language unknown in that
country. But the snake, which understood many tongues, most of them forked as
its own, swung itself about and, seeing who addressed it, bowed itself down
three times over.

“O Magus,” said the snake, “I know you by your elder name. One of
my kin you slew, long ago, under the wasteful waters men call Ocean.”

“I am contrite for that,” said the priest.

“I see that you are,” said the giant snake. “But your debt is to
your own kind, and you have slain, too, enough of them. May I not decapitate
this one uncivil maiden who rudely stamped just now upon the roof of my
dwelling?”

“Forbear,” said the sorcerer-priest.

“Because you bid it, I must reluctantly obey,” said the snake, and
frowning between its cat’s eyes, it dropped straight down into the ground like
a rope, and the earth sewed tight again.

Then the crowd, which had hesitated to run away, once it found the
priest to be the situation’s commander, vehemently acclaimed him. And the
prince’s daughter threw herself at his ankles.

“I am dear to my father,” said she, ‘‘and he will reward you for
saving my life.”

“I will take no reward,” said the priest.

“Winter is coming,” said the prince’s daughter. “The leaves will
blacken and the fruit become husks. Winged dusts will scour the hills and
valleys, and frosts will gnaw on them. Rains will fall. Let my father build for
you, for he will do so, a palace, and install there a hundred servants to wait
on you, and yours,” and here she graciously indicated the carping old uncle,
who—lost in a tome—had not troubled even to get up, the mantled other up the
slope, and the idiot girl.

Then the priest softly laughed. His laughter said, if any had been
able to decipher it, Such palaces and such service I have had as might shame
emperors, and could have them again. Here, where the wild fig tree grows, I
might cause the very wind to build with bricks and raise a mansion to confound
all others. But if I do not do it, and yet still refuse you, it is from a
stamping pride like your own.

And so he said to the princess, “Not a palace. But some more
modest shelter I would accept.”

Then he too looked down, and saw the girl who was a child gazing
at him intently. When the snake had come from the earth, she had stayed by him,
and taken a sharp flint in her grasp, perhaps to defend him. Now she let go the
flint, and he took her hand.

Seeing this, the princess asked if the woman was really a
simpleton, as the rumor had it.

“Not so. She has become a child. She was an empress once.”

“Fate is fate. Nothing is sure,” prosaically appended the
princess, as she tiptoed over the snake’s roof to her litter.

On
the banks of the wide river, then, where the shrinking autumn sun cast bars of
amber, there came to be a stone house. The brown shore ran into the brown
water, and the hippopotami took their mud baths beneath the house wall. Roses
grew there, and vines, and now and then a long-legged crane would pass daintily
between, or there would fall a furry dew of bees.

Every morning, shortly after sunrise, Dathanja would leave the
house and go up the bank to the spot where another of the wild spreading fruit
trees gave shade. From this vantage he might see some miles along the river,
and over the land on either side, away into the morning haze from which pierced
the tiaras of the mountains, sparkling now with snow. A white city or two he
might also discern on either hand, and the white town of the princess’s father,
and his palace of painted windows.

Sometimes a multitude already waited for Dathanja about the tree.
He was famed; men would make expeditions to reach him. All day long, through
the whey of morning, the cinnamon of afternoon, into the deep-dyed dusk that
quickly gave on night, he would heal and he would debate, for some came to him
for a decision even in argument, or to have a prophecy explained which had
foxed them. And he sent none from him at a loss, or empty. His patience was
boundless, and his strength seemed likewise.

Frequently the girl he called Soveh was with him, and in the early
day she would lean by his knee. But she disliked the midday sun, and to elude
it even climbed the tree and hid in the branches. Persons healed there, and
drunk with wonder and relief, might come away also with a memory of a white
flower looking down through the dark leaves, upon the triumph of hope.

At other times, she played along the bank, or swam in the river,
for she had forgotten how to walk on water, and to swim was all the instinct
left her. Under the river, among the stems of the lotuses, she met the hippos,
graceful as swans in that element, who did her no harm, and occasionally let
her ride—unseen by mortals—on their backs. When darkness came, Soveh would make
garlands for herself and for Dathanja, all clung with fireflies, and so light
him homeward to the stone house.

In those weeks, the watcher of the blond mantle was seldom come
on. “He must keep to the house,” the people of the neighborhood said, “Only let
him come out again and show us his unusual hair, which is the color of the
summer grain.” But it began to be said that one of the two sorcerers had
summoned to their service a huge golden bird, for such had been seen, flying
over the sky at dawn, or threading the swift sunset, and others declared it had
made a perch for itself atop a hill across the river.

For the magician uncle, he too kept from sight, though his carping
might be heard from the upper room of the house, as he pored there over his
weighty collection of magegoria. “Pray do us no harm, Uncle,” said the
cattle-herders, between amusement and earnest, as they drove their charges by
under the window.

While the priest and the child discoursed below, or ate their
simple meals, or were silent together, they too could make out—if they so
desired—that muttering in the upper room. And it might chance a whirlwind would
be dragged in there by a spell, or some other undomestic item, and the stones
of the house would rattle, so at length Dathanja must go out and repair them.
(The child was not afraid. The upheavals interested her, and in return she
sometimes threw garlands, figs, or mangoes in at the upper window.)

But the sage-mage Tavrosharak, reborn out of drowned coral
(twice), he paid no heed. He would have nothing to do with humankind anymore.
He had taken up residence in the humble house because said house had occurred,
but the upper room was filled to crowding with costly furniture—subtracted from
palaces by air-borne devils. And amid it all, Tavrosharak lived, hemmed in by
valuables, and served each dusk a fabulous repast whipped from under the very
lips of kings. And to his unhuman minions neither would Tavrosharak speak, but
sent them about by other means. He would give words now to none, save to his
own reflection in a silvered glass, and to this he did talk, and conversed long
with it. But even with that he sometimes fell out, and then would not speak to
it for days.

Along the margin of the shore, the lotuses had turned to twilight
mauve and to magenta. Elsewhere they closed their cowls like hermits;
shriveled. The sun waned and a bleak wind breathed upon the earth.

Dathanja saw the color of the lotuses below the house, and how
they did not die. But Soveh the child, playing among them and swimming between
their stems, only took them for another aspect of all life, which was a
constant novelty to her. They did not, therefore, cause her hurt or
aggravation, as to Sovaz or Azhriaz they would have done, being recollections
of Chuz. And she had not questioned herself if, by the lotus that broke from
the insane egg, he had found some way, even inadvertently, to bring her
consciousness out of the nothing where it had wandered. Or if this act, as with
the coloration of the plants in the river, were random, or chosen, of one who
once had been her lover.

The winter came, riding his sere chariot. He flung before him the
flowers and fruits, the leaves, the birds, the new-mown days.

A dust wind blew. The shutters of the stone house were bolted
fast, as were the ornate panes of all the palaces. Like sticks of brittle
sugar, the reeds. The hippopotami had made for themselves long caves in the
mud, and slept there, or floated in the river, somnolent, with their round eyes
fast locked as any shutter or pane. And the winter frogs, and the lizards, and
the grasshoppers, crept in by night to the shore of the fire. Sometimes the
sick or weary, seeking Dathanja, were also let in to share the lower room. They
went away singing, through wind and frost, careless now.

It was the end of the third year.

The child played by the hearth, making paper garlands for all the
frogs and lizards there, and their little eyes were like row upon row of bright
beads. Dathanja sat and looked at this, and put aside the precious book he had
been reading, which the prince’s daughter, along with much else, had given him.

“How old are you, Soveh?” he asked the child in the woman’s body.

“I am seven or I am nine or I am eleven years of age,” said she.
“For you told me.”

“What have you learned?”

“Only to be alive,” she said, and she laughed, and hung a paper
garland on the toe of his shoe. (For the princess, seeing him barefoot, had
given him shoes, and sometimes Dathanja wore them.)

But the lizard for whom the garland had been intended came and
pulled it off and gave it to Soveh again, stretching out its neck for the
token.

Across the river, in the west, a star rose, and later it flew over
the roof. But Tavrosharak had squabbled with his mirror again and it was quiet
in the upper room.

It would seem Dathanja, priest, healer, sorcerer that he was, must
know some witchcraft that could have cured Soveh of all her delusions. Or maybe
he had attempted it, but the effect of chaos proved obdurate. Or, he had not
attempted it.

One by one, the creatures at the hearth allowed her to adorn them,
and reminded her when she omitted to do so. They knew, it appeared, she was not
only a retarded girl. And the hippopotami, they knew. Why not, when she
breathed water as she rode upon them under it?

And the lotuses had found out or been told, blooming on through
the gales and the nights of ice. And even some of the servitors that the
mage-sage called up, they had guessed, and glared down through the floorboards
at her, while they were before him.

And the angel also, that knew, keeping its watch upon them all.

3

ONE
DIM veiled morning, Soveh was under the house wall, playing a game of hers with
small stones she had collected. It was a complex game, involving rulers and
ruled, armies, citadels, and ominiscient strokes of fate—those few who had
chanced to ask her to explain her childish hobby had been mostly astonished,
and sometimes discomposed.

As she played she sang, in a voice so beautiful the very air
seemed hushed to listen. The sun, not long risen, sent its rays through the
stripped trees along the shore, and over the river, polishing as it went the
islands of four or five floating hippos. Every night the sun descended into and
sojourned amid chaos. It touched the child-woman, who had also entered the
Un-ness beyond the world, with a musing finger.

Your grandmother, your mother’s mother,
said the sun,
once wedded my light. It is already in your bones, and your soul
knows it, my power and the powers of chaos and nonmatter. There is no need to
hide.

Soveh won a city with a legion of small brown pebbles.
I
am not ready to
believe you, yet,
said Soveh’s averted head.

Just then, Dathanja came out of the house, and Soveh ran up to
him. “Here is the king of all the stones,” she said, and gave to him a pebble
of a strange and natural stripe, opaque black, transparent blue, a beautiful
thing she had saved for him. Dathanja took the pebble, and next her beautiful
face between his hands, and he kissed her quietly on the forehead. “What have I
taught you, Soveh?” he said. “About the seasons,” she said, “and dark and day,
and why trees grow, and where the sea is. And how to be loved.” Dathanja said,
“Yes, that is true. You have learned that very well. But do you know then what
you have taught me?” The child looked at him, and the woman smiled. Neither
knew the other, but both were for a moment before him. Dathanja said, to both
of them, “You have taught me how to take. It was the hardest lesson, the
longest missed, and I learned it from you in three seconds.”