Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 (53 page)

And there it stood, the body of Tavir, a prince of Tirzom Jum,
spangled with wet, and with the seaweed still upon its shoulder.

The
body of Tavir had not decayed, not in three years and more. Perhaps the
cataclysm—chaos, which touched even angels—had done something to the fibers of
a corpse that lay so close to the shock. Or else, its link to the immortal
magician had preserved the discarded flesh. To the girl and the man Tavir’s
body gave no attention, though both were sorcerers, and greater than that.

It prowled across the floor to the stair, and up it went, and
giving there the second door, that of the upper room, a mighty shove, strode
into the chamber of the mage.

Tavrosharak had been seated at his table (pilfered from a king’s
library and laid with books and curios obtained in the same spot). He had been
long silent, but now he leapt up, oversetting some bizarre unuseful experiment,
so holes were burned in the table’s wood, and in the very atmosphere.

“Pay heed,” said Tavir’s body.

“I will,” said Tavrosharak, although he made a pass or two and
uttered a mantra or three that should have rid him of the apparition, and
failed.

“I am no ghost,” said the body. “I am the whole skin, and the
physical soul—the
ego
of
Tavir. You lured me to you, sensing your liberty would shortly come, and
claimed back the spirit-soul out of me. But I had lived. I had been a mage,
like you. And I am young, as you—when you acquired your immortality—no longer
were. Now,” said Tavir’s body, “Simmurad is no more. It is destroyed, for the
Fire ran through it, and then a fearsome fiery wave that ran the other way.
Where fire and unmatter met in water, a red sun was born, that dashed away. And
I was galvanized to pursue it, awhile. But then, my mind awoke in me, and I
remembered you. So I sought out you instead. And here I am before you.”

“What do you want?” quavered the sage-mage, still flapping about
in efforts to effect some spell of riddance, ineffectually.

“A soul,” said the body. “Yours,
mine.
That which I had.”

“And what of me?” howled Tavrosharak.

“What of you? Look at the life you have given our soul, shut up
day and night, dabbling and dithering, hating all men. What will you learn in
here but what a fool you are? Come,” said Tavir, black, beautiful, a lord of
the sea, shining green of hair and eye, “come, dear soul, back to the one who
truly values you. See in me what you will gain. And consider what you have
lost, with him.”

“Stay, dear soul,” gabbled Tavrosharak. “I will mend my ways. We
will go out and change men into stones and stones into sheep, and overturn the
whole earth—”

“Come, dear soul,” coaxed Tavir, “and we will enjoy the loveliness
of the world, and try to repair the pain of it. We will found a city under the
sea where the ocean peoples shall live at peace together. All the teaching of
the priest Dathanja, which the one who traps you has overheard—and
dismissed—but which you have pondered on, all that we will try, and bring to
bear upon our future life together.”

The mage-sage sat abruptly down in his chair. He gave a grunt, and
from his parted lips spun flame. It was a soft fire, barely visible. But Tavir
opened wide his arms to receive it.

“There is,” said Tavir presently, “a goddess in this house, and
the teacher, who has such skill. But also this body I have now will not live
forever. I must be swift. No distraction. And so—farewell without greeting—”

And Tavir spoke his own mantra for a disappearance, soul-possessed
and so a magician once more. And was gone.

Meanwhile, the body of Tavrosharak, soul-empty, sat hard as coral
in the chair, and it muttered: “How am I to work upon occult science with such
a disturbance?” And it called a whirlwind in at the window simply to berate it.
For the immortal flesh of the sage had kept much of its mage-craft, even
soulless, and did so still, and, too, its irritated personality, that needed no
soul to fuel it. So there it sat, and would sit for centuries, grumbling and
complaining, studying and disparaging the books, quarreling with itself in the
mirror, and performing feats of annoying sorcery.

And the cattle herders going under the window three hundred years
hence, when trees had rooted through the floor and roof of the house, and the
shores of the river widened almost to the door, would still say in propitiating
voices to it, “Pray do us no harm, Uncle.”

7

THE
WINTER, who had lain hard upon the earth so long, pressing her down, having his
will with her, left her suddenly with only a chilly kiss, and mounting his
branch-bare chariot, he stormed away.

Pale gleaming days, like zircon drops, came to the earth, and
clothed her in filmy yellows and wild greens. To the brown land they came also,
bringing robes of a denser dye, setting fire to flowers, sprinkling the fields
with whispering fringes. On the trees the heavy leaves sprang out. The
hippopotami washed off their mud and fought each other in the river. The
elephants, breaking their tethers, screamed and stamped among the hills by
night.

The prince’s daughter, the princess, cried in her painted bed.
“Now he will leave me.” But it seemed he would not, yet, though he did not
promise her all time.

The girl who had been Dathanja’s daughter walked on the shore, and
took the last winter lotuses for a garland. Against her throat, in a little
silver cage, a mote of amethyst constricted their color. (Even chaos, toucher
of angels, had not been able to melt that gem. Or had avoided doing so.) Its
influence had been with her then and since, for good, for ill. And she had had
her days of madness, surely, simple and a child?

A white ibis stalked among the stems. It bowed as it passed her,
and uttered a weird cry.
Atmeh.

For the earth knew the name she had chosen for herself, the name
which meant hereabouts Flame, or Flame of Life.

One other too, maybe, knew of her rebirth and her naming.

And she looked with more than sight across the brown river, away
toward the land’s boundaries. The snow had dissolved from the mountains where
they rose, afloat like jeweled ships in the sky. Beneath, on one single hill,
one dot of asphodel snow. The Malukhim, unfolding his wings.

It might have been he had hibernated, or even flown to some warmer
clime. Or he had only sat out the interim. Who could divine what retributive
angels did in the cold months, the will of the gods being so loose upon them?

Dathanja had left the house and stood before the doorpost. Atmeh
went to him. “It is,” she said, “today that I will go from here.”

“Yes, it is today.”

They looked at each other.

She took up his hand and kissed it.

“Wise healer,” she said, “gentle priest. We may never meet again.”

“One day, far off, maybe we shall.”

“Will you know me then?”

“Do we not,” he said, “always remember, through all our several
lives, old friends and former kindred, however we, or they, are altered?” He
held her to him, and stroked her hair, long, black, demoniac. “There is the
angel,” he said.

“I shall meet him. The gods are conscious, surely, I am no longer
a god.”

“You do not know for sure your road,” he said. “But you will find
it.”

“So I shall. Dear love,” she said, “farewell.”

“Farewell,” he said. “Dear love.”

Then moving from him in the rays of the early sun, Atmeh went
along the bank and left the house behind her.

The hippos paused in their jousting to see her go. The white ibis
raised their ebony heads. All the winter lotuses crumbled away to smoke.

But for Dathanja, his face was not to be read, nor the dark eyes
of it. He watched, or seemed to watch her, for some while. But then he turned
to the tree at the top of the bank.

The little crowd which was already there saw him approaching, and
cried out to him thankfully. He smiled at them, at each group of features, each
healthy or diseased body, for in every one there burned the flame of life, in
all of them, and in him. And in the girl, even if by another mode, in the
manner of immortals, that flame yet burned. They were, near or far, all one.
All things were one. All men were gods. And love was enough.

Atmeh
walked toward the mountains. She walked as a lovely human girl would do,
gracefully, through the contact of her soles with the ground. Before the
mountains she would reach the hill, there, westward, where the Malukhim opened
and shut his wings.

She had, the girl, the woman, all her memory. Yet she had been
reborn into childhood, and known it, then left it—lacking only the growing
pains of an adolescence. The world was therefore very fascinating to her, known
and new, seen equally at dawn and at noon. By this means she had come to
recognize the helpful power, the actual lesson of birth, death, and rebirth. It
seemed to her that her soul had itself lived bodily, often, before it had been
summoned to the child in Dunizel’s womb. For though Azhrarn believed he had
invented true life, could even he do so? The humblest peasant could create a
child, and so could the least sensible of men. Azhrarn, too, formed a fleshly
case, though his method had not been the same (the carnal act being art and
pleasure to demons, but never procreative). Nevertheless, could he, any more
than the peasant or random lackwit, who by a spillage of semen got life on a
woman, create the soul itself? By the variation of the lives—and deaths—Atmeh
had clearly undergone in this existence, she had detected the others that had
made and unmade her, in the past. And now an immortal, the question came to
her, was there not more to be learned through a diversity of lives, through the
confusion of genders, temperaments, creeds, wishes—through the very and natural
unknowing of the infant, through the continuous relearning even of the same
lesson—for was it not, in point of fact, on each occasion learned in a
different way?

And thinking these thoughts, she traveled through the brown land,
day by day, sleeping by night at the edges of the budding fields, or under some
spreading tree at the roadside. Supposing her a wandering holy woman, goatherds
gave her milk from their flocks. She did not require sustenance, yet accepted
it. Sometimes, when it was needful, she performed acts of healing or mending,
as she had seen Dathanja do, and rather in his character, with some uncomplex
paraphernalia to offset marvel.

After a palmful of days (how many fit inside a palm, a woman’s
palm—seven then), she came to the feet of the hills, baked as cakes in the
morning light, and behind stood the mountains westward. But between the two,
Ebriel, awaiting her, and with sword drawn—for she saw its glitter like one
glaring sliver of ice the winter had left behind.

So she climbed toward the angel. She climbed through midday, and
all one afternoon, and when the sun was westering, she came over a ridge, and
there the angel was, with the sun behind him like a ball of gold. He showed
black on the brightness, and this struck her—again—how dark might become light,
since pallor could be black as ink.

“Ebriel,” said Atmeh. (She knew his name. There was little she
could not know of the earth, and its adjacent environs.) “Ebriel, look at me,
and consider me. I do not challenge heaven, now. If ever I did. Say then what
must be between us.”

The angel did not reply, not by word, nor any action.

Now, she had been tended by Eshva. And that unspeaking speech of
theirs was still second to her nature. It is not properly said—which in itself
is a sort of pun—how the unspeaking speech was spoken, or heard. It was not exactly
a mind-language, telepathic. Nor entirely corporeal, though the breath, the
eyes, and movements of the hands, limbs, and torso, even of the hair,
contributed. A language possessed of symbolism, certainly. Whatever it was, and
however exercised, the inspiration came to Atmeh to employ it with the angel.
And so she spoke to him again, by this tongue. She said, “You have heard my
words, and you have read me clear as still water. But we cannot stand here
forever, you and I. Nor go on as we have done, flying and flown after,
hesitating and always overlooked.”

“Forever,” said the angel. “What is that but the eternal state of
all things? Why should we not?”

And he too used the Eshva speech, or an approximation of it, which
seemed also natural to him.

“Your masters are the gods,” said Atmeh.

“That is so.”

“What do the gods instruct you to do?”

“I have their instruction. The first and only motivation given me,
as to my brothers.”

“The gods, if they still concern themselves, which I suspect they
do not, realize I am no longer any nuisance to them.”

“That has no place in the scheme of me, or of my being.”

It was true. Automaton that he had remained, this Ebriel, his
first command was the sum of him. He had cast down a city and a worlddom
because of it. And here the very cause of the command confronted him.