Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 (57 page)

“No,” said Atmeh. And she bowed (another slender poplar), in
parentheses as it were, to Naras. But Naras only glared.

“What do you want?” said Death.

“Has no one told you, lordly un-Uncle-who-is-not? I have confessed
freely. I would become one of your subjects.”

The Lord Uhlume, King Death, or alternately King Uhlume, Lord
Death, rested his black chin upon his black hand, and looked upon her
beautifully and with an icy endless majesty. (In the other chair, Naras snapped
her bone fingers, once. When she did so, every one of the hunting dogs
disappeared, save for the hound of chilliest blue. This dog, a bitch, she
fondled. But that was all she did.)

“You are the daughter of Azhrarn,” said Death at length. “And his
demon blood it is which has made you an immortal. This is within the present
order of things. You are no concern of mine.”

“You are Death. Tell me how I may learn to die.”

“Why do you yearn to?” said Death, leaning yet his sculpted chin
upon his ringless hand.

“To liberate my soul from my body. That my spirit may inhabit many
lives and be lessoned in these, and so join the adventure all human souls have
as their right.”

“Men do not consider in this way,” said Uhlume. “Men shun bodily
death with terror, and envy those who do not perish.”

“That is only the safeguard of forgetfulness. Enhance your
reputation by it,” said Atmeh. “Make me mortal and perishable. Greater even
than your overthrow of Simmu, Immortality’s Thief—called also, sometimes,
Death’s Master—to bring down a demon’s child to the clay.”

“You are hungry for endings.”

“Not at all,” said Atmeh, with a very melodious laugh. “I shall
live long. I shall learn much, even as I am. But it is not enough.
Metamorphosis is necessary. Will you grant the favor?”

“Atmeh-Azhriaz,” said Death, “it is not within my jurisdiction.”

“You refuse then.”

“I do not,” said Death, Lord of Darkness, potentate of earth’s
core, “have the power to do so.”

Then Atmeh turned to Naras.

“Lady,” said Atmeh, “do you suppose he lies?”

It was, apparently, the part of Naras now to laugh. She did so.
The laugh, nearly inaudible, had a frozen heat in it. Then she spoke in a low
voice that was, one might say, of the tonal value of her hair.

“You mention metamorphosis. Here is one. There has been a truce
between us, he and I. We do not exchange chit-chat, but as you note, we present
ourselves as joint rulers of this muck heap. And in the world, they tell often
now of me. Death, they say,
she
walks on the battlefield.
Death, they say, I met
her
in the marketplace.
Behold,” said Naras, stooping forward a little, “I might have left this stony
midden centuries ago, to partake of that adventure you hanker for, that savage
flight of souls through witless birth-and-death and birth-and-death-and-birth.
But I was cheated of the life I valued, my life as Narasen. And now I have
assumed it here, and here I will live it and queen it, till sated—which shall
not be for a while yet. As for him, this one, this uncrowned Master of Death,
you will find he has lost interest in grave matters. He skirts the plague ships
and the war zones, he rests on silken beds, not all inanimate, avoiding tombs.
Is that not so, O black vulture?”

Uhlume glanced at her. Then his eyes returned to Atmeh. Now, they
were like opals. They had sight and might be seen. There were, most oddly,
dreams of color in them. Changeable. (Like Kassafeh’s?)

“It is so,” he said.

Atmeh looked at Death.

“You say you will not or cannot aid me. But you yourself—”

“No more,” said Uhlume, gently. “You perceive, if I abdicate, I
leave a worthy and practiced successor behind me.”

Now, it was a bizarre conversation, this, if it is to be credited
(be sure, it is credited). But there is this to be assessed. If the state of
death were only interim, and men, spiritually eternal, never died save in the flesh,
Death, even his symbol, had ultimately no function. Why should he not, bored
and wearied by those deadly millennia, take up other pursuits?

“Then, Uncle,” said Atmeh, “I will wish you joy of your new
life.
And
go elsewhere to seek mine.”

But Uhlume stretched out his shapely hand, and Atmeh, an immortal
still, was able to take his hand in conscientious farewell. A mortal,
naturally, would have died of it instantly.

Atmeh therefore vacated the hall of the palace of Queen Death,
where Uhlume had thought fit to receive her. And as the phantoms of Uhlume’s
long-departed courtiers fluttered about her, Atmeh brushed them off like
cobwebs.

No sooner was she outside under the bleak sky than something came
bodily yelping and rushing after her. It was the blue hound. It ran to Atmeh,
and ingratiatingly panted. Then it cried in a young girl’s voice: “Do not
abandon me, O mistress of astonishments—deliverance!”

“Can it be?” said Atmeh, questioningly.

“I am Lylas,” whined the bitch-hound, “once an enchantress, now ignominiously
bound and
kenneled
here by that
woman,
who, for all my pains on her behalf, continually ensorcels me into this image,
to tickle her sadistic whim.”

“From what I have heard of you,” said Atmeh, “might that not be
just?”

“Like all great ones,” snapped the hound, “you are a dolt. Too
feebleminded in your pride to see that if you were to help me, I might be of
use to you. I might tell you the answer to your riddle. For I am cunning Lylas
still, I am winsome and witty and pretty and
myself.”

“I commiserate, but will promise you no help. For yours to me, you
have already given it immeasurably—for by your very words I discover some
answer does exist, which I had come to doubt.”

At that Lylas leapt and pawed at Atmeh’s skirt, and licked her
wrists, until the lion, still detained at the damson tree, growled and beat its
wings.

“Let me give you all the answer! It is such an easy task. There
are mirrors here which show everything of the world, what passes there, who
does what. Sometimes I glimpse in them, and I am so astute, learn much in a
second.” So whimpered poor Lylas, dropping away. “Let me be useful. Then reward
me.”

Atmeh laid her hand upon the blue bitch’s anxious brow.

“I can allow neither. Your path is not mine. Your punishments and
rewards not mine to render.”

“Cruel foulness,” said Lylas, trying now,
regardless
of the lion, to take off Atmeh’s fingers, and unable. “Your filthy sun-d
amn
ed race were tricksters ever. And you are mad besides. Be
accursed with them, all madmen and demons.” And hurrying to the silver tripod,
where the fire had begun to smoke again, Lylas boyishly lifted her leg against
it. She had always been something of a slut. This attended to, she loped back
indoors to fawn upon her tormentor, Naras.

But Atmeh, having untied the lion, remained to walk the empty town
of the dead, in thought.

She hesitated at last on a garden slope where poppies flamed, and
after a little, she plucked one. For she had heard there was an answer to the
riddle of immortality’s ending, that the task was easy, and she—mad.

3

SHE
COULD know almost anything, Atmeh, but not all. Her very quarrel with her
condition was that she knew too much to learn as the innocent may, or the
infant, or the sagacious one who sees he is a fool. Yet, by some law of the
earth’s, or the gods’, when they had bothered to make them, the library of a
sorceress’s mind, or a demon’s, lacked here and there a vital volume. The way
to rebirth she must find out.

But for the other business, it was child’s play.

One evening therefore, as the stars were coming out, there entered
an impoverished little village between some hills a starry maiden riding on a
lion with wings.

“Look! Look!” outcried the populace of the village. “It is the
king’s youngest wife.”

“Or perhaps it is a demon,” ventured a few of the poorest and
silliest inhabitants, and were immediately ridiculed and put to merciless
scorn.

Atmeh rode down the street of the village, between the sad huts. A
sick dog lay by the muddy well. It had assisted the village in hunting, but now
it ailed they had decided it must be killed and cut up for its meat—but no one
had yet had the heart to do it. Atmeh made a graceful pass above the dog with
her white hands. The dog sprang barking to its feet. It was strong and healthy,
and would live for a hundred years.

“A sorceress,” said the villagers, as one, and came toward her
warily.

But Atmeh spoke a word or two to the village, its stones and mud
bricks, and the well, and the fields beyond. To the yards she spoke, where the
pots were stacked, and to the spaceful larders, and the orchards, and the three
goats, and the very air. Once she had turned cheeses to jewels to content
Azhrarn. She knew better now. Every store overflowed, every field wildly
burgeoned, every flaw and hole was sealed, new shirts, new roofs, new
shoes . . . or, that is to say, the old ones, as they had been,
before years of wear wore them. The goats were friskily getting under the
billy, and the billy obligingly filling each with baby goat inside the hour.
The well had water sweet as wine. The jars of sour wine indoors were fit for
the king, and too good for him, indeed. While in the air hung a fragrance and a
balm. It would come to be, in the rescued dog’s twenty-fifth year, that this
place would be famous in the region for its curative properties, and
sufficiently prosperous it had lent money to the king’s sons, so that—in the
dog’s thirty-fifth year—a man of the village would himself be made the king.

For now, when the village had done congratulating itself, it
applied to Atmeh. Why had she performed this kindness?

“You also,” said Atmeh, “unasked, and with no suspicion of
return, have done a kindness to a stranger, a kinsman of mine.”

Wondering, the villagers looked at each other.

“There has only been one stranger, saving yourself, since my
granddam’s time. An insane mad lunatic, who is in a desperate mad insane state
in the ruined cot up the hill. It could not be of him you speak.”

But it was, of course, of him.

They
had come on him seven seasons before, or longer, for their method of telling
time was somewhat inventive. The goatherd who drove the village’s herd of three
goats—soon to be increased to thirty—had been terrified on the hills by a
sudden howling and a lumbering shape which accompanied it. Even as the herder
turned to run, the horror stumbled and fell down, slavering and cawing and
kicking its legs at heaven. Then it lapsed. It lay as if dead. And the goatherd
inquisitively went to see.

The felled thing looked to be a man of eighty years, skinny and
wasted, his head and face quite lost in matted hair representing all colors and
all earthly dirts. Naked he was, and by this nakedness, the goatherd beheld
that his life had not been tranquil. Many dreadful acts had been performed
against him, beatings and whippings, and impalings by pikes, and even there
seemed to have been attempts to hang him, to brand him, to put out his eyes and
lop his ears, and to deprive him of his manhood. These forays, while they had
left fearful scars, he had somehow survived intact. (And it had seemed later
on, to the women of the village, that in his youth the maniac, for such he
proved to be, was not uncomely.) Yet the madness, and the raving that was on
him always while he had the strength for it—they did not abate. There was no
means, in the village, to try to set him right. This they saw from the start,
as they did with their own who sickened. The first day, the goatherd went to
fetch his brothers, and when they returned, they met the madman on the track,
revitalized, yodeling and jumping and rending himself, while gnashing his
broken fangs. But once more, his failing vigor could not hold up the paroxysm
indefinitely. Soon he crashed down again. They bore him to the empty cot. Here
presently they shackled him, for fear of what he did to himself when able, and
might also do to them. So, he became the village’s property.

When he was quieter, or unconscious, they would clean his hurts
and cover him with straw and their own ragged quilts. If he roused, and would
let them, they spooned broth into his writhing mouth. There was a girl of the
village who had a sweet voice, and she would go to the cot and sing to him, and
it soothed him, the madman, to hear her. And in the spring, she took white
blossom and laid it by his face, and in the summer she brought him roses with
the thorns removed, so he would not harm himself, he who had torn out his own
hair and clawed his skin—“She is a little touched herself,” the village said.
“She understands him.” But then a famine came to the village, which meant that
instead of each man having nothing, he then had less than nothing. And in that
time, the girl died. That night, under the crisp mockery of the stars, the
madman rolled in his chains and made a noise so unhuman, so desolate, the
entire village thought it should itself be driven mad.