Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 (15 page)

Slowly, Jadrid turned
from the peach trees and went to find the servant, who was waiting for him at
the door, arms folded.

“I—” said Jadrid.

“Say nothing now,” said
the servant mildly. “There on the road waits a chariot, whose driver has been
instructed on the quickest route whereby to attain your house.”

Jadrid looked and saw
that a chariot had indeed arrived by the mansion’s wall, with three proud
horses in the shafts, and a driver who huddled to his business more like a
monkey than a man.

“We shall hear from you,
it may chance,” said the servant.

“At first light,” said
Jadrid.

“Such haste is not
needful. We are fond of the night, here. Send at tomorrow’s dusk, if you wish.”
Then the servant himself went into the garden and closed the door.

Jadrid, all bemused,
walked to the chariot, entered it, and sat down. The journey went by in a
dreaming whirl, so that the bridegroom—who now wished to be nothing more
vehemently—scarcely noted any of it, its unusual speed, the wild agility of the
leaping horses, their thinness, the odd monkey-like slave who managed them.

Returned to his father’s
house, and going straight to that father’s chamber, Jadrid made his confession.

“I will wed this one, or
none.”

The merchant was
troubled, but—apples of fire.

Now the whole affair was rather bizarre, but not unseemly,
and in the end even the merchant had put off his doubts as satisfied. It
transpired that the strange servant’s august master was a very learned but a
very old man, for years in wretched health and now near death. He, having vast
wealth and one charming daughter, wished to dispose both wisely and well before
his departure. He had therefore made inquiries, and it seemed to him that a
particular merchant-lord, the father of Jadrid, would be a suitable
father-in-law, the merchant’s house an excellent and worthy one, and the
merchant’s son, Jadrid, a noble husband. All this the girl’s father
communicated to the merchant by means of elegant letters, accompanied always by
gifts of surpassing magnificence. That the elderly invalid did not himself
appear was due, as he said, to his illness having made him feeble and
reclusive. His child, nevertheless, he was eager to bestow on Jadrid, and upon
Jadrid’s avowal she had been enlightened, and declared herself, dutiful
daughter that she was, willing to abide by her father’s choice.

Her name was Liliu.
Besides her loveliness, she had been gently and ably reared, could read and
write in many languages, was a musician of no slight art—yet also was she
childlike and innocent. And because of this, on a single point the father
begged indulgence. It would seem that, virtuous and loving as she was, the girl
had spent most of her time with her ailing parent. And his illness had made him
unable to bear any but the rays of the moon or the subfusc of candles; sunlight
worsened his condition. So her new protectors must, if they would, be lenient
at first with Liliu’s aversion to the sun—for, living by night with her father,
and taking against the sun for his sake, she might wish to eschew the hours of
day for a time, rising at sunfall as had become her habit, sleeping through the
morning and the afternoon.

This seemed most
understandable. Besides, the idea of wakeful nights did not displease the young
man. He, too, had something of the sort in mind.

So letters and presents
were exchanged, priests were consulted, the proper sacrifices made to the gods
(who, as ever, ignored them), necessaries laid in, furnishings made ready. And
at last the night arrived when, lit by torches, Jadrid went to claim his
bride—for convenience’ sake, since the old father was at death’s door, from the
pavilion in the garden.

There she sat, veiled
and demure, among flowers and perfumes, her dowry (which was truly wondrous)
piled around her. The sick parent, as was expected, was nowhere to be seen.
Oddly, neither did she have any attendants. It was assumed they modestly stood
back in the surrounding trees, consigning her to the bridegroom’s care.

Jadrid had no worries on
this score.

They were accordingly
married, Liliu and Jadrid. Seldom was a bride more fair, more circumspect, or
more winsome. Seldom a bridegroom so envied.

Aloft in the bedroom,
having disrobed his wife, Jadrid learned that her perfections were as
all-encompassing as he had been feverishly dreaming they were. And though she
was a virgin, and rendered him the proofs, yet she seemed, perhaps from her
erudition, to have gained many wisdoms which—with proper timidity at first, but
seeing that her actions were not amiss, with ever greater assurance—she
practiced on him, so that his pleasure was doubled and trebled, and actually
went beyond all such meager mathematical limits. So much so indeed, that late
revelers, who happened to eavesdrop under his windows, were highly gratified.
It was in fact at the crest of one such delicious excursion that Jadrid,
flinging out an arm unwarily, overturned a ewer that stood by the bed. The
ewer, in breaking, cut him.

“Oh, my dearest lord!”
exclaimed Liliu, as he sank back spent, to discover that his wrist bled.

“It is nothing at all,”
said Jadrid.

But Liliu, not
unfittingly for a young wife, was most concerned.

“No, no. Who can tell
what infection there may be on the edges of the broken thing.”
(Yes,
thought Jadrid, full of tenderest sympathy,
she has been too long with a sick man.)
“Now, if
you will permit me, here is the surest remedy, which will cleanse your veins of
all poisonous stuff.” And saying this, she put her mouth to the wound. Jadrid
was amazed, and touched at her solicitude. That venoms could be removed in such
a way, he knew. But how well she must love him so to tend him! When eventually
she was positive all harm had been sucked forth—it took a little while, she was
very conscientious—Liliu smiled, and set her lips to other work. Soon, she
mounted him lightly, and with an abandoned dancing beautiful to behold and of a
divine anguish to experience, began to draw him toward the seventh gateway of
the night.
Ah—what a wife
I
have been blessed with!
thought Jadrid. Anon, his
loud groans brought a new toast from the revelers below, and shook several
fruits from the damson tree that grew against the wall.

When he woke at sunrise,
Jadrid saw his wife had already vacated their bed, and sought the daytime
seclusion which he had, kind husband as he meant to be, prepared for her. He
himself slept well past noon.

The first weeks of the marriage, then, went by in
harmony. The only discord sounded in the area of the young wife’s preference
for night over day, from which she, so meek in all else, would not budge.
That is the great love she bore her father,
thought
Jadrid. So, he restrained his discontent. (Ah, yes. Apples of fire.)

But in this way, Jadrid,
having business affairs he must attend to in the daytime, saw rather less of
his wife than was customary, for he could not keep awake all the night through,
as it seemed she did.

There was one other
slight peculiarity. At the nuptial feast, Liliu had eaten nothing, and drunk
nothing save a sip or two of water. This had been taken for timorousness, or
sorrow at leaving her father. Yet, even now, Liliu would eat nothing in her
husband’s sight. She assured him, living as she had so long with an ailing man
who could partake only of gruel, she had got in the way herself of eating one
frugal meal a day, and that alone. Jadrid remained amenable to this custom,
though it subtly discontented him.

After a month had gone
by, Jadrid became irritable over little things. One morning he had woken a
space before sunrise, wishing very much to embrace Liliu. But though the sun
was not yet over the horizon, his wife had already left his bed. Accordingly
Jadrid broke his fast alone and in an ill humor, and it happened that one of
the servants spilled a dash of salt, and Jadrid cursed her, because it was
unlucky. Suddenly the woman burst into a flood of tears. “Oh, my lord,” she
wept, “unlucky you may well say. Only let me go on my knees and tell you the
thing I have kept hidden these past three days, and which has filled me with
such distress, I have been nearly out of my mind at it.”

Jadrid, astonished,
forgot his bad mood.

“Speak at once,” he
said. “Do not fear my wrath. I have none, unless you continue to keep silent.”

Then the woman told
Jadrid this, as follows.

Owing to her tasks in
the house, she was frequently obliged to get up before cockcrow, and one early
morning, when it wanted some half hour of dawn, she was filling a water jar at
the courtyard well when she heard a stealthy noise, nearby and, as it seemed,
underground. Something made the woman cautious, indeed, rather afraid. So she
left her jar and took shelter behind a bush against the privy wall. After a
moment, her heart almost started out of her breast. For what should happen but
one of the big old paving stones in the yard began to lift by its roots, and
presently it stood on its side, and up out of the place underneath came gliding
a dreadful apparition, in the predawn dusk all glaring dark and white. No
sooner was it clear of the hole than it set back the paving stone as if the
huge thing weighed like a feather. Then it turned and looked carefully about
it. (Never had the woman been so glad to bloom unseen.) For sure, the arrival
was a ghastly sight, a female being in a white shift, but all dabbled and
filthy with dirt and—could it be with blood? Going to the well, it let down the
bucket, and when the bucket came up again, the creature washed itself. And then
for the first time the woman saw that what had come up in blood and filth from
under the earth was none other than her young master’s young wife, Liliu.

“Where she had been I do
not know, nor do I wish to know. But surely something had delayed her—she was
all anxiety lest any come out and catch her at her washing. Then, when she was
clean, and had wrung out her long hair, she went into the house and away to her
own chamber that she cleaves to by day. And now,” said the woman sullenly,
folding her hands, “I suppose I shall be slain for witnessing the misdeeds of
my betters.”

“Not slain for that, but
whipped for lying,” said Jadrid in a rage—he was frightened, too.

“Well, I have proof of
what I say,” announced the woman.

“Show it.”

So she did. Leading
Jadrid to the courtyard, the servant woman requested him to kneel down by one
of the paving slabs. At a glance he could see it had been disturbed, but
anything might account for that. Not, however, for the strand of hair,
poppy-red, which was caught under it.

“She went out again last
night and returned again an hour before sunrise. I heard her and looked from a
hole in the privy door. She was not canny enough this time. As she set back the
slab her hair was caught, but she cut it through with her own sharp teeth, and
then ran in haste, not bothering to take the evidence from the stone—for who
would glimpse it if they did not come looking for it, as I did. Now you, strong
lord, try to lift that stone, and see whether any of us are playing tricks on
you.”

Jadrid then did try to
lift the stone, but even working till the sweat poured, and with his dagger as
a lever, he could not shift the piece of paving more than half an inch.
Certainly not sufficiently to come at the strand of hair still trapped beneath,
clearly on an occasion when the slab had risen freely. . . .

Eventually he rose, and
said to the woman, “You will stay quiet. Tell no one, not even my father. You
have watched and seen her come in. Now I will watch and see where it is she
goes.”

If truth were told, Jadrid had a notion already, nor
did he much relish it. It happened that the cellars beneath the merchant’s house
abutted underground on some ancient catacombs, supposedly haunted, into which,
by his own boy’s means, Jadrid had penetrated once or twice years before. These
forays had revealed nothing very terrible, aside from rats and mummy-dust. In
their turn, however, the tunnels led out of the city to an antique burial
ground, no longer much used save by the very poor, and itself of ill repute.

Unbeknownst to any,
then, Jadrid spent that day enlarging, with iron bar and mallet, the exit
point in the cellar which had accommodated him as a boy. By the afternoon, he
had got through into the foul warren beyond, where it was always night, and
choking on the dust, he lifted high his lamp. He soon found, as he had
unwillingly imagined he would, a weird tearing in the tangled webs of powder,
and a mark on the stone roof high overhead—here was the place which
corresponded to the loose paving in the courtyard. Going up and down awhile
with his light, Jadrid next beheld on the tunnel floor and on some of the
shelves that went toward the ceiling, the muddled imprint of many footfalls—or
of one person’s journey many times repeated. Small feet they were, with ringed
toes, but they had been dipped in something to leave such a mark. And what they
had been dipped in had been very red—

Oh, horrible. And more
than horrible, most strange. Never having suspected her, having been so long
her dupe, Jadrid now felt everything coming clear. As if, in some way he had
concealed from himself, he had known
always
—