Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 (58 page)

“And since then,” they said, “he has been dying. Dying in great
anguish. His energy is exhausted, for even when he screams now, no sound comes
from his throat, and when he rolls and kicks, only the cot shakes a fraction,
where before boulders would plunge downhill. Yet, though he dies, he cannot
die. This we see. He struggles to throw himself in at Death’s door, but some
portion of him will not allow it. Or cannot. So they say the immortals are, who
never die, if such even exist.”

Then they conducted the beautiful maiden up the hill to the ruined
cot.

“Here,” said the village men, and opened the door.

The maiden thanked them civilly, and sent them away.

In the village street below, the women brought the winged lion
bowls of milk and honey, and the children braided violets in its mane. There
was to be a feast out of the full larders. As they lit the lamps and torches,
and took from chests old instruments of music to string and oil them, they did
not glance toward the ruin. “He is in her hands,” they said.

Atmeh
had sealed the cot by her magic. It was out of time, out of the world. Perhaps
it was only her heart, and not her magic, which had done this.

There was no light in the cot, yet there was light, fragile as
starshine. It seemed to stream from Atmeh, from her garments and her hair, and,
softer, brighter, from her eyes. She stood and watched the wrecked creature,
tied by iron and wrapped in quilts. It was awake, and looked at her. It did not
cry out, or attempt to, but its huge starting eyes, whites bloody and irises
pinched away to nothing, strained upward into her own that were so clean and
beautiful.

Lylas had said to her:
You are mad.
And
from the positioning of the phrase, its coincidence with those other phrases
concerning the riddle’s answer, Atmeh extracted her cue. Fate was on her side.
That being so, scarcely anything would be random. And because she had sloughed
all the former angers, spites, resentments, dashed the dregs of bitterness
away, Atmeh saw clearly to the earth’s ends, and so found, and at the proper
hour, the means, and also—nearly incidentally—the lover of her dawn.

Had he been parted from her? Even split into the grains and
fragments of insanity, somehow had he not been with her still? Lotuses opening,
that offered jewelry dice, petals that flew and kissed, water flowers that
bloomed in winter frosts . . . he had loved her in her mother’s
womb, they said, crazy Chuz, Prince Madness.

And now, lying on the straw, in the last deluded delirium, under
Azhrarn’s curse, dying grossly as Azhrarn had decreed—yet immortal in the
essence of himself, unable quite to die—thus, Chuz, finally. The hill trembled
in its sheath of grass, to have such a circumstance taking place upon it. The
stars above crackled in their dry dews, having no choice but to look down on
this.

She did not say to him: “Do you know me?” He did not. He did.

And she did not say, “You deserted me. You preferred suffering’s
game to the music of love.” He had. He had not.

She said, “Beloved.” And she laid her hand upon the warped and
raddled, hairy, bestial face. And when the bloodshot eyes closed at her caress,
she offered in her turn her flower to him. It was the poppy she had plucked in
Death’s garden. Its petals dripped, like the purest blood, upon his eyelids,
his lips, and breast. All pain it took from him at once, this scattering of the
flower. That was the secret of the poppy, which even to this day it has not
been able to keep.

For the pod of the flower had been despoiled, the fruit of it.
Atmeh and night together had drawn from it a tiny vial of bitterest juice. Like
all the fruits of Death’s garden, this too was poison. And this she offered to
her lover.

“You have done all he asked of you. It is accomplished, and it is
over. You have paid in full for a crime of which you were not guilty, as I
shall hear you tell me, too, from your own lips, in the future. Drink now. Here
is life.”

But at the last, and despite everything, as she set the vial to
his mouth, her hand shook. She could not help herself. And a drop of the drink
spilled on the quilts and it wrote a symbol there of the demon tongue, probably
an insignificant one—but it was enough. Azhrarn’s bane apparently had an
energy of its own, and outlived both the intention and the settled debt.
Recollecting his allotted labor, the madman reared in his chains. He nudged the
vial from him—it soared up in the air—and a hand caught it. Not the hand of
Atmeh, but one she had clasped not long ago, black as a raven’s back; blacker.

Uhlume stood within the cot, tall enough his head nearly brushed
the rafters. He said nothing to her, but going by the girl, he bent to the
struggling madman.

When the creature saw him, which it quickly did, the fight left
it. Even madmen heard legends. Even madmen knew of Lord Death. It was excuse
enough.

And when Death offered the vial, and in the vial the blood of the
poppy which Death’s own blood had made, the madman craned and stretched to meet
it. Thirstily, greedily, he gulped the liquor down.

For a moment his eyes were only cloudy. They were glad, seeing in
their blindness all the vistas sight denied. Then, as a clockwork stops, he
died.

“I stole from you,” murmured Atmeh. “Did I do wrong?” She hung her
head, and her tears fell. “You have forgiven me.” If she spoke to Chuz or to
Uhlume, none will say.

But it was Uhlume who brushed away her tears with the edge of his
white sleeve.

“There will be a night,” he said, “when I shall come to you and
offer you another drink and from another cup. But you will drink it.”

“Thank you for your courtesy in that,” she said. “But will you,
then, be Death?”

“It may be I shall not. But still, for you, I will perform the
office.”

“The wheat grows,” she said, “and is cut down. And again the wheat
grows. Yours was a heavy task. But if you are only the chrysalis, lord, what
will the butterfly be?”

“Ask that of all things. Nor exempt your father.”

Then Atmeh laughed, like a child—for she would ever be a child,
much as,
when
a
child, she had seemed also ancient decades beyond her span. And like a child she
embraced Uhlume, and Uhlume—he suffered it. And they say he smiled, but who can
be sure, for even the skull grins cheerfully as if it knew something the flesh
did not.

Yet so they parted, the niece and her uncle, for a couple of
hundred years.

After their parting, Atmeh performed a very ordinary mortal deed.
She bathed the body of the madman, and poured over it spices and perfumes. She
laid the limbs straight, and combed the hair, and shaved the face. And when all
was done, she brought to the body, by sorcery, the clothing of a great prince,
the silks, the gems, and dressed it in them.

And there he lay at last, dead Oloru, or the replicate of Oloru,
rather aged and emaciated, yet still a handsome man, even a king, it would
seem, who had fallen on hard times.

And over this body, in its splendor, the village was afterward to
puzzle, for like a petrified substance already long dead, it never decayed, but
remained firm and wholesome. Therefore they built a tomb above it, with a
window of crystal in the side. Those that came to take the curative air of the
village would also stare in at the wonder of this cadaver.

“What can it mean?” they asked. “What can it portend?”

For it was, and is, often that way, with instances which mean and
portend nothing.

But Atmeh had left the body at once, when she was done with
tending it. She passed through the village feast unseen, and calling the winged
lion, rode over the night sky.

They flew high up, near to the starfields, and below, the world
unrolled its carpets of seas and shores, forests and mountains.

“I rule none of it,” called Atmeh to heaven. “Listen to me, you
peerless soulless gods, I rule nothing and no one, and soon, soon I will
outshine you, for I will be a mortal. And one day, as you never can, I and mine
shall inherit the earth.”

PART THREE: The Lotus

1

WANDERERS
there had always been. From the choicest city to the direst hovel, they were a
likelihood, if not always welcome. Nor so much remarked, unless they sold
wares, or knew scandal, or were sorcerers, or caused death. Atmeh then, a
beautiful girl accompanied by a large lionlike dog—which some, but not all,
claimed had wings—traveled quietly. It was true some also said this girl
performed healings, and others declared they had been told of those who had found
a dish filled with pearls when they had only given her a dish of milk. Others
remembered she had told stories which children and the aged liked to hear.
Still others recommended, “Do not get on her wrong side.” But not many had been
inclined to do that. Those who did were unsuccessful in any case. For example,
rich landowners who chased itinerants off their estates with dogs discovered
their dogs would only adore this one. In places, persons entreated her to stay,
for no reason but that the look of her lifted their spirits. Yet she never
remained anywhere for long. In her diligent practice for humanness and
mortality, she would eat and drink, she would learn weaving and the care of
plants by simple means, and she would take up and rock in her arms this baby or
that, the rich woman’s infant wrapped in velvet, the naked one raised from the
warm ashes of the fireside in some cave where the poor subsisted. And these
children did well, as if those slim arms, fine hands, had imparted to them
something rare. Yet now and then, despite all that, there were those thought
they saw the young girl flying about in the evening sky on her dog. And now and
then too, the many men who fell in love with her came asking for her as their
lady, or their wife, and these, gently, she put aside, though to a handful she
granted her favors, but only in a woman’s way: She shielded them from demon
lovemaking, for they must be content with mortal women after, and she too, one
day, content to be such women herself.

In this manner, time moved on, and late summer came, a great
glassy heat, into the land where Atmeh wandered with her dog-lion beside her.

On a rosy afternoon, as Atmeh walked along a dusty path, a child
of, perhaps, seven years appeared before her, a boy raggedly dressed and clumsy
of feature, but with hair of rose-gold like the sky. On either side the hills
went up and rills of water glittered down, but ahead the way ran flat and broad
with nothing on it but dust, and light, from which the child seemed to have
been formed.

“Luminous mistress,” said the boy, bowing to the earth, “there
lies before you, three miles distant, a humble village. Do you journey there?”

“Perhaps,” said Atmeh.

“My master,” said the boy, “who has heard of you, for you are
famed, trusts you will pause in this village. He may then elect to meet you
there. In token of which he sends you this.”

And the child came to her and offered her a single tiny seed.

Atmeh accepted the seed.

“And may I pat your dog?” asked the boy.

Atmeh assented. So he patted the lion with the partial illusion of
dog upon it. (And the lion wagged its tail.) Then the boy vanished, becoming
only dust, or light. But the seed lay hard and still in Atmeh’s palm.

Atmeh continued along the path, and after three miles came to a
gap in the hills and the village. It was a small one, but prosperous, well used
to travelers, but kindly careful of them. It welcomed Atmeh in, and as the dusk
fell, spread out a banquet, under the stars which hung overhead thick as grapes
on a vine.

And it seemed the village knew that here was a witch, for it
prompted her eagerly to perform feats. So she did such things as might be
pleasant, and which were the stock in trade of what they thought her, doubling
and trebling the quantities of food, turning water to wine, causing lights to
burn in midair, and strange visions to dance and to foretell interesting
happenings.

But of the one who had said he might meet her in that village, the
boy’s master, she saw no sign. And presently, when she looked for the tiny
seed, it had crumbled into nothingness, less substantial even than dust, or
light.

Next day Atmeh left the village. She climbed up a steep hill, the
dog-lion trotting at her side.

As the afternoon was drawing out toward sunfall, Atmeh came upon a
grove of wild orange trees beside a pool. And by the pool stood a youth, about
thirteen years, waiting for her it seemed. He was of a staid appearance, but
well dressed, like a merchant’s son, yet his hair was his only jewel, a
lustrous rosy blond.

“Iridescent mistress,” said this youth to Atmeh, bowing to the
earth, “there lies before you, three miles distant, a proud town. Do you
journey there?”

“I wonder if I do,” said Atmeh.

“My master,” said the youth, “who has heard of you, for you are
illustrious, trusts you will linger in this town. He may then elect to meet you
there. In token of which he sends you this.”