Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 (59 page)

And the youth came to her, and offered her a single pale bud on a
single slight stem.

“I looked for your master last night,” said Atmeh.

But she accepted the bud.

“And may I pat your animal?” asked the youth. “Which is not a dog
at all.”

Atmeh assented, so he patted the lion, which had less than usual
of the disguise of a dog upon it—and which purred. Then the youth vanished,
becoming, it seemed, another of the orange trees. But the bud lay warm and
still in Atmeh’s palm.

Atmeh continued along the slope, and in something less than three
miles, she crossed the brow of the hill and saw the town below. It was indeed a
proud one, and let her in only after some interrogation, though the sun was by
now sinking.

As the dark came, Atmeh entered the marketplace, where the
storytellers had put up their awnings and sat under their colored lamps. Here
the girls of the night also sat, in rows, beneath bold torches, with copper
rings in their ears and cornflowers in their hair. Atmeh took a seat not far
off, upon the ground, but she lit no light for herself, though a light did seem
to be there, where she was. A man quickly approached and asked her if she was a
whore or a fortune-teller or a teller of tales. “None of these,” said Atmeh,
“yet we are of a brotherhood and a sisterhood. For we deal in magic, all these,
and I.”

“How is a whore to be magic?” scoffed the man.

“Go lie with one, and you will see,” said Atmeh.

At this, the girls under the torches became interested in Atmeh in
an amiable way—before they had suspected a rival, and some had been plotting to
push her off.

Gradually then, the night-walkers of the town came to sit about
Atmeh on the ground, the stones of which were yet warm from the day’s oven. The
people debated and discussed matters with her, and sometimes they fell silent,
and she told them stories that were not stories, and gave them news of their
fortunes without divination, and seduced them quite, without lying down in their
arms. What she said was amusing, too, and comforting. She spoke the truths
which are forgotten, but which all men know in their hearts. These, being given
them again, were like long-lost friends that they embraced gladly, if only for
one short minute. “A man may say to himself,” said Atmeh, “why should I trouble
to do anything that is useful or compassionate for half an hour, when in
another hour’s half I shall go back to my former selfish, cruel ways? But there
is all the more reason for him, then, to do good when he can. Ten years of evil
do not cancel a single moment of gentleness or a solitary profound thought.”

Then a prostitute said to Atmeh, “But what of such as we, who sin
day and night?”

“What you do,” said Atmeh, “is not a sin, unless you think it so.
And then it is. For who can say they do anything wrong by giving joy to
another? And is it less noble to ask money for joy than to ask money for oil or
silk or spice? But if you think always,
Oh how I sin,
and
so despise yourself, you lessen and wound mind and heart, and there is no worse
crime on earth than to sour the sweetness in yourself. For the sweetness comes
from the soul, which no act of the body ever can, at the last, corrupt.”

As she spoke and discoursed, however, Atmeh became aware that
someone, a mantled shadowy figure, sat far out at the edge of the large crowd
that had gathered. And now and then he partly raised his head, and it seemed to
her that under the hood his hair was like the sheerest gold. But he never
addressed her, or came near, and finally the night waned. In the first ray of
sunlight, Atmeh looked for him, that recalcitrant figure, and he was nowhere to
be seen. As for the bud on the stem, it had crumbled into air.

That day Atmeh left the town. She walked through a valley thick
with new wheat, and the lion flirted with the grain and played with her, just
like a dog, certainly.

Beyond the valley there opened a wide paved road. No sooner had
Atmeh alighted on it than a young man stood at her side, of perhaps three and
twenty years, well favored, and clad like a prince, though his fair hair was
his greatest glory.

“What now?” inquired Atmeh, walking on.

“O mistress blinding-bright,” replied the young man, bowing to the
earth, then falling into step with her, “there lies before you, three miles
distant, an arrogant city. Do you journey there?”

“Not at all,” said Atmeh, but she laughed.

“That is a shame,” said the young man, laughing also, “for my
master—”

“Who has heard of me,” said Atmeh, “for I am famed and
illustrious—”

“And also you are blessed and revered everywhere,” embellished the
young man, “and therefore my master—”

“Trusts I will pause, linger, hesitate, and delay in this city,”
said Atmeh. “That he may then elect to meet with me there. Or not. Or he may
arrive and not exchange a word or look with me. Or he may arrive and greet me,
and next abscond. Woe and despair,” said Atmeh, and she laughed again. “In
token of which,” she added, “what?”

“This,” said the young man, and he held out to her a lotus of the
palest clearest honey amber, on a stem of damson-colored quartz.

Atmeh took the lotus. It had a fragrance; the sunshine lay in it
like a fish of flame within an orb of fire.

Then Atmeh wept, only for a moment, but her tears fell into the
heart of the flower—and the amber and the amethyst were gemmed by sapphires.

“You may,” said Atmeh to the young man, “pat this lion.”

The young man did so. The lion kissed him fondly.

“I will tell my master,” said the young man, “that you accept his
gift. And that I was kissed. If not by you.” And he was gone, into utter
nothing—but the lotus gleamed and refracted in Atmeh’s hand, and its perfume
filled the day.

It
was something more than three miles to the city, but Atmeh came to it at length
as the sun was westering. Its towers and tiers rose up in the gold-leaf air—but
Atmeh had seen many cities, and ruled over one that had been to cities as a
year is to a day.

Yet this city was grand, and arrogant as the messenger had
promised.

So, to get in, Atmeh, who might have put on herself the presence
and adornments of an empress—if not a goddess, from consideration of the gods’
thin hides—and stormed the gates by her glamour, Atmeh turned herself into a
dove, and the winged lion into a winged lion as small as a dove. And together
they flitted in over the mighty battlements whereon were done in enamels just
such doves and lions with wings, but each of these was the size of an elephant.

As the sun set and laved the sprawling city, its temples, its
palaces, and its warren of slums, Atmeh the dove sat upon a high cornice and
gazed about. Honey and amber was the light, and damson the aftercolor that
soaked upward from the east.

She flew down to the steps of a temple. Here, by day, there was a
market. Now the commerce ceased, and brazen bells boomed out from above,
summoning men to honor heaven. In the shadow of a painted column, Atmeh
transformed herself again into a girl, and the lion resumed its size. None of
the worshipers noticed this, as they hurried up the stair, on their way to
plead with and bribe the marble images they thought were holy and might be
persuaded to listen. Nor did they feel compelled to turn aside and ask this
female figure, subtly clothed in blue, her dog at her feet, to help them
instead.

It grew dark under the temple’s heavy brow, and the sky filled
with purple and stars. And then a man came walking up the stair, also cloaked
in purple, with stars upon and in the folds of it. He reached the column, and
casting off his hood, leaned down toward the woman there. And he regarded her.
Somewhere a lamp was lit in the portico above, or else some other light had
found their faces.

“It was not so very great a while,” he said. “Do you remember me?”

“You? Who can you be?” she said. And she raised her face and her
arms to him, and he, taking hold of her, drew her up. Any who saw them then
might have been startled by their beauty, and by something more about them,
beautiful also. But none saw them, only the paintings on the column, and the
birds that nested under the temple roof, and the flame in the lamp there, and
all the stars of the sky.

“Say my name,” he said.

“Oloru,” she said.

“No, that is not my name.”

“Perhaps you are like another,” she said, “a prince. But they say
he is also ugly—”

“Never with you,” he said. “How could anything be ugly, in your
company? That one, half hideous, half deformed, when he approaches you, he
grows handsome. Even his eyes, both of them, are golden. Look, do you see?”

She whispered his name. Only he heard it. His face was matchless
either side, as all his body was (and the stars on his mantle were stars—not
jabs of cutting broken glass). He also smiled.
Chuz,
she
had whispered.

“But you are called Atmeh,” he said. “How you have changed. Where
are the tricks you worked on mankind? The lands are littered with those you
have healed, and those who teach as you taught them, these philosophies of the
undying mortal soul.”

“Let us not talk of that. Tell me rather how it is I met you three
times over disguised on my road, and why you teased me, appearing and disappearing,
referring to yourself as ‘master.’”

“I have served my term for Azhrarn the Marvelous,” said Chuz,
laconically. “Am I not therefore again my own master?”

“None to rule you now.”

“Save only you.”

They drew yet closer then, and their mouths touched as the mouths
of lovers will.

They had been parted five or six decades, half a century, a
little more—not long. But at their kiss, curious events took place. The birds
started from the roofs and began to sing, as if to greet the dawn. And the
bells rang in the temple top with no one at their ropes. And elsewhere mirrors
turned to icicles, or melted, emerald necklaces were frogs—

“What is this madness?” the citizens exclaimed. “Some enemy is
playing a joke.”

And others, looking up from their high avenues and roof pavilions,
pointed and said, “Now what is that? Some huge bird, or a bit of blown
washing—”

“It is,” said a child, “a man and a woman seated on a velvet
carpet, and a lion flies beside them.”

“Nonsense,” its elders told the child.

And in the temple top one of the bronze bells whirled off in a
shower of fireworks, and roses rained, and all the unlit lamps were kindled.

“Some noble is holding a feast,” said the elders.

How mundane life was. Only another evening, like all the rest. For
even so soon the world was growing skeptical, and sensible, and sound, and
blind.

But not for them, this dark of experience and reason. Unreasonably
he and she, on the cloud of a carpet, magicians up in the air, lovers least
reasonable of all—the world a garden through which they passed. Through which
they might pass forever. Or not, as they chose.

2

THEY
JOURNEYED then awhile together, or they left off rambling and made their home,
now in a cottage, now in a mansion. They were wandering entertainers, musicians
and story-makers, they were a lord and his courtesan, a queen and her warlord,
or they were two cats, one black, one yellow, two birds of the sky, two lights
that shimmered over marshes and woods by night. And there are the tales, too,
of a black-haired man and a blond girl, for both were now
shape-changers. . . .

And a year and a day, or one long elemental day that was a mortal
year, this they spent together. They asked very little of each other, except to
change stones into gold, to walk through walls for amusement—small things. If
the gods noticed them at this date is not recorded, and probably they did not.
And if any other paid them attention, he did not provide evidence of it.
Azhrarn, the instigator of their woes, he had slept then woken, and his waking
was more of a sleep than the sleep. Mortals were nothing to him. And of similar
worth such royalty as Lords of Darkness. There had come to exist a saying in
those times:
He
does not look at us.
Those that said it hardly knew what they meant. But demonkind
knew, and came up on the world like the moon, and toyed with them all the more
for it.

But for the lovers, they were happy. Happy even after a mortal
fashion, for they too understood their idyll could not last beyond its season.
This was the bitterness of joy, that it must end, or else grow stale. Dunizel
herself had written as much, in the desert shrine of Bhelsheved.

So, then, a scene may be pictured. A day like many others, gilded.
A meadow curded with flowers, mountains along the sky’s blue hem, far away yet
visible, like the foreshadow of parting.

Atmeh is, on this day, a king’s youngest, loveliest daughter.
Eye-blue her dress, flowers in her hair. At her throat a collar of electrum set
itself with a strangely wrought flower, amber, amethyst (which, they moot, may
have been made for one Lord of Darkness by the Drin-folk of another). Before
Atmeh stands a bold winged lion, looking as if it had stepped directly from the
enamelwork upon some mighty city gate—whereas in fact such enamels have been
inspired by sights of such animals as the lion.