Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 (26 page)

The boy thought. He said, “Inside so many rich wrappings, only
something more rich can lie.”

“Ah, you must read with your heart and not your wit,” said the
woman, so tenderly tears started to his eyes. “How rich is the body of any
mortal creature, yet under its fine covers, there is only bone, and only bone
remains when all the jewels of the flesh are gone. Bone, and one other item,
better than the rest, but unseen. Now, open the six rich caskets, gaze into the
jewel. There you will find a child, weeping.”

The boy sighed, comprehending nothing, save that this did not need
comprehension.

“Get up now,” said the woman quietly, “and cut the rope which
binds the stone you lie over. At dawn, when the priests come to examine the
tribute, this one pillar will roll away and fall into the river. Do not let it
distress you. You shall go home safely.”

The boy turned eagerly, and with his knife he cut the rope which
secured the baleful stone to its fellows. When he looked again for the woman,
she was walking away along the bank through the flowers. Though it was a dream,
a night breeze had began to blow, and a wing of her hair was tossed shining
from under her veil. And this hair, though young as she herself, was whiter
than the moon. But the boy was unversed in the stories. Her white hair told him
nothing.

Dawn came, green and turquoise, lifting its blue cornflower of a
sun.

The river bank roused, the boy with the rest, recollecting
nothing of what he had dreamed.

The priests of the Goddess came over the river to shore on a raft
of gold, and the oars rowed by themselves. The priests, in the robes of that
blue like which there was no other, chanted in a shrill groan, and bells rang,
and incense smoke, blue on blue on blue, unwove into the sapphire-lidded sky.

The tribute of the many lands was laid out like a market, oddly
quiet, and the blue priests passed silently amid the tribute, weighing,
counting. Among them were both old and young, and there were female orders,
priestesses of Az-Nennafir, but in truth they each wore the same face, ageless
and lacking a gender. They had given their spirits to Azhriaz, or to the ethos
they recognized by her name. They had relinquished all identity, and gained in
lieu of it no other thing. Pithless gourds. They worshiped, knowingly, the
indifferent hatred of heaven.

But all this while, the vaster part of the multitude gazed only
across the river. They wondered if
she
would appear to
them. She did not always do so. For all the swarms of people who came to her
City, only a fraction witnessed her. The majority were bitter all their lives,
cheated by being spared.

Six white stone cats, big as elephants, patrolled the farther
bank. The jewelry of the stair glittered like a glacier. The high doors of gold
did not quiver.

The boy who had had the dream was also gazing, his heart in his
mouth. He was aware a priest came by him, eyeing the scores of white natural
columns, bundled there like huge posts. As the thin hand of the priest reached
out to one of these bundles, its topmost column, resting some thirty feet in
the air, suddenly leapt free. It flew outward like a live thing, and then came
hurtling down. The priest, making no move to avoid it, raised his arms and
shouted aloud: “
Azhriaz
!”
And the column struck him in the chest; as he fell it ground over him and on,
toward the river.

Other men scrambled to safety; only the flowers were in the
column’s path, and did not stop it. That stone from the desert one and a half
years away dropped into the Goddess’s river, and the water gushed upward and
poured down again, but the stone, having gone under, re-emerged, and lay afloat
on the surface like a long white bone with one black knot in it. The boy, still
remembering no iota of his dream, had flung himself flat to wait for death, but
the priests took no notice of him. One cried in a great voice: “An omen! The
gift itself rushes to meet the Goddess.”

But they did not attempt to fish out the pillar, bizarrely
floating there and, borne now despite its weight—which did not seem inclined to
sink it—to drift with the current downstream.

And that was all. Presently the boy, shaking with trepidation,
got up. The portion of tribute he had been in charge of was declared in order.
The golden doors of the temple-palace did not open, and the Goddess did not
appear. No attempt was made to salvage the dead priest who had allowed the
pillar to crush him. It was thought offensive to treat the sick or to display
pomp in funerals, since punishment through illness and death was the casual
will of Upperearth. Corpses were dragged by the heels and hair to pits, and
burned there. And in a while, some did this office for the priest. Others came
to deal with the treasures of tribute, and soon the bank was empty, but for all
the people and their much-lightened beasts and wagons, and their hearts—emptied
also.

The boy stood and sobbed with raging disappointment, one of
countless others. He wished to swim the river and immolate himself on the
sapphire steps. He shivered with resentful ire that he had not been asked to
murder or to die for her. Nor was he alone in this seizure.

And it was months after, on the tedious journey homeward, that his
hysterical craving gave way to a sulky gladness. And it seemed to him then that
he
had
seen her, all alone by night, but that was in a dream.

3

SOME
QUANTITY of air there must have been, trapped in the sealed cavity of the
pillar stone, to keep it afloat. Unsinking, it wended through the blue day on
the river. The flowers of the bank brushed it and sought to detain it, but it
slipped easily from each embrace, though showered by petal-tears. Spangled
flies pursued the stone, wanting to alight, but found the texture not to their
liking, buzzily discussed it to its detriment, and flew away. And as the day
declined, and dusk began to purple the river, the pillar came between great
gardens on the shore, and here armored crocodiles of prodigious size slunk from
the reeds, and approached it. “What manner of beast is this?” they sinisterly
mumbled. “It moves as we do, graceful and leaden, but where are the jaws of it?
It has only one dull eye.” And they snarled their teeth of white and yellow,
and closed up their lazy-lidded hellish gaze, and rowed away on strong spiky
legs.

But the blossoming rushes of the gardens, whose dusk-colored lily
heads stood up from the water, had made a net beneath the surface. Here they
caught enormous jewels that were sometimes thrown in the river, unwary fish of
startling girth, and the corpses of men who had sacrificed themselves to the
Goddess through drowning. Now, the net caught the pillar of stone, gently, and
held it fast as chains.

When the first moon of Az-Nennafir’s night flew upward from the
east, and the first dance of the first stars began across the sky, the stone
lay still, white and grave, among the crowns of the purple rush iris.

And the water sipped and lipped the pillar. The water said: Taste,
drink of me, hard desert thing. Be wet as never before. The river can dissolve,
in time, almost anything. I will lick you away, and you will become water,
too. Taste and drink, as you are tasted and drunk. Soak up the river’s wine as
it melts you. I am full of death and life. I carry the magic of this metropolis
like an artery. I know black caverns where neither the sun nor the moon ever
shine, but they are light as day to those that dwell there. And I know lairs of
weed where little creatures swim about that are like tiny lions and horses and
cattle, but with fishtails, and where there are tall shells that scuttle on
fringed spider legs. And I know where the crocodiles go to die, and their bones
have made a temple of calcium, but their eyes only crystallize and become lamps
of pale green topaz. And I flow in and out of everything that pauses or that
passes here, through its very body, and so learn all its secrets. Flowers grow
far down that no man has ever looked on, not even Azhriaz the Goddess has
looked at them. They have no color, here, but if they were brought up into the
light, they would be found to have a color never seen before on the earth. And
there is a place where there exists an invisible race of insects, who build complex
cities of their own in the slime. And there is a forest of dead women’s hair,
where ferns grow that sing in female voices. Ah, then, said the river to the
pillar of stone, when you become one with me, we will travel together and all
these things you will see and know. But it may take a short while, a few
hundred years. Be patient. Taste and drink. Soak up the river’s wine. . . .

High as sky, the temple-palace on the river bank in Az-Nennafir of
the Goddess. Few have entered it, and of those that have, fewer come away, to
tell. Yet the moonlight of seven moons falls now in through the painted and
stained windows. What does the moonlight see?

The outer precinct is a hall of jewels. Every gemstone of the earth
is represented in it. There are columns built of butter-yellow beryls and
beryls yellow as a cat’s eyes, or greenish as the eyes of crocodiles. And there
are columns of crimson faceted corundum and polished corundum of dragon-red.
There are blue columns also, of transparent aquamarine, that seem to hang
suspended, and jade and emerald columns that seem to grow like trees or
spouting waves frozen in viridescent ice. The walls have scenes depicted on
them, made all of these jewels, and others, and the floors are a jeweled
mosaic. The ceiling has seven carbuncles in it larger than cartwheels, of
bloodiest green and most astringent violet . . . The moonlight
spins and grows giddy and hastens through a half-open door into an inner
precinct, which is of gold.

There is a carpet in this room, on a floor of gold so malleable it
is runneled and pitted like mud. The carpet is made of the wool of golden
sheep, so it is said. Golden swords, each the stature of three brawny men upon
each other’s shoulders, uphold a canopy of golden disks. Gold,
gold
—the
eyes are numbed and see all things golden. Even the candles are gold in golden
sconces, and burn with a sheer gold flame. The moonlight flees through a
lattice of gold lace, into a room of silver.

Aloft, a silver web. Beneath, the floor is a pool—of fluid silver,
boiling and bubbling. Silver bridges cross the silver pool, but the moonlight
falls in love with the silver room and falls fainting with desire into the
molten liquid.

Imagination, or hearsay, must go on alone.

Up a stair of silver flanked by silver gryphons, to a silver door
with a silver keyhole, and through that into a room which is crystal. Part
milky the walls, and part lucid. You may look up into the sky—so close, for all
the while, the enormous rooms have subtly ascended. Stars dance on the roof of
this one, twirling their skirts of tinsel. In crystal columns, which are slim
as a girl’s arm, crystal water seems to play, and sometimes fish—that have no
visible bodies, only crystalline spines and little crystalline skulls and
bright, bright eyes—flit about there.

Beyond and above the crystal room lies a room hollowed from a
single pearl. Heaven alone knows (if it bothers) what monstrous oyster could
have been afflicted by what horrific boulder of grit to produce a result so
large. Smooth, the pearl room, and slightly flushed, but with no furnishings,
save another long stair—each step of which is, too, a single pearl, but, of
course, infinitely smaller. The stair ends at a pearl-crusted door; these
pearls are only the size of hand mirrors. The door is firmly shut, and will not
yield to pressure, to a demanding cry or to a courteous knock.

So far, there have been glimpsed no attendants. Sometimes priests
may be found on the outer stair of this sacred house, but they do not enter
even the room of jewels, though they have spied it. In the temple-palace,
hordes of human slaves of all the peoples of the conquered world-third may be
supposed to come and go. Yet, in this succession of chambers at least, they
have left no evidence.

Nevertheless, by the door of pearl, something waits. It is not to
be looked on, has no form, makes no sound, gives off no odor. But it is there.
A guardian. And by night, surely other things come to pass within the door of
pearl?

They say she has supernatural handmaidens and pages more beautiful
than any mortal. Gorgeous, as she is, and with black hair, though they do not
have her eyes. They tend her only after sunfall, being children of the night.

But by day or by night, oh what splendors must manifest inside
that inaccessible room—

The room within the jewels, the gold, the silver, the crystal, the
pearl—was bare. It was built of nothing important, it would seem to be
constructed of wattle, and the floor was wood. Fat candles burned prosaically
on iron spikes. There was a window half a mile up from the ground, that saw
only sky, but the wooden shutters were fastened by iron bolts, and the sky,
also, was shut out.

A girl of seventeen years sat on the floor, drawing on the wood,
with a wand of ocher, strange symbols. She wore a gown of vermilion velvet, as
if she were cold in the hot night. Her black hair made her veil and diadem
both. Her eyes were sapphires; she had no other jewel that was to be seen: Her
beauty was enough.