Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 (52 page)

“As I lay here in my illness,” said the Sun, “I saw these three
rise up from the pools of my garden and run about here, and when I spoke to
them they came to me lovingly and respectfully, showing no fear, and calling me
their father. “

“Who then is their mother?” asked the gods.

“You must ask them,” said the Sun virtuously.

The gods did so. And running happily to the Moon, the three called
her “Mother” at once.

And the Moon blushed red as a sunrise.

For it had been this way. She had reflected in the three pools of
the garden, east, west, south, and the powers of the garden, which could imbue
even a spider’s web, had retained that reflection, and imbued it, and later the
Sun reflected there too. . . . And later still there had been
some dalliance, which had brought all symbolically together.

“They are daughters to be proud of,” said the Sun. “One shall
light my way in the morning; she shall be the Morning Star. And another, who is
a little darker, she shall walk behind me at sunset to close the doors of the
west—and she shall be the Evening Star. But the fairest of them I will keep by
me at all times, for there is not yet any situation vacant that is good enough
for her, though there may come an age when that may happen.”

But the Moon covered her face and said, “All is proved against me.
I was peevish and dishonest and have done wrong. For he would not let me in the
garden, and he did not even, finding me there, remember who I was. And, worst
of all, I loved him again, as once long ago, and could not remember our
quarrel.”

Then the Sun, hearing that, went to the Moon and kissed her.

“I had no right to shut you out. You are my beloved, and only the
distance that is always between us made us enemies.”

However, the gods pronounced judgment for all that, for they were
not invited lightly into any affair.

The Moon they allowed to keep her gorgeous robe, and even to wear
it, but not often. And they decreed that she must hereafter endlessly alter her
shape in the heavens, shrinking and enlarging and shrinking, as she had done
when she tried to get out of the garden by stealth, in order that men recollect
she was inconstant, the lady of secret lust, and thieves. But this they added,
that since the Moon and Sun were reconciled with each other, and only distance
had made them enemies, at particular times they might meet, there in the sky,
before the gaze of mankind and all the world, and that at these infrequent
meetings the Moon should stand before the Sun as he kissed her (which
undoubtedly he would do), so that his beauteous and great light would be
dulled. And so they reprimanded the Moon’s sulky deception and the Sun’s
vainglorious pride.

As for the two chosen daughters, they came to be the Morning and
Evening Stars, and they greet their mother joyfully when they see her in
heaven. But the third daughter is still waiting for her appointment. For the
garden, it passed from Being as such wonders did in the maturing of the world.

But the Sun and the Moon have stayed close friends, and so we have
seen them to be. For it was the privilege of men, by this midday shadow, to
know that the lovers had embraced each other over men’s heads. That darkness
was only their kiss.

Now who could be churlish enough to be afraid of that?

And even as Dathanja closed the story, the moon swam from the sun,
and the light of day shone out again, and the birds sang, and the hippopotami
frisked in the river.

5

THE
SUN, having displayed his kingly face again, rode westward and vanished.

The crowd upon the river bank arose and also went away, pointing,
with intimate irony, to the evening star, as she walked sedately after her
father, to shut the doors of a yellow sunset.

The priest and the child turned toward their house. The child, who
had been very silent since the passing of the shadow, said to him at last, “If
the sun can be a darkness, cannot darkness be a sun?”

Dathanja said, “It would depend upon the form of the darkness. It
would depend on many things.”

“Most youthful Father,” said the child, “it is not possible for
me ever to thank you for your goodness to me, nor did you do it to be thanked.
But I have sat at your feet and listened. I have learned. And the whole earth
has spoken to me. Also, my own heart. Such excellent teachers I have had. And
when the shadow left the earth, the shadow that was on me, this too drew away.
Here I am. No longer Sovaz, or Azhriaz. No longer Soveh, your child.”

The crepuscule had come. The land was blue, and the river, and in
her eyes the blueness of every dusk the world had known. And in his that regarded
her, every black night which followed.

“I am glad for you,” he said.

“For the sake of that gladness, for a little while,” she said,
“let us remain as we have been. For each grows up, as you have told me. But the
moon, changing her shape, is still the moon, and just so with love.”

So he took her hand, as he had done in her three-year childhood,
and they walked together along the river bank where the lotuses still
burgeoned, to the house.

Not a lamp was lighted there, not even in the upper room, which was
also noiseless.

“He has argued with the mirror again,” said the girl, and she and
Dathanja burst out laughing.

In the midst of the laughter they held each other close, and he
said to her, “We should not laugh at him,” and they laughed, and she said, “No,
we should not,” and they laughed more.

“Oh little girl, I rejoice you are yourself at last.”

“Am I myself? Who is she? But I think no longer am I another’s,
not even yours, my kinsman, my kind lord, who cared for me.”

“What now? You will leave me now?” he said.

“And you,” said she, “will be pleased to be left. To your work,
and your princess who gives you
shoes
—”

“Oh little girl, how do you know that?”

“Oh dear friend, my father-brother, the whole land knows. Even the
frogs talk about it. ‘What did he with her
then?
they ask. And the grasshoppers tell them.” At that they laughed all over again.
And flirtatiously, by sorcery, they each of them lit the lamps of the lower
room, so the flames winked up out of the darkness like spring flowers. And then
they lit the fire on the hearth, blew it out, lit it, and they were both
children, she and he, who had lived and died and lived, each in their own
fashion, a girl of seventeen whose years amounted to almost half a century, a
man perhaps in his twenty-fifth year, who had known whole centuries intact, and
numberless.

“Let us,” repeated the girl, “not speak for a time of parting.
Though you have wintered in this region, yet you are and will be again a
wanderer. And I—I must seek my life under every stone, upon each pinnacle,
within the shade and shine of the earth, and elsewhere. . . .
But not yet. We have the last days of winter still. And I will be a dutiful
daughter-sister to you. I will be a girl of the village and the town, and cook
your food and mend your clothes, set flowers by your pillow, and sing to you.
If in return you tell me still your stories, and hold me in your arms as you
have held me, asking nothing but the love of a child.”

“Here are all the lizards and frogs, waiting by the rain-jar, to
be let in,” said he. “Shall I allow them to come to my hearth, when they have
been gossiping all this while with the grasshoppers concerning myself and the
princess?”

“Shame them by overlooking their faults.”

So the assembly of frogs, and other creatures of the bank, were
permitted the warmth of the fire.

Then, by the firelight under the lamps, the man and woman ate a
rustic supper, augmented by two pitchers of wine ensorceled out of the vaults
of a nearby potentate.

And later they slept, in their allotted separate places, which
were close enough together. Neither experienced desire for the other. It had
not been their fate to be lovers, though to love.

Dathanja dreamed that he was seated on a hillside with a maiden
whose hair was the color of apricots. They spoke and laughed together, while
she fed wildfowl of the air, and slender reptiles from under rocks, out of her
hands. And later they lay, he and she, in the blazing grass, in love. Below, on
a plain beside a lake of clear water, unicorns were dancing, white and rose and
gold. Somewhere a bell rang from a distant temple’s tower, and leaves sighed
as they opened.

And Zhirek, as Simmu relaxed her clasp upon him, and he his own of
her, kissed her flame of hair and said to her, “Have you punished me enough,
have you been sufficiently revenged on me?”

“You yourself punished yourself, and avenged me. And such things
are, anyway, a silliness.”

“The priests are liars?” asked Zhirek.

“Yes. All but one.”

And soon they joined in love again, in love of love. And at that time,
love was enough.

But the Vazdru Goddess-girl, Sovaz-Azhriaz-Soveh, she dreamed
this:

There was a blue mountain above a green valley. Buildings grew up
in the valley, the stalks of towers. There was a temple, blooming from the
mountainside, row upon row of pillars, and the stairways of roofs ascending.
Aromatic smokes traveled from its courts, straight as ruled lines in the
sublime summer air.

But high up, near the mountain’s summit, was a small shrine made
of blue marble, so like the sky it might be missed altogether. Here an old
priestess dwelled, and very old she was. “Three centuries she has seen out,”
the pilgrims said to the dreaming girl, as she climbed the path with them. “But
she is tired now. Tired by all her wandering. She is a healer and teacher, and
a prophetess. Decades she has resided here. Kings come to her to explain their
visions. Queens come and ask that their destiny be told them, or the meaning of
portents. And though she is ancient, this woman, as one of the great snakes
that dwell in the mountain’s core, yet she can make herself to seem a young
girl, satin-skinned and fleet as a deer. Why,” they added to the dreamer, “have
you sought her out?”

“I would have her explain a dream to me,” the dreamer said.

And then she was within the mountaintop that lay behind the
shrine. Enormous columns rose, glossy as milk, and vapors from the cavern’s
throat, some perfumed and some acrid. An elderly woman, all wizened and bent, a
crone, sat on a ledge, and she caressed the diamond-shaped head of a serpent,
which head alone was the length of a man’s foot.

“Do not trouble about the snake,” she said, in a voice like a dry
old leaf, so faint, yet audible as is a tiny noise within the ear.

“Snakes I have never feared,” said the dreamer, and going near, she
stroked the snake also. And looked up into the priestess’s face and into such
blue, blue eyes, her own were filled by tears.

“What is your name?” said the girl to the crone.

“It is Atmeh.”

“Why did they name you that?”

“None named me but myself. In the land where I was reborn, and
where I was a child, I had another name. But in the language of that country my
name, which meant a petal of the fire, had another meaning, which was
spark of life,
and
the word for this, in that tongue, was Atmeh. Thus, when I set out to find
myself, I took that name to be my own. Ah, young girl, pretty dreamer,” said
the ancient priestess, “one day we shall meet, you and I. Go now, and find your
life.”

And Azhrarn’s daughter woke up, there in the house by the brown
river shore. She looked at once at her companion, as he slept, seeing his
beauty and his youth, his age, his sorrow, and the recompense of knowledge—all
that upon his slumbering face.

She would not have woken him, yet she yearned to tell him of her
dream.

But even as she sat there undecided, the house door rushed inward
with a terrific crash—and woke the entire world, it seemed.

6

IT
HAD SWUM for miles, and years. Beneath the sea, in the long depths under the
dark green hills, whose crowns were islands, and on the surface also, under the
blister of sun and glister of moon. Tall ships had sighted it, and called after
it, thinking to effect a rescue. Or they had avoided it, supposing it to be
what once it had been. And the huge fish of the aqueous abysses had tried to
detain it, or fish-girls with cool green lips and eyes like stars that had
drowned. But on and on it swam, indifferent, determined. And sometimes even it
went in circles, searching and not finding. And sometimes it crawled through
subterranean channels. And sometimes it rested, whole hours at a stretch,
before it crawled or swam on again. So at last it reached the mouth of a river,
and swam up that. The waters altered from the tones of ocean to a tawny glass,
now and then blackening with night. Rime lay over the river, where enormous
bladders floated with closed-up eyes. At length the swimmer broke from the
water among the ice-cold stems of lotuses, and so came to a house, and flung
wide the door.