Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 (13 page)

At these words, Azhrarn
cursed Chuz. Every flickering candle in the tavern died at once. Outside, the
last lamps of the town perished. The very stars seemed to falter overhead,
though probably they did not.

“You are clever,
Madness. Yes, there is no other means,” said Azhrarn in that black quiet. “I
accept your terms. We will so conclude our quarrel. This the first night,
tomorrow the second; at the third expect my answer, and your punishment. It
shall not be nothing, Chuz. You are warned.”

Then, where the Prince
of Demons had stood was only a column of scarlet searing lightless flame,
which, going out, left a cold-hot wound in the dark, that faded slowly.

While in all the land
about, dogs wailed, and winds howled, and leaves rotted from trees, and a brief
rain fell that stained the walls of the dwellings of men like diluted blood.

“If I were a woman I would say, What now will become
of you? And I would weep. You will be ripped from me for some living death he
will devise. I cannot think what. But so it will be.”

“If I were a man, I
would hold you in my arms, as I do, and kiss your hair, as I do, and the blue
tears of your blue, blue eyes would spring into
my
eyes, as they do. And I would say, What else is to be done?”

“Why did you kill my
mother?”

“Did I kill your
mother?”

“Why did you kneel to my
father?”

“Did I kneel to him?”

“Liar and fool.”

“What is any of this to
us? Time is endless and ours. Love and death are only the games we play in it.”

“You have been my
father, you have been my brother, and my beloved. If I were a woman, if I were
a child, I would weep. Oh, let me weep.”

3

TWO DAYS and a night between them. What to do then,
with these last seconds before the ending of the world? Unhuman beings, they
made the time seem to stretch for them, yet, such vistas before them, eternity,
how swiftly this small ration ran away.

The cottage was a
mansion. They lured to it by sorcerous means a host of people, feasted them,
created for them an orgy of pleasures, and lorded it, prince and princess, and
loaded with presents the ensorceled guests. And some of the donations were
sumptuous and goodly; some turned to frogs and owl pellets on the route home.

The mansion was a
cottage. They spent a day as peasants. Sovaz baked black bread and cooked a
broth of herbs and roots. Chuz (you could not call him Oloru now, though still
he wore Oloru’s shape) cut grass for hay and logs for the fire. With garlands
of wild flowers in their hair they ate the impoverished meal, where, garlanded
with rubies, they had just previously supped on transparent wines and magic meats.

In the second night,
those two days’ center, they roamed about the trees. The pools of the wood
sprang to diamond, the foliage spangled, and breathed disembodied music. Birds
which sang by day stirred and sang for them by night. They lay down there, the
lovers, and loved. Remember me by this, they said, as lovers then, now, have
always said, who must part.

But the third night,
after their humble peasants’ day, they arrayed themselves like kings and left
the cottage deserted. They went deep into the wood, to a place that was so
dense and black nothing came there ever, not bird or beast, not man, nor even
demon, probably, till then. And here they waited for Azhrarn.

A long while, too, they
waited, or a long while Azhrarn, the Prince of Demons, made them wait. The moon
passed over the black place, and one thin wire of light probed through, and
then was drawn away again.

She said at last, all
pretense over, “Do you guess what he will demand of you?”

“I think I guess. I
believe in a manner I have been foretold of it by him.”

“It is fearful?”

“Perhaps. And just, in
its way.”

“Cease speaking as a
man. Speak as Prince Chuz now, my guardian, my lord.”

“Oh, beloved,” he said,
“my lady, my soulless soul’s dream of night and sunrise.”

“
No
,” said Sovaz, “unless you will refuse him.”

“Impossible. It must be done.”

“What will the legends say of you?” inquired Sovaz
bitterly.
“You,
a Lord of Darkness, to accept
the bane of a Vazdru who only hated you for slaying his mistress.”

“Once it was, ‘Why did you kill my mother?’”

“Once. But she was only
his. Does the wine call the jar ‘Mother,’ when the wine is spilled? So I was
for her, wine for his use.”

But then the moon came
back into the dark. Not one dull wire now, but a vast iridescence, as if dry
water poured through the trees, or a heatless conflagration.

He had announced
himself, knocked upon the door. It was not politeness, only a threat; they
should notice and be careful.

Azhrarn walked after the
light, entered the glade, and stood in it with them.

And as she had said to
Chuz, so the Demon said to him instantly: “Do you guess?”

“It would seem I do.”

“Do you consent?” said
Azhrarn.

“I admire you too well,” said Chuz, “to wrangle.”

“Azhriaz,” said the Demon.

But she answered, “That
is not my name.”

“It is your name,” said
Azhrarn. “Azhriaz, what will you do, when he is lost to you? You are nothing to
me as yet, but I am curious.”

“Stay so,” she said. “I
shall only follow him.”

“Thus let it be,” said
Azhrarn. “Now I shall tell you what you will follow. He has been a man, and
fair, and he has been pleased to claim all such deeds are his madness. But by
our agreement now, to give me some recompense he must relinquish his state and
his powers, and even the evidently charming mortal guise that he put on for
you. Mad now Chuz shall be. Truly mad, as a mortal knows it. Mindless,
screaming, foaming, and tearing himself. More beast than any ass or jackal.
Less a man than any man he has artistically dressed himself to imitate. A
shunned outcast of the tribes of the earth, a mock for every unearthly thing.
To demons, a new joke they will indulge and disdain. No longer a lord, a
prince, or a magician. Foul and disfigured, each side of him—allow that I miss
no quintessence of the irony—matted and maimed, and so to go scrabbling over
the world. That the world may see, if it is able, that even his day-playing
peers must be courteous to the Master of Night. And all this, for a mortal
lifetime, he must and will endure, till some gross mortal death rids him of the
vile disease that is himself. Only then, Chuz, may Chuz be Chuz again. The
whole sentence you will serve. Or serve none of it, and we will find another
way.”

“My dear,” said Chuz, languidly, “what greater happiness
can there be for me than to experience—if for such a little,
little
while—the life-style of my own subjects?”

“Go then,” said Azhrarn. “Be happy.”

“No,” said Sovaz. She
spoke coldly and she seized the wrist of her lover. “You were Oloru. You are
mine. You may not leave me at his whim, to suffer for his disgusting sport.”

“He will leave you,” said Azhrarn. “He will suffer.”

“Then he too betrays and deserts me,” said Sovaz.
“Chuz, do you hear what I say? If you obey him, I conclude it must be your will
and your wish.”

But the face of Chuz had
subtly altered. He said to her, “As men die in the flesh, so the undying, too,
have their deaths. This it would appear is to be a death of mine. And he, he
has died often. One night, he will recount the stories. For now, Oloru tells
you this: Of all the stars, the flowers, the songs of earth, or beneath or
above the earth, you are the brightest, loveliest, best. What is there to fear?
There is all time to meet again.”

And then he walked away
from her, under the black, light-touched waves of the wood. Out of which there
soon came the braying cry of an ass, and then a strange wavering shriek and
the splintering of branches. And birds that had slept there burst upward to be
gone in haste.

Presently Azhrarn, who
had stood looking off into the dark, said, “I am satisfied. For the moment.”
And he glanced at the girl and said to her, “There is the road he took, if you
mean to go after.”

Then she did begin to go
that way. And as she went by Azhrarn, Sovaz spoke to him, one word of
Underearth which the crude filthy-minded dwarfish Drin, lowest caste of
demonkind, sometimes wrote up on the walls of each other’s habitations.

“That I call you,” said Sovaz, “and that you are.”

“For your mother’s sake,” he said, “I will restrain my
hand. But there will come some midnight when you will make amends for it.”

“When the seas are fires and the winds seas and the
earth glass, and the gods come down on ladders to lick the feet of men.
Then
I will. Perhaps.”

Azhrarn said no more.
Nor she. She had said surely enough.

And turning from him,
she fled away through the trees after Chuz, like a frightened child.

PART THREE

Fair is Not Fair

1

MADNESS there had always been, in one form or another,
on the earth. When first it came, it was nameless, as were all things. But soon
men coined a name for it, since there must be names for every mote and seed.
And after the name came the name’s Being, which was called Prince Chuz, and
became Prince Chuz, and
was.

One of his own subjects
now, Chuz. All Azhrarn had said he would be. No longer fine. No longer, at his
own choice, half shining bright, half eerie sinister shadow—like the lunatic
moon. Now a lumbering fear-shape at which to slam and bolt the doors, to say,
What beast passes?
But the beasts themselves flee
from it, the forests sink silent. It flounders through mire and swamp, through
the high palisades of thorns. The ducks rise from the reeds, exclaiming. In a
dead tree it halts to rest, if rest it must. In a village street it appears,
and the men fling stones at it, even take their bows and hunting spears and let
fly with those. Till, quilled like the porcupine, it absconds, squealing, hurt,
but hit in no vital spot—for its time to end is far off. Did Azhrarn not
promise?

Madness has gone mad.
Truly mad, and utterly. And Chuz’s princely kingdom of the mad—they know it. It
drives them to worse excesses, to more comatose declines.

They pine, they take up
knives, and fall down in fits to prophesy the world’s ending, or that some
colossal lumbering elemental, slick with blood and mud, prickled by arrows, is
sweeping through men’s lives like a wind from chaos.

But only the mad
understand this. And who heeds them? If the times are out of joint, were they
not always so? When was the world ever perfect? Speak of golden ages, ages of
Innocence and Dream. Those are tales for children. Thus runs the philosophy of
the Flat Earth, bearing some resemblance to that of the round one.

But where humanity had
hidden and muttered
What beast passes?
now it
openly stared and said, “What maiden is this?”

Sovaz went by without a
look.

The earth—what was the
earth to her? A birthright so long denied, a treasure house, an alien desert—

Some saw her as a
maiden, a white dress, bare feet, no ornament but her eyes, and her long hair
for a mantle. Some saw her in male attire, striding fierce as a panther. Some
did not see her, sensed her, a fragrance, the mark of one narrow foot in the
dust. . . .

There was an anecdote. A
young lord, finding just such an exquisite footprint, fell in love even with
that, dreaming up an exquisite foot to fit it, so a limb, so a whole body,
face, and personality. And then, sleepless and wildened, he sent his soldiers
over every inch of that kingdom, to bring him all the women, young or old,
virgin, nubile, prepubescent. The married, the celibate, the hag—all were
brought, many weeping and protesting, their husbands, lovers, religious orders,
and relatives in uproar, and hurrying after. When the procession came to the
lord’s house, he had them taken, the women, to the forest path where he had
spied the print of the foot of Sovaz. “It is sorcery,” he said. “She has
disguised herself to tease me, for that is ever a woman’s way, to flirt and run
off and say No, since a man’s part is to demand and pursue and tell her Yes.
Even the elderly women, one may be
this
one,
hidden by her powers. But I will find her out. Even if she seems a child of
twelve.”

So then the women, angry
or afraid, or hopeful and willing, were made to set each their left foot in the
footprint. None matched, and the lord grew pale, and paler and more pale. Then
at last a girl came, among the very last. She put her foot into the footprint,
and see! It was a perfect fit.

The lord leapt up and
upon the track. The maiden was of a seasonable age, late spring. And she was,
as he had known she would be, very beautiful. He took her by the hand. “So, you
can elude me no longer.” “No, my lord,” said the maiden, and lowered her eyes.
She was a poor man’s daughter and had spent her days so far in herding sheep.
She agreed demurely and apologetically with the land’s lord that she had set
him this test, to be sure of him, and that certainly her ragged appearance was
all part of a mischievous plan. “But believe me,” she added, “it was not my aim
to vex you. My kindred and I have for long years been under the sorcerous curse
of an enemy. My father was once a king.” “I will not treat him as less,” said
the land’s lord. (So we behold here not only the foot of Sovaz, but the hand of
Fate.) And he wedded the maiden and raised her father and brothers also up to
the rank of lords, where, let it be said, they all lived righteously.