Glory and the Lightning (31 page)

She still did not speak, for there was a sudden drawing of unendurable pain in her throat. Then she said, “But have you not told me that all is ordained? If it had been fated for you to die you would have died, lord, and no ministrations of mine could have delayed you.”

His laugh was almost as strong as before his illness. “I am not superstitious, nor do I believe in your Fates. I have told you, my rose of the valley, that nothing is fated and all that concerns man is an accident, for it is not possible that Deity is aware of our insignificance in the vastness of His domains.”

Returning health made him feel like a youth again. Last night Aspasia had slept in his arms once more, surfeited, and he had held her so for a long time as men hold their life’s treasure. No, she was not young, though still beautiful; he no longer thought of her beauty, remembering her ministrations and her devotion to him, and her tireless care. He thought of the hours when she had sat beside him, reading to him, anxiously watching every change of his expression. No task had been too repulsive for her, no aspect of his illness sickening or revolting. As a mother would have tended him so she had tended him, through nights of suffering and convulsive spasms in his belly, and though often he would urge her to rest she would only palely smile, and each day she had grown thinner and her eyes had enlarged in her translucent face. He never awoke but what she was there, bending over him. Sometimes she dozed in exhaustion, but her hand held his. His slightest movement had aroused her to full alertness, as a watchman is alerted at the most distant stir. She would permit no slave to attend him.

He said, remembering, and was greatly moved, “Tomorrow, my beloved, I will take you to my jeweler and anything he possesses is yours. It is a poor sign of gratitude for my life, but it is the only recompense I can make.”

She bowed her head and said to herself, Alas, is that all?

Then she said, “Lord, I want no more jewels, for I have much from your generosity.”

“How, then, can I repay you, Aspasia?”

A cool sweat broke out over her body. She must speak now or never have the courage to speak again. She lifted eyes clouded with tears to him and from behind her veil she whispered, “Lord, let me go, in peace, with your blessing.”

He was astounded. He turned so that he could more fully look down into her eyes. “Go, Aspasia? Where would you go, and why?” He could not believe it.

“I wish to return to my old home in Miletus for a space, and then go to Athens to open a school for young women who desire to be more than a mere bauble for men, and who wish to live as surely the gods intended a woman to live, for does not Athene labor endlessly, and Artemis, and does not Demeter attend the land, and is not Hera queen of Olympus and ever dutiful? The goddesses are potent in their sex. It was surely intended for earthly women to be important also, in their lives.”

Al Taliph was still incredulous, but a pallor ran over his dark face like a shadow of a white wing.

“You desire to leave me?” he asked.

“Lord, I must.” Now her tears ran over the edge of her veil, but her eyes were full upon him and straight.

There was a sick tightness in his chest, as if he had been wounded to the death. His hand left hers. He stared before him and she shut her eyes lest she weaken and implore him not to grant her wish.

He said, “How have I offended you, Aspasia, that you wish to desert me and leave me forever?”

Ah, she thought, if you had but loved me, even a little, I should not flee from you, core of my heart. But men cannot love to the measure of our hope, and that is their nature. Even if they love, the love is evanescent, and a new woman is a consolation and a forgetting. I do not reproach you, my darling; I reproach my own folly in that I have hoped when hope was impossible. I had forgotten what I had learned in the house of Thargelia and that was my grievous error. I am a woman.

Because she had not spoken he continued: “Then you tended me not out of love but as a slave would attend a master, a dedicated slave thinking of duty?”

She said in a low voice, “I have remembered our years together, and our affection and our joys, and you are a man of worth, lord, and must be preserved.”

“For what, for whom?” he asked with bitterness.

“You have wives and sons. Are they nothing to you, sire?”

He thought of three of his sons, now young men, of whom he was proud, and who had fortunate futures and who loved him. Though fathers did not cherish their daughters there were two whose beauty and gentleness were dear to him.

Aspasia said, “Return to your family and their love for you. You are still their lord and their protection. Is that not enough?”

He did not speak. His eyes changed with his thoughts and with his rebellious passions. Then he said, “Is not what I have given you of any value, Aspasia?”

“Lord, it is of inestimable value. I will never forget you. But I must go.

He lifted her veil to look at her face and he saw there the marble resolution and did not see how her lower lip trembled. “It is regrettable that you are learned, Aspasia,” he said in a hard voice. “Learning is not for women, for it makes of them not what nature intended.”

“To be learned one must also be intelligent, lord,” and she was deeply offended. “Is the intelligence of women to be wasted?”

“It is the nature of women to love and nurture and serve. The market place is not for them, nor commerce, nor the affairs of the world.”

“But you have not answered my question, lord.”

“There is no answer to absurdities.” He paused, and felt ill again and undone. “Is there naught I can do to persuade you to remain with me?”

Yes, she answered in herself. You can tell me that you love me—which would be a lie—and swear to me that above all things I am eternally dear to you. She said, almost inaudibly, “There is nothing which is in your power, lord, that can persuade me, for what I desire you cannot give me. It is true that you can take back your jewels and set me defenseless on the streets, as once you threatened. How I shall live then I do not know. So, I beg you to let me keep them and to set me free.”

“You believe I am cruel and ungrateful?”

O gods, she cried inwardly, is gratitude all you know, my beloved? A heavy faintness came to her. “I ask for no gratitude, which is a poor and reluctant and resented thing. I did what I had to do. Let us not speak of it again. There is of a certainty one thing you can still give me: peace.”

“You have known no peace with me?”

She put her hand to her throat where the pain was enormous. “No,” she said.

He was silent. The pallor increased on his face, but when she touched him in alarm he flung off her hand, and she shrank.

“Peace is for the dead,” he said. “Are you foolish enough to believe it is attainable for the living? Surely Thargelia taught you better!”

“We are, as usual, conversing, but we do not mean the same thing,” she pleaded. “The peace I desire is not the peace you would understand.”

He motioned to the litter-bearers. He said, “I only understand that you wish to leave me. I owe you much, Aspasia. I owe you several years of pleasure and conversation and the contemplation of your beauty. You have been my companion in my empty hours and have filled them with contentment and delight. No other woman has been to me what you have been, and I, too, will never forget.”

“The world is full of complaisant women,” she said, out of her pain. “I will not be hard to replace.”

This wounded him more than anything else and he made an abrupt gesture. “I have a caravan leaving tomorrow. Do you wish to be part of it?”

Tomorrow! Then there would be no last parting, no last embraces. It was well, but it was also agonizing. “Yes,” she said.

“I have servants who will then take you to where you desire to go. I trust that pleases you, Aspasia.” He spoke dully and without emotion. “As for the jewels, they, too, are in gratitude, and I will also send to you a purse of gold coins.” He paused and smiled at her somberly. “Go in peace, Aspasia, if that is what you desire above all else.”

I do not desire that, beloved, she thought. But it is all that remains for me in this accursed world. It is a barren desire, the desire of the dying or the hopeless. But it is all I have.

They returned to the inn in a silence too sorrowful for words. That night he sent to her a large purse rich with gold coins—but no final word, no entreaty, no avowal. Her women gathered her possessions together and put them in her chests, gloating and smirking when she could not see them. They whispered to each other, “The foreign woman has been dismissed, and contentment will come to the lord’s house again. She has the evil eye. We will all rejoice in the harem when she is absent.”

The caravan departed, with Aspasia’s tent. There was no last farewell from Al Taliph, no sign of his solicitude. Aspasia thought, He has already forgot me. She lay on her cushions in the tent and when the caravan began to move she rose and moved aside the flap on the tent and stood in the doorway. Al Taliph was not there. The gates of the inn closed after the caravan, and it started on its long journey. Had Al Taliph appeared she would have run to him and would have implored him not to let her go.

Unfortunate are we, she thought with crushing despair, when the gods grant our prayers! She lay on the cushions again and covered her face with a length of silk and gave herself up to torment and to suffering she had never experienced before. She was like a shell cast up on the seashore, bereft of the vital creature which had inhabited it. She was empty except for the dolorous woe that blew through the shell of herself and whispered of desolation, of the breaking of a heart, and the ending of life and immortal loneliness. She shed no tears. The dead do not weep for themselves. They can only remember.

CHAPTER 20

Autumn came again to Persia and the great caravans began to move to their many destinations. But Al Taliph accompanied none. “I am still recovering from a grave illness,” he would say to his friends and his fellow merchants. “Too, I am no longer young.” They accepted this explanation, for they were gentlemen. But it was whispered everywhere that the beauteous Aspasia, the crown of his harem, his adored one and the adorable, had disappeared from his house. Had he banished her or had she died in Damascus?

The women and the eunuchs gossiped. The women were happy that the sister of Ahriman had departed, and they were assiduous in their attempts to amuse their lord. His oldest wife suggested he acquire a new young wife from the slave markets of Greece, or Macedonia, where, it was said, there lived girls so fair that their hair was almost white and had eyes the color of hyacinths and flesh like pearl. Moreover, they were skilled in music and the dance, and were amiable and full of grace. The oldest wife, who loved her husband, felt alarm for him. He had become emaciated and his dark face, never lively or gay, was as somber as carved bronze. He accepted no invitations. He sat in the gardens, or alone in his chambers, and did not speak. He rarely frequented his library, once his pride above all his other treasures. He sent for no books. He received no visitors.

The women who had attended Aspasia in Damascus were eagerly sought out and had to repeat their story countless times. It was bare enough, but their malicious imaginations supplied factitious details. The lord had wearied of that woman’s impudence. She had become too old and had borne him no child, and was idle and contentious. They had heard him quarrel with her many times. They even hinted that she had cast a malign spell on him and had mysteriously inflicted an illness upon him, with her incantations, so that she had brought him close to death. When he recovered, despite her malevolence, he had understood and had sent her away. She had been consigned to a small mean caravan, and no one had seen her since. “Rejoice,” they said to the wives and the concubines and the slave girls, “that he was enlightened in time, for if Mithras—or Zoroaster—had not intervened he should have died.”

The oldest wife was shrewd and a little more discerning. “Why, then, knowing all this, did he not have her murdered?”

“She had cast a spell on him. Did I not see it myself?” asked Serah.

“A veritable Circe,” said one of the slave girls who was a Greek. She was forced to explain. The other women expressed horror, raising their hands and lifting their eyes to heaven. “She made a swine of our lord!” cried the youngest wife, holding her last baby to her breast and shivering.

The oldest wife said, “Nonsense. He adored her. Do I not know it? A woman who loves, as I love him, knows when another woman possesses his heart. It is given a loving woman to know it in her breast,” and she touched that ample object. “I know also that she loved him. He murmured of her in his sleep when he slept beside me, in the most endearing words, and smiled in the moonlight. A man does not do that unless his love is returned. Do I not know?”

The others looked at her with disfavor, yet also with respect.

“Nevertheless,” said the oldest wife, “it is well she does not disturb us longer. It is a mystery, with which we must be content. Let us go to the temples and offer thanksgiving and pray that he will forget her speedily.”

“He permitted her to take with her all the fabulous jewels he had bestowed on her.”

“Another spell!” cried the girl from Greece.

“Nonsense,” said the oldest wife. “Spells cannot hurt our lord; he is too powerful for them. If he allowed her to do so then it was his will, which is inexplicable to us.” She was annoyed at the mention of Aspasia’s age, for she, herself, was a year or more older. She sighed. “Who can understand a man? What they desire they do, and we women cannot comprehend.”

But one of Aspasia’s attendants in Damascus licked her lips. What she had to say was too important to be whispered in the harem. It was also valuable. It would bring a good price. Who would pay it? Eventually she thought of Kurda, who had not gone to Damascus. He would pay the price. But he disdained to gossip too much with the women of the harem, and he was busy in attendance on Al Taliph, as he loved him and was full of consternation at his appearance.