At that moment the panting torch revealed an unexpected thing in the wall to my right-an oval of featureless darkness.
Curious, and not at ease, I swung about to look, and made out a recessed entrance that appeared to lead into some inner chamber.
I was intrigued, put aside my child’s fears of lurks and haunts-to which this place, against my rationale but most definitely, made me prey-and rode between columns, up the marble pavement, and into the recess.
Inner chamber it was indeed, an apartment designed as a lodging, obviously for the god people who journeyed the tunnel.
At least the curtain that hung inside the entrance was perishable. It shivered to dusty particles as I brushed it, giving me the sense that I had wrongfully disturbed something I should not have presumed to touch.
The dying glare of the resin swept once over the big room, catching, as before, a variety of objects and glitters and, to the left of me, a man-high stand of solid silver with candles on iron spikes. It was only an arm’s stretch to let the last of my torch kiss their wax awake. In seconds a warm pallor enfolded the entrance, and showed me similar stands about the room. It was oddly and unpleasantly irresistible to me to dismount, take up one of the burning candles, and walk around the chamber with it, giving light wherever it would prosper. Perhaps it was some spell of theirs, the old ones, wanting me to see the grandeur that was their monument. I remember I thought myself a fool after, for my actions and apprehensions in the tunnel.
It was a beautiful room; I had anticipated nothing else. The ceiling was green onyx carved into a forest-roof of leaves and vines where the light played glorious havoc with form and
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shadow. The rugs and draperies had turned as fine as spiderspun; you laid hand or foot on them and they were no more. Otherwise, the furnishings endured: the love couches in the shapes of mated ivory swans and ebony cats, the vases of chalcedony. I came on a huge silver dish of fruit, pristine as if newly plucked; then, putting in my hand, drew out aa apple of chilly wine-red crystal, an amber peach, and grapes, each fashioned from black tourmaline with leaves of jadethe toys of men and women who regarded fruit as ornament, having no need to fill their bellies.
It seemed the legends were true. There was something else. A sumptuous bathing apartment opened behind a door of gold. I found it abruptly and went in to see. The sunken bath was full of moss and the golden dolphin taps no longer dispersed water. There was another lack. Accustomed to Eshkorek, I searched about. At length I grinned stupidly, for I was afraid-of the story, the reality, of a difference so absolute. There was no latrine.
It was like a crude joke. It was like a blow in the face. Any man who crossed their exquisite tunnel must leave his dung like a rat. It was later I discovered the narrow, dustchoked privies they had had built that their human slaves might not soil the thoroughfare. There is a certain black shame to see one’s irremediable self through such eyes.
Finally I tethered and fed the horse; Demizdor had thought of all such necessities. I lay down to sleep. Not on one of their love couches, unconcealed and brazen as nothing else of theirs needed to be, but on the webby floor, wrapped in my cloak.
It was a sudden sleep that took me, and deep, though not agreeable. “For with slumber, the wall paintings came alive….
A woman stood over me. She was winged with light and garbed in it; her face was like a star. She stirred me with her foot. I could not rise or move my limbs.
“Vazkor, man, magician, warrior, Black Wolf,” she said. “War-lord, king, fool, dead, maker of a son. Vazkor son of Vazkor. Who is your mother?”
In my dream I assumed she was a ghost, and my hair shifted on my neck, as if ants walked there.
Later I was crawling in an intricate maze of white marble, trying to reach a plate of fruit laid out for me at its center.
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The god-race had shut me in the maze for their amusement, to see how intelligent the inferior human might be. I could hear them laugh and lay bets on me. When I took a wrong turning, a woman’s voice would cry sharply, “No, Vazkor, Not that way.” (In Eshkorek I had seen the goldand silvermasks indulge in a similar pastime, setting a mouse in a miniature labyrinth, and watching it scurry hither and thither after the food. If it found the dish, they would pet it and reward it. Some of the creatures perished of hunger before they solved the puzzle.)
Once in the dream I was flying. The upper air was blue with dusk and I threw a black shadow over the plain below. Before me a woman darted like a white pigeon. I caught her by the hair, and it was Demizdor, and there was a dagger in her hand. I said to her, “We are the sum of our achievements, nothing more and nothing less.” And she said to me, “Vazkor, you are a human man.” And she struck the dagger to its hilt into my brain.
There was no pain, only a blazing and a blindness; then a sense of icy water, and in the water a million knives.
I started up, soaked in my own cold sweat.
I thought, Is it to be thus, then, I must be a battling ground for them, my father and my mother? He got her with me, and she worked some curse on him and he died, and they will reenact it forever?
I lay sleepless then awhile, too worn out to rise and make on. When I slept again, there were other dreams. I was to grow accustomed to them on that journey.
The beauty of the tunnel became monotonous; it never altered.
Generally after many hour’s riding, I would seek the elaborate rest-chambers for my slumber. Each time I must steel myself against the dreams. It was as if the ghosts gathered to mock me then. At last, even that niggling horror lost its edge. I woke unharmed, and awake; no phantom challenged me. My own mind was my enemy and my obscure heritage, nothing else.
Sometimes the apartments in the tunnel achieved peaks of fantasy. There was a particular stopping place all shades of red, ceiling of strawberry glass, furniture dyed with vermilion-red copper lamps, even a dish of polished garnets cut
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to resemble plums-somehow, I never thought of stealing them. There were other rooms like this, all green, all blackmany were a treasure trove for thieves, yet they had never been plundered.
Then, too, there were curiously poignant surprises. The small silver harp left lying on a couch, as if put down only an instant ago, and in an instant more, she-it had been meant for a girl-would be back to take it up again. Or the board game like Castles, yet unlike, with pieces of gold and enamel standing on their squares, the play unfinished now till eternity.
By the eighth day the dreams had begun to ebb; rather I had a-waking dream, which concerned my earlier life and the men and women who peopled it.
This was like a pursuit that had caught up to me now that I was alone and had the leisure to remember. Human action seems dogged by guilt, frustration, and melancholia. There is always something to think back to, and say, I would I had not; or, I would that I had.
Of other pursuit I had some warning on the tenth night.
I was reckoning in nights and days, though I had no evidence of them, keeping to an earlier assessment of the passing of hours. The tribes reckon by the sun and moon, the position of stars and shadows; the cities have other ways, great mechanisms of iron, pendulum clocks, and clepsydra. So, I had learned two methods: the old instinct inbred in me from the krarl, the means of measuring from Eshkorek. In the tunnel anything to hand became a measure for time: the length a candle took to burn, or a torch; the hours of the stomach, hunger and thirst; and sleep. When I emerged aboveground, I was not far out either, in my judgment. . . .
That tenth “night,” having dismounted to water the horse from the shallow vessel Demizdor had provided, I heard a sound behind me, miles away back along the length of the thoroughfare. It was the faintest drumming, scarcely more than a vibration, faultlessly transmitted through the rocky roadway, the walls, the polished roof: hooves, and hooves coming on at a gallop.
My own horse was untired; he had had an easy ride of it this far. I let him finish his drink, then mounted up and set him trotting. Presently, when he felt his legs, I lightly slapped