The messengers bowed to me, a couple kneeled down. Their masters were dying of a variety of incurable afflictions-boils, gout, headache, palpitations, the illnesses of overindulgence and refined nerves. I told them I would visit
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them, and stipulated times. I was prepared to travel to and fro, to spy out as much of this opulent landscape as I could. Anything might be of use to me; the maddening thing was not knowing quite what.
I had also sent one messenger myself, having first seen him dressed in the black livery tailored for my servants at one of the better shops in Bar-Ibithni. He had carried my letter to the Hall of Physicians. It required an audience of them, at which, I assured them, I intended before witnesses to turn a crone (Lellih) into a girl.
It seemed too fine a stroke to miss, since her gods had set her in my hand. I no longer wondered if I could do it. Moment by moment I saw myself commit acts that one year before would have had me gawking if another had produced them. Out of boredom, I had raised the wine jar from its courtyard corner where it stood cooling in the shade, raised it without use of hands, by will alone. A voice in my brain had said to me then, It is the time to beware -when you begin to work miracles from ennui. Had my father, Vazkor of Ezlann, ever done so frivolous a thing as raise a jar up in the air that he might hear the kitchen girls shriek? I imagined not.
Lellih was in the first court, Kochus’s area, shielded from the Hessek barracks by a porphyry wall, a grove of young cypress trees, and a gray marble fountain. A friendship had been struck between Thei and Lellih, a means, I suppose, of preserving the artificial sustenance of their lives. Now they crouched like a couple of cats over a Masrian board game of red and blue checkers, drinking koois in little enameled cups and smoking little female pipes of green Tinsen tobacco.
My shadow fell on the board, and Lellih sprang around to berate me. I cut her short.
“Tonight you will go with me to the Hall of Physicians.”
Lellih screamed.
“They cut up Hessek women there, and pickle their parts.”
“No doubt wise. Beginning with the voice box.”
Lellih cackled her cackle. “Is it to make me young, young before witnesses, eh? Is it?”
“Yes. It may kill you.”
“May it? Then he would raise me, would he not, my lovely darling?”
Magicians work wonders on the living; demons raise the dead. I did not like her words.
“I agree no bargains of that sort.”
But she was already back to the old song.
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“Make me young. How young will you make me? Make me fifteen, fifteen and a virgin.”
Thei laughed. The laugh was disconcertingly a boy’s.
“She has no modesty.”
Lellih squeezed his waist, her elder lust tickled by anything toothsome, its sex random.
“We’ll make a pretty pair.”
I hired horses and a carriage. By conqueror law, no man but a pure-blood Masrian might ride or draft white mounts. Therefore, with the contrariness of my years, I chose blacks. We made a small procession, going down through the Palm Quarter to the Hall of Physicians, the carriage with its gilt and enamelwork, the six black outriders. I heard the tremor of sound start up all about: “There is the carriage of the sorcerer Vazkor.” Truly, I had not done badly in three days to get myself into such a quantity of heads.
The thoroughfares were crowded. The Palm Quarter seemed never to sleep by night, lamps burned till daybreak.
Women with faces in veils of paint instead of cloth leaned from their balconies; torchbearers, each torch in its cage of iron or glass, ran before some lord on his way to a theater, bisecting the road with streamers of gold smoke. On every side, pillars reached up with their round fingers to grasp the cascading panoply of roofs. The prayer-towers murmured at the death of the light, their tall minarets like slender starry war-spears massed on the blue-green dusk, while at the center of the rising terraces, suitably far toward the sky, the Emperor’s Heavenly City made a distant black diadem.
The Hall of Physicians was crammed to its doors. They had come to mock, as they were telling each other, to deride this obscure showman who dared try to deceive them with some common trick. The talk had an oiled quality of deprecation and laughter, but when the usher led me across the mosaic of winged horses that served as a floor, a silence fell like the night.
The Master Physician peered at me though a spyglass of topaz while the usher announced me, for all the world as though none of them might guess who I was. There was then a discussion between this fool and that, the purpose of which was to keep me loitering. I broke in.
“I am aware my name and my intention precede me,” I said, “or I should not have been granted audience here at all. Thus, gentlemen, shall we get on?”
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Kochus and three others escorted Lellih in. Two underlings of the Hall were selected to strip her, for the physicians’ observation, to a dry, curd-colored nudity. Lellih leered about her, unabashed, from inside that case of flapping dugs and bald loins, still irrepressible. Brazen as their scrutiny was merciless, she poked their well-fed sides for every touch she got from them.
The Master Physician spoke.
“I doubt you can do more with her than soften her flesh a little with some oil or balm, such as Tincture of the Princesses. For her teeth, perhaps an artificial set of ivory or whale-rib. The breasts might be cut and padded with membrane, but there is a risk of infection and this practice has grown unpopular.”
“Sir,” I said, “don’t presume to teach me cosmetic medicine.” The ponderous old wretch was unaccustomed to plain arrogance in others, and could not collect himself sufficiently to reply. I said, “The woman is eighty years. I mean to make her young, a girl. And without recourse to any such rubbish as you mention.”
Affronted, he dropped his spyglass. An usher bounded to retrieve and hand it back to him.
Lellih meanwhile screeched, “Tell the frog to sew up his jaws. He shall see, he shall.” And she drew the attention of one sleek young man who had attracted her notice to the straightness of her spine, she, who had gone crooked from birth till I healed her.
At last I inquired if they were satisfied, and the physicians drew away, shaking their heads, smiling, gesticulating, saying I was deranged, every man tense as a bowstring. I had a stool brought and set Lellih on it. She would keep up her chatter; I put her in a trance, as much to have peace as because I thought she might feel pain at what I did. I motioned the assembly to stand as close as they wished to me, and to her. The Master Physician had stopped looking through the topaz, and leaned forward in his chair so far that he was almost out of it.
I placed my hands on her little skull. I thought, as one does suddenly when there is no road back, Maybe I shall find now I cannot do it. But something in me struck the hesitation aside. You are a god, Vazkor, son of Vazkor. And you do this thing not only to make a path to a witch’s hiding place, but to prove to men what has come among them.
I had never completely felt the true pride of what was in
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me before, not even when I had turned the storm, had walked on ocean. Hubris had mingled with surprise that day. Now, it stood alone with me.
I was flooded with a surge of Power, of life itself. I felt the flood sear from me into Lellih under my hands, bright as a bursting sun.
Not intending it, unguarded, I glimpsed her brain, the squawking crows in their mind attics, the dusty cerebral mansion of an old woman’s soul. Then the light had scattered the dust and crows. I drowned that inner room with it. I gave her my Power for that instant, let her feed from it, and felt the dying tree tremble in its bark.
The nearest physician uttered a cry, and actually ran backward.
Lellih’s skin was crackling and twisting like paper in a fire. In the prosaic seconds before the sense of glory came on me, I had never anticipated anything this showy, the flesh sloughing from her like plaster from a wall. Her left hand appeared first, like a pale flower pushing up from dead roots. One perfect woman’s hand with almond nails and a lotus palm.
“Stop,” the nearest physician, no longer so near, shouted. “This is a blasphemy. Stop, you will kill the woman.”