She lay yet within the bronze box, which I did not like to see. (Even at such a moment, this obsolete superstition unnerved me.) I took the hand she had let fall, and spoke her name. I helped her to sit up, then lifted her from the cask. She stood before me, as she had stood countless times before me, and her eyes were bright as swords, though she did not speak to me or make any movement of her own.
I led her through into the other chamber, to the silken bed, and poured her wine. At first she would not drink, till I set the cup to her lips. To see the soft ripple of her throat as she swallowed brought home the wonder to me afresh. The responses of sex live close by death–it has always been so, nature striving to replenish the store-and rape has followed the battlefield time out of mind. For all the prelude, I was hot to lie on her now, among the shiny silk. Only her wide eyes kept me from it.
“Malmiranet,” I said. “What is it? You’re safe and I am with you.”
As if at a signal, she placed her hand again over her breast. There was no longer any mark of the knife on her, as I could well see when I leaned and rested my mouth there.
It had not been her practice to be so wooden. At length I told myself I asked too much, and, holding her by me, tried to explain to her the things she must already be aware of, but perhaps could not comprehend. Fool that I was, I even required her to inform me why she had slain herself. I had
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some notion to shock her from her reticence if I could not bring her to me more gently.
I heard my own voice go on and on, as if I lessoned a child. And she in my arms, like a wide-eyed child, unspeaking.
I was weary, and fell asleep somewhere in my monologue, and woke in the near black tomb to find her there beside me yet. A star stood over the vent in the dome and showed me her eyes, still fixed as gems.
I rose and lighted the lamp that had been provided for my ghostly comfort. In an ivory chest close by, a pile of clothes were lying-my own gear from the Palace; even the jeweled collars in a tray, and the boots below.
I glanced about at her, and she watched me silently.
“I will dress myself as befits a civilized man,” I said to her, “since you’ll have nothing to do with me. Then we leave this place.”
I had no plan; all ways were open but inchoate. My world was centered here, despite my words. I had found I could not quite think what I should do with myself and her. Smash down the wall, that was easy, erupt out into the amazement of the city-or, if I pleased, levitate myself and her to the opening above, destroy the grille and, as once before, travel over a starry nighttime sky. But to what?
There had been a star when I was dying in Bailgar’s boat, I remembered it now, one star visible through the murk, like the star in the vent of the tomb. A distant breath of unease passed over me, for even inside safe walls, one may hear the wolves howling.
“Who rules Bar-Ibithni?” I said to her. “The council, or has the old man got back in the chair?” This illusion to Hragon-Dat brought me to Sorem. I had forgotten him, an indication of my true state if I judged myself. Sorem, too, was dead, locked in some gold case. I could raise him, if I felt it proper to my scheme of things. Would he then look at me as she did, and with such bright, unblinking eyes?
I had been examining the chest rather than continuing to gaze at her. Her stare had begun to strike chill on me. The rustle of her skirt made me turn about.
A curious phenomenon. I could survive death, yet my instincts to avoid a mortal blow were as insistent as ever.
She had stolen out as quiet as air and up to me almost as quietly. Her face had not altered, nor her look, but she had
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brought me another gift. One of those slender hunting spears, which she had raised to plunge between my shoulders.
I jumped aside. The spear flashed down and bit upon the wall and the head broke from the haft. I recalled how she had told me once she had not gone hunting in a long while. The wood had softened, still it was the force of her striking that snapped the shaft. She had meant a second death for me, and to spare.
I caught her by the arms, but she made no other move at me. She was expressionless and she did not struggle. I wondered how I had slept by her and come to whole. Was it some madness of grief or terror on her that drove her to this?
“Malmiranet,” I said, “in what way have I done you wrong? Tell me. I will set it right.”
I had grown to a knowledge of her face, of her body and its gestures; I could have picked her out if she had been masked and draped among forty women. Now, her body familiar, its contours positive through the silk, and the chiseling of that face of hers unlike any other’s, and those narrow hands, one wrist with its wound serpent of gold that I had seen her wear when all the rest of her apparel was gone now, when she was identifiably one woman only, yet she was not that woman. This was some doll, fashioned in the absolute likeness of Malmiranet, but Malmiranet it was not.
I had let her go, and I had walked away from her, keeping my eyes on her, nevertheless. I took garments from the chest and began to clothe myself. It seemed always so with me, that after the greatest and most miraculous feats of my life, I must be made to feel, by emotion or .by circumstance, a whipped brat among Ettook’s tents. I could not bear the searing blankness of her stare on my nakedness, like the leveling of a blade. We had been skin on skin too often; it was hard to find winter risen from that fire.
What I had put on I scarcely noticed, some workaday suit of the Crimson Palace, too fine for anything but lounging in. With the jeweled accouterments there was a belt of rare white snakeskin, chased with gold and with a buckle of lapis lazuli-something she had given me. I showed it to her, remembering how she had buckled it on me, and what followed.
She took half a step toward me, her hand outstretched and my heart leaped in my throat, wondering what would come this time.
What came was this: all passivity left her, she flung back her head, her mouth opened wide, and she screamed. Not a
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woman’s screaming but the ululation of an animal, piercing, feral, almost continuous.
I ran to her and pulled her to me. I tried to stop her cries, tried to rock her, console her. The terrible wailing went on and on. When I drew her head against me, she sank her teeth in my shoulder till they met, and still she cried in her throat like a beast, even as she gnawed my flesh.
My blood had grown cold, and I shook as if my death had returned for me. I have no recollection of what I said nor of what I did, until my desperation drove me to that thing I hated and abhored, to seek the reason in her mind.
The mysteries of existence and of surcease remain with me, with me more than with most for, in setting me apart from them, my heritage has denied me, for a while at least, the answer all other men learn too swiftly. The grape of truth is often bitter, but not to taste it in its season would be to waste the vine. One answer I had, there in that tomb with its painted flowers, its clothes chests and its gold. Not mine, but all other human flesh decays, and at its death, what lives within it goes elsewhere. Maybe to some other place, some fiery world such as the Masrians talk of, or to the black pit of the tribes, or to something too wonderful to conceive of, or maybe to nothing, to smoke, to air, to silence. Whatever else, no magician, however masterful, can bring that substance, that element-spirit or soul-back into the vase which held it. Or no, I will amend that I will say only that Vazkor could not, after Malmiranet’s death and the failing of her flesh, recall her. Everything of her I had healed. She was whole, her organs sound, she breathed and her heart beat. But she, she was in another country. The creature lived and moved and made its noise, but it was empty as the sarcophagus from which I had lifted it.