Childishness entered into him. He had towered among men, but here in the endless night of the trees, his identity was valueless.
If he had measured time, it might have been five days later that he came on the pillar.
Its paleness, or some other thing, caused it to glow in the ebony forest. It matched the tallest trunks to their topmost heights, eighty feet, or a hundred. Coming near, you saw the figures of birds and cats, dragons and serpents, carved into the pure white stone.
Beyond the pillar, straight as a knife-cut through the forest, ran an unpaved track, two chariot-lengths across. Nothing blurred the track, or had rooted in it. It went into distance, until the darkness smoothed it away. Without a doubt, it led somewhere. It led to the ultimate hallucination, the Amanackire city. Ashnesee.
BOOK 6
Ashnesee
20
Death and Life
It was a place of blackness, of untextured night sleeker than water. But out of the black sprang a flame.
And the flame gathered itself, and grew.
The flame became flesh.
Became a woman of unnatural height, white as the snow upon a mountain.
A white body, and eight white arms stretched in rays . . . beneath, the torso ended in the tail of a great snake; the coils like alabaster, scalloped by scales that gleamed faintly, as they ceaselessly stirred.
Far above, framed by a snow-cloud of hair which was also a whirlpool of serpents (twisting, spitting to her shoulders), a pale face, set with a devouring stare of colorless ice. Or colorless fire.
Aztira’s face.
Then the sheen of her became unbearably effulgent—and went out.
Only the untextured blackness remained, sleeker than water.
The moon was rising as she left the temple. The Star was already aloft, and west and east the sky was a clear magenta, deepening into night only at the zenith.
From the height of the temple terrace, the young woman had an encompassing vantage of the city, spread around and about her down to its ring of walls. Outside these walls the flattened landscape had swum into nothingness. The city itself had the look of an artifact, a small assembly of carven buildings on the board of some Vis war game. The Star and the stained moon dyed it like a fiery bone.
The girl abandoned her height, descending a broad paved stairway between garden slopes of sculpted trees, basins and arcs of water.
Her whiteness glimmered in the hot dusk, if not so emphatically as in the temple. That which she had created there, on the altar, the image of Inner Self symbolized as the goddess, had probably been witnessed, though not a sigh penetrated the sanctum. It was to her a spiritual exercise, a condition of life, similar to the walk she took, morning or evening, through the wide avenues of Ashnesee, or across the plain beyond, where the wind blew sometimes warm and saline from the jungle-forests, or a slinking tirr might come to mouth her footsteps or rub its nightmare head, in abasement, on the dust. She need have no fear of tirr, and in the city of her kind, she was foremost among equals.
At the bottom of the temple terraces, two men of the Amanackire stood beneath a cibba tree, maybe by design, to look at her. Their whiteness, like hers, shone in the umbra of tree and night.
Greetings, Aztira.
They did not speak aloud, but within. And in words only approximately.
In the same fashion, she replied, and walked on, along one of the marble roads without a name, between the pale palaces.
Silence lay on the city. Like the most primal of creatures, these people had no vocal conversation, sounds rarely escaped them. They moved with a deftness nearly noiseless. They seldom inclined to music, and perhaps never sang. Their children, few, for birth was controlled and selective among them, were as quiet as they.
The road was lined solely by palaces, with here and there an obelisk or shrine. These places, some now blooming into lamplight, were interspersed with parks and groves. There was very little else in Ashnesee. Beneath the mansions and the lawns, under the streets, the city was cut by tunnels and chambers, generally manmade, where the maintenance of everyday living went on. Ashnesee was served by slaves, and had been built by slaves. Once dark Thaddrians, Otts and Corhls, and darker Zakors, they were by now a mingled, molded race, some generations bred to their duties and their station.
After walking for the half of one hour, meeting no other, Aztira reached her house. It rose on an eminence, unwalled but moated by a mosaic courtyard. Near the stair was a tall pillared edifice, the Raldnor Shrine. From this proximity the mansion of Aztira was to be identified.
She went up the stair, over the mosaic, and through opened doors. Beyond the unlit vestibule, whose plaster was marked with dimmed pictures, lay the round painted hall of an Amanackire palace.
Ghostly lotus lamps floated on slender chains in the high ceiling. No slave had yet come to kindle them.
Aztira crossed through the hall, climbed more steps, proceeded into the braincase of a tower, a large bare room, with one large window of smoldering glass.
Before this window, which faced east, Aztira stopped. Her stillness was like that of an icon, she did not seem to breathe.
Her entire consciousness was centered at the core of her mind. She was listening, but not for any kind of sound.
In the Lowlands, a village of five huts—this was her birthplace. She was born pale-eyed, and perhaps her mother had misliked her gaze. When the child’s hair began to come like silver flax, they knew, and took her to a temple.
Her parents, unremembered, and vanished in her first year, were pure yellow-fair Lowlander, accustomed to mind-speech as to need. Otherwise ignorant, solitary, fixed. From such stock the albino strain normally emerged.
Before she could walk, or talk in the verbal sense (Lowland children from the initial months were capable of a sure if eccentric telepathy), Aztira was in Hamos, that xenophobic city of the south Plains. Here she grew up among her own, those with whom she had no ties of blood, and here she was schooled, as all such children were, a process which incidentally discovered among them the most adept, the most flawlessly Of Anackire.
There was no love, and there was no kindness, not in that inner reach. But Aztira did not miss love or kindness, for neither was there any injustice or cruelty shown her. There could be no lies. Though educated to use the spoken language forms of Vis—and, too, of the blond Sister Continent beyond the seas—communication rested on the hundred thousand nuances of mental dialogue. It was learnt early, how to parry and to protect the insights and signals of the mind. For, unlike the merchanting telepaths of Vardath or Moih, these did not give to tactful atrophy any of their supernatural gift. The Amanackire were also children of Truth.
They were a cold people, so the Vis had always named them, even at the gold-haired periphery of their tribe. What need had they for warmth? Passion and effusion were the sugar and salt with which the mind-blinded spiced the turning meat of their relationships. What the Amanackire desired they asked, and what they would not render they refused. Now, because they had grown powerful and self-sufficient, because their legend had imbued all Vis, because they were coming to believe that they were gods, they did not hanker after human things.
What was ambition? If wanted, advantage might be taken. And what was love ... a carnal urge that in the Lowlander was subject to command—or only the product of fear—terror of loneliness or death—which states the pure Lowlander had almost eradicated, and which the Amanackire had almost ceased to know.
For the soul continued forever. And (like a mild breeze the other intuition moved upon them), the flesh itself might be sustained.
When she was twelve, a year after she became a woman in the physical sense, Aztira had found herself capable of healing.
One of her fellows had fallen, the skin undone. Aztira knit up the skin again, and drew off the scar like smoke into the air. The motive had been the empathy of startled pain. The fount, herself. To heal was native to her. In fact, she had effected some slight cures before, not understanding what she did.