Tanith Lee

On the threshold of the inner court, where the marriage was to be, priests made offerings at the household altars, to the gods, who, as always, paid no attention.

The gods’ inventions are notorious by their errors.

But in the mental overcast of that town, such things went rigidly unremarked, save through their irrelevance. For life was only a series of pitfalls, not to be enjoyed or celebrated. The gods chastised pleasure just as they ignored suffering.

He took her virginity with the gentle care of love, and with love’s glorious violence.

If she had supposed the gods ever listened, she would have prayed.

“Your beauty leaves me breathless,” said Pereban.

“Yet you find the breath to say so.”

Of the rest, nothing further is said, save that lovers love and live and, in due season, as all men must, they also die. And so with Ezail and Chavir who had been Sovaz and Oloru, Azhriaz and Chuz. For such was and is mortal life, mortal death. But for love, who can predict or measure, plot, ascribe, or declare an end. Love is one of the immortals.

Finding in himself a profound strain of yearning, Pereban had mistaken it for religion. He entered the temple and dedicated himself to the worship of the goddess. Thereafter her statue—a roughhewn lump of rock with painted blobs for eyes and black wool for hair—so disappointed him that he kneeled to it, and beat himself regularly, every morning.

The sky powdered her cheeks with rouge, and the forest was mantled in crimson. Then the face of the sky altered, became that of a beautiful black damsel having no wish for rouge, but only for a net of stars and a piece of silver moon to hang on her forehead. And the forest mantled in sable, whispered with waters and the lyres of the grasshopper, and with the turning pages of leaves, and the unheard footsteps of unseen things.

To be static was never wise. Cobwebs clung to walls which stood. Men must journey, for in motion lay the seed, or at least the symbol of progress.

The stink of madness is unsubtle here. Let us be going.

“The gods will take notice, Mother, of our righteous distress, and come to my assistance.” In this pious belief she was, of course, quite mistaken (since in those days the gods cared nothing for mankind).