4
On an elephant rode Ksasnaja, a mammoth with tusks longer than spears which were tied with fine ribbons and dripping with beads. His long skull and snout were painted with fine designs, and his four legs, like the firm stems of earth-hugging trees were bound with gold like the ankles of a nimble dancer. The howdah was of silver and pearl’s mother, the cushions and hangings blue as the blood of noblemen. She felt a goddess again, riding that fine beast decked out like a maharaja.

Six other elephants, smaller of stature and lesser of dignity, yet still more awe-inspiring than any put together by nature’s crude hands, cleared the way for her, trampling the jungle and setting monkeys screaming, parting crowds and setting them to yell with excitement. Jugglers and swallowers of fires danced and pranced around their feet, swirling ribbons and tossing sweetmeats among the audience. A thousand men mounted on grey-white mares in steel armour that shone like mirrored silver marched in perfect unison, as trumpeters blew rousing calls on conches and five thousand foot soldiers emptied their lungs singing the majesty of their princess.

The palace was before them, on a slim peninsula that pointed out to the sea like a lapping tongue. Before its death-white gates the guards mustered in futility before the invaders.

“HOLD!” Bellowed their captain through a loudspeaking trumpet. “WHO ARE YOU?”

The chief elephant marched ahead so that its handler was level with the parapets, and to do this she raised herself on her forelegs in a manner that made all watching cheer at her cleverness.

“We are the guard of the Princess Vrasyati, here to seek the pleasure of Prince Trishan.”

The guards breathed a sigh of relief.

“We have no barracks for so many men, not in the city.”
“We men of the Princess’ kingdom have fewer needs than the soft men of this part of the world do. All we shall require is space to stand, for out meat and drink is air, and we sleep on foot, as the albatross sleeps on the wing.” The guards sent word to the King, and when their orders returned, the gates were opened, and Vrasyati-Ksasnaja was admitted on her elephant, with a pair of horsemen as her escort.
Through the courtyard they rode, trampling gardens of exquisite grassery set into the rocks and coaxed into teasing shapes by gardeners who lived for the sight of cleverly arranged flora. To where six fountains gargled clear water in the morning sun they were led, and the King, not yet old but no longer young, marched out to them, vizier on his ear and concubine on his arm.

“The Princess Vrasyati, come to visit your son,” announced the lead horseman.

“Is she up there in the howdah?” Asked the King, squinting up at the elephant. It tossed its trunk, making all jump.

“I am,” said Vrasyati.

“We were not informed of your coming,” said the Vizier.

“No,” agreed Vrasyati. “Where is the prince?”

“He is in the tower,” said the King. “He has refused to leave it for five weeks now. He allows only his favoured slave in once a day, to bring food and a tub of bathwater. He has refused the other princesses.”

“I have come here from a land far beyond the knowledge of your primitive cartographers,” came the voice of the princess. “Outside your gates are six thousand men who fear only dishonour and are old friends with death.” A horseman rode alongside the elephant, and dismounted, curling up beside his horse. As all watched the princess emerged, helped by her elephant’s trunk, and stepped first onto the horse’s back, then onto her knight’s, before allowing her silk slippers to touch the lapis that paved the courtyard.

She let her eyes look upon the King, in whose face she saw the unfinished work of his son. She smiled as all stared at her; the perfect form aspired to by every architect, gardener, sculptor and artist who had worked on the palace. “He will see me,” she told them, and they believed her.

One of the knights stayed with her
elephant, the other stood by her side, hand on his scimitar, as the king led the way through the palace to the highest tower, where his son pondered the meaning of life in ivory seclusion. Every beat of his heart, fast from his pace, pounded Vrasyati’s face deeper into his mind and loins, those amethyst eyes and silk-shrouded curves burning deep hot holes in his brain. The door was locked from the inside. He pounded.

No answer came, and he yelled; the vizier would have been shocked at his king’s lack of decorum, but his whole attention was focused on the spot on his lower arm where the Princess’ scarf touched his bare flesh. Breathing, let alone thinking proved difficult, and the queen and guards were similarly entranced as Vrasyati gestured the king aside and put her lips close to the keyhole.

“Trishan…” she whispered. “Open the door. I am here to see you.”

She heard motion within. An eye, brown and clear, like a precious stone from deep within the earth, looked out at her from the other side.

“Who is that?”

“This is Princess Vrasyati. Open the door! She wants to meet you!” The King ordered, but the prince ignored him, and the eye was gone from the keyhole.

“I want no more princesses,” said Trishan.

“You have not yet seen me,” said Vrasyati.

“She is lovely as the first day of spring,” breathed the vizier. “As the last day of winter. Her eyes are like midnight stars... they turn a man’s thoughts to astrology.”

“When I am dead,” said Trishan. “What use is beauty then? Can love or lust buy immortality? Or even peace?”

“Open the door,” said Vrasyati, out of patience. “OPEN!” The door, which might once have blown its own hinges apart and shaken itself to splinters in its hurry to obey her, held fast, and as her eyes bubbled with impotent rage the King fell to his feet and the guards exchanged looks of confusion.

“He will not open,” murmured the Vizier incredulously. “Knock the door down.” The guards cast about the palace for a battering ram, but finding none among the fine vases from far kingdoms and sprays of exotic flowers blown from particoloured glass, watched as the Princess walked down the steps from the tower, her plain sadness touching them all.

“Find me quarters to stay,” she ordered the king. “And when the time comes in the morning for his slave to bring him his meal, let me take it instead.” The king did as she instructed, and that night a feast was held for her; a thousand chickens and lambs were butchered and served as toothsome stews, spiced with peppers and grasses of mouth-watering scent, with rice of every natural shade and soft breads. Vrasyati ate little, for the finest mortal foods are as excrement before the subtle flavours of nectar and soma.

5
Her quarters overlooked the sea, and in the night when only the reflected moon and the sharp stars shone through the thick night, she looked out over the dark waters which hid the treasure she needed. On her finger, the ruby no longer shone with light, but in the endless space within the sapphire a dervish made from white light formed like silver wire struggled to get free. She brought it close to her face, and spoke softly.

“Few on this earth know it, but in the vast womb of night the stars, the planets, the moon, all sing their own melodies, and it is these lullabies, each longer than life and more beautiful, which filtering down through the clouds, move poets to write hymns and lovers to couple in the silver light. But the greatest song is that of the almighty sun, to whose bass tones the earth itself does giddily spin.

“Long before the floodwaters subsided on this earth, the krakanas rode the echoes of this song across black infinity, chasing their prey between stars and mapping the nothing that orders all creation. But there was war there, beyond heaven, and the krakanas were cast down into the waters, there to dwell out of sight of the life-giving sun they worshipped, arising from the deepest, light-starved depths only to snatch galleons full of sailors or wrestle with whales. Then Gunjna was young, but now she is old, and yet her great eyes remember the sun. Her children are as many as the sands of the beaches, but with each spawning they grow smaller, so that now they sit upon the plates of man and are called ‘squid’.

“They say she is as a living island when she surfaces, the Great Krakana Gunjna. Her suckers are barbed like saws, and her eyes misty with age are larger than lakes. Her great cowl is marked with the holy swastika, the wheel of the sun, and her beak swallows seas as she drinks each day. Eight arms has she, and two tentacles slim and clever like the trunks of elephants. And upon each is a hook, cruel as cat’s claws, curved like the crescent moon, able to turn through every degree like the spinning sun, to tear flesh and catch deep into the hearts of leviathans. And it is this hook which I shall take to Rshti the crone, to make with it her spell for immortality.”

The shape within the sapphire was still, and Ksasnaja rubbed a finger over it once clockwise, speaking aloud the name of the maridah within. In the vizier’s room, where he desperately coupled with virgins, the face of the princess in his heart and mind, the candles blew out, and all desire in a moment fled his body. The king and queen drew close in the sudden chill. Even the inhuman, afreet-made soldiers of Ksasnaja, arranged like potted plants in the parading ground shuddered in their armour, sending a rattling noise all around. In his tower Trishan, not for the first time, felt mortality, a cold, awesome thing closer to him than sight.

And in Vrasyati’s room, the goddess-no-more stood before a magnificent being, an ice-sculpture brought to life, filled with crackling lightning that shone through her like cold fire. A maridah, a she-djinn of powers splendid and fearsome, clad all in silver that burned with a frosty intensity, a helm like the hood of a many-horned cobra, and a warrior’s skirt like a mass of porcupine’s quills. She looked into the eyes of the goddess, proud but laced with a sadness so profound Ksasnaja thought she saw an echo of her own tragedy in that chrome stare.

“And you wish me to bring it to you, this hook torn from the wrist of a sea-monster?” The demoness asked her mistress in a voice that was less than a whisper but clear as crystal.

Ksasnaja laughed. “She has seen the deaths of universes, has Gunjna, the Eldest of Flesh. She has watched the waters take the first kingdoms, and the gods make races of gold, silver and bronze. When you were first shaped from subtle fire she devoured the last fish-priest and became the undisputed empress of the deeps. So shall I send you to pluck from her a hook? No, I shall not send you to your death.”

The maridah watched her coldly. “Then what?”

“Take me south, to the land where the sun oft forgets to set, where the bears are white and the birds do not fly in the air but in the sea. Fly to the sun, and gather me the drops that form on Her surface. Then you are free.”

“To the sun?” Repeated the maridah quietly. She reached her arms, softly scaled like a coatl, around Ksasnaja, and six wings drew them into the air. The ground fell from them, and time and distance passed like a dream as those six wings moved in synchrony. It was no longer night, but day, and then night again, and they alighted on an iceberg. All around the sea was like wet night, and Ksasnaja was cold. She wished she had brought a blanket, and feared death would take her sooner than she had expected. Her demon saw this, and drew a pin from her own colourless hair, and placed it in her mistress’ hand.

“Hold this for me,” she said gruffly, and Ksasnaja knew that so long as she held it the cold would not dare to take her. The Maridah turned, and into the night she went, silent and unchallenged, free after six thousand years in her crystal prison. Alone, the woman who was born a goddess sat on the ice, and watched her breath as it formed before her. She was alone, more profoundly and truly than ever before, with only the slender magic of a silver pin between her and the dark spectre that haunted her. In the distant dark she heard a great commotion, a splashing great enough to cause tsunami and a lowing as of a gigantic cow. A whale died, and only she heard it.

The sapphire on her finger was her only guarantee of the maridah’s return, and when, hours later, that form, cast from filaments of wet silver, descended back to earth, glowing now with a hot, orange glow, Ksasnaja had almost forgotten her quest. The demon was heavily scarred; one wing was entirely gone, the rest were badly singed, the sooty black a strange contrast to the invincible purity of her earlier self. Her face, arms legs, torso, all were similarly marked. In her arms, cradled, was her precious cargo, glowing like coals, white-hot droplets from the sun itself. But they were not hot when Ksasnaja took them, even when she returned the pin to the maridah.

Instead, her body was filled with a radiance like divinity or the blush of youth, and the antarctic cold could not touch her. Into the water gazed Ksasnaja, and her face was mirrored in the light of stars from past yugas. “Wait here for me,” she said, and dived.

Down, down, her legs kicking until they tired, and the weight of the gems she carried was all that propelled her down against the increasing pressure as she left the upper ocean behind. Down further, where the unfamiliar light she carried caused fish transparent as clear glass to flee in a panic, fang-faced demons whose weird, alien visages were never meant to see light. Further still; and though she did not draw breath the sun-dew sustained her, tiny fragments of the giver of all life, whose heat warms the fields even across the vastness of space. Deeper. Deeper. Before her was the swastika, scarred in black ink of ancient octopuses on living flesh, pink pale from the dark, which pulsed with unseen veins, stretched on a canvas larger than the tents of steppe khagans.

“Gunjna!” Called Ksasnaja with the last of her breath. Suddenly, the great shape like the ocean bed pulled away, and all about her vast serpents, headless with pale bellies that crowded with razored suckers danced. A black blacker than the ocean moved close to her, and in the great mirror that was Gunjna’s eye Ksasnaja saw her own self reflected. The great Krakana stretched from one dark horizon to the other, impossibly huge, and the ex-goddess knew how powerless she truly was to this ageless beast from the outer cosmos.

“I have brought to you a gift, Mother of Krakens,” she said without a voice. “A memory of when the black heavens beyond the sky were yours to swim without exception. The drops of light from the holy sun whose symbol you wear.”

The krakana’s eye swam with salty water, but then, it always did.

“I must beg you a favour in return, o great Echo Rider,” she added, as a great tentacle, barbed savagely like a madman’s halberd came close, only to pull away. “A single hook from your great limbs.”

Suddenly Ksasnaja was lost, amid the tossing of the ocean. The great monster churned the waters, and on far-off shores the waves crashed into cliffs and tore down the huts of fishermen. The woman who had been a goddess clung to her offerings desperately as all around her sickly-pink tentacles squirmed, and a horrible beak, scarred and set into puckered flesh like a giant arse-hole squawked and chattered in the language of the deep places. At last it ceased, and a single arm snaked out to her, holding in its grip a hooked claw of cartilage, trailing thick droplets of oily blood through the water. With one hand Ksasnaja took it, and released into the water the sun droplets, and in an instant, dexterous fingers more cunning than human hands gathered them close. But this Ksasnaja did not see, because as the pressure threatened to blow open her skull and flatten her lungs, she flew upwards, pushed up by the water itself. Gunjna disappeared into the blackness, unalleviated now the sunstones were gone, black as the void itself. As she threatened to pass into an inner darkness, as she could no longer hold her breath against the chill water, Ksasnaja was reborn, springing, gasping for air, thrown like a cork from a bottle. The maridah caught her, and together they flew back to land.

The sky was red with gathering dawn, and in her hand the girl who would be goddess held Gunjna’s hook.

“Goodbye,” said her wounded demoness, and, surprising her, pulled her close so that those silvery-blue lips were close to Ksasnaja ears. “I know who you are.” She murmured, a voice sad with shared suffering. And she was gone, trailing silver through the night. She flew to freedom.

Vrasyati put the hook carefully away in a
chest, made from the same steel as her soldier’s breastplates and impervious to all but her touch. Lack of sleep made the carpet’s complex designs swim before her reddening eyes.

“One down,” she said to no-one. Her work
was not yet done.

6
As the light of the sun reached to the highest tower, Vrasyati too climbed it, though by the stairs, dragging with her a copper bathtub and a tray of brown rice, which was all he would eat. Her guard, the king and the vizier stood back, out of sight from the keyhole, and the princess knocked on the door.

“Who is there?” Came the voice of her chosen one.

Now his favourite servant was mute, so she knew not to say anything, but when he asked again, she replied with a cough, of the sort a tongueless one might make.

“I know it is not Lakka, because you did not knock as I instructed you to yestermorn.”

Vrasyati sent a furious and sleep-deprived look at the king, and Lakka would have died for his excessive service to the prince but for what happened next.

“It is me, Vrasyati,” she said.

“The princess?”

There was a pause.

“A fellow soul who like you lives and shall die,” she corrected him. All breaths were held, until the reply came.

“Come in, alone. Leave the food and tub by the door as you come in.”

The locks were drawn, and with a body aching from her ordeal the night before the princess pushed open the door. She could not see the prince, and so lugged in the tub, splashing herself royally with water as she sploshed it as far in as she could carry it. The tray of food she placed nearby. She closed the doors behind her, and drew a single lock.

“Stand over there, on the balcony,” said the Prince’s voice, from behind the thick veils. Vrasyati recognized the layout of the room from her earlier visit, and found her way to where he instructed easily. With her amethyst eyes she searched out her godform.

“Where are you, Trishan?” She asked.

“I will bathe and eat when you are on the balcony. I must not see your face, and you must not see mine.”

“Do you think you are ugly?” Asked the princess. “Is that why you hide?”

The prince laughed and there was bitterness in his voice. “They say I am beautiful, they say it to me so often it means nothing. And yet I find that is all it means in any case.”

The princess could not understand this at once. She stood by the balcony, and saw before her the entire kingdom from the narrow point where it met at the palace to its broadening as it joined the continent, and lush fields embraces hot jungles and sandy plains. From the corner of her eye she saw the prince emerge from behind a pile of cushions and strip off the simple white shirt and trousers he wore. A clandestine smile on her face she admired his naked body, smooth and muscled, soon to be hers. He climbed into the bath, and she looked away again. She was swaying, she realized; tiredness threatened to overcome her. It was a strange sensation, eerie. She blinked.

“Can I sit down?” She asked. “I… I’m unused to standing.”

“You get carried everywhere,” said the
prince. “I saw you arrive, on your elephant. Sit on the bed then. I’ll close my eyes.”

She walked halfway, and then fell, curled on the bed. She could smell him on the sheets, a smell animal to her divine nostrils, but intriguing, and a concrete link to him.

“You saw me?”

“Only from a distance.” He began to scrub himself. Eyes screwed shut, he was comical, and the princess couldn’t help but smile, finding affection for him growing inside her.

“Look at me,” she said.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I think you are a witch. I see how you have mastered my father, all the court and soldiers. They are your slaves. Why you now want me I do not know, but I will not be entranced by you.”

“You are afraid of me? You think I am a witch?” She shut her eyes and found herself drifting into dreams of cold water and colder djinniyahs. Fighting, she resurfaced. “I am a witch,” she confessed. “Last night I summoned a mighty maridah, and we flew to the frozen seas of the south where I took a claw from the Empress of the Oceans.”

The prince laughed.

“What’s funny?” She asked him.

“As you travel south it grows hotter,” he said, chuckling. “I have never traveled further than the islands, yet I still know that! And there is no Empress in the Oceans, clawed or otherwise. Nor are there witches or maridahs. There is only matter and void.”

“You said I was a witch.”

“Because you can ensorcel with your charms, manipulate men with your will and twist them about your ten fingers. But the reality is that there is only matter and void. That is what the sages say.”

There was a silence. She watched him as his blind fingers felt for the plate of rice, and like an elephant clumsily feeding himself, he clutched a clump and put it in his mouth.

“Anyway, what will you do with your claw?”

“Make a spell, so that I can live forever.”

He stopped chewing for a while. Then he swallowed and asked her, “Are you frightened of dying?”

“Yes,” she said. “More than anything. I see it before me, this thing. It is everywhere. I fear it, but there is nothing I can do to escape. It waits and waits and waits but one day it will come. There is nothing I can do. Almost nothing.”

“I fear death too.”

She looked at him, crouched naked in his tub, chewing without savour on brown rice.

“I think you fear life, prince, and that is why you hide here. You do not wish to live. But that will not save you from death. Enjoy what you have. Men would kill to be as you are, the greatest prince among men. Fate loves you as her favoured child, yet you brood alone when you should dance.”

“There is more to life than bright colours and strong tastes. We only mistake these for life. Life is in the simplest of things, in drawing breath. Life is.”

She lay in his bed and wanted to scream, wanted to slap his beautiful face and force his eyes open, to cast a spell to make him love her more deeply than he treasured his breath. But he munched on his rice and kept his eyes shut, and her body was weak and mortal, bruised and tired.

“I think you should go now,” he said. She stood, and walked to the door. “But thank you.” He added those words as she left. The court sat on the steps outside, and as she closed the doors behind her and Trishan clicked all his locks into place, they eyed her, hungry for news.

“I will visit him again tomorrow,” she said. They tried to follow her, but propelled by a need deep inside her she strode with rapid steps to her quarters, and her guard barred their way to the door. Into her bed she climbed, stripping off her gold and silks as she went. It was warm, and welcomed her like a lost babe. Her eyes shut and behind them she fell into a sleep deep as the day.