Lips Touch: Three Times (22 page)

He didn't know anything else but being Yazad. Until the day his
eye turned blue he didn't remember what he had been before, but the sight of
that pale eye brought it all back, not at once, but in

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quickening surges. Memories battered him like ugly moths. He was
besieged by them, and after a terrible struggle, days of madness and priests,
his animus was shunted out into the air and his brief humanity came to an end.

He remembered the horror of finding himself unskinned, ripped from
Yazad's soul and looking down from above at the boy whom he had thought was
himself,
seeing agony on that familiar face and trying to fathom that he was
not
Yazad,
but only something that had been growing inside the boy like a parasite.

Bitterly, he knew himself again: Mihai, Druj, Naxturu.
Demon.

He was just an invisible animus, adrift far from its abandoned
body, bereft of the soul he had believed was his.

He had felt souls before within the bodies he had worn, but they
were poor quivering things, thrust askew by his animus with as little care as
robes hanging from a hook. This had been something else. Yazad's soul had been
his,
and he had been inside of
it
and it had been inside of
him.
Fear
and pride and shame and fury and woe and
love
had moved through it and
him like the shivers of harp strings. Every day had been a dazzle of sensation.

And now that soul was gone. It was like dying, but without the
consolation of oblivion.

He let the distant, insistent tug of his body call his animus back
across mountains from the green vale of Kashmir to the wilds of barren Persia.
Years earlier he had left his body in an ancient tin mine of the Sassanid kings
and it was still there. He flowed back into it and dusted it off, feeling his
immortal shell with its pale eyes and wolfish teeth to be a cold home after his
brief human life.

And if that cold life had been desolate before Yazad, it became
nearly unendurable after. Mihai tried to return to his old ways. He

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happened upon a wedding and passed himself into the groom almost
without thinking, but the feel of shoving into that young man's soul sickened
him, like crushing a creature beneath his boot heel, and he'd withdrawn at
once. He'd watched the wedding from a distance and wondered at the feeling of
revulsion that had come over him.

He realized it was remorse.

Druj don't feel remorse.

Mihai began to understand that he was changed.

"Is that all souls are for?" Esme had asked him earlier.
"For when we die?" Mihai could have laughed or cried when she'd asked
him that. In all its simplicity her question was like cupped hands holding the
meaning of his life.

"No," he'd said. "They're for living too."

And because of Yazad, he had one. If not an entire soul, a shred
of one. And Yazad had gotten something from him too. He had been born in 1564,
after all, the year Michelangelo died and Shakespeare and Galileo were born,
when people still believed the earth was the center of the universe. More than
four hundred years had passed since then, and Yazad was still alive.

Such longevity was a mixed blessing, they would discover together.

Wearing his own body again, Mihai had traveled back to Kashmir and
found the boy whose soul he had lived inside of. Seeing him again had been like
getting back a piece of himself, and for Yazad it was the same. They were kin
now, more than kin; they had been one creature, and together they felt
something like wholeness.

Hathra.

They had traveled together after that, in and out of the
centuries. Yazad had prospered. With the help of Mihai's magic he had

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become not only rich, but learned. He had collected artifacts and
lore, learned the herbal cures the Druj used on human pets and beasts, even
learned some animal language, and he had amassed a fortune in gold. At one
hundred and fifty years old and still a young man, he had married a Mughal
princess. Her father had objected and imprisoned her in the palace, but Mihai
had sent a pair of giant ghorpad lizards up the sheer wall to carry her down
and the three of them had escaped together across the desert. Tranquil Sahar
had borne Yazad sons and daughters and they had all of them faded and died
before even a hair of Yazad's own mustache went gray. Thus had he tasted the
bitter residue of long life -- to outlive all love.

When Mihai began to think of finding a new unborn soul to twin
with, Yazad would only agree to help him on one condition: that any new host
would never know his own loss and loneliness. If there was a solution, it was
only to be found in magic, and so the two of them had bent themselves to it.
They gathered books from forgotten places, but there was nothing written anywhere
to help them. They experimented on their own with the language of the Druj.
They had time, and in time, they wove the spell they wanted.

Over the next centuries, Mihai repeated his incubation a dozen
times. He slipped into a dozen more human hosts, entering through a mother's
eyes and slipping down into the kernel of incipient life within her, only to
hatch years later with another shred of humanity to add to the patchwork soul
he was making himself. Each time, his humanity deepened and something else happened.
The mists began to clear. The almost-memories danced near like butterflies and
he learned to cultivate stillness so they would alight upon him. And he began
to remember.

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And what he remembered pulled his world apart and rewove it in a
new shape.

"We were human," he repeated, still holding Esme's
hands, looking into her eyes and seeing only the Queen's eyes. Esme was there
too, a part of this now forever, but it was the Queen to whom he spoke.
"We had souls. We gave them up, Sraeshta. We were given a choice and we
chose immortality."

Esme stared at him. She, or the Queen -- for the moment there was
no distinction -- said faintly, skeptically,
"No."

"Yes. We didn't know what we would lose. We were so filled
with our own power we didn't think that even the archangels could humble us!
The things we had discovered had lifted us above the rest of humanity. We could
change our shapes, become invisible, become weightless. We had mastered the
elements. We rendered iron into gold, and rock into iron, and earth into water.
We could send sickness on the air, and we sent the ill wind that slew the
accursed Alexander who destroyed Persepolis and burnt Zarathustra's scriptures.
We are great, Mazishta, and we are ancient, but back in the mists there is a
time that we were children, you and I."

And, he thought but did not say, a time that we
bore
children.

Esme was trembling now, and despite the chill in the dank
tabernacle, moisture had sprung up on her brow. Mihai reached out carefully to
touch her and felt the heat radiating from her even before his fingers reached
her skin. He knew what was happening. He'd been inside of it a dozen times but
had never watched it from without. He thought watching would be harder to endure
than the pain.

Esme's soul and the Queen's animus had twinned and intertwined for
fourteen years, and now they would be ripped apart. Like

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birth, this hatching came in its due course and nothing would stop
it. He had hoped to tell his Queen more of their story first. Afterward, things
would be ...
difficult.
She would be herself again, more powerful than
he by far, and she would see what he had done. How he had tricked her and
stolen fourteen years, held her whole tribe prisoner in animal cithra while her
spies' eyeballs rotted in their silver lids and her citadel fell to the beasts.

A beast roared and slammed at the door as if to punctuate Mihai's
thought. The whole spire trembled and Mihai trembled too. He was afraid. His
patchwork soul made fear a real and vivid thing and he loved even the fear, for
he still remembered the numb absence of it. If he had the choice to make again,
his soul for immortality, he knew what he would choose. But he wouldn't have
that choice to make again. There was only one way that his benighted race might
blend itself back into humanity -- this secret way that he had discovered.

There was more he had hoped to tell the Queen before her animus
hatched from Esme's soul -- so much more -- but now was not the time. Esme's
blue eyes were glazing over. The pain was already taking her away. Yet there
was one thing Mihai thought he could tell her now that might help. Taking
Esme's chin in his hand, he said, "Mazishta, listen to me. Your true name,
when you were human, it was Mahzarin. Golden moon. My beautiful Mahzarin."

Esme's eyes flared open and fluttered as memories unfurled within
her. A sob broke from her lips. The beasts wailed outside the door. And pain
descended like nightfall.

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THIRTEEN Almost Memory

She had forgotten her name a long time ago. The mists had taken
it.

(But her name was Esme. She was a girl with long, long, red, red
hair. Her mother braided it. The flower shop boy stood behind her and held it
in his hand. Her mother cut it off and hung it from a chandelier.

She was Queen. Mazishta. Her hair was black and her handmaidens
dressed it with pearls and silver pins. Her flesh was golden like the desert.
Her flesh was pale like cream. Her eyes were blue. Brown.

She knew what it was like to hold eyeballs between her fingertips.
To toss cats to the beasts. To wrest babies from their mothers' arms. To kiss a
fanged hunter in the snow. There was a crypt of memories at her feet, going
deep into the earth. Things were starting to rise from it, on wings and tatters
of mist. Things that horrified her.

Mahzarin.

She had forgotten her name.

She tried to hold her mind like a corridor of open doors, clear

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and ready for footfall, for whatever might dance past. Wolves,
beasts, girl-mothers, stolen boys.

Rooftop dancing, a string purse filled with cherries and lace,
fairy tale books embossed with gold.

And her body remembered things her mind did not. Whenever she had
held the babies in the crook of her arm, she had been besieged with
almost-memories, like fireflies never close enough to catch.

Mahzarin.
She snatched the name from the air and held
on to it as pain came down like drums and thunder and she felt herself begin to
pull apart. She was a girl and she was a queen and back in the mists she was a
woman who had seized the moon from the sky and drunk its light so that she
would never die. And she never had.

The pain blinded her. It shattered the world into a maelstrom of
jagged wings, beating and tearing at her. Falling to her knees, she imagined
she was in a long corridor, and though she couldn't see or feel the doors, she
tried to keep them open so the pain would find some egress after it had torn
her in two.

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FOURTEEN The Kiss

Mihai held Esme's head in his hands as she writhed on I the floor
of the tabernacle. Her screams had even shocked the beasts into silence, but
after a moment they resumed their piteous moaning outside the door. Esme's eyes
were open, but Mihai knew she couldn't see anything but darkness and tangled
memories. He cradled her head in his hands and her body between his knees to
keep her from harming herself as she thrashed.

Seated in its niche, the Queen's body still did not stir, but soon
it would. Mihai wished he could believe that his waiting was drawing to an end,
but he was no fool. She might kill him for what he'd done, and he wouldn't even
blame her for it. It would be a poetic end to his long, mad life, and sometimes
death didn't sound bad at all, but simple and even a little sweet. Of course,
he hoped for something else.

He had hoped for it since the day fifteen years ago when he had
kissed his queen and everything had at last come clear.

It was luck or destiny that their paths had converged at all. Of
all the places two bodies can be on a world, all the avenues and mine shafts
and battlefields, they had found each other on the same desolate sweep of snow
in mountains at the ragged fringe of Russia.

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Mihai sometimes went away to bleak places when he needed an escape
from the life he had chosen, with its welter of feelings and its dance of
almost-memories opening themselves to him one by one. He had lived in thirteen
human hosts and he knew hathra with them all, each one a part of him like blood
in his veins. He laughed and wept with them and helped name their children, knew
what they dreamed and helped them get it. And because of the magic he and Yazad
had wrought, their long lives weren't spent alone. Their longevity, rather,
proportioned itself amongst the ones they truly loved -- soul mate, children --
a measure of their years gifted to each, so that a beloved spouse might live
long beside them, the span of years perhaps not as long as Yazad's, but richer.

Mihai had pieced together a soul of sorts, but he still didn't
know what he
was.
The mists of memory were thin now, barely a veil, and
there was something behind them always shifting, beckoning, receding. It
exhausted him, straining to see through it.