“Beauty! What is beauty? Can it be that I am blind, that a fiend distorts my vision? Tell me, how does one see beauty?”
“I don’t know,” said T’sain. “It seems very plain to me. Is not the play of colors across the sky beautiful?”
T’sais looked up in astonishment. “The harsh glarings? They are either angry or dreary, in either case detestable.”
“See how delicate are the flowers, fragile and charming.”
“They are parasites, they smell vilely.”
T’sain was puzzled. “I do not know how to explain beauty. You seem to find joy in nothing. Does nothing give you satisfaction?”
“Only killing and destruction. So then these must be beautiful.”
T’sain frowned. “I would term these evil concepts.”
“Do you believe so?”
“I am sure of it.”
T’sais considered. “How can I know how to act? I have been certain, and now you tell me that I do evil!”
T’sain shrugged. “I have lived little, and I am not wise. Yet I know that everyone is entitled to life. Turjan could explain to you easily.”
“Who is Turjan?” inquired T’sais.
“He is a very good man,” replied T’sain, “and I love him greatly. Soon we go to Earth, where the sky is vast and deep and of dark blue.”
“Earth … If I went to Earth, could I also find beauty and love?”
“That may be, for you have a brain to understand beauty, and beauty of your own to attract love.”
“Then I kill no more, regardless of what wickedness I see. I will ask Pandelume to send me to Earth.”
T’sain stepped forward, put her arms around T’sais, and kissed her.
“You are my sister and I will love you.”
T’sais’ face froze. Rend, stab, bite, said her brain, but a deeper surge welled up from her flowing blood, from every cell of her body, to suffuse her with a sudden flush of pleasure. She smiled.
“Then — I love you, my sister. I kill no more, and I will find and know beauty on Earth or die.”
T’sais mounted her horse and set out for Earth, seeking love and beauty.
T’sain stood in the doorway, watching her sister ride off through the colors. Behind her came a shout, and Turjan approached.
“T’sain! Has that frenzied witch harmed you?” He did not wait for a reply. “Enough! I kill her with a spell, that she may wreak no more pain.”
He turned to voice a terrible charm of fire, but T’sain put her hand to his mouth.
“No, Turjan, you must not. She has promised to kill no more. She goes to Earth seeking what she may not find in Embelyon.”
So Turjan and T’sain watched T’sais disappear across the many-colored meadow.
“Turjan,” spoke T’sain.
“What is your wish?”
“When we come to Earth, will you find me a black horse like that of T’sais?”
“Indeed,” said Turjan, laughing, as they started back to the house of Pandelume.
III
T’sais
T’sais came riding from the grove. She checked her horse at the verge as if in indecision, and sat looking across the shimmering pastel meadow toward the river … She stirred her knees and the horse proceeded across the turf.
She rode deep in thought, and overhead the sky rippled and cross-rippled, like a vast expanse of windy water, in tremendous shadows from horizon to horizon. Light from above, worked and refracted, flooded the land with a thousand colors, and thus, as T’sais rode, first a green beam flashed on her, then ultramarine, and topaz and ruby red, and the landscape changed in similar tintings and subtlety.
T’sais closed her eyes to the shifting lights. They rasped her nerves, confused her vision. The red glared, the green stifled, the blues and purples hinted at mysteries beyond knowledge. It was as if the entire universe had been expressly designed with an eye to jarring her, provoking her to fury … A butterfly with wings patterned like a precious rug flitted by, and T’sais made to strike at it with her rapier. She restrained herself with great effort; for T’sais was of a passionate nature and not given to restraint. She looked down at the flowers below her horse’s feet — pale daisies, blue-bells, Judas-creeper, orange sunbursts. No more would she stamp them to pulp, rend them from their roots. It had been suggested to her that the flaw lay not in the universe but in herself. Swallowing her vast enmity toward the butterfly and the flowers and the changing lights of the sky, she continued across the meadow.
A bank of dark trees rose above her, and beyond were clumps of rushes and the gleam of water, all changing in hue as the light changed in the sky. She turned and followed the river bank to the long low manse.
She dismounted, walked slowly to the door of black smoky wood, which bore the image of a sardonic face. She pulled at the tongue and inside a bell tolled.
