Aux clartés naissantes de l’aube, les danseuses peintes sur les mur semblent agiter leurs crotales, et du bout de leur pied blanc soulever comme dans une écume rose le bord de leur draperies, croyant sans doute que les lampadaires se rallument pour les orgies du triclinium...The palace of Jînastr lay like a broken skull on its prominence, glaring down on all who passed with a hundred gaping window-eyes, black and ominous, wherefor many travelers began to tremble in their paces, to falter and stumble, mumbling prayers and apotropiasms, ere halting and retracing their path, that they might find some other route, unoverlooked. And few indeed — not one in a century — dared tread the thick-lichened flags of the road that led to the palace itself. But a century-and-a-half had elapsed since the last, and now the painter Teg-Numara, carrying both art-stuff and food-stuff, came up the road, daring the palace’s ill-fame in search of certain murals said to have decorated it in Jînastr’s prime. Painted with long-departed skill, employing long-forgotten pigments, if they clung yet to its walls he hoped to find inspiration therein for his own work, whereby to make his name and fortune. Yet he stumbled and halted as the first shadow of the looming ruin touched him, for at that moment two crows took wing from a rock whereon, unseen, they had perched and watched him up-toil. For they croaked as they flew and echoes took up what seemed words in an archaic feminine mode of Teg-Numara’s own tonal tongue:Théophile Gautier, «Jettatura» (1856).
“Azèk! azék!”
Which is to say:
“I slay! I slough!”
Teg-Numara stood tremblant and dubious, recalling that central legend of the palace anent Jînastr’s youngest and most beautiful daughter, who, brought forth a day after its sacking for the embraces of the victorious barbarian king, had seized a dagger of her careless guard and slain herself before a mural of his new throne-room, crying out those very words with such puissance and clarity that they were imprinted ever after on all brains to hear them, not excluding the crows’, guiding glut on the battle-field below. And whether the girl had meant her paronomasia, or had produced her second verb by lapsus linguæ, it evoked some magick whereby her own painted representation on the wall took life and moved even as drops of her life-blood splashed its pigments. And this vivification filled the barbarians, king and all, with a horror icy and unshakable, so that a mere gesture from the live painting sent them howling not merely from the chamber but from the palace, their horror renewed and re-iced by the cries of the new-taught gore-crows:
“Azèk! azék!”
And ever since, ’twas said, the girl’s simulacrum had flitted the walls of the palace, nibbling at painted fruit, sipping from painted goblets to sustain her watch on her father’s domain, whereoff she drove rare intruders with moues and gestures secularly harmless but supernaturally horripilant. All this Teg-Numara had heard, all this he had disdained in his quest for fame; now he stood uncertain, ears ringing yet with those duplex verbs:
“Azèk! azék!”
But, being professionally accustomed thereto, he saw no reason to fear any painting, albeit it mimicked life with movement as well as form and tint, and walked on, climbing to the palace with the skep wherein reposed the tools of his trade and the food he would eat while he plied them. First step across the threshold of Jînastr brought him first confirmation of the girl’s legend, for his sandal passed over the bones of severed arms, legs, and hands lying thereon and therearound, white and crumbling with centuries’ passage, as though horrified men had crowded and jammed at the door, drawing swords against each other, hewing and hacking in their panick for flight. The floor beyond was littered with rust-shards, as of weapons and armor let fall by some for greater speed, and surviving within as they had not without, under rain-lash and snowfall. And then the painter’s eye, accustoming to the gloom, swung to a wall whereon, aye! and beautiful!, lay yet one of the murals he had come to see. It was faded, cracked, but the lamp he drew forth and lit rewarded his journey in an instant, for the mural’s beauty glimmered yet therebeneath. ’Twas of a garden in Paradise, with peacocks and fountains amid fruit-trees, whereof, however, Teg-Numara grunted to see some fruit nibbled or whole-consumed, with core-stones scattered at their feet.
Was this some jeu d’esprit of the long-dead painter or some compliance with Jînastr’s cult, whereby Paradise could not be depicted free of flaw or fault, lest the gods be angered at a too-close resemblance with that which they reserved for themselves and their heroes? He knew not, but thought he had the explanation here for the legend of Jînastr’s daughter: these imperfect trees had suggested the visits of a living painting, to whom the garden was real and the paradisian fruit edible, each bite thereof supplying a month or more of further life. Aye, that was it — and then he spun, the lamp nigh-on falling from his hand, for he had glimpsed a movement where none should be, save in nightmare. And aye, on another wall of the palace he saw a girl-of-paint move, flitting theredown and onto the next, his own, that she might confront him where he stood. Superstitious horror seized him, which might the next instant have puppeted him out of the palace, controlling limbs and lungs for flight and screaming, but he recalled his logism as he approached the palace and summoned professional pride enow to stand and watch as La Peinte reached the wall-patch before him and began to gesture him out.
Aye, see the skill with which she had been painted... see the richness of her pigments yet... their color and gloss... And with these thoughts his horror dwindled and died, lost in his appreciation of both long-dead painter and now-living painted, till he smiled to see uncertainty and doubt enter the smooth and beautiful face before him, for she was unaccustomed, ’twas apparent, to see her supernature defied on this wise. And when he reached hand for her, to test with a careful fingertip the pigments whereof she was composed, see the would-be biter bit! For she ducked his finger and retreated, seeing somewhat in his face whereof he himself was not yet aware. Never before had he seen a girl so beautiful, flowerlike for the thirsty bee of his concupiscence, surpassing all secular maids by reason also of her painted nature, which had outlasted centuries on these crumbling palace walls. He reached for her again, two-handed now, wanting to trace and stroke her curves and lines, and she retreated faster, then turned and fled wall-wise in earnest, easily distancing his lumbering, gloom-hindered pursuit.
Thereafter he searched for her hour on hour, finding further murals, further nibbled fruit-trees in the palace, whereby she-for-whom-he-lusted had sustained this supernatural life of hers down the centuries. A few glimpses he caught of her, flitting from the sanctuary he had uncovered to find another, till at last she slipped from wall to ceiling, wherefrom she gestured to him in disdain as he gaped up at her. Then she was off again and when he went in search of her, craning neck for every patch of ceiling, he was rewarded with not even a glimpse: she had retreated to some inaccessible corner or through some deep crack, hiding herself from him for ever. Or thus she thought, no doubt, but the ambition of Teg-Numara had been not unbuttressed with wit and skill, and when he left the palace, pricked by the thought that her painted eyes watched him go, it was not unsmiling or hopeless.
And aye, he was back five days later, having returned to his city, where he had made certain enquiries of a herbalist ere purchasing more food and three flasks of turpentine. One flask thereof was broken on his re-ascent to the palace, for in his eagerness he returned by night during dark-of-the-moon, stumbling on the path and dropping his skep, wherefrom he swore to find rising a rich scent of turpentine. But the two flasks that remained were enough for his purpose, when he set to stripping the murals of the palace of their fruit and fountains, rendering them foodless and waterless. When he had finished, he charged his brush instead with paint and added a new fountain and fruit-tree to one wall, whereto he came thereafter each day of his extended stay in the palace.
A week passed; two; three; and he was rewarded: on the twenty-seventh day the girl lay senseless at the foot of his tree, one nibbled fruit thereof fallen from her fingers. Aye, he had tricked and trapped her, for the tree was a narcotic hemra of the eastern islands, whose form he had studied in the botanography of the herbalist. He smiled as he charged his brush anew and set to adding fetters and chains to her limbs, attached to a golden ball far beyond her capacity to move. This would hold her should she awake ere he had completed new trees and fountains, stocking the girl’s painted universe again with that which would nourish her for centuries to come. But when he had completed these, he set to work on two thrones and on images formerly unknown to the walls: baths, beds, and wardrobes, most luxuriously appointed; books on cedar shelves, each title painted with his finest brush; and a kitchen hung with well-cured hams and joints. Last of all, he added his own image — a little taller, sturdier, and fuller-breeched than the reality, mayhap, but for that who could blame him? He would risk much in the throw he would next take and wished full reward if it fell right. With eyes blurred from his pictorial labor, he examined the girl again, finding her lying motionless still in her fruit-induced slumber, then returned to his own portrait, standing before it to sigh, nod, and thrust a dagger through his heart, that his life-blood might splatter it as he cried, in the masculine mode:
“Azòk! azók!”
“I slay! I slough!”
Two decades later, when, by reason of the disappearance of Teg-Numara, the palace of Jînastr lay deeper than ever under its prohibition, an antiquary from the east, one Nezradak-Hiphor, dared its hill natheless and passed its portal as the painter had done before him. But to him no supernatural wardress of the palace came, driving him out with harmless but horripilant gestures, and he passed from chamber to chamber thereof till he came to that wherein a most curious scene awaited, whereof he wrote to an old disciple on the island of Kimpesh:
“There was a mural on one wall wherebefore a male skeleton lay, its bony hand gripping yet the dagger whose blade was buried in its ribs. And, strange to relate, two further skeletons were, amid a most incongruous jumble of luxuries, depicted within the mural: viz., a girl’s, so it seemed, chained to a golden ball, and a man’s, hanging therebeside from one branch of a hemra, which tree was most strange to see depicted here, so far from its native soil. But legends of it are current here natheless, though few herbals I have consulted remark its lunar rhythms, whereby fruit that are merely narcotic most days of the month become lethal during the dark of the moon.”