by Tanith Lee
He saw her come towards him, but only as a shadow. There was not enough light in the room after the match had fallen to show how, at the first slicing stroke, the eyes of the woman opened wide after all. Each is a transparent void, shaped like a little bowl, and like a little bowl each one begins to fill with a pure and scintillant red.
And somehow, even without light, he did see, did see, did -
Until all seeing stopped.
As the clock of Our Lady of Lights struck one, beginning the new day in its blackness, Armand woke from a comfortless doze. The room, his own, was veiled over rather than revealed by its low-burning lamp. The bed, a stale shambles on which he had thrown himself, now repelled him, forcing him to sit, and next to stand up. On the table no manuscript lay to exalt or reproach him. There was, however, something.
Armand looked, his eyes enlarged, as if he had never before seen such an array, though he himself had bought and amalgamated these articles yesterday. Or the day before that.
It was stupid, then, to regard them with such misgiving. Indeed, the arrangement was rather attractive, something Etiens might have liked to paint. The utensils themselves were beautiful.
The preparation was not even very complex. To achieve what he wished would take a modicum of time.
Armand moved to the window and flung it wide on the black and rainy night. In the rain, the city itself might seem to lie beneath the river. (We are then, the drowned, already lost, yet measuring out our schemes, our prayers, as if they might be valid even now.)
Across the city, the bloody corpse that had been France was being trundled on its route to the morgue. Armand did not know this, nor that, some minutes before, bemused and soaking wet, Etiens had passed below, looking up at the poet’s drearily lighted window — and finding himself completely unable to proceed to Armand’s door, had gone away again.
The poet stared into the external dark. Roofs and chimneys held back the sky. Here and there a ghost of light, like a flaw in vision, evidenced some other vigil, its purpose concealed.
Armand did not know of the death of France, nor of Etiens’s white child. Possessed of these things, coupling them with his own oppression, his own knowledge of where the night, like a phantom barge, was taking him, the poet would have presented this history quite differently. It would have been essential, for example, to provide some linking device, some cause, a romantic mathematic as to why such elements had fused within those hours sloughed from the great clock between the striking of seven and of three in the morning that was yet to come. What should it have been? A ring, possibly, with a curse upon it, given to Etiens in his infancy, inducing thereafter the first image of death: the white-eyed Pierrette; passed to France in disbelief or spite, summoning the second, the monstrous nun in her wimple of blood. While Armand, drawing the ring from the portioned body of France, would thereby unwittingly or in despair arouse the final aspect of the appalling triad.
But Armand, a character entangled by events, and not their reporter, had no say in the structure, apparently random — though immensely terrible — of what is taking place.
What then should one say? Merely perhaps that most children will, at some point, behave with dangerous foolishness, as if led on by imps, but it is only that they know no better. And that the Pierrette was an analogy for this which Etiens had fabricated for himself from a feverish dream and a patch of moonlight through a dirty window. And then, that France had suffered a hallucination invoked by drunken horror — if he had even seen the thing which was described. No proof of this is offered. Maybe he saw nothing but Clairisse, the stolen cleaver in her hand. There was a gruesome murder, a crime of cold passion. That was enough. And for Armand, the poet, he had perceived a shadow in the half-lit mist at the end of the bridge, a shadow of malnutrition and self-doubt and inner yearning. And in a moment he would have every reason to see her again, as he would see many things that thereafter would leave his work like a riot of jewels, inextinguishable, profound, terrifying, indisputable, cast in the wake of his own wreckage.
La Mort, Lady Death, La Voleuse, La Tueuse. The trick, the violent blade. And then the third means to destruction, the seductive death who visited poets in her irresistible caressing silence, with the petals of blue flowers or the blue wings of insects pasted on the lids of her eyes, and: See, your flesh also, taken to mine, can never decay. And this will be true, for the flesh of Armand, becoming paper written over by words, will endure as long as men can read.
And so he left the window. He prepared, carefully, the opium that would melt away within him the iron barrier that no longer yielded to thought or solitude or wine. And when the drug began to live within its glass, for an instant he thought he saw a drowned girl floating there, her hair swirling in the smoke… Far away, in another universe, the clock of Notre Dame aux Luminères struck twice.
After a little while, he opened the door, and looked out at the landing beyond. There in the nothing of the dark he sensed her, and moved aside, welcoming her with an ironic courtesy into his room, his bones.
She was even more beautiful, now he saw her closely, than when he noted her at the end of the bridge.
Her skin was so pale he could gaze through it to a sort of tender, softly blooming radiance. Her eyes were mysteriously sombre. As her cloak unfurled, he observed the ice-blue flowers on her breast, and the corseting of her bodice where La Danse Macabre was depicted in sable embroidery.
She seated herself with a smile before him, and he, his hand already moving of its own volition, as if possessed, began to write.
La Séductrice was his death. The drug would kill him in a year, having burned out his brain, nervous system, and marrow. But his spirit would be left behind him in the words he had now begun to find. We are not given life to cast it aside, but neither is life to be lived for life’s sake only. What cries aloud within us must be allowed its voice. Or so it seemed to him, dimly, as the seascapes of the opium overwhelmed him, and the caverns of stars, and the towering crystal cities higher than heaven.
She is three: Thief, Butcher, Seducer. Do not seek her out. She is all around you, in the blowing leaves, the cloud across the moon, the sweet sigh behind your ear, the scent of earth, the whisper of a sleeve. If she is to be yours, she will come to you.
Across the river the clock sounded again.
Un, deux, trois.
NICHOLAS
I wrote Nicholas to make a statement about the enduring persistence of one kind of love. Then saw I had made two statements.
She heard him come in when it was almost two a.m. He had been gone some while, and always the fresh sight of his beauty was a sort of shock to her. They gazed at each other; then he walked past her into the flat.
‘Are you hungry?’ she said.
He followed her to the kitchen and watched her as she set out food. He ate, not looking at her once.
She made tea and seated herself at the breakfast bar, near him, to drink it. Tea did not interest Nicholas. When she moved to touch him, he too moved a little. Away.
‘Well,’ she said brightly, ‘I thought you’d left me.’
She rubbed her eyes. They were gritty. She had been working too long on the batch of layouts. Partly, of course, waiting to see if he would come back.
The flat was a good one, spacious, with long windows and a view of the park. But how lonely she’d been, deprived not merely of the proximity of known persons, but of known scenery, vistas, scents and sounds. The chuntering of the late night train: she would wake, listening for it, and for the milk-train in the morning, because she missed hearing them in her sleep. But only birds sang in the trees outside.
She had met Nicholas in the park. As if he knew her from long ago, he had walked straight up to her across the grass. When she offered, he returned to the flat with her, and spent the afternoon there. His electric presence had made her nervous. When he left she was almost relieved. But she guessed he would come back, and when she shopped, optimistically bought extra food, things she thought
he would like. Then, she did not see him for three days, and relinquished hope. When he did turn up, inevitably, he moved in. And that night they slept together.
Now, if she woke in the darkness she could reach out and touch him. Unless he was not there, for there were still days and nights when he stayed away.
The life he kept private from her was a rough one. Once he had been in a fight. There was a wild streak in him, a truly savage streak she could do nothing about, and once or twice, too, he had physically hurt her. She realised then she was a fool to put up with him. She gave; cleaned up after him, cooked for him, bought him whatever he needed — or that she thought he needed — loved him, wanted him. While he used her, giving nothing except his haphazard companionship, those vicious blows. But she was hooked by beauty, and my God, he was beautiful.
‘I love you,’ she said to him. ‘You do know that?’
He had finished his meal. He got up, stretched, went into the living-room. When she followed, he walked away to wash.
She stared after him. Yes, beautiful. The gleam of muscle under the burnished surface. The cool cruel eyes, soulless and serene. He took things as he found them. If some woman loved him, that was fine. But he could manage without her love. This was quite obvious.
The night was close. She stood at the long, open windows and heard the distant rush of traffic on the roads.
She was almost asleep when he touched her face. He could also be, when he wished it, very gentle.
‘Darling,’ she said. And opened her arms to him like the windows.
When she woke, he was gone. It was not until after breakfast, when she walked into the little annex she had made her work-room, that she saw what he had done.
The last layout, which she had negligently left lying on the flat-topped desk, had been vandalised. There were long determined tears, smearings of dirt. She began to cry with frustration and rage. It would all have to be done again, five hours of work.
There had been other, minor things he had done before, never anything so bad as this.
She forced down the last of her coffee, diluted with tears, angrily.
He would come back, of course he would, expressionless, spiteful, careless. ‘Damn you.’ He would get a surprise this time. Oh yes.
But he did not come back.
She saw to the chores and, unable to face re-working the wreck of the layout, went for groceries. As she descended to the street, she half expected to meet him coming up, or seated on the stairs. Sometimes he did that, sat there, as if her flat were the last destination he had in mind. The other residents were wary of him. The aroma of a villain was all over him. Those who had to pass him slunk to one side, it was he who did not move.
When she returned from the market, the sky was iron-coloured. The first yellow leaves were floating down from the trees. He was nowhere around, and when it began to rain, she shut the windows against him and all the world with a tiredly desolate feeling. By six o’clock, she had re-worked most of the layout. Reluctantly, she could admit now it was an improvement on the first production, which she had finished half blind with exhaustion.
She opened a bottle of white wine, and stood sipping a glass at the windows. The weather was as different today as another season.
Outside, the grey water sluiced past, on and on. She pictured Nicholas prowling the streets in the rain. Or out of the rain somewhere, not with her.
The iron sky turned to black.
She made dinner and ate it, watched TV, read. The rain went on as a background, a reminder. Here in her safe cave she was secure and happy enough, and yet the feeling of incompletion continued. She could not reason it away. It seemed wrong to be secure when he was outside, apart from her, under her curse. She would forgive him, if only he would come back.
All the sane TV was over now, and the book finished. Apart from the faint noise of the traffic, there seemed no sound on the earth, and it came to her the rain had stopped.
He was all she had, the only one to whom she could give her love. She needed him. What did it matter what he had done, or did? She didn’t care any more.
And in that moment, like sorcery, she heard his voice, calling to her.
She ran to let him in.
Soaked by the rain, without surprise or thanks, he entered her warm safe world with the breath of night and chaos.
As usual, she prepared food for him and he ate it.
Later, he lay against her on the bed, dry now, warm as the warm flat, and she stroked his back. How strange love was. Strange, forgiving, innocent love. Under her caress, he curled himself together, and his dim low purring vibrated through the blankets and her bones.
THE HUNTING OF DEATH: THE UNICORN
I saw the Unicorn Tapestries in New York, a golden island in a dark time, and brought the sight away as kindling fires. The work came strongly, with its own assurance, but puzzled me, the transcriber.
Its integral substance grew clear later, on re-reading.
One: The Hunting
In the first life, Lasephun was a young man.
He was reasonably tall, of slender, active build, and auburn-haired. His skin, which was to be a feature of all this group of lives, was extremely pale, and lent him an air of great intensity. By nature, the being of Lasephun was obsessive. Charged with fleshly shape, the obsessiveness took several forms, each loosely linked. The first life, the young man, who was called Lauro, became obsessed with those things which were unobtainable, and hungered for them with a mysterious, gnawing hunger.
Firstly then, the motive force, which was creative and sought an outlet, drove him from place to place. In one, he would find a forest, and in the forest a shaft of light like golden rain, and the sight of this would expand in him like anguish. In a city, he would see a high wall, and over the wall the tops of crenelated towers, and beyond the towers the sky with thunder clouds, and somewhere a bell would slowly ring and a woman would go by picking up the whispering debris from the gutter. These images and these sounds would stay with him. He did not know what to do with them. Sometimes, like some intangible, unnamed scent, there would be only a feeling within him that seemed to have no cause, a deep swirling, disturbing and possessing him, which could neither be dismissed nor conjured into anything real.
At length, he learned how to make music on the twenty-two strings of the lutelin, and how to fashion songs, and he sang these in markets, inns, and on the steps of cathedrals for cash, or alone on the billowing roads and the sky-dashed face of the land for nothing — or for himself. But his songs and his music filled him with blunted anger. And as he grew, by mere habit, more polished, his anger also grew. For what he could make never matched the essence of what he felt. The creation was like a mockery of the stirring and dreaming within him. He almost hated himself, he almost hated the gift of music.
To others, he was a cause of some fascination. To others he was attractive, phantasmal, like a moving light. They would come to him, and sometimes even follow him a short distance, before they perceived he no longer saw them. He never stayed long in any one place. As if he felt the movement of the earth under him, he travelled, trying to keep pace with it.
Proceeding in this way, it occurred to him one night that he himself did not move at all, but simply paced in one spot, while the landscape slid towards him and away behind him, bringing him now a dark wood, and now a pool dippered by stars, and now a town on a high rock where wild trees poured down like hanging gardens.
It was well past midnight. The morning, disguised as the night, was already evident on the faces of any clocks the town might hold. Lauro leaned on a tree in the vale below the town, not far from the pool which glittered and the dark wood which had gathered all the darkness to itself as if to be cool.
Was a world so beautiful, so unfathomable, also a disappointment to its Creator? Had the world failed to match the vision of the god who devised it? On his seventh day, not resting but lamenting, had he gone away and left his work unfinished, and somewhere else did some other
world exist, like but unlike, in which had been captured the creative impulse entire and perfect?
Lauro touched the lutelin and the strings spoke as softly as the falling of a leaf.
And in that moment a white leaf blew out of the dark wood and flickered to the edge of the pool.
Lauro stared. He saw a shape, which was not like the shape of a horse, but more like that of a huge greyhound, and all of one unvariegated paleness so absolute it seemed to glow. He saw a long head, also more like that of some enormous dog, a head chiselled and lean, with folded glimmering eyes. And from the forehead, like the rising of a comet, frozen, the tapering crystalline finger of the fearful horn. And the horn lowered and lowered to meet the horn of another in the pool. Where the two horns met each other, a ring of silver opened and fled away. Then the mouth cupped the water and the creature drank.
As the unicorn was drinking, Lauro only watched it. To him it would have seemed, if he considered it at all, that the unicorn was not drinking, but only carrying out some ethereal custom special to its kind. For the unicorn was unearthly and therefore did not need to accomplish earthly things. The unicorn had strayed into this world, which was God’s disappointment, out of that other world, the second creation God had made, when the form had finally matched the vision.
So Lauro watched and did not move, probably did not even blink, his back against the tree’s trunk, his hands spread on the strings of his lutelin. But then the unicorn raised his head from the pool, and turned a little, and began to come towards him.
All creative beings are capable of seeing in symbols, and each will seek analogy and omen, even if they deny the fact. Embryonic though Lauro’s creative gift might be, his beautiful voice unrefined and his song-making erratic, uneven, and a source of rage to him, still, presented with this unique symbol, he recognised it. The sorcerous quality of the unicorn was inevitably to be felt. No one, however dull, could have mistaken that, and Lauro was not dull at all, but, if anything, too aware and too sensitised. The sight of the unicorn touched him and he resonated to the touch as the strings of the lutelin had resonated. It was not a voice which spoke to him, and there were no words uttered either in the darkness or within his own heart or brain, yet it was as if something said plainly to him: Here it is, here it approaches you, that which you require, that which for ever and ever you have pursued, not knowing it. The wellspring within yourself you cannot tap, the jewel in your mind you cannot uncover. And in that moment the miracle of the unicorn seemed to be that if he could only lay his skin against the skin of it, even so small an area of skin as a finger’s tip, everything that burned and smoked within him would be, at last, his to use. He, too, laying hands on this creature of the second perfect world, would gain the power of perfect creation. But maybe also there was a part of him which recognised the unicorn in another way, as that thing which must always be pursued and never taken, the inconsolable hunger, the mirage which runs before and can never be come up with, since the consolation of hunger is satiety, and the end of the chase is stillness and death.