Forests of the Night

by Tanith Lee

  ‘Look in the garden,’ said the Witch Queen.

  The hunter looked through a dark white pane. The sun had sunk, and a maiden walked under a tree.

  ‘The Princess Bianca,’ said the huntsman.

  ‘What else?’ asked the Witch Queen.

  The huntsman crossed himself.

  ‘By our Lord, Madam, I will not say.’

  ‘But you know.’

  ‘Who does not?’

  ‘The King does not.’

  ‘Nor he does.’

  ‘Are you a brave man?’ asked the Witch Queen.

  ‘In the summer, I have hunted and slain boar. I have slaughtered wolves in winter.’

  ‘But are you brave enough?’

  ‘If you command it, Lady,’ said the huntsman, ‘I will try my best.’

  The Witch Queen opened the Bible at a certain place, and out of it she drew a flat silver crucifix, which had been resting against the words: Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night… Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness.

  The huntsman kissed the crucifix and put it about his neck beneath his shirt.

  ‘Approach,’ said the Witch Queen, ‘and I will instruct you in what to say.’

  Presently, the huntsman entered the garden, as the stars were burning up in the sky. He strode to where Bianca stood under a stunted dwarf tree, and he kneeled down.

  ‘Princess,’ he said, ‘pardon me, but I must give you ill tidings.’

  ‘Give them then,’ said the girl, toying with the long stem of a wan, night-growing flower which she had plucked.

  ‘Your stepmother, the accursed jealous witch, means to have you slain. There is no help for it but you must fly the palace this very night. If you permit, I will guide you to the forest. There are those who will care for you until it may be safe for you to return.’

  Bianca watched him, but gently trustingly.

  ‘I will go with you, then,’ she said.

  They went by a secret way out of the garden, through a passage under the ground, through a tangled orchard, by a broken road between great overgrown hedges.

  Night was a pulse of deep, flickering blue when they came to the forest. The branches of the forest overlapped and intertwined, like leading in a window, and the sky gleamed dimly through the panes of blue-coloured glass.

  ‘I am weary,’ sighed Bianca. ‘May I rest a moment?’

  ‘By all means,’ said the huntsman. ‘In the clearing there, foxes come to play by night. Look in that direction, and you will see them.’

  ‘How clever you are,’ said Bianca. ‘And how handsome.’ She sat on the turf and gazed at the clearing.

  The huntsman drew his knife silently and concealed it in the folds of his cloak. He stooped above the maiden.

  ‘What are you whispering?’ demanded the huntsman, laying his hand on her wood-black hair.

  ‘Only a rhyme my mother taught me.’

  The huntsman seized her by the hair and swung her about so her white throat was before him, stretched ready for the knife. But he did not strike, for there in his hand he held the dark golden locks of the Witch Queen, and her face laughed up at him, and she flung her arms about him, laughing.

  ‘Good man, sweet man, it was only a test of you. Am I not a witch? And do you not love me?’

  The huntsman trembled, for he did love her, and she was pressed so close her heart seemed to beat within his own body.

  ‘Put away the knife. Throw away the silly crucifix. We have no need of these things. The King is not one half the man you are.’

  And the huntsman obeyed her, throwing the knife and the crucifix far off among the roots of the trees. He gripped her to him and she buried her face in his neck, and the pain of her kiss was the last thing he felt in this world.

  The sky was black now. The forest was blacker. No foxes played in the clearing. The moon rose and made white lace through the boughs, and through the backs of the huntsman’s empty eyes. Bianca wiped her mouth on a dead flower.

  ‘Seven asleep, seven awake,’ said Bianca. ‘Wood to wood. Blood to blood. Thee to me.’

  There came a sound like seven huge rendings, distant by the length of several trees, a broken road, an orchard, an underground passage. Then a sound like seven huge single footfalls. Nearer. And nearer.

  Hop, hop, hop, hop. Hop, hop, hop.

  In the orchard, seven black shudderings.

  On the broken road, between the high hedges, seven black creepings.

  Brush crackled, branches snapped.

  Through the forest, into the clearing, pushed seven warped, misshapen, hunched-over, stunted things. Woody-black mossy fur, woody-black bald masks. Eyes like glittering cracks, mouths like moist caverns. Lichen bears. Fingers of twiggy gristle. Grinning. Kneeling. Faces pressed to the earth.

  ‘Welcome,’ said Bianca.

  The Witch Queen stood before a window of glass like diluted wine. She looked at the magic mirror.

  ‘Mirror. Whom do you see?’

  ‘I see you, mistress. I see a man in the forest. He went hunting, but not for deer. His eyes are open, but he is dead. I see all in the land. But one.’

  The Witch Queen pressed her palms to-her ears.

  Outside the window, the garden lay, empty of its seven black and stunted dwarf trees.

  ‘Bianca,’ said the Queen.

  The windows had been draped and gave no light. The light spilled from a shallow vessel, light in a sheaf, like pastel wheat. It glowed upon four swords that pointed east and west, that pointed north and south.

  Four winds had burst through the chamber, and the grey-silver powders of Time.

  The hands of the Witch Queen floated like folded leaves on the air, and through the dry lips the Witch Queen chanted:

  ‘Pater omnipotens, mittere digneris sanctum Angelum tuum de Infernis.’

  The light faded, and grew brighter.

  There, between the hilts of the four swords, stood the Angel Lucefiel, sombrely gilded, his face in shadow, his golden wings spread and glazing at his back.

  ‘Since you have called me, I know your desire. It is a comfortless wish. You ask for pain.’

  ‘You speak of pain, Lord Lucefiel, who suffer the most merciless pain of all. Worse than the nails in the feet and wrists. Worse than the thorns and the bitter cup and the blade in the side. To be called upon for evil’s sake, which I do not, comprehending your true nature, son of God, brother of The Son.’

  ‘You recognise me, then. I will grant what you ask.’

  And Lucefiel (by some named Satan, Rex Mundi, but nevertheless the left hand, the sinister hand of God’s design) wrenched lightning from the ether and cast it at the Witch Queen.

  It caught her in the breast. She fell.

  The sheaf of light towered and lit the golden eyes of the Angel, which were terrible, yet luminous with compassion, as the swords shattered and he vanished.

  The Witch Queen pulled herself from the floor of the chamber, no longer beautiful, a withered, slobbering hag.

  Into the core of the forest, even at noon, the sun never shone. Flowers propagated in the grass, but they were colourless. Above, the black-green roof hung down nets of thick green twilight through which albino butterflies and moths feverishly drizzled. The trunks of the trees were smooth as the stalks of underwater weeds. Bats flew in the daytime, and birds who believed themselves to be bats.

  There was a sepulchre, dripped with moss. The bones had been rolled out, had rolled around the feet of seven twisted dwarf trees. They looked like trees. Sometimes they moved. Sometimes something like an eye glittered, or a tooth, in the wet shadows.

  In the shade of the sepulchre door sat Bianca, combing her hair.

  A lurch of motion disturbed the thick twilight.

  The seven trees turned their heads.

  A hag emerged from the forest. She was crook-backed, and her head was poked forward, predatory, withered and almost hairless, like a vulture’s.

  ‘Here we are at last,’ grated the hag, in a
vulture’s voice.

  She came closer and cranked herself down on her knees and bowed her face into the turf and the colourless flowers.

  Bianca sat and gazed at her. The hag lifted herself. Her teeth were yellow palings.

  ‘I bring you the homage of witches, and three gifts,’ said the hag.

  ‘Why should you do that?’

  ‘Such a quick child, and only fourteen years. Why? Because we fear you. I bring you gifts to curry favour.’

  Bianca laughed. ‘Show me.’

  The hag made a pass in the green air. She held a silken cord worked curiously with plaited human hair.

  ‘Here is a girdle which will protect you from the devices of priests, from crucifix and chalice and the accursed holy water. In it are knotted the tresses of a virgin, and of a woman no better than she should be, and of a woman dead. And here — ’ a second pass and a comb was in her hand, lacquered blue over green — ‘a comb from the deep sea, a mermaid’s trinket, to charm and subdue. Part your locks with this, and the scent of ocean will fill men’s nostrils and the rhythm of the tides their ears, the tides that bind men like chains. Last,’ added the hag, ‘that old symbol of wickedness, the scarlet fruit of Eve, the apple red as blood. Bite, and the understanding of Sin, which the serpent boasted of, will be made known to you.’ And the hag made her last pass in the air and extended the apple, with the girdle and the comb, towards Bianca.

  Bianca glanced at the seven stunted trees.

  ‘I like her gifts, but I do not quite trust her.’

  The bald masks peered from their shaggy beardings. Eyelets glinted. Twiggy claws clacked.

  ‘All the same,’ said Bianca, ‘I will let her tie the girdle on me, and comb my hair herself.’

  The hag obeyed, simpering. Like a toad she waddled to Bianca. She tied on the girdle. She parted the ebony hair. Sparks sizzled, white from the girdle, peacock’s eye from the comb.

  ‘And now, hag, take a little bit bite of the apple.’

  ‘It will be my pride,’ said the hag, ‘to tell my sisters I shared this fruit with you.’ And the hag bit into the apple, and mumbled the bite noisily, and swallowed, smacking her lips.

  Then Bianca took the apple and bit into it.

  Bianca screamed — and choked.

  She jumped to her feet. Her hair whirled about her like a storm cloud. Her face turned blue, then slate, then white again. She lay on the pallid flowers, neither stirring nor breathing.

  The seven dwarf trees rattled their limbs and their bear-shaggy heads, to no avail. Without Bianca’s art they could not hop. They strained their claws and ripped at the hag’s sparse hair and her mantle. She fled between them. She fled into the sunlit acres of the forest, along the broken road, through the orchard, into a hidden passage.

  The hag re-entered the palace by the hidden way, and the Queen’s chamber by a hidden stair. She was bent almost double. She held her ribs. With one skinny hand she opened the ivory case of the magic mirror.

  ‘Speculum, speculum. Dei gratia. Whom do you see?’

  ‘I see you, mistress. And all in the land. And I see a coffin.’

  ‘Whose corpse lies in the coffin?’

  ‘That I cannot see. It must be Bianca.’

  The hag, who had been the beautiful Witch Queen, sank into her tall chair before the window of pale cucumber green and dark white glass. Her drugs and potions waited ready to reverse the dreadful conjuring of age the Angel Lucefiel had placed on her, but she did not touch them yet.

  The apple had contained a fragment of the flesh of Christ, the sacred wafer, the Eucharist.

  The Witch Queen drew her Bible to her and opened it randomly.

  And read, with fear, the words: Resurgat.

  It appeared like glass, the coffin, milky glass. It had formed this way. A thin white smoke had risen from the skin of Bianca. She smoked as a fire smokes when a drop of quenching water falls on it. The piece of Eucharist had stuck in her throat. The Eucharist, quenching water to her fire, caused her to smoke.

  Then the cold dews of night gathered, and the colder atmospheres of midnight. The smoke of Bianca’s quenching froze about her. Frost formed in exquisite silver scrollwork all over the block of misty ice which contained Bianca.

  Bianca’s frigid heart could not warm the ice. Nor the sunless green twilight of the day.

  You could just see her, stretched in the coffin, through the glass. How lovely she looked, Bianca. Black as ebony, white as snow, red as blood.

  The trees hung over the coffin. Years passed. The trees sprawled about the coffin, cradling it in their arms. Their eyes wept fungus and green resin. Green amber drops hardened like jewels in the coffin of glass.

  ‘Who is that, lying under the trees?’ the Prince asked, as he rode into the clearing.

  He seemed to bring a golden moon with him, shining about his golden head, on the golden armour and the cloak of white satin blazoned with gold and blood and ink and sapphire. The white horse trod on the colourless flowers, but the flowers sprang up again when the hoofs had passed. A shield hung from the saddle bow, a strange shield. From one side it had a lion’s face, but from the other, a lamb’s face.

  The trees groaned and their heads split on huge mouths.

  ‘Is this Bianca’s coffin?’ said the Prince.

  ‘Leave her with us,’ said the seven trees. They hauled at their roots. The ground shivered. The coffin of ice-glass gave a great jolt, and a crack bisected it.

  Bianca coughed.

  The jolt had precipitated the piece of Eucharist from her throat.

  In a thousand shards the coffin shattered, and Bianca sat up. She stared at the Prince, and she smiled.

  ‘Welcome, beloved,’ said Bianca.

  She got to her feet and shook out her hair, and began to walk toward the Prince on the pale horse.

  But she seemed to walk into a shadow, into a purple room; then into a crimson room whose emanations lanced her like knives. Next she walked into a yellow room where she heard the sound of crying which tore her ears. All her body seemed stripped away; she was a beating heart. The beats of her heart became two wings. She flew. She was a raven, then an owl. She flew into a sparkling pane. It scorched her white. Snow white. She was a dove.

  She settled on the shoulder of the Prince and hid her head under her wing. She had no longer anything black about her, and nothing red.

  ‘Begin again now, Bianca,’ said the Prince. He raised her from his shoulder. On his wrist there was a mark. It was like a star. Once a nail had been driven in there.

  Bianca flew away, up through the roof of the forest. She flew in at a delicate wine window. She was in the palace. She was seven years old.

  The Witch Queen, her new mother, hung a filigree crucifix around her neck. ‘Mirror,’ said the Witch Queen. ‘Whom do you see?’

  ‘I see you, mistress,’ replied the mirror. ‘And all in the land. I see Bianca.’

  THE RAKSHASA

  With no special warning one year I was overtaken by an enthralment with India. For several months I immersed myself in this exotic pool, and a collection of short stories resulted (Tamastara). This one, however, is a rogue, not belonging with the others. Its spokeswoman, who has given me other work (and who may also be the author of I Was Guillotined Here and Down Below), uses her frankness as a spiked shield. I predict she will produce a novel one day.

  ‘There is a demon in the woods,’ said Vikram, leaning on the verandah rail.

  ‘A demon?’ I wondered, half lowering my book. ‘Do you mean a tiger?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Vikram, ‘it is a tiger, no doubt.’

  ‘And when not a tiger?’

  ‘Ah. Who knows? A young girl with long slim arms like ivory, and three gold anklets. An old man with a begging bowl. A coil of mist rising from the ground.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  ‘No, you do not see. But you will, I think.’

  He leaned there smiling his white teeth at me, maddening as only he, or his kind, could be.
And by kind I don’t of course mean race. Vikram’s sort are prevalent the earth over, I imagine, rare but continual, and maybe unavoidable. There is something left out — or put in — that the rest of us have — or lack. I’ve never been sure which. And they are always beautiful, too. His skin was the darker shade, the twilight shade one feels, under a very slight change of circumstances, would really be bluish. The black hair was like a wonderful luxuriant new material, and the black eyes of a high and liquid polish. Slim, youthful, strong, and elegant, irresistibly recalling Krishna, surely the Pan of India. (As Pan, one realises, is surely the Krishna of Greece.) Lovely, delicious young man, with his so impeccable English, and his slightly insulting grammatical and vernacular ploys — such as this talking about woods. Beyond the environs of the Grande Namda Hotel, they stretched away: the savage forests, the rukh.

  We were in the midst of the Rains, season of deluge. When the downpours came, the mild and seedy old hotel was boxed in a glass cube of water. Between the downpours, the jungle that ran beyond and about the Namda Road all the way to Chahala, steamed and fitfully glowed. It was so green now, the rukh. In the unabated heat it was green still, but a different olive colour, streaked always with burned brown and white. Today, above the steam, stems and pillars and curved fronds melted from transparent grey into emerald into black. I had given up, for the time being, my attempts to paint the effect, exhausted by labour in the face of nature’s humiliating effortlessness.

  But it was possible that anything might be out there, in there, beyond the terraces and muddy paths of the garden, the adjacent huts and awnings and small brick houses with their secret yards stacked with blood-red water jars. Beyond the road, too, the road that went to civilisation, the train station at Chahala, and so, countless miles later, to real life in the colonial city. The forest, the rukh, was nothing to do with real life, obviously.

  Just as obviously, Vikram sensed my feelings on the matter. Somehow he knew, without ever being told, that I had picked my way, like a pedantic wader, from boat to train to hotel, to street to hotel to train to boat, to train to hotel. I had gazed long at very much, but only through the safe bars of my cage; a window, a railing, a party of acquaintances. It was not exactly fear. Before I came, I knew what I might be exposed to, poor weak thing. I had hardened my heart and put on mental polarised lenses. No, it was not that. Perhaps then, I feared the soul of the land, as others are drawn to abandon themselves to it. It’s a strange country, another planet.