Forests of the Night

by Tanith Lee

  Just then, Zhoreb concluded the unusual history of Dathanja, and, glancing about at his hearers, added, ‘And in the manner of this ideal we strive, though even that not too onerously. For piety itself may be used to make a chain about the soul.’

  ‘And does this then indicate that you are free also to enjoy yourself with women or men, as your appetite prompts?’ inquired the little sister of seventy-three, who was inclined to be saucy.

  But Zhoreb laughed. ‘Lady,’ said he, ‘there is no ban on love.’

  And when he replied in this way, and looked smiling round, Jalasil’s heart seemed to cry out within her — Ah! I could tell you —

  ‘For love,’ said Zhoreb, ‘is the clue to all life, of the body and the spirit both.’

  As he said this, his eyes seemed to fathom the lilacs. They seemed to meet the eyes of Jalasil and to fire up, so she saws their colour, which was of green like her own, and of a river’s brown and silver, too, the colours of that which, brimming, would slake and make flower a desert.

  Jalasil was filled by fear. Her heart beat and her limbs were leaden. But quieter than a ghost she went at once away.

  Early the next day, at dawn, Jalasil — not having rested a moment of the night — summoned her body-servant.

  ‘Well, and did the travelling men enthral you?’

  ‘Madam, it was a treat to be sure.’ And the servant spent some minutes in describing the interest she and her sister and the boy had had, and how it had benefited them.

  ‘I am rejoiced for you, and only sorry your entertainment lasted but one evening.’

  ‘No, madam, there you would be wrong. For these good men have agreed to linger by the pool another day and night, being parched of the sands.’

  ‘Then they are not gone,’ said Jalasil.

  Shortly after noon, when three quarters of her household snored, Jalasil began to pace about the chambers. And she said to herself, I have never seen that man before, he is nothing to me. Let me steal down now, for they will be slumbering under the trees. Probably I shall not be able to tell one young man from another.

  And she felt great uneasiness as she considered this, and was loath to go, so her limbs felt heavier than lead and iron together. Yet she went for all that. Down the path from the house, swathed in her veil, Jalasil crept like a thief.

  Most of the nomad fellowship reclined in the shade under the locust trees, but three of their number, of whom Zhoreb was one, had elected to bathe and swim at the pool’s lower end. It was a private spot in the normal way, screened round by the trees and bull rushes. Jalasil stole upon it like a lioness. And before she knew what she did, she stared through the screen.

  So she saw Zhoreb, to his thighs in the shallows, and naked.

  His hair was wet and fell about his face and neck in blackest coils. The drops of the water starred his tawny body like pearls across dark ivory. The gems of his breast were like cinnabar. From his shoulders to his waist he seemed carven, so flawless was the proportion. At his hips he was straight as flesh ruled between two lines, and sheathed in the black hair of his loins the serpent of his manhood lay, blind, innocent, and sleeping. Just then he turned, unaware of any scrutiny, to pluck a pod from a branch above. In his back, the spine and ribs flowed under the skin, like a river under ivory.

  Jalasil fled.

  ‘What you have told me concerning these holy men has impressed itself upon me,’ said Jalasil to the elder servant woman. ‘He that you say recounted the life of their teacher — send for your sister to fetch him to me here at sundown. I would hear the story, too.’

  ‘Why, as you wish, madam,’ said the woman, puffed to find her praise so influential.

  But then her mistress seemed to grow instantly sick. She was pale and trembled. Nevertheless, she bathed and had her hair combed afresh with sandalwood. She put malachite on her eyelids and dipped her nails into rosy lacquer, and, having seen a man in his nakedness, dressed for him in a gown like a butterfly’s wing.

  Zhoreb entered a chamber of the green-eyed house. It looked on a garden, where vines and roses grew, and the lilacs of the oasis in more constricted forms. The air was sweet with the flowers, and from other aromatics.

  On a couch sat the household’s mistress, turned a little from him, seeming to read a book with covers of thin jade.

  ‘Lady,’ said Zhoreb, ‘I and my companions thank you for your bounty, the dinners of your kitchens and the freedom of the water. What may I do in return?’

  Jalasil set by her book, as if reluctantly — for she kept her eyes only on it. ‘I would hear something of your philosophy.’

  So then Zhoreb, seating himself at her invitation on the couch which faced her own, began to speak of all those things his faith entailed. He was most eloquent and besides, in dealing with a woman both arrogant and shy, he exercised tact and mildness. But he wooed her with his words also; he strove to penetrate her heart with the light of the teaching. For, like many who think they have found the one true key to life, he wished it given to all the world.

  And as he spoke, he was gladdened to see that Jalasil became responsive. She commenced to look at him, at first doubtfully, and then searchingly, and soon with some intensity. And when he made humorous allusions, she laughed delightedly as a child. And when he discoursed upon the darker aspects, she was anxious. Two or three times her eyes filled with tears. Zhoreb believed he had moved her, which he had, and so helped her — which he had not. Unfortunately, as he urged her so winningly, supposing he led her to consciousness, it seemed to her he exerted himself to such heights because he had discovered something in her which had charmed him. And his clearness and brilliance appeared to sparkle up from the same wild fount by which she was brightened. An interplay of energies wove between them like a fiery net. Then Jalasil was able to meet his eyes, to mingle her eyes with his without fear but with a terrible excitement. And meanwhile, struck by the virtues of his mind and spirit, she saw him to be not merely handsome of person, an object of desire, but admirable, a tutor for her ignorance. In short, she fell deeply in love with him. But as she did so, the morning waned, noon passed overhead, afternoon settled, and Zhoreb, despite a plying with fruit, confections and wine, started to feel rather tired under this relentlessly seeking gaze.

  ‘Well, madam,’ he said, ‘I must leave you now. The day is drawing on.’

  At once Jalasil was flung from her pinnacle to a freezing depth.

  ‘Pray remain and dine with me. I must give adequate return for your kindness and your lessons. For I shall treasure them.’

  At that Zhoreb, who, it must be remarked, had been flattered by her attention, his success, seemed to hesitate. As if, in the tiled floor, he suddenly beheld a pit concealed under a shawl.

  ‘Alas, madam,’ said Zhoreb, ‘it is the custom of my fellowship to take our evening meal always together.’ This was a lie. He did not like to tell it, and blamed her at once for forcing him to do so.

  Jalasil, unaware of her crime but sensing his coolness, averted her eyes again and said, ‘Perhaps then you would return to the house later in the evening, at an hour which is convenient to you. You will pardon my request, I know. You have divined we are starved here of informed conversation.’

  Then Zhoreb did see the trap and checked at it. He felt a dim anger, for it seemed he had been sported with, made a gull. It was not life’s truth this idle silly woman wanted.

  ‘I will return if you wish,’ he said very coldly. ‘But may not then linger. At dawn tomorrow we must be on our road, my brothers and I.’

  Jalasil’s heart started up and fell down. At the same moment she felt the sting of his look she could no longer meet. Her cheeks burned. She thought, He judges I have propositioned him. So then she entirely averted her face and said haughtily, ‘By all means. Do not trouble then. Go as and when you please. Shall I send you money by the servant?’

  ‘We take no money,’ said Zhoreb in a voice of whips.

  ‘Oh, then it must be given you in kind?’ asked Jalasil
. ‘Like the dinners.’ For now she was hurt enough she must strike back.

  But ‘Madam,’ said Zhoreb, in a voice of scorpions, ‘I beg you, have them serve us no food or drink tonight. We have indulged too freely in the shackling greeds of the body. The figs of the trees and the water of the pool will suffice, and they will cost you nothing.’

  And on such a parting, he left her.

  Night covered the world, and in the garden of Jalasil the lilacs and the myrtles were grey, and every petal of the vermilion roses — black.

  Wake, said the night to many things of the desert, the phantasmal owls, the wolf-faced foxes. Yet, Sleep, the night said to humankind, where it came on them in their sandy shelters, by rocks and wells, or in a silk-hung bed.

  ‘I cannot sleep,’ said Jalasil. ‘Night is too restless. It rings with unheard sounds. It speaks in my ear saying words I cannot recall. The moon gapes at me. The shadows are so thick. Under my lids colours surge and fade. I ache. I cannot be still. I can never sleep.’

  Then she did sleep, and dreamed Zhoreb lay beside her, staring at her with his riverine eyes.

  She woke and wept and did not sleep again.

  Before sunrise, said the little sister, the young men had vacated the oasis. When she went down to fetch the water from the fountain, all trace of them was gone. Such a pity. They would be journeying that way, said the elder sister. Their leader had told her so. A town lay there, ripe for them, no doubt.

  ‘Our lady is behaving oddly,’ confided the elder sister later to the little sister. ‘I do not know how to make her out. She will eat nothing, only drink wine and water. She sits with her harp in her arm, but makes no music.’

  At noon, when the sun was a spike driven from the sky into the earth, three-quarters of the house succumbed to snoring. One quarter, Jalasil, with her veil over her head, went out of her gate and took the incoherent track which led toward the days’ distant town.

  As she walked, the sun smote her and the sand glared up into her eyes. Her feet were scorched, and she shivered.

  I must go to him and sue for forgiveness. Surely, surely I have wronged him, and spoken uncouthly to him. That is the fault. Let me put it right.

  It happened that there had been some contention, for the very first time, among the young men. Most of them had valued their sojourn at the oasis of the ship, the good food of the green-eyed house. ‘Fasting and abstinence may also be used to enchain,’ they quoted at Zhoreb. But he was determined. Supper was avoided, and in the pallor of false dawn they arose and left the place.

  Before the heat of the day, however, they took refuge in a gulley by the road, not many miles from the oasis, for arguing had slowed their pace. Here one of the brackish wells contrasted with the memory of the pool’s clean water. And they began again to grumble at Zhoreb, at which he finally lost patience.

  ‘Return if you will,’ said he. ‘But for myself I shall not.’

  Then they wished to know why this was.

  After some persuasion, he told them.

  ‘The woman there, having nothing better to do, meant to play at love-matching me. It is no vaunt. I was embarrassed at it.’

  Zhoreb’s company looked at him under their lids.

  ‘Well, but,’ said one, ‘you have not been immune to women.’

  It chanced in the way a stone will tumble, or a leaf, that Jalasil at this instant had come upon that stretch of the track. She knew of the gulley and had even tended toward it, thirsting but confused as for what her thirst might be. So she had caught the murmur of their talk, and so she had gone nearer, thinking only to hear the voice of Zhoreb, a drink she craved more than any water.

  And thus she spied on him a third time, unseen, and heard this:

  ‘Girls I have had and not regretted, but they were my choice. She guesses me fruit on a tree and reaches out her hand.’

  ‘But Zhoreb,’ cried another of the band, ‘was she then so uncomely?’

  ‘Not to notice either way. Certainly no beauty to be her excuse. She has two pale green eyes like a cat’s, and no other feature of importance. But worst of all, she stares with those eyes like a hungry vampire. You know the kind of woman, who would split one’s bones for the marrow.’ And at that they laughed, and so did he. ‘Therefore, let us get on when the sun leaves the zenith.’

  ‘You shake lest she pursues you?’

  ‘Hush,’ said Zhoreb, though he laughed yet. ‘I have said too much.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Jalasil, although she spoke only to herself. ‘It is proper you should say such things to cure me.’

  But she was not cured. She wandered away across the sand until, being clear of the spot, she sat down in the shade of a solitary boulder.

  ‘Zhoreb,’ she said, ‘I loved you, I love you still. The one you say you met with was not Jalasil. For if you had met with her, you would not at least have despised her. But you met some other dressed in my skin. And I, some other man dressed in the skin of Zhoreb, who was kinder and more generous than he.’

  Then the day went on, and she knew the young men would have left the gulley, and she considered returning to the track, and to her house. But she thought, All regions are now alike, for love and happiness are in none of them.

  She thought, Even if he had kept himself aloof, yet been a friend to me, this would have contented me.

  But then she thought, No, it is his love I wanted.

  And soon the sky turned red, and redder, and then the sky turned black and the moon came up.

  How cold it is, thought Jalasil. How the wind whistles and whines through the rock.

  At last she did return along the track, through the darkness. Once a wolverine crossed her path. She smiled upon it sadly. Why did the gods make me a woman? What does such a beast know of love?

  At her house, Jalasil encountered some outcry, but she put it aside. She went to her bedchamber and lay there, in darkness. She could not bear a lamp, for her eyes had been dazzled by the sun. Even in the black, red petals fell across her vision. And in her ears ceaselessly rang and whined the sounds of the wind through the rock, but now they were inside her head; she could not elude them.

  She yearned to die, but had not the courage to accomplish it. She yearned to live, and knew this was to be denied her.

  My days are to be only this. Before, I did not know it. (For she had come to realise she had cherished some flimsy hope of change all this time.) He is all the world, and the world goes from me.

  But somewhere in the night, over the restless lights and sounds, the notion came to her that at some hour her love, too, would burn out, and then she would be cold and bitter as the moon. The desert she should be then, sand, ashes.

  The days passed, and a month or two they carried away on their backs. A silence had come on the green-eyed house. It had never been noisy, yet it had been animate. Now the old porter-boy sulked in his lodge, the two old sisters tottered about or sat like two sticks leaned on a wall. The youngest thing in the house had begun to warp and wither. They could no longer draw sustenance from a Jalasil warm and resinous, and suitably active at her tasks and recreations. They had found her out to be an unemployed and hollow-eyed and grieving hag, on whose forehead now, abruptly, a single vertical scar appeared between the brows, who walked with no lightness, who had all the ailments of one twice her age — aching and tingling in her joints, cloudy vision, hearing which heard such sounds as did not exist, an insomnia, a quarrelsome appetite — and since they found her to be this, and so could no longer think her a child, it came on them in turn that correspondingly, they, too, had aged. It seemed to have happened in three nights. An evil spell.

  ‘What is to be done?’ said the sisters. ‘If only her mother were here.’ And then they spoke of Jalasil’s mother, which helped them recapture younger years. They put Jalasil, her sickness and sadness, away in a closet.

  Along the path, the roses shed their blood.

  Just before dawn, the old little sister, disgruntled from a dream, went to fetch water
early. As she came down through the oasis, she saw a woman standing by the shrine of the stone god.

  This woman was tall, and remarkable to look at in some not quite explicable way. For she was clothed only in a coarse robe and her feet were bare. Yet a wave of black hair sprang around her, burnished as the locks of some empress. And the long nails of her hands had been painted with silver.

  ‘Now what are you wanting?’ said the little sister, irascibly. ‘If you have come begging, you must get to our kitchen yard an hour after sunrise. Perhaps we may have some scraps for you.’

  The woman laughed. The little sister almost dropped her jar in fear.

  ‘So you think me a beggar?’

  The little sister frowned, squinted. The black eyes were haughty as a king’s. She had none of the modesty or passive decorum of her sex, this female.

  ‘Whatever you are,’ quavered the little sister, ‘I have no time to stand gossiping here.’

  ‘Nor I, indeed,’ said the woman. ‘Do you see that ugly glare in the east?’

  The little sister looked. She descried the forecast of dawn.

  When she turned about to tell the woman as much, no one stood there at all, save the ancient stone above his altar.

  ‘May the gods preserve me. It was a demon!’ exclaimed the clever little sister. And she spat on the earth and rubbed in the spit with her toes, made various signs, and wailed some gibberish she had learned in her infancy.

  The manifest of a demon in the oasis provided the sisters — and the porter, who did not credit the tale, and enthusiastically berated them — with a busy and useful day. All about the house went the old women, sprinkling certain herbs and laying occasionally some talisman. Every orifice of the house, doors and tourmaline windows, they dolloped with nasty mixtures. Even the panes of their mistress’ chamber were seen to. (Jalasil, seated like the blind and deaf, seemed not to notice.) ‘A blessing her mother was a witch,’ they said to each other, ‘and taught us a thing or two.’