Forests of the Night

by Tanith Lee

  ‘Bah!’ shouted the boy and shook his stick.

  ‘Just like a man,’ said they. ‘Ignore the brute.’

  All told, much harmless pleasure that day gave them, and when the sun westered, the sisters huddled in a room above the kitchen, peering from its windows this way and that between vivacious fright and complacence. ‘It cannot get past the safeguards should it return. It will try to make a bargain. On no account must we speak to it. I recall one story of an elderly person who asked a demon to be made young again. And the demon said, “That I refuse, but you shall get no older.” And struck her down.’

  ‘But I recall a story of a hideous one that the demon transformed to such beauty the whole world ran mad for love at the sight of her,’ said the little sister.

  ‘Even lions and tigers,’ she added, saucy as ever.

  ‘Less of your squawking,’ ranted the porter below. He had left the gate and gone in to the kitchen, though he denied this was on account of the demon.

  Presently the sun went down. The sky shone like wine in a golden bowl, then became pale like rosy ink in a bowl of platinum. And then the sky was the colour of distilled lavender, and a cool breeze ran lightly through the garden as a cat, turning the heads of the flowers as they drooped.

  ‘Oh! Oh, look and see!’ screamed the little sister.

  There, quite within the safeguards, in the garden, the black-haired woman stood, the demon, wrapped in a mantle on which the stars were coming out exactly as they did in heaven.

  ‘Open your window,’ said the demon to the sisters, although perhaps not in words. (They were aware of a wondrous music; noiseless.)

  ‘By no means,’ said the elder, ‘open the window.’

  They opened it, and leaned out chittering.

  The woman looked up at them, her white hands and face seeming to glow and float upon the gathering dark, like the white flowers of the garden.

  ‘Listen well,’ said she. ‘You will conduct me at once into the presence of your mistress Jalasil, who lies this very moment drowning in despair upon her couch.’

  ‘What do you want with our poor girl?’ cheeped the sisters.

  ‘To give her,’ said this demon, ‘her heart’s desire.’

  ‘This is a trick,’ said the sisters. ‘We must resist these blandishments. We must not stir.’

  So they scuttled down and the little sister conducted the demoniac being into the house and upstairs to Jalasil’s chamber, with the elder sister preceding them to announce an arrival.

  Jalasil did lie as predicted, tossing on her divan in a cold fever.

  ‘Madam,’ said the elder sister, ‘one has come to comfort you.’

  The night-haired woman with the kingly eyes entered the room. Where she stood, starlight and moonlight seemed to coalesce in a curtain of crystal.

  Go out now. Be gone.

  Out went the sisters, gone they were. Down to the kitchen and the porter, to crouch among the pots, muttering and clicking amulets.

  The woman stood in her crystal curtain and beckoned to Jalasil across all the hills of oblivion.

  ‘Return to the earth,’ said Azhrarn. (He might take any form, had taken this one.) ‘Come here, straying, limping heart. Do not make me impatient, waiting.’

  Then the essence of Jalasil seemed to fill her like water. It brimmed up to her eyes, and she opened them and saw; her ears, and she heard clearly. She sat up on her couch, staring, not knowing where she had been, where returned, who was there with her, and hardly recollecting, for that matter, who she herself was.

  ‘Jalasil,’ said Azhrarn, in a woman’s voice.

  Jalasil recollected everything. Her face became a scarf of pain.

  ‘Yes,’ said the Demon, musingly, looking at her. ‘These are the true lessons of love. Desolation, anguish, misery. Have you learned them well, Green-Eyes?’

  Jalasil could not speak. She moaned. A thousand speeches, ten thousand songs, lived in that one note.

  ‘Well, then,’ said Azhrarn, ‘what reward do you say you merit, for becoming such a scholar in this school?’

  Then she did reply. She wept. ‘He will never feel love for me, and him only I love, and that for ever. He is all I want and all I may not have. The agony of this does not abate. It eats me away. I am poisoned. If only he had loved me!’

  ‘He shall.’

  Silence.

  Then: ‘Do not mock me,’ she said. Yet her eyes suddenly burned. Azhrarn was, even in disguise, what he was. She believed him. None, hearing him answer in that beautiful and appalling voice, could have doubted.

  ‘There is some magic in you,’ Azhrarn said, ‘the legacy of your mother. I have devised for you a sorcery which, having been performed, will bring you this man, as a dog is brought to a bitch. Loins and heart, mind and flesh — all yours: Zhoreb, upon your leash.’

  Jalasil only breathed. The last of her strength seemed to leave her in that exhalation. Her head drooped as the heads of flowers before they fall.

  ‘Give me this, if you are able. In return, what? Do you want my soul? It is yours.’

  ‘Your soul. Find a way to place it in a handy casket, I will take it with me.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘To assist you,’ said Azhrarn, ‘is payment in itself.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jalasil. Her condition was so heightened, she saw with more than sight. ‘It is a wicked deed, to suborn the will of another. And you are Wickedness, are you not?’

  The woman made no comment. She said only, ‘I will tell you the sorcery whereby to gain your heart’s desire.’

  Jalasil waited wearily, pale, and stern, to hear.

  ‘Descend to your garden. Search out there the season’s final rose. Cut the stem. Cut a finger of your left hand. Give your blood to the rose and let it drink. Say these words: There exists in Zhoreb no love for Jalasil. Therefore believe in the love of Zhoreb for Jalasil.’

  Again, silence.

  ‘And is that all?’ said Jalasil.

  ‘What more would you have? Take the rose to your chamber. Set it on your pillow. You will see a change. In seven days, he will be at your gate.’

  ‘Supposing that you lie?’

  ‘You do not think I lie. Repeat the spell. Let us be sure you have it right.’

  ‘The final rose from the garden. Cut it and cut myself, the left hand’s finger. Give the rose to drink my blood. Say, “There exists in Zhoreb no love for Jalasil. Therefore believe in the love of Zhoreb for Jalasil.”’ The fever had deserted her. She added in a deathly voice. ‘Yes, you do not lie.’

  But she was alone in the chamber.

  Soon, Jalasil left the room. She descended and sought through her garden like a ghost. The sky was dark now, the moon in a cloud. She detected the rose not by its shape or colour, but from its scent. She cut first one thing, then the other. She gave the rose a drink full of the poison of love. She said the words.

  She returned to her bed, and let the rose lie on her pillow. She plunged asleep, was buried there, woke at sunrise. And on the pillow lay the rose, not faded, but black as coal.

  Where he could, he ran; where the terrain made precipitate speed impossible, he advanced by great strides. As he went, he flung back his head and sang, or whistled the piping tones of the desert wind over. Even by night, while he could, he went on. The animals of the waste fled from him or hid from him. When he stretched himself exhausted on the ash of the sand, he dreamed of her. The dunes became her body, the fine dust silvered through his fingers like her hair. In the wells, he saw, sleeping and waking, her eyes. Where he could, he ran.

  He had been in a town — some conglomeration of buildings — they had halted there, he and the band of young men. There had been falling out and abrasions. Some slackened, and Zhoreb beheld them as they succumbed to the whiles of the town, to patrons who took them up, fed them and soused them with strong drink, exploiting their abilities as if they were street magicians. Yet others of the fellowship, too staunch in their views, going against a priesthood the
re, had been offered stoning and fled. Zhoreb went about his business, as he saw it to be, quietly. He healed, he addressed the crowds in the market. He did not speak against the town temple, which was less corrupt than others he had been shown. He waited out the squabbles, seductions, runnings off. One did not, in the teaching, enforce help. He waited to see if any union of the fellowship might be retrieved. For himself he would not deny, for denial was itself a snare, that he was no longer light, but merely restless. He experienced again and again a curious discomfort, as if he had left unfinished some vital act. Putting his hands upon the shoulders of an old man to ease his rheumatism, Zhoreb glimpsed all at once the fearsomeness of a world all of whose beauties and foulnesses, joys, triumphs and ailments were the creations of untruth. Nothing was real, and for that very reason, illusion had made itself into granite, the better to fake what it was not. To move these granite blocks, such as illness or pain, was simple — but then, the amorphous abyss lay revealed under one’s feet. As the cripple straightened his arms, crying out that he felt warmth, then that his hurt had left him, Zhoreb for a second knew all the terror of one adrift in compassless space. I have been a child at play with fires, some voice said within him. Now I see it burns, how can I dare?

  But he remained in the town, at its outskirts, where the hem of the desert was stitched. Sand drifted into his domicile, which was an awning pegged across the end of an alley.

  Gradually, some of the nomad band returned to him, along with the poor and the sick, and the children who came daily to sit on the swept sandy earth under the awning. Quickly, in haste, let us take up again the wandering life. To be static was never wise. Cobwebs clung to walls which stood. Men must journey, for in motion lay the seed, or at least the symbol of progress.

  But then, in the night, the awning’s night which had no stars, softly something brushed into his ear. Like a petal — a moth — he started up and felt a golden chain riveted through his very soul with bolts of steel.

  And by this, illusion in its turn displayed to him all its awful and consoling power. The granite was immovable. The abyss, out of which anything might be summoned, vanished from sight.

  He was glad. He was made drunken by the relief of it. Powerless, the student of Dathanja, Zhoreb cried aloud a cry that shook the alley.

  He went from the town before dawn, telling no one of his purpose, himself barely conscious of it.

  Somewhere, as he hastened along, under the burning-glass of the sun, it came to him it was love drove him, dragged him, thrust him. She — that woman in the house with eyes of tourmaline — she, with her transparent satin hair. He could not think what lay beyond the deed, which must be possession. He had seen it in her eyes — not famishment but entreaty, desire — they must have reflected the image in his own. For that very cause he had turned from her, put her from his brain into exile. But uselessly. She had fastened herself under his skull.

  Love was the key to all things.

  Illusion was granite, an immovable mountain.

  Where he could he raced and ran.

  On the seventh day the black rose crumbled into soot. There was a loud knocking at the gate. In her chamber, Jalasil, in a gown of colours, her hair combed with sandalwood, malachite paste on her eyelids, sat waiting.

  He entered the rooms like a storm, dark flame, male energy, and the old women let him go up alone, as if they knew. They crept to their kitchen, as if they knew it all.

  ‘You are here,’ she said.

  He saw her, how she had been pared by savage need. He loved her for her suffering and her pallor, her green eyes, her hunger.

  ‘Jalasil,’ said he. He came to her and raised her to her feet. His hands, which had healed many, and soothed many more, and which were not entirely strangers to the limpid skins of women, they clasped her. He drew her in, encircled her. He put back her head upon his arm and kissed her mouth. Her hair glided on his wrists. The touch of her hair, her body against his body, the pulse in her throat, the refreshment of her mouth, broke in the secret doors of a wisdom he had never dreamed of. Having her, he would possess himself. She was the key. The mountain must shatter heaven, they riding on the crest.

  He lifted his face, to look at her. Her eyes, too, were pale, and far away. He did not mind it. He spoke all the love-words to her that the poet in him, that was, is, in all human things, knew to utter. They lay upon her bed. Her longing for him, her tortured yearning, palpable as the silk, had remade that couch.

  He took her virginity with the gentle care of love, and with love’s glorious violence. They rode the air, clove through fire and water, sank in the closeness of earth.

  And when it was done, in the death-like honey of after-pleasure, he watched her lean above him.

  ‘Too late,’ said Jalasil. ‘My heart had died of the wounds you gave it. If you had wanted me at the start, ah, how it might have been — sun and moon, earth and heaven. Stars would have fallen. But I have dreamed of you so often, I have dreamed you out. You are only a shadow, and even that shadow came to me, not from love of me, but through a filthy sorcery of demonkind, who hate all men, and all women, too. I have suffered and given too much to have you.’

  And then he saw her eyes as they were, cruel and empty, wanting nothing any more.

  ‘You,’ she said, ‘you. You might have brought the best of the world to me, and I, perhaps, some comfort to you. But it is too late, you are a shadow, you are the demon’s toy and trick. Zhoreb loves me, Zhoreb desires me. Therefore I no longer believe in Zhoreb’s love and desire. Perhaps I am to blame. I made you a god. You are only a man.’

  And from under the pillow she drew the knife which had cut the rose. And he, like the sacrifice, chained in gold, felt only the granite mountain heaped on him, which there never was, or ever is, any moving.

  ‘In my chamber,’ said she to the porter, ‘you will find a dead man with a dagger through his throat.’

  The porter lowered his gaze, as if he were only sullen.

  Jalasil walked down into the oasis. Above, the ship of salt glittered in the sunlight, and the water of the pool flushed bright below.

  Taking off her girdle of green braid, she knotted it into a locust tree, and thereby hanged herself.

  And here, through the day, she hung from her bough, and through the glistening noon she hung there. But in the afternoon, the shade came and garbed her round, mantling her whiteness, binding her eyes. In the end each trace of colour melted into the ground. And night covered everything, black as a rose.

  RACHEL

  Rachel began in my consciousness when I was eighteen. It took me therefore twenty-two years to resolve my approach. What I was approaching I did not, as has happened elsewhere, know, until I recognised the story’s destination, on the final page.

  The oriental source is very unlike that of the preceding work. The core of the story, too — not fantasy magic, but the mystical-spiritual muscle much of humanity senses within itself, and interprets in so many and various ways.

  Among the brazen snake-necks of the candle-branches, the green blackness of her hair a coiling cloud … But I remember also their two faces, forming a white cameo, the profiles identical, facing together, like some design in the margin of an ancient book.

  She berates me: You have thought only for your sister.

  I answer: I have no sister. All the daughters of my father’s house are dead.

  It was disposed in this way, in the manner of tradition, my father arranged for me a marriage. I saw my wife for the first time when I met her under a scarlet canopy. She was a stranger, and as such I took her in. I did what was expected, with any courtesy or kindness that was in me. Maybe not with much.

  Perhaps she had convinced herself to love me, or been taught she must do so. She made her world from me, having nothing else. And presently, finding no emotion reciprocal, she began to hate me, too.

  ‘When did she die?’ asked my wife, sometime in the third month of our marriage. ‘I mean, your sister Rachel.’

  I
was bemused, not sure of her reference.

  ‘Long ago. I was a child.’

  ‘But you recall her. She was the elder?’

  My house is an old one. The fashion of it is to keep separate the men’s side from the women’s. I reminded my ignorant wife of this. But she persisted.

  ‘Rachel you saw often. Passing on a gallery, in the little garden gathering herbs. In a white dress, with her black hair unbound.’

  ‘I remember nothing like that.’

  ‘Where is her grave?’

  ‘In the cemetery of the Levae-Besset.’

  ‘Not here? Not in the courts of the house?’

  ‘Only my great grandfather, the Patriarch, is buried here, as you know, by the north wall. If you require other information, you must seek out my father.’

  ‘Your father is unapproachable.’

  ‘He is elderly, and frail.’

  ‘A scholar, he locks himself away. He will not speak to a mere woman of his house.’

  ‘You are my wife, his daughter by the Law.’

  ‘What?’ she said, ‘do you believe that?’

  I stared at her.

  Then she lowered her eyes, which were by turns cunning and afraid.

  ‘I mean,’ she whispered, ‘that you forget me.’

  In response to this, I begged her pardon and promised to spend that evening and night with her in her apartments.

  She then went to great lengths to amuse and please me. A banquet was laid at some expense to my father’s coffers, and there were two dancers from Belkasha. But when we retired she began to weep, saying I did not love her, which was true enough. In the midst of her recriminations and incoherent laments, she pointed to a strange shadow some object in the room had cast up on the wall. ‘You unlawfully summon her ghost!’

  I bade her be still, and left her long before dawn, weary, and in a singular, heavy depression of spirit.

  Later that day, about noon, when my father rested from his prayers and study of antique books and scrolls, I went up to his rooms over the west roof.