Forests of the Night

by Tanith Lee

  He grew with the year, through a summer of soft heat, waxing thereafter as the season waned.

  Perhaps thirteen days after the advent of winter weather, I chanced to be in that part of the city where lies the cemetery of the Levae-Besset. The winds had come, and scoured the grave-yard, but all the same a lonely sweeper moved about between the tombs, seeing after that which the wind had done, like a tired servant who must wait upon a naughty boy. He was an old, old man, a leper once, who had been cured by a miracle now only speculated upon, and though pronounced clean, he was given a wide path, left friendless, partly a beggar. Seeing him, I tossed him some coins, which he took up from the ground with dignity, as though I had only dropped them in mistake on handing them to him.

  There is, aside from, or because of, his dire, sad, wonderful and obscure history, some weird thing about this ancient creature. It was he, indeed, from whom, when a boy, I had heard of the passing of God across the stars, for it seemed he had beheld the marvel for himself once, before even the sickness struck him.

  I paused now, beckoning him closer. I asked him the location of two or three particular tombs, and finally where stood the grave of Rachel, the daughter of my father’s house.

  The winds blew upon the leper, making him a being of sand itself, a disfigured statue, for the disease had destroyed his features, leaving only his eyes, and a crease of mouth from which his piping voice issued like the wind itself out of a crevice.

  Nevertheless, I could not that day understand what he said to me, though I followed his pointing. In an overgrown corner of the cemetery then I found a small dwelling of death. I did not go very near, for something in its aspect repelled me. I did not guess why I had come to see the spot, nor if I believed one thing or the other, that I had had a sister who perished in my infancy — or if it were some aborted thing unborn. I recalled how my former wife had feared the ghost of her namesake, saying that I conjured it. Did some other Rachel slumber here, having also all the name of my house, some Rachel of an elder or other city, and known to me there.

  I could discover no evidence, or even any clue upon the tomb, which was poreless and worn as the egg of a monstrous bird. The tares and weeds gathered on the sides of it. Did my own wife, after all, lie here, her bones of white amber not yet unsheathed from flesh, the flowing hair which, in candleshine, had had that glimmering green tarnish on it not common save with such blackness -

  Rachel. No, she lived in my father’s house, the mother of my son. She masked her eyes from me, not to let me see where her tiny mouse soul skittered and squeaked behind the windows.

  The leper swept the by-ways between the graves with the wind going before him, the greater at the work. But they were for now in harmony.

  I made a curious resolve. The day was shrinking to the west, and presently the sun would set. By an act of will, I might return to my home at the exact commencement of the twilight…

  My heart stirred to beat like a tabor over my brow, against my throat.

  Muffling my face against the dust, and the glances of the inquisitive, I took my way with slow carefulness, sometimes loitering, at length quickening my steps when the dark began to bloom along the edges of the city.

  I reached the gate at the exact moment, and passed on like a dreamer into the inner courts. I hesitated at the threshold of the women’s quarters, and looked about, striving to recapture the elusive element which had risen so poignantly, once, to my thoughts, so readily. If it were a magic I could not say. I did not choose to question, as then I had not.

  There were no lamps, although it was the time of their lighting. A hush, profound as stillness upon water, held the earth. I moved towards the apartment of my wife, the tabor beaten loudly in my ears. What should I now go in and find? Why, it should be whatever I might desire. It should be she.

  But the maid at the door stifled a stupid giggle when she saw me. She was a dunce of a girl. She belonged in the actual world that Rachel-who-was-Harah inhabited.

  I tried to blind myself to muddy reality. The twilight made its panes within the lattice, amethysts that glowed. I approached the darkened room with the divan of silk, and going in, I found the lamps were burning, and my wife sat with her women, looking up astonished at me, as if I disturbed them all.

  When the attendants were gone, I was at a loss. She had put on her meek simpering manner, awaiting my demands, without fear or pleasure.

  ‘Harah,’ I said, ‘how do you fare here, in these rooms?’

  ‘I am most comfortable,’ said eye-hiding Harah.

  ‘Have you never heard the story,’ I said, ‘my former wife, who died, perhaps haunts the place?’

  Harah folded her hands. Her face was like a bladder, so fat and soulless, it seemed blown up by nothing.

  ‘Or my sister,’ I said, ‘Rachel. Have you never seen their ghosts?’

  ‘Oh no, my lord,’ said Harah, darting me a mindless blink, to see if this were some jest she must pretend to enjoy.

  ‘But I have seen her,’ I said. ‘My Rachel. For many months she appeared before me.’

  Harah was dimly startled now, and fiddled with some beadwork on her sash. She had grown plump and heavy since the child. She doubted my mind, yet still was not afraid or anxious, not properly interested. She spoke some other language. Harah was her name. She could never be Rachel. I left her without another word.

  My father lay propped in the bed of carven posts, he was weaker now and retired early. The owl was long since away above the city, hunting in narrow corridors of the white moonlight, I had seen it passage over the lunar bow, its shadow flung across my eyes. I fancied the old man’s spirit went with it in his dreams; at death, he might enter into the body of the owl, his tried companion. Was God so merciful? There was nothing in the teaching of scripture that gave me to suppose He was.

  ‘Father,’ I muttered, bending near. He raised his lids. I should not trouble him with this. His fingers, thin as wands, were surely too insubstantial to support the three great rings … his skull gleamed upward at me through his slender skin, a bone beneath a gauze. ‘Father.’

  ‘What do you crave?’

  ‘I beg you — I entreat you — tell me the facts of her life, your daughter, Rachel.’

  He seemed to smile. He said quietly, ‘She was the child of a concubine. On the day that I wed my wife, your mother, Rachel was twelve years. She had always seemed to me winsome. She would gather herbs, and sing songs to a little harp. Her hair was blacker than black water. But your mother took against Rachel. I sent the maiden away. She died soon after, perhaps of sadness, for in my house she was obedient and given to laughter, but there they said she was shrewish, or she wept.’

  ‘Where is her grave?’

  But my father was sleeping between his last sentence and mine. Beneath his lids, the eyes seemed still to stare upward at me, blue as the sapphires in the other skull. They were pitiless, these imaginary orbs.

  Beyond the window, the owl hunted the stars of heaven. Its wings put them out, they reappeared a moment later.

  I did not know if I had heard the truth at last, or if a truth existed.

  After my father’s death, which occurred peacefully during that winter, near to the Days of Bitter Herbs, I put on the mantle of my house, finding to my slight surprise that it did not weigh me down or chafe me. I had grown myself slow and heavy enough to bear it.

  Harah awarded me another child in the spring, a second boy, not so strong as the first, a baby continually crying, so that sometimes, in the silence of the day or night, I would pick up his mournful notes, persistent as a cricket, rubbing away at sorrow in his crib.

  That summer stalked the land like a lion, and there was a great drought, as far as Geth Lelah, and up into the Dark Lands even, where the river, that is named for their mighty crocodile god, turned red and failed to rise, pray and sacrifice to it as they would.

  The winter came again, and at last the rain fell, out of season. The winds were flails and scourges. A plague of scorpions te
rrorised the city. One of these was found near the bed of my first son, but he took no harm from it, a servant killed it without even waking the boy. But Harah became frantic and would not be comforted. At length she sent asking me to visit her.

  It was late in the afternoon, the shadows barred across the floor, and something in the light made me, on going in, consider this woman as if I had never met with her. And it was a fact, she seemed to me unknown, a fat and ugly thing, with ravaged eyes from weeping, so I half wondered what call she had on me, though she had been my wife and borne my house two sons.

  ‘Have they told you,’ she burst out at once, wringing her podgy hands into which the unsightly gold bangles now bit, ‘your son was almost slain as he slept?’

  ‘But now he is safe, all is well.’

  ‘No, not well! It is that witch who practises against him. As against me. Since I have lived under your roof I have not had a moment’s good. Bearing your children, each time, I have almost died. Now she sends the scorpions to kill my babies!’

  ‘Who is it you speak of?’ I asked quietly, hoping to impose some calm upon her.

  But she flared out worse than before.

  ‘You say to me that you do not know? You who shelter and shield the abomination under your arm, preferring her in my despite. Well, I can do nothing for myself. I have no worth here. But surely, when the life of your heir is threatened — ’

  ‘Harah, I understand not one word of this. I shelter no woman but yourself, save in the general way, the servant women of the house.’

  ‘Servant she never is. Your handmaid. Oh, I have known all these years. They whisper how you shame me. Setting her the higher, your accursed concubine, that Rachel.’

  I felt as if I had received a violent blow. Rather than stun or enrage me, it stirred me up to excitement, nearly joy.

  I said, in the same stony voice I had employed before, ‘The name you speak is that of my former wife. I will request you, do not insult her memory, which stays dear to me.’

  ‘Dead — no woman dead, but a live woman. I have seen her, at twilight before they light the lamps. She parades herself upon the gallery, combing her hair, all unbound like a virgin’s, twining flowers in it, and rich trinkets you have given her, who give me nothing. She scratches in my side like a thorn, and you care not at all. Yet if you do not curb her evil sorcery now, your son will die. It is she plagues us with scorpions.’

  ‘Then she has plagued the whole city with them. Be quiet, Harah. You talk nonsense and you anger me. The boy is secure, and none of this would in any case have happened, had you taken better care of him and less of your sweetmeat boxes. I must leave you. There are things I must attend to which stand neglected for your sake. Command yourself. In future do not bother me with foolish lies.’

  ‘God is my judge!’ shrieked Harah. ‘How you wrong me!’

  ‘He is mine also,’ I answered. ‘What I have said, I have meant. Be schooled by it, or expect no further courtesy from me.’

  ‘What courtesy have I had of you then,’ she said, ‘that I should fear its loss?’

  And covering her face, she wept and screamed so her maids came running and I hastened to be gone.

  Sitting late with the steward over certain accounts of the house, I asked him if there were any woman that he knew of in our service who went by the name of Rachel.

  He seemed perplexed to be asked, considered, and told me eventually there had been one elderly woman of that name, who had died three summers before.

  I said my wife had spoken angrily of Rachel, accusing her of unlawful acts of witchcraft.

  The steward shook his head. The vagaries of the female sex …

  We sat on together, as the candles burned away, and the flagon of wine between us. Close to dawn, the owl, which still returned at this hour to my father’s empty study, floated by the window. The mask of its face was like a painted ghost. Its comings and goings went uncurbed in memory of my father, yet to the owl we were nothing, the esoteric room of ancient curios and books, only a perch. The loss of its companion had not disturbed the owl. My father would have felt it keenly, had this been the other way about. I could no longer dream the old man’s soul had taken wing inside the bird. God is merciful, yet his mercy is beyond our understanding. His ways to us appear cruel and jealous, and yet we know that when we shall come to see clearly, even the direst strokes that He has made against and upon us, even those that have smitten us like the sharpened edge of steel, these, even these, shall be revealed in their true purpose, to be His justice and His infinite compassion.

  The steward was grey, he had served us faithfully for many decades. I realised, as we rose together, stiff from our vigil, that I now trod slow but sure upon his heels. My youth was done. It had left me lightly as a summer breeze. I had never felt it go.

  There came a year that I took, after all, a concubine.

  Harah was past the age for childbearing, and preferred that I did not visit her. At first she had dyed her hair with henna from the Dark Lands, but then she left it alone, and wore the wig of tradition, which was not the manner of the women of my house. Her body had changed shape, becoming a bundle on which she hung still her bangles and necklaces of gold. If I sent her a jewel, it pleased her, as did my gifts of sweets, although I believed she liked the sweets rather more. I have one unfailing picture of her, my second wife, upon her divan heaped with cushions, sparkling with her ornaments, and the sunlight dancing on her rings and the green gem that matched the greenish glaze of the confectionary; a tray of eatable emeralds, or an emerald sweet stuck into a ring. Our elder son was there, looking up at her fawningly. She fed him from the tray. He too would grow fat as she, he had that tendency already. He was sluggish at his lessons, and bullied the other boys. The younger child had not lived beyond his third year. There were no others. This, then, the heir of my house, this Ibram. He called me Father, and was respectful to me. When he stood before me, he had a habit of hooking one leg behind the other, nervous and wanting to be away. Of course he knew I had no love for him, was uncomfortable with him, did for and with him all I must do out of duty. He was destined to grow into a sturdy, gross young man, who hated me and was contemptuous of what I had accomplished. He does not value the roots of our lives, sees not much worth in them. I suspect even his aspect before me (though he has given up the hooking leg) is largely a pretence, although he dreads what I might do in anger — and that also is from his mother. I would never raise my hand to my son in anger, if ever he had forgotten himself so far as to cause the emotion in me. Harah told him I am a tyrant. He sees for himself he irks me. Perhaps he thinks I would have cared more for the other son, if that one had lived.

  Is it then that I found within myself that year a desire and need for some presence which, asking of me nothing, would supply nevertheless a mere friendliness, a lightness, the blossom of a youth which had vanished away, soaked up into the avaricious stones. For even my fat son was old, more than his years, and every servant of the place seemed crooked, slow-footed, pale and sere, a colony of withered reeds.

  So, I had them find for me this girl. She was the daughter of slaves, yet they had trained her well, she was gentle, modest, yet not secretive.

  Her hair was long and of a coppery colour. She would comb it out for me, scented with the perfumes of the Dark Lands, costly presents I obtained, for such things delighted her. She was very young, and her manner with me was like that of a child. I took care not to abuse her. I did not lie with her for almost three seasons. She was innocent but not fearful. The pattern of desire had altered for me with age.

  When I had lain with her the first time, I experienced a sadness, of the sort that now and then a certain music will bring on.

  Her name was Leah.

  Soon after this there began with me a recurring dream which, I think now, may visit me until my death. Sometimes it is with me at every slumber, then it comes not at all and almost I forget the nature of it, till at length in the last of night, perhaps between the mo
onset and the dawn, the familiar returns upon me, but with no sense of being known.

  I am a young man in the dream, as I was before my father’s age and frailty fastened upon him.

  It is in the dream, always, twilight, and in the women’s quarters of the house they are lighting the lamps.

  As I approach I see, up on the gallery, my sister Rachel in her white dress, her sash of silver, and although there is no wind that evening, her unbound hair is coiling out about the stems of the brass candlebranch she carries. Candles burn in it, and a green glimmer ebbs and flows over her hair. She shakes her head at me: it is forbidden.

  I remember then that we have committed, she and I, the terrible sin of incest, that we have been lovers here in our father’s house. And I comprehend, as if with my very soul, that all the agony of deliciousness I have had with her must be paid for in life and in regret, perhaps in blood — But to me, only the mysterious coiling of her green-black hair has any meaning, and the shape of her in paleness on the dark.

  Then she goes away, vanishing like a phantom into the shadows. I pass on to the apartments of my wife, who I find, sullen and pregnant, in the red glow of a lamp.

  Beyond her, too, in the window the moon is high on the stretched pane of the shining dusk. As my wife raises her head, her white profile shows for a moment, mirrored by the white bow of the moon — which, at that instant, seems also to possess features … the face of my sister Rachel.

  My wife greets me in the usual way: What? Have you forced yourself to call on me?

  I say nothing. What she says is a fact. I have no love for this woman, and that I have got her with child is solely out of obligation, that she has permitted it, likewise. We are two slaves of our traditions.

  But then she says: You have thought only for your sister.

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

  She laughs bitterly, and answers: You forget Rachel.

  I say, to excuse this dangerous mistake: Rachel is not counted my sister. She is the daughter of a handmaid of my mother’s.