by Tanith Lee
It was at a banquet that, initially, Heracty beheld the Red Queen, the dead King’s widow.
She entered late, and the Prince rose graciously, and with ill-concealed boredom, to greet her. Seating herself, she stared about as if not knowing where she was, thinking it a dream. Occasionally she would take up some morsel from her plate, or begin to lift her goblet — but sustenance never reached her mouth, for obviously she forgot its purpose half-way. She wore a gown the shade of dying autumn, not a single jewel.
The Prince, demanding antics constantly that evening from Heracty, interrupted the dwarf’s study a hundred times. Courteous and wise, Heracty never once displayed his annoyance.
The Queen left the feast before midnight. Heracty was not permitted to leave until the men lay drunken in their chairs, or over the tables.
When dawn breaks, Heracty frequently goes into the menagerie. Adjacent to the dwarfs’ enclosure, it is simple of access.
More often than not the unicorn falls asleep at dawn, its muzzle laid on its flank, the curving horn, more swarthy than its hide, like the sinking crescent of the moon. The two-headed dog sits sadly, one head deep in thought and the other slumbering with the tongue hanging out.
But the gulon stalks its prettified pen, disdaining the luxury of its kennel. A fox-cat, it looks now most feline, but next second mostly canine, having strong features of both types. It is the colour of Queen Innocin’s banquet gown, and her hair, and Heracty has been told that combings of its long damascened fur are sometimes woven to trim her mantles.
The eyes of the gulon are rather like Heracty’s own, but lack any trace either of courtly politeness or civilisation.
The gulon has been known to savage its keepers, one of whom lost an arm as the result. It is dissatisfied with its life and does not appreciate its uniqueness.
Heracty is wondering if Innocin the Queen has ever looked on the gulon.
When he witnessed her descent through the palace, sensed the wild, inane search, it fitted her like a costly necklace. It is a perfection. She could do no other thing.
He values it in her.
The Lost Child (the Palace)
The girl Idrel wakes like an early crocus.
She lifts her head, and all about her lies the snow. Snow is her coverlet in a four-poster bed of ice. Slight wonder she dreamed she lay in a coffin, but the coffin was of glass …
The girl gets to her feet. She does not feel the cold, only a deep desire to lie down again and sleep again — and this she believes is to be resisted. She is garbed only in a shift, and not, she guesses, her own. It covers her decently from neck to foot and even drags a little behind her as she walks. But for a shield against the winter it is useless. However, she is under protection, feels it must be so. All the ways of the forest look alike to her. She consents to walk forward, in the direction she faced on waking, rising.
A stealthy umbra permeates the woods, it might be any time of day, though not of night. The snow is packed very hard and does not take an impression of the bare soles of Idrel. She expects wild animals lair among the firs and cedars, and perhaps will run out at her. Twice she catches a glimpse of some sinuous thing, the colour itself of the forest dusk — but this does not approach.
Sometimes a branch or bough cracks under the snow’s weight, startling, like a whiplash. There are no other sounds but for the glacial ringing of silence itself.
How long the girl walks, in distance or time, she is unsure. But suddenly, the trees have thinned, and there ahead is a thick sky of grey nacre, and the terraces of a snow-hill cut into it.
Ghostly winds run on the hill, and blow the snow like white steam along the ground. Idrel climbs with three winds taking up her hair and throwing it to each other, and then down, clutching at her ankles, slapping her cheeks, and her eyes fill with slow tears. Then, at the summit, she discovers an odd road made all of solid ice.
Idrel steps on to the road of ice. Dimly, a reflection tapers from under her feet, and also there are objects caught there, mostly abstractions, though she begins to fancy statuary or frozen people are trapped in the glass coffin of it.
In a brief while, she perceives herself to have come in, almost unawares in the sameness of the snow, to a colossal ruin, maybe of a city. Tiles and parts of walls, doorways, roof-beams, arches, the skeletons of windows, have stolen round her, and high above a briary of knife-like cruel towers hangs abandoned in heaven.
The sight of this abnormal edifice, or what there is left of it, causes Idrel, lost and alone, to question for the first time where she has come from, and who she is, and why she has travelled to such a place.
After an appreciable time, she mutters aloud, ‘I shall remember, soon.’
And then she goes on, walking through the eroded architecture, down into dark avenues where pillars have collapsed and become static rollers of snow, and up stairways innumerable to her. And on her journey she passes only once something which touches her poignantly. This is an enormous flower, portionally of stone but mostly of opaque, bluish ice. The shape of the flower is a rose, but this the lost girl fails to ascertain. Perhaps she never saw a rose before, in whatever spot she has come from.
At last — the sky is stained with a more foreboding twilight — the girl Idrel reaches a wide platform against a door that seems to be of iron. Icicles drip down it, with edges that are like razors. She is afraid to put her hand to the door.
She sits before it. Night now must find her here.
The desire to sleep returns, and there in the leaden sunset she shuts her eyes and knows no more.
The King (the Queen’s First Sin)
It was not true, she had not been a slut of the kitchen, not even a scullery maid, Innocin — but neither had she been called, then, Innocin.
On a day in late spring, returning from a hunt, the King had passed across the rough meadows below the Palace. A few good houses stood about, with formal small gardens, and orchards. But on the meadowland the first poppies were blooming, and a girl was there, plucking them like the strings of the day-harp, gathering armfuls of fire. Her hair was like a soft fire, also, but not much in evidence, scraped back from her yellow-white face and confined in a long rat’s tail of braid.
She was dressed like a servant and doubtless that was what she was.
The King, having glanced at her — attention caught by the blot of red among the redness of the poppies — rode on. Half a mile further, he reined in. He called someone, his steward, or some aristocratic companion. ‘I spied a damsel in that last field. Have her got.’
This King had whims, now and then, and his court was not unaccustomed to them. An envoy was sent — but the girl had vanished from the meadow, perhaps frightened away by her vision of loud horsemen and the carcasses of deer.
He went back behind the great iron doors of his house, the King. He brooded. He was used to getting that which he chose to want. A dark man, big and bear-like, he began to think of delicate things, waist-chains of slender gold, satin stockings, tortoise-shell combs which, taken forth, let fall a light flood of hair …
Another whim came over him, and inside two days he had had made a slim dress of poppy-red velvet, and red-gold slippers with buckles printed by rubies. He had judged her measures; for the footwear, if it did not fit, he supposed she would make the best of things, the shoes being what they were.
He had the garments transported around the peripheries of the Palace, and out to the marble houses on the meadows. He did not go so far as to accompany the party in disguise. His only instruction was: ‘Red hair, white face. And if these bits go on to her, then you have the proper animal.’
But the hunt did not turn up anything of the right looks, let alone the correct build to fill garments and slippers.
The King began to fret. He was not used to this, to not getting his way.
They said afterwards the management of temporal affairs suffered at that time, but in fact, by now, the King was no longer necessary in the manner of a ruler. The direction of
such lands as were postulated to be his was under the sway of councils, assemblies and ministers. What matter if a scatter of minor papers went unsigned, or a town or two was spared a royal progress?
Months presented themselves and were spent.
Came a morning, sportively pretending to simplicity the King went out, on foot, with ten men and some dogs. He had almost forgotten the girl among the poppies, she was fading from him as the flowers had already had the grace to do. He would refer to how he had been cheated, occasionally, since he had stubbornly retained his dissatisfaction, the whiff of baulked romance, lose his temper then, or frown and call for music. This daybreak, it was quite out of his head.
There was a mist, mild and sweet, and in the mist suddenly he saw the girl, walking along, russet-cloaked, a basket on her arm.
She was going towards the ornamental woods out of which, further down, the King and his company had just emerged. In the mist, she seemed not to note eleven hunters and seven dogs. Perhaps her eyesight was poor, as others came later to believe.
Because she was slipping away into the shadows of the forest, the King motioned his men to silent stasis. He alone went back into the wood after her.
She had committed a kind of heresy against him. She had kept him waiting, and worse, vexed. He felt an entitlement now to do what he liked, although he would have done what he liked in any event.
The Blonde Dwarfess (the Beast in the Wood)
Heracty has been told that the flaxen dwarfess once had an adventure in the mock forest below the Palace.
He does not know whether to credit this. She herself has never told him anything of it, though she is far from reticent.
Apparently, she had gone down the floral steppes, and wandered, astray, among the trees. She was gathering flowers, and carried a basket. But she wore courtly finery, and a scarlet snood sewn with brilliants, a gift of the Prince’s. No one had warned her of the clockwork animals in the forest. Or, if they ever had, she misunderstood. She had left her maid, a canny brat of six years, behind.
When something howled, the dwarfess took the noise for that of one of the Prince’s hounds, which were sometimes exercised in a large enclosure at the other side of the steppes. It was a still afternoon, and sounds might travel.
Then, as she bent towards a clump of pale hyacinths, the dwarfess saw, in the midst of a bush, two narrow, gleaming and carnivorous eyes.
Next moment, a grey wolf slunk from the thicket.
The dwarfess curtsied to the wolf. Though she had not been informed, or had unremembered, clockwork, the etiquette of the Palace was by now ingrained in her. And at her curtsy, indeed, the wolf smiled, and prancing forward, capered all about her with expressions of amiability, so she was not in the least alarmed at it.
Presently the two walked on together. The wolf was helpful, nosing out for her absolute treasuries of flowers, aiding her in uprooting them. The dwarfess became fond of the smiling wolf, and on impulse placed her hand on his grey head.
No sooner had she done so than the wolf sprang and dashed her full-length on the ground. That done, it jumped on her, muddying her skirts and tearing them with its claws. It gave off bear-like roars, drooled and licked her, and sometimes bit her with excitement. Though these toothings were no more dangerous than the nips of an eager puppy, the lady in her terror imagined herself about to be devoured, eaten alive. She fainted.
On reviving, she found the wolf stretched heavily across her, using her pliant body and hair for a couch, fast asleep or certainly in the attitude of one grossly sleeping.
Not until the wolf awoke did she dare to stir. To her amazed relief, at her first cautious movement the beast quickly leapt away from her and darted into the forest.
The dwarfess, weeping, gathered up her slobbered skirts, and abandoning the spilled, crushed flowers, limped home.
At length, the gruesome tale was whispered to her consoeur, who pertly replied, ‘Why, you should have thrown the brute an apple or a sweetmeat. That’s all it wants.’
But the blonde dwarfess wished aloud, or so it was reported, that men might go and axe down the dreadful wood.
The Priest’s Darkness (the Beauty)
Comfortless, the vampire dreams, while that which passes for its soul, a beast, lies snarling on the snow, pinned by hafts and staves. The cold is like a wound, felt all through the tangled blackness of the pelt, through to the scald of the blood, and snow burns on the lashes of the fiery eyes, which are not composed of pure ferocity but of questions, and lit by bewildered distress and pain. It cannot comprehend, this thing, why it has been pursued, brought down, is tortured now, solely for being, for living as what it is.
The speech of the hunters is a blur of successful hatred and successful fear. They are recalling an idiot, tender of a midden, whom in error they did to death for these crimes. Yet here is the culprit, caught in the act, the milk-white lamb in its jaws -
‘But the other shape — !’ one cries out now, frantic.
‘That perishes too. See — what’s done here, we’ll go back and search the houses to find.’
‘Somewhere the devil will be weltered in his own blood.’
They laugh. It is a laugh of utter fright.
And the black wolf writhes, grinning, also afraid.
Until it beholds an axe, glinting silver in the torchlight, the rays struck upward from the fevered snow, an axe of silver iron raised over all their heads.
The axe flashes and crashes down.
He experiences the impact, the blow, and starts up choking, blind and maddened, calling out to God, in the turmoil of a hard, thin bed.
But he is not killed, can breathe and see. And if he shouted aloud, beyond the walls his frozen village lies submissive enough, under the sterile quarter moon.
He has had this dream before, the priest. This dream, others. Once he would dream always that he led them, his flock, over the cliff of night into a valley of shadow, and there, as they entered the defile, he, the shepherd, seized them and sank his fangs into their throats. His dark priestly robe is a black pelt. He puts it on. Beware of me, he whispers, setting the wafer between their lips, giving them their sip of God’s blood, as he aches for the beauty of their wine. He stalks them and can pull them down with pitiable ease. He has had so many. Is it only hundreds?
Now he sobs, kneeling before the window, which has no glass, only a broken shutter. There are no riches here. Only the love of God and the blessing of the Devil.
What is to be done?
He looks round wildly, but there is nothing to hand. Even the razor for shaving is blunt in its dish.
Besides, it is just an evil dream. Of course, he is so tired. This terrible place, when he had once thought of lofty cathedrals, of purity, dedication, and bliss.
The priest lies down again on the bony bed. He stares with open eyes at the beams in the roof, and disciplines himself to think of … beauty.
Now he stares with open, inner eyes. He sees an altar-cloth, a white dove ascending on gold; this becomes a window in a church which touches the sky. But then it is a white girl painted against flames, and in her hands is a poisoned apple, like red flesh, which she throws to him. There is the choice, to catch the apple, to allow it to go by. If it does so, another will catch it. The apple fills his hand. He senses its fragrance. He longs to shut his inner eyes, but to do so must open again the outer ones. The moon is in the window now. His lids are wet. He is ashamed.
Beauty in the Palace (the Vampire’s Dream)
Somehow, perhaps by magic, the door has been opened. Icicles lie around Idrel on her platform. Within the doorway, a stair mounts into darkness. This is not inviting, yet seemingly it is an invitation, as sure as if a dark figure waited at the darkness’ heart, calmly beckoning. Getting to her feet, the girl enters the doorway and climbs the stair.
The ruin is intent with strangeness, and the loud silence of snow and settled night.
Far beneath, in the blue ice-rose of a paralysed fountain, a mermaid had been
trapped. Or, possibly, only drawn there with a dagger. And here, all at once, there are candelabra, with snow or wax heaped down their stems, but in their cups flames are beginning to burn up, like blossoms breaking too soon.
And then Idrel emerges high on the mountain of the wrecked enormous edifice, among its circlet of thorny towers. She is in a great hall, which has no roof and into which the towers seem to be gazing from huge eyes of dimly tinted glass. On the roofless walls hang lamps. As Idrel looks at them, they are being ignited, two or three at a time, by invisible tapers carried in unseen hands.
A cavern of pillared hearth has already flowered into fire. Instinctively, the young girl goes to it and stretches out her arms, flexes her fingers. The fire gives off heat. It warms her. It shows the crimson under her skin. Behind a curtain she finds a little closed chamber of some opulence, nested there in the ruin, and prepared for her, obviously for her.
A bath stands on silver feet, and from it rises scented steam, and a silver-framed table of vanities, mirrors, cosmetics, curling-tongs, and with jewellery littered about as if a princess had only just got up from it. Tall chests will offer her clothing. The unseen invisibles are pulling wide all the drawers and doors and trays, to demonstrate. While under its canopy, a bed has been aired with hot stones. It is a broad couch, the virgin notices, a marriage-bed, such as her foster parents shared. She senses, without nervousness or embarrassment, that someone may be watching her.
Idrel allows the sprites of the ruin to remove the shift of her village burial, steps into the soothing bath, and is laved so gently with unguents and water she cannot for an instant misinterpret the supernatural familiarities as anything human. She is made, and becomes, a beauty.
As she eats the dainty supper they have laid for her, the girl accepts the solution of her prior death, for this must be heaven and she is receiving her reward. As to the means of death, she cannot conjure any.