Forests of the Night

by Tanith Lee

  She inhabited one world, and now is here. She does not insult her condition by thinking she is dreaming. Perhaps, however, she is part of the dream of another.

  That in mind, she ponders her pale hand with its new cuff of black, over both of which a coil of her hair has poured itself, in the firelight hectically coloured. A dramatic concoction for herself or any watcher: Black as ebony, red as blood, white as snow.

  The Queen’s Second Sin (the Dead King)

  After he was done with her, the King lumbered to his feet, regarded her, and made as if to help her in turn to rise. Tumbled, her very downfall appealed to and enticed him. Provisions from her basket — she had been taking loaves and cakes to someone, somewhere — lay all over the turf. Candied cherries had bruised on her gown. Cherries, fulvous hair, maiden blood, a foam of petticoats. He was pleased by the artistic chaos he had created from her.

  But she seemed to have lost her memory. He found that out when he had dragged her up. She had forgotten where she was going, where she had come from, even who she was. Her very name. He took it for a gambit, and guffawed. ‘But you know who I am?’ She thought, and shook her fragile head. ‘Your King,’ he told, her, not without pride. She looked at him in complete belief and pure uninterest. He felt then he could not leave such a simpleton at large. He would have her at home a day or so more. He ate her pastries like a hearty ploughboy as they went, having summoned the abortive hunt with a yell. They had only been waiting out of sight. ‘A fine quarry, eh?’ said the King, jostling his lackwit doll.

  In the Palace, he soon grew used to her amnesia. It was rather novel. He gave her things instead, rooms, clothes. Even the dress and shoes he had bandied about. The slippers were in fact too small, and did not fit.

  He had had a royal wife, once, who produced a viperish son, now being tutored, as was the vogue, elsewhere. The queen-mother next contracted a fatal plague during a pilgrimage she insisted on making, so it served her right. For himself the King did not foresee an era when he too, poisoned more slowly by various indulgences, would be gone, becoming in popular parlance ‘Dead’.

  What began as a clumsy snatch in a wood progressed to a merry hole-in-corner adventure, involving the game of secret passages and similar artifice.

  Eventually, by accident, the King learned who it was probable he had abducted. An elderly aristocrat, living in a remote nook of the Palace grounds, which were considerable even in those days, had lost a child, a young, not quite legitimate daughter, fifteen years of age. It was suggested jealous older sisters of less beauty, the product of another union, had got rid of her. The description of the lost girl tallied sufficiently with that of the amnesiac now haunting the apartment of the King’s favourite doxy.

  Certain gifts were instigated. Vows of unspeaking were fashioned. The lady, garbed in her autumnal camouflage, was brought out and discovered to be, first, a duchess, and next, a queen. The ulcerous foot, and some other heralding ailments, had by now taken charge of the King. Virtue did not alleviate them.

  Something else atrocious had meanwhile happened.

  The Red Queen had ceased to be a girl, was not fifteen, not seventeen, not twenty, not thirty, any longer. Flourished in the harsh illumination of the public court, far from her shady room and fireglims, she revealed her decay into a woman.

  There was a story she had conceived but not borne to term. If one had asked this Queen, to her face, she would not have dissembled, for she did not seem to know, even now, anything valid about herself.

  She could not truly be said to know, even, what she might be assumed to have realised — that she had been leapt on and vampirised, buried, dug out, thrust into the violent glare of an empty mirror which leered at, and insolently answered her, saying, Now you are old.

  The King’s bleared eyes, certainly, saw the etching of her bleak, icy face, as if it had been drawn on by a nail. It was unforgivable of her.

  By the night of his summer death, he had, though, both forgiven and forgotten.

  The son, fattened from viper to python, coming back, treated the madwoman Innocin with urbanity. He found it amusing so to do. After the amused period, it was established custom. Being very young, he thought her an antique. Such articles might keep their place, come and go as they wanted, wandering like a lost soul if no longer a lost child. Sometimes he would point her out to visitors, as another curio of his collection.

  The Dwarf’s Third Interview with His Grandmother

  ‘Go away,’ stridently commands Heracty’s relative, as she sees him through her ice-locked window. In winter the marble houses are difficult to warm and tend to promote rheumatism. But the handsome dwarf, ignoring all temper of weather or woman, is already in, and standing by the hearth.

  ‘What did I say to you?’ snarls the grandmother.

  ‘You welcomed me with tender cries,’ says Heracty. ‘And look at what I’ve brought you. A mantle trimmed by damascened fur combed from the Prince’s gulon.’

  The grandmother examines the item unkindly.

  ‘There is no such animal as a gulon,’ she remarks.

  ‘The Red Queen,’ says Heracty, musingly, ‘has all her winter cloaks enhanced with gulon-fur, when not by ermine.’

  ‘An ermine is only a weasel.’

  ‘And what is a ghost?’

  ‘The demon of a sickly stunted brain.’

  ‘Wrong once more,’ says Heracty. ‘I’ll tell you.’ He seats himself by the fire, and props his boots on a stool. He notices today the grandmother looks ninety, and she that his legs seem to have grown longer. That is impossible. ‘The Queen,’ says Heracty, ‘has visualised and hunted her lost youth so determinedly, it has taken on a shape. It has become a girl, lovely, clad in black velvet. But daylight or a lamp shine through her. She isn’t substantial. And I believe, from the manner in which she gazes about, the Palace is just as unreal, in its way, to her. A ruin maybe is all she sees. Or else she exists in a previous or later time. Other dwarfs have met her. They say she lies down on their beds, with her feet and hair, both spangled, hanging over the ends. They say she wears slippers made of ice, or glass. The mastiffs fawn on her. The unicorn offers her rides. Even the two-headed dog turns one head. The gulon, naturally, spits and makes water. It’s peevish. Have a honeyed almond? No? The gulon is very partial to them.’

  ‘To hell with you, sir, your ghosts and gulons and honey and legs.’

  ‘And here’s a rose I found, after the phantom passed me on a stair.’ Heracty extends it. ‘A flower blooming in the snow.’

  But, though exactly formed, the rose also is made of ice. Grandmother burns her fingers on it, and thrown at a wall, it smashes.

  The Beast (the Bride)

  The sumptuous bed, entombed by its curtains on which are sewn bizarre animals and birds, has invented a separate breathing. It had, of course, not been there when she lay down to sleep — but is now so close to her that, as she wakes, she partly believes the rhythm of breath is her own. Not, however, the smooth planes of flesh, the cool hands which take her face between them, the lips which press her mouth.

  She is not afraid. It was so inevitable, this. Surely she has known these caresses before. She yields without a word, with all her self. And since this place is heaven, love too is unalloyed. She is spun away as if through a starry sky. She falls to earth uninjured, but completely changed.

  The man who has shared with her the bed of the act of love, invisible to her in the dark as any of the magical servants, is held in her arms. She ventures only now to question him, because now it does not matter.

  ‘You ask me for my name,’ he responds. His voice is musical and low. ‘Call me Lucander. He, Lucander, will be with you here, at night. But you will never see him.’

  ‘But will I see you?’

  ‘At these times, he and I are the same. Never.’

  ‘Never?’

  It is a ritual. It neither frightens nor convinces her, though she is prepared to honour its outer show. In the same way, in her former life, she
would have cast spilt salt across one shoulder.

  ‘Not once, Idrel. Never. Never attempt to see my face.’

  ‘Why not? Why?’

  ‘Light, and my face, can’t agree together. Even the moon’s my enemy. Especially that. Without doubt the sun.’

  ‘But a single candle,’ she says.

  ‘Don’t try to discover me. The revelation would drive you mad.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘The beast stays to be found in man. The hunter which preys on the trusting sheep.’

  ‘A beast.’

  ‘The bestial joke of God. Monstrous.’

  In the blinded blackness, the bride describes the face of her husband. Her fingertips learn only the mask of a human male, the brows and lashes, the lips and earlobes, the jaw with its masculine roughening. And the taste of him, of the fruits of the darkness.

  ‘But by night you will be here with me?’ She employs his name, ‘Lucander.’

  She is already, in his second embrace, planning for his future slumber, a tinder struck and the surprising candleflame.

  Innocin’s Ascent (the Queen’s Last Sin)

  Can it be her stepson’s dwarf is continuing to follow her? No, surely, it is just her shadow compressed and thrown behind. For a new idea has occurred to Innocin. Not to descend in the twilight, but instead to seek higher, into the diadem of the Upper Palace, its tallest towers.

  They are remote and neglected, and in the vast attics there perhaps a white skirt has often gone up and down, and pale feet have all this while been stepping.

  As she ascends, the Queen considers the sin of her husband, a black sticky sin, or spotted red, the murder of her past amounting to an utter death. This sin it was that gave her to conceive the child clad in clement white.

  The stairs are craning, spindly, thick with webs and dust. Yet far above in the air, a pastel eye beams on her, a window made encouraging by a lamp. Or only the moon in a cloud.

  She crosses a passage, her cloak industriously sweeping up the dirt and old nests — once doves brooded here. The stars glint in broken bricks. The towers are very ancient. They belong to other, earlier, histories.

  On a threshold, the Queen hesitates. It is now too dark for her to see anything, and the guiding light has vanished. Nevertheless, a sweet, slight voice is singing, the words indistinguishable, like a faint zephyr tingling through the bones of the tower.

  Innocin sighs.

  The voice she hears is like that of a child, but not a child lost and alone, bleeding or crying in the bitter cold. This is a found child, braiding her hair and playing with a rope of pearls. Roses unseasonably grow about her, a fire dances. There is food and wine. Slaves to serve, not to exact service. There is love.

  Suddenly Innocin can see a cave of golden light, and a shining young woman going by through the yellow heart of it.

  ‘Oh,’ whispers the Red Queen. ‘There she is.’

  She smiles at the glamour and riches, all the nights and mornings, guessing the beloved is due to return. Not for the found daughter a wild beast in a forest, rending and blight.

  The Queen smiles, and lets her soul go out of her.

  The soul is gone.

  Like an amber dove she falls from the tower-top, her mantle bearing her on its wing. She falls at Heracty’s feet, where he stands in a court below.

  Though her skeletal structure is dislodged at the impact, her body settles, resting her pristine on her back, her hands folded on her breast, her long lids closed, and her mouth still blossoming its flame of smile. Oh, she is yet saying, there she is. And the mirror has cracked, and set her free, at last.

  The Wolf’s Head (the Awakening)

  There have been many nights and days. In the day, sometimes, led by the unseen slaves, Idrel explored the ruin, discovering its secret wonders. The labyrinth is full of ghosts. Frequently, the girl has witnessed, tiny in the telescoped lens of distant corridors, or courtyards five flights of stairs beneath, frantic scenes of another world, which plainly do not otherwise have substance. Idrel observes impartially games and feasts, courtings and quarrellings, aristocrats and unicorns and dwarfs.

  But the nights are better for exploring.

  In the snow-field of white sheets, her night-husband draws her away into the forest of desire — and abruptly the darkness engulfs her.

  To these delights, the lingering tension of Idrel’s plan has subtly been added.

  Tonight she will carry it out.

  Slipping from the bed, she fetches a candle. As she does this, a sigh seems to flutter round the chamber. The ruin is crammed with phantoms, and Idrel pays no heed.

  Light is absent, the fire long-smothered and all the lamps doused before her lover’s arrival. Carefully returning through screens and panes of blackness to the bed, she puts the candle down, strikes the tinder, lets the fire-bud drop on to the waxen branch where, like a canary, it beats its wings. When the flame steadies, holding it high, Idrel pulls aside a fold of the bed-curtain. She stares down at what lies sleeping on the white drift of the sheet.

  Shadows and sheen combine to describe. Here are the lines of a man’s body, which at the shoulders culminate in the head of a black wolf.

  As soon as she sees it, she remembers, everything.

  In that moment, too, perhaps alerted by the light and its flickering, or solely by the intensity of the watcher, the creature wakes. It growls softly, or, the muzzle of the wolf does so. Feral, human, lupine eyes glare up at the young girl standing there, pinning it with a stave of light, and clothed herself in her white nakedness, save where the same light blushes her apple-red.

  ‘I look and I see,’ says Idrel.

  Her eyes say clearly: I knew all the time it was there, your black wolf. To live is to die. I’m dead, and here with you. You made me holy, taking my blood.

  And leaning down, she kisses the wolf face, over and over, with quiet still kisses. And as she does this, the candle tilts and the burning hot wax sears and seals his skin, but he does not flinch at it. When Idrel lifts her head, she finds a man, with a man’s skull and features, a broad low brow, hair black as crow’s feathers, black-water eyes that regard her.

  ‘There will be another bed,’ he murmurs, ‘with a dead wolf in it, or a living man — but not this one.’

  ‘But you are Lucander. You are with me, here.’

  The vampire, or supernatural spirit, whatever it is, has now fully recognised the soul, or ghost, of Idrel. That is, if Idrel ever existed beyond the brain of a red-haired queen.

  They contemplate each other in the melting honey of the candle-gloom. When the candle finishes, who can say if they remain in the black night, or if they too have gone away.

  Even the serene susurrus of their voices, which is yet to be distinguished, may not be real. Although more so, perhaps, than the stairs and galleries and towers of the preposterous Palace.

  The Black Queen (the Seven Dwarfs)

  Because he thinks of himself as an innovator, the Prince has had a strange new mausoleum built, on a hill three or four miles from the Palace. In the mausoleum lies the body of his stepmother, the dead Queen.

  The view from the mausoleum is eloquent. Above, uncut meadows, woodland tapering to park, the mountain of the royal domicile. Below the sapphire basins of the valleys, the far-away forests which are not fakes, a thunder-cloud of trees, redolent and rowdy with every animal applicable to the clime.

  The corpse of Innocin was come on at daybreak in a yard of the Upper Palace by some sozzled young nobles, who were startled but not astounded. It was decided she had toppled from a tower. The sin of suicide was not mentioned. Nevertheless the location of the new tomb was fortuitous, it did not require sacred ground. It could be erected as a monument. Somewhat to that end, the Prince had organised rather a peculiar funeral rite, which, repeated on and off in subsequent years, became known as the Masque of the Black Queen.

  The title role was undertaken by the dusky dwarfess. Attired like midnight, with sables, and jets in her hair, s
he was drawn in a carriage by a team of plumed black greyhounds. The other six dwarfs, each got up allegorically, came behind, mounted or on foot as their character advised. Heracty had the part of Worldly Fame, his pony, a suit of cloth-of-gold, and the obligation of lugging on leash two ill-mannered peacocks. His brother dwarfs represented Modesty, Sloth, Rage and Joy. The blonde dwarfess, in butterfly costume, was asked to suggest Unearthly Apprehension. The dusky dwarfess, the Black Queen, was unarguably Lady Death.

  Additional pets of the Prince’s had work in the procession. The unicorn appeared wreathed in thorns as the Pardon Of Heaven. The gulon and dual-headed dog were excluded, however, as untrustworthy.

  All this display, with the snuffling, labouring court plodding after, toiled out through heavy snow to the mausoleum, where dirges were sung, and flowers dyed black, or gilded, tossed on the ice. The mausoleum steps had gone to mirror, and the miraculous dome was topped again by a scoop of snow.

  Months on, when the thaws of spring had manhandled the land and flung down the rime and snow from the slopes, the court would voluntarily visit the area, also the dwarfs. They would sit on the tomb-steps, and look pensively out into the valleys. Their reasons for doing so, particularly the reasons of the dwarfs, were banal. They liked the vista, thought it prudent to pretend respect, or relished the proof of the high brought low.

  Heracty attends the tomb seldom. When giving the gulon exercise, as he now sometimes does, he will tend that way.

  For its part, the fox-cat sniffs all about the mausoleum, trotting up the steps to peer with peridot eyes in at the transparent dome. Does the gulon recognise the bleached trimmings in which Innocin has been laid to rest? More likely, being fed on carrion, its interest is of that order.

  The Tomb (the Spring)

  The priest walks to the summit of a hill on an evening of late spring — and sees in front of him a curious monument.

  The ordeal which he endured in a backward, superstitious village is over with. He has been recalled to the towns and cities of his earliest dreaming. Conversely, he has sloughed those dark nightmares that haunted his beginnings. The inner outcry for flesh, the carnal ravening, like hunger, these impediments are surpassed. He has wrestled with the subterranean angel, and triumphed.