by Tanith Lee
Is there time? All time and none.
How wonderful it was, the sense of abandonment. All things gone but one focused goal. And that pristine and sure, whatever was or would be between. Liberty. Truth. To have two names, and neither, to be one being now, and there another, and perhaps no one, perhaps all. Here is the dark, and here am I, of the dark.
I followed the graceful stream.
* * *
It came at me suddenly, with an awesome shriek. I could not see what it was, but I raised the pole and swung the length of it between us. The merest collision resulted, but the pole shuddered and the boat pitched. Not quite letting go the pole, I fell to my knees.
From the blackness, two albino eyes, a beak of burning wire. Wings. It flung itself at me again.
Some nocturnal bird I had dismayed, or some guardian of transit.
The feathers of its black wings guttered and ignited as it threw itself at me again and again. Now an eye seared. Now the beak stabbed for my throat or sight. A talon scored my hand. It dashed itself against me, to take the blood, and I let go the pole and seized its neck like a snake’s, and broke it.
I hurled the corpse into the stream, the night.
Horror and hell were all around. I had no strength. I had fallen down into the boat and lost the guiding pole, also my only weapon.
Fool, to abandon the reality and laws of the sensible world, to set out on this perilous course.
Now I lay in the boat as in the coffin, less optimistic than then, and only the current drew me on.
I cannot go to you armed then, in armour. When I approach with pride, with a book, a loaded pistol, these are of no avail.
The stream ran fast now, and straight. We plunged out under the open sky. The moon had not risen, yet there it was, down among the trees. The boat sidled to the shore, and rocked there, refusing to continue.
I was following the moon. A land moon, crossing the surface of the earth. She glimmered between the trees. I reasoned to begin with that this must be some man or woman, at last, and carrying a lantern.
The village, to which the moon led me, was deserted. It lay outside a palisade of trees, all up an incline, like fallen stones. As I came out into its grass-grown lanes, among the toppled chimneys, I saw for the first that what flitted along before me was the figure of a girl. She passed through the houses in a way that gave me to suppose she was not solid, not flesh.
Where the derelict village ended, the land opened to a sheet of black mirror, a tarn of water. The girl, a quarter of a mile away from me now, seemed to glide out on to it, bobbing there like a candle-flame, but when I too reached the brink, there was a massive causeway, with huge paving-blocks, well able to accommodate a carriage.
After the causeway and the tarn, appeared the structure I had seen at sunset.
It was a ruin, of course. In the darkness the impression was of solitary standing walls, perforated by round glassless spoke-framed windows, like colossal wheels, similar to those found in ancient churches. Higher than the highest, a tower broke the sky. It was out of all proportion to the landscape, or so it seemed, too tall, like a funnel spun of black night, yet it also was cleft at the top, blasted wide as if by the hand of God.
The glimmer of the ghost-girl went up the shore and in among the ruin like a moth attracted to warmth or light. There was light. I made it out as I drew closer.
In a wall against the tower, a featureless door had been cut, and the ground rose up to it in a flight of steps. Above this door a window like a spiderweb held a sonorous living glow.
The ghost, if she was, had disappeared. No carriage, and no horses, were in evidence. Only the lit window. The tower leaned and the wind of night sighed through its great axed cranium, the alleys of shattered corridors, the window-wheels, as through the fingers of the pines.
I climbed the sunken, uneven steps, and touched the door, which opened.
It was a priest’s chamber, perhaps the ruin was indeed that of some religious building. The light came from a pale and leaping fire, and from candles in silver stanchions. There were a few pillars, with a soft, grey-velvet texture, a long table of darkest mahogany, pulled close to the fire, with some objects on it of glass that caught the flames and reflected them down into the wood. Three silver crucifixes of various heights stood on the sculpted mantelpiece above the hearth, and above these, hung a sword in black chains. This was all the room seemed to contain.
I shut the outer door, and advanced across bare flagstones. As I passed the table, a crystal apple on it turned to red amber, then to insubstantial pearl, as the flames brimmed and drained it.
In the farther wall there was an inner doorway, with a dark curtain thrust to one side. Beyond, through the echo-chamber of the great barrel-vault of tower, a sound was tenuously beginning. Was it music I heard, or only some deception, a whining in the coals of the fire, my own blood singing, silence itself?
No, the eerie sound came full upon me now, sweeping down the arteries of stone into the small mouth of the doorway.
High in the tower, Antonina played her piano, as in the rented house at Paradys. She played the carriage-ride, the savage headlong race across the plains of darkness, the rough track, and the race of the pines overhead – she played the slowness of the Hades stream, the languor of relentless willnessness, obsession and dim night …
Close by, the ghost-girl clung to a pillar. The firelight came and went in her, as in the apple of glass. Did I recall her from some occult tampering in the house of Philippe, some séance? Was she a girl, or a crone? She looked familiar, and not so. She throbbed, the whole length of her, to the pulses of the piano. I said to her: “What are you doing here? Your time is over.” And she faded to nothing. She was gone.
The piano crashed like thunder. It ascended and rushed down the scale, searching new peaks and abysses of cold brilliance, power and menace. It was not Antonina who played.
Presently the torrent stopped. I turned from the door and retreated to the far side of the hearth. It was a retreat, but not unstrategic. I had remembered a stance Philippe’s mother had been wont to take, her back straight, her head slightly raised, her hands clasped together at her waist above the fall of her gown. I assumed it, and when I heard his step, on the stairway, on the flags of the room, did not turn to face him.
He came to the table, but it was between us. From the tail of my eye I saw him now. He was no longer dressed in white. The fire sprang, he dazzled and sank.
“An unexpected displeasure,” he remarked. I heard the gentle clink of glass. From a decanter on the table he poured wine into a goblet – red wine, or white? “I would have thought,” he said, “under such trying circumstances, you would have had a wish to go home.”
“Your domicile is haunted,” I said. “Perhaps I’m another ghost.”
“There are no such things,” he said. He raised the glass and drank.
I turned, and looked at him. He wore black, like a priest. As she had done. The wine was itself blacker than ink, a black brandy or some unknown distillation. Some while since we had been so close. Not since the duel, the day he killed me – but we had been closer then. His eyes bore upon mine like a weight I could not bear. I lowered my gaze. And he said, “But you lack papers, I believe, mademoiselle, and cannot cross back over the border.”
“Who am I,” I said, “do you think?”
“I don’t think about it. Your identity is your own business.”
“Your dog, von Aaron, will have given me a name.”
“Von Aaron’s deductions are usually faulty.”
“And so you sloughed him. You would find that easy.”
“But you have proved more difficult,” he said. “What is it that you want?”
“My revenge on you,” I said, “of course. Because you have made me suffer.”
“That was your choice.”
I raised my eyes and stared at him. I stared into his eyes which were her eyes, as, all along, her eyes had been his.
“You are a
busing me as she did,” I said. “You’re telling me that if nothing is given me I must try to take nothing. That I must starve.”
“Then take some drink by all means,” he said. “You’ve a long journey before you.”
He moved from the table to the hearth, as I moved from the hearth to the table. I reached out to the wine and discovered it was after all a blackish red, it had been reflecting his clothing and his mood merely. It had the taste of wormwood, however, when I drank it.
I smiled, and said, looking into the wine, “You have no husband to hide behind on this occasion. Or do you have some convenient wife stashed in an upper room? Is each assault to be different, or are all of them the same? A snake eating its own tail.”
“Mademoiselle,” he said, “I give you the freedom of all the night. I request only that you leave me this small part of it, my privacy.”
“What will you do,” I asked, “in your corner of the night? Lovingly dwell on the darkness?”
I put down my glass. Fire filled it, and sank from it. Blood filled and sank from my heart.
I moved around the table and stood quite near to him, though not quite near enough to touch. The flames burned, throwing their flimsy architectures to the roof, and dismantling them again.
“Let me,” I said, “enrage and unnerve and trouble you. Let me speak the truth to you, Anthony, to your face for once. No, don’t look away. If I have the courage to meet your eyes, at least salute my courage, however little you value or desire it. Are we not, all of us, on a field of battle? I betray myself, I am my own enemy. She gives me to you, in chains, like the sword. You see, I offer you nothing at all anymore, not a book, not a line of prose. You may think I have written this, but if I had or if I ever do, these are words drawn from air, magic, or a dream. Only think how strange it is, that I have formed a whole cathedral out of nothing, where for you the chance is only a pebble, a moment’s acute annoyance. All the passionate song stemming from the same fount as your little indifference and dislike. It is you who have made the monster, where I invented beings with wings. Well, I love you. Nothing is changed. I have no more fame than ever I did, or I could offer you the bribe of making you immortal. You’d spurn it anyway, until it was too late to take. Then, perhaps. But who will remember me? And who will remember you?”
At the end of this recital, each of us lowered our eyes. The fire too lowered itself. The night was very still.
“Well,” he said at last, “you have had your say.”
“And you have kept your silence.”
“Go home, mademoiselle,” he said. “We are at variance.”
“Put me out,” I said. “I’ll lie across the doorway.”
“Oh, please,” he said, “must we now have this?”
“You may step over me as you choose, or on me. I would prefer not the latter, but can’t quarrel with it if you do.”
“There are other measures I might take against you. You’re very troublesome.”
“That is the nature of life. Risk and trouble. You may do as you want. And so shall I. To go away from you is, for me, to be annihilated. I’ve said before, command your own actions. You may not command mine.”
He lifted his glass, as I thought for a second to drink, but instead he cast it across the room with tremendous force. It struck some obstacle, perhaps a pillar, and shattered into a glittering spray.
“This then is your notion of a revenge,” he said.
“Yours was, perhaps, more conventional.”
His hand flew upwards, as if to strike me, but he checked it. In turn, I caught his hand. It was so cold, what could I do but warm it a moment, before it should be snatched away.
“Where is the ring?” I said.
“You will never find that.”
“I shall find it. A drop of blood on all this palette of pallors and shadows, in a tower of shadows. Perhaps in the wine?”
“Certainly, look.”
“Not there, then.”
I let go the cold hand, which withdrew itself.
His eyes, since we had drawn so much nearer, seemed lost in the fiery dark.
I said, “Have I made you hate me yet? That’s better than uninterest. I’ll give you something in exchange for the ruby scarab, shall I?” I put my hand to my breast and drew out that snub-nosed silver thing. He stared down at it. He did not ask me what it was, avoid or take it, and I did not say, See, even this failed. More lightly than he had thrown the glass, I cast the bullet into the dying hearth.
The fire was hurt, there. It turned a curious red. As I gazed at it, he walked away from me, towards the inner door with the curtain. His footsteps echoed up from the stones. The clash of the rings, when he drew the curtain over after him, repeated itself in the air, the way ripples do in water.
I listened to this noise for centuries.
After the fire had died, I continued to sit on the stones of the hearth. I felt a deathly peace, only that. When the sun rose I must go away. I must choose unreality, for reality, going by the name of the Unreal, would no longer harbour me. But I was lost at last. Therefore, sit, and await the dawn.
But the night stayed a great time, it was fond of this place.
Having discarded my paper, I wrote with a piece of charcoal from the fire along the stone. All single lines. What I had said to him, and other things.
Also, once I wept. If there was any alteration in Anna’s weeping from the raging grief of Andre, I did not notice it. I wondered if the stones of that priestly hall would hold my pain long after I had gone.
Then, dawn came. The spiderweb window changed to silver. Even down the chimney of the hearth the anaemic resin seeped. Suddenly, beneath the curtain of the inner door, there ran out a pool of blood.
I came to my feet. I stared at the revelation. Slowly as if afraid, I went towards the bloody light, stepped into it and stood half a minute, wading. Next, I put my hand on the curtain and drew it aside.
What had been a black funnel, the tower, was now the cavity of a burning rose.
High, high above, just before the top of the tower had broken, hung the wound of a mighty sword, a window petalled by glass … magenta and maroon, crimson and carmine, blood, scarlet, madder and pomegranate – it bled, this glass, every petal, and as it fell down towards the east, the sunrise, it paled through every flushed nuance of roses. Tears of blood – I knew its name, had named it in the City when it formed inside my dreams. Beyond, a horizon of mountains, dim and fine as if drawn with a brush. The very land about was a mountain, which I had climbed unknowingly, within its mantle of pines and water. One only sees such things as mountains for what they are when they are far off.
My foot found the first step. I must approach the window. Through a gauze of crimson light, ascending – such a shaft it was, it too seemed made, the light, of glass. Birds of thin alabaster might have been set in it, or carven fish leaping. I moved upwards through the hollow core. It had a perfume, this colour, like the gardenia incense of some temple. And a sound, a low and sombre drone.
Trembling, the air, the light – I had reached a stone landing, and a gallery. The window seemed suspended, and it was possible, turning here, to touch the glass. Huge drops, they rained, some transparent, some opaque, some translucent – they passed me and went on below. I was dizzy now, the tears seemed to fall in actuality – I put my hand against the panes. But they were not wet. They were cool and dry. And under my very fingers, a creamy stone, not glass at all. I had found the gem from Antonina’s marriage rings. Yes, it was true. Still in its oval setting of silver, lacking the band, pushed now into the glass, a single pane. Then I looked up, up the window. And saw there a ruby tear with, incised in it, a beetle with folded wings.
You could look a year and not see it. Or, staring only a second, see in a second. As with any mystery.
I stretched myself, all my height and more. If I had had Andre’s stature, it would not have been so difficult. At my back the uncertain railing of the gallery, the drop below. Before me the blood-je
wel of the scarab. My fingers sought it and my nails prised at the rim. Let it come out. It was mine. It shifted. It twisted, paused, and fell into my hand. Still in its metal band, it remained a ring. It burned my hand, so cold it was. I slipped it on my finger, which, though more slender than that same finger of Andre’s, it seemed to have shrunk itself to encircle.
I turned and went along the gallery and in at a doorway.
The first room was very bare. The piano stood in it. The lamps had burned out, and one tall candle frilled with wax. There was a table with large old books spread over it, a rack of pens, a chessboard with only two or three figures standing or lying on its spaces. The red light of the mighty window had come in. It lit the lettering on the page of a single book: Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini.
The second room, opening from the first, had light of its own, a round eastern window of plain glass. Here, morning was white.
As white effigies lay on the marble of their tombs, so he lay, on the bed. The pillows of it, the covers, were heaped about him like sands, or foam from the sea. He was stranded in the wake of these things, hair spilled, lifeless. His sleep resembled death, was that so curious?
I moved closer. It would be impossible to wake him. I need not be afraid of it. He might never wake again.
The sheet would seem to have been dragged off him by some external agent, leaving the left shoulder and the left arm bare, outflung. The left hand rested, palm uppermost, and open, as if it awaited some gift or some caress. A vulnerable hand. He slept without his shirt.
I stood above him now, and my shadow fell across his face. Without the open eyes, the face was like a mask. I leaned down and touched my lips to his cheekbone and his jaw – with some surprise I felt the rasp of new beard starting against my mouth. The orbs of the eyes moved under their white lids. These were smooth, as the lips were … The reserved kiss did not wake him. No, nothing could. Nothing, nothing.
Like Psyche, who had searched for her love in hell, I leaned to his flesh. But the onus of the myth had been to dash aside unconsciousness. I was not Psyche, though he might be said to be Love.