by Tanith Lee
He was Love, and he was Antonina. He and Antonina were one thing, as Anna was Andre. Vampires, shape-changers, incubus-succuba – such vacant names.
I drew all the sheet away, and gazed at him as he lay there. He slept on. What might I not do?
I put from me any clothing that impeded me, and slipped into the white bed with him as if into a bank of snow. My skin touched his skin. I fastened my lips to his. His mouth parted under mine. I drew the soul out of his mouth, and in his sleep, unwaking, he moved against me, as if we lay beneath the sea.
Refuse me now. No? You will not do it. This you will do, and this.
I lay over him, curved to his body. In sleep, his excitement had answered mine. We swam together now. So beautiful, my love, you are so beautiful. The strength of you, and all the pain and glamour of your body, your bones, your silver spine arching – now, now –
The white light was cloven, stayed, Not yet. As with the first kiss, my lips sought, closed, against his flesh.
Yet, I am she and she is you and you are myself. I hold you and am held. You are my slave, and I am yours. You destroy me, and are destroyed. I give myself and receive myself. We are one thing and all things. And nothing. We are nothing.
I felt and heard him catch his breath. I need not wait any more. I raised my head and cried aloud under the sword of death.
And the cloven light burned, but only like a fire.
As the interior of the coffin had borne her imprint, so the mattress had retained the shape of him. There was no other trace, save for two or three long and curling jet-black hairs.
The interim might not have been sleep. Some blank omission from awareness following the summit and the fall. What had occurred? Ah, was it only that? I left the bed, and hesitantly went about the room.
In the round casement, the landscape was framed, under a high sun. It was midday, perhaps.
There had been some failure. Something amiss, or mistakenly done. Did I remember what it was? I wound the black hairs about my finger, around the scarab ring. I was depressed and weary. I left the bedroom, crossed the chamber with the piano – quiescent in the noon dusk. The great window beyond was a symphony of crimson by day, nothing else or more – I descended the tower with a strange sense of permanence, or memory – not my own, but others. The ghosts lay thick as the shadowy sunlight on everything. In the hall, a woman was busy at the dead hearth. She was scrubbing with her rag, erasing the words I had written there during the night.
I stood and looked at her. What was she? Was she a creature of normal reality, or a phantasm, or had she crawled from some aperture between these states? Her rag made a husky noise. How dared she obliterate the ramblings of my heart’s soul? An illiterate, she could not read them, she thought them only the marks of the soot.
“What are you doing?” I said. “Leave that at once.”
To my gratification, she did stop immediately. She got up and observed me. She had a quiet, vegetable face.
“Where is he?” I said. “Do you belong to him?” For some reason, I found it hard to speak his name, any part of it. But she nodded now. She was some villager, from some village, a servant. “Well,” I said, “where has he gone?”
She stared. He came and went as he pleased. How would she know.
I sighed. What did I want?
A dreadful lassitude, almost a revulsion, threatened me. I had possessed him and it was done. It was no more than a convention. There had been so much poignant drama, did it only end in this unoriginal deed of lust? The storm of orgasm was so soon over. What could one say after it but, Farewell, or, Again and then farewell. Or, for ever and ever, Amen, and God preserve all from that Amen. Passion is not self-begetting. It must burn up brighter and consume. It must always be in doubt, and in anguish, and perhaps even in agony – to this, carnal love was nothing. It would be better to die in the act. Such fireworks, and then to go out in the habitual dark behind the sordid rooftops?
The woman, relieving herself of any duty to make conversation with me, had turned and was going out of the door. I followed her, naturally. She went down the steps, which looked peeled in daylight, and walked along the shore. How was the rest of the scenery by day? I could not have said. It was a place I passed through. The huge tarn of water gleamed, hard as a gem. My eyes were hurt by so much truth-discovering light. I shielded them, and was glad when she went in at another entry in one of the standing walls.
I found us then to be in a sort of kitchen, with long ovens and a wide hearth, fireless now. By the hearth sat a girl with a snow-blonde chrysanthemum of hair. She did not glance at me, she was taking from a wicker bag a baby, only a few days old, and next a leather bottle with a teat. She fed the child from this as he sat naked on her lap. His fine floss of hair was paler even than hers, and one of his eyes was lighter than the other. They had a look of someone I had known, both the girl and the infant. I realised it was a decided resemblance to Philippe.
The older woman now busied herself with lighting the hearth fire. That achieved, she took a broom, of the pastoral sort, a bunch of twigs tied together, and began to sweep the floor, up and down, back and forth, with an aimless determination.
I sat down facing the girl, and pushed back the red hair from my face and shoulders. Hers, cotton-white, straggled all about her.
“Is this child yours? When was he born?”
She glanced at the woman who swept, but that one only went on sweeping. The girl pursed her lips, readied herself, and spoke to me.
“Not mine. Another girl’s. But he makes things happen, so I bring him away.”
“Makes things happen – what do you mean by that?”
Her skin was lucent. Now she blushed.
“Well, he does.”
The child turned then and stared at me. He could not be more than ten days old, less maybe, or a little more. But his odd eyes seemed to look upon me with knowledge and some sly amusement. I had known Philippe when not much older.
“Do you mean,” I said softly, clandestinely, leaning forward to the girl and endeavouring to catch her eye, “that things move about when he’s in the room – that, say, a candle will blow itself out, or some hanging thing will be swung to and fro?”
She nodded. “And the shuttle goes on the loom.” She lowered her lashes. “The priest, he says it will stop as the child grows. It’s not a demon, but the spirit is restless.”
Behind us, the woman swept the floor, up and down, and round and round.
“But you’ve come here quite often,” I said. “When he is here. The master of this ruin.”
She smiled. She would not look at me now.
I got to my feet. “You must heat water and fetch it up to me,” I said, “for the bath in the upper room. You understand me?’The child pushed the leather bottle away. He crowed. Ah! Philippe cried, reborn between a peasant’s thighs, you see, here I am again to mock and torment you.
But I turned and left the room quickly. I went back along the shore. Light pierced open-work windows like flights of arrows. Walls leaned as if about to come down. Birds were rising from trees on the farther bank; perhaps Scarabin rode there, on one of the black horses. Or were all the horses metamorphosed now to white?
I wondered if the girl would obey me, but when I had climbed up again through the tower, she presently came with two buckets and filled the porcelain bath with scalding water and with warm.
I made her remain in the chamber as I bathed. She was shy, and would not look at me, but she wandered about the room, more surely than I had done, now and then picking up some item, a brush, the razor from its bowl, an ivory pencil-case that lay under the window.
“You’re familiar with these things,” I said. She did not answer. “And with that bed, also. He’s had you. Is that not so?” She darted one glance at me. It was true. Was it jealousy that burned through me? No, it was a pang of horror at the vulgarity of it, that I had only been that, too. A woman had by him, and he, a man I had had.
I dried myself, and put
on again the costume of Paradys. There was not a stain on it, not a rent in its soft fabric. And I, stained like the church-glass of the unholy window, immutably, and rent by silver – I was damned because I had failed, had failed.
“Come here,” I said to the girl. “Brush my hair now.”
She brushed my hair, with long smooth strokes, more nicely than her fellow had swept the floor.
“There,” I said. “We’re friends.”
I stood over her, some inches taller than she. I took her face in my hands and kissed her fresh mouth. He had kissed her, I kissed, deeply, and she leaned against me, letting me caress her, her flower-like skin, her warm breasts. As there had been Anna within me for Philippe, so Andre now sampled this girl on my behalf, for my sake, since Anthony had made love to her. She was like Philippe herself, as the child was. She and I, had by the same one, were, briefly, the same one. And I remembered the exaltation of my abandonment in the sexual climax of desire. Of course, it was nothing of any value at all.
When I let her go, I asked her name. Shivering, her lambent eyes on mine, she said she was called Oula. I wondered then why I had asked. What did her name matter to me?
There came a sharp clangour from below.
“The child!” she cried. And turning from me ran away, out of the rooms and down the tower again. I hurried at her heels. And going by the window of the tears of blood, thought, Passed and repassed and so past. So it becomes a thing of no consequence. I am used to it, now.
In the hall below, the woman had come back to work, with her broom, and had brought the child in the bag. His cobweb mane and anemone arms protruded from the wicker. Meanwhile, one of the three heavy silver crucifixes had been crashed from the mantel. Now another was rising, and wafted through the air, as if weightless. The woman watched it, stopped in her tracks but with no appearance of alarm. The girl Oula called out something in the dialect of the north, another language, which I did not know. The child gurgled and laughed.
Oula ran across the floor and whirled him up. She lifted him high and shook him a little. The miniscule face was vivid with evil glee. The second crucifix too clanged on to the stone floor.
I looked at the broom-woman and shouted: “Take him. Take him out. Do as you’re told, you bitch.”
She made a vague move towards the girl and the fiendish baby. Just then, the decanter rose from the table. It flung itself at me and instinctively I threw my hands before my face. With a stinging drizzle of lights, the glass smashed at my feet. The liquor spurted up, and I was splattered, all over the fine old gown, as if with blood.
I ran across and pushed my hand against the baby’s laughing sneering face. “Yes, I remember the fight, and the cherries. Yes. Enough. Go away and forget. This isn’t for you.” And the face fell, enviously. Toothless gums tried to bite. “Give him to her.” I indicated the woman to Oula as if they had never met. “He must be taken out.”
But the child had abruptly lapsed into a sullen exhaustion. It was borne away and put back into its bag. The older woman, having propped her broom on one of the pillars, took the bag, and without a word, plodded to the door and down the steps.
Would she walk into the tarn and sink there, becoming some aquatic animal? No, she simply trod her route along the shore to the causeway. Oula and I, standing in homely fashion in the door, watched her out of sight.
Oula timidly put her hand on my waist. I removed it.
Together we replaced the crucifixes. If they were an iota from their stations it would be sure to be noticed. “Sweep up the glass.” She swept it up and took the fragments away.
Drearily I stood before the hearth. What a barren place this was, when he was not in it.
I did not properly believe that Oula’s habitat, village or otherwise, existed. She, or any other, evolved and retreated to some secondary plane, inaccessible to me. There was therefore nowhere I might escape to. When he returned, whatever should we do, he and I? With Antonina, when it had been Antonina and Andre, the progression was unavoidable, rushing away downhill, tumbling forward into the pit of delicious darkness. But this. Dear God, suppose it should become domestic?
But suppose too he did not return.
Terror fastened on me. I lay against the hearth in fear and misery. And was aware, through these monstrous concussions, that I was glad of them.
Just after sunset, I heard Oula laughing along the shore. I had been standing under the tower window, watching the light go out of it, to see if this happened in the way I had formerly described. Her laugh came like a flying thing, and flitted round me. Hearing it, I knew Anthony had come back, and was with her somewhere in the ruin.
My eager foreboding drew me across the pillared hall, to the doorway. Here I looked out and saw smoke still tapering from the chimney of the kitchen room.
The tarn was a bath of wine, the whole sky had become a red window, and made all the broken open wheel-windows red, the tower a black fire-iron against incorrigible space.
On the threshold of the kitchen, some colourless flowers lay scattered. Inside, it was an oil on canvas, though not from Philippe’s quirky brush. Pale Oula was kindling two hanging lamps, with alabaster arms highlighted, while dark Scarabin stood by the hearth.
As I shut out the afterglow in the doorway, both looked at me and then away. They had formed a liaison against me. I was to be excluded.
There was a table of wooden planks near one wall, and two wooden benches. Here I sat, as if at the Cockatrice or the Imago. After a moment he took a place at the table across from me, without a word or further look. Oula brought an earthenware jug and set it down, with a glass for him.
“Bring a glass for me,” I said.
She went at once to a cupboard and extracted another glass and gave it me.
He took up the jug and to my surprise, poured the drink firstly into my glass. Tonight the liquor was cloudily pale, an absinth that seared the mouth.
During, and after this, we sat in silence, and the girl prepared a meal, moving to and from the fire and the ovens and here and there. Scarabin drank steadily. His expression was lazy, but his face held tensely in against the bones. His eyes were fixed far off. They looked sightless, so densely black, giving no access, having no floor. The mouth was sulky and cruel. In the muddy lamplight, sometimes it seemed to me the face of a handsome man, sometimes of a beautiful woman.
When the food was ready Oula brought it to the table. White meat and bread, and a dish of cheese and apples.
“Sit down,” he said to her then. The room quivered at his voice, as if a coin had been thrown into a well. When she only stood by him, he got hold of her and gently pulled her down at his side.
Then, as if she were some clever clockwork doll, he began to feed her. It seemed he ate nothing, only drank the absinth, but her he fed, with infinite persuasion, persistence, and care. The attention, or the food, brought the blood into her cheeks. Even her hair pinkened, appearing to blush a little.
Beyond the door, the dusk had drawn its curtain.
“Why do we eat, Oula?” he said. “Why drink? Could we not do without sustenance, don’t you suppose so?” But she had now ceased herself to eat, or he to feed her. She lay against him, her head on his shoulder, sometimes playing with the buttons of his coat. Her hands were gracious for a servant girl’s, and the nails clean and trimmed. “What is reality after all,” he said. “Did we not invent all this, are we not God, any and all of us?” He spread his own elegant hand on the table. “I could pass my hand through the wood as if through water. Any man, any woman, could do it. No chains, no bindings. It’s a world of chaos restrained solely by the human mind, which then, afraid of itself, steps back and says, see this colossal machine over which I have no power at all.”
I said, “She won’t understand you. And I already know it.” But he ignored me.
Soon after, he stood and drew the girl up with him. He said to her tenderly. “Where now?” And she murmured her laughter. They went away.
The room, in whi
ch the fire still crackled, turned cold, solid, and deathly still.
Stars were in the sky above the tarn, I could see them through the doorway, huge stars that blazed too brightly.
I closed my eyes, and saw instead Philippe, a maddened child of eleven years, on the rocking-horse, riding faster and faster, with his head thrown back.
I had nothing to write with. The hag with the broom and rags had finished cleaning off the stones of the hall when I left her unsupervised. Write with my voice then, on air, or with my nails in the plank table. Or with fire, scour the kitchen out with arson.
Plucking three of my own long, curling hairs, I wove them together with the black hair I had found in the bed. (What colour had my hair been, before the “Martian” red of Paradys?) Then I burned the hair together.
Water was sadness, air a vision, earth was thought. But fire, fire was the will.
Since reality and the physical world were only chaos, illusorily subdued, I did not perhaps pass through night along the ground, or through ruined halls of stone. Ascending, what did I climb but the heights of meaning? Certainly the tower had grown taller. High up in it, I was on some rarefied and open summit, where the air was thin and chimed with ice. There were no dimensions, or they were different ones … No, they were the usual ones. A bedchamber lit by a few candles, a man and a woman embracing.
I walked about them, round them, once, twice. They did not (did they?) know I was there. Hungrily they annexed each other with their mouths.
I put my arms over hers, around him, and my hands on hers – and drew them down from his body. Standing at her back, I wrested her quietly from his grasp, and when I had her, putting my mouth to her ear, I whispered, “That is over. What are you doing here?”
She opened her eyes, and looked at me with a somnambulist’s smile. Then, in the way of a peasant girl released from some temporary office, she bobbed me a silly little curtsey, and drifted at once across the room. The candlelight made lace, a bridal veil, over her hair. She vanished through the doorway, or only altogether.
He stood and looked at me, already in his shirt, a libertine’s face of arousal, the eyes of dreaming death.