by Tanith Lee
The viridian banners by the doors were garlanded with myrtle. This house was black, like a sarcophagus, and the great hall was black, with old charred flags like broken wings drooping from the rafters. But the candles burned and white damask clothed the tables and he led her to sit beside him.
Helise was happy. Her eyes sparkled and everything had become wonderful. They gave her white wine to drink, and on the gallery minstrels sang like angels.
They banqueted on fowl roasted with figs and cakes of flour and sugar, milk jellies, fish served in their armour, doves in their feathers. There were salads of spinach and beans made into gardens, and castles of rice and pine kernels, and almond puddings sweet as the promise of life everlasting.
A pageant was performed, displaying the prowess of d’Uscaret, her knights and lords, their deeds of valour.
Lilies fell from a canopy.
At the table sat the new father and mother of Helise. He was a dark and peevish man, fretful, who drank until huge drops spurred out on his forehead. The woman was like something cut from wood, having only two dimensions, angular in her tourmaline gown, her silver caul and steeple headdress from which black spiderspun floated.
What did they matter?
At the side of Helise sat Jehanus who was Heros, still and nearly silent, real as all things, given to her by God.
I am his wife, and he is –
He was beautiful as a young divinity. Had she suffered so only to be intoxicated by this ecstasy?
The masque in the hall was now of a girl and youth embraced upon an isle on wheels, while tame panthers frisked about – but they were all men inside the feline velvets. A dim cry floated on the sea of delight: shape-changer.
“Come, madam. Now, lady, come with us –”
D’Uscaret’s maids of honour, the young girls of the house, were urging her bashfully, wantonly. She must get up and go with them, to the bridal chamber.
Helise rose and let them lead her out. Their butterfly mutters and touches, playful, childishly-naughty, swirling her through a door and up an inner stair where brands blazed in brackets. A vast heat was on the stair, bringing out the scents of flesh and unguents, and above in the curve of a shadow, the arch, the corridor, great doors carved with falcons, through which they slipped like thieves. And there the room, the room, and the tall wide bed, where tonight she would lie beside her lord.
Now she could reconcile herself with all of it. Yes, she could conjure endless darkness furled in ceaseless embrace. His mouth on hers, his arms about her. And if he should wish more – whatever he wished she would grant.
The girls of d’Uscaret, with sighings and nonsensical acid ribaldries – traditional things they probably did not, all of them, comprehend – disrobed Helise and clad her in a shift of samite, combed out her hair and wove lilies in it. She climbed into the high bed, and they arranged her there like a toy, leaning on the pillows.
At the hour of Matines, the wedding-party bounded up the stair with torches and candles, bells and lyres, bringing the husband to his wife.
The solid doors flew wide, and between them the uproar surged, the lights and sequins and the blowing of tin trumpets. The old men making sour old dirty jests, and the women laughing or compressing their faces. The Lady d’Uscaret was there, like a pillar of flint. Her perspectiveless face also contorted to smile or grimace, but it was like a disc of paper.
Before all the horde, the bridegroom. He made the rest into a dumbshow.
They brought him forward to the bed, and the men instructed him and the women looked away.
The eldest of the maids of honour bowed.
“Your bride is here awaiting you, m’sire. May you have joy of your night.”
Then, hiding their faces coyly, the maids ren away, and the old men tried to catch them going down the stairs, so there were shrieks and a scattering of sugarplums.
With a susurrus of trains and mantles, the doorway sucked back the last of the crowd. The doors were shut.
Heros and Helise, alone now, in the bedchamber.
She sat in the bed, as if in a bank of snow. She knew she must be shy like the gentle female deer. Her heart drummed, and she watched him under her lids.
What would he do now? She did not care, so long as he would lie down with her. She was parched for his nearness, the pressure of his mouth and body. This was true lust she felt, and did not even know it.
But Heros went straight back to the doors, and in came one of his gentlemen. Behind a screen painted with a hunting or hawking scene, the bridegroom was undressed. He stepped out from the screen wrapped in a mantle, and the gentleman took himself away, and again the door was shut.
And now, now surely, Heros would come to her.
But, as if he were alone only with himself, Heros d’Uscaret wandered along the length and breadth of the chamber. He seemed deep in thought. Now and then he hesitated, picking up some article or other. Once he stood for several minutes reading at an open book on a stand.
Helise did not dare to call to him. To question.
Her suspense became firstly painful, and then sickening, as gradually her trembling warmth died into chill.
As though he perceived this, Heros circled once more and snuffed the candles.
A veil of blackness covered the chamber, edge-to-edge, shrinking it to the area of the bed, where one light remained burning on the chest at the bedfoot.
Heros now moved towards this final candle, it enamelled him upon the dark.
There and then, he looked at his wife.
Before she could control herself, she leaned from the pillows, as if to hold out her arms to him.
But Heros d’Uscaret, her husband, blew out the candle. And as she shivered there, he got in beside her, and reclined, with the space of a third person left between them. And he said, “Goodnight, Helise.”
Perhaps only minutes later, lying beside and apart from him, she whispered, “Have I offended you, my lord?”
“No,” said the darkness.
“But will you not then –” and here she faltered on her own unspeakable audacity.
After her anguish had gone on for some minutes more, Helise stretched herself out, and visualised that now they lay together as man and wife should. But her instinct knew perfectly well that this was not as it should be. Blindly, her instinct clawed at the night while she kept like a stone, but after a century had passed, she murmured, “But will you not – kiss me, my lord?”
This question was answered.
“No,” darkness said again. “I won’t do that.”
And then there went by aeons of blackness and heartbeats like massing tides in the shell of the ear. After which Heros d’Uscaret said, “In the morning, Helise, you must take a pin and make your finger bleed. Stain the sheet with it, and your shift. That’s for the showing, to prove your virginity is gone. Without that your life will be miserable here. More miserable than necessary. Do you understand?”
She did not, of course. Of course she said that she did.
There were a hundred things – she did not know how they must be expressed. She lay in black silence, until he added, “Go to sleep now.” And then she lay awake all night until the dawn.
“Well, demoiselle. Do you please my son?”
Helise, a bride of eight days, gazed modestly on the ground. Eventually she found some words. “I try to, madam.”
“Come, lift your head. I can tell a liar by his eyes.”
Helise lifted her head, but not her gaze.
“Look up,” said the implacable Lady d’Uscaret.
Helise looked up. Just like her other mother, this one in her inlaid chair, but having no lap-dog.
The eyes of the second mother were black. Her dark hair was imprisoned within a birdcage of silver-wire, with a band of nacre across her pallid forehead. Everything was hardness, even the folds of her gown seemed hacked from steel.
“You’re afraid of me, Helise,” pronounced d’Uscaret’s lady. “But that’s as it should be. Your fam
ily’s rich, but has no history, in comparison with this house. Beside my own lineage, your name is a title written in sand.” Helise might have been surprised; already, not interpreting, she had seen that the new mother despised her own husband. But the new mother continued. “I too am by birth a d’Uscaret. But of the elder line. We may trace our roots to the days of the emperors at Rome. My lord is of the lesser branch. My blood kin are dead. A plague …” She paused, her eyes not softened but made adamant by memory or bitterness. “Perhaps you’ve heard legends of the d’Uscaret? These concern my kindred.” (Helise could not ascertain if this boast concerned legends of might, or myths of – other things.) “I alone am left. And my son. My son is d’Uscaret. He has the sign on him. His fairness. His wonderful eyes. Once, my own eyes … Do you love my son?” said the Lady of d’Uscaret as if she spoke of dross.
Helise bowed her head again.
“Madam, yes.”
“Naturally. How could it be otherwise. But to you he is indifferent. Am I correct?”
Helise wavered between shame and fright.
“Oh,” said the hard woman, as she would flick a fly from her gown, “you are serviceable. You may entertain his nights and bear him a boy or two. But that’s all. His brood-mare.”
Helise stared at the flags as if at the gate of Hades.
“Poor little mite,” said Lady d’Uscaret, without compassion. “At least you have the wit to know he is a god, and far above you. You won’t annoy him, I believe. Never do that. It was a marriage of convenience. You brought cash, and we thank you, Helise. Remember your place here. You are a pretty beetle we keep to amuse us now and then.” She leaned her snake’s head thoughtfully upon her bone hand. “Go away.”
And Helise gathered up her skirts and hastened from the room.
The world was as it always had been, incomprehensible, unyielding. She had her part. A lesser part perhaps, here. She had fundamentally as much sway over the house as had her brother’s wife at la Valle. If she was dutiful, and did not thwart them, they would not chastise her.
The humble were the elect of God. Did not the priests teach so, in their gemmed, kingly robes, from their towering pulpits?
Helise spent her days in ladylike domestic forms. She embroidered, she pressed flowers. She had no talent for music, and reading soon tired her. At the proper times she heard Mass with the household in the family chapel. Food might have been a diversion but she had no appetite.
At dinner, sometimes she saw her husband.
Generally the great ancestral hall was not employed, d’Uscaret dined in a parlour of panelled walls, where were displayed some paintings on classical and religious subjects. Above the table, whose legs were in the shape of eagles, three silver herb-censers depended from the ceiling, with aromatics burning over charcoal, to perfume the air. All d’Uscaret that was present in the house assembled here, in this show-place, with their house dogs lying at their feet, and the tame monkey of the lord’s brother eating candied cucumber or running about the length of its leash.
If he should be there, Heros was seated beside Helise. But sometimes he had gone hawking, beyond Paradys, or to some library, or cloister, or to another house. Sometimes father, uncle, and son were all of them absent, at the Duke’s table.
She seldom saw her lord during the day in any case. As, by then, she saw him seldom at night.
The first month he did spend with her, prostrate every night at her side. She would lie sleepless most of the hours, tortured by nervous cramps, afraid to be restless. Hearing the level breathing of his sleep, the dim bells of Matines and Laude, sometimes the reborn bell of Prima Hora. If she ever fell asleep it would be towards the dawn, and waking when the sky was light, she would see he had already left her.
She had stained the sheet as he had told her to, that initial morning, with the blood of her finger. She had had to force herself to prick her skin with the point, for she was, that way, a coward. She did it to content Heros, ignorant as to why. Were they then supposed to have acted out together some rite of viciousness and tearing, to cause blood? Was she fortunate to have been spared?
After one month, he did not come to sleep by her often, maybe every eight or ten days. Foolishly, when he entered the room, and when his gentleman unclothed him behind the screen, Helise hoped – but did not know for what. For a kiss, an embrace?
He gave her nothing, no more than in the beginning. Usually he would bid her goodnight, as he would greet her when he met her at dinner. They exchanged few other words, and at night none at all.
In the third month of her life at d’Uscaret, an elderly woman of the house came to Helise in the small square chamber allocated her sitting-room, that lay off the blank bed-chamber.
The woman was bustling and beady-eyed. She seemed respected in the house, and sat at dinner with the family. Her position Helise had never been certain of, but had once or twice heard her referred to. “Consult Ysanne if you still have your cough.” Or, “Hush, that’s a matter for old Ysanne.”
Now the old woman, who was fat, and wrapped her head in an Eastern turban of silk, sat across the fireless hearth and watched Helise, until the young girl turned hot and cold together.
“Have you noticed anything?” said old Ysanne at length, in a gossipy tone.
Helise could only look.
“Come, come,” said Ysanne. “Speak out. Do you vomit in the morning, or at certain foods? Have your courses stopped or grown erratic?”
Helise suddenly became aware that sickness and the stoppage of blood implied a gift of pregnancy.
She shook her head. Here was another failing. And yet (she had randomly grasped enough) she suspected the fault was not all her own. There was something which occurred between the husband and the wife, in bed, some sorcerous communion or vow, which invoked children.
Ysanne now got up again, and said, “You know you must give your husband an heir?” Helise did not reply. What could she say? “Timid,” said Ysanne. “The young wife must overcome her blushes and cherish her lord. You mustn’t shrink from anything he wishes.”
Helise felt faint. It was terrified lust, although she did not know it.
After a litter of more meaningless admonishments, old Ysanne went flat-footedly out.
Helise, as she had not done before, broke into sobs and tears. She even prayed, although she had long accepted God did not listen. Who else was there to talk to?
Then, in her abject wretchedness, when she could think of no shelter and no friend whose counsel she might seek, piercing her like the awl, her inner heart told her what she should do. She must run to him, to the one who never spoke to her, who never or rarely lay beside her, to he who was the cause of all her hurt, for he was also her love, the reason she had lived at all.
The decision of unthinking love was an insanity and it made her bold, perhaps for the first time in her existence.
She left her futile stitchery, and walked slowly, as if with an invited purpose, up through the house.
She had begun to learn its thoroughfares almost by default. She knew the situation of that other room, in which her lord slept, when not with his wife. She must go northerly, towards the most ancient portion of the building. She passed servants, but none challenged her. To them, she was a lady, a facet of d’Uscaret, however slight. Long corridors lit by windows, hung with tapestry, and quartered with carven benches, gave on thinner darker lanes, whose windows had no glass but only bars, whose occasional tapestries rotted. No longer did any servants appear. There was a dull silence. Yet she did not lose her way. For in the wilderness there was still some sign of habitation, or passage. Here and there a landmark of a great chest, even the mossy blackened hangings – for elsewhere the corridors were closed by grilles of spiderweb, the floors seas of dust – empty of anything human, limitlessly undisturbed.
So she found her way to a twisting stair she had once or twice heard described. It was the path into the tower-top, the Bird Tower they called it: doves had been kept there once. Now Heros dwel
led in the apartment, as if upon a rock in that desert of wasted corridors and rooms.
The door was abruptly above her. On its timber, a falcon’s mask in iron, and an iron ring.
As she put her hand on it she realised the door would be locked fast. She would have to sit down under the door-sill and await his return.
But the door gave at a pressure on the ring, without even a resistance.
That frightened her. She saw at once all her temerity in daring to invade the sanctum where no servant, no kindred, would enter unasked.
Yet it was too late, for the chamber opened before her, all its mystery, its spell, for it was his.
She stepped straight off the stair into the room.
It seemed to her the cell of a scholar. The bed was narrow and low, with a footstool by it, and a plain chest. No evidence of luxury was in these things. But across the floor, beneath a high, round, glassed window, that showed only air, was a table laid with a feast of objects and books, with measures and globes, the bones of hideous creatures mounted up as if they lived, weird instruments of alchemy and science.
There, on that board, his interest and his commitment were spread. She knew immediately, and with the jealous pang of a rival.
Between the table and the wall a three-paned triptych had been raised upon a stand.
Peering over the items on the table, careful to dislodge nothing, Helise did not pay the painting much attention. But then something in the angle of it, catching the window light against the shadow of the wall, caught her eye. It was his, of his choosing. She went to see.
How strange then, these images after all, strange as anything maybe in the room, or stranger …
In the first painted panel was a fang-like mountainside parting a ravenous sky. A procession of men and women had ascended, with livid torches; they stood like mindless things, staring into the clouds. Something with black wings was carrying off a young girl in white. From her lolling limbs and head there streamed draperies and hair, and a wreath of flowers went tumbling earthwards. This ominous tableau was titled in gilt: Nuptiae.