by Tanith Lee
From those times Haninuh’s soul remembered the demon. The utuk.
Night lay motionless on Paradys, yet it moved towards the east. Haninuh heard the bells ring for the offices of Christendom, the hymn of drunks from an alley, smelled the corn market, and flowers on the house vine, saw, heard, smelled nothing from the ordinary.
About two hours after Laude had sung from the convent near the quays, deep weariness overcame the Jew. A longing for sleep weighed on him. Soon it would be dawn. Though hidden senses told him grim events had gone on somewhere, he had been vouchsafed no clue.
He rose from the bench and made his way towards the pavilion’s door. His hand was on the latch when he heard a muffled scraping and rustling from nearby, on the wall.
Sleep dropped from him like a mantle. A chord of sparks shot across his body. Something was coming through the vine, up the side of the house.
Haninuh turned to confront the six unshuttered windows of the pavilion, his back to the closed door. He did not have long to wait.
A black lump of darkness came sliding over the roof’s edge and slewed across two windows, enlarging itself into the third.
Haninuh, back to the door, the third window before him, whispered, “I believe with perfect faith that the Creator, blessed be He, is the maker of all things created … I believe with perfect faith that all the words of the prophets are true … I believe that the Creator … knows every deed of the children of men, gives heed to all their acts – for my salvation I hope, O Lord! I hope, O Lord, for my salvation! O Lord, for my salvation I hope!”
Blackness, and from the black a sort of twisting into form, like a man’s, but the hands were talons and clacked against the pavilion wall – and out of the black leaned something. It was the head of a bird composed of the green sequins of scales, and a beak black with dried blood, and two eyes like emerald.
There was no intelligence in these eyes – and yet they were, they lived, they knew.
“In the presence of my enemies,” said Haninuh, “You are with me. Even in the valley of the Shadow, You are there.”
The beak of the utuk cracked apart, and a snake tongue whipped outward and in again. The eyes were smoky now, as if drowsy. It came and pressed on the open window – and started off again. It had struck the invisible lines of power that barred every aperture of the Jew’s house. And it did not like them; perhaps they stung.
At that instant the Jew woke into movement. Casting before him a cabbalistic incantation that smashed the etheric lattice of the window, and seemed to carry him with it, out of the pavilion he sprang, snatching up as he hurtled through a sword of honed steel from the bench.
In that moment, in his blaze of fear and rage, the magus Haninuh touched terror with his body, came knee to knee with the unearthly, deathly thing, and with a moan of dread raised the sword, on which the names of angels, the script of most arcane talismans, were scored –
But the horror shuffled off from him, like the nightmare. It evaded the stroke, flounced on a flightless wing-beat away, and over the rooftop, smearing and roiling itself in, getting like an ape down the wall. The fragile vine was ripped now, and fell with it into the street. There in the pure black the beast of night disappeared.
Haninuh stood and trembled.
He had been too slow, yet too strong for it – or else, by flight it mocked him. For it was drawn to him as he had sensed it might be. A traditional foe. Doubly in danger now. Worse, he had let it escape to continue its mayhem. For this hour he had planned, but he was found wanting.
The Jew bowed his head before his own failure, consenting, bitter.
PART FOUR
The Scapegoat
Remember me – Oh! Pass not thou my grave
Without one thought whose relics there recline:
The only pang my bosom dare not brave
Must be to find forgetfulness in thine.
Byron
For thirty-nine days she was their prisoner. On the fortieth she was their victim. It was her punishment. She knew that she was guilty. She had looked for no kindness, and her first actions were prompted by the habit of human commerce, not fantasies of pity.
The truth had come to her gradually, as if she returned to consciousness: nothing had happened to alert the house.
Even her screams had been those of pleasure, and doubtless, if anyone had overheard them, they were correctly interpreted.
The metamorphosis occurred in silence.
It had been visible only to herself.
At the recollection – the full absorption of what had taken place in front of her – Helise wrested herself to her feet and swayed there in her ripped gown, her hair raining round her shoulders. She felt herself dirtied, bloody. But the only wound, of course, was one which would be acceptable, despite the fact that it was out of date.
Nevertheless, her helpless need was to seek others, to raise her voice to a new pitch, and tell what she had been the witness of. That this was not believable did not cross her mind. She had watched. She had no choice but to believe.
Some while it took her to recall how a door was to be opened. That achieved, she went out into the corridors of d’Uscaret, almost wandering, and coming to a lighted spot, she did raise her voice, and began to scream. Once begun, this expression was not easy to leave off.
People came. She did not know who they were. Shadows jostled on torchlight and the eyes of candles blinked at her.
What she screamed, if there were words, Helise did not afterwards know.
Presently someone struck her in the face. She fell down, and looking up from the stones, beheld Lord d’Uscaret. One of his rings had cut her eyebrow. She felt the numb hurt of it and putting up her finger, caught a bud of wetness.
She was now quiet and they dragged her to a room. Here the kindred gathered and glared on her. The servants were shut out.
Lord d’Uscaret paced about. His wife sat in a chair and gnawed her lip. For a long while they did not ask. At length, this question: What did Helise mean by her noise?
Helise said, with the clarity of an honest child, “When he lay on me, his face and head became the head of a bird.”
As Helise said this, Lady d’Uscaret let out a single sharp cry, as if she had driven an awl into her hand. Then she rose and left the chamber. Her face was awful, as though its bones had collapsed and no blood was anywhere under her skin. One of the men followed to support her.
D’Uscaret came back to loom above Helise, and he was sweating as he did at his evening drinking.
“Who told you, you witch, to say such a thing?”
Helise was confused and did not answer.
Then d’Uscaret slapped her again, and though now the rings did not cut her face, she darted away, and fell once more, and crouching on the floor she said, “He never would, my husband Heros. But tonight I made him, and he lay on me, and when the thing happened to him which happens, he altered. His flesh broke out in metal spangles, and I saw he had a bird’s face, and the beak, and a demon’s eyes, like a hawk’s eyes, but green. It ran away up the chimney.”
D’Uscaret turned from her. “Go search the bedchamber.”
Pale as their lady, two of the men went out. The few left behind looked half-mad. D’Uscaret sweated. Not one of them had declared these events must be impossible.
Helise saw that her statement seemed obtuse, which was mostly due to a lack of carnal vocabulary. Feeling no reticence, she tried to put this right. “I mean,” she said, “that when he was being a husband to me, when the fit comes, then he was changed.” Suddenly a wild lament swept down on her. Tears gushed. She sprawled on the floor.
Shortly after this, everyone went out, and locked her into the room.
Helise wept until all awareness was wrung from her body. Perhaps she slept then.
She wakened to torchlight. A steward of the house, and a woman who waited on Lady d’Uscaret, pulled Helise upright.
“You will make no sound,” said the waiting-woman.
Th
ey took her through the mansion, along passages, up stairs, rather as she had taken herself earlier, searching for the secret apartment of her beloved.
Finally there was another room, with sparse furnishings, a window of lactescent glass. A ghostly servant had arrived before them, and was putting out a ewer and cup, a covered basket. One candle burned.
The servant, the woman, the torch-bearing steward, drew off from Helise, until she was alone in the middle of the gloom.
She said, stupidly, and for no real reason, “What am I to do here?”
“Stay, at my lady’s will,” rapped the woman.
Then they went, and closed the door, and locked it on her as the other door had been locked.
Helise crept to the neglected, ill-prepared bed. She felt nothing, no fear, and no alarm, no longer the agony of sorrow. She slept again, and only realised, reviving to sickly awareness at the entry of light through the vitreous window, that she had been imprisoned for her crime.
They brought her food and water and a small amount of wine, her tiring table and embroidery, fresh linen. The room was cold, was summer waning? Although she sometimes asked the servant, they sent no logs for her fireplace, and only allowed her one candle at a time.
There were no writing materials, and if there had been any, who would have agreed to be her messenger? Besides, to whom should she apply? Her family of la Valle had loved her only in as much as she had been wanted by d’Uscaret. Now d’Uscaret hated her.
I prayed to the Devil. He granted my desire and now collects his fee.
She slept a great deal, and dreamed of Heros. Nearly always he was breaking in to rescue her. But overcome with lust, they fell at once to coupling on the floor or bed. In the midst of this she would try to push him away, shrieking. Also she would dream she lay down and the pillow slowly changed into a staring, decaying eagle’s head. And once, that her aunt’s pet bird flew out of its cage and went for her eyes.
She would wake in fear, or crying.
They gave her no news. One morning, in desperation, she had muttered to the dull unkindly servant who brought the food, “What do they say of Lord Heros?”
The servant sent her a glance.
“Nothing, madam. He’s away on his journey for the Duke.”
Helise was bemused. Later she began to see that d’Uscaret had used the proposed excursion Heros had intended, on Ducal business, as the excuse for his vanishment. He had merely set out a day or so in advance. The City, and half d’Uscaret’s own household, were handed this tale, and would accept it. Probably it was put about that he hurried to escape the difficult young wife, who now turned hysterical at her lord’s absence, hence her confinement to a remoter region of the manse. Had even the Duke himself been deceived?
But meanwhile – where was it that Heros had gone to, or that thing had gone to he had become? Thinking of that all her nerve deserted her. She had a vision which seemed almost palpable. She imagined the creature on the roofs of the City, at upper windows, perhaps availing itself of chimneys. It flickered in and out of her inner sight. What it did she could not be sure. But they were deeds of darkness, hunger – and in the end it would hide itself. She did not know where.
However, she had one other dream, and only once. She saw the thing (her husband) seated in his chamber in the very house, at that table under the round window and the triptych of Psyche. Among the paraphernalia of former studies he had paper, pen and ink, and was writing … she saw what he – it – wrote. Even in the dream … incongruous. For they were rhymes of love. She had not wanted to approach, had been afraid, but the creature did not see her, for in the dream she was incorporeal. Besides, its head lolled, the eyes were dull, and the tongue ran from its beak. The hands wrote busily, alertly, the claws scratching the paper. Some human facet of Heros, some memory from his man’s brain, plainly supplied the task, at which the bird’s head moronically attended.
Close by on the desk, among the apparatuses of silver and glass, the balances and skeletons, lay some strands of hair, caked with blood at one end. There were also several teeth in a pewter dish, fresh and white but for the old blood on them.
After this dream, Helise did not cry out or sob. She got up as if tranced and went to her tiring table, where the mirror was, and stared in at her own young, shrunken face.
She had never before realised that her eyes were of this shade. Definitely, if looked upon closely, there was a greenish cast to them.
On the thirty-eighth day of her captivity, Helise was visited by her second mother, Lady d’Uscaret.
The woman entered the room and had the door shut behind her. She wore the black and viridian of the house like mourning. All her hair was covered. Her collapse, which seemed to have maintained itself, had not softened or fleshed out any part of her.
“You may stay in your bed,” she told Helise. “What else are you good for? I came to look at you. To see this insect which destroyed my son.”
Helise lay with the covers up to her chin, and endured the looking-at.
“Merciless Heaven,” said Lady d’Uscaret. “Is it a fact, you made the old fool Ysanne give you aphrodisiacs of Alexandria? Don’t bother to speak. She was beaten, and confessed. A meddling wretch. But I am to blame. I judged the tales were lies, or advised myself they were. Who could live otherwise? Sometimes, one would say I was green-eyed. I should have guessed from that. My mirror reassured me. But the mirror was old and cloudy … And my son, that beautiful boy from such a loveless match – there are such eyes in other houses, other lands. Why attend to a legend, a story to frighten children with at the hearth in winter?”
She spoke in a composed, indifferent way.
“And you. I reckoned you harmless. He had his night, so I thought. There is proof, I thought. He took pleasure with her, and no uncommon thing occurred. He had always feared it. Unspoken. I would never listen. Until we walked in the garden, not long ago. “I must be away,” he said to me. Then I knew. He’d left you untouched, was virgin still. The curse was in our blood. He dared not.”
D’Uscaret’s Lady looked on with her eyes not green, nor black.
“But you forced him to it.”
Helise was nailed on her pillow. She could not move or reply.
“Make no mistake,” said her second mother, “I’ll have you killed. Expect it. Some bane in your drink, a cushion pressed to your face. Or a strong man will come and hang you.”
In her coffin of a bed, Helise could not even feel terror.
Lady d’Uscaret opened the door and went out of it, and it was locked again.
That, and its after-taste, were the thirty-eighth day.
On the thirty-ninth day, women filled the chamber.
They pulled her from the bed, washed her and dressed her, combed out her hair. There was a spurious air of the preparation for the bridal. No one said anything to her, nonetheless. They did not even address her as “lady” or “madam.”
When the women had gone, without explanation, Helise sipped the watery wine of her confinement, wondering if it had been doctored. She seemed to have a burning sensation in her throat, but then it passed.
In the afternoon, men of the house entered, without preamble or apology. The steward said to her, “You must get up, and come with us.”
“Where?” she said listlessly.
“That you’ll learn.”
Where she was not an article of barter, or a sexual pawn, she had never been treated as an adult, only ever as a baby, save some of the cruelty might have been restrained in a baby’s case.
She went with them, and they took her away along the corridors and stairs, and she noticed the rotted tapestries, the lost chests mice had chewed. She did not pay much attention. She had no say in the world to be interested in it.
Finally she did know where they carried her. She began to scent their fear, and then her heart stumbled and in their grip she almost sank down, but they hauled her on, up the twisting stair into the Bird Tower. The door was in front of her with its ring and
falcon’s mask. A hand flung it wide, and straight off the step she was lifted, into that chamber, that cell of the scholar, which had belonged to Heros d’Uscaret.
At the hour they gave her no reasons. She was nothing to them, useful only for her femaleness and expendability. It was later that, by small sproutings of gossip, by a letter or two uncovered from forgotten cabinets, such things, that the brain of Helise evolved and ordered a theory of events.
Her dream of him, as he wrote the uncouth verses, had verity. She was spiritually linked to him, she, the author of his damnation. In the moment of union, two becoming one …
No sooner did she enter the room with d’Uscaret’s men, that thirty-ninth day, than she glimpsed the strands of hair, the teeth in the dish, ink spilled on paper, on the floor. He had left other marks in that room, once so esoteric and cleanly. (The painting on the triptych had at last been overturned. Perhaps this was some vestige of human anger, or only the upsetting of flight.)
The Duke had sustained d’Uscaret, and one other great house had reluctantly held its vengeful arm. But there had been atrocities in the City. Not only a daughter of Lyrecourt was won to a couch of blood, not only the rich and mighty howled for an end. The Duke had said, it seemed, he would leave d’Uscaret to its own affairs, whatever their nature, providing d’Uscaret would see to them.
It did not always come to shelter by day in the Tower of the Birds. No, only seven or eight times did they detect it had entered there, going over the roof and in at that round window inaccessible to any other. It would possess scattered eyries. The vaults of chapels, wild land about the old City wall; it had been seen climbing the turret of a ruined church, by a man who took it for a monkey – but some, hearing the rumour, knew otherwise. Elsewhere, near the markets, two fornicators were scared in a corn-bin by a beast they swore was a giant beaked lizard that had on man’s clothing.