by Tanith Lee
He never looked her way.
Never.
After the supper, Monsieur Roche, a little tipsy, agreed to give a speech from the play. This was second best, but of course Johanos Martin would not perform. He had modestly and arrogantly refused.
Monsieur Roche, though the worse for wine, was very good.
The night had dropped like velvet on the garden. The lamps were lit along the paths, and up against the two small statues Monsieur Koster had had imported.
The guests walked in the soft air.
Madame Koster was arm in arm with Monsieur Martin. However had she achieved it? He looked disdainful, faintly amused. She seemed to take this for his interest.
Monsieur Koster was arguing about business in the salon with three gentlemen from a famous bank.
Hilde walked out between the hedges.
It had taken all her nerve, all the six glasses of wine she had consumed.
Unlike Monsieur Roche, Hilde Koster was not drunk. She was a maenad, given over to the god, and balanced in his hand. But had she mistaken the wrong god for the real one? For the real god of the wine is the god of self-knowing, dark twin of Apollo, black sun of opening and rebirth. Dionysos offers often painful truth with the wine, but he does not actually lie. Hilde’s god, maybe, was all a lie, and that was what the look of affirmation was, a wonderful, successful sham. Like acting itself.
“Oh –” exclaimed Madame Koster. She was caught in the state known among mothers and daughters. Here was the fruit of her body, which she had loved, and perhaps still did love. Only not now a joy, but an interruption. Worse, a reminder.
And Johanos Martin looked from his height. And noticed Hilde.
She was very beautiful. Better than the poor little mutilated classical statues. Better by far than the women of the house. He did not want her, for he had already what he wanted. But still, he looked. At last, he saw.
“My daughter,” said madame. “My little girl. Hilde. This is the great actor Johanos Martin.”
Hilde gazed up, for a while half blinded by his eyes. Then she glanced down. She held out her hand because she had long ago been taught to do so. All sense had left her, it was automatic.
“Mademoiselle,” said Johanos Martin. And he bowed.
That was all.
“Come,” said Hilde’s mother, “your glass is empty, monsieur.” And she led him back toward the terrace by the window, where the servant had appeared with long glinting goblets.
“I’m afraid, madame, I must take my leave,” said Monsieur Martin.
“But no – such a lovely night – this garden air is so good for you after –”
“Ah, madame, you must permit me to know what is good for me.”
Madame Koster was speechless. Unfortunately, she had got used to people who rarely said what they meant.
And so he slipped from her clutches like the sea.
The two women, one middle-aged and sour, one young and blighted, stood on the walk and watched the cold priest stride away, back to his church of Tragedy.
In her room, Hilde became hysterical.
Naturally, she had not meant to. It was a reaction to the wine, and to grief. (Was Ophelia only drunk?)
She wept in the way one screams.
The maid ran for tired, soured madame.
And madame came like a storm.
“What is the matter with you? Ridiculous noisy child! Be quiet! Here I am with a migraine and all this racket.”
Hilde tried to stay her tears, her shrieking sobs, for she was accustomed to obey.
But the grief was new. It ravaged her. She was torn. How, with her entrails ripped from her body, could she be calm and quiet?
“Well – what is it?”
“Oh, Mama –”
But Hilde did not say what it was. There is a knowledge beyond knowing. Besides, how to speak of the unspeakable? Persuaded to the throne of love, and pushed aside.
“Hurry – three drops of my mixture, quick. Give it her; for God’s sake.”
The drops were administered. On top of the wine they worked wonders. Hilde was violently sick again, and eventually, exhausted by these humiliations, tumbled into sleep.
Is death this? To wake in a vault and swim slowly upward, and there to meet the blows of memory?
O God – O God – But God had gone deaf.
In her virgin’s bed, Hilde wept. Softly now, as after the ecstasy in the dark. Must not be heard. No one must find her. For who would help?
Her maid chided her for not arising. Then for not touching the invalid breakfast.
Madame came, and chided too.
Hilde lay like a wounded snake, spineless, broken.
Then she heard a woman, some gypsy, singing in the street. Servants from the houses chased her off. And Hilde wept again.
But then she thought, He bowed to me.
And she recalled how his eyes had, finally, seen her.
But her mother had been by. And all the people. And the lights.
Perhaps …
Hilde got up and went to her mirror. She was so young, even after the outburst of anguish and tears, still she was what she had been. And somehow her youth infallibly told her she was not yet destroyed.
Of course, there were concerns surrounding him. In the story, the knight must win the notice of the lady. And she, Hilde, she must win his notice.
What could she take to him? Only herself. Surely he must see. Surely, surely, he must know.
She would die for him. That was enough. She must be brave. She must seek him out. Alone. Alone he could not fail to find her, as she, amid a crowd of hundreds, had found him.
Hilde washed and dressed and put up her hair and went down.
Monsieur Koster was at home, and beholding her, he beamed. He had heard she had been naughty, but now she was only his pretty, nice little daughter, his very own, that one day he would sell for a high profit in the marriage market Babylon of Paradys.
“Well, Hilde, got over your sulks?”
“Yes, Papa. I’m sorry, Papa.”
“You mustn’t be a bad girl. You worry your mother and then she worries your poor papa. A young lady must be demure and gentle. Loving and giving. Docile. Not these unbecoming tantrums and noise.”
Hilde drifted past a mirror, and some radiant, true, but deceiving part of her called in her soul: No one can ignore this. This youth and bloom, this being and nature.
Loving and giving.
THREE
Paradise
Who put the “art” in heart, the “pain” in paint
and the ice in Pardise?
John Kaiine
Smara walked through the night mist of the City, under her floating lamp. One hand she kept against the rough and stony, dripping surfaces of walls. In the other, she carried a long and slender knife. This was her left hand. She was naturally right-handed but had trained herself to left-handedness. It had been her first curtsy to the craziness of her world.
She was on the path beside a canal. A snake, perhaps, glicked and eddied through the water, but she could not see it, only the blurred ripples picked up by the lamp.
Then, footsteps.
Smara waited, and a man came from the mist. He wore graceful gray garments, and a mask like a black bird.
“Beloved – how extraordinary to meet you here,” he exclaimed. And held out his arms to Smara.
She went to him, and plunged the knife slantwise into his throat. Blood sprayed like thick drops of jet, some hitting the lamp in the air, but it quickly shook them off.
The man soon fell dead on the towpath, and Smara bent over him. She removed from his finger a ring of twisted bronze, and then dragged the bird mask from his face. Beneath he too had the face of a bird, beaked nose, tiny mouth, protuberant sideways eyes. Smara held her breath in dismay.
She stood up and hurried away, having only paused to wipe her knife on the bird man’s sleeve.
The third bridge had long ago collapsed into the river. It was feasible to go
halfway across it, and then to jump into the mercury-colored water and swim for shore. To those who sat in the bar above the strand, the intermittent splashes of these jumps were broadcast spasmodically.
A woman danced naked on a table to the tune of a comb.
Felion sat drinking from a jug of water drawn out of the river. It was highly toxic, more inebriating than any liquor.
Smara went to him and gave him the ring. There was a trace of blood on it. He put it on, and handed her four brushes of wonderful springing hair.
“He was painting shells on the ground in the porch of the church. A shame it was a painter I killed. He was quite talented. But the shells will stay. He didn’t smudge them as he convulsed all over the stone.”
“Mine wore a bird mask,” said Smara.
She drank some water and closed her eyes. She was very pale.
A man came by with a tray of lizard-scaled, fanged fish snared from the river. Felion bought one, and put it into his drink. It revived and swam about. He threw it from an open smashed window, back into the river.
“What are we to do?” said Smara. “Oh, what?”
“Let’s go into our uncle’s labyrinth.”
“No,” she said. “No.”
“Let me remind you of his will. He had accrued property and funds in the other city – the sane city. These riches would come to us. We could live there.”
“But to walk through the ice …”
“Don’t be afraid,” he said. His face was beautiful with compassion. “Smara, what can hurt us worse than here?”
“I must kill again,” she said abruptly.
“All right. Let’s finish the jug, and then we’ll go together.”
Now she nodded. He refilled her glass twice, thrice.
A woman came by selling human eyes set into rings.
“How lovely,” said Smara.
“They won’t last,” said the woman. “I’ll sell you one for a kiss.”
“Then kiss me.”
The woman kissed her, briskly, and gave her one of the rings. The eye in it was pure, a crystal spherical gray.
“How much better than the ring I brought you.”
Felion took her hand. “When we go out, you can throw it away.”
She nodded. Two silver tears ran suddenly from her eyes. “I try so hard. It’s as if I must. Do you remember Mother?”
“She’s dead,” he answered absently.
“I wish –”
“No, you don’t wish that. Let’s live. Come on, we’ll kill.”
They left the bar together and walked along the pebbly strand. From the banks of the City, gleams and glares spilled into the water. Someone leapt off the bridge and drowned.
“This way,” he said. He led her up, onto the embankment, and then they turned into the upper City.
Out of the charcoal fog of nighttime Paradise, the open doorways gaped, shining. Here and there processions of citizens passed, chanting and banging gongs, or weeping, or utterly silent.
“Where are we going?” she said.
“To the Clock Tower Hill.”
“Dogs run in the streets there,” she said.
“Yes,” he said, “and when we kill, it will feed them.”
So they climbed up the heights of Paradise.
A bell was ringing in the cranium of the cathedral, but when they reached Clock Tower Hill, only the ticking of ancient apparatuses, mimicking clocks, was to be heard, and an occasional snarl.
Felion and Smara found people dancing around a bonfire and lured them off one by one, and sliced them to death in the shadows.
After about an hour of this, only two were left dancing by the fire. Felion and Smara joined them briefly, then stole away.
“Where now?”
“You know where, Smara.”
“No, I won’t.”
“Please.”
They stood beneath a street lamp that still burned with a cold luminescence. Smara’s personal lamp had faded.
“I won’t enter the labryinth of our uncle.”
“Then I must do it by myself.”
Smara turned from him.
Lightless, she moved away like a ghost, down a slim alleyway under broken casements, into the fog.
As he climbed back up the hundred steps to his uncle’s mansion, Felion experienced a partly irritated excitement.
When he gained the house, and it had let him in, he went at once to his uncle’s study, or workroom, on the second floor. The room was built into a sort of tower and jutted out over the abyss of the steps. In the darkness, anything might have been below, a cliffside, even some sluggish silent sea.
Felion activated the mechanical lights, and then, sitting at the great black worktable, he reread portions of the rambling letter his uncle had left for him. (Smara, of course, had never consulted it.)
All about lay bizarre machines that did not now work, and which perhaps never had, and arrested experiments involving vials of glass and transparent plastic, coils of metal, balances, and fluids that had solidified. Over these the damp dust formed a second skin, in parts thick and vegetable as moss.
“… I am a scientist who has always longed to be a poet,” said the sonorous and self-indulgent letter. “Where, after all, is the difference? Scribbling down on scraps of paper equations and potential formulae, or snatches of mystical words, couplets that rhyme. My labyrinth is also a sonnet. It has its own meter, its own intrinsic meaning. One must reach the heart, and then the farther side, and so new knowledge. This requires concentration, but not necessarily courage. Nothing mechanistic can be taken into the maze. No watch or other timepiece, no devices for measuring. Not even a gun, should you or your sister have come across such a weapon on your karma-collecting activities of murder. No mechanical lamp. You may use one of the torches I have prepared and left for you; each needs only a match to light it. As you pass through the ice of the labyrinth, the torch may melt it a little, but that is to the good. There will then always be a limit on the number of occasions you may go in and out. This isn’t a game. You will have to decide whether you want your inheritance, a life in the second city beyond the maze.”
Felion glanced about the study. One of the unreliable lamps fluttered, as if winking at him. He turned the page, and read:
“I myself am not in fact approaching death. But I am going away. I won’t confuse you by attempting to explain. My first identity I established through a connection – false – to a pair of people in the partially rational City. Metal, which as you know is valueless in Paradise, is almost priceless here. With such a fortune I have done much as I liked but mostly kept to myself. The half-sanity of this second world is in some ways disturbing. I have, obviously, left a will in this place that recognizes such things, and it names you both. I am also the (spurious) uncle or guardian to many persons here, but only one might have proved an obstacle. She is a painter and will find my cash useful. You need not fear she is in your way. Probably she will drink herself to death quite soon. Her madness attracted me to her, although she is not insane in the manner of Paradise, would get no glances there.”
The flirtatious lamp went out. Felion shuffled the pages of the letter and held them toward another light.
“The exit from the labyrinth is always subjective. It is controllable only by will. Maybe you won’t be strong enough to operate journey’s end with any skill. I must warn you, too: The labyrinth, because it is modeled on a brain, and therefore inevitably upon mine, may open randomly to show you one other particular place, or time, where I have gone, or am going. For time slips in the labryinth, and it is possible to travel into the past. I have never attempted the future, in case the future of the second city should be as dismal as the present of Paradise. You would do best to ignore these latter past excursions. The place involved would not appeal to you, although I have seen its potential and indeed, because I am insane, found it in my destiny to go there. Avoid it yourself, however – it is not for you. Keep your mind on the present parallel world
I offer. The woman painter will soon die, and then you can do as you wish. You can even kill in the second city, if you want. I myself have done so, although only once. It was the day that my two introductory people became curious about me, quite suddenly, after a drinking party. On the pretense of playing with their vehicle, I destroyed something in its engine, and an hour later both of them were killed on one of the vast highways that now run over this city. I may add that in the past of the City, I have slain no one. But I believe, even so, there will be death there.”
Felion skimmed through the final pages of the letter. They were repetitious and increasingly disordered.
But a little later he found the antique torches in a cupboard, and above on a shelf a box of matches, with some eccentric items, among which were two wooden dolls of Smara’s, a necklace, and half a brown glass bottle with a shattered neck.
When Felion had got down to the basement and walked along the track, he reached the cavernous hall that housed the labyrinth, and now he looked at it wryly. That it should truly be the route to another world, and to other planes of time, seemed unlikely. And yet how horrifying it was, this wall of ice, shimmering, and drily wet, in the torchlight.
Like the prince in the legend, he could go in, holding up the torch, and knife in hand. (Smara should have been the priestess who stood to guard the entrance.) And in the maze, at its heart, would be a monster.
Felion listened and heard a faint roaring, like the quake of ocean captured on a screen. But it was only the blood sounding in the shells of his ears.
Suppose he went in, and it was a reality, and he could not get back? He considered Smara, alone in Paradise. In childhood, when they had begun to kill, they had formalized the slaughter, devising a ritual of changing implements. Blades, then cords, then poisons, before blades again. Of these means, Smara found the use of cords, the method of strangling, the most difficult. Generally she needed his help. And if he were not there, she might not manage the act efficiently, and die in turn.
He could burn his uncle’s letter – even burn down the mansion, if necessary. Or he could merely leave at once and never come back.