by Tanith Lee
After about an hour, the forest marched up out of the ground and swiftly enveloped the road on all sides.
There was presently an insidious, but generally perceptible change. Between the walls of the forest there gathered a new silence, a silence which was, if anything, alive, a personality which attended any humanly noisy passage with a cruel and resentful interest. Lisel stared up into the narrow lane of sky above. They might have been moving along the channel of a deep and partly frozen stream. When the drowned sun flashed through, splinters of light scattered and went out as if in water.
The tall pines in their pelts of snow seemed poised to lurch across the road.
The sled had been driving through the forest for perhaps another hour, when a wolf wailed somewhere amid the trees. Rather than break the silence of the place, the cry seemed born of the silence, a natural expression of the landscape’s cold solitude and immensity.
The outriders touched the pistols in their belts, almost religiously, and the nearest of the three leaned to Lisel.
“Madame Anna’s house isn’t so far from here. In any case we have our guns, and these horses could race the wind.”
“I’m not afraid,” Lisel said haughtily. She glanced at the trees. “I’ve never seen a wolf. I should be interested to see one.”
Made sullen by Lisel’s pert reply, the outrider switched tactics. From trying to reassure her, he now ominously said: “Pray you don’t, m’mselle. One wolf generally means a pack, and once the snow comes, they’re hungry.”
“As my father’s servant, I would expect you to sacrifice yourself for me, of course,” said Lisel. “A fine strong man like you should keep a pack of wolves busy long enough for the rest of us to escape.”
The man scowled and spurred away from her.
Lisel smiled to herself. She was not at all afraid, not of the problematical wolves, not even of the eccentric grandmother she had never before seen. In a way, Lisel was looking forward to the meeting, now her annoyance at vacating the city had left her. There had been so many bizarre tales, so much hearsay. Lisel had even caught gossip concerning Anna’s husband. He had been a handsome princely man, whose inclinations had not matched his appearance. Lisel’s mother had been sent to the city to live with relations to avoid this monster’s outbursts of perverse lust and savagery. He had allegedly died one night, mysteriously and luridly murdered on one of the forest tracks. This was not the history Lisel had got from her father, to be sure, but she had always partly credited the more extravagant version. After all, Anna the Matriarch was scarcely commonplace in her mode of life or her attitude to her granddaughter.
Yes, indeed, rather than apprehension, Lisel was beginning to entertain a faintly unholy glee in respect of the visit and the insights it might afford her.
A few minutes after the wolf had howled, the road took a sharp bend, and emerging around it, the party beheld an unexpected obstacle in the way. The driver of the sled cursed softly and drew hard on the reins, bringing the horse to a standstill. The outriders similarly halted. Each peered ahead to where, about twenty yards along the road, a great black carriage blotted the white snow.
A coachman sat immobile on the box of the black carriage, muffled in coal-black furs and almost indistinguishable from them. In forceful contrast, the carriage horses were blonds, and restless, tossing their necks, lifting their feet. A single creature stood on the track between the carriage and the sled. It was too small to be a man, too curiously proportioned to be simply a child.
“What’s this?” demanded the third of Lisel’s outriders, he who had spoken earlier of the wolves. It was an empty question, but had been a long time in finding a voice for all that.
“I think it is my grandmother’s carriage come to meet me,” declared Lisel brightly, though, for the first, she had felt a pang of apprehension.
This was not lessened, when the dwarf came loping toward them, like a small, misshapen, furry dog and, reaching the sled, spoke to her, ignoring the others.
“You may leave your escort here and come with us.”
Lisel was struck at once by the musical quality of his voice, while out of the shadow of his hood emerged the face of a fair and melancholy angel. As she stared at him, the men about her raised their objections.
“We’re to go with m’mselle to her grandmother’s house.”
“You are not necessary,” announced the beautiful dwarf, glancing at them with uninterest. “You are already on the Lady Anna’s lands. The coachman and I are all the protection your mistress needs. The Lady Anna does not wish to receive you on her estate.”
“What proof,” snarled the third outrider, “that you’re from Madame’s château? Or that she told you to say such a thing. You could have come from any place, from hell itself most likely, and they crushed you in the door as you were coming out.”
The riders and the driver laughed brutishly. The dwarf paid no attention to the insult. He drew from hip glove one delicate, perfectly formed hand, and in it a folded letter. It was easy to recognize the Matriarch’s sanguine wax and the imprint of the petaled flower. The riders brooded and the dwarf held the letter toward Lisel. She accepted it with an uncanny but pronounced reluctance.
Chère, it said in its familiar, indeed its unmistakable, characters, Why are you delaying the moment when I may look at you? Beautiful has already told you, I think, that your escort may go home. Anna is giving you her own escort, to guide you on the last laps of the journey. Come! Send the men away and step into the carriage.
Lisel, reaching the word, or rather the name, Beautiful, had glanced involuntarily at the dwarf, oddly frightened at its horrid contrariness and its peculiar truth. A foreboding had clenched around her young heart, and, for a second, inexplicable terror. It was certainly a dreadful dilemma. She could refuse, and refuse thereby the goodwill, the gifts, the ultimate fortune her grandmother could bestow. Or she could brush aside her silly childish fears and walk boldly from the sled to the carriage. Surely, she had always known Madame Anna was an eccentric. Had it not been a source of intrigued curiosity but a few moments ago?
Lisel made her decision.
“Go home,” she said regally to her father’s servants. “My grandmother is wise and would hardly put me in danger.”
The men grumbled, glaring at her, and as they did so, she got out of the sled and moved along the road toward the stationary and funereal carriage. As she came closer, she made out the flower device stamped in gilt on the door. Then the dwarf had darted ahead of her, seized the door, and was holding it wide, bowing to his knees, thus almost into the snow. A lock of pure golden hair spilled across his forehead.
Lisel entered the carriage and sat on the somber cushions. Courageous prudence (or greed) had triumphed.
The door was shut. She felt the slight tremor as Beautiful leapt on the box beside the driver.
Morose and indecisive, the men her father had sent with her were still lingering on the ice between the trees, as she was driven away.
—
She must have slept, dazed by the continuous rocking of the carriage, but all at once she was wide awake, clutching in alarm at the upholstery. What had roused her was a unique and awful choir. The cries of wolves.
Quite irresistibly she pressed against the window and stared out, impelled to look for what she did not, after all, wish to see. And what she saw was unreassuring.
A horde of wolves were running, not merely in pursuit, but actually alongside the carriage. Pale they were, a pale almost luminous brownish shade, which made them seem phantasmal against the snow. Their small but jewel-like eyes glinted, glowed and burned. As they ran, their tongues lolling sideways from their mouths like those of huge hunting dogs, they seemed to smile up at her, and her heart turned over.
Why was it, she wondered, with panic-stricken anger, that the coach did not go faster and so outrun the pack? Why was it the brutes had been permitted to gain as much distance as they had? Could it be they had already plucked the coachman and the dw
arf from the box and devoured them—she tried to recollect if, in her dozing, she had registered masculine shrieks of fear and agony—and that the horses plunged on. Imagination, grown detailed and pessimistic, soon dispensed with these images, replacing them with that of great pepper-colored paws scratching on the frame of the coach, the grisly talons ripping at the door, at last a wolfs savage mask thrust through it, and her own frantic and pointless screaming, in the instants before her throat was silenced by the meeting of narrow yellow fangs.
Having run the gamut of her own premonition, Lisel sank back on the seat and yearned for a pistol, or at least a knife. A malicious streak in her lent her the extraordinary bravery of desiring to inflict as many hurts on her killers as she was able before they finished her. She also took space to curse Anna the Matriarch. How the wretched old woman would grieve and complain when the story reached her. The clean-picked bones of her granddaughter had been found a mere mile or so from her château, in the rags of a blood-red cloak; by the body a golden clasp, rejected as inedible…
A heavy thud caused Lisel to leap to her feet, even in the galloping, bouncing carriage. There at the door, grinning in on her, the huge face of a wolf, which did not fall away. Dimly she realized it must impossibly be balancing itself on the running board of the carriage, its front paws raised and somehow keeping purchase on the door. With one sharp determined effort of its head, it might conceivably smash in the pane of the window. The glass would lacerate, and the scent of its own blood further inflame its starvation. The eyes of it, doused by the carriage’s gloom, flared up in two sudden pupilless ovals of fire, like two little portholes into hell.
With a shrill howl, scarcely knowing what she did, Lisel flung herself at the closed door and the wolf the far side of it. Her eyes also blazed, her teeth also were bared, and her nails raised as if to claw. Her horror was such that she appeared ready to attack the wolf in its own primeval mode, and as her hands struck the glass against its face, the wolf shied and dropped away.
In that moment, Lisel heard the musical voice of the dwarf call out from the box, some wordless whoop, and a tall gatepost sprang by.
Lisel understood they had entered the grounds of the Matriarch’s château. And, a moment later, learned, though did not understand, that the wolves had not followed them beyond the gateway.
2
The Matriarch sat at the head of the long table. Her chair, like the table, was slender, carved and intensely polished. The rest of the chairs, though similarly high-backed and angular, were plain and dull, including the chair to which Lisel had been conducted. Which increased Lisel’s annoyance, the petty annoyance to which her more eloquent emotions of fright and rage had given way, on entering the domestic, if curious, atmosphere of the house. And Lisel must strive to conceal her ill-temper. It was difficult
The château, ornate and swarthy under its pointings of snow, retained an air of decadent magnificence, which was increased within. Twin stairs flared from an immense great hall. A hearth, large as a room, and crow-hooded by its enormous mantel, roared with muffled firelight. There was scarcely a furnishing that was not at least two hundred years old, and many were much older. The very air seemed tinged by the somber wood, the treacle darkness of the draperies, the old-gold gleams of picture frames, gilding and tableware.
At the center of it all sat Madame Anna, in her eighty-first year, a weird apparition of improbable glamour. She appeared, from no more than a yard or so away, to be little over fifty. Her skin, though very dry, had scarcely any lines in it, and none of the pleatings and collapses Lisel generally associated with the elderly. Anna’s hair had remained blonde, a fact Lisel was inclined to attribute to some preparation out of a bottle, yet she was not sure. The lady wore black as she had done in the portrait of her youth, a black starred over with astonishing jewels. But her nails were very long and discolored, as were her teeth. These two incontrovertible proofs of old age gave Lisel a perverse satisfaction. Grandmother’s eyes, on the other hand, were not so reassuring. Brilliant eyes, clear and very likely sharp-sighted, of a pallid silvery brown. Unnerving eyes, but Lisel did her best to stare them out, though when Anna spoke to her, Lisel now answered softly, ingratiatingly.
There had not, however, been much conversation, after the first clamor at the doorway:
“We were chased by wolves!” Lisel had cried. “Scores of them! Your coachman is a dolt who doesn’t know enough to carry a pistol. I might have been killed.”
“You were not,” said Anna, imperiously standing in silhouette against the giant window of the hall, a stained glass of what appeared to be a hunting scene, done in murky reds and staring white.
“No thanks to your servants. You promised me an escort—the only reason I sent my father’s men away.”
“You had your escort.”
Lisel had choked back another flood of sentences; she did not want to get on the wrong side of this strange relative. Nor had she liked the slight emphasis on the word “escort.”
The handsome ghastly dwarf had gone forward into the hall, lifted the hem of Anna’s long mantle, and kissed it. Anna had smoothed off his hood and caressed the bright hair beneath.
“Beautiful wasn’t afraid,” said Anna decidedly. “But, then, my people know the wolves will not harm them.”
An ancient tale came back to Lisel in that moment. It concerned certain human denizens of the forests, who had power over wild beasts. It occurred to Lisel that mad old Anna liked to fancy herself a sorceress, and Lisel said fawningly: “I should have known I’d be safe. I’m sorry for my outburst, but I don’t know the forest as you do. I was afraid.”
In her allotted bedroom, a silver ewer and basin stood on a table. The embroideries on the canopied bed were faded but priceless. Antique books stood in a case, catching the firelight, a vast yet random selection of the poetry and prose of many lands. From the bedchamber window, Lisel could look out across the clearing of the park, the white sweep of it occasionally broken by trees in their winter foliage of snow, or by the slash of the track which broke through the high wall. Beyond the wall, the forest pressed close under the heavy twilight of the sky. Lisel pondered with a grim irritation the open gateway. Wolves running, and the way to the château left wide at all times. She visualized mad Anna throwing chunks of raw meat to the wolves as another woman would toss bread to swans.
This unprepossessing notion returned to Lisel during the unusually early dinner, when she realized that Anna was receiving from her silent gliding servants various dishes of raw meats.
“I hope,” said Anna, catching Lisel’s eye, “my repast won’t offend a delicate stomach. I have learned that the best way to keep my health is to eat the fruits of the earth in their intended state—so much goodness is wasted in cooking and garnishing.”
Despite the reference to fruit, Anna touched none of the fruit or vegetables on the table. Nor did she drink any wine.
Lisel began again to be amused, if rather dubiously. Her own fare was excellent, and she ate it hungrily, admiring as she did so the crystal goblets and gold-handled knives which one day would be hers.
Presently a celebrated liqueur was served—to Lisel alone—and Anna rose on the black wings of her dress, waving her granddaughter to the fire. Beautiful, meanwhile, had crawled onto the stool of the tall piano and begun to play wildly despairing romances there, his elegant fingers darting over discolored keys so like Anna’s strong yet senile teeth.
“Well,” said Anna, reseating herself in another carven throne before the cave of the hearth. “What do you think of us?”
“Think, Grandmère? Should I presume?”
“No. But you do.”
“I think,” said Lisel cautiously, “everything is very fine.”
“And you are keenly aware, of course, the finery will eventually belong to you.”
“Oh, Grandmère!” exclaimed Lisel, quite genuinely shocked by such frankness.
“Don’t trouble yourself,” said Anna. Her eyes caught the fire and be
came like the eyes of the wolf at the carriage window. “You expect to be my heiress. It’s quite normal you should be making an inventory. I shan’t last forever. Once I’m gone, presumably everything will be yours.”
Despite herself, Lisel gave an involuntary shiver. A sudden plan of selling the chateau to be rid of it flitted through her thoughts, but she quickly put it aside, in case the Matriarch somehow read her mind.
“Don’t speak like that, Grandmère. This is the first time I’ve met you, and you talk of dying.”
“Did I? No, I did not. I spoke of departure. Nothing dies, it simply transmogrifies.” Lisel watched politely this display of apparent piety. “As for my mansion,” Anna went on, “you mustn’t consider sale, you know.” Lisel blanched—as she had feared, her mind had been read, or could it merely be that Anna found her predictable? “The château has stood on this land for many centuries. The old name for the spot, do you know that?”
“No, Grandmère.”
“This, like the whole of the forest, was called the Wolfland. Because it was the wolves’ country before ever men set foot on it with their piffling little roads and tracks, their carriages and foolish frightened walls. Wolfland. Their country then, and when the winter comes, their country once more.”
“As I saw, Grandmère,” said Lisel tartly.
“As you saw. You’ll see and hear more of them while you’re in my house. Their voices come and go like the wind, as they do. When that little idiot of a sun slips away and the night rises, you may hear scratching on the lower floor windows. I needn’t tell you to stay indoors, need I?”