by Tanith Lee
On the far side of the river, a weird gleam went up by night, where the torches reflected back from the snow into the wild and chiming air. But it was forbidden, that upper bank. The great market, the great horning church, the house of murders, the enclosing arm of City Wall that held in it slabs the legions had laid there.
"I'll go with you. Up the hills. Who cares," said Conrad. Scar-Nose added, "For what?" The thin man said, "It's cosier there."
Jehan ran over the bridge, through the palings of ice-crystals, gliding where there was the horizontal ice, arms outflung graceful and demoniac.
"Come," said Conrad.
Yet not one of them moved.
The well lit, climbing streets about the market were nearly bright as day, but black mud lay around the houses and torch-poles where the heat had melted the snow.
For Jehan, creature of darkness, it was early, not yet eleven o'clock. With the advent of winter when night began to come down in the afternoon, he sometimes took the risk of evolving during Complies, the completion of the nunnery's diurnal.
As she entered the street of the statue-well, Jehan gave her nothing to feel. She glanced at the house where the fat woman had died, the rich man, the servant. No watch was any longer kept on it. Meanwhile, across the way, stood the other more important house, the studio and dwelling of Motius the Artisan. Seven nights before, solitary outside the Cockatrice, Jehan had identified other students of the Master. She had fallen into chat with them. They had seemed stunned by Jehan's resemblance to someone they had known but would not coherently speak of. One had suggested Jehan might model for the studio as a young Patroklos or Dionysos. Jehan had not seemed averse, and so learned the house at which he should present himself.
Through the shutters light showed in the upper storey. Jehan knocked at the door. After a time, a shutter opened. A young man's face, unknown, peered down. "Who's there?"
"Jehan."
"Whoisjehan?"
Jehan shrugged, standing out in the pool of light to be seen. "I was told to come. The Master might employ me as a model, they said. Perhaps not."
Then the youth in the window gave a startled sound.
He withdrew. Voices came together.
(It is one like Pierre Belnard. Oh me, ohmy't)
Feet bounded down a stair and hands unbarred the door.
A second youth drew Jehan in, shut the door to keep him there, stared at him unblinkingly in the flame of a flinching candle, then said something very fast, a sentence of Latin, unrecognised. "So," added the youth huskily, "you don't vanish."
"Shall I try?"
"Don't mock. Don't speak. Stay there, exactly where I have put you. Wait." And the student rushed away, up the stair once more, the panic-splayed light borne with him.
Jehan stayed, unmocking, or speaking, and seemed to be waiting. Then he moved, went to the stair-foot, and looked up the dark funnel of it. In a moment more he began noiselessly to ascend.
There was now not a twitter, not a mumble, above.
Jehan entered a passage and came to a door, closed, with a keyhole of shouting light. Tickled by such aptness, he knelt to the hole at once, and looked through.
There before him was a morsel of fire-lit chamber, and in it a man stood, lean and old and bearded, stooping a fraction. One hand clutched at his breast, and the other held a chalice of wine, which he was pouring evenly into the flames on the hearth. The sizzling splishery intrigued Jehan, so much so that when it ended, and the man moved from the sphere of vision, Jehan did not react. Then came a motion across the light that indicated someone was returning to spring the door. Jehan was up in an instant, standing aside. As the second student burst out toward the stair, Jehan stepped directly in the doorway and said, "Here I am." Which brought the other back cursing foolishly.
The fine fiery chamber, opened out, was opulent. A hearty meal had been eaten in it at the white-clad table, not long before, and still positioned there were a gilt wine-jug and cups, a dish of yellow plums and apples - in winter Paradys - and two branches of candles that stintlessly burned. Through a part-closed curtain beyond lay the studio, darkened and asleep, but smelling yet of paint grindings, clay, oil and marble-dust. Here Pierre would have been wont to work late, and dine afterwards with the Master, a favourite pupil, as these, too, must be.
But Pierre had evaporated from their lives. Drinking and whoring had undone him in the alleys. Now on the threshold, his double, more exact after an interval, and so more miraculous.
Master Motius now sat in his carved chair by the hearth and stared as the young men did. He was, as keyhole-seen, old, bearded and wore besides a cap to warm his head and a fur-lined mantle in the hot room. And three rings on his fingers.
"You are the brother of Pierre," he said.
Jehan smiled.
"Brother of who?"
The artisan sighed.
"Not," said Master Motius.
"There was some gossip one of his brothers sought him out," said the student who had looked from the window. "That's why he went off without a word."
The second student said, "And this one was at the door, peeping through it, I'll bet. What did he see?"
Jehan looked down at his feet modestly.
"There was nothing to see," said Master Motius.
"Except, you pour wine on your fire," said Jehan.
The artisan said, "That's a Roman custom. We keep the classic formula here. Otherwise, what do you say?"
To what?"
"To our talk of Pierre Bernard."
"Who is that?"
"You have never met such a young man."
"I?"
"Do you know of whom we speak?"
"Is it possible?"
"He was my pupil and apprentice. He was well-liked everywhere, and well-known."
Tor what?"
"Uncivil, gutless, pig-souled dog - ' cried the second student.
Master Motius held up his hand. Leaning on the arms of his chair, he rose.
"I will show you," said he. He took a candle-branch from the table.
The first student hurried to open the curtain into the studio, and the Master passed through.
"Go in," said the second student to Jehan, threateningly.
Jehan smiled again. He went after the artisan leisurely and the students followed.
The studio was a big vault, where the candlelight collided with angles, drapes and shapes, was smashed and fell down. A peculiar being - a whole, if idealised, skeleton of wood - posed on a plinth, making a mad gesture. There were benches and cold braziers, long tables with parchment, canvas, jars and alembics. Things stood propped or lay prone; things sweated under wet cloth.
The artisan moved through this forest and stopped before the far wall. A small panel of wood had been fastened on it. He raised the candles, though his arm shook a little, from age or feeling.
"This he painted, in his third month with me. It is flawed, he had much to learn. But ah, so perfect also. What he would have been."
Jehan looked at the painting.
Jehanine had never been shown anything the mature Pierre had fashioned, though he had performed some work for the lord of the estate. She could not properly understand the painting, however, for it was not real, not flesh and blood, and did not move. A girl sat under a flowering tree, her fair hair falling round her, and birds fed from her hands, and a faun, and a she-wolf with a cub… But Jehan was distracted somewhat by some strange scuffed marks along the lower wall and the floor. Did the students of Motius also draw on the ground?
"He called this painting The Madonna of the Innocents," said Master Motius. He wept. "Marie the Mother, but also the goddess Venus. Sacred and profane. But all beauty is sacred." The tears ran down into his beard like flames, catching the light. "Boy, if you know where he might be - no matter what depths he may have fallen into -whatever sink or vice - I beg you, you must tell me."
"Who?" said Jehan.
One of the students said hoarsely, "He knows, Master." He moved towards
Jehan. "Shall we make him? I can do it."
"No - no - no violence here. Perhaps he doesn't know. The likeness isn't so marked as I thought at first. We see what we wish to. I have studied men's faces."
Jehan felt the topaz cross slide between his girl's breasts under the binding. He toed the chalky lines on the floor. He smiled and he smiled, and reached out to take the candles from the artisan.
Master Motius seemed surprised but not reluctant to let go of the light. Conceivably, he thought his guest wanted to gaze more closely at the painting, and that this might augur well.
Jehan, clasping the candle-branch, leaned forward carefully, and touched the fire to the wooden panel. A black line ran along the edge of it, and the paint bubbled. She seemed not inclined to burn, the Madonna -
"Oh God!" shrieked the artisan. His old voice splintered, he tottered against Jehan, striking at him, clutching now for the fire, now for the painted panel. Jehan turned and smote downward with the candle-branch. It cut the old man's temple and most of the candles showered upon him, catching webbed in his hair, beard and mantle. As he began to burn, so did the panel on the wall. Jehan stepped back, face composed and serious, the eyes very pale.
The students were running to their master, who writhed on the floor, stunned and crying and alight. As they came Jehan both avoided and met them, and dipping the last candles, with gentle strokes, torched each of them. They seemed highly inflammable, perhaps some constant contact of their garments with the paints and oils. It was very simply done.
Jehan flung the fire away against a hanging bolt of dry material, which flared at once.
The studio was illumined in saffron, and by hopping, dancing, screaming fire-creatures, that tried in turn to come at her, at each other, and which all the while beat at their own selves, until they went down and boiled along the floor.
Jehan dashed from the room. In the outer chamber he took fruit from the dish and snatched up the gilt jug of wine.
Escape was made by a lower window, into a side-slip between the houses.
In the open yard before the embryo of the Temple-Church, Jehan climbed a workman's ladder up a pile of stones, and seated there high in the air, watched all the street come alive in terror as fire exploded from the upper storey of Master Motius' house in one mighty blast. Some combustible in the studio had ignited, it would seem.
In fear for the wooden structures of their homes, men scurried in the street like frightened mice. Jehan, eating plums upon the stone pile, watched. It was like a scene in Hell, until the snow began to fall and, as the cumbersome buckets had not been able to, whisper by whisper, put out the burning house.
He had a fancy for the jug, and kept it by him. Springing down from the nunnery tree with the rope and the vessel in his hands, he found before him a young nun.
"There's soot in your hair, Jhane," said Sister Marie-Lis.
"Then I have been in a fire, demoiselle."
"And this is how you travel the City by night."
"How else?" replied Jehan.
"But you return."
"I found a rope hanging down to the street. I climbed it."
"You are Jhane."
"Presently," said Jehan. He moved towards the young nun. He put his face to hers. She did not resist. He put his hand on her breast. She did not resist. "I know a quiet cell, over there," said Jehan. "We shan't be disturbed. Or here, on the cold ground in the snow."
"You are Jhane," said the young nun again.
Jehan drew back. He lowered his eyes.
"Who will you tell?" said Jhane.
"No one. God sees."
"You worship Satan," said Jhane.
The young nun turned from her and moved away over the snow and vanished through an arch of white plum trees. The ground was too hard to have kept her footprints.
Jhane burned on her pallet. Garbed in fire she rose and ran into the south cloister to cool herself in the snow. She wished the fountain would play. It did so. It played fire. Fire like a golden tree splashed up into the black sky. By its light, she saw it was not a stone child who held the bowl, but the dwarf.
"Fero, fero, I am Ferofax," said the dwarf. "Fire-Bringer. I am a demon. But you're possessed by devils."
"Lucifer, King of the World," said Jhane as she burned.
"His first captains were Azazel and Esrafel," said the dwarf. "They hastened to him, and consoled him, after the fall."
"I am burning," Jhane cried bitterly.
She screamed: 'lam burning*' And the nuns tied her to her bed in the infirmary where now she lay in the blazing fever.
"I'm burning! I'm burning! Fire! Fire'
"Lie still," they said.
She hated them, but that was not new, to hate. There was a pain in her groin and her bowels. She saw an old man with a beard tied to a stake, and burning too.
"Pierre!" she screamed.
Ferofax sat cross-legged on the foot of her bed, crowned with stone flowers, eating a lump of paint. The world will end in fire.
"It is Yule Natalis," said the nuns. "It is the birth of the Angel as the Christ."
Bells rang.
The Temple-Church rose and hung, unfinished in the sky, with great windows like flame for eyes.
When the pain and fever left Jhane, she was very weak for a long while and lay in the infirmary where the old sick nuns came to die.
"The world is a terrible place," the old nuns said to each other. The City was the world in miniature, filled by lusts and malignities, killings and awful crimes. Qhane wearily suspected they kept certain secrets and sorry events from her ears, out of regard for her illness.)
There were no novices left. Unfeelingly, they had wedded Christ, as Jhane burned. Christmas was past also. Soon the year would die. New Year would come, and two-faced Janus, an antique Roman deity, fling open the doors, at the Feast of the Ass.
On the estates of the lord in the north, as everywhere, the Ass Feast had been celebrated with riot. It was the contrary time, the letting of the bung from the cask, when everything must reverse itself, upside down, in order to come right for the remainder of the year. Carts of manure had been trundled through the village, and the unwary pelted. The priest would put on his gown inside out and the bell be rung, for once, but at the wrong hours. Processions roved the fields, beating drums and Eastern tambourines, and a garlanded donkey, though not Belnard's own, paraded about with an idiot or a young peasant girl made king, and riding on its back. You might do anything on the Day of the Ass: all things at their season. By that token, for the rest of the year you could be virtuous.
It had begun in classical times, the old dying nuns said now, disapproving, admiring. A beautiful god on an ass's back, drinking, and ritual, and other things.
Jhane, who had had hideous hallucinations and dreams during the fever, did not discuss the festival. The weather had changed. There had been a thaw, (Fire! Fire!), and there was an unseasonable warmth, so a few thin buds spurted from the trees and were chided. As soon as Jhane was able, she resumed her duties and chores. But, having spent so long with the senile nuns, she now moved slowly, ached, must lean often on her broom, sometimes fainted as she scrubbed the flagstones, could not remember easily anything.
Jehan woke, got up and dressed himself. Stowed behind the chest he found a wine-jug, gilded, which he had partly forgotten. He took it with him, along with the cross - which he had only once removed, when ill, for fear enemies might steal it as he raved - and his climbing rope.
He left sanctuary behind without a backward look, and made towards the inn, over the slush.
The torches burned as usual on the cobbles before the gate, but in the upper room, only three or four were gathered together.
They jumped up when Jehan entered.
"Where did you go?"
"We thought you were hanged."
Jehan set down the jug. They gazed at it.
Then Conrad came and grasped Jehan, hugging him close. Jehan eventually pushed him off.
"Tomorrow is t
he Ass Feast," said Scar-Nose. "Tomorrow we'll rob the world and slit its gullet."
They sat drinking most of the night. Jehan watched them. For the first time, he slept at the inn. When Conrad came slinking to his resting place, Jehan rolled over and laid the knife against Conrad's windpipe.
"When?" said Conrad.
"After the nun."
"What nun?"
"The nun I told you of. There's a dainty nunnery not far off, near the river."
"Never."
"Ask the dwarf. He knows."
"Did you burn the house?" said Conrad.
"A house?"
"In the street where the rich man lived, before we did for him."
"We'll burn the Temple-Church next," said Jehan.
"You're the Devil," said Conrad.
"One of his captains," said Jehan. He laughed softly. "Azazel, Esrafel."
"You laugh like a girl. Your voice never broke. Is that why you hate the whole earth?"
Jehan reached out and fondled Conrad. Conrad fell against him. He whined, struggling forward, labouring. Jehan ceased his attentions, spat in Conrad's face, and went away to another part of the inn to sleep.
At sunrise there was a colossal noise, the clashing of cymbals, pans and pots, the mooing and bray of horns. All the bells jangled. It was Donkey Day, All Fools Feast. The little madness that held off the greater, hopefully, while God, the Harrier and Destroyer, winked.
The gang of thieves came out on the street along with the rest of the City. Festivals were always fortunate. But sometimes, in the day's tradition, having gained purses and other oddments, a robber might infiltrate a coin into some poor man's satchel or pocket. A day of reversals.
On the bridges they were fishing with mousetraps, and throwing decaying fish back into the river. Huge chunks of ice still wallowed sluggishly by in the water. But the morning was clammy, and drops sweated on the stones and plaster, the foreheads of men.