by Tanith Lee
They were usually polite, in the boat. They wanted the fare. This one had the visage of a clown. It leered out of the shadow, its frown and down-turned mouth.
The window was above them. It was black.
“Put down the oar.”
“Signore?”
A stupid one, this.
“Stop us here. Wait, until I tell you.”
Furian stood up. The influx of new drink had contained the vertigo of the fever.
He looked at the window, and readied himself. It showed very little, only one faint-gleaming thing, just behind the lattice. Which might be anything.
Furian sang. His voice, untrained but sound, a light baritone.
“She is the moon of my evening.
“Before her darkness ruled me.”
He knew the song. He sang it, both verses, with a slow intensity; largo. He wanted to make her smile, could not. She would not. He must die. He held the last note only for nine seconds, and when he stopped, there was a spike in his left side. But it went away.
“Oh Signore—bravo, bravissimo—”
“Quiet. Be quiet.”
The gleaming faint thing was her mask, the butterfly with blue eyes and eyeholes for blue eyes.
In the moment he realized, he realized too she was not wearing it. It hung there in space, suspended by a ribbon from some hook, behind the lattice in the shadow.
He spat in the canal, and remembered he had only thought the truth—but what?—it was forgotten—under the unlucky Bridge of Lies.
SHAACHEN’S PALACE WAS IN DARKNESS, and when he went around to the alley door, it was locked. Furian knocked a while. Shaachen had occasional servants, you could never be sure. On the wall someone had scrawled Death to Lovers!
When no one came to open up, Furian forced a narrow, weak-grilled window to the side.
He climbed in, went through a verminous pantry, and up a back stair. Twice he had had to use this way before.
The door to Shaachen’s study was ajar, and inside there was no sound.
“Doctor Shaachen—are you there?”
Shaachen’s voice muttered, elderly, hollow. “Who would know?”
“Furian.”
“Come in and see.” Furian went through the door.
Doctor Dianus Shaachen, seated in the corner on the floor, looked up and said, “Am I? Am I Shaachen?”
The room was lit by one guttering lamp. It was a shambles.
The window that faced the canal, black now, had stayed intact, but all the bottles were broken. On the ground lay the orrery, buckled and ruined. Books were everywhere, torn, pages trampled, and smeared with excrement which stank, in a dry, thin way, hours out of date.
On the desk the heavy tortoise-turtle had not been harmed, but papers were scattered, some drawn, Furian could see, with crude moronic cartoons of sex and savagery.
A chair had been smashed.
Furian’s eyes went up the wall, past a broken lamp. and found the cupboard like a jail, where the books had been pulled down. The cupboard door was off, hanging by one hinge. The place inside was empty.
“They took the mask.”
Shaachen said, “Curse the mask. Do I want it. What does it matter to me, the death of human debris..”
“He was—” said Furian. He stopped. In Shaachen’s hands, as he sat on the floor like a tired child, was something black and white, stiff, and oddly folded like a poorly made cloth doll.
“You see,” said Shaachen. He held it up. The lamp stroked a pearly gleam along white feathers, the shine of the canals over black ones. “They didn’t touch him. He flew up too high, my darling. But when I came back, and come in, and find it, when I find all this, he flies down to me. Down to me, his father. And he puts his head into my breast. And then he dies. It was anger kills him, or fear. My darling. My only love. My magpie.”
“Christ, Christ,” said Furian.
“Fucks on your Christ. Where was your Christ when my darling died? Shits on him.”
Furian went to the table. A decanter of deep blue Venusian glass held wine. He poured it in a goblet and took it to Shaachen.
“You drink. Would choke my throat.”
Shaachen lifted the dead magpie to his lips and kissed the smoke-soft feathers. Its black eyes glistened, not yet dull.
Furian swallowed wine. He took more. He sat down by Shaachen on the floor. It was very dark, the lamp purple with exhaustion, nothing in the window but broken bottles and black sky.
“Gather your strength, Doctor. We should leave here. They wanted the mask, and might come back to punish you.”
“What do I care. Let them come. I’ll rip out their livers.”
“That might not be possible.”
“Let me alone.”
They sat side by side, and the magpie rested stiff and weightless with death in Shaachen’s old hands. The lamp filmed, flickered and went out.
Just audible, as if made louder by the lessening of sight, the glutinous constant murmur of the canal reached in to them. The sea would, in the end, wash the City away, would wash away everything.
Shaachen began slowly and carefully to speak. He told how he had seen the magpie in a too-little cage in the market, and how he had fed it a scrap of meat. And then they had let the magpie sit on his wrist and the magpie had pecked Shaachen spitefully, and the vendor swore at it and pulled on its leg chain hurtfully to correct it. But Shaachen had said, “Give him me.” For the magpie had spirit and had been ill-treated, and anyway, was Shaachen’s lost child. He told how he loved the magpie, its beauty, its strengthening flights about his rooms. How he took it to his bed, where it perched on the bedpost, nestled on his pillow, shat on the Eastern carpet and his wig on its stand. He loved its unmusical voice, its grace and insolence, its musty sometimes rancid smell. It came to know him. It trusted him. He alone could handle it, and when it pecked him he scolded it, then took it in his hand and kissed its bristly and wicked head. Its breast was warm and soft as a girl’s. You could feel the heart beating like a tiny drum. It strutted and poked about. Once it had relieved itself on his dinner and then, with a delicate beak, eaten the compendium. You could feel its heart. And its eyes winked milkily when it blinked. And sometimes it had cawed in his ear and frightened him awake. And you could feel its heart. But no longer. Furian got up, and went out. He checked the palace cautiously, knife in hand. No one was in the lower rooms. Bony pallet beds lurked in upper chambers. Also a chamber pot, months unemptied, was growing a curious fern. He did up the window he had forced.
Why had del Nero’s mask had such value it must be traced, stolen back, killed for?
When he went up again, Shaachen was just the same.
“I’ll bury him,” Shaachen said, “I’ve a big casket.
His little bones. I’ll keep his bones. But they won’t fly. They won’t tell me the time. Darling,” he said to his dead. “Darling.”
Furian sat on a chair that had not been destroyed.
He felt sick and weary. Later it might be feasible to lead the old man somewhere so he could rest.
He must have dozed, perhaps only a few minutes.
When he woke, there was a different noise in the room.
“Hark,” Shaachen whispered. “Do you hear?”
Furian heard. It was the sound of wings, fluttering, over the room, up and down. The magpie had come alive. “No,” said Shaachen, as if Furian had spoken aloud. Something flew over the window. It might have been a trick of fever-sight. Then came a light knock on the table, a slight dripping.
“He knocks over my inkwell,” said Shaachen. His voice was light and breathless and young. “Always he does it.”
Something scraped, scraped.
Furian half moved. Shaachen hissed, “Stay still.”
The scraping ceased.
A flurry of wings beat up, up into the ceiling, and stopped in midair.
They sat motionless for some minutes.
Then Shaachen came to his feet. He went to a candle-stub, and lit it. Wa
lking to the desk, he laid the candle and the dead magpie down there. “Look, Furian, you see?”
Furian got up. He crossed to the desk. On one of the papers a message had been untidily written, black on white, as if by the unwieldy scraping of a beak dipped in spilled ink.
“Thus,” said Shaachen. He rubbed his face. Perhaps it was only magic, though he had seemed too feeble. Shaachen said, “The body is the mask of the soul. Eh, darling?”
On the paper were the words: Don’t cry. I live.
PART TWO
The Face
1
DID THE FALLEN ANGELS REMEMBER their time in the house of their father, God, with shamed nostalgia? Had they been happy then?
The last day of his happiness in his father’s house had been soon after Furian’s eighteenth birthday. It was, in memory, a canary yellow autumn. His family had been at the estate for two months, and he had just left the University of Venus, and come there, along the dusty roads, to be with them. What a party they gave him. He could still taste, six years later, the meats and wines, the crystallized pale oranges in shells of rich, saccharine black dolche. He could see the fireworks let off beyond the terrace, showers of crystal on the dark. His mother, his sister Caro, with sparkling eyes. And his father taking such proud tender pains to treat him as a man. “My son.” The coat embroidered by butterflies. Music.
At dinner, was his father’s favorite agent, who had docked in Venus not seven days before. Lepidus was a gentleman, much traveled, a show-piece conversationalist. This time he had been as far as the Amarias, the mythical double continent dedicated to the Virgin. Lepidus recounted his journey, after leaving ship at Candisi, and traveling overland. The trek had taken more than a year. He had seen broiling summers, and winters of such snows a man would sink and be lost in them as if in a lake. He had walked on rivers, and on the sea, iced ten feet deep. He saw the capital of Russa, with its core of metallic domes and green dragon-scale. Beyond, he crossed into the white land of Rus Parvus, Little Russa, (for it was Russa who had discovered the Amarias, two centuries before) traded for whale ivory figurines, the furs of bears, from the agate-eyed Argenti. Going south, by kayak and sled, he saw the great tent city of the tribal peoples named for brass, the Orichalci. One tribe now ruled the rest. They were called, in translation, plainly enough, The Enemy. They worshipped tribal gods, like the Argenti of the White Lands. They believed, too, all things had a physical soul, internal during life. the supernatural essence linked to yet separate from both body and spirit. They were a cruel and noble people, living more in an unseen world of magic and powers than on the plains and deserts of the continent. Here he might trade for tobacco from the long blue leaves the Orichalci smoked in their ritual pipes.
One more year, and Lepidus reached the ultimate south, the second Amaria. Here were drugs and jewels and gold, and the cobweb silk which would pass through a woman’s ring. Also the wonderful dark sweetmeat, black dolche. This came from a little hard bean, just as coffee did.
The table sat entranced by Lepidus’ stories. Furian recalled, his mother had asked, “But surely someone has gone by now to convert these poor heathen to the religion of the Christ?”
“Oh yes, Madama. But they don’t take to it, especially in the north. Their belief in a certain type of spirit is so strong. Do you know, they beg the pardon of every beast they hunt, and bless and thank it after a kill? They fashion spears that resemble the beast, to show respect to it. They have ceremonies in the dark, dances with masks and manes of feather Every mask has the nature of some creature. They think all men are represented, on some higher corporeal plane, by a holy and non-physical part that yet is tied to the earth. The positions of the stars at birth, the nature of the man himself, these form his unseen psyche.”
Furian’s mother had turned uncomfortable, a touch ruffled. He could remember how he himself left an offering at the altar of Neptune in the City, minutes before he accepted divine communion at the altar of Christ.
“But can they comprehend the true soul?” asked Caro.
“Signorina, the soul to them is a stranger, something only to be regained with fleshly death. The psyche they constantly commune with while alive.”
Furian’s mind had drifted. There was a lovely girl among the guests, the daughter of one of his father’s friends. She was too old for him, twenty perhaps, but he had wondered if he might have some chance of something.
The evening ended after the fireworks.
On the pillared terrace, with its antique fountain, (a Hebe pouring water), Furian’s mother came and took his hands. “My dear, my dear.”
After the mother, the sister. “Are you really home now? Or will you go off at once to travel? Stay a little.” And then, only the last of the night. It was almost four o’clock.
The servants were going round the garden, putting out the paper lamps, the candles under colored glass.
A bird sang somewhere, perhaps from its cage, or in the grounds, disturbed by all the lights.
His father’s steward had approached, and said, “I’m glad to see you home, Signore.”
“Thank you. So am I.”
He had vowed to go out and visit the girl, and she had appeared to welcome this. She did not seem to mind the difference in their ages. She had allowed him, in the piecemeal shadows of a myrtle arbor, to stroke her upper breast, kiss the corner of her lips.
He looked up into the sky, where the stars were large and liquid, fixed and safe as diamonds on velvet. Furian too might one day see the Amarias, and Russa. And he might begin to write the concerto. The first melody and the fugue had run in his mind all day. He knew himself happy. All his life after, he would recollect this fact. The sensation of happiness, full and warm. The past sound as a bell, the future gleaming beckoning before him, the present holding him in its steady safe hand.
He spoke a word of thanks to God, and crossed himself. And among the tress, a final lamp went out. Far off, the phantom of mountains had already an edge of bluish snow. It was the omen of a winter soon to come.
He did not read it.
As he climbed the marble staircase, his hand on the gilded balustrade that showed fan-tailed birds—it was then. What had done it? The dying glimmers of the candelabra? The silence? The mystic last hour of departing night?
Between one step and the next. So swift.
Later, when he had tried to explain, they had said to him, all the ones he told, (the ones who shouted or pleaded, ranted, or mocked), that something must have occurred. Did he disremember? Had the lovely girl spurned him? His father insulted him? Had he seen something in the City which, only now, as night and inebriation perished, came back to him? But there was nothing, no explicit, appalling thing. No petty upset. No tragedy.
It was that he suddenly beheld, Here I am in this.
But this—this—
Furian had paused, in puzzlement. trying to think, to think it out. It was elusive, ran before him, lashing its tail. A fearful monster. Yet it led him on.
A servant below, seeing to the indoor candles, had said, “Is there anything you want, Signore?”
“No—nothing, thank you.”
And he climbed on, but the stair was a mountain now, with blue snow on it, and a black elemental clung to his back.
For the world was not this. The world was as he had seen it. The stench of the beautiful canals. The divers’ children at Aquila and Silvia, their chests distended, and all their bones showing. The beggars and the thieves. The poor whores with draggled skirts and bare breasts and star-shaped patches over their sores. Old men who died. Young ones with knives. Children screaming in pain and some too weak to cry at all. A starving dog. A cat with a pigeon in its mouth. A drowned rat.
The world was trouble and hurt, age and decay and death. And since hell was already in the world, small chance it existed beyond it, or heaven either.
Furian felt and worried at these things as he climbed the stair, which seemed to go on for miles.
In his room, he stood
at a loss, gazing about him at his rich man’s possessions. They were no longer real. He inhabited a fantasy.
He had thought, Oh, I’m low tonight. It must be the wine. And he tried to go to bed cheerfully, clowning his drunkenness—stumbling, dropping things—which also was not real.
Almost as soon as he lay down, he slept. He dreamed a glamorous dream of walking through a garden, although not the garden of his father. The trees were made of Venusian glass. It was an hour after, and now he was wide awake. Presently he got up, and walked about.
Beyond the window and the balcony, a soft dawn wind was blowing up the Veneran plain. The sky was melting, and its lowest band was the color the fruits had been under the dolche.
If he tugged the rope, they too would get up and bring him a cup of hot black dolche, or a herbal tisane to help his slumbers.
He had only to ask, for all the doors to be opened to him.
But that was the fantasy again.
This was not life.
He sat on the balcony and watched the dawn flood up the sky like a blush. It was chilly. He shivered, but not from cold.
He was still reasoning with himself, and did not realize the days of lotuses were over.
All that morning he acted out his part, the performance of what he had, until the previous sunrise, been.
By noon his head ached and throbbed, and they indulged him, thinking he had got drunk at his party, and why not, why not.
He tried to write down the music that had been budding in his head. On the paper it looked as if it did not matter. Not because it was untuneful or inept, no, it was pleasing, gracious. But it was not real. The music of the real world was abrupt and sharpened, thorns without roses.
In two or three days he was sick. They called a physician who diagnosed a fever currently common in Venus, bred by her waters.
But when he had thrown the fever off, nothing had altered. The more he tried to push the being away, the being of reality, the worse it had hold of him. It was simpler to stop fighting.
He tried to tell Caro then. She did not grasp what he meant. At length, Furian approached his father.