Faces Under Water

by Tanith Lee

  The bull offered him a steady hand to shave his face. Furian laughed. Said No. The bull insisted. For business to come, he must be at his best.

  “Oh, yes, then. Watch the razor doesn’t slip. They want their meat unsliced.”

  Afterwards there was a meal, with wine, and fruit. Would it be achievable, the state of sleep? How could it be. That phase was over. And soon, a longer sleep. (The same for Shaachen, who thought it would be otherwise.)

  Yet Furian dreamed for five minutes in a chair, and saw Lepidus’ substitute skull, symbol of all death.

  Fresh linen had been left out, and a new set of noble clothes. He did not bother with them. If they wanted his refinement, they would have to insist.

  The body anyway was the suit of clothes, and under the body were the indecent bones. And under those, a soul, perhaps, or not a soul.

  The day gathered and spun towards an evening, long skeins of light that put gold-leaf on to the high unseeing slot in the wall. Once a bird passed by. Was it Shaachen’s magpie? A symbol opposed to the Skull, one of everlasting existence and renewal. The Virgin’s bird also, Virgo …

  He thought of insubstantial, anguished things. His mother’s outcry when he had gone away. Cupid in her rose-yellow bed complaining that he had given her up and heaping invective on him. Men he had cut open.

  The child crying outside the tavern because two bastards abused her with words, too young to answer or know how to run away.

  Sunfall, dusk, these went on and on. A man before his execution, Furian felt obliged to look at them, take note. How saffron gave way to madder, and so to mallow.

  But he was impatient with life now, parading herself. Another beauty trying to deceive, when reasonless night was so obviously close.

  5

  MIDNIGHT HAD JUST STRUCK, when they came.

  They told him this.

  But he was waiting.

  No comment was made on his unchanged garments, stained from the lagoon and the smoke of a fire.

  He had put on the shoes only. There had been no mask. They went back the way they had come, and so out into the garden.

  The sky was blackest blue and the moon had risen, waning and fragile, a slender, graceful girl. Moonlight spotted the tombs, leopardine shadows. They reached a wall of the chapel. There was a door, and this they undid for him. He was to go through.

  Lepidus was in the room, standing, a genial host. One recalled his faultless manners as an agent and traveler. His wit and finesse, and how he had never seemed put out, with all the resentment and contempt smoldering, invisible.

  He too was unmasked. Perhaps he had extra entertainment in acting this out, his face schooled to such spurious and insulting, avuncular charm.

  “Furian. Take a seat, and try this wine.” Furian took the seat, and the wine. He drank a mouthful and put it by. “So abstemious all at once? Well, that’s to your credit. You may want to be able to think.”

  “Yes I may.”

  “I have to tell you of certain events. Before we come to guild matters.”

  Furian said, “What’s next? Fire, earth or air?”

  “Nothing so straightforward. Consider the lagoon, if you will, as fluidity rather than the element of water. The mutable and transient—Neptune. There’s only one more trial of you. You may not even mind it. May like it. We’ll see.”

  Furian said nothing.

  Lepidus sat down in the chair opposite, and poured himself a glass of the wine. The chamber was not large, but hung with sober velvet. Another door led somewhere. The lion’s den?

  Lepidus spoke low, in an encompassing and companionable way, (Furian was put in mind of some priest benighted with him at an inn.)

  “Almost, Furian, I stand as a father to you now.”

  “A father. But I left my father.”

  “So you did. And why was that?”

  “A complex and irksome tale, Lepidus. I don’t have your flare for story-telling. I won’t weary you.”

  “Then I shall tell you, Furian, shall I, your own story?”

  Furian said nothing. But now he waited.

  Lepidus said, “Once or twice, I saw you as a boy.

  You were impressive for your years. I remember, you had a special talent for music—”

  “You embarrass me.”

  “But also you were very impertinent to me.”

  “Was I. I don’t recall.”

  “Of course not. They were little things.”

  “I didn’t always stay to listen,” said Furian.

  “That night,” said Lepidus, “that night you were eighteen and newly home, you spent your time gawking at a young woman’s breasts across the table.”

  Furian laughed shortly. “I do remember that.”

  “Well, you were immature, and had been studious.

  I was wrong in what I did.”

  Furian said, too swiftly, “And what did you do?”

  “I’ve got your interest now. I’m glad. I did a foolish thing, almost what a woman might have done, if able. I put a little spell on you.”

  Furian’s throat closed hard. He tried to swallow, and could not. He sucked air into his lungs and said, offhandedly “To make me love you instead?”

  “I might not have minded it, Furian Furiano. A taste of you in your youth. There are more pleasures that way than one. But no, it wasn’t for love.”

  Furian waited again. He did not dare to speak, and in his breast his heart was clammering, in tight iron strokes. Had he always partly guessed? Something—

  “When I was among the Orichalci and the Argenti of the Amarias,” said Lepidus, leaning back, the raconteur again, “I learnt some of their formulae, their arts. To get anywhere with them, a man had to take on some of their nature, and go through particular endurances. It was worth while, although I carry scars, both physical and of the psyche, to this day. A treacherous and wondrous people, that tribe, The Enemy. It was only a little, little spell. The sort they’d use to turn a man away from their hunting grounds, or from a woman. Or from his kindred.”

  Lepidus paused, and Furian heard the silence of the close, draped room, loud as a whistling gushing wave from the sea.

  “And to turn me from what, exactly.”

  “Your then life. Its happiness and content. To make you dissatisfied. Disturbed. Want other things. Oh, maybe I had some notion you might seek me out for adventure. I would have liked it, Furian, to show you the world as I’d discovered the world to be. But it was a fact, your passion was too strong for me. It took my tiny hex and turned it to a massive stroke. You left everything and ran into the dark.”

  Furian looked away. He looked into the insubstantial, wavering past. To his father’s estate, the stairway in the folding up of the candles. A score of pale wings fluttering down, and there, between one step and the next. So swift.

  (He had been puzzled. Trying to work it out. It was elusive and ran before him, lashing its tail. Yet it had led him on.) Disillusionment. Guilt. Emptiness. That dawn at the window and the soft wind blowing up the Veneran plain. The days of lotuses over.

  But it was not possible that Lepidus had been so accomplished. To drive him out of his mind, to exile him from his family, to diminish him among the slums and sinks of Venus—to make him into what he was—

  He said, very dry, “I’m to believe all that was your doing, then. How you amaze me, Lepidus. And I thought you only a showy vagabond.”

  Lepidus bowed. “You’re at liberty, of course, to disbelieve. But I’ve had you in my fist since that night. When I watched you, when I forgot you, you were mine. I created you, Furian. Even your actorish name.” Furian took up the wine. He had a pair of mouthfuls. Lepidus observed, amused, it seemed, or so he pretended.

  The simplest means to get a man into your power was to inform him he was there already.

  And Lepidus began to talk again, as if he enjoyed this so much, he could not hold back.

  “Even with her, with my daughter, I like to think it was some element of my labor on you
that drew you precisely to her. Even to finding del Nero’s mask on the canal that fateful morning. A dog follows its master, even when he doesn’t call.”

  “I’m not your dog.”

  “Are you your own then? Eh? Would you say so?” Furian took another mouthful of the wine. He had finished it after all, and his tormentor saw, and came at once, so solicitous, to refill the cup.

  Furian said, “That was a quaint story. Now tell me one about Shaachen.”

  “The Doctor? Oh, he must die. I think he knows not only what our inner guild does, but perhaps just how we do it.”

  Lightly Furian said, “Can’t I buy you off with something? He’s an old dunce. Nearly what he was acting for you with his rabbit mask.”

  “I don’t think you mean what you say. A fool, yes; or why else come here after you. But a learned fool. Among his books and potions I wouldn’t trust him. But he carries little in his head, save curious illusions for drunk princes.”

  “Let him live. You promised me my life. Or is that changed?”

  “No. I’m like any kind father. You’re to be my heir. You’ll have my daughter, and a function within the guild.”

  “But I don’t want your daughter.”

  Lepidus beamed upon him. “You must understand,

  I have servants in her house who are useful to me. Do you remember the girl who threw a shoe at your head?” Furian got up. He stood by the chair. He said, “So it was all spied on.”

  “What else? Your idyll sounds most enchanting. You were made for each other, it seems … both by me. The musician loved her but she was only generous to him. You’ve no notion how apt this will be. The hatred you feel for her, the love, the distaste, the distrust—the fury.”

  “Like your own? Or don’t I measure up to you?” Lepidus now laughed very loudly. He looked hugely tickled, gratified.

  “Can it be you deduced so much?”

  Furian hesitated. “What do you mean now?”

  “Let me tell you then. I’ve had her. She was fifteen.’ Furian felt a panic-stricken cacophony rising in him, black as the pits of hell, and with their heat. He pushed it away and said, but his voice sounded cracked and old, “You fucked your daughter.”

  “Divinely, three or four times. I was so disgusted by her, but she was so dewy, soft, so arousing. What else?” In the depths of his mind, Furian saw the animal of rage with the barb upon its phallus, rearing amid trampled sparks.

  “You want to ask me, did she like it. How can I know? She didn’t resist. Or encourage. And naturally she neither wept nor frowned nor screamed out in pain or ecstasy. In her writings to me after, she never once referred to it.”

  Furian picked up the wine. Then he let the glass fall, shattering on the floor.

  He said, “You made her your whore, and then the whore of others, to come at them. Del Nero and who else? You meanwhile lay over the others who were women, such as Messalina.”

  “And a man or two … but otherwise you have it.

  Yes, Furian. Sex is a component of what I did to them. You see, these weren’t like the little spell I set on you. These are the arts of murder.”

  Eurydiche, whore and accomplice. Maybe the willing mistress of her father. Eurydiche—disgust, arousal. Furian stood behind the chair.

  Lepidus sat drinking at his ease. He looked well-fed. As if he had just been dining.

  A huge wind of fire seemed to have rushed through the room. But it was gone.

  A knock sounded gently on the inner door.

  Lepidus put aside his glass.

  “Let’s go down now and complete the ritual.”

  “Yes, let’s, since I haven’t a choice.”

  “The technique of it I’ll explain to you, at the proper moment. But you’re primed.”

  Furian turned to him. He said, with no control, hoarsely, wildly, like a boy of eighteen, “Don’t trust me, Lepidus. Don’t ever do that. I’ll be obedient. I’ll keep my place. One day or night I’ll settle with you.”

  “I’ll look forward to it. You and I and a little tussling. How appetizing.”

  OUTSIDE THE DOOR, A WALL, and one more corridor that ran in two directions. Lepidus went away to the left, and Furian was led decorously to the right by the bull-masked man.

  Furian was compliant. Without argument or struggle. For what was it to be now—some rank magic, some vicious, scar-making infliction learnt from the tribe called The Enemy—what significance did it have? He had revealed his namesake fury, fury and shame, his weakness, all of it. He had retained nothing that could be handy. Even if Lepidus had lied about his ‘little spell’, (he had lied, he must have lied), he had made Furian his creature.

  THE INNER HALL OF THE chapel was of some size and perfectly round. Above, it rose into the arena of the dome, which here was faced with black marble, like all the chamber. Eyelets had been cut in the fabric of the dome, but they were small, and revealed only further darkness, the black marble ceiling of the night.

  Below, the floor was glassy, like polished obsidian.

  Shallow black steps rose from it, and around the walls at the top of this terrace, were placed a ring of braziers that leapt with bloody flame. And the flames reflected upward into the roof, downward into the floor.

  Within the black circle of the floor was marked, by narrow inlaid tiles, a white square. At the point of each angle, on the terrace above the steps, bulked a black marble chair with a high arched back.

  Alchemically, conceivably, these points and chairs marked the Cardinals of the compass, North, South, West and East.

  There was nothing else in the round hall but for the three human shapes left, as if stranded, on the lower floor.

  Each poised alone, isolated, like a chess-piece on an emptied board.

  Furian saw the woman Calypso, in her black fan mask, and scarlet dress. And perhaps twenty feet away from her, the woman Eurydiche. They had changed her clothes. Now she was clad almost like the Virgin, a white gown, and caught from a coronet in her hair, a blue smoke of veil. A diamond spangled on her forehead, the star of Venus. She was not masked. Yet, masked. Shaachen, sitting near the center of the floor, had kept his rabbit’s face. Also kept up or put back his invented character. He was idly tossing his dice on to the floor with an annoying, unbearable clinking, retrieving them, throwing them again. The satchel was gone, and anything it might have contained with it. He looked very small and black, a pathetic, pitiable form. Of all of them, he should not be here. But then, he had asked to witness the ritual. A show-off himself, he had unerringly sensed the same in Lepidus. But as Lepidus had guessed, removed from his props, powders, tinctures, chalk, book—Shaachen was powerless.

  Furian did not go down the steps. He looked at the upper tier on to which he had come out. The door was no longer to be seen. Now his eyes grew accustomed to the braziers’ jumping arson, he saw golden outlines traced on the inner dome. All the beasts and figments of the zodiac were there, and the constellations, gods in chariots, unicorns and dragons, which seemed to move—his head reeled. He turned his glance back to the floor.

  He looked at her. But Eurydiche made no movement, if she noted him. Her body was still as a stem no wind could blow.

  His eyes left her. And he beheld, with sudden surprise, almost affront, Calypso’s bodice had been altered. Above the scarlet stuff, her oval, heavy breasts were sumptuously bare. She did not seem to notice. Keeping to where she had stood or been put to stand, she turned her fan-face here and there, up and down. She called to Furian in a fish-wife’s screech: “Be careful of them! They sting.”

  He thought, Her breasts perhaps. Yes, they’d sting. He thought of filling his hands with them, playing the tips of his fingers over them until she clutched him. She liked men. It would not take long.

  But these thoughts did not belong in this place. (What had been in Lepidus’ hospitable wine?)

  A fearful sound stamped in the hollow chamber. It was a drum. It beat once, then over and over. Its tempo was like a heart. The heart irresistibly pick
ed up its rhythm.

  Four figures were at the Cardinal points of the square, on the terrace at the top of the steps. They had come in through the walls at other now invisible entrances. In the dancing flame-light, such appearances were manageable.

  Each figure was naked, and each was masked, the entire head covered over. Four heavy muscular men, (the fourth with curious, well-knit scars on the tawny material of his body.) They had each been shaved of every hair. One had the head of a shark, of silky slate grey. One the head of a white bear, whose fur ran down his neck. One had a face composed of a black vapor of bats with tiny winking eyes. The fourth one was a red wolf, its pelt pouring to his shoulders.

  They walked about the chairs and sat in them. Four living statues with the heads of demon animals. And one, only one, the wolf, with his member swollen, ruddy and upright, which as he sat, he fingered, approvingly. A golden ring surrounded his erection, ornamenting and maintaining it. Lepidus. Lepidus in the station of the East, for the East was the wolf, the east wind howled with its voice. And the bats were the evening West, the shark the oceanic South. the white bear the cold and legendary North, the White Lands. Argenti masks, Orichalci.

  From inside the head of the wolf, Lepidus spoke.

  His voice was almost a whisper, but the chamber carried it.

  The words were Latin. Furian did not comprehend them. From Shaachen’s mysteries he recognized the first swirling prickling of the air, and what might come, but did not care. Probably he could even understand the chant, for they had taught him Latin once. But he had made himself forget—

  Whatever was wanted, he would have to do it. This was what he had confused with death—the death of the will. Until that day or night he had prophesied. Then he would rebel and Lepidus would kill him. Tonight anyway, he had lost all of himself.

  And was she laughing? Would she like to have him after. The slave brought in chains to her bed. And again, the stab of desire, so he was erect as Lepidus, under his clothes.

  The Guardians of the Guild chapel were rising.

  They were only partly visible, red and roiling, with fires for manes. The drum beat and the heart ran with the drum. A new chanting came, far, far off, across the continents perhaps. There were feathers in the flames and faces almost of men, painted black and cobalt and crimson. Winged men, and men with the lower bodies of stags. Things from the otherwhere. Sacred images of The Enemy.