by Tanith Lee
The child, too, had changed, was no longer a child. She was thirteen, the age at which many a damsel of good house might already be contracted if not married. The girl had, however, never seen a man, save in a painting, never heard of one save in a book. She knew they existed, just as lions, wolves, unicorns existed, far beyond the walls, another species in another country. Yet from this same outer wonderland her toys, her furnishings, her books somehow transpired. Everything was delivered as she slept, or taken away as she slept—like magic. Sometimes shocking, and sometimes delightful, yet she was used to it. Magic, as with the apartment, the garden, was an everyday matter.
And beyond the walls of the house and the garden which divided her from the far-off mythology of the earth? The bones of the trees gave evidence of a waste. No other evidence was awarded her.
The woman, whom she did not call “Mother” but “my lady,” was the only live thing the young girl saw, or had ever seen. It was a fact, as the ceilings drew lower, the woman became smaller, until she and the girl were almost of the same height. Otherwise, the woman seemed not to change at all. She wore plain clothes, dark and without ornament. Her face was colorless, expressionless. She offered neither love nor friendship, not even the shelter of another personality. Yet it was this woman who, without passion, without enthusiasm of any kind, taught the girl all she had come to know, and brought in to her, by those mysterious nocturnal means, the literature, the musical instruments, that were the accessories and gilding of knowledge; the elegant garments, and the jewels.
The young girl knew her origins, also. My lady had told her from the first. “You are not the child of my body. You are the child of a man and woman who did not want you. I wanted you, and so you were brought to me. You are named Jaspre, since I sent to your mother powders of jaspre to strengthen her while she carried you. Do not feel any regret or any betrayal. Your natural parents are nothing to you.” And the girl named Jaspre felt nothing. The ideas of parentage, of love, even, were unconvincing, alien to her. In her world, such things did not exist.
Sometimes, Jaspre would wander through the large garden, among its avenues, of which there were many, between its uncannily manicured box hedges, in and out of its grottoes where nymphs of mossy stone played statically with each other but never with her. Occasionally birds flew over the garden. In some naive manner, she understood they represented freedom, but freedom held no particular allure. Jaspre’s world was of the intellect and the spirit. Even her daydreams were contained within the garden. She had never seen a lion or a man or a forest or a mountain. She had never seen beyond the door of her apartment.
Nor, when she looked into her long mirrors, did she realize what looked back at her was the most beautiful thing in the beautiful room.
But the woman realized. She had nurtured Jaspre like a rare plant, its white stem, its bright petals. The woman, who had no lust for human flesh, who lusted only for one thing, had caught her breath, seeing the glowing creature drift toward her from the sunset shade of an ilex tree in the walled garden. The skin like pearl melting in the dress of pearl silk, scarcely any difference observable. The loosely plaited hair like a golden rope…
* * * *
“Do you recall how old you are, Jaspre?”
“Yes, my lady. I am thirteen years of age.”
“You have never,” said the woman, “asked me anything concerning the rest of the house.”
“It is,” said Jaspre, “the house.” To this non-questioning the woman had molded her in subtle, gentle ways. It was not apathy. It was an intelligent disinterest in those things that could have no bearing on one’s existence.
And yet now, “I will show you, today, a door. It has remained hidden, Jaspre, but now we shall use it, you and I.” Jaspre nodded calmly.
“Yes, my lady.”
The door was concealed behind a section of the wall which moved. It gave on a stair. It was the stair to the insularium.
* * * *
To the world of the apartment and the garden then, was added this new continent of marvels. In ranks, the tall stoppered vials, from which a pinch of powder dropped into air might burn, another produce sweet perfume. Slim flattened statues of bronze stood in the shadows, a bronze bull with wings. While on a platform reached by several narrow steps, was a great instrument which, when tilted up at an extravagant angle, pierced some opening in the side of the house, and by means of mirrors and lenses captured the stars and planets in the green evening sky.
Jaspre wandered in the vast room, windowless and lamp-lit, sipping from it, tasting of it. She had been nurtured and lessoned to gain much from the appearances of things, the sensations of their umbras, less from their functions. Hers was an intellect which dreamed and fantasized upon, rather than inquired into. So, she touched the statues, the telescope, gazed on the constellations, inhaled the sweet aroma of powders, and did not ask their natures, nor require to be informed.
Presently, the woman led her to a narrow alcove, and drew aside a curtain of smoky samite, and then another behind it of black velvet. Beyond the curtains was a gate of horn scrolled by black iron, and with a gilded iron lock. This lock the woman negotiated without a key, using strange pressures of her hands. As the gate opened, a third curtain was disclosed, but this of a dull brazen chain mail.
Although she did not know, and had been told nothing of what lay in store, the suspenseful drawings of curtain upon curtain, the unlocking of the gate, the metallic mesh, the unsuspected depth of the alcove itself—all this had worked upon the young girl’s imagination. That some pinnacle of importance was about to be attained, and revealed to her, was apparent.
The woman paused, her hand resting on the drapery of brazen mail.
“That I took you in,” she said, “was for a purpose. I did not, as you have seen, bring you here to serve me. And yet, I did take you, raise you, keep you, in peerlessness and in innocence, that you might serve—another. And now you are fit to learn of him and to look upon his image.”
Jaspre’s heart beat quickly, instinctually, and she waited, her eyes fixed only on the curtain. Which, in another instant, the woman drew aside.
Jaspre had never seen a man before. Inside the alcove stood a man. Then, as the lamplight beat on him, she beheld he was made of stone, a pale stone finely planed, fantastically burnished, colored with all the most convincing nuances of life.
His long and thickly curling hair was black, and lay seemingly loosely against his forehead, cheeks and shoulders. His features were chiseled, of a faintly Eastern cast, singularly handsome even to the point of beauty. His flesh was pale, but not with the dead pallor of the stone, rather a curious dark whiteness flushed through with somber tinctures, as if ichors flowed directly under the skin. In the eyes, which most of all might display lifelessness in a statue, there had been set dark jewels that glimmered, that seemed possessed of actual sight.
The image was represented as garbed in a black outer mantle of the ancient Parsua, diagonally cut and fringed with silver, with a broad belt that flashed with large bloody gems. Gems of blood and ink and blue water also crusted the shoes carved on his feet and stared from his long fingers. One hand lay relaxedly at his side. The left hand was gracefully uplifted in an ambiguous gesture of offering or beckoning.
The statue’s feet rested upon a low plinth, and in the plinth some words had long ago been cut, their letters softened now by time that had, in no other form, impaired the freshness of the work. After a while, as if impelled, Jaspre looked at them and next leaned close.
Deo Arimanio, they read. Nox Invictus.
The woman spoke quietly at Jaspre’s side.
“You have deciphered the writing. Do you translate it?”
“He is,” said the girl, “a god, and this is his name. And here it says that night—”
The woman broke in, softly as before:
“Unconquerable Night, is what it says. It is a good wish for his future victory, against the god of fires.”
Jaspre’s eyes fell. Her heart beat so fast now the woman did not miss it.
“But that fight is far off. For now, he dwells in darkness and is at peace in his kingdom.”
“Does he then,” said Jaspre, “truly exist?”
“Yes. He is God. The King of the World, that is him. The Prince of Darkness, eternal adversary to the devil Lucifer, bringer of light and blinding. The Lord of Eternal Night. By some called Bel, and in the Roman tongue Arimanio, as it is carved here. But as you shall worship him now, he is named Angemal. Angel, demon and god.”
“And I am to serve him?”
“For this you were born.”
Slowly, the young girl’s cheeks stained red with blood. The lights in the eyes of the statue blazed and sang, as if he saw and smiled at it.
TWO
Into her world, then, of floral garden, of gracious room, of magical laboratory, a god had entered.
In miniature, a creation myth, Jaspre its feminine principle, her axis now fixed: A man who was also God. Who was also the Serpent. She was thirteen, and everything spread before her, a glittering sea clothed in phantasmal mists, tossed by mystic gradual lights. On this her mind embarked, into the perpetual dawn of knowledge. And now knowledge was enhanced by that best accessory of all—desire.
Jaspre did not know that, in the person of the remarkable and lifelike statue, her desire and her love had come to reside, to put down tenacious roots, to burn into red blossom. But her feelings, senses, yearnings, these did the work for her. She did not need to think, to know, to reason. Her pulse and her spirit were now her guides.
The woman had been not only generous in the gifts of learning she had poured in on Jaspre’s receptive intelligence; she had been also most selective. There from the first, always, was that which would enhance and increase this ultimate moment, the moments which succeeded it. Nothing to detract. Nothing to alarm, defame, erode.
Knowing nothing of this esoteric cult which now had been set shimmering before her, Jaspre knew no indecision and no doubt.
She had been born to magnify him. He had chosen her.
For a year then, she “served.”
She brought her offerings, fruits and flowers from the walled garden, and laid them at his jeweled feet. She brought him wine, and music. She began to dream of him. Her dreams were lapped in fires, which were dark, heatless, sable, laval fires, such as burned in his kingdom, far, far beneath the earth.
Lord of Demons, Prince of Darkness. She began to hunger for him, for those things which were his. Less and less did she sleep by night. She slept by day, drawing her shutters and her curtains against the sun. At dusk, as if to blue morning, she woke. She sat among the closed night flowers, and played upon her guitars to the rising of the moon. She made her hymns to him then. And her skin grew moon-burned, she supposed, as was his.
For she too altered. Her hair hung long, to her waist, to the backs of her knees. She was taller, more slender. An ambient night-vision enabled her to perceive the silver apples on the tree, the nocturnal moths flying on their paper wings from the surface of the moon.
Angemal. Arimanio. Lord of winged things, lord of the panther and the black wolf, lord of quietude, lord of the silver caves a hundred miles beneath the ground.
Fruit and flowers she brought, her hymns she brought, and next her tears.
He lived. She worshiped. Should he never come to her? Would they never meet? Her mind, her spirit dreamed; her flesh spoke also—dreams were not enough.
* * * *
“How old, Jaspre, are you now?”
“I am fourteen, my lady.”
“I seldom see you in the garden, now, by day.”
“I am there after dark, my lady. I abhor the sun. I love only the night.”
“And he that is the night. You love him.”
Jaspre’s face, lovely, savage, a storm.
“Yes! I would give him more than ever I gave.”
“You shall.”
The hidden door, the stair, the insularium.
There was a difference to the room.
At its every angle, aromatics burned, bittersweet, rose, terebinth, camfre, myrrh. The lamps were out. A single blue cloud burned high up on a massive chandelier of candles let down from the ceiling. On the floor there were marks: The Circle, the Star of the Five Points, the figures of an arcane zodiac—Fish, Serpent, Bull, Virgin… At various stations stood the symbols, the Chalice, the Sword, the Crown, the Veil and others.
The girl knew little of any of this. But what if her baroque world grew still more unfamiliar and bizarre? She checked at nothing.
“Now,” said the woman, “I will tell you what you must do.”
She did so, and Jaspre obeyed her.
Jaspre removed her gown of icy satin, her undergarments and her shoes. Unaware that nakedness meant shame and vulnerability, she went to the Circle naked, and naked she lay down in it, her hands and her feet extended to conform with four points of the five-pointed Star, her head conforming with the fifth, and her hair like pale golden snow frayed out about her everywhere.
The scents of the smokes made Jaspre drowsy and sad. Her heart beat in her very womb, and she lay listening to it.
The woman said to her out of a blue fire-cloud in the air: “You have brought many offerings to the Lord Angemal. Do you fear to give him of your blood?”
“No,” said Jaspre.
She did not know what she had said. Yet her soul knew and beat its wings within her, attempting, like the caged bird it was, to fly.
How beautiful she was. The woman, bending above her with the silver knife, comprehended without human lust this beauty. After all, had she not trained it, complimented it, nourished it, setting all things to inspire the enchantment of physical perfection? A child of golden light.
“Fix your thoughts,” the woman said, “upon him. Do you consent to be his?”
Jaspre breathed. “I do.”
She felt a flicker of pain. It did not trouble her, she rejoiced in it. Her pain, too, she would render him. Was it sufficient? She almost entreated to be hurt again.
The dream began subtly, first with a vague awareness, then with a still certainty, of where she was, and the reason and the logic of it.
Far down under the house, beneath the very surface of the ground, the insularium was a cellar. Only the telescope craned, and that merely by the means of a stone funnel and twisted lenses, upward into the sky. Now, however, some portion of the chamber, that magian centre at which Jaspre lay—the pivot of the Star—had become the head of a mighty tower.
The tower was stone. She could visualize it quite clearly, the roofed cup of its spire, which contained her, the perilous swooping descent of its sides. Slowly, Jaspre rose. She looked about. The room in the head of the tower was small, and, of course, pentagonal. In each of the five sides, a long window lacking glass framed an uncanny vaporous darkness, without form and void—indeed, as the first darkness of all, the dark of Chaos, had been described in the parchments of the Judaians.
Yet, Jaspre was not afraid of the void darkness, nor of the height of the tower. She went to the window before her, toward which formerly her own skull had pointed, and looked out of it.
The scentless, moistureless yet somber mists, disturbed a little, seemingly by human warmth, swirled and floated. Nothing else was visible before her, and so she turned her eyes to gaze downward.
The spire plummeted below her, it seemed, forever. She grasped at once, as if she had always been cognizant of the fact, that the sub-earth cellar of the insularium could be also the top of a tower because such a place thrust on, by sorcerous means, deep into the core of the world, to those nether regions, those buried ca
verns that had been named Hell, or Hades, or Tellus Occultus in explanatory, analogous legend. It seemed to fall miles below her, growing ever more slender as it fell, becoming eventually nothing larger or stronger than a needle, and on this the upper masonry balanced, and she within it, so she seemed to experience all at once a gentle swaying in the cup of the tower, rhythmic as that of a pendulum, mild as that of a flower-stalk in a breeze. And still, she was not afraid, either to sense this motion, or to stare downward into the formless abyss.
There were carvings in the sides of the tower, the magic symbols from the chamber as it had been, the zodiac, the Crown, the Sword, the Chalice—she knew such seals must hold the spire safely.
And then she became aware of the little fluttering at her left wrist. She looked, and a scarlet butterfly flew away from her, away down the length of the tower, and then another, another, an unraveling scarf of butterflies like winged blood. Jaspre watched them descend, and as she leaned there, strands of her unbound hair came streaming over her shoulder, and spilled away also, unfurling like a shining ribbon, down, down, down with the red ribbon of the butterflies, down, down into the dark below.
Jaspre was filled by wonder, but not by perplexity or questioning. The butterflies, which were born from her wrist, seemed spontaneous and natural. The way her hair trickled now from its fount, pouring over her, pouring down, a golden river, a silken rope, growing long and longer—as it had done in her life, but never so swiftly—this appeared also fitting, and right.
And then her very eyes, her very sight and spirit seemed to be freed of her body, and she herself, invisible, a thing of air, flowed down the tower.