by Tanith Lee
Estár touched her finger to the topaz in her left ear.
“And so I love you spontaneously, but without any choice. Because we were chosen to be lovers?”
“Does it offend you?”
“If I were human,” she said, “it might offend me. But then.”
“And I, of course,” he said, “also love you.”
“And the way I am—my looks… Do you find me ugly?”
“I find you beautiful. Strangely, alienly lovely. That’s quite usual. Although for me, very curious, very exciting.”
She shut her eyes then, and let him move to her across the dark. And she experienced in her own mind the glorious wonder he felt at the touch of her skin’s smoothness like a cool leaf, just as he would experience her delirious joy in the touch of his velvet skin, the note of his dark and golden mouth discovering her own.
Seeing the devouring sadness in her face when she looked at them, unable to reveal her secret, Estár’s earthly guardians would fear for her. They would not realize her sadness was all for them. And when she no longer moved among them, they would regret her, and mourn for her as if she had died. Disbelieving or forgetting that in any form of death, the soul—Psyche, Estár, (well-named)—refinds a freedom and a beauty lost with birth.
THE WATERS OF SORROW
The dead live in the trees. But in winter, when the trees are bare, the dead go down after the fallen leaves, into the waters, and hide there, in the glowing dark.
The dead are cruel. They have reasons to be.
And they dance.
* * * *
Back in the old days, when some of us were children, and some, of course, not yet born, the only boats on the River were the kind with paddle and sail. But for a while now we have had the levisteamers, which travel two or three feet above the River’s surface, with only their steel ‘sippers’ trailing down in it to suck up wet fuel for the fired pod. And the long trails of white steam go fluffing out behind them, like the feathers of a swan in moult.
When the first few of these craft appeared they were a marvel. Folk would take a special journey to the shore to watch them go by. Some still swear the wide River grew wider, and its water grew darker green because of the constant churning. Others tell you they have eaten fresh hot steam-cooked fish straight from the water. Certainly, the birds that use the riverbank roost higher up. But in half a dozen years anyway, we had a handful of steam-chariots too on the inland tracks, and now and then a pretty coloured balloon-pod would sail across the sky.
It was about then that the levisteam showboat came down the River.
She was a lovely sight, the boat, green and gold and polished up like a medal. No matter she had an unlucky name. The Vilya she was called. After all those girls that die of broken hearts when their lovers betray or abandon them, those dead girls who live in the trees or the waters, and come out on certain nights of the year to catch men - any man - since to any vilya, by that hour of their living hating death, any man may have been a traitor to all or any woman. And they lure him, with their weird dead beauty, to dance, until his own heart, or his lungs, go out and he dies. Or else they cast him under the River. There was and are stories even now of a particular lady, daughter of a rich businessman in the steam-power trade. Her name was Myrra, for that Biblical ointment of mourning. He gave her the name at an ignorant fancy, it would seem, but it turned out a prophecy too, because her lover jilted her two days before their wedding, and she broke her own heart - by driving a dagger through it. Five or fifteen years after, depending on who tells the tale, the wrongdoer strayed back to his former haunts. And one midnight, as he smoked his cigar in the woods, she found him, Myrra. Beautiful and unhuman and terrible she must have seemed to him, with her long, uncombed hair and flimsy garment, and her skin, white as the live-dead ancient moon, staring at him from them. She made him dance too, dance till he fell into the River, where she and her fellow vilyas drowned him, but very slowly, they say, very, very slowly.
Even today you can find entirely blameless men who will refuse to leave their homes, be they mansion or hut; they will not set one foot out of doors on such nights when the moon is full. But nowadays they are generally old men, who remember when the River was empty of steam traffic, and only horse-carts and carriages on the roads, and birds to cross the sky.
* * * *
It was becoming respectable for women to go to the theatre without male escort, providing they did not go singly. So Ghisla slipped on to the showboat with a bevy of other young women, as if she were part of their group. They were strangers though and she quite alone. She was nervous, yet eager. She had heard of the play from her mother’s customers at the haberdashery shop in the town. Due to the shop as well, Ghisla had been able to kit herself out quite nicely, in a plain white gown, hair combs and proper gloves. It was a warm night, and all along the track to the River, the crickets were tuning up like tiny violins. Set up by the Vilya’s stage hands, coloured lanterns lit the trees.
“Such an exotic name for the boat,” the gossips had cried. “Vilya! My goodness. But he is exotic, everyone knows that, the Prince.”
As she wrapped their ribbons and stockings, Ghisla had listened. She was sixteen, quite tall, and slender as a reed, graceful too, which she somehow realized without naming it to herself, let alone ever having had anyone tell her. Her mother certainly never told Ghisla such things. What Ghisla must aim for, her mother always said, was to be virtuous, polite, modest, and hardworking. She must help her mother, who herself had toiled so ceaselessly she had aged in looks, voice and personality to an embittered crone of sixty by the time she was thirty-three. But the mother’s husband had died of coughing fits when Ghisla was only seven years old. Another betrayer, Ghisla’s father, heartlessly running off with death like that, and leaving the pair of them to cope as best they could.
Ghisla’s hair was very black and silky. She had put it up on her head with the four green combs to support it. Her eyes were that kind of brown that looks like jet at dusk or by moonlight, but under sun or a lamp go the colour of Amontillado sherry with a dash of gold in it.
The exhausted mother was already in her bed by the time Ghisla left their little apartment behind the shop. But light lingered in the sky, it was not yet nine o’clock and the show began late. When Ghisla reached the River and went up the broad gang-plank just behind the other girls, the air and the water were like pale amber. But on the boat, and seated in the gilded gallery’s front row, only the steam lamps shone, and outside darkness fell swiftly. It was like being in a cradle too. The boat, now grounded on water, rocked softly at her moorings. Which made Ghisla a little giddy, but she did not mind.
Then the lights went down, and the stage burned up, and out he came, to great applause, the actor-manager they called the ‘Prince’. His name in fact was Lutz Alvarek. His hair was long, ice-blond-white, and his eyes were of a clear gleaming glacial blue, like a blue topaz. Tanned by the summer, and accented by his stage make-up, he was fit to knock anyone else’s eyes quite out. He stood there in his elegant costume and welcomed his audience, and they clapped and cheered, and the women sighed. The drama was to be a play known as To Hunt the Hidden Sword. But the showboat had brought to it one further startling element. The main female character, a femme fatal of enormous beauty and treachery, Bithida, was played in this version by a steam mannequin, a life-size doll run on fire, water and clockwork. It was able to move and to make a variety of gesturings, although an actress must supply the voice from the wings.
The novelty of the doll was what had brought Ghisla to the boat. She was yet child enough, you see, and had possessed no doll since her father’s death. For the past week she had offered extra assistance to customers - sewing on lace, replacing buttons - and kept back the payment for her ticket. True, she had felt guilty about this, but only in a vague and childish way which now she put aside. She had had great p
ractice in doing so, since her mother had always made a point of ensuring Ghisla would suffer guilt whenever possible.
When Prince Lutz appeared and then went away again, Ghisla still longed to see the moving doll. But also, with a peremptory and sore desire, to see again Prince Lutz. Unlike guilt, in her deprived existence she had never before experienced such a feeling.
Perhaps you will believe that, even when he instantly appeared once more in the thick of the play, and her heart leapt up as if it had caught fire, even then she did not realize she had fallen in love at first sight with him. She had never seen a man like him, obviously, had no chance to. And he was very wonderful to behold, Prince Lutz Alvarek, anyone will tell you that.
The play went on, with some intervals, quite a time. But it was full of sensation—poisonings, stabbings, the lurid uncovering of secrets—only its high moral tone had made permissable giving it a public airing at all.
Perhaps Ghisla was bemused. Or did she properly notice the dramatic events? Bithida the doll was herself very captivating, though in the end rather disappointing. Not least because clouds of steam tended to furl out of her whenever movement was required. Beyond the doll’s initial entrance, and one subsequent exit, her motion was soon limited to slow turns of the head, wafting gestures of the hands, and the occasional blink of two cobalt eyes.
The audience thrilled to everything, however. The atmosphere buzzed and sparkled, cheers, groans and involuntary oaths scorched to the roof, and echoed out into the riverine night, where the lanterns by now guttered and only golden and crimson fireflies spangled the trees.
But in the end the play finished, as all plays, and all things, eventually do.
By then, you might imagine, Ghisla was wrung out, in a sort of trance or dream. Not wanting the play ended, of course, for then he too would vanish from the stage and from the world. Without thought even, she grew aware that then—now—this inexplicable joy somehow caused only by him, would leave her with him. Surely, surely she did now grasp that what she felt was love—or was this fact unavailable to her, poor girl? Had it not seemed to her that, during the concluding act, he had looked up into her eyes very often, held her gaze which, in any case, could not look away from his, even if his eyes were blue lightning, or shards of silver glass—But all her usual dreary and meaningless existence was crowding back to her, smoking over her heart and mind, as she sat alone on the gilt gallery, and the mass of other theatre-goers ebbed, like the dry ice and steam, away into the bar, and so into the firefly dark, returning to all their own realities, arduous or horrible or sweet. And when the last of them had gone, and the last internal lamp was fading, as if fading too, still Ghisla sat there. She must have forgotten how to stand up and independently move. Or, like steam-driven Bithida, was restricted from anything more than the slow turn of her head, meaningless flick of her hand, the infrequent blinking of her eyes.
* * * *
Prince Lutz turned himself to find Heine in the doorway of the dressing-cabin.
“They say there’s a young woman sitting up in the gallery still.”
To Heine’s curiosity Lutz Alvarek, who had sloughed his make-up, paled.
“Where on the gallery?”
“At the very front . . . that pretty one with dark hair and the white dress. Maybe you noted her. Oh, no doubt you did, Lutz, knowing you.”
“You know nothing about me, Heine,” said Lutz, in the cold and arrogant manner he could suddenly adopt, often taking his fellow actors by surprise. Though they failed to like these turns in him, they checked at the signal, for he was not only their star but their banker, and mostly they had no wish to anger him.
“I meant no offence, Prince.”
“Good. Then tell me why she’s there.”
“Ermelind says she thinks the girl may be unwell—”
“In God’s name—” said Lutz. Next moment he was out of the cabin and running up the ladder to the higher decks. Doing that he heard the low thrum of the boat’s pod, and too the whispery drinking of its sipper-tube, working now in the black River below. But reaching the upper levels where such noises were less, they were with him still. He knew then it was the tension in him. For he had indeed noted the girl on the gallery. Once or twice during the performance he had looked steadily straight into her eyes. It was not the first, naturally, he had ever done such a thing. Maybe seldom with such purpose. But she was so young. So fragile. What had befallen her?
* * * *
By now it was well after midnight, nearer one in the morning. The smoke-cloud of her mean life had completed its re-conquest of Ghisla.
She had stood up, bemused and uncertain still, but able to move, able to leave the boat with the strange unlucky name, to pick her way back along the black wooded bank, to reach the town streets and the loveless apartment behind her mother’s shop, slip into her cramped and loveless bed, into her loveless and unlovely place in the real world.
As she went up the gallery towards the exit, a man’s tall figure abruptly filled the doorway.
Ghisla stopped. She felt a little sad twinge of fear.
She had stayed too long, was in the wrong as always, and would now be scolded and abused. Perhaps even she had broken the law—
“My God,” he said, “in this dark you seem—Are you a ghost?”
For a second she did not know who spoke to her. Or she did, surely? Yes, she must have done, that marvellous voice of his that had filled her ears for three hours and more.
She became less fearful. More terrified. She said nothing. Was afraid to speak.
And then he stood directly in front of her, so much taller than she, and still in the flamboyant clothes he had worn for the play. He carried a scent too of the stage—the steamy footlights, the metal doll, the grease-paint and candlewax, sawdust and fire.
She looked up into his face and his pale gem-stone eyes burned out of it as they had from the flamelit stage.
“Oh,” she said. “It’s you.” Mundane words, such as might be spoken by handmaidens when a dead god rose and appeared before them, and was known.
“Yes. And it is you. Are you well?”
“Oh, yes . . . no—”
And what indeed was she, this young girl that no one had ever spoken to in such a caressive, meaning-filled way, that nobody ever asked of whether she was well or not, or if she was a ghost, that nobody had ever greeted with such evident ardour: It is you. You.
Prince Lutz led her quietly out, across the darkened and vacant bar. Elsewhere the other actors, the stage-hands and boatmen, held their own follies, a dim rumble of noises, chink of bottles; while the sipper sipped the River and the River rocked the boat gently, so he caught the girl’s arm to steady her. And as they moved on across the scene-shifting half-light, under the beam of a single lamp on deck he saw her face, her neck and shoulders, her piled-up hair with its River-green combs, her eyes now cool black, now the warm of copper and bronze. He halted her there, in that soft beam, and said, so softly to her, “How beautiful you are. More beautiful even than I thought you from the stage. I’ve been waiting for you a long while. Did you know that? No? Well, my love, now you do.” And now she did.
* * * *
The dead live in the trees, or in the waters. No doubt they watch the final scene of this First Act.
It occurs about three in the morning, there in the darkness of the wooded bank, some way upstream from where the golden showboat Vilya is anchored.
There is a rustling and snapping to begin with, a sound of torn cloth and small tearing branches, undergrowth that is trampled, however lightly. And breathing, fast respiratory stabs.
And then the white figure appears, with a flurry of combless undone hair like new tearings from the material of the night. Straight to the brink of the bank, the brink of the River she runs, the young woman in her torn white dress. And then she stand
s quite motionless as if, all over again, she has forgotten movement, even—now—how to flex her wrists or turn her head.
Tears stream from her eyes.
She stands there on the brink, holding her hands like frozen steel against her breasts, weeping, her emotion so colossal it seems she smiles or laughs. And then a spasm of movement after all quakes all through her, and her eyes shut. Weightless as a swan’s feather she drifts over from the bank and falls floatingly into the dark below. Which opens like many pale arms, unearthly out of the black, receiving her, drawing her in and down to sanctuary and oblivion.
They know. Those ones who have dropped down here before. The girls betrayed, the girls like Myrra, they know how the heart breaks, and the taste of deep water.
Only ripples then, only silence then. It never changes, in the end, the way we mislay things in the dark.
* * * *
Lutz Alvarek came back to the town and to the River five years later. He travelled firstly down to the city in his big steamwheeler car, that had once been painted and trimmed, green and gold, like the Vilya, but which by now was plain black and chrome. At the city he stabled the ‘wheeler and, with just twenty others, boarded the steambus, that old panting rattler only some of us anymore remember; she was nicknamed Puffing Pankra.
Alvarek did all that to avoid too much notice in the town. Then it was a small place still, and quiet.
Probably some of us did recall Prince Lutz. No doubt a number of the women did, would you say, those that watched him on the showboat. But by then too Vilya was long gone with Alvarek’s former employee, Heine. Some people said that Heine was gifted the Vilya by Lutz, to keep Heine dumb about something or other, though this gossip had never come so far as the town. In any event, even without his boat, Lutz had kept his career all glowing bright. He had stayed a success, a great actor many claimed, and he was as handsome as he ever had been, they said too, even the ones who reckoned he had committed some crime. But we need to remember anyway, he was only twenty-two years of age on his earlier visit. And now he was only twenty-seven.