Redder than Blood

by Tanith Lee

  “A wild weird tale. Take me to the king. He must hear first.”

  Urlenn had been driving a wagon, pulled by two mules, and his war-horse tied at the back. One or two heard a baby cry, and looked at one or two others.

  Prince Urlenn went into the king’s presence just as he was, in workaday colorful peasant clothes, and with two white scars glaring above his shining eyes.

  The king (who did not know he was The Dad) had been on a broad terrace that commanded a view of the valleys, and the distant mountains that marked his kingdom’s end. The two elder sons were also there, and their wives, and most of the court, servants, soldiers, various pets, some hunting dogs, and Princess Madzia, who, for motives of sheer rage, had not gone away all this while.

  Urlenn bowed. The king, white as the paper of Urlenn’s last—and only second—letter, sprang up.

  They embraced, and the court clapped (all but Madzia). Urlenn thought, I’ve been monstrous to put him through this. But surely I never knew he liked me at all—but he does, look, he’s crying. Oh, God. I could hang myself.

  But that would not have assisted the Dad, nor Urlenn, so instead Urlenn said, “Will you forgive me, my lord and sire. I was so long gone on the strangest adventure, the most fearsome and bizarre event of my life. I never thought such things were possible. Will you give me leave to tell you the story of it?”

  There followed some fluster, during which Princess Madzia scowled, her eyes inky thunder. But these eyes dulled as Urlenn spoke. In the end they were opaque, and all of her gone to nothing but a smell of civet and a dark red dress. Years after, when she was riotously married elsewhere, and cheerful again, she would always say, broodingly (falsely), “My heart broke.” But even she had never said that Urlenn had been wrong.

  Urlenn told them this: Journeying home through the forests, he had come to an eerie place, in a green silence. And there suddenly he heard the most beautiful voice, singing, Drawn by the song, he found a high stone tower. Eagerly, yet uneasily—quite why he was not sure—he waited nearby, to see if the singer might appear. Instead, presently a terrible figure came prowling through the trees. She was an old hag, and ugly, but veiled in an immediately apparent and quite awesome power which he had no words to describe. Reaching the tower’s foot, this being wasted no time, but called out thus: Let down your hair! Let down your hair! And then, wonder of wonders, from a window high up in the side of the tower, a golden banner began unfolding and falling down. Urlenn said he did not for one minute think it was hair at all. It shone and gleamed—he took it for some weaving of metal threads. But the hag placed her hands on it, and climbed up it, and vanished in at the window.

  Urlenn prudently hid himself then more deeply in the trees. After an hour, the hag descended as she had gone up. Urlenn observed in bewilderment as this unholy creature now pounced away into the wood.

  “Then I did a foolish thing—very foolish. But I was consumed, you see, by burning curiosity.”

  Imitating the cracked tones of the hag, he called out, just as she had done: “Let down your hair!”

  And in answer, sure enough, the golden woven banner silked once more from the window, and fell, and fell.

  He said, when he put his hands to it, he shuddered. For he knew at once, and without doubt, it had all the scent and texture of a young girl’s hair. But to climb up a rope of hair was surely improbable? Nevertheless, he climbed.

  The shadows now were gathering. As he got in through the window’s slot, he was not certain of what he saw.

  Then a pure voice said to him, “Who are you? You are never that witch!”

  There in a room of stone, with her golden tresses piled everywhere about them, softer than silken yarn, gleaming, glorious, and—he had to say—rather untidy—the young girl told him her story.

  Heavy with child, the girl’s mother had chanced to see, in the gardens of a dreaded, dreadful witch, a certain salad. For this she developed, as sometimes happens with women at such times, a fierce craving. Unable to satisfy it, she grew ill. At last, risking the witch’s wrath, the salad was stolen for the woman. But the witch, powerful as she was, soon knew, and manifested before the woman suddenly. “In return for your theft from my garden, I will thieve from yours. You must give me your child when it is born, for my food has fed it. Otherwise, both can die now.” So the woman had to agree, and when she had borne the child, a daughter, weeping bitterly she gave it to the witch. Who, for her perverse pleasure, named the girl after the salad (here he told the name) and kept her imprisoned in a tower of stone.

  “But her hair,” said Urlenn, “Oh, her hair—it grew golden and so long—finer than silk, stronger than steel. Was it for this magic, perhaps imparted by the witch’s salad, that the witch truly wanted her? Some plan she must have had to use the hapless maiden and her flowing locks. I thwarted it. For having met the maid, she and I fell in love.”

  Urlenn had intended to rescue his lover from the tower, but before that was accomplished, he visited her every day. And the witch, cunning and absolute, discovered them. “You’ll realize,” said Urlenn, “she had only to look into some sorcerous glass to learn of our meetings. But we, in our headstrong love, forgot she could.”

  “Faithless!” screamed the witch, and coming upon the girl alone, cut off all her golden hair. Then the witch, hearing the young man calling, herself let the tresses down for his ladder. And he, in error, climbed them. Once in the tower’s top, the witch confronted him in a form so horrible, he could not, later, recall it. By her arcane strengths, however, she flung him down all the length of the tower, among great thorns and brambles which had sprung up there.

  “Among them I almost lost my sight. You see the scars left on my forehead. Blinded, I wandered partly mad for months.”

  Beyond the tower lay an occult desert, caused by the witch’s searing spells. Here the witch in turn cast the maiden, leaving her there to die.

  But, by the emphasis of love and hope, she survived, giving birth alone in the wilderness, to the prince’s children, a little boy and girl, as alike as sunflowers.

  “There in the end, sick, and half insane, I found her. Then she ran to me and her healing tears fell on my eyes. And my sight was restored.”

  Love had triumphed. The desert could not, thereafter, keep them, and the prince and his beloved, wife in all but name, emerged into the world again, and so set out for the kingdom of the prince’s father.

  He’s crying again. Yes, I should hang myself. But maybe not. After all, she said I might make out her Gran was wicked—said the old lady would have laughed—all in a good cause. A perfect cause. They’re all crying. Look at it. And the Dad—he does love a story.

  “My son—my son—won’t this evil sorceress pursue you?”

  Urlenn said, frankly, “She hasn’t yet. And it was a year ago.”

  The king said, “Where is the maiden?”

  Oh, the hush.

  “She waits just outside, my lordly sire. And our children, too. One thing—”

  “What is it?”

  “Since the witch’s cruel blow, her hair lost its supernatural luster. Now it’s just . . . a nice shade of flaxen. Nor will it grow at all. She cuts it short. She prefers that, you see, after the use to which it was last put. By her hair then, you’ll never know her. Only by her sweetness and her lovely soul, which shine through her like a light through glass.”

  Then the doors were opened, and Flarva came in. She wore a white gown, with pearls in her short yellow hair. She looked as beautiful as a dream. And after her walked two servants with two sleeping babies. And by them, a pale stalking cat which, having no place in the legend, at first no one saw. (Although it may have found its way into other tales.)

  But the king strode forward, his eyes very bright. Never, Urlenn thought, had he seen this man so full of life and fascinated interest. Or had Urlenn seen it often, long ago, when he was only three or four or
five? In Flarva’s time . . .

  “Welcome,” said the king, the Dad, gracious as a king or a father may be. “Welcome to the wife of my son, my daughter, Rapunzel.”

  Open Your Window, Golden Hair

  AT THE POINT where the trees parted, he saw the tower. It seemed framed in space, standing on a rise, the pines climbing everywhere toward it in swathes, like blue-black fur, but not yet reaching the top of the hill. A strange tower, perhaps, he thought. The stone was ancient and obdurate, in the way of some old things—and these not exclusively inanimate. He could remember an old woman from his youth, that everyone called a witch, crag-like and immovable in both grim attitude and seeming longevity. Someone had said of her that she had never been younger than fifty, and never aged beyond seventy—“But in counted years she’s easily ninety by now.” The tower was like that.

  Brown raised his binoculars, and studied it attentively, rather as he had so many landmarks on his excursion through Europe; he did this more as if he should, than because he particularly wanted or needed to.

  But the tower was rather odd. Caught in that mirror-gap of spatial emptiness, only the cloudless sheet of earliest summer sky behind it, turning toward late afternoon, a warmly watery, pale golden blank of light. The tower was nearly in silhouette. Yet something hung down, surely, from the high, narrow window-slits. What was that? It had a yellowish effect, strands and eddies—creepers, perhaps.

  Should he check the tower in the guidebook? No. He must make on to the little inn which, he had been told, lay just above the road to the west. It would take about half an hour to reach it, and by then the sun would be near to setting. He did not fancy the woods after nightfall, at least, not alone.

  He was not sure about the inn. They were so welcoming and kindly-spoken he suspected at once they might be planning to rob him, either directly or through the charges they would apply to his bed and board.

  But the evening went on comfortably enough, with beer and various types of not unpleasant food. There was a fire lit, too, which was needed, since, with sunfall, a slight but definite chill had seeped into the world. Brown had selected and retained a good seat to one side of the hearth. Here, after his meal, he smoked and wrote up a few brief notes on the day’s travel. This exercise was mainly to provide something with which to regale acquaintances on his return. He sensed he would otherwise forget a lot. The general run of things did not often linger very long in his mind. Having, then, made a note on it, he asked the so-genial host about the tower.

  “Oh, we do not speak of it,” said the host gravely. “It is unlucky.”

  “For whom?” bantered Brown.

  “For any. An old place, once a witch’s fortress.”

  “Witches, eh?”

  The host, having refilled Brown’s tankard, straightened and solemnly said, “It is unlucky even to look at it. To go there is most inadvisable.” And after this, rather belying his previous assertion that one had better not talk about the tower, he announced: “Long whiles ago, back in times of history, it was said a creature also lived in the tower, the servant of the witch. She had bred it by force on a human woman, they say, and all the while the mother carried this monster-child, the witch fed the woman special liquids and herbs of power from her own uncanny garden. When the baby came forth, the mother, not to surprise us much, died. The creature then grew in the charge of the witch, and did her bidding for evil, and for all manners of ill.”

  “A fascinating story,” said Brown, who thought he was actually quite bored.

  “There is more,” said the host, now gazing starkly up at the inn’s low, smoky rafters. “Men were drawn to the tower, and somehow clambered up there. They were lured by the vision of a lovely young woman with golden hair, who would lean out the narrow window and flirt with and exhort them. But when they reached the stony place above and crawled in at the window—Ah!” exclaimed the host quite vehemently, making Brown jump and spill some of his beer—perhaps a ploy, so he would have to purchase more—“Ah, sweet Virgin and Lordship Christ, protect and succor us. No one must look at the tower, or venture close. I have said far too much, good mister. Forget what I have uttered.”

  • • •

  Brown dreamed. He had gone back to the tower.

  However, he was much younger, maybe eighteen or seventeen years of age. And his father was standing over Brown, as so often Mr. Brown senior had been, admonishing his son. “Don’t touch it, boy. It isn’t to be touched.”

  Yet surely—it was. All that golden floating fluff-like golden feathers escaping from a pillow full of swansdown—which down had come from golden swans.

  “But it’s so sweet, Father,” said Brown.

  And frowningly woke in the tiny bedroom up under the roof at the forest inn.

  Midnight, harshly if voicelessly declared his watch.

  Now he would be awake all night.

  Next moment, Brown was once more fast asleep and dreaming . . .

  Treacle goldenly flowed. Of course it was sweet. He tasted it, licked it up, swallowed and swallowed, could not get enough. He had been deprived of confectionary when a child, his strict father had seen to that.

  The only difficulty was that the treacle also spilled all over him. He was covered in the stuff. There would be such trouble, later. Better then enjoy himself while he could. Brown opened his mouth wider, and held out both his eager, clutching hands.

  • • •

  The next day dawned bright as any cliché, and Brown got up with the abruptly, rather dreary awareness he must now go on with his exciting, adventurous journey across Europe. What, after all, was the point, really? Had he been a writer he might have made something of it, some book. Or a playboy would have used the time pretty well, though in a different way and through an unlike agenda. But Brown. What could Brown do with it? Bore people, no doubt, with badly recollected snippets of this and that. Even snippets like the tall tale the inn-host had cooked up last night. It had caused some funny dreams, that. What had they been? Something about sweets, was it, and—gold? Ridiculous.

  Brown ate his breakfast in an ordinary silence, which the host respected. If the man felt either embarrassed or scornfully amused at his previous story-telling, one could not be certain. He might even, Brown decided, have forgotten it. Conceivably, he subjected every traveler who spoke of anything to some such dramatic recital.

  After breakfast, Brown paid his bill, and left the inn.

  His next stop was to be a town by a river, both with unpronounceable names. It should take about four hours to reach the unpronounceable town. If everything ran to plan.

  Presently, Brown, striding through the sun-splashed blackness of the forest, realized he must have taken the wrong track. For it seemed to him the landscape was familiar. That leaning sapling, for example, and the fallen pine beyond—and then that break in the trees, through which the daylight currently streamed so vividly.

  Brown halted, staring out with disfavor and a degree of annoyance. And there, sun-painted now on the sky, stood up again the old tower, with the pines still climbing toward it, and the yellow weeds still hanging down by the windows.

  • • •

  For a long while Brown paused, gazing at the tower. It was not a great distance away, perhaps a couple of miles, or not so much. He noticed a slender path of trodden earth ran down through the forest here, that seemed to lead directly to the foot of the hill, which really, itself, was not significantly steep.

  He found he had walked forward without noticing it, and was on the beginnings of the path, descending toward the shallow valley that lay below the hill. See what sheer indolence, mere indifference, could lead to! Did he truly want to go in this direction? Did he want to climb up and gape at a nondescript ruin—which probably it was, a ruin, when one saw it close to? Then again, why not? It was all the same to him. One more rather pointless episode. Climbed up to tower, he mentally penned in his notes
. Nothing much to look at. Perhaps dating from the fifteenth century; creepers all over it. Not much of a view, as surrounded on all sides by the forest.

  • • •

  As he had believed the path, and the subsequent climb, were not overly taxing for a man who had, so far, mostly walked through two or three countries already.

  Well before noon, he had come up and out just below the hill top, and the stonework loomed in front of him.

  Something about the tower was after all rather interesting—but what? It was lean, which had made it look taller, though it was not in fact high—perhaps thirty-five feet? Its construction had been from a darkish, smoothish stone, polished subsequently by weather, like the carapace of some hard, smooth, rugged sea-creature, possibly. The narrow window-slots appeared quite a way off from the ground, but were, of course, only some twenty-eight or thirty feet up. Nor would they be so narrow, one reasoned, when viewed at their own level. Something he would not be able to do. It was not a tower to climb, not in any way. Nor did he wish to. What besides could be up there—an empty stone space—or else it was full of the wrecked debris from some previous era, only left unthieved because it was so worthless.

  But there was a curious and strangely pleasant smell that hung around the tower. It did not resemble the balsamic fragrance of the pines, let alone their other flavors of dryness and wetness, fruition and fading death. On the contrary, the tower had a—what was it? A sort of honeyed scent, like the tempting sweetmeats of the Middle East.

  Were they the peculiar hanging creepers that gave off this aroma? There seemed to be nothing else that would do so.

  Brown was reluctant to go nearer and sniff at them. They were doubtless full of insects, and might even have tiny thorns. One could never tell with alien species. Their color, however, was really after all quite beautiful. Less yellow than a golden effect, a shining radiant hue.

  There now, despite his caution, he had approached very close. In fact, there seemed nothing remotely injurious about the plant. It was, if anything, extremely silken, and totally untangled—as if, fanciful notion, combed by careful and loving hands. And yes, the perfume was exuded by these multiple ‘locks’. Irresistibly, Brown leaned forward, and drew into his lungs the delicious scent. What was it that this recalled for him? Was it confectionary—or flowers? Exactly then, something gleamed out above him. Involuntarily, Brown’s neck snapped back. He found he gaped up the stem of the tower at the single window-slot directly above. He noted as he did so that oddly the creeper actually seemed, instead of having grown about the stone embrasures, to be extruded from their openings, hung out of the windows like some weird and ethereal washing, falling free thereafter down the tower wall.