by Tanith Lee
“These things happen,” he said. “It’s a new house, but the foundations are old.”
Beatrixa said, “You believe ghosts come back to haunt us.” Her voice was faint, soft. Andrea thought she had had a fright. And on top of the other thing: superstition, tattle. She was a woman, after all.
“No, Triche. I don’t think they haunt us. But I think there are ghosts.”
“How can there be? After death we sleep, to wait for Judgment, and Heaven or Hell—” Did she plead?
“That’s the priests’ version,” said Andrea. He felt gloomy suddenly, out of sorts. There had been a coldness in the sunlight, where the phantom must have been, and it had touched more than his books. “Now, to your other matter. What did you mean to ask?”
Her color had returned, he saw. She was not swooning or carrying on as most women would.
“I simply meant to ask you if it were true,” she said.
“That story of Meralda? That Ciara slaughtered her? God knows. I don’t, Triche. I don’t know. But Ciara gained a name afterwards that reeks like a three-week carcass. And Meralda—” he paused.
Silvio had prevented her from asking. But even so, did she still see it in her father’s face? Something unspeakable, something long ago, which he had done?
“Meralda’s at peace,” said Andrea Barbaron weightily. “That’s all we can hope from death. Peace in Heaven. Or peaceful sleep in ashes or a bed of earth.”
But Hell, she thought, what of that?
SILVIO
A WOLF AND A SHEEP lay side by side under the cypress trees, among some clovers, and watched him with tranquil eyes as he went past. When he looked back from higher ground, they were no longer there.
The dusk had begun. The sky was a peacock’s feather, violet, Tyrian blue, and emerald.
Now in shade, the palazzo continued to glow from its memories of daylight, and even as he approached, his mother’s servants were lighting the candles and the lamps, so the windows each became a single recurring day.
“Mother, tell me what I am?”
“Mine,” she said. “And your own.”
“You,” he said, “are a mighty sorceress. If I hadn’t known it, my books would have informed me. You are great as Melusina or Cleopatra, or the goddess-women of the barbarous northern world: Grania, Morcandia … and I am your son. So what am I?”
“Whatever you desire.”
“That I know. Are there no limitations?”
“Oh,” she said, “none.”
“There you’re wrong. There are some after all.” She sighed. She lifted one hand a few inches, and the unseen musicians started to play. Delicate note trickled to note.
He sat on the floor of the chamber, resting his head against her knees as she leaned back in her tall, carved chair. Sometimes his mother stroked the hair from his forehead. Her hands were scented with bergamot, and she was younger than he. But that was usually the case.
The room was full of lampshine, crystalline yet warm. When he was a child he had sometimes tried to count the lamps, which hung down from chains of silver as fine as eyelashes. It was never possible.
Silvio sank into the state of quietness, almost trance, that was habitual to them both when together. They did not really talk to each other very often. And yet, they communicated, without words, by some process he had, formerly, never considered.
But this, too, had happened with Beatrixa. She had believed Silvio able to divine her thoughts. That was not what he did. It was more as if she breathed into him the meditations—not of her brain—but of her body. Though he had seen her dreaming, too. And once, when asleep, she had spoken his name.
From the first, it had no longer been simple, none of it, with her.
She was to have been his pathway to Andrea, the father. To allow him to damage Andrea in ways other than those of a demonic eel or a flamingo-golem. To chastise him, rather, with scorpion whips of the psyche. And then, and then—Beatrixa. The arrogant, fierce child … the severe and graceful, restrained woman, whose silence lay about her, even when she spoke the most, like folds of a samite curtain.
Their unseen slaves came floating round them now. They poured white wine into cups transparent green as the waters surrounding this island.
Silvio thought he had drifted asleep. He was so comfortable, nothing need concern him. What he was, what he felt, or must do. That had never been his, none of that rubbish to which a human man was shackled.
And yet, he had prevented Beatrixa, at the last second, from asking the deadly question. He had wanted to save her from that. Why was this? He knew why it was.
“You are a sorceress,” he said again to his mother, out of his half-trance. “Will you give me what I most dearly desire?”
“I’ll give you anything.”
“I wonder if you can.”
“What is it?” she said.
“A woman that I want,” he said.
“Oh, that would be easy. For either of us to do.”
“No, mother. Not a woman of that design, not like the birds that come and go, and the animals. Not a creature we make for ourselves. Not like those. This is a woman who is really alive and lives in the world we have left, you and I, a woman of mortal flesh.”
He felt her shift away from him. Her caressing hands were gone.
Silvio also shifted, and looked at her. Her eyes had stretched wide, and she was so much younger than he, three years or five, his mother.
He had never until now imagined, seen, her afraid. Was she afraid? Was this her terror?
Silvio felt a sense of abject loss, a despair coupled incongruously to fury. Had he felt such an emotion ever? Even working out their vengeance, surely, he had never felt any of that.
She said, “What are you talking of? You speak as if we were dead—”
“Mother, we are.”
She rose from the chair. A razored gleam came from her, like sun striking on ice.
“Not as you mean it. Say nothing else. Say nothing.”
She was walking away from him, over the silky lagoon floor that was like the glass of the goblets.
Was she fearful cracks would appear, and let the water through? Or the roof would collapse, or the sky?
He was sorry to have dismayed her. He was angry. He thought of Beatrixa, and a darkness flashed through his mind. If he was not of her clay, also neither was he of the clay of the mother who had borne him. He was, then, unmatched with anything he had ever known. He saw it now.
But his mother was gone into the dusk beyond the door, and the sky in the windows was all emerald now, like her name.
MERALDA
WITHIN ONE MOMENT, a million years—
And in the four minutes, the amount of time it had taken, less than a single second.
… I beheld … the church of Maka Selena pass … drifting above and away … I saw the bottom of the lagoon, which was inky, and cold … I remember the cold …
All confusion assembled into this chaos.
A sensation of falling down and down. Of heaviness, suffocation, blindness, and the roaring of the sea, and salt, the scorching taste of the salt. And—
—not fear. Or the fear only of the body and the mind. Something other—
—more unthinkable, less human—
Then
I glimpsed …
The drowning creature experienced her own expulsion from the flesh, but far away. Some different part of her was aware of it more immediately. And this part gazed back, and outward, and down—or up—and saw the dying girl, floating in her skeins of hair, only a doll. But there, embedded in her like a gem, was another something, which was not yet anything much, not yet truly sentient, not yet two days old in its forming, but clasped in the death of her: the seeded child inside her womb.
And, though mostly already dead, she, or the other incorporeal filament to which she was returning, took note.
Not one life then, but two, both of which drowned.
I glimpsed … (Bartolome, seeing too, if n
ot all, in his boyhood dream fourteen years after. But how …?)
What lay beyond the world? Heaven, they said, or Hell.
Some choose Hell.
Meralda chose Heaven, or its shimmering shadow.
… A mild green … a hill … more like an emerald—
This was what her name meant, Meralda—Emerald.
Out of the depths she came, out, upward, or deeper down, carried on a rush like wings. And in this flight, she left behind her, in the lagoon, all her horror and her hurt, or meant to, along with her body and its death. But the child—her’s, Lorenzo’s—that she took with her.
She awoke on a shore. The sea was going in and out, but gently, more like the rippling of a lake. It was a lagoon, of course, and behind her rose an island, lavishly green in the glassy morning water.
The time was just after sunrise.
Meralda thought birds would fly across the sky, and then she saw the birds, flocks of them, making eloquent swirls and featherings against turquoise blueness.
Presently, Meralda got up.
She was quite dry, her clothes comfortable and pristine, her hair decoratively dressed. She felt, at first, tired and almost disorientated, as sometimes happens on waking up. But this was already fading. The air, with its scents of clean open water, and the flowers and trees which grew along the slope above, refreshed her like an elixir.
The way up from the shore was easy. A green path. Myrtles grew beside it, and tamarisk, giving a cloud of scent. And in the shrubs, as she would have expected, small birds flitted and hopped about. But they were of wonderful colors, primrose, cobalt, and flame, and somehow she had known they would be like this, too. Perhaps she had looked at such a scene illustrated in some book?
The island seemed familiar. Seemed nearly recollected. And she knew her way.
Further up the slope, lilac trees grew, and when the land folded outward—for the island was large—orchards of apple and damson. They were in blossom although, from the fig trees, the ripe fruit hung out its green pods, and peaches showed, too, like pink velvet globes.
When she hesitated to sample any of these, despite beginning to want them, something happened.
Someone went among the trees, and gathered up some of the fruits, then brought them to her in a little silver basket.
This someone was not visible.
However, from it streamed such an emanation of benign things—kindness, innocence, a wish to serve, lovableness even, and love itself—Meralda was not afraid or unnerved, even with the basket bobbing there in front of her seemingly unsupported.
She had been waited on all her life, before. If she had forgotten all that, or pushed it from her remembrance, nevertheless, certain fundamentals obtained. (For this reason she had found herself well-dressed, and been pleased to; nearly relieved.) But in the past she had been bullied, also. Harmed.
Now, here was a servant. A kind and loving servant, to whom she might entrust herself without a qualm.
And though she could see nothing of it, yet in a way, she could. She did think she almost saw it, in fact, by use of another mechanism than sight. What it actually was she did not know, nor contemplate. Such questions did not matter any more. So much at least she realized.
The ethereal servant accompanied Meralda over the island, and sometimes (how?) showed her things: A natural fountain sparkling on stones, a wood of beech trees, grapevines with bells of olivine and rubicelle, bees and butterflies. Everything was beautiful, flawless. Not a blemish on it—new. And also, strangely, an air of incredible antiquity hung about the island. But age lighter than the atmosphere, like an ancient woman with wings.
There were animals, as well. Spotted deer came and went through the poppies, white birds fluttered around the trees, and a peacock walked across Meralda’s path, his fan trailing like a train of jewels. There were no intransigently fierce or dangerous animals. She might have been alarmed at those, although here they would have done her no damage—and that she knew also, in a way, or might have done had she thought of it …
At the height of the island, the groves and woods centered in a garden. Here the trees were sculpted into a topiaria. Statues held shells dispatching spangled water, roses cascaded from urns of porphyry. Also there was an avenue of tall cypresses, which led to the house.
Never did she ask herself to whom this palace belonged. As with the rest, she was half familiar with it. This was, more than anything perhaps, a feeling of coming back, of return.
It had a look, however, the palace, of the Palazzo della Scorpia that stood, a million years and a moment away, in the City of Venus. But it was altered, youthful now and hotly-colored, among the wine-red roses.
When Meralda went into the house, it was lit with sunlight from all its windows, which sometimes had glazing, and sometimes did not.
For the night, wonderful lamps like pearls of fantastic size were suspended high up from silver threads. A manmade fountain—although what man?—played, as in the garden. There were no murals on the walls; there could have been. But the della Scorpia murals had never meant anything, or they had meant only awful things, being emblems of house power. And so the palazzo of Meralda rejected them and contained nothing to disconcert, as the island had no tigers or lions.
Indoors, the invisible servants flocked about her, as the birds had flocked about the risen sun.
How welcomed she was, how lovingly taken care of.
Standing in the middle of this transparent, glimmering of force, Meralda put one hand for an instant against her body. She rested the hand over her belly. When a small girl, she had seen a lady of her house do this, and enlighten her attendants …
Meralda spoke aloud, as she had to the servant met outside.
“I’m with child.” Solemnly she added, with no trace of grief or panic, “My lord is dead. I will have a monument set up to his memory. In the future, his son will be your lord, when he is a man.”
Some items do linger, at least a while. The oddest of life’s customs, splinters, or even granite blocks, of etiquette and ritual. And love, love stays. What else, in such places as these?
At the palazzo in Heaven (for so it will be easiest to call it), Meralda grew up. And as she grew, so did the child she gave birth to, early in the sixth month of her pregnancy.
She should have been afraid, but now she had no fear. Fear had been jettisoned in the lagoon, out of which she had brought so little—but so much: the name of her lover, Lorenzo, some dreams, her baby, and her soul.
Curious, in a way, that here she accepted Lorenzo’s death—had spoken of it at once and, within another day, seen an obelisk (which should have been the work of months) erected to his loss. But then, if she had not allowed Lorenzo to be dead, Meralda would have needed to recreate him from the brilliant air. Which evidently she could have done. Thus on the level of her consciousness where this was known to her (for it was, though it was also hidden), she resisted indulgence of such a fantasy. For of all and everything, Lorenzo had been to her the most real. Since he was not automatically here with her, she would not fashion his image. After all, she thought herself still alive, and while in a magical world, still a physical world.
Demonstrably Heaven must have many mansions—once, we were told so—and they cannot be physical—maybe they are only the more absolute for that.
To Meralda, however, the island was built on earth. Somehow, and somewhere.
Nevertheless, she had no trepidation as she carried her child, and she was perfectly right to be unafraid.
When the hour came, she felt him move in her, without pain or upheaval. She went to her bed in the palace and, lying down between its slender posts, let the gentle invisible servant-spirits hover over and about her. Until, still with no pain or even any effort, they drew from her (apparent) body, in a mingling only of slight pressure and excited urgency, a baby. It was unmarked by blood or slime or any soiling, and it was male, as Meralda had known it would be.
There he lay, smiling, delightedly kicking,
thrilled to be at liberty, among the unseen, careful hands. He was still attached to Meralda, but only by a birth-cord like a thin, silver rope. When this was bloodlessly severed, he drew his first breath, this newborn child of the afterlife, and broke out not into crying—but laughter. Laughter.
Silvio, the son of Lorenzo and Meralda—oh, what was he, what would he be? Another soul that loitered in this sumptuous mansion-waiting-room—or, something else? A ghost … what can a ghost be, if a soul need not remain? As Bartolome would say, we must come to that.
Only this should be believed of Silvio. He arrived in that wondrous otherwhere equipped with none of his mother Meralda’s preconceptions or devices of forgetfulness. He came with his own. And like the Snake, Silvio, with his acts of play and vengeance, would introduce truth, shame, and evil into Paradise, and the knowledge of death.
PART FOUR
Heaven
Oh, it is then … that you are on the borderland of Death’s amazing kingdom, where everything moves twice as fast, and the colors are twice as bright, and love is twice as gorgeous, and sin is twice as spicy. Who but the doubly purblind can fail to see that it is only on the Other Side that one can begin to agree?
MERVYN PEAKE
Gormenghast
BARTOLOME
ONCE WE HAD BECOME LOVERS, Flavia and I, we met whenever we were able to. Which meant, of course, that I would visit her house. For a guildsman Master, in most trades, there are plenty of excuses for being away, and in mine none more. What with genuine business then, and the affair with my mistress, I was seldom at home.
At first, Pia seemed quite content with that, then she became fretful, then she turned abrasive. We exchanged unfriendly words, and afterwards I was sorry—not for my adultery, let it be said, since I could no more have regretted that than I would regret drawing breath—but to have upset my wife, to whom, under the circumstances, I owed extra fair-will. It seemed the strangest and most perverse thing, that I should be hurtful to Pia, at a time when I was so happy.