Fair Weather

by Barbara Gaskell Denvil

  He sighed. “I dissuaded confessions,” he admitted. “Keeping Tilda in ignorance was her protection and her right. Besides,” his voice softened further into only the rustle of echoes. “I would not let the gatekeeper into my house, my secrets or my heart, for you could have destroyed everything and all my hopes with it.”

  “I never thought of you as having hopes,” I said stupidly. “I think of you as always getting what you want.”

  “With my wife slaughtered in my bed and my future dragged into solitude and grime?” He frowned. “For a woman of three worlds, you show remarkable ignorance in this one.” The malice was back in his voice. “Are you equally absurd in the others?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I probably am.” Tilda was always ready to admit inadequacy and I was beginning to feel that way myself. Most of all I wondered what was the third world he referred to, and whether I would ever understand. And then I thought of something else. I asked him, “Why did you murder Thomas Cambio?”

  His eyes were suddenly inky with suspicion. “Don’t you know?” Then his hands gripped me so violently that all the sting of the burns burst back. “I warned the woman Molly. Did she,” he stared into my eyes, reading the truth in case I lied, “the future you – ever bed this creature?”

  I shook my head so vehemently that I was dizzy again. “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “She - I told you before. Thomas was an old man. I liked him and I trusted him and I was shocked when the evil thing told me you’d killed him. At first I thought he’d been murdered like all the others.”

  Vespasian relaxed his grip. “You liked him either because of stupidity, because your own darker self tricked you, or because he tricked you himself.” I remembered when I first met Thomas in the mist on the hills, how I’d meant to avoid him and then found myself vacuously agreeing to immediate friendship. How I’d always ended up doing what I had never intended doing, speaking words that had never been in my mind and how one drink and the flare of a hot fire had sent me into a trance, and him into my confidence.

  “So it was you who killed him?”

  “You should have known that from the start,” said Vespasian. “I left you a message.”

  I nodded, though in fact I’d mistaken the clue. “You wrapped his body in Hugh’s cloak.”

  “When Molly alerted me,” said Vespasian. “I followed your Thomas Cambio. Even the name symbolised what he was, the wer-myth and one of Lilith’s shells. But I killed him too quickly and the spirit fled the body before it was done. I had little choice. Lilith has other flesh she can inhabit at will and she cannot be so easily tamed.”

  I felt something crawling over me, a realisation of filth and disgust. “The thing I’ve met,” I whispered, “the foul thing that comes into other bodies and tortures and kills and controls the tarot and wants to control me. That was inside Thomas? From the very start? And you ask if I made love to it?”

  “No,” said Vespasian. “I asked if it fucked you.”

  It was an inopportune moment for Gerald to appear at my side. He had been kneeling beside his mother’s grave and was now bent and tired. “I’m interrupting you,” he said, “but I have to talk to someone. I never thought much about my mother until now. I mean, as far as I knew, I had no parents at all. I was split from an egg like a chicken without a past. Now it all starts feeling real.”

  I looked around us at the flicker of lights, diamonds and misty worlds colliding. “But it’s so unreal,” I said. “More unreal than any dream.”

  “No, Gerald is right,” said Vespasian. He had taken his hands from my shoulders at last and it felt as though he’d released me from an inquisition. “This is the truth behind the symbolism of simple fact. We stand within the soul of nature instead of its material illusion.”

  Gerald nodded as if he understood very well. “I can feel it,” he said. He looked up, his wide blue eyes gazing into Vespasian’s black intensity. “Have you brought me here as a sacrifice, my Lord? Is that why we’ve come?”

  Vespasian smiled and I thought it was the gentlest smile I had ever seen, transforming the harshness of his face into tender and wistful affection. “No, my child,” he said. “You have come here to know who you are and to claim your freedom and your future. It is I who am the sacrifice.”

  Chapter Forty Seven

  The glimmer of fallen rain still caught the long low rays of prismatic sunshine, but a pale twilight slunk close. I knew now what Samhain was and in this past age of mysticism and old faiths, All Hallows Eve was the night when gates opened from one world into another, the crossroads of the afterlife spun in upon themselves and justice could be done between spirit and creator. As the holder of gates, I had been summoned.

  A zenith moon was huge above the tree tops. Where the sky before had been hidden now it was all light. A great white blazing circle reflected in the pool. The smooth water turned pearly silver. The night was not yet dark but the moon, perfectly full at the height of her second phase, had risen early, watching over us all.

  “When will they come?” I whispered.

  “When you call them,” he said.

  There had been birds in our forest glade. In the spring cool of the willow and chestnut I had heard the co-coo-cooing of the woodpigeon. The blue tit had bobbed along the lower branches of the hazel, the lark had swooped and trilled and blackbirds had sung their fluting love calls, liquid as the silver pool. But now as first shadow silhouetted the darkening leaves, the silence hushed us all.

  “I’m aware of being Tilda.” Frightened to break the suspenseful quiet, I spoke as soft as Vespasian. “I’m aware of being Molly. But you call me the gatekeeper and I’m not aware of that at all. There isn’t anyone else I recognise inside me. There’s no third personality.”

  Vespasian frowned, eyelids heavy. “That has been a puzzle to us all,” he said, “even to Lilith herself. As it has been in the past, she expected the veleda to open the doors. That is why she forces you to cut the cards. The next card you pull from the pack will be that which represents the way holder. But I will not allow you to choose. I will not lose you to utter evil and I can influence the card I pick where you cannot. I will stand in your place.”

  “Thank you.” I was shivering again. “I freely give you that right.”

  “But you cannot give it,” he said. “It cannot be done voluntarily. Indeed, I have taken the right and no one can now deny it to me.”

  I understood so little and wanted to understand so much, so I argued over what didn’t matter. “How can you demand to stand in my place if I haven’t chosen to let you?” I said. “If I’ve no choice, how is it you to take my place, and not another?”

  He stared down at me, expressionless. “I stole that right,” he said. “It can be done no other way.”

  “How?” I demanded.

  “Can’t you guess?” he said, very soft.

  Suddenly, I realised, through trembling, this was indeed the answer to that which Vespasian had always refused to explain. It was not something I wanted to think about now, though I’d longed to understand for months. I was beginning, perhaps, to appreciate why he could never have told me the truth before.

  We still stood, all facing each other like three tired travellers waiting for the storm. Gerald stood peaceably by my side, following what little he could. He looked even younger than he was, all pretty in his powder blue. He said, “Am I in your way? Would you talk better without me?”

  “Arthur will be here soon,” Vespasian said. “And then there can be nothing hidden.”

  “Who else is coming?” asked Gerald. “Will my grandmother come?”

  “All that brood will come,” nodded Vespasian. “And others too. You will stand beside or behind me, my son, and keep absolute quiet unless I tell you otherwise. If you speak out of turn, I will strike you. Do you understand?”

  Gerald blushed meekly beneath his tousled flaxen hair. “Yes, my lord,” he murmured.

  “And another thing,” said Vespasian, again acerbic, “You wil
l immediately cease calling me my lord like some idiot child brought up to do so by his strumpet of a wet nurse in his father’s castle. You will do me the favour of calling me Vespasian, as you have always known me before you discovered I was someone else.”

  Gerald relaxed. “Excuse me, my lord,” he said, all dimples.

  I hoped Vespasian would laugh, but he didn’t. “You may wish to call me something else altogether before this night is over,” he said. “Remember only this. You must not speak unless I order it. You may be asked many questions, or encouraged to talk by those other than myself, but you will obey only me. It is important.”

  “I understand,” said Gerald, looking at his feet.

  “And me?” I asked. “Must I be mute?”

  He looked searchingly at me. “Molly will speak for herself as always,” he said. “Tilda should keep as quiet as possible and will undoubtedly wish to do so. The gatekeeper will have a great deal to say, I imagine, before I claim the right I already hold to speak in her place.”

  Gerald stared from Vespasian to myself. “So we’re just three,” he said, “and one just a girl. And they will be twenty or more.”

  “They will be more than that,” said Vespasian. “Eighty, a hundred perhaps. But among them will come creatures who supersede mere number. It’s of no matter how many there are. And we are not just three and one of us is not just a girl. You underestimate us, Gerald.”

  “Is someone else coming then, who’s on our side?” asked Gerald hopefully.

  “Our allies are already here,” smiled Vespasian. He swept his arm towards the whispering trees and the grave mounds, the waters, flowers and herbs. “Hush now, the sun is sinking and Samhain has arrived.”

  The sunlight, already diffused, had dipped below the last young saplings of our horizon and with its passing the moon seemed brighter and even hungrier and the shadows crept longer. In the deepening twilight the rainbow glitter was transfused with moonshine. Gerald held his breath and then let it out in a frightened gasp. Along all the edges of our mist shrouded glade and wandering boundaries, the people were already thick under the trees.

  I could see no faces for they hesitated, just shadows themselves in their dark cloaks. I waited for Arthur to stride forwards and face us. I expected immediate attack. But there was only hesitation. “They are waiting for you, and for Lilith,” Vespasian said softly in my ear. “And even Lilith waits for you.”

  My pulse was so fast that it burned and all my panic rose like vomit in my throat. I still was not sure who Lilith truly was, nor of any of the questions I had meant to ask. The drifting lassitude and dream state in the glade had seemed timeless. I thought nothing would happen until I was prepared, but now it had begun and I was as unprepared as I had ever been. I stared up at Vespasian, who stood tall and supportive beside me. I reached out and clutched at his hand, slipping my fingers into his cupped palm. My hand was very cold, my blood immobile in its veins. Vespasian’s fingers were warm and dry and hard. I felt the banded ridge of his palm from his long hours in the saddle, the wearisome pull on the hands from guiding the reins. Then crossed like a star, the weals across his palm from combat and the weight of the sword. A man whose hands told their own stories of action and attack, of defence and of the long, bitter years of solitary planning. They were hands that could kill, but he held mine tight and warm as I pleaded silently for his help.

  He smiled down at me, a real smile, tucked with genuine tenderness. “We all wait on you,” he said, still whispers on the breeze, “and yet you beg for comfort and cling to childhood.”

  Tilda had often wanted to rest against him, to hold to his hand and shelter in the protection of his touch. When I was young, I wished for my own parents to offer me such a cocoon of safety and affection, but had never received it. I sighed. “Lilith is the thing I met?” I asked. “She took over Thomas, and inhabited another man I knew. The thing that killed and tortured in Molly’s world?”

  He continued smiling, an even greater reassurance than the clasp of his hand. “Yes, you have met her undisguised,” he said, “as few ever do. She is the tarocchi reader, malignant guardian of destinies and the reveller in human agony and blood. She is the oldest demon of them all, split off from creation in the first instance when good became fused in positive concentration and evil became scattered in negative fragments. Throughout history we have called her Lilith, but she has no name for herself and is hermaphrodite, being neither male nor female though often both - for she represents dissociation and chaos, as does all evil.”

  “It was Lilith that Arthur was waiting for,” I murmured, remembering, “in the tower when he tortured me.”

  “Indeed,” said Vespasian. “At first as sacrifice. He intended your pain and eventually your death as a gift in her honour. Then, perhaps because of me, he recognised your use as a lever. Then slowly he began to suspect your true power. Finally, through torture and blood he hoped to summon, control and dominate the gatekeeper. He needed you to open the path.”

  “And so did you,” I sighed. “He lost, didn’t he? But because of what you did to me, you succeeded. That’s how you have the right to stand in my place?”

  “This is not the time to explain the past,” said Vespasian. “You must now face the future.”

  Arthur had entered the circle. I smelled his breath before I realised he’d come.

  He was not as tall as Vespasian, but was all muscled threat and imposing swagger, supporting a square head so cruelly lined that the skin slunk in folds from cheek to jowls and from hooked nose to the gaping corners of his eyes. Like Vespasian, he was very dark, black eyed and olive skinned, but his crow hair was thinning and his beard was clipped silvery stubble in a wide bruise across his jaw. He looked at me as I looked back at him but he did not come too close.

  “So, de Vrais,” he sneered. “Have you yet discovered your own whore’s identity? Is this the veleda indeed, or just the bitch at the gate?”

  Vespasian kept my hand in his, but he lounged at my side, all casual insolence. “Come and find out, d’Estropier, if you dare. You failed miserably before. Do you have any virility remaining to make the attempt again?” As usual, his voice drifted soft, forcing the other man to stand silently, straining to hear each word.

  Arthur didn’t have the control Vespasian had naturally and I saw the fury flicker in his eyes. “I’ll kill you this night, Jasper. I should have done it long ago, but I was tricked into believing you useful. Tonight we bring out the sacrament and the altar and I’ll break every bone into small pieces before your soul’s allowed free of its sacking.”

  “I thought it was my soul you wanted,” said Vespasian pleasantly.

  “I no longer want any part of you,” snarled Arthur, “only the pleasure of killing you, as slowly as I wish.” His right hand rested on his sword hilt. I saw the sword was curved like a scimitar and embossed in gold. I couldn’t see what the ornate design represented for the dark clawed fingers held it in shadow.

  Then, though I was Tilda with my child’s hand tucked into the safety of Vespasian’s, and I was Molly watching in silent horror, my voice spoke words I did not even understand, much less expect. “Keep back. I have not yet cleared the way,” I said, quite clearly from a second throat, not gulping in fear like my own. “Gloat in consequence, not anticipation, or the sword swings back upon its owner.”

  “Then clear the way now,” said Joanna. She had moved up behind her husband and now stepped forward into the moonlit aura. Her pale head was sleek and she looked polished, dressed in black with jewels high at her neck, elegant and severe. “Make the way clear for Lilith. She can command you, if we cannot.”

  Gerald stood to Vespasian’s other side. I looked across at him. I felt his misery, staring at his grandmother. She ignored him. Now the mist was crowding in on us, a silver fog all spangled with refraction, closing off the trees and the pool and the crowd who stood on the edges.

  “It takes great power,” Vespasian explained to me briefly, “for any one of t
hem to enter into the nemeton that I have prepared here. But there are many of them who have that power. Eventually many will succeed, Uta and Malcolm and the others. Some will shrink away and all will suffer the weight of natural beauty pushing against them. It will slow them and weaken them. It will help us.” He had released my hand and was easing his fingers back into his heavy leather gloves, steel reinforced and ready for battle.

  “The veleda will come,” I said, in someone else’s voice. “She is almost here.”

  Vespasian’s hand closed again on mine but he did not look at me. “Ah yes,” he sighed. “I thought she might.”

  A heavy dew was bringing shimmer and soft sodden whispers. Amongst the crowd, now barely visible under the hush of the trees, a few were trying to push forward into the opening. One or two came a few steps and more behind them, taking courage from the first. They were all dark cloaked like ravens ready for the scavenge, but I thought I knew Malcolm with his thin legs trembling, and Uta taking his arm to lead him forwards. I could not see at first why they were so reluctant. They could have rushed in on us and killed us all, easily overpowering us where we stood. I was used to Vespasian’s power and his foresight, the glazed sardonic arrogance that made others step back and listen only to him, but I did not believe that he alone could intimidate such a brood as this. I clung to Vespasian and thought I’d scream, biting my lips to hold onto my courage.

  “Don’t be frightened,” he whispered and the encouragement of his voice was huge. “You’re quite safe, for this is the gate you have opened yourself. It is the way to the Underworld. But you can always close what you have opened. Remember that.”

  “To hell and beyond?” I stuttered. It was impossible to believe I had any hand in the monstrous terror taking shape before me. I had touched nothing and said nothing. I had turned no handles and spoken no incantations. “If I don’t know how I’ve opened anything, how can I close it?”