by Tanith Lee
But it is true they were in the islands long before men came there. And who knows but they will be there long after we are gone.
Leviathan
The seven islands lay at various distances from the mainland, four in a sort circle, like a frozen dance, three completely isolate. The general impression, if seen from the air—birds, the occasional plane—was that they belonged to another landmass, once partnered to the original, now snapped off, carried away—then carelessly dropped, and broken on the sea.
Perhaps something had taken this chunk of the continent, to feed itself and its offspring? If so, it and its descendents had not finished their meal.
The Leviathan stirred slowly. It raised its head and looked about. It had no memory of anywhere. It had no memory of itself, only a sort of familiar driving force, which was its own forward motion, probably physical.
Once the Leviathan had been a monster beast of legend and myth, a symbol of vast Empires of the East. Also, a cipher for an ultimate Wickedness and Power.
Now, like a discarded, grey-silver crystal case, it lay at the shore-line.
The ground showed through its glassy body. In its eyes only the night showed, where the sweep of dawn had cast it aside.
Some time passed. A handful of fishermen landed on the beach, quietly assessed their catch, and went away, unnoticing.
A storm flew up the pebbles, and rushed shrieking into a cave, coughing with urgency.
In the end, the Leviathan rose. It looked about in all directions, at the night, the stars, the smoothing of the ocean. Into the past.
Once, the other beast had preyed here, vast, shapeless, nameless and indecipherable, battering on these isles. It had literally fed on them, and left them in tatters.
Then came the other creature. At that time, the Leviathan was deep and heavy as new gold. It sprang into the air, and grasped the predator in its jaws. The creatures perished, yowling, in seconds.
Later, the Leviathan swam away. At that hour, the world was its open country. Now and then, it would come back—but from preference, not need. Yet years and centuries go by. It is their unbreakable habit.
It was like withered crystal now, the Leviathan, colossus of gold. It needed rest and sanctuary. Spells of soft nullity, unstinting, recalling the gallant rescue of the past. The land gave it these gladly, and more.
Safe on the shore of honour, the Leviathan slept, its head between its paws, like that of a huge and savage hound, grown slow and mild with age.
But now and then, behind the sleeping eyes of it, a soft wild wonderful flash, as if new young stars ignited in its brain. Perhaps they did. For look there, the sky was full of them.
Where Does the Town Go At Night?
“Where does the town go at night?”
“What did you say?”
Gregeris turned, but some sort of vagrant stood there, grinning at him out of a dirty, flapping overcoat. Gregeris supposed he wanted money. Otherwise the broad square was deserted in the pale grey afternoon, its clean lines undisturbed by the occasional wind-breath from the sea, which hardly even moved the clipped oleanders behind their prison-railings, or the ball-shaped evergreens on long bare stems, (like lollipops), which flanked most of the municipal buildings.
“Perhaps this will help?” Gregeris handed the man, the supposed beggar, a bank note. It was a cheerful, highly-coloured currency, and the man took it, but his smile lessened at once.
“I can’t show you. You’ll have to see for yourself.”
“Oh, that will be all right. Don’t trouble.”
Gregeris turned to walk on. He had only come to the square to kill a little time, to look at the clock-tower, a sturdy thing from the seventeen hundreds. But it was smaller and much less interesting than the guide-book promised.
“Don’t believe me, do you?”
Gregeris didn’t answer. He walked firmly, not too briskly. His heart sank as he heard the scuffy footsteps fall in with his. He could smell the man too, that odd fried smell of ever-unwashed mortal flesh, and the musty dead-rat odour of unchangeable clothes.
“Y’see,” said the beggar, in his low rough voice, “I’ve seen it happen. Not the only one, mind. But the only one remembers, or knows it isn’t a dream. I’ve seen proof. Her, then, sitting there, right there, where the plinth is for the old statue they carted away.”
There seemed nothing else for it. “The statue of King Christen, do you mean? Over there by the town hall?”
“The very one. The statue struck by lightning, and fell off.”
“So I believe.”
“But she was on the plinth. Much prettier than an old iron king.”
“I’m sure she was.”
The beggar laughed throatily. “Still don’t believe what I’m saying, do you? Think I’m daft.”
A flash of irritation, quite out of place, went through Gregeris. It was for him an irritating time, this, all of it, and being here in this provincial nowhere. “‘I don’t know what you are saying, since you haven’t said.” And he turned to face the beggar with what Gregeris would himself only have described as insolence. Because facing up to one’s presumed inferiors was the most dangerous of all impertinences. Who knew what this bone-and-rag bag had once been? He might have been some great artist or actor, some aristocrat of the Creative Classes, or some purely good man, tumbled by fate to the gutter, someone worthy of respect and help, which Gregeris, his own annoying life to live, had no intention of offering.
And, “Ah,” said the beggar, squaring up to him.
Gregeris saw, he thought, nothing fine or stricken in the beggar. It was a greedy, cunning face, without an actor’s facial muscles. The eyes were small and sharp, the hands spatulate, lacking the noble scars of any trade, shipbuilding, writing, work of any sort.
“Well,” said Gregeris.
“Yes,” said the beggar. “But if you buy me a drink, I’ll tell you.”
“You can buy yourself a drink and a meal with the money I just gave you.”
“So I can. But I’ll eat and drink alone. Your loss.”
“Why do you want my company?” demanded Gregeris, half angrily.
“Don’t want it. Want to tell someone. You’ll do. Bit of a look about you. Educated man. You’ll be more flexible to it, I expect.”
“Gullible, do you mean?” Gregeris saw the man had also been assessing him, and finding not much, apparently. Less than flattery, education, he sensed, in this case represented a silly adherence to books—clerkishness. Well, Gregeris had been a clerk, once. He had been many things. He felt himself glaring, but the beggar only grinned again. How to be rid of him?
Up in the sky, the fussy clock-tower sounded its clock. It was five, time to take an absinthe or cognac, or a cocktail even, if the town knew they had been invented. Why hadn’t the ridiculous tower been struck by lightning instead of a statue under a third its height?
“Where do you go to drink?”
Some abysmal lair, no doubt.
But the beggar straightened and looked along the square, out to where there was a glimpse of the sky-grey rimmed, sulk-blue sea. Then he pivoted and nodded at a side street of shops, where an awning protected a little cafe from the hiding sun.
“Cocho’s.”
“Then take a drink with me at Cocho’s.”
“That’s very sportive of you,” said the beggar. Abruptly he thrust out his filthy, scarless and ignoble hand. Gregeris would have to shake it, or there would, probably, be no further doings. Ignore the ignoble hand then, and escape.
Compelled by common politeness, the curse of the bourgeoisie, Gregeris gripped the hand. And when he did so, he changed his mind. The hand felt fat and strong and it was electric. Gregeris let go suddenly. His fingers tingled.
“Feel it, do you?”
“Static,” said Gregeris calmly. “It’s a stormy afternoon. I may have given you a bit of a shock. I do that sometimes, in this sort of weather.”
The beggar cackled, wide-mouthed. His teeth, even the back o
nes, were still good. Better, Gregeris resentfully thought, than my own. “Name’s Ercole,” said the beggar. (Hercules, wouldn’t you know it.) And then, surprisingly, or challengingly “You don’t have to give me yours.”
“You can have my name. Anton Gregeris.”
“Well, Anton,” (of course, the bloody man would use the Christian name at once) “we’ll go along to Cocho’s. We’ll drink, and I’ll tell you. Then I’ve done my part. Everything it can expect of me.”
This was all Marthe’s fault, Gregeris reflected, as he sipped the spiced brandy. Ercole had ordered a beer, which could be made to last, Gregeris ominously thought, until—more ominous still—he watched Ercole gulp half the contents of the glass at once.
It was because of Marthe that Gregeris had been obliged to come here, to the dull little town by the sea. His first impression, other than the dullness, had been how clean and tidy the town was. The streets swept, the buildings so bleached and scrubbed, all the brass-plates polished. Just what Marthe would like, she admired order and cleanliness so much, although she had never been much good at maintaining them herself. Her poky flat in the city, crammed with useless and ugly ‘objects d’art’, had stayed always undusted. Balls of fluff patrolled the carpets, the ashtrays spilled and the fireplace was normally full of the cold debris of some previous fire. He suspected she washed infrequently, too, when not expecting a visitor. The bathroom had that desolate air, the lavatory unwholesome, the bath green from the dripping tap. And the boy—the boy was the same, not like Marthe, but like the flat Marthe neglected .
“Thirsty,” mumbled Ercole, presumably to explain his empty glass.
“Let me buy you another.”
“That’s nice. Not kind, of course. Not kind, are you? Just feel you have to be generous.”
“That’s right.”
The waiter came. He didn’t seem unduly upset that Ercole was sitting at the cafe table, stinking and degenerate. Of course, Gregeris had selected one of the places outside, under the awning. And there were few other patrons, two fat men eating early plates of fish, a couple flirting over their white drinks.
When the second beer arrived, Ercole sipped it and put it down. “Now I’ll tell you.”
“Yes, all right. I shall have to leave at six. I have an appointment.”
So after all Marthe (the ‘appointment’) would be his rescue. How very odd.
“You’ll realise, I expect,” said Ercole, “I don’t have lodgings. I had a room, but then I didn’t any more. Sometimes I sleep in the old stables up the hill. But there’s a couple of horses there now, and they don’t like me about. So I find a corner, here or there. That’s how I saw it. Then again, y’see, I might have been the type to just sleep right through it, like most of them. It’s what’s in you, if you ask me, in yourself, that makes you wake in the night, about a quarter past midnight.”
“And what have you seen?” Gregeris heard himself prompt, dutifully.
Ercole smiled. He put his hands on the table, as if he wanted to keep them in sight, keep an eye on them, as if they might get up to something otherwise, while he revealed his secret.
“The town goes away.”
“You mean it disappears?”
“Nothing so simple, Anton. No, it goes off. I mean, it travels.”
Generally, I wake at dawn, first light, said Ercole. Like a damned squirrel, or a bird. Been like that for years. Sleeping rough’s part of it, but I grew up on a farm. It’s partly that, too. Well, when I woke the first time, which was about two months ago, I think it’s dawn. But no, it’s one of those glass-clear, ink black summer nights. The moon wasn’t up yet, but the stars were bright, and along the esplanade the street lamps were burning cold greeny-white from the funny electricity they get here. Nothing to wake me, either, that I can hear or see.
The moment I’m awake, I’m wide awake, the sort of awake when you know you won’t sleep again, at least not for two or three hours, and it’s better to get up and do something or you get to thinking. So presently I stand up. And then, well, I staggered. Which scared me. I hadn’t had anything in the way of alcohol for about five days, so it wasn’t drinking bad wine. And you can’t afford to get sick, in my situation. But then my head cleared, and I just thought, maybe I got up too quick. Not so young as I was.
And then I go and take a stroll along the esplanade, like the leisured people do by day, which is when a policeman will generally come to move me elsewhere, if I try it. But no one’s about now.
The sea is kicking away at the land, blue-black. It looks rough and choppy, which strikes me as strange really, because the night is dead calm, not a cloud. A sort of steady soft thin breeze is blowing full in my face from the mouth of sea and sky. It has a different smell, fresher, more starry bright.
When I looked over, down to the beach, the sea was slopping in right across it. It wasn’t the tide coming in, I’ve seen plenty of those. No, the sea wasn’t coming in, falling back—but constant, gushing in up the beach, hitting the lower terrace of the esplanade, and spraying to both sides. Drops hit my face. It reminded me of something, couldn’t think what. It looked peculiar, too, but I thought, after all tonight was a full moon and this moon would rise soon, maybe it was that making the sea act crazy.
Just then, the clock strikes on the tower in the square. It’s one in the morning, and I can tell I’ve been up and about for around three quarters of an hour. That means I woke at a quarter past midnight. I mention this, because another time I was in the square and when I woke, I noted the clock. It’s always been that time, I reckon, that I wake, and the other ones who wake, they wake up then too.
That minute, the first night on the esplanade, I see one, of my fellow awakers—only I didn’t know it then, that we were a sort of select club. No, I thought there was going to be trouble.
It’s a girl, you see, young, about sixteen, a slip of a thing, all flowing pale hair, and she’s in her nightwear—barefoot—walking slowly along the esplanade towards me. Her eyes look like veiled mirrors, and I think she’s sleep-walking or gone mad, and going to throw herself into the sea, and I’m asking myself if I should save her or let her do what she wants—have you got any more right to force someone to live that doesn’t want to than to kill someone?—or if I’d better just hide, because trouble isn’t what it’s best for me to seek out, I’m sure you’ll understand. Anyway, then she blinks, and she walks up to me and she says, “Where am I? What am I doing here?” And then I’m really scared, because she’ll start screaming and God knows what’ll happen then. But next she says, “Oh, but of course, that doesn’t matter.” And she leans on the railing and looks out at the sea, calm as you please.
The moon starts to rise then. First a line like spilt milk on the horizon’s edge. Then the sky turns light navy blue and the disc comes up so fast it almost seems to leap out of the water.
“I was in bed, wasn’t I?” says the girl.
“Don’t ask me. You just came along.”
“They call me Jitka,” she says. And then she says, “I think I looked out of the window at home. I think I remember doing that. And the hill wasn’t there. You know, the hill with the old palace on it.”
I know the hill, because that’s where the stables are, my bedchamber of old. That big hill, about half a mile inland. Where all the historic splendour of the town is, the mansions and great houses and overgrown gardens of cobwebby, bat-hung cedars. And then the slums start all round it, either side.
Gregeris mutters that he knows the area, he has his appointment near there.
Well, I say to this girl called Jitka, “You’ve been sleep-walking, haven’t you. Best get back indoors.”
“No, I don’t think so,” says Jitka. Not haughtily as you might expect, but kind of wistful. As if she’s saying, Just let me stay up half an hour longer, Dadda. But I’m not her father, so I turn away prudently, before I start trying to see through her flimsy nightie, past the ribbons to the other pretty things inside.
Perhaps not v
ery gallant to leave her there, but I didn’t go so far, only about fifty yards, before I find another one. Another Awaker. This was a gentleman sitting on a bench. He’s in his nightclothes too, but with a silk dressing-gown fastened over. “Good evening,” he says, and I can tell you, by day he’d have crossed the street not to see me, let alone exchange a politeness. But I nod graciously, and when he doesn’t say anything else, I walk on.
The esplanade runs for a mile, no doubt you know that from that guide-book in your pocket. I amble along it, and after another few minutes, I see these two old ducks tottering towards me, hand in hand. He’s about ninety if he’s a day, and she’s not much less. He’s got on a flannel nightshirt, the sort Grandfather would’ve had, and she’s in an ancient thing, all yellow lace. And they’re happy as two kids out of school. We pass within a foot of each other, and she calls out to me, “Oh isn’t it a lovely fine night? What a lovely trip. Do you think we’ll reach China?”
So I generously say, “I should think so, lady.”
And they’re gone, and I go on, and then I stop dead. I stare out to sea, and then down below the terrace again at the water rushing constant up the beach. What I’m thinking is this: But that’s just what it’s like, the way the waves are and the whole ocean parting in front of us—it’s like a bow-wave cutting up before a ship. A moving ship, sailing quite fast. But then I think, Ercole, you’ve got no business thinking that. And suddenly I feel dog tired. So I turn and go back to my place under the columns of the library building, where I’d been sleeping. I lie straight down and curl up and pull my coat over my head. At first I’m stiff as a plank. Then I fall asleep. And asleep I can feel it, what I’d felt standing up when I thought I’d gone dizzy. It’s the motion of a ship, you see. Not enough to make you queasy, just enough you need to get your sea-legs. Then I’m really asleep. I didn’t wake again until dawn. Nothing up then, not at all. A street-sweeper, and a pony-cart with kindling, and then a girl with milk for the houses by the park. A couple of cats coming back from their prowl. Moon down, sun up, rose-pink and blushing after its bath in the sea. That’s all.