Darkness, I

by Lee, Tanith

  Almost too late she let him go that way, and got up on him, slim and velvet pale, and he had to cram into his mind the worst images, to hold off for her. Even Cardiff rose to aid him, Cardiff burning dead on the beacon. And the granny with her cake. But Cardiff would have forgiven him, like Viv, who had opened one eye then closed it courteously.

  This time she did come, for her back arched like a bow and out of her mouth issued a long harsh hiss.

  By then he could not let go, he could only sink strengthless down. But it had been worth it, and fair. Once for him, once for her.

  ‘It’s morning,’ she said, presently.

  The sun had made its decision.

  ‘I’ll have to take you back.’

  ‘I’d have loved the night ride,’ she said, ‘but then, I had the night ride, didn’t I?’

  He did not know if he should say he would want her again, so he did not say it.

  They lay relaxed, awake, and the yellow light lay on the silver sea.

  Viv climbed on to the windowsill to look.

  When Miranda got up and went to the bathroom, Connor saw a tiny darkness moving on her limbs, and for a moment was concerned. Then it occurred to him she had only started to menstruate; their activity must have brought it on.

  He heard her singing in the bathroom. He did not recognize the tune but it did not sound old. Of course not.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Candlelight burned through all the rooms, which ran about a rectangular courtyard. The court was from no particular period. It was only dark, like night, the high ceiling black and painted with gold stars. The candles burned also in the court, in tall wooden holders, as if on a still evening.

  On one wall of the court was a fresco, faintly Pompeian, some sort of race in red and ochre, very faded.

  Nacreous carp swam in the tank of water, hiding under large leaves. There was no other vegetation, not a single plant; no other life, but his.

  Cain walked into and out of the rooms. On some days he would do this over and over. The rooms, of which there were ten, opened also into each other, except for the bathroom, which was modern, white and functional, and very small, having a shower not a tub, like something squeezed into a flat in Soho in London, as an essential afterthought.

  Another of the rooms was a bedroom. It had a bed. The bed was of a somewhat Victorian or even Regency design. It was draped by dark blue that had pastelled with dust.

  There was dust in all the rooms but for the bathroom, which the slave-servants of Cain cleaned every day. The dust did not come from the cold environ of the world outside. It was composed of shed particles of material, of wood and fibre and cloth. And of Cain himself. For his skin, though evidently more than human, was human enough it sloughed, and his black hair also.

  They had saved his hair once. His own pillows were once stuffed with it, and with the fallen or cut hair of women he had, now and then, fancied. But that was so long ago, the pillows themselves fell to pieces. Or had it even happened?

  On some days, Cain did not go about the rooms. He sat still, hour by hour, in one of the chambers, on a seat or chair that was of European or antique Greek or Italian design.

  There was very little furniture. Of all of it, only a vast black piano took up any space. The piano too was sheeted in dust. Its keys had swollen, turned yellow, and locked fast. Inside its harp-like entrails a spider had lived. Perhaps the spider had been imported, or had arrived in some case of books or fruit from another place where spiders were.

  Other than furniture, there were objects.

  They were possibly valuable by reason of age, but for no other reason. Stones and sticks, shards, stoppers, bottles, iron bolts, keys. In one area some cages of brass hung from the ceiling. On the floor of one lay the skull of something. The others were unoccupied.

  In one room there were portraits or replicas. None were apparently of Cain, whose unique face was nowhere represented, save occasionally in a round bronze mirror that rested opposite the blue bed. There were, in the portrait room, three images of the woman, Lilith. One was a head in old brown marble, maybe Grecian, very lifelike, resembling her almost exactly. She had been crowned with marble flowers. Elsewhere she was shown in an oval of soft gold, a painting from the 1600s, a French school, wan and a-typical, still to be recognized under her visor of gauze.

  The third image was a sepia photograph. Lilith did not look the same in this at all. She looked matronly under the plate of the great black hat, and in her stiff and studied pose, there was the hint of an aliveness she no longer had.

  On a table stood a foot-high glass pyramid full of deep red liquid, with one silver bubble in it. The candlelight shone through the redness, which, perhaps, was blood. Or not.

  When the candles burnt out, Cain himself would sometimes replace them. Otherwise the slave people did so when they came.

  In the room that stood at the west end of the rectangle there were modern things. A flat-topped desk of black metal supported an Apple computer. Some software lay randomly beside it, as if it had been used at least once. There was a machine for playing music, but this conceivably had never been used, for it was thick with cobwebs, like the piano, almost. There was no evidence of disks or tapes.

  Various gadgets were scattered about, with panels of buttons. These had been picked up, fingered, replaced quite recently.

  Cain came into this room now, but only for a moment. He regarded it. Expressionless.

  He did not look old, although maybe to a child or an animal he would have done. The boy, probably, thoughtlessly considered him to be well over sixty. Only Ankhet, still a child, seemed to see him timelessly. Ankhet-Ruth. Did Cain ponder her? Or Malach? Anything? Nothing?

  Old men... might grow set, small-minded, spiteful. Physical youth might be full of itself, knowing everything. And Cain, was both. Too young. Too old.

  Or was it all a carefully never-spoken lie. A fit and clever, intellectual, stupendously rich man of forty years. A madman, supposing himself to be so ancient that even his wife must be modelled and painted and photographed in a cunningly faked way. Surrounding himself with antiquarian treasures and, more cunning still, antiquarian mediocrities. As if he had picked them up along his path of thousands of years—

  Cain turned and looked out at the pool of the elderly, white glistening carp.

  His eyes were like tunnels into night.

  He crossed from the room, and stood above the pool. On a silver dish were some scraps of something. And now he held it, down into the water, and the carp came and fed from his ringless hands.

  Had some clever operation reinvented his eyes?

  How had it been done? To put the black night of space behind the blue of earthly sky.

  In the fifth room the stone was lying, on a granite ledge. The stone engraved with those words Lilith had mentioned to the white girl in the Hall of Nuit.

  Tenebrae sum.

  I am the darkness. Darkness, I—

  The carp did not fear Cain, had no cause.

  They nibbled his hands, and he let them, as he had let flies and beetles go over his flesh, lizards and serpents, crocodiles, unharmed.

  Youth was fresh, and knew everything, and old age was locked and knew it too, two different and opposing intolerances, without mitigation.

  More than human—yes, perhaps. But the mind, the psychology—only human.

  Cain got up from the carp pool, where every regimented day he fed the carp, like clockwork.

  Cain, who was Darkness, went across the court to the wall painted with a race, and the concealed automatic door slid open before him.

  The woman was standing in the upper, actual world, at a spot where the river froze again, beyond the mountain. A vast greenish glacier spread away to the south, like a shadow under the ice.

  Lilith was clothed over in grey and black fur. Like him, she did not cover her face against the snarling cold, although it was today many degrees below zero.

  A short distance from her were her attendants,
dressed in thermal garments, but their faces similarly unshielded.

  The group stood watching, as the two albino tigers hunted over the ice.

  The tigers were about half a mile off, where some animals, taken at the coast, had been brought and let go. The cats had selected their kill, and, trapped in childhood by their association with Lilith, worked together in bringing down the prey.

  They felled it, after the shortest dash, hardly enough to exercise them.

  The two snow white beasts flung themselves down and began to rip the hot carcass apart, while the other prey animals waddled aimlessly away.

  Steam rose like smoke from the kill, as if the ice were burning.

  Soon enough they would run back to her, their feathery mouths dribbled red, their tongues red. They would bring her a morsel of death, and she would take it from them, to please their instinct. She, the old tigress, who had assumed the role of their dead mother.

  Her brain... it was not senile, yet, like that. Glimpses of memory moving always within her, like the flicker and thrash of the two white barred tails on green-slotted whiteness, thought rising like the frail steam of the blood.

  And she was on a sea that rocked her, quite gently, bore her on. But the ship had lost its sail (and that saying, a ship without a sail, a woman without breasts). Now, only a raft of black and white bones, Lilith.

  Then, miles away, farther than the sight of her feeding sons, the tigers, rose the island of another thought. A child. Not the two he had named, Harpokrates, Ankhet—for there were others to come, other children. And one child, this child who was black skinned. He would appear so solid and real on the surface of the snow.

  Faran.

  Yes, the name, not minted by her lord, had been spoken to her. Faran, who was seven, or eight years old. Black knight to black queen. An island in her sea.

  For he was something to her. She knew distinctly, inexplicably that he was—and oh the glimpse, the flicker of the thought. Hold it to her. Hold it before her.

  Was it for this reason she had spoken to the girl called Ankhet, called Anna, called Ruth? Because that one was a foretaste of him. Of Faran. Her child. Lilith’s child.

  With him she would be, truly, a mother with a son.

  And presently a lover. A wife.

  And then at last, quickened by the newness of his new-made body, filled with seed, the vessel of a child that would be her own—

  The darker tiger rose and shook itself.

  Thought vanished from Lilith.

  She saw only the two cats bounding towards her, the ice spinning from the runners of their paws.

  She took from their red mouths the tiny slivers of flesh, and, turning, Cain, her lord, Phrah, Magus, husband, was at her side. And the slaves had drawn away.

  He spoke to her now in one of the oldest tongues of the earth. Its very music almost robbed it of all meaning, yet she understood.

  —Soon, Lilitu. Are you anxious? Does your heart drum in your breast?

  —Perhaps, my lord.

  —But it must. Never disappoint me.

  —Whatever you wish, my lord.

  And then Cain said to her, in French contemporary as his clothing—for he looked like a twentieth-century explorer of the ice-waste, all but the maskless face—‘Were you thinking of him? The boy I’ve taken for you. The black boy like smooth polished ebony. Fleecy haired. With cat’s eyes. Yes?’

  ‘Who?’ she said.

  ‘Or is it Malach you think about,’ said Cain in an obscure dialect of Holland. ‘Do you care about Malach?’

  Lilith said nothing. The paler tiger licked her ungloved hand, streaking it with blood.

  Cain said, in English, ‘Maybe I’ll have them both, after all. Your black boy. Her white priest. Leave only Cain for you women to fight over.’

  Lilith’s eyes quickened. They flared like points of mercury in her white face.

  ‘You said the boy would come to me.’

  ‘You care then?’ he said in French. ‘Hélas. J’ai perdu, mon amour.’

  But the life in her eyes had sunk. She glanced at him. She spoke in a tongue almost as old as the first one he had employed, calling him Phrah— Pharaoh—quirkishly, some eldritch remembered coquetry.

  ‘You have Ankhet,’ she said. ‘You have got Ankhet.’

  But her eyes were soft, dim, like the distance, where now a wind was lifting on the snow.

  Ankhet Persephone Anna Ruth had dressed for Ruth, as Ruth would have wanted.

  She had told the women, Shesat, Mesit, Ast, what they must do, and they obeyed instantly, faultlessly. She was very polite to them, in Ruth’s way. Thank you, she said. Like Ruth, too, she was a little prim, but then she put that aside. The Egyptians had gone bare breasted often.

  The wig hung to her shoulders. It was of thick black hair, many strands of which were plaited and ended in golden lunettes pierced by cornelians. Her earrings were also of gold, with three angelica crystalizations of green jasper.

  The dress was transparent milky linen, tight on her legs so she could hardly walk, leaving one breast free—the right, and thus the left breast, which bore the blue wisp of scar, was hidden. Crossed braces of gold held up the skirt, and where they joined was a red scarab. Her pubic hair was covered by a mesh of gold which shone through the fabric.

  Her eyelids were painted gold and outlined in dark green. She allowed them to add mascara. Her lips were the red of the scarab, dark as blood which oxidized.

  She had taken off her turmaline ring. Rachaela had given it to Anna.

  She was delighted by her looks. More than herself it was not herself at all, but someone else that she really was.

  Down in the dark, the darkness Cain had made under the white pyramid, Malach was.

  As Ankhet Ruth had been dressed, he had been, appropriately, stripped. Naked.

  It would not surprise her. Cain had told her of it. It was what was done. And Ruth—had seen Malach naked. Even Anna had done so, in the dream.

  His body, in the unlight light of a torch stuck high up in a wall of stone, was a universal sigil of the bodies of all prisoners. Although hard, proportionate, and beautiful in other circumstances, now it was debased, made vulnerable, horrible. In tint almost grey, streaked by fire.

  The scene was again a set from some film, most likely a bad film. And Malach was a character, the way he had always seemed to behave, a person invented in romance, song and story. Doomed, glamorous, motivated—pointless. A revenger of wrongs, a rescuer, a white knight.

  His head hung, and the long, long hair fell round him. They had not hacked it off. Ruth who was Ankhet Persephone had said she did not want that. She would do it, if she wished. No one else.

  Imperious little spoilt and angry child. Child killed for love. Child dead of love’s death.

  Pointless too. Another character.

  If they had lived so extensively, those centuries, and where they had not continued in one body, had returned, reborn, half remembering, how had they come to this pass? This utter stupid littleness?

  They could have been gods, almost. They thought like people. Loved and hated and wanted to hurt and save the way only people excusably can, people who are tortured and maimed and have only one life.

  And this was what he was saying, quietly, but it was in another language and she did not understand.

  But then Ruth would never understand.

  He had begun to teach her.

  And then, he stopped.

  ‘How are you, Malach?’

  She asked him this, standing on the steps that led down to him, just like the wicked lady in the off-colour epic film.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘And you?’

  ‘Shall we play the word game? I’ll say a word and you say what comes into your head. Mistake.’

  Malach smiled. He hung in the steel fetters Cain had epically arranged—Malach was strong—and smiled mildly.

  ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘I want you to talk. I might forgive you if you talk.’

  ‘A
nd you might not.’

  ‘Don’t you want to ask, forgive you for what?’

  ‘I know for what.’

  ‘Good. He’ll do anything to you I want. He’ll have them hit you, whip you.’

  ‘Don’t you mean scourge?’ he inquired softly, giving the softest inference that he had not quite accepted his status in her film, or, had accepted it humorously.

  ‘Scourge then,’ she said. Ruth’s sense of humour had never developed. Perhaps Anna’s had not. ‘Castrate you, even.’

  ‘No, I don’t think he’ll do that.’

  ‘Because Scarabae revere generation? He doesn’t care. You’re my toy. He gave you to me.’

  ‘No, Anna. I gave me to you.’

  ‘Weren’t you silly.’

  ‘What else could I do. I thought he had you here against your will.’

  ‘He’d never let me go.’

  ‘He would. If I was here, and you wanted it.’

  She seemed to be thinking of this. Then she said, ‘But he wants me.’

  ‘I want you.’

  ‘No. It’s too late. Blood, Malach. What do you think of when I say that?’

  ‘That he likes to drink it. Or pretends that he does.’

  ‘So do I.’

  ‘Anna—’

  ‘Now you sound different. But don’t call me that. They called me that. I’m Ankhet, now.’

  ‘Althene named you. You want to renounce Althene too?’

  ‘Althene didn’t come after me.’

  ‘She would have tried. Something—No. Only I could find you. Was meant to find you.’

  ‘Yes, that’s true. So you could be mine. I was your prisoner once. You punished me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Now you’re my property.’

  ‘His,’ he said. ‘That’s the mistake you mentioned.’

  She came down the steps and walked into the space below Malach, where he hung forward from the chains. His arms were pulled up above his head. It must be painful, awkward to breathe, yet he seemed relaxed. There were no marks on him.

  ‘I’m left-handed,’ she said. She flexed the left hand. ‘That’s because of you. It’s called sinister.’