by Tanith Lee
Wolf Tower - Claidi Journals 01
TANITH LEE
AUTHOR’S NOTE
When I write, I go to live inside the book. By which I mean, mentally I can experience everything I’m writing about. I can see it, hear its sounds, feel its heat or rain. The characters become better known to me than the closest family or friends. This makes the writing-down part very simple most of the time. I only need to describe what’s already there in front of me. That said, it won’t be a surprise if I add that the imagined worlds quickly become entangled with the so-called reality of this one.
Since I write almost every day, and I think (and dream) constantly about my work, it occurs to me I must spend more time in all those other places than here.
TANITH LEE
CHAPTERS
This Book
Excitement By Air
Him
The Lion In The Cage
The Escape
Hell
Stormy Weather
Chariot Town
Trouble Always Follows
Flight
The Bandit Camp On The Move
Nightmares By Day
Pershamba
Changing Partners
Marshes Of The Moon
His City
The Law: Finding
The Law: Keeping
Wolves
Fireworks
THIS BOOK
Yes
I stole this. This book.
I don’t know why. It looked… nice, I suppose, and nothing has been nice for years. Well, not often.
It was in her stationery chest, out of which she sometimes makes us—mostly me—get her a piece of silk paper or thick parchment. Then she doodles a few stupid lines of awful “poetry.” Or a foul painting, like used washing-water in the Maids’ Hall with something dropped in it—lime juice or jam. And then we all have to applaud. “Oh! How clever you are, Lady Jade Leaf. What bright-shining genius!” Because she’s royal. And we are not. Oh no. We couldn’t ever do anything wonderful like that.
Frankly, I think I could spit in a more interesting pattern. As for the poems…
Here is the latest example:
I drift like a petal all upon the air And the roses b o w.
Drift like a petal… She’s more like a hippopotamus in the river. I don’t mean fat—Lady Iris is fat, but she’s also glamorous and graceful. Jade Leaf is slim. But the way she moves…
If the roses bowed, they did it because they fainted with fright, screaming: “Don’t let that great thing bash into me!”
(Having said this, I feel I should add that hippopotami are graceful, too, underwater. Besides, a hippopotamus has never picked up its little ornamental cane and cracked me across the palms of my hands so they bled. Which Jade Leaf has done so many times, I can’t remember the number.) If you found this, and are now reading it, need I ask you not to tell anyone? But hopefully you aren’t. I’m just imagining you.
And there’s someone banging for real on the door, which means I have to go and do something so much more important—that is, attend Jade Leaf.
I’ll write my name here. After that, you’ll know it’s me.
Claidi.
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Midnight. (I just heard the House clock.) Sky a sort of thick, stirred-up black, milky with stars. Vile day. Daisy broke a vase, and Lady Jade slapped and slapped her till Daisy cowered on the floor.
Then Lady JL kicked Daisy with her silk-slippered foot. Daisy has bruises and is also expected not to be given any dinner in the Maids’ Hall for nine nights. Pattoo and I put some of our food in a napkin and gave it to Daisy when we went to bed. Pattoo and Daisy are sleeping now.
I’m so tired I have to stop, too.
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Absolutely nothing to write. Its seven days since the last thing I wrote. But nothing ever happens here. No, wrong. There was a dust storm yesterday that blew in from the Waste, and the slaves ran to work the fans and pull up the slatted roofs over the best parts of the Garden. In the House all the windows and doors were shut, and everybody was cooped up and bad-tempered.
LJL had a tantrum. She screamed and yelled and threw things. Then she was ill and had to lie down, and we put cloths soaked in cool scented water on her forehead. If it dripped in her eyes, she screamed again. We all had headaches, but no cool water-cloths for us.
I hate this place.
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Nothing to write. Except Pattoo and I were prevented by the Maids steward from putting aside food for Daisy. She cried with frustration (and hunger), but now she’s gone to sleep.
Perhaps I should say, we share this tiny room in the Maids’ Hall and have three narrow mattresses and one mirror and one chest. These are not our possessions, you understand, but things lent to us, like our clothing, by Lady J and her mother, the Princess Shimra.
Sometimes we steal two or three flowers from the Garden and put them in a jar in the narrow window.
But flowers don’t last, do they?
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Nothing to write.
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NTW
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There seems no point, really, I sternly say to myself now, in having thieved this book, so craftily and unsensibly, if I’m not going to put anything in it. Any news? Well, today was the Ritual of the Feeding of the Red Birds.
We went to the Red Aviary, a birdhouse full of feathers and trills and tweets. They fly about freely here, between the trees that grow up through the floor into the glass roof. They look, the birds, like flying flowers of crimson and scarlet, but the squeaks are sometimes piercingly loud, and also droppings fall on everyone, despite the parasols we dutifully hold over our ladies‘, heads.
The birds today are fed special grains and seeds, dyed to match or to coordinate with bird colors.
I like the birds a lot, but the smell is pretty overpowering.
Later there was an ordinary storm. Colossal bangs of thunder as if gigantic trays were being dropped in the sky. Lady JL is loudly afraid of the thunder and the lightning, but I ran off and watched from an upper window. Next, summoned back to her, she asked where I had been, told me where—she was wrong—then that I was a lazy slut, and predictably cracked me over the hand with her cane. Only one hand, though, the left one, so I can still write this.
Oh, and Daisy, who has been eating so much at dinner every night, making up for the nine missed ones, was violently sick all over the Maids’ Hall floor, which had just been cleaned.
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I ask myself, if you are reading this (and aren’t bored with it all, as bored as I get with it all, and flung it on the rubbish dump or in a fire), I ask myself what you might find interesting to have me tell you. Because perhaps you don’t live in the House or the Garden but have somehow come from somewhere else. This seems unlikely, but then you aren’t real, are you? Just some wonderful intriguing imaginary person I’ve made up. My fantasy.
So, I’ll pretend you’re keen to know… Shall I?
Or not.
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I’m sort of an orphan. My parents aren’t dead—although I suppose they might be, in fact, by now. That’s a grim thought. But I can’t even really feel much about it, because I never knew them. There are so many Rituals. The House and the Garden live by them. What else is there to do? But the Rituals are taken entirely and stonily seriously. They’re immovable. And if you profane a Ritual—if you break one of the idiotic rules of this place—you’re punished.
Sometimes they’re only slight mistakes and the punishments aren’t too bad. (Lets say you miss lighting every single candle in the Lighting of the Candles Ritual, or do it in the wrong order. Then you might only have to stand in the Black Marble Corridor for a f
ew hours, something like that—though your lady would probably beat you, too.) But for profaning some of the most important Rituals and rules, the punishments are fierce. The worst punishment, of course, is to be exiled to the Waste.
Its a death sentence. At best, if you do survive, a living nightmare. Hell-on-earth.
The Waste is the worst thing in the world.
This is what they tell you.
It is always stressed how grateful we should be that we were born here, the House, the Garden, this earthly paradise, and not out there in the Waste. I can recall them drumming this into me when I was a child, a baby, and crying for my mother and father. To be an orphan, and the maid of a (cruel) lady in paradise, was better than existing in the Waste.
The weather there is unthinkable. White-hot heats, freezings, rains of stones, gales that tear up the dry starving landscape. There are terrible mountains of black rock, and the dust storms that sometimes pass over the Garden come from there. In the Waste you go hungry always, and thirsty. Water is poisoned.
Nothing grows, or if it does, its horrible to look at and disgusting to eat.
No wonder the people and things that survive out there are peculiar and dangerous. Madmen, murderers, and monsters roam.
From a couple of the highest towers of the House, if you’re willing to climb hundreds and hundreds of stairs—I have—you can just glimpse something beyond the edges of the fortressed Garden walls. That must be the Waste. But you can’t see much—only a sort of threatening, shimmering vagueness. A pale shadow.
Once a lion got into the Garden. A monster lion from the Waste. This was in the year before I was born.
It was an ugly and lethal beast, foaming flame, they say, from the mouth. So they killed it.
But why have I gone on so about all that, the outside world, which I’ve never even seen?
Because my parents profaned one of the greatest Rituals. (I don’t know which one.) They were promptly exiled to the Waste.
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Now I can’t sleep. There are clusters of huge, blistering blue-white stars. Tomorrow is the Ritual of the Planting of the Two Thousandth Rose.
We have to be up extra early, before dawn.
I feel strangely guilty, since I think I’m going to stop writing in this book. Which makes me aware that I’ve mistreated it—the book, I mean—taking it and then spoiling it with my writing. And then worse, stopping.
But what is there to say? I’m sorry, if you’ve read this far. But then you haven’t.
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Something INCREDIBLE. Something unthought of and impossible has occurred. I have to organize my mind, which feels as if its whirling about, and my heart is bird-flying and flapping around inside me. I keep laughing out loud.
I’m not in our room. I’ve climbed up to another place. I’m sitting here, but inside me everything is jumping and spinning. How can I start to tell you?
Let me go back, back to the morning, and begin again.
EXCITEMENT BY AIR
The Garden stretches for many miles in all directions away from the House.
We walked slowly down the green, closely cut lawns, Pat-too, Daisy, and I. And then down lots of mossy steps, with mossy statues standing by them.
The Gardeners keep everything perfect, and the slaves attend to all the cunning mechanisms that keep the Garden watered and nourished. The Garden is even kept warm, when the weather turns cold, by a system of underground furnaces and hot-water pipes, quite like those used in the House.
Aside from maintenance, the Garden is also very artistic, to please the royalty. Here and there, areas may even look a little overgrown, or there might be a pavilion a bit ruined. But the overgrowings are always carefully clipped to just the right amount of wildness, and the ruin will be clean and gleaming, with ivy trained up on wires. Even decay is planned here, and controlled.
The House, which is the center of the Garden, showed from the steps every time we took a left turn. I’ll describe it quickly. Its a terraced building with columns, white and pink, and with sloping roofs scaled in dark green and gold.
Above, through the leaves, the sky was that breathtaking blue that sings. The sort of sky that makes you feel something astonishing and marvelous is about to happen—only it never does.
“Oh, come on, come on,” panted Pattoo. She’s always nervous. She likes to please. Which is sensible really. She’s seldom beaten.
But Daisy snapped, “I can’t go any faster. I’ve already spilled some of this filthy stuff. Do you think they’ll notice?‘ she added to me.
“Umm.”
Perhaps they wouldn’t. There are twenty or so Ritual oils that have to be brought to any special planting in the Garden, each of them highly scented and sticky.
Daisys flagon of oil was noticeably low, and besides you could see the mark on her dress where most of it had gone.
(We were wearing melon green today, to coordinate with Jade Leaf’s deeper green dress. And our hair was powdered paler green. The ladies generally insist their maids complement their own choice of colors. An order arrives before every function. The dresses weren’t comfortable, either. For the past month or so, the fashion has been for stiff-bodiced, ankle-length silk tubes, which is all right in a way if you’re not big, though Pattoo is rather. But when it comes to walking, you have to take mincing little tiny steps, or you [a] rip the dress, or [b] fall over flat.)
Pattoo and I scrubbed Daisys dress-tube with our decorative gauze scarves. This made things worse.
“Stand behind us,” I said. “She may not see.”
But Jade Leaf almost certainly would.
We teetered on.
The sun was hot, but beautiful fragrances throbbed from the flowers. Sculpted woods and thickets poured down toward the river, which sparkled.
It’s a lovely place, to be honest. I mean, it is to look at. And for royal people I’m sure it’s lovely altogether.
At the bottom of the mossy steps, the lion house runs behind gilded bars. The lion house is large, complicated-looking, and their whole enclosure is enormous. But the lions are normally on view. They seem to put themselves where they can be admired. They play and sleep and sun themselves and are very peaceful. Sometimes they’re even brought out on a jeweled lead, and royal ladies and gentlemen walk about with them and feed them sweets.
The lions seem contented, like the House hippopotami and all the other animals here. They never have to hunt or fight—everything’s given to them. They’re even groomed by slaves. But every year there are less.
They can’t even be bothered to have families.
I used to wonder, when I was a child, if these creatures missed something? Of course they do.
Another terrace went down in steps of marble, and there were fountains, and pools with golden fish, and lilies.
Then, the Rose Walk.
The smell is astounding; it makes you dizzy. Roses rise on every side, in arches and tiers and cushiony banks. They’re every shade of red and purple, yellow and white.
Wicked thorns like claws scratched at us as we wended through, and Daisy almost spilled the rest of her oil.
In the center of the Rose Walk is a big oval of grass and a statue of a rose carved out of some shiny stone.
This is where the Two Thousandth Rose was to be viewed before planting.
It was apparently a very startling and special rose. One is always bred by the Gardeners for this Ritual, which takes place every three years.
You may wonder how there was ever room for a new rose in this dense chaos of roses. But obviously other roses die or are weeded out mercilessly when the princes and princesses get irritated with them.
Not that many of the royalty had come to the Ritual (a lesser one). It was a hot day, even though the sun had been up less than an hour.
We went and took our stations behind Lady J. No maids are allowed to arrive until this moment, and others were coming in from all sides of the Rose Walk, but Lady J seemed to think we were late.
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“Why are you always dawdling?” she snapped. We bowed our heads, looking properly ashamed. Daisy edged in close behind me to hide the spill-stain. “You’re moronic,” decided LJL.
She has a pointy face, rouged all rosy, and now her hair was powdered a kind of cabbage color.
Her mouth sneered over her sharp little teeth.
“You deserve a slap,” she said to me.
I lifted my head and looked at her. She doesn’t like that. But then she hates me anyway, even if she would never admit to hating something as low as a maid.
“Don’t you stare at me,” she rasped. But I’d already bowed my head again. “I’m so tired of you, Claidi.
I can’t even beat any sense into you. I’ve asked Mummy, and she says she’ll have you properly whipped if you wont pull yourself together.”
Then her little eyes went over me and fixed on Daisy.
In all her green, Jade Leaf went the color of an exploding raspberry. “Why, you ghastly little beast,” she shrieked. “That gown—-you’ve ruined it—”
Heads turned.
Princess Shimra spoke coolly nearby, in the cluster of ladies. “Calmly, Jade Leaf. You’ll give yourself another headache.”
Several princesses murmured soothingly, slinking and swaying like one more bed of lushly tinted plants.
JL lowered her voice and leaned toward us like a snake.
“Expect something,” she said. “And you too, Pattoo. You’ll have done something, even if I can’t see it.” I was already frightened. She’d never threatened me with a proper professional whipping from her mothers steward before. Now I went cold. Daisy was breathing fast, and Pattoo had crumpled. It was so unfair. She’d done nothing at all.
But now the Gardeners were pompously bringing the Two Thousandth Rose in a gilded basket, and the royal ones were bending over it and exclaiming.
It reached Lady J, and she too peered down.
What a nasty sight. This green and puce monster craning in over the new rose, which was itself extremely hideous.