Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4

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Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 Page 11

by Tanith Lee


  Her name was Liliu. Besides her loveliness, she had been gently and ably reared, could read and write in many languages, was a musician of no slight art—yet also was she childlike and innocent. And because of this, on a single point the father begged indulgence. It would seem that, virtuous and loving as she was, the girl had spent most of her time with her ailing parent. And his illness had made him unable to bear any but the rays of the moon or the subfusc of candles; sunlight worsened his condition. So her new protectors must, if they would, be lenient at first with Liliu’s aversion to the sun—for, living by night with her father, and taking against the sun for his sake, she might wish to eschew the hours of day for a time, rising at sunfall as had become her habit, sleeping through the morning and the afternoon.

  This seemed most understandable. Besides, the idea of wakeful nights did not displease the young man. He, too, had something of the sort in mind.

  So letters and presents were exchanged, priests were consulted, the proper sacrifices made to the gods (who, as ever, ignored them), necessaries laid in, furnishings made ready. And at last the night arrived when, lit by torches, Jadrid went to claim his bride—for convenience’ sake, since the old father was at death’s door, from the pavilion in the garden.

  There she sat, veiled and demure, among flowers and perfumes, her dowry (which was truly wondrous) piled around her. The sick parent, as was expected, was nowhere to be seen. Oddly, neither did she have any attendants. It was assumed they modestly stood back in the surrounding trees, consigning her to the bridegroom’s care.

  Jadrid had no worries on this score.

  They were accordingly married, Liliu and Jadrid. Seldom was a bride more fair, more circumspect, or more winsome. Seldom a bridegroom so envied.

  Aloft in the bedroom, having disrobed his wife, Jadrid learned that her perfections were as all-encompassing as he had been feverishly dreaming they were. And though she was a virgin, and rendered him the proofs, yet she seemed, perhaps from her erudition, to have gained many wisdoms which—with proper timidity at first, but seeing that her actions were not amiss, with ever greater assurance—she practiced on him, so that his pleasure was doubled and trebled, and actually went beyond all such meager mathematical limits. So much so indeed, that late revelers, who happened to eavesdrop under his windows, were highly gratified. It was in fact at the crest of one such delicious excursion that Jadrid, flinging out an arm unwarily, overturned a ewer that stood by the bed. The ewer, in breaking, cut him.

  “Oh, my dearest lord!” exclaimed Liliu, as he sank back spent, to discover that his wrist bled.

  “It is nothing at all,” said Jadrid.

  But Liliu, not unfittingly for a young wife, was most concerned.

  “No, no. Who can tell what infection there may be on the edges of the broken thing.” (Yes, thought Jadrid, full of tenderest sympathy, she has been too long with a sick man.) “Now, if you will permit me, here is the surest remedy, which will cleanse your veins of all poisonous stuff.” And saying this, she put her mouth to the wound. Jadrid was amazed, and touched at her solicitude. That venoms could be removed in such a way, he knew. But how well she must love him so to tend him! When eventually she was positive all harm had been sucked forth—it took a little while, she was very conscientious—Liliu smiled, and set her lips to other work. Soon, she mounted him lightly, and with an abandoned dancing beautiful to behold and of a divine anguish to experience, began to draw him toward the seventh gateway of the night. Ah—what a wife I have been blessed with! thought Jadrid. Anon, his loud groans brought a new toast from the revelers below, and shook several fruits from the damson tree that grew against the wall.

  When he woke at sunrise, Jadrid saw his wife had already vacated their bed, and sought the daytime seclusion which he had, kind husband as he meant to be, prepared for her. He himself slept well past noon.

  The first weeks of the marriage, then, went by in harmony. The only discord sounded in the area of the young wife’s preference for night over day, from which she, so meek in all else, would not budge. That is the great love she bore her father, thought Jadrid. So, he restrained his discontent. (Ah, yes. Apples of fire.)

  But in this way, Jadrid, having business affairs he must attend to in the daytime, saw rather less of his wife than was customary, for he could not keep awake all the night through, as it seemed she did.

  There was one other slight peculiarity. At the nuptial feast, Liliu had eaten nothing, and drunk nothing save a sip or two of water. This had been taken for timorousness, or sorrow at leaving her father. Yet, even now, Liliu would eat nothing in her husband’s sight. She assured him, living as she had so long with an ailing man who could partake only of gruel, she had got in the way herself of eating one frugal meal a day, and that alone. Jadrid remained amenable to this custom, though it subtly discontented him.

  After a month had gone by, Jadrid became irritable over little things. One morning he had woken a space before sunrise, wishing very much to embrace Liliu. But though the sun was not yet over the horizon, his wife had already left his bed. Accordingly Jadrid broke his fast alone and in an ill humor, and it happened that one of the servants spilled a dash of salt, and Jadrid cursed her, because it was unlucky. Suddenly the woman burst into a flood of tears. “Oh, my lord,” she wept, “unlucky you may well say. Only let me go on my knees and tell you the thing I have kept hidden these past three days, and which has filled me with such distress, I have been nearly out of my mind at it.”

  Jadrid, astonished, forgot his bad mood.

  “Speak at once,” he said. “Do not fear my wrath. I have none, unless you continue to keep silent.”

  Then the woman told Jadrid this, as follows.

  Owing to her tasks in the house, she was frequently obliged to get up before cockcrow, and one early morning, when it wanted some half hour of dawn, she was filling a water jar at the courtyard well when she heard a stealthy noise, nearby and, as it seemed, underground. Something made the woman cautious, indeed, rather afraid. So she left her jar and took shelter behind a bush against the privy wall. After a moment, her heart almost started out of her breast. For what should happen but one of the big old paving stones in the yard began to lift by its roots, and presently it stood on its side, and up out of the place underneath came gliding a dreadful apparition, in the predawn dusk all glaring dark and white. No sooner was it clear of the hole than it set back the paving stone as if the huge thing weighed like a feather. Then it turned and looked carefully about it. (Never had the woman been so glad to bloom unseen.) For sure, the arrival was a ghastly sight, a female being in a white shift, but all dabbled and filthy with dirt and—could it be with blood? Going to the well, it let down the bucket, and when the bucket came up again, the creature washed itself. And then for the first time the woman saw that what had come up in blood and filth from under the earth was none other than her young master’s young wife, Liliu.

  “Where she had been I do not know, nor do I wish to know. But surely something had delayed her—she was all anxiety lest any come out and catch her at her washing. Then, when she was clean, and had wrung out her long hair, she went into the house and away to her own chamber that she cleaves to by day. And now,” said the woman sullenly, folding her hands, “I suppose I shall be slain for witnessing the misdeeds of my betters.”

  “Not slain for that, but whipped for lying,” said Jadrid in a rage—he was frightened, too.

  “Well, I have proof of what I say,” announced the woman.

  “Show it.”

  So she did. Leading Jadrid to the courtyard, the servant woman requested him to kneel down by one of the paving slabs. At a glance he could see it had been disturbed, but anything might account for that. Not, however, for the strand of hair, poppy-red, which was caught under it.

  “She went out again last night and returned again an hour before sunrise. I heard her and looked from a hole in the privy door. She was not canny enough this time. As she set back the slab her hair was caught, but
she cut it through with her own sharp teeth, and then ran in haste, not bothering to take the evidence from the stone—for who would glimpse it if they did not come looking for it, as I did. Now you, strong lord, try to lift that stone, and see whether any of us are playing tricks on you.”

  Jadrid then did try to lift the stone, but even working till the sweat poured, and with his dagger as a lever, he could not shift the piece of paving more than half an inch. Certainly not sufficiently to come at the strand of hair still trapped beneath, clearly on an occasion when the slab had risen freely. . . .

  Eventually he rose, and said to the woman, “You will stay quiet. Tell no one, not even my father. You have watched and seen her come in. Now I will watch and see where it is she goes.”

  If truth were told, Jadrid had a notion already, nor did he much relish it. It happened that the cellars beneath the merchant’s house abutted underground on some ancient catacombs, supposedly haunted, into which, by his own boy’s means, Jadrid had penetrated once or twice years before. These forays had revealed nothing very terrible, aside from rats and mummy-dust. In their turn, however, the tunnels led out of the city to an antique burial ground, no longer much used save by the very poor, and itself of ill repute.

  Unbeknownst to any, then, Jadrid spent that day enlarging, with iron bar and mallet, the exit point in the cellar which had accommodated him as a boy. By the afternoon, he had got through into the foul warren beyond, where it was always night, and choking on the dust, he lifted high his lamp. He soon found, as he had unwillingly imagined he would, a weird tearing in the tangled webs of powder, and a mark on the stone roof high overhead—here was the place which corresponded to the loose paving in the courtyard. Going up and down awhile with his light, Jadrid next beheld on the tunnel floor and on some of the shelves that went toward the ceiling, the muddled imprint of many footfalls—or of one person’s journey many times repeated. Small feet they were, with ringed toes, but they had been dipped in something to leave such a mark. And what they had been dipped in had been very red—

  Oh, horrible. And more than horrible, most strange. Never having suspected her, having been so long her dupe, Jadrid now felt everything coming clear. As if, in some way he had concealed from himself, he had known always—

  “Forgive me, sweet wife. I cannot enjoy you tonight. I am weary.”

  So saying, Jadrid lay down and feigned the most abject slumber. Yet she was prudent. She did not steal away till moonrise.

  When he was sure she had gone, Jadrid leapt up, flung on his clothes, and belted on his sword. He ran noiselessly through the house and into the cellar, and so came out into the pitchy vault of the catacombs beyond.

  He had prepared for himself a dull lamp, by which he could just find his way. For the rest, he knew the passages from before. He went forward with enormous stealth nevertheless, shielding the vague light also with his cloak. And as well. At a turning among the cubbies of disintegrate bones, he caught a flicker of brightness—it was the hem of her shift, the shimmer of her white instep and a white ankle with a chain of gold upon it. So certain she was that none had tracked her here, and so eager for her destination, she went easily, never looking back. And he, taking pains where she did not, pressed after.

  Suddenly the tunnels ended and came up through a quantity of caves into the open air. Here the bats took exception to Jadrid’s light (she had needed none), and he put it out. Still without a glance over her shoulder, the pale flicker of Liliu sped on before him, and through the ruined wall of the old burial ground.

  The moon stood high and made a silver twilight. On all sides, among the funeral trees and weeds, the tall tombs rose up, the houses of the dead—and it reminded Jadrid in an awful way of the boulevard of mansions where he had first followed to find his love.

  Presently, they drew near a very large tomb, in parts crumbled and fallen down, but elsewhere pillared, and sculpted in historic ways—it had been the resting place of a mighty prince. Out of cracks and holes, and between the carvings of this, there streamed a greenish glow, and as Liliu approached, abruptly the door grated wide. Up the steps she ran, merry as a maiden running to greet her husband, and in. And the door howled shut again.

  Jadrid stood awhile. His blood was ice, and many another man would probably have hurried away. But anger, and love-gone-rotten, can work wonders. In less time than it would have taken him to offer a prayer for salvation to one of the deaf gods of the Upperearth, Jadrid had climbed a tree which overlooked the prince’s bonehouse, and so got on its roof. Here he quickly discovered an aperture to look through, and availed himself.

  What a scene was that, down below, and which he saw in such detail. A great stone catafalque, from which the skeleton had long since been rolled, and great stone chests much despoiled—only those of a superhuman strength could have opened them to rifle them—yet still with skeins of pearls, rubies, diamonds dripping down, and marvelous instruments (such as a long-necked harp) leaned by, and books of erudition centuries old, all green like the putrescent phosphorus which made the light, yet supposedly readable, and held in covers of pure gold. On high, threescore filigree jewelry lamps, with the nasty substance burning away in them. In the midst of it all some nine persons who passed around between them nine golden, gem-encrusted goblets, each containing a different colored wine. And as they did so, like guests before a feast, they laughed and joked with each other, kissed and intimately fondled each other. They might, for a fact, have been a family, and in a manner of speaking, they were, doubtless. Each was of exceptional good looks, slender, pale, and with that red-black poppy hair Jadrid knew so well and had admired so much. And each was clothed, too, as if newly escaped from some bedchamber. And the ninth of them, of course, was Liliu, his wife.

  “Then let us drink,” said one of them, a man who could have been brother or cousin of Jadrid’s wife, yet who held her to him in a way Jadrid himself would have been shamed to do in company. “Let us drink to our immemorial lineage, our destiny, and our success, and to our genius when compared to the clay-brains of ephemeral mankind. For it transpires we have each succeeded. Who are lords then, but ever we?”

  And they did indeed some extra drinking, and toasted each other again and again, in the green and yellow and scarlet and white and even the black wines. And tickled and caressed and lipped each other as never before, making all the while obscene and uncharitable comments on the sexual ableness of humanity they had, apparently, every one of them recently had to endure.

  And then another door opened to the rear of the tomb and their servants came out, some rather like monkeys, some like men, and one of the latter was the very servant who had conducted Jadrid to Liliu’s garden. He it was bowed low, and proclaimed that the feast had been brought.

  The nine diners were very much delighted, and more so when this feast was laid before them on the catafalque. They fell to with appreciating cries and smacking of lips. But Jadrid, who also saw on what they banqueted, had fallen prone among the ornaments of the roof in a deathly swoon.

  When he came to himself again, the sky was gray, the dew was down, and the great tomb in darkness. Trembling, Jadrid gave some prayers of thanks to the gods (who were not at all responsible) that the ghoulish feasters had not discovered him.

  Now, Jadrid saw it all. Demonstrably their race was old, of “lineage” and “destiny” as the male ghoul had remarked. It would seem that for some reason they sought to live among men, and so tricks had been played—not only Liliu’s upon himself. In her case there was no elderly father, no house—the mansion deserted, the chariot some dead king’s, the horses—phantoms? Only the dowry, the plunder of a hundred graves, was real. Probably it was a variation of this theme they had played elsewhere. Nine in number, they had now, it would seem, snared nine families by their deceptions. From eight other beds, some of hapless wives, some of trusting husbands, these fiends stole out on certain nights to meet together and rejoice. Small wonder Liliu did not care to eat with her lord. Small wonder she abhorre
d the wholesome sun.

  Jadrid’s course was sure. He would go home and wait for darkness. When she came to him with her wiles, he would kill her.

  As he strode from the cemetery, tears and rage on his face, the sky was lightening but the sun not up. Dwellers in hovels under the city wall, seeing him emerge in this way from the haunted burial ground, fled indoors screaming to each other he was the very devil they had feared all these years, who caroused in the tombs all night and ate their deceased relatives. Which irony was lost on Jadrid.

  It happened that Jadrid’s father had been away a day or so on business. And that night, which was the night of his return, Jadrid gave orders that there was to be a dinner of especial magnificence.

  Accordingly, about sunset, all came to the table, the merchant, and also the guests and relations, every one of whom had been at Jadrid’s wedding. Presently Jadrid entered with his wife. “I have entreated her to dine with us, for once.”

  Everything was laughter and smiles.

  Jadrid sat beside his wife. He begged her to take some wine.

  “Pray excuse me,” said she.

  “No. Tonight you must drink with us.”

  “But you know, my lord, that I never drink wine.”

  “A wonderful wife,” exclaimed one of the guests. “So abstemious.”

  “Then at least,” said Jadrid persuasively, “you must taste a little of this meat—”

  “Pray excuse me.”

 

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