Tanith By Choice: The Best of Tanith Lee

by Tanith Lee

  In the house, Georges was hysterically protesting in French, “Non, non, madame –”

  But had he been in the court with us probably he would have clung to me, trying to anchor me to the spot, and save me from who knew what worse-than-death fate the old man was plotting.

  Unimpeded, I accompanied Patxi Cuerca. And what sort of name was that, if I had even understood him? Cuerca – didn’t that mean crow? Or no, perhaps not. Yet he was like a crow, like the eldritch crow in the tree the two stones missed.

  The Room led directly off the court. Through the round-topped door we entered a windowless blank, where something seemed lurking in a smell of spice and mould. He struck a match and lit a lantern which hung just inside. I had not even seen it. Then, he shut us in.

  A child somewhere – where? who? – had told me about the chamber in the rock where the robbers hid their treasure and Ali Baba found it. The child had not been Anna, though she was quite capable of that. But my sisters and I had never met when we were children.

  The lantern, a huge ungainly object, swung for a few moments, then settled itself.

  It was a filthy room, into which a rainbow had fallen, splashing everywhere, even into the webs of spiders.

  With the erosion of time, which can eat at the edges even of the most visual memory, Cuerca’s Room is difficult to describe, at least in logical terms. It acted instead on the optic nerve, the viscera.

  What did I see first? There was a stripe of pure green that hung and blazed as if with green fire, and rippled as if with green water.

  And over there, another stripe, this one orange, that did similar things. And there was a crimson square that kept immobile and glowed like the core of a hearth. And curves of deep blue and purple that twitched and waited, and a slinking manipulative yellow, like a leopard.

  He didn’t advise me. He let me find my own way. I began to see in greater depth.

  He, it could only have been he, had painted shapes on the walls in vivid opaque colour. And over them and beside them and before them had been hung or slung, or nailed, or simply piled, objects that were of those same colours, either exactly, or in some corresponding colour-echo. A bunch of green enamel grapes suspended from a green cord before the green stripe, an emerald glass pitcher, its neck smashed off and instead surmounted with a green-painted egg, stood below, jade grapes on a plate of green faint enough to seem transparent. Against the red oblong rags of a tattered vermilion banner from some war, a red cup holding an artificial rose like blood. Where the yellow uncoiled, a piece of ochre ivory, shaped like the fretboard from some giant’s guitar, nestled in a cascade of broken yellow glass. Against the blue a woman’s blue shoe, its little heel caught in a sapphire comb. A cluster of dried oranges choked by necklaces of chipped amber melted into the orange circle...

  The old man, Cuerca, went by me, and unceremoniously and unerringly shoved the purplish grape-flowers between the violet coloured jug without a handle and the chunk of raw amethyst beside the hoop of purple paint.

  The expensive and the worthless clustered in each group as one. No hierarchies among these items, lost or abandoned, stolen or thrown out on rubbish heaps, all eventually pilfered by him, by Patxi Cuerca, brought here and each made part of its correct entity.

  To outline all this is only to invite incomprehension and scorn. How could such an eccentric, childish medley convey anything? It did. No doubt the dark, flooded selectively by the big cracked lantern, caused some of the effect. But that hot day maybe my eyes had been thirsty. And now they drank.

  The lamp flickered, some insect or cobweb dropping in there. I saw the yellow shape, crusted with its glisten, swing quietly sidelong to seize the blue shape – a woman, dancing – in its mouth. How gracefully she fell. But the red shape, stretching from oblong to square, and back to oblong, sprouted a thousand red roses, twining and knotting with their ruby thorns. The purple shape was a galleon’s sail, marked with an indecipherable device. The orange shape was the ship’s bodywork. They flowed together and sailed over the green shape of sea, which spangled and rioted with darting j’ade fish, spraying up the emerald foam –

  But I thought of the spice and mould I could still smell, of drugs grown and harvested from the petrified courtyard, which formerly had been, had it, a Garden of Earthly Delights?

  I blinked, once, twice. The shapes were static. Almost. Priceless and worthless. Unalive and living. They only shimmered a little, as the lamp had. Flicked a blue sequined eyelid or a sinuous tail. One last minuscule wave broke over the amber figurehead, who pursed her lips, before her face lapsed back to necklaces. The purple sail shivered as it flattened out against the wall. A single petal fell through the roses. Became again a broken red bead.

  Quite suddenly then the old man, the magician, turned round, and the finale of his magic show was accomplished.

  I saw him dazzling clear, meshed between the streams and orifices of colors. Like the salamander which had emerged from the chipped cherub, the real man now stepped free of his shell. Cuerca was young. He was straight, tall, lean, his shoulders back, his body planted as fluidly as an athlete’s on his strong long legs. He wore his now inky clothes only in affectation, to match the ink-black feathers of his thick smooth hair, the jet stones of his eyes. His unlined face was handsome, nose aquiline, mouth long, slender and aloof. In his beautiful hands, articulately strong enough to rip out any beating heart, he held a burnished flame of knife. But you could not be afraid at this. You wanted all, and therefore anything and everything he might do. And he said to me, in perfect, only-slightly accented French (while the light glinted on his white teeth), “Go along now. Get out. You’ve seen. Go and rescueyour friend from Marija. Remember. I am Patxi Cuerca. Never forget you have seen me, and this room.”

  And then, weightless and careless, as if casting a paper, he tossed the knife over my head. It thunked into some soft place in the wall behind me.

  Disarranged by its motion, the lamplight jumped again, the rainbow leapt, and all its pieces, with the shadow, came down on him, and covered him up. He was old once more, dirty and crippled, and crazy. So I turned and went out, and in the courtyard the dragon too had slid back into its stony carapace. The liquid it had spat was already dry.

  Although I rescued him from Marija, Georges did not forgive me. She had been telling him he was her long lost son, it seemed, and threatening him with the rich (seventeen olive trees) betrothed he had deserted, telling him she would bring him wine and he must drink it.

  Perhaps he was her son. After all, I had seen the Room, and I had seen Cuerca grow young again, and then old again. Metamorphosis riddled the place.

  No doubt Cuerca’s youth was only a trick of the light, as they say. Or drugs burning. Or the dazzling after-images of all the colours sprawled about in there.

  Around thirteen years later – also long ago now – I saw a photograph of him as a young man, in a book to do with the art of that torrid southern region. For of course he had been an artist of repute, when young. Abstract paintings, sculptures and mechanical toys not for children, peculiar gardens even, were credited to his invention. He did, in the picture, look remarkably like what I’d glimpsed, or imagined, standing among his last creation, his Room. (The book did not mention, or did not know about, the Room.) But probably, even by the time I opened the book and saw him there, he was himself dead.

  As Georges and I tramped back to our rented house in the ash of the afternoon, he swore at me and I at him. Any liking was gone, and any tenderness. Which wouldn’t, naturally, prevent an orgy of famished coupling for another two days and three nights.

  When we passed below the poplar tree, the crow had returned there. It sat far up, raising its dishevelled head to the over-gilded sky and rasping out a succession of caws.

  Georges at once transferred his vitriol, or some of it, to the crow. “If I had a gun I’d shoot it!” And then to me, “I’d shoot you too, you damned Semite bugger.”

  But I only saw Cuerca’s knife as if skimme
d over my head; Remember me. Remember me.

  Georges, immune to his own repetitions, was scrabbling for another stone. I pushed him hard so he fell flat on the track. When he got up, he followed me in rebellious docility.

  “Bloody crow,” he muttered. “Crow-crow-crow. Why do you want to protect it? What use is it? It’s old and diseased and worthless. It’s nothing.”

  The crow lifted itself out of the quills of the poplar. It spread its wings and sprang into the sky.

  “Look, Georges,” I said. “Do you see? It can fly.”

  From a fragmentary MS by Judas Garbah, collated and adapted by Anna Garber, his sister.

  The Crow

  Chosen by Craig Gidney

  I met Tanith Lee only once, at Eastercon in 2008. But by then we had already had a long correspondence via email and post. When we met in person, it was like greeting an old friend.

  I believe it was on a Sunday morning during that convention that Tanith told me about Judas, the brother of Esther Garber, the Jewish lesbian writer she channelled (see Fatal Women: The Esther Garber Novellas). Judas, she told me over a pint of cider she’d bought me, was Esther’s half-brother. He was gay and lived in Egypt, and, like Esther, transmitted fiction to Tanith via spiritual channels. (By the way, Tanith was well aware of how this sounded and had a certain gallows humour about the process).

  A year or less later, the plans to publish a follow up to Fatal Women fell through. At the time, I was volunteering for Lethe Press, who had published my debut, Sea, Swallow Me and Other Stories. I managed to broker a publication deal for the new collection, entitled Disturbed By Her Song, which was to feature short fiction by both the Garbers. “The Crow” is Judas Garbah’s most Tanith-like piece in that collection, full of the menacing beautiful atmosphere she was a master at creating.

  Craig Laurance Gidney is the author of the collections Sea, Swallow Me & Other Stories (Lethe Press, 2008), Skin Deep Magic (Rebel Satori Press, 2014), the Young Adult novel Bereft (Tiny Satchel Press, 2013) and The Nectar of Nightmares (Dim Shores, 2015). He lives in his native Washington, DC. Website: craiglaurancegidney.com.

  White as Sin, Now

  The initial notion behind this last novella was to form something like a pack of cards, brightly coloured sections that could almost be pulled out at random, and reshuffled in any order. Pretty soon, though, the story-line asserted itself, and drilled the pack into an ordered regiment.

  Many of my obsessions have crowded into it, including queens and dwarfs, wolves and virgins and priests, deep snows, flowery meadows, ruins. The omnipresent forest appears again, also, in person, and in two distinct guises.

  A last excursion then, into the wood.

  The Dwarf (the Red Queen)

  The dwarf Heracty balances on the rim of a frozen fountain, drawing pictures with his nails in the ice. His handsome face is set into the frame of a great leonine head applicable to a muscular man six feet tall. Heracty’s form is that of an elf. But he has, too, an elfs eyes, long, aslant, and crystal-green.

  Engaged on the scales of a mermaid, Heracty pauses, listening. His hearing is so acute, his ears sometimes hear noises that do not exist. He must decide now whether this sound physically belongs to the world, is a phantom, or a memory. Presently Heracty becomes sure that two narrow feet in shoes are descending a flight of cold stones.

  He turns a little, looking sideways from his slanting eyes.

  Held high in an archway over the stair are towers resembling a crown of thorns, on a half-disc of twilight. From that point, the Upper Palace drops like a cliff into a riverbed.

  And from those heights she has again come down.

  It is always at this hour, just as the sun goes away. In the ghostly ‘tweentime, when all pale things pulse and stare . . . the white beasts of the fountain, the roses of snow across the gardens.

  When she comes out suddenly from the arch at the bottom of the stair, she also is glimmering as if luminous.

  She only looks straight ahead, beyond the fountain and the winter lawn, to a second arch, a second falling staircase. She does not see Heracty, has never seen him there, as she passes by like a sleepwalker.

  The wide eyes of the Queen are so astute, Heracty knows, she sometimes glimpses things that do not exist.

  As before, he slides from the fountain’s rim, and silently follows her.

  They then descend twenty flights of steps one after another, and the nineteen terraces between.

  The Dwarf’s First Interview with His Grandmother

  On a bitter morning in spring, mother and son went to visit the grandmother in her marble house.

  The woman was hardly more than thirty-five years of age, but with old, terrible, unhuman, alligator eyes.

  To begin with she did not upbraid Heracty’s mother, but only questioned her on domestic matters. The boy sat motionless and dumb on the rugs. He was very much aware of himself and of his mother’s tense and trembling awareness of him. But his grandmother, by a slight flexing of her colossal will, had shut him out, so that he was not in the chamber at all. Until finally:

  ‘It’s a curse that struck you,’ announced the grandmother to her daughter. ‘I don’t begin to guess who you wronged, to incur it. If I had my way, such things would be smothered as soon as their nature was evident.’ Every syllable referred, of course, to Heracty.

  The mother whispered, as she had done on many occasions, ‘His father was normal. Straight, well-made –’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said the grandmother, ‘and between you, you managed this. A monster.’ Now she bent her awful glance on the boy. ‘I have come to a decision,’ said Heracty’s grandmother. His mother waited in abjection, and he in fear. ‘The Prince collects freaks. He has got into his possession, so I hear, a two-headed dog, a unicorn, a gulon. And besides, six of this kind, half-men – though a pair are reckoned to be females, so I’m told.’

  ‘You mean my son is to go up into the court of the Prince?’ asked Heracty’s mother, astonished.

  ‘No. Into the Prince’s menagerie.’

  The Hunter (the Young Girl)

  While the vampire lies sleeping, its soul, or what passes for it, roams the night, dreaming it is a wolf.

  The season is winter, therefore snow covers the forests, hills and plains, and far away the mountains blackly glow upon a blacker sky where all the stars are out. Between the black and the white, the black wolf runs.

  Presently there is a small stone house on the dark, with one lit pane.

  The wolf runs among the fir trees. He raises himself up, something now between man and creature. His eyes of colourless mercury meet the image of a poor room, where a girl sits sewing by the hearth.

  The wolf-soul does not see a girl. What it sees is a stream of living holy light far brighter than the dying wood on the fire, and an icon burning in it, as if in a cathedral window. There is a white hand containing red blood, plying the silver needle, a bending throat like the stem of a goblet of glass.

  She puts her hair back from her cheek, and in that moment hears a noise outside, which is like the murmur of the trees, internalised, the rhythm of the sea in a shell.

  Rising, the girl leaves her task. She has been stitching an altar-cloth for the church in the valley. But her eyes and hands, her shoulders, her very brain, are tired now. It is a relief for her to walk to the window of the room, to look out.

  There is no moon. The forest stands against the door, and the wall of the dark. She beholds her own face reflected on the pane, transparent as a spirit. The strange noise comes again.

  The girl lifts the latch of the door, and going out on the snow which so far is unmarked, prints it with the signature of her own bare feet. Forgotten, the door is left open behind her.

  She thinks she sees for an instant a tall male figure against the fir trees, but it has the head of a wolf. Then there is also a pale-faced man, and two eyes of iron.

  She moves forward, leaving her last message on the snow.

  And abruptly the darkness en
gulfs her. She vanishes. Without a cry, she is gone for ever.

  The Red Queen (the Lost Child)

  Innocin, the Queen, has become conscious only gradually that something follows her. At first, she believes it to be a cat, then, later, a child. But the presence is subtly more imminent. Crossing through the deep shadows of pillared gullies, the Lower Palace, she realises that what is mysteriously on her track is nothing less – or more – than one of her stepson’s pet dwarfs.

  She wonders if the Prince himself has sent this spy. But surmise fades. Such matters have no interest.

  In the shadows, the blood-red mantle of the Queen, limned with white ermine, her hair like red-bronze surrounding an ivory face, are elements of a female.

  She enters a long corridor with a low ceiling, intricately carved. For all the hundreds of times she has traversed this thoroughfare, Innocin has never properly regarded the caving. She does not know what it represents although she has seen it over and over.

  The was a day when she looked into her mirror. The light cut sharply as broken porcelain against one side of her face. She saw that she had lost her youth. It was then that she thought of a young girl, dressed in purest palest white, the sin of her husband, the dead King. Somewhere within the enormous labyrinth of the Palace, between the topmost towers and the deepest basements, the girl must have secreted herself. The afternoon had passed, and the sun gone down. But that sunset the Queen became, like a star, certain of her course.

  She descended then the stairways to the terrace with the lawn and the great fountain. It had been autumn still, and sallow leaves lay adrift on the water of the basin.