by Tanith Lee
Nothing disturbed the preoccupation of Innocin. She had crossed the terrace of the lawn and progressed down twenty further flights. She searched night after night, among decayed architecture, and neglected rooms, for the unmistakable, beautiful young girl.
So far, she has not found her.
Sometimes there is a glimpse or a clue – the white flicker of a skirt between two columns, a sigh that circles an upper gallery where no one seems to be and, on ascending, where no one is. Or a rose moulded from snow, poised in a hollow vase of ice.
The Hunter’s Prey (the Dark Priest)
As a small child she had played about the cottage, a darling of the entire family. The truth was, the child did not belong to them at all. At midnight once, going out to make water, the man of the house had found an infant huddled in his doorway. It was late in summer, the nights not yet cold, but the child shivered and moaned. Conversely, although she could form noises, she had never apparently been taught human language. She could tell them nothing.
The woman had lost her baby some months before. This seemed the returns of heaven. Her husband was a woodcutter, quite prosperous, having three men in his employ, besides two strapping sons.
The household took in the girl-child, and gave her a village name.
Her origins she forgot instantly, except sometimes in nervous dreams. Then the woman would comfort her. ‘Here is your mother,’ the woman would confide, ‘you’re safe, my baby.’ The man and the two boys brought her dolls and baubles from the town. Her childhood was happy and carefree.
However, about nine years old, by some arcane law, she had become a woman, and all was changed. She had work to do at which first she laboured diligently. But, as there was never respite when she grew bored or exhausted, her duties soon turned to drudgery. It did not occur to any of them, perhaps she had been born for something else.
While years sprang in flowers on the turf beyond the house, or fell in sculpted cones from the branches of the fir trees, the woodcutter’s daughter also unremembered she had ever been a happy, carefree child.
She was the maidservant of her father and two brothers, and her mother’s nurse, for the woman waxed sickly. The evening before the girl’s fourteenth birthday – that is, the night-day of her discovery in the door of the stone house – her stepmother died.
‘She shan’t marry now,’ said neighbours, down the valley in the village street. ‘She must tend her own. She’s got men enough to care for.’
A new priest had taken up his office at the church not long before. He was tall and slender, with a broad low brow, and his hair – untonsured, for this was a wild place – was black as the wing of a crow.
The young girl, seeing him stand above the coffin of her step-mother’s corpse, dreamed a waking dream, which that night was translated. She believed she was a nun, gowned and coifed in snowy white. She served a dim altar where a tall crucifix gleamed, a man’s pale body hammered on to it.
She would go to church every holy day, and often visited her stepmother’s grave. She never approached the priest directly, but when he requested of his flock various attentions to the church, the young girl, though burdened by duties to home and kindred, gave her service.
The other women free to do so were mostly old, or else fat, sullen widows. The young girl felt herself shine strangely among them, a clear lily in withered reeds.
That was a terrible winter for wolves. They preyed on the sheepfolds and the byres, and several children were taken, or so it was supposed. One lean black wolf was seen frequently, but though the men scoured the forests round about, and laid snares, this animal was never trapped or killed.
The Dark Priest (the Wolfshead)
The priest elevates the Host, an offering and invitation to God. It is a moment of supreme sanctity, of supreme savagery even. Less substantially, he senses the consciousness of those persons who fill up the building, trailing from his lifted hands. A vast light, without tint or radiance, enspheres the church. And he is the arrow-head of the flight, fired out toward the celestial target of the omnipresent, awful, eternal, invisible, and actual, centre of all things. A ray of the sinking sun, unearthly and lemon-green, pierces through the window, penetrates the body of the priest – And at that instant the door of the church crashes wide.
The priest’s awareness is smashed in pieces.
He turns, slowly lowering the sacred element. His black eyes give to him a scene of the sudden and the inappropriate. Whatever it may be proved to be – the onslaught of a local calamity, death, plague, or war, this interruption is to him only an unforgivable sacrilege.
A body of men stands in the nave, staring from side to side, in their hands some makeshift weapons. They are the inhabitants of outlying parts. They seldom enter the village save to get their ration of beer. Now it is not beer they want. The woodcutter’s second son thrusts forward. He bellows insanely into the church: ‘Out! Out! Demon! Out!’ And swings up his axe.
‘The Devil’s hiding in your flock, shepherd,’ says another man roughly, to the priest. ‘It went by night and murdered his sister.’
The congregation starts to its feet, becomes a beast of many limbs and eyes and voices. The church is no longer a special place. The priest does not remonstrate. He sets down the precious Host, and feels keenly how it goes back into dust. The last of the vivid sunset is perishing round the feet of trampling peasants. There is nothing to be done, or said.
Arrogantly the priest watches from his altar as the mob, not finding after all the one suspected, blunders forth on to the greenly embered snow, bolts and plunges up an incline, collides with darkness at the entry of a hovel near the village cess-pit. Great blows shake the flimsy hut. Even from the church-door the priest hears them. He is very cold.
Shortly, a half-wit man who subsists in the hovel, the tender of the midden, is brought out on to the snow. The villagers search him, looking for marks of the Devil, tufts of feral hair, claws, certain lupine deformities of jaw, teeth and forehead. Presumably they uncover them all. While this goes on, the half-wit smiles courteously, and moves himself this way and that, in order to be helpful.
Next, still smiling and assisting them, he goes up the hill with the men, and the brother of the young girl – fifteen years of age, who, the night before, was found lying among the fir trees by her father’s cottage, her throat tom open like a winter rose.
The crowd vanishes over the hill. Presently a scream sounds, shrill and sheer from the forest’s edge above.
The priest does not make any gesture, except that, going back into the empty church, now closed already by shadow, he shuts and bars God’s door.
Heracty’s Second Interview with His Grandmother
Having reached the age of sixteen Heracty, the Prince’s seventh dwarf, decided once again to visit his grandmother. This time he imagined he could do so on his own terms.
He dressed in a suit of clothes of wan green satin, a mulberry-red cloak, and wore in his ear a large pearl. He rode a most charming dappled pony, another of the Prince’s gifts, and took with him for escort his little page not yet eight years old. Over the saddle of the pony, too, had been placed a couple of embroidered bags containing delicacies.
The gardens of the enormous eccentric Palace were equally vast and varied. Downhill lay the grandmother’s marble box, a house given her decades before by an admirer (Heracty’s unintentional grandfather), when she frequented the court. To get there first Heracty, the pony and page, must navigate an ornamental river. Then came a number of high floral steppes. Next they entered a mock forest, densely planted with pine, fir, rhododendron and cedar trees. Even at noon it was dusk in this forest, and here and there clockwork animals prowled and howled. At the turn of the track, a grey wolf pounced out on them, and the small page had hysterics.
‘Hush,’ said Heracty, who had been in the forest before. And he threw the clockwork wolf a peach from the bags, which it greedily and realistically ate, trotting off afterwards to bury the stone.
; Beyond the forest lay an acre or two of modest meadows, and here the grandmother had her abode. As they got on to the path, the dwarf could see, across the shoulder of the landscape, the blurred valleys below where his mother had lived. But by this time she was dead.
The grandmother of Heracty was now not much over forty. Her complexion was nearly flawless as a girl’s, her eyes had advanced from alligator to dragon.
‘Well,’ she said, looking her grandson over, satin, pearl, pony, page, and bags.
Heracty had the page distribute his presents. The grandmother fingered some of them and set them aside. The food and flasks of fine wine caused her short fits of harsh laughter.
‘What a splendid fellow!’ she jeered.
Heracty sat down, although, in her chairs, his feet hung in limbo far above the rugs.
‘You did me a good turn, Granny,’ said the dwarf, ‘when you persuaded my mamma to send me into the Prince’s service.’
‘My idea was merely to get you out of the way and out of my sight.’
‘Yet here I am again. What a sad nuisance.’
‘Your tongue,’ she said, ‘has grown longer, if nothing else of you has. Or is it,’ she amended, ‘true? That which is said of the loins of your sort.’
The dwarf blushed, could not help it. But he had been well seasoned at the court, and he replied, ‘Those few among the Prince’s eldest servants who remember you always remark you had less manners than a pig. Naturally, I defend you, and only confess the sin of lying on holy days.’
The grandmother took one candied nut from the gifts and bit it in two. She then dropped both bites in the fireplace.
‘What do you want, monster?’
‘Tell me,’ said Heracty immediately, ‘about Innocin, the Red Queen.’ ‘When you hear so many remarks, how is it you never heard that?’
Heracty sat and waited. He made his face quite blank and his elf’s body immobile. At last, the grandmother shifted.
‘She was a slut in the kitchen, or something of that kind. He saw her, raised her, bedded her, became besotted, so married her. She’s now Queen, but she was his second wife. The first died. When the King died himself, and his lechery with him, the Prince took power. It remains to be seen if he will ever get himself properly recognised, become King like his father. But for her, she’s gone mad. So she wanders about, looking for a vanished daughter she had by the King.’
‘A lost child?’ said Heracty. He considered. ‘Did it die at birth? Was the matter hidden?’
‘How should I tell you?’ asked the grandmother, ‘What do I know?’
‘Granny,’ said the dwarf, ‘in the basket of sugar-plums – I understand you’re fond of them – is one sweet containing a potent and unpleasing purgative. Without harming you, it will cause you extreme discomfort.’
‘Nasty little beast,’ said his grandmother, bright-eyed. ‘I’ll eat none of them.’
‘What a waste, and your favourites, too. The particular plum,’ he added, ‘is easy to identify, once I describe it.’
‘Perhaps you are lying again. And perhaps any way, you’d indicate the wrong plum.’
‘Perhaps. Or not.’
They sat then in silence some minutes, the dwarf a small elegant statue, she a lizard in a girl’s skin.
Finally she said this:
‘In the position I had at court, I learned that the Queen was to be thought of as barren. But it was not possibly the case. One infant, a girl, had certainly been born, but a portent made the Queen afraid of it, or her own shame at her low beginnings and bad blood. She sent it away into the forests, to be brought up among ignorant strangers.’
The dwarf sighed. ‘Her lost child is,’ he murmured, ‘her own youth.’ Granny threw all the sugar-plums in the fire.
The Menagerie (the Court)
Indeed, they live close to the Prince’s menagerie. On calm nights, when the music from the Upper Palace is not too lively, they may hear the gulon catawaul and screech at the full moon, or the unicorn clicketing up and down on its gemmed hoofs, though the dog of two heads is generally reticent.
The dwarfs had been given their own town at the foot of the Palace. Each house is a doll’s mansion, equipped with furnishings all the proper size, and with intelligent child servants always replaced in their tenth year. Rose gardens and knot gardens and gardens of topiary and water gardens, and so forth, make wondrous chessboard squares around the mansions. Everything is enclosed by a stout wall, whose gates are guarded at night by specially bred miniature mastiffs, who, introduced to the dwarfs as puppies, threaten to maul anyone who disturbs them. Only the prince himself, and his selected courtiers, can invade the sanctum whenever desired. But that is not often.
Heracty quickly became accustomed to the dwarfs’ estate. He grasped how they were patronised, yet simultaneously, how could he dislike anything that so suited, and that rendered him so comfortable.
The four fellow male dwarfs were comely and alert, two with high boyish voices which, in one case, flowed out into a clear alto instrument for song, seemingly much prized by the Prince. The two dwarfesses were remarkable for their charms and accomplishments, one blonde, one dusky. The latter had wed her dwarf suitor – the wedding had been a fête at the Palace; the Prince gave the bride away – and it was said the union produced a child. But as the baby evinced every sign of growing up into an ordinary woman, it too was taken off, as a potential cause of future grief to the parents.
Heracty, sent among the dwarf community when it was established, expanding it into an uneven number: seven, though never made unwelcome, stayed an outsider. He became instead a student of men, the other species. When summoned to delight the Prince by his presence, handsomeness and wit, Heracty on his side narrowly observed everyone about him. He definitely supposed that he came of another race, human, but unadulterated. What he saw of fully formed human behaviour confirmed this opinion.
It was at a banquet that, initially, Heracty beheld the Red Queen, the dead King’s widow.
She entered late, and the Prince rose graciously, and with ill- concealed boredom, to greet her. Seating herself, she stared about as if not knowing where she was, thinking it a dream. Occasionally she would take up some morsel from her plate, or begin to lift her goblet – but sustenance never reached her mouth, for obviously she forgot its purpose half-way. She wore a gown the shade of dying autumn, not a single jewel.
The Prince, comma demanding antics constantly that evening from Heracty, interrupted the dwarf’s study a hundred times. Courteous and wise, Heracty never once displayed his annoyance.
The Queen left the feast before midnight. Heracty was not permitted to leave until the men lay drunken in their chairs, or over the tables.
When the dawn breaks, Heracty frequently goes into the menagerie. Adjacent to the dwarfs’ enclosure, it is simple of access.
More often than not, the unicorn falls asleep at dawn, its muzzle laid on its flank, the curving horn, more swarthy than its hide, like the sinking crescent of the moon. The two-headed dog sits sadly, one head deep in thought and the other slumbering with the tongue hanging out.
But the gulon stalks its prettified pen, disdaining the luxury of its kennel. A fox-cat, it now looks most feline, but next second mostly canine, having strong features of both types. It is the colour of Queen Innocin’s banquet gown, and her hair, and Heracty has been told that combings of its long damascened fur are sometimes woven to trim her mantles.
The eyes of the gulon are rather like Heracty’s own, but lack any trace of courtly politeness or civilisation.
The gulon has been known to savage its keepers, one of whom lost an arm as a result. It is dissatisfied with its life and does not appreciate its uniqueness.
Heracty is wondering if Innocin the Queen has ever looked on the gulon.
When he witnessed her descent through the palace, sensed the wild, inane search, it fitted her like a costly necklace. It is a perfection. He could do no other thing.
He values it in her.
The Lost Child (the Palace)
The girl Idrel wakes like an early crocus.
She lifts her head and all about her lies the snow. Snow is her coverlet in a four-poster bed of ice. Slight wonder she dreamed she lay in coffin, but the coffin was of glass . . .
The girl gets to her feet. She does not feel the cold, only a deep desire to lie down again and sleep again – and this she believes is to be resisted. She is garbed only in a shift, and not, she guesses, her own. It covers her decently from neck to foot and even drags a little behind her as she walks. But for a shield against the winter it is useless. However, she is under protection. Feels it must be so. All the ways of the forest look alike to her. She consents to walk forward, in the direction she faced on walking, rising.
A stealthy umbra permeates the wood, it might be any time of day, though not of night. The snow is packed very hard and does not take an impression of the bare souls of Idrel. She expects wild animals lair among the firs and cedars, and perhaps will run out at her. Twiceshe catches a glimpse of some sinuous thing, the colour itself of the forest dusk – but this does not approach.
Sometimes a branch or bough cracks under the snow’s weight, startling, like a whiplash. There are no other sounds but for the glacial ringing of silence itself,
How long the girl walks, in distance or time, she is unsure. But suddenly, the trees have thinned, and there ahead is a thick sky of grey nacre, and the terraces of a snow-hill cut into it.
Ghostly winds run on the hill, and blow the snow like white steam along the ground. Idrel climbs with three winds taking up her hair and throwing it to each other, and then down, clutching at her ankles, slapping her cheeks, and her eyes fill with slow tears. Then, at the summit, she discovers an odd road made all of solid ice.