Tanith By Choice: The Best of Tanith Lee

by Tanith Lee

  ~

  I’m a historian. I did not set out to be, but it’s where I ended up and, by and large, it sits well with me. But historians and histories (and I mean histories, for there is no one universal History, but rather many overlapping and equal valid histories) have this in common. They are inclined to look at events sideways, to wonder about roads not travelled and to seek journeys into other minds. In that sense, we are a lot like writers. ‘After the Guillotine’ is a story Tanith wrote inspired by her novel The Gods are Thirsty, which is set during and about the French Revolution. That latter is a key event in the histories of western Europe and the development of new systems of government. It occupies a lot of space in the minds of many historians, philosophers, economists and political thinkers. The Gods Are Thirsty is a historical novel. But in ‘After the Guillotine’, however, Tanith added a new motif to her theme and looked at the revolution, several of its central figures and their actions sidelong, asking what if, how come and if only.

  It’s a lovely reflection on death and guilt and our conception of what might happen after. And it’s a powerful commentary on history.

  The historian in me loves it. So does the writer.

  – Kari Sperring

  Kari Sperring is an academic mediaeval historian, and author of five books on early Welsh, Irish, and Scandinavian history. Her fantasy novel Living with Ghosts won the 2010 Sydney J Bounds Award and was shortlisted for the William L Crawford Award.

  Taken at His Word

  1

  Olvero the Scholar left the Governor’s court, intending to kill himself by drinking the poisonous ink from his ink-well. It was not long before sunrise. The sky was black as the intended ink, slit by one prescient, envenomed slash of red.

  Consumed by self-pity Olvero leaned on a wall, and wept.

  Yet, even while weeping, he heard the simultaneous nagging of that stern, pure, obdurate voice of his mind. Though he might have every justification for pitying himself, he must resist. Self-pity was useless. Just as suicide, in this instance, was despicable. Others had a right to both self-pity and self-destruction, but Olvero (Olvero admonished himself) had not. He was young, strong, healthy, not ugly, and though his last cash had gone, still not entirely without potential funds. For could he not sell most of his possessions and so gain enough to support himself, at least another month? What, after all, did he need with the silver ring his adulterous mother had left him in place of herself? Or the little blue glass goblet he had rescued from a court official’s banquet, where all else was being drunkenly smashed? Why too did Olvero need a quiet apartment with white walls and having a view of tall trees in which birds sang, at dawn and sunfall? Or, come to that, a supportive chair? A mattress? A roof? For God’s sake, let him lose all and wander in rags and weather. See what gems he could write then, damn all his enemies to Hell.

  Ah. The stern voice, as had been the weeping voice, was now subsumed in a raging one.

  It was the City Governor’s fault. He had deigned, after three months of the scholar’s life spent in unaffordable bribes and waiting, to consider an epic drama the scholar had written. Tonight, however, the Governor had rejected the drama, having himself kept the scholar waiting thirteen months. This was done during a supper, to which the scholar had been summoned, and placed at a very low table. The rejection was staged just before the meat course when, having invited the scholar to stand up, the Governor and his courtiers regaled him with their censure and ridicule and – worse – ‘disappointment’ in the ‘poorness’ of his work.

  “My last meal in a nest of ignorant vipers!” Oh, God, thought the scholar, wiping his eyes on his sleeve, if I begin to write now as tritely as I speak – I deserve no better than a dose of poisoned ink.

  The birds were singing beautifully when he reached his room.

  He stood by the window and stared at sun rising from river, turning the foliage of all the framing trees, and all the feathers of the flying birds, to gold, carmine and amber.

  Then he poured himself a cup of chocolate. It was the very last cup.

  On the desk he spread his scorned epic, leafed through its pages, read here and there a line or two. His heart leapt. Though he would never claim perfection for any of his work, Olvero had known, since his eighteenth year, that what he did was of worth; was worthy too of notice. For it was not, really, his. That is, it was given him. It was a gift to him – or perhaps some reward he had earned by other work, in some other mystical and forgotten world inhabited before this one. Its glories came from there, that higher source, God, or gods, or angels – or even non-malignant demons possibly – which possessed him whenever he sat to the paper and dipped a quill into ink. Any flaws, of course, were due to his own misunderstanding – or mishearing – of the silent yet omniscient guidance which thereafter fired his brain and moved his hand.

  He had been blessed. Olvero knew it. And yet if some vast power had chosen him as an imperfect yet acceptable conduit, the mortal power of men now spurned him. More, it seemed set to ob1iterate him.

  At the thought, rage towered up again in Olvero, potent as lust. But he stamped upon the rage. He shut it in his heart, tightly bound it, locked on it the doors of his mind. For rage would interfere with the mediumistic process of his work. As indeed could great sorrow – the memory of his mother’s departure, the later loss of a young woman he had deeply loved, who had fallen away from love of him . . . or extreme physical pain – as when he had been beaten by a gang of thieves for not having enough money to satisfy their rapacity. ..(also let it be said, for defending himself and breaking a pair of their noses).

  Nevertheless, of these three distractions – rage, sorrow, pain – rage seemed the worst. It blocked and muddied the receptive channel. It must not break loose again. However many deserters, thieves, governors, monsters he was compelled to confront.

  And so he sat down and closed the manuscript of his epic and drew towards him a piece of fresh paper – one of the hundred final sheets he had.

  His urge was only to write a short piece, perhaps even a poem to praise the birds in the dawn. To bid them farewell, for the approaching day when he must leave his apartment.

  But instead his mind slipped strangely askew. He thought first of a ghost story he had heard only yesterday, in the small tavern where sometimes he took a glass of wine. But the story was old now that he considered it. Then his mind – was it fumbling? After all still too dismayed to seek true dreams and images? – his mind slewed like a sailed craft to the wind. Olvero stared in vague surprise at an inner procession of odd, uncanny freaks. After the predatory ghost, a ghoul, said for years to prey on the burial ground of the city’s cathedral. Next, an undine who lurked in a village well, drawing young men to their deaths. A murderous witch came after, with rats in her hair... a stone-inflicting gorgon whose own hair comprised snakes... a devil of the Eastern lands that danced in a sand storm, with ready teeth as pointed as awls.

  Olvero stood up. He thrust away from the table.

  To work with such nonsense was absurd.

  He should sleep.

  Yet even as he moved towards the mattress in the alcove, Olvero turned about again. He recrossed the room, leaned over the paper and, with the quill fresh dipped, wrote there very large and black, and with many curlicues of the sort he seldom if ever employed, one word. Vampire.

  Stepping back once more, he regarded this effort.

  He swore, both amused and disgusted. Best leave it all, go sleep, awake refreshed. Evidently, he could do nothing legitimate till then.

  The Scholar Olvero sold his winter coat, (it was not yet autumn) a jacket reserved for grand occasions; (such as the Governor’s disgraceful dinner); his boots, the blue goblet, one of the pillows from his mattress-bed... There were also things of lesser value. They all went. And with their unopulent returns, he kept himself in cheap lamp-oil, cheap ink, cheap food, dull husk-filled coffee and watered wine. His rent though seemed likely to plunge into arrears. Olvero borrowed from a usurer. (Leec
hes, all he dealt with, yet no worse than the Governor.)

  During this while, a matter of eighteen days, Olvero found he could not write a single word.

  Or, ultimately and bizarrely, that was all he could write.

  Coming back to his desk on the very evening following his return from the Governmental palace, he had seated himself to construct the brief simple ode previously considered. Now to sunset birds, carrolling a sinking disc.

  The trees were falling into deep black, and stars scorching through them, when Olvero flung up from the table. He had written only gibberish, he believed. Masses of half-formed, unpunctuated sentences, verbs lacking nouns, and adjectives lacking meaning, and all of it with letters left out – things similar to carlet for scarlet, or rung for running, ght for night and inggni for singing.

  Olvero thought he had gone mad, and became afraid. He set himself to write at least one word carefully, readably. And found he wrote again the word Vampire. Then he attempted the word God and instead wrote Bark. Next Howl.

  After this he drank the last of his good wine, two cups. Then he wrote a prosaic list of things he must do – buying more cheap bread, stopping up a mouse-hole – and this all came out quite sensibly, spelled in the usual way and coherent.

  But nothing else other than such lists would come. He could not even describe the darkness of the night, nor the narrow lighted windows across the street, nor a fisherman’s fire on the river bank. This was like a horrible attack of lexicological hiccups or incurable stammering. Oh, he had known his ill-treatment by the Governor, (and by all those through the years who had belittled and tried to deny – or better, ruin – his gift) had harmed him. But surely not to such a pitch as to rob

  him of his true life, his ability to work.

  In the end, drunk on the last of the strong wine, he sat and wrote over and over the one word he could now pen. Vampire. Vampire. VAMPIRE. And each time he ornamented it more and more. He draped it in coils and spirals, dots, slots, festoons of calligraphic decoration. Until, eventually, it seemed less a word than a briar-clump, or curving wall of thorns worthy of some fairy-tale imprisonment, that both shut in and shut out, threatening mutilation and death to any trying to get through it either way.

  Next day then, and for seventeen days after, waking generally late, Olvero the Scholar wrote angrily across two, three, even four whole sheets of paper. He wrote over and over and only the ghastly and primitive word for a nightmare creature in which he, his enlightened self, did not believe. Vampire. Vampire. VAMPIRE. Vampire.

  Then, not even pausing to sip water, he encumbered the word with swathes of inky ornament. He went out only reluctantly and after noon, in order to sell one or other more possession, or to visit the usurious establishment.

  On the eighteenth day, Olvero did not leave his room.

  He had nothing left to sell. Even his mother’s ring was sold. Most of his paper was gone, too. Only one little stoop of ink remained.

  Not even, now, enough to poison himself.

  Perhaps, instead, he might eat the papers with their inky alphabetic briar forests of vampire vampire vampire.

  The birds sang heartlessly at the dying sun.

  Birds did not care for the sun’s nightly death. Nor its morning birth-agonies. Nor would they care at all if Olvero, a mere human, could not sit and look at them, nor praise their voices. Another would do as well at the window. Or none at all.

  By flickering, fading lamplight, Vampire wrote Olvero with enormous attention and in the last ink, across the height and width of a single sheet of paper.

  Tomorrow he would wheedle another small loan, leaving his shoes as surety. He would then get drunk in the tavern on weak beer, next drowning himself in the river. Make the birds sing for that!

  Vampire: deceiver, cheat, criminal, parasite, perpetrator of violence, adversary having implacable and undeserved powers, anti-god, un-thing, mindless drainer of blood and life...

  Olvero dreamed he was still scribbling the word on and on. Yet there was a difference. Before, he had written Vampire first, then ensconced it in draperies of ink. Now in the dream, he commenced with a proliferation of inked coils and curls and curdles, and out of these gradually if remorselessly the letters of the word Vampire grew. Like a serpent it rose from two hundred score of looping, swirling talons.

  The scholar opened his eyes. He was awake?

  His room, in darkness after he had blown out the lamp, was now lit with a soft creamy radiance. Perhaps the moon had risen, and shone in at the window. No, it had not. The sky beyond the glass was black with latest night or most premature morning. The moon was dead. It would never shine again.

  In here, however –

  The pages covered with the word (Vampire) had somehow been dislodged and scattered in a loose heap on the floor. These were what gave off the glow, being now mostly pure white, unspoiled by marks. Instead the inked and thorn-like curlicues had also risen straight up, just as in the dream, right off the paper. In the white-lit air now the darkly molten spiky spiral hedges knotted and unreeled, embracing each other, strangling each other with wet-gleaming and spiny tentacles and feelers.

  Olvero stared. He had become only eyes.

  With those he watched what next emerged from the dance of the separated Word.

  The shape was elongate and thin. Yet instantly solid, opaque and actual as marble and ebony. It also swayed and wriggled its long body, which while seeming legless as that of a huge worm, still displayed arms and hands, a neck, a face, a torrent of spooling hair, all of which wove and rippled in restless, ceaseless gesturings. The constant, almost tidal flux of it, having once formed, nevertheless retained a basic hardness and permanence. Nowhere was this more evident than in the awful face. It was a dead-white mask, equipped with all required features – but formed of a sort of – living? – alabaster. And where its eyes burned between the white lids they were only black – black as ink. And the lips were wet-black too, and between them showed a wet-ink-black mouth and an ink-black pointed tongue. And from the upper jaw extruded two extended canine teeth, the whitest things of all, and glittering.

  Even as Olvero watched, this structure of animated writing folded suddenly as a closing fan. All motion stopped. Balanced on its black tail, the creature now represented utter stasis. Only the black tongue flicked once across the black lips, and the ink pools of the eyes were shut for a split second in a white-lidded blink.

  Either it smiled at Olvero, or that was the thing’s habitual expression in repose.

  On the floor, the sheets of paper lay sodden and limp, not a single written mark on them. (Tomorrow the pages would have fallen to pieces. The ink-well – and the air – would be empty of darkness).

  But now the creature hovered, elevated maybe an inch or so above the floor. It was quite impossible to tell if it had either or any gender. As for intelligence, it was not to be said. Yet intent it did seem to have. It smiled at Olvero, or through Olvero, a few more moments, during which the scholar, who had become only eyes, felt himself also adrift in the atmosphere of the room. Then the Vampire gathered itself together like a vast skein of black and snow-white wool. Mobile once more, it spun into itself, flattened, compressed, became like a twisted stalk of salty bitumen – and vanished.

  At once all light was gone. All dark, too.

  Olvero dropped away down miles of nothingness, and did not come back to himself again until light had refilled his window, and the rent-collecting landlord hammered on his door.

  2

  There was plague in the city. Everyone spoke of it.

  A man would, in the day, be healthy and about his business or pleasures as usual. Come next birdsong dawn, someone or other would find him – on the open street, tucked behind some wall of the tavern, in his own chamber, flung across floor or bed – a chalk-white corpse already stenchful and turning rotten, covered with peculiar lesions and wounds that were dryly black, since no blood remained in his body. Or her body; women were often victims too.

&nb
sp; What kind of plague was it then? Most citizens knew the name for it but in the first days none would mention that name. Then they did, almost all of them. Vampire.

  “Vampire,” they said, whispered, muttered, shrieked, and hurried to the churches and cathedrals for blessed objects and holy water. None of these things did any good. It seemed the plague creature was not itself religious, had not the intellectual wit to reverence the might of God or gods – nor even demons – for counter-spells did no good either.

  None had seen theVampire. Or, only the dead had done so. (A wife, say, rousing from a sickening deathly sleep more like a trance, would wake beside her husband to find him a corpse. It would seem the night-fiend was selective, had chosen between them – while she had been spared any sight of it, or what it did).

  It preyed everywhere, through all strata of society, from the lowest to the highest. Although... a certain partiality, aside even from its tendency to choose, might have been observed in its – what could one call it? – diet.

  Fathers who bullied and whipped their sons, mothers who abandoned their sons while still children, girls who rejected their young suitors, tutors who scorned their pupils, thieves who beat those they robbed, officials who took bribes and patronizingly prevaricated... usurers, evicting landlords, tavern-keepers who refused an old customer a little beer gratis... Such were the feasts of the vampire. On these it supped, and left them whiter than their own bones, colder than winter, and riddled all over with black coils and curlicues of wounds, almost like a devilish scrivening.

  3

  Veranilla the Courtesan went to the Governor ‘s palace, intending to provide him with sex, as their customary bargain was. It was late in the afternoon and the sky was rosy as a peach. Only the east showed a single hint of shadow.

  Quite satisfied with her life, the courtesan felt neither unease nor resentment. She had been well-trained since her fourteenth year, and never used unkindly by her mother (also of the sorority) nor her early patrons. By the time she encountered any patrons of the rougher sort she was established, and able to make them rue the day they were born.