About the only thing, Wolfgang thought, about being regarded as an old, scholarly sot was that people confided and gossiped when he went among them. The late King and Queen Hedwig Elisabeth had found his ability to charm stories from their subjects very helpful. Wolfgang himself saw it as a mixed blessing. Long before the folk at the castle heard, Wolfgang knew that the changeling down in the village wandered by night in the graveyard, where she picked flowers and sang spells over them. Worst yet, when the moon was high, rumor had it, she would dance amidst the tombstones.
Old men sleep little: the next moon-rise found Wolfgang kneeling in the chapel where the Prince's banner (a swan, argent, on an azure field beneath a crescent moon) overhung his empty tomb. That they had never found Prince Siegfried's body was a familiar, even a homely grief by now.
Moonlight filtered through the delicate rose window, moonlight and something more: lightnings without rain or thunder. The night before, St. Elmo's fire had flickered on the castle turrets. Some called it a sign of the trouble that had befallen. Fire walked the roofs, and, in the lake, which had fed the people roundabout for as long as anyone or his grandsire could remember, the fish died because the water turned from fresh to salt. The fishermen had taken especially to avoiding one spot in the lake after a boat capsized by the great white rock that resembled a snow owl. Now there was mourning in the village, some hunger, and the promise of more privation in the cold season that approached. And the swans whom some called the village's luck were feeble.
Wolfgang read those signs like a primer. Perhaps they were indications of magic and perhaps not; he neither knew nor cared. They were, however, signs that soon the people would seek a scapegoat for their misfortunes. A lost girl who never spoke and who haunted tombs by night was perfect for such a role.
Nor was it only the commons who sought someone to blame. Wolfgang had seen Benno speaking with those strangers from the East Marches. One of them bore a heavy, black-letter volume. Malleus Maleficarum, the Hammer of Witches, was stamped on the worn leather binding. Wolfgang had glanced into that book once and seen only torture of the helpless, the deluded, and the simple. He saw a mute, frightened child strapped to one of the instruments in the crude, lurid woodcuts, her mouth open in a silent scream. How would she confess, even with a lie, if she could not speak?
And what of Jurgen, who loved her? He was strong enough to withstand torture for a long time, yet his only crime was to love a maid whom he had rescued. Wolfgang thought of the young man, so like the dead Prince, his fingers crushed, his spirit broken, and he was hard put not to cry out in grief.
Benno was too angry to judge wisely. But give him his due; there was reason to fear.
Shivering a little in the dank chapel, Wolfgang rose from creaking knees, and limped out through the small door in the chapel's carven narthex.
What he saw froze him in his place.
Like children intent on the most innocent of games, Jurgen and the girl knelt in the shadow of a tombstone so old that the engraving on it wasn't honest Latin, but spiky, angular chisel blows and serpentine scrawls, much worn away by generations of the curious. The maid's eyes were fixed upon her lap, and Jurgen's eyes upon her with such an intensity of love and pro-tectiveness that it hurt Wolfgang to watch. Just so Prince Siegfried had regarded Odette that night before the fatal dawn. Just so he had regarded the dark witch Odile before she had scorned him. Just so he had looked before he and Odette embraced for the last time, and he had followed her up the cliffs to hurl . . . Wolfgang would not think of that. It had taken an eternity for the two slender bodies to hit the water.
He glanced up at the quivering stars and fancied that he could hear a crystalline, sweet humming. After a time, he looked around. The stars were silent, but the humming continued. Gradually, he realized that it came from the lips of the girl who he had believed was mute.
"One more garland," Jurgen's voice came low. "And then what?"
The girl held out a chaplet adorned with pale, funereal flowers and what Wolfgang realized had to be her own hair. Jurgen took it and thrust it into hiding. The girl rose and began to dance, a series of steps about casting away, of greeting, of relief. At first, her motions were halting, but they gained speed and assurance as she circled the stones. For an instant, she stood poised as if listening to the music Wolfgang had thought that the stars were singing. Then she began an intricate, exultant series of flashing turns, her face spinning about, always turning toward Jurgen, spinning faster and faster with innocent,unselfconscious bliss. . .there was joy in that dance, and hope, and then the stirrings of some sad, benign power . . .
"Just as I told you," Benno's voice from the shadows broke the lovely spell. "Witch . . . and her warlock with her."
The girl broke out of her spins. Only her astonishing grace kept her from falling and harming herself. She staggered off-balance only for an instant, then rose to curtsy to Benno.
"Didn't I tell you that the village lay under a spell?" Benno demanded. "We'll have the good fathers here examine the witch and her lover. Take them!" He beckoned, and the black-robed strangers emerged from the shadows. Their eyes glistened in the light of the torches that they carried along with the heavy book in their arms, and they could not take their eyes from their prey.
If she had her voice back, the girl would have shrieked that she needed more time. Now they would seize her, those cold-eyed men in black, so unlike the gentle man who had laid hands on her brow, gazed into her eyes, and not recoiled from her. He had even blessed her, "Not for what thou art, but for what thou wouldst be." These men saw only what they wanted her to be — what she had been. Dark beauty. Witch. Fallen princess, not a creature of ashes, love, and hope.
Though the men of the village shrank from the task, they finally came forward to seize her. She spread her fingers wide, as if clutching at fragile stems to stay rooted where she was. When they pulled her away, the flowers came free in her hands. Frantically, she began to weave them into one last crown.
"What about her man?" came a voice behind her.
Poor Jurgen had done her only good. How much he looked like the Prince that she had betrayed while she was Odile. But he loved her as she was now. If he kept very still, very silent now, he just might have a chance to live.
Of course, he did not.
It might be justice that she be forbidden to accomplish her dream of expiation. It might be that the fear and the silence were not sufficient penance; perhaps she needed further punishment before she could earn forgiveness. But Jurgen was innocent. Odile turned in her captors' lax hold to look at the fisher. Then — and how she despised herself for her fear! — her glance slid over to the bushes in which she had hidden the chaplets.
"What does she stare at?"
"Look!" ordered one of the men in the stark black robes.
Using a long stick, a reluctant fisherman drew the chaplets from their hiding place and flung them to lie at Jurgen's feet.
"In my country," the man opened the thick book, "there is a simple test for witches. Fling the witch into the water. It is the natural property of bodies to sink. Should she float, however, she is no woman but a witch . . ."
"What if she sinks?" The old man, the red-nosed one called Master Wolfgang, asked that contemptuously.
"Then she dies in a state of grace. Trust heaven to know its own. Unless, of course, you yourself dive in to save her. But I do not think that would be wise."
Wolfgang stared at Benno and his witchfinders. How Prince Siegfried would have mourned to see hate transforming his friend. Benno would never permit this girl to be fished out before she drowned. Natural properties be damned, Wolfgang snorted to himself. Hadn't these fools ever seen a swimmer? Certainly, they smelled as if bathing were something unknown to them. The live body's natural property was to float — unless you had to count anyone who was able to float as a witch. In that case, the witchfinders would simply have to condemn the village, the castle, and the
ir own ignorant selves. Best not even give them the glimmerings of such
an idea.
Wolfgang gestured at Jurgen to stay down. Probably the girl was doomed, but there was still a chance that Jurgen could be gotten off. Then the fisherman looked at her as she stood between her tall, reluctant guards — his old friends — and she tore away from them, twining the flowers she still clutched into a chaplet like those on the ground.
The stranger-priests shouted in outrage and holy horror. "Even now she works her spells. To the rocks with her!" They dragged her hands down to her sides and pushed her up the steep rock stairs, past the point at which Jurgen had found her, lost his heart, and maybe his soul along with it, all in the same moment, until they reached the peak from which Siegfried and his beloved had cast themselves. Wolfgang swallowed hard and looked away. He was glad to see that Benno looked sick.
You've got second thoughts now, have ye, lad?
From this height, the village looked very small, and the lake seemed leaden, except for the white owl-shape of the rock in its center. Now it resembled the skull of some bird of prey. By the shore floated the swans, their graceful necks bowed, their feathers dingy, and their movements sluggish, as if they were sickened by the water in which they lived. As the fishermen dragged the girl to the cliff's edge, the swans raised their heads to look at her. One opened its bill as if it might sing for the first and last time.
The girl shrank back, but her guards forced her to the brim as the blackrobes muttered their prayers of exorcism.
Wolfgang muttered a child's prayer, which was all he could remember at the moment. He reached for his flask, but found it empty. Then he heard shouts, rapid footsteps pounding up behind him. He felt a hard hand shove him aside — to think that he, at his age, would be set sprawling thus! Jurgen raced up to where Odile stood pinned. His arms were full of garlands: aster and asphodel, rosemary and rue.
Men tried to stop him or trip or hold him, but he dodged them all. My poor lad, Wolfgang thought. You have doomed yourself. Just like the Prince.
What looked like half of the men of the fishing fleet bore down upon Jur-gen, and Benno drew his sword. But Jurgen rushed to the cliff's brink and tossed the garlands into the water. Then he took the girl into his arms.
"At last we will be together," he said, and laid his cheek against her ashen hair as it whipped about them like the banner of some forlorn but starlit hope. People were reluctant to compel them, Wolfgang saw, and he had a brief, bleak hope that they might yet be spared.
"Get a boat pole up here and push them off!" shouted one man, and that hope quickly died.
Jurgen tightened his arms about the girl and moved between her and the mob. She gazed out of the water, where the flower crowns, twelve of them and one, floated untouched by the salt that slowly was killing all else within the lake.
Slowly, painfully, the swans came toward them. Odile raised her eyes. The night those others had died, a storm had risen. How she remembered the lightning and the wind. The wind! A tiny breeze blew, then strengthened, tossing her hair about her hot face. In toward the thirteen swans drifted the garlands. Each swan extended her neck, then plunged it delicately beneath a garland to emerge crowned with asphodels and aster, rosemary and rue . . . and a lock of silver hair.
The hands that pinioned Odile's arms went limp. She flung herself forward to kneel over the cliff, her arms outstretched. Tears burned down her face, and she fought to breathe. As the crowned swans turned in toward the land, moving more surely, more swiftly with every yard, she drew breath in a great sob.
"Odile," Jurgen tested the name, which had been that of the dark princess. "Is that truly your name?"
She had her hands over her face now, and tears dripped into them. Now he would know for certain, and now he would turn from her. She had all but cost him his life . . . and she might yet do that too. But he was kneeling at her side, was forcing her hands away so he could gaze into her eyes.
Now her tears dropped down her fingers and splashed into the lake far, far below.
"You can weep now," he marveled. "Odile — is that truly the name I should call you?"
"Give me another!" she cried. "Call me love!"
She buried her face against him. Now that the constraint that had locked her voice was gone, her tears came easily and brought healing with them. Where they dropped into the lake, light danced on the water. Blue ripples, the color of icemelt, spread out until the lake gleamed with healthful splendor. The owl-shaped rock began to crumble. The ripples caught it up, and it fell in on itself, and was gone.
As the sun rose, its light turned the long, flowing strands of Odile's hair to silver and shed glory on the crowns worn by the thirteen swans. It even cast a healing light on the faded gilt letter of the priests' book in the instant that they turned to go. But the lovers, lost in one another, did not see them leave, nor did they notice the transformation of the lake.
Not until gasps of wonder broke their wonderment in one another did they notice the thirteen maids who set bare foot on shore and walked toward the village. Each wore a long white shift through which her flesh glowed like spring roses. And on her long, gleaming hair, each wore a crown of flowers and herbs that cast a rare, lasting fragrance. The swan-maids walked to the church where Father Bertwald stood waiting. Hand in hand, Jurgen and Odile followed them. And the bells rang out to celebrate their wedding.
V
THE LOST ART OF TWILIGHT
by Thomas Ligotti
I have painted it, tried to at least. Oiled it, watercolored it, smeared it upon a mirror which I positioned to rekindle the glow of the real thing. And always in the abstract. Never actual sinking suns in spring, autumn, winter skies; never a sepia light descending over the trite horizon of a lake, not even the particular lake I like to view from the great terrace of my great house. But these Twilights of mine were not merely all abstraction, which is simply a way to keep out the riff-raff of the real world. Other painterly abstractionists may claim that nothing is represented in their canvases, and probably nothing is: a streak of iodine red is just a streak of iodine red, a patch of flat black equals a patch of flat black. But pure color, pure light, pure lines and their rhythms, pure form in general all mean much more than that. The others have only seen their dramas of shape and shade; I — and it is impossible to insist on this too strenuously — I have been there. And my twilight abstractions did in fact represent some reality, somewhere, sometime: a zone formed by palaces of soft and sullen color hovering beside seas of scintillating pattern and beneath rhythmic skies; a zone in which the visitor himself is transformed into a formal essence, a luminous presence, free of substance — a citizen of the abstract. And a zone (I cannot sufficiently amplify my despair on this point, so I will not try) that I will never know again.
Only a few weeks ago I was sitting out on the terrace of my massive old mansion, watching the early autumn sun droop into the above-mentioned lake, talking to Aunt T. Her heels clomped with a pleasing hollowness on the flagstones of the terrace. Silver-haired, she was attired in a gray suit, a big bow flopping up to her lower chins. In her left hand was a long envelope, neatly caesarianed, and in her right hand the letter it had contained, folded in sections like a triptych.
"They want to see you," she said, gesturing with the letter. "They want to come here."
"I don't believe it," I said and skeptically turned in my chair to watch the sunlight stretching in long cathedrallike aisles across the upper and lower levels of the lawn.
"If you would only read the letter," she insisted.
"It's in French, no? Can't read."
"Now that's not true, to judge by those books you're always stacking in the library."
"Those happen to be art books. I just look at the pictures."
"You like pictures, Andre?" she asked in her best matronly ironic tone. "I have a picture for you. Here it is: they are going to be allowed to come here and stay with us as long as they like. There's a
family of them, two children and the letter also mentions an unmarried sister. They're traveling all the way from Aix-en-Provence to visit America, and while on their trip they want to see their only living blood relation here. Do you understand this picture? They know who you are and, more to the point, where you are."
"I'm surprised they would want to, since they're the ones —"
"No, they're not. They're from your father's side of the family. The Duvals," she explained. "They do know all about you but say [Aunt T. here consulted the letter for a moment] "that they are sans prejuges."
"The generosity of such creatures freezes my blood. Phenomenal scum. Twenty years ago these people do what they did to my mother, and now they have the gall, the gall, to say they aren't prejudiced against me."
Aunt T. gave me a warning hrumph to silence myself, for just then the one I called Rops walked out onto the terrace bearing a tray with a slender glass set upon it. I dubbed him Rops because he, as much as his artistic namesake, never failed to give me the charnel house creeps.
He cadavered over to Aunt T. and served her her afternoon cocktail.
"Thank you," she said, taking the glass of cloudy stuff.
"Anything for you, sir?" he asked, now holding the tray over his chest like a silver shield.
"Ever see me have a drink, Rops," I asked back. "Ever see me —"
"Andre, behave. That'll be all, thank you."
Rops left our sight in a few bony strides. "You can continue your rant now," said Aunt T. graciously.
"I'm through. You know how I feel," I replied and then looked away toward the lake, drinking in the dim mood of the twilight in the absence of normal refreshment.
"Yes, I do know how you feel, and you've always been wrong. You've always had these romantic ideas of how you and your mother, rest her soul, have been the victims of some monstrous injustice. But nothing is the way you like to think it is. They were not backward peasants who, we should say, saved your mother. They were wealthy, sophisticated members of her own family. And they were not superstitious, because what they believed about your mother was the truth."
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