by Tanith Lee
The pendant blazes. It’s a ruby and never less than a ruby, and some nights it’s a dragon’s eye.
Before I became Sarah my life was just a series of roles. My mother’s daughter, a hundred men’s dream-lay, Sand’s oyster, Jace’s Hamlet-vengeance, Cassi’s scapegoat. When was I ever my own?
Now I’m Sarah, I drink the air (which has become the mud). Now I’m truly me. But no, Sabella. Now I belong entirely to the blood-red stone around my neck.
Maybe, indirectly, Cassi’s plan to destroy me is working after all.
Meantime, I watched the skies above the city.
* * *
* * *
There are about ten churches in Ares. Ten churches to around ten thousand bars, around ten thousand girl-houses, twenty-seven landing strips, fifteen spin-drive stadiums, twenty-five cinemats, ninety public swim pools, nine hundred hyper-markets, eight hundred automats, six hundred lavatories.
But once there were no churches at all. Till the Revivalists built them. Silver tinstone and white plasti-plaster, blue concrete, stained glass. Spires like metal pylons with crosses that light up by night.
I hadn’t been in church for around eleven years, apart from Cassi’s chapel, and the chapel at Angel Meadow when momma died. Sarah Holland had never been in church at all, nor did I suppose she’d have any hankering to be.
Of the ten or so, about half stay open at night, and the utensils on the altar have faintly glowing lectro devices around them.
I’d been hunting and I’d taken, and I was going home to where home was just then, which was an apartment block on Eighteenth Dale. The cross of the church, like an emerald badge pinned on the night, appeared between the tall stacks and crags of the buildings, and then the pale wall, and then the wide-open doorway. I hadn’t seen this place previously, though others like it many times. The warm-tinted soft light inside, the musty incense smell. Above the door was a treated painted panel. This Christ looked like Sand Vincent, the longish dark hair, dark eyes, amber flesh.
Before I knew it, Sarah Holland walked up the steps in at the door.
I sat on one of the polished benches, and looked at the altar. The cloth was dark red, embroidered with green and gold, the Cloth of the Blood of the Redeemer. A mutedly lit sign gave the times of the services, which were all done for tonight. No one was there but me; so I sat, my spine pressed against the hard supporting plank of the bench. I wondered why I was there, but the church was quiet. The peace was heavy on the air as any scent.
Then a priest came out of the back and began to walk along the aisle.
I meant to get up and go out at once, but my feet were heavy, had grown into the floor, I was weighted down on the bench. I stared straight ahead, but, of course, the priest would come to me. Presently he spoke.
“Can I help you in any way?”
His voice was young, younger than he’d looked coming toward me.
“No, thank you very much.”
“Are you sure?”
I should never have come in here.
“Yes, I’m sure. I just wanted to sit for a while.”
I know he’s taking in my garb and my hair.
“Christ can help you,” the priest said, “even if you won’t let me.”
I turned and stared hard at him, and I said, “If He knows the things I’ve called Him, He won’t help.”
The priest startled me by smiling. “Oh, I think He’d understand about that.”
He was trying to draw me out, gently and kindly. And I felt the danger of a response. For three months I’d only really spoken to those I meant to have. And what was this? Childhood’s theology hanging on my shoulder.
“Look,” I said, “I won’t discuss Jesus Christ with you.”
“No,” he said, “you don’t have to discuss Him with anyone.”
“You don’t mind if I sit here.”
“I’m glad for you to, if it helps.”
Does it?
I wish I could tell him the truth and he’d pray with me and Christ would come down like a dove on the altar and make it all right.
The priest moved on and left me alone, but my own emotional prodigality had driven off the mood of peace from me, leaving me in the midst of the peace, in a little vacuum of dread and confusion.
You thought I was happy, did you, the wolf-bitch stalking the city?
I walked home to my unhome on Eighteenth Dale. I had a dream that night. I dreamed I was wandering through the house at Hammerhead. But the house was very old, ruinous and piled with pink rusting dusts of the desert. The blinds were torn and the doors broken and even the indestructible glass of the windows was cracked. In my bedroom, the bed was just a frame, and dust webs hung from the carved posts instead of gauze curtains. Then I came to the mirror and I saw myself. I wore the black night-hair wig I wore in the church, but it was thick with blood, and ends spiked stiff with it. There was blood over my mouth and down my dress (the way there’d been blood on my dress the first time, when I was fourteen, my own blood and the boy’s). My nails were long and pointed and sheathed in blood. My eyeballs were scarlet. My lips were parted and I saw my teeth were very long, like white needles; and my tongue was a thin black whip. The terror that filled me was unspeakable, unutterable. And when I plunged awake, the terror was still with me, clamped inside me, a tumor on my invisible, shadow-casting, mirror-image-making, nonexistent soul.
The next sunset, I went back to the church. I went back without the black wig, in another dress, hoping the priest wouldn’t recognize me. It was between services, and the church had emptied, all but for one woman kneeling, and the priest at the altar, who didn’t seem to see me at all. Then there was another woman kneeling, and it was me.
You look like Sand, and I don’t believe in you, or if I do, I resist the belief. I’ve cursed you and profaned you, and I’ll do it again. I’ve never served you and I never will. Every minute that I’m not afraid I’ll forget you. I can’t make a bargain. But help me, help me. Help me, if you can, or you’re there, or if anyone’s there, or no one. Help me. Help me.
Then I went home to Eighteenth Dale. I brought a bottle of pills from the pharmacy across the way. But I only took five, and then I got sick, and it wasn’t any use.
Next morning, the Ares sky was overcast, and my rent was up at Eighteenth Dale. I packed my red bag that I bought at Brade Corner with the things I bought at Cliffton when I arrived in the big city. It was time to move on.
* * *
* * *
I moved into a room at Iles, and I went with a blond spacer. His blood had been purified by the stars of space, but it was still mud, and I still had to have it. I also had to get out in the dark. He couldn’t leave me alone, nor I resist his entreaties, and I was coming perilously close to killing him. At one in the morning I panicked, and when he was unconscious I smeared the jel on his neck and I ran.
I ran straight for the church in Dale.
The altar cloth was white and blue and I couldn’t remember why. I huddled into the pew-bench and laid my head on the rail of the bench in front. I didn’t know what I was doing there. If the priest had come out I would have bolted, but there was only a man near the door in the shadow, head on hands, praying.
And then I turned and looked, and he wasn’t praying, and it was Jace.
I got up slowly, and slowly returned to the door, and he didn’t react. Then I got outside, and he was there, and he caught my arm.
The touch of his hand on my arm, my skin, stopped me.
“How?” was the only word I could get out.
His voice was so familiar, I must have been hearing it in my sleep.
“You have religion,” he said. “It was just a matter of when and where.”
“Let me go,” I said.
He said, ignoring that, “I’ve been to every goddamned church in Ares. I left a call code. I told them I wa
s looking for my sister.”
“Sister?”
The priest, the kind priest, wanting to be kind. Any woman can bleach her hair, wear a white dress. When I was praying to Jesus for help, the priest was looking at me, recognizing me despite blonde hair, black hair, from Jace’s description. When I was vomiting up the pills, the priest was calling Jace.
I’m immobile in his grasp, except I’m shivering in the hot city night.
“Still want to kill me for Sand? Sand, the blackmailer, the cheat.”
“I know what Sand was,” Jace said.
“He looked like Christ over the door.”
“Sure he did. That was his big number. Extortion, blackmail, those weren’t new games for Sand. He raped a girl on Gall Vulcan. You find that hard to believe? So did she, till he did it to her. And I was the insurance, the demon brother who had to clean up whenever the stuff hit the fan, which it always did.”
“So why come after me?”
“To see how far he’d implicated me this time, and in what. Whatever you and he had been into. He did write me. That was part of the fun, to show me what a great deal he was making for himself. Only the deals stank, and they never came off. Then I’d get the stella from the belly of the whale: Get me out, Jace. No stella at all was special. After what he’d said about you, it sounded as if the pot had boiled over. I’d say he meant to take you for everything you had, but then you did your magic act on him, and he shot for Trim instead. Someone was bound to get Sand one day. It just happened to be you.”
I recalled Sand’s confession, and his trying to run away from me across the desert, when he was dying, afraid I must be paying him out for discovered tricks. I recalled Jace’s profile, yellowing, when Sand’s bones landed in the dust.
“This is another trap,” I said.
“Whatever it is, you’re stuck with it.”
“Does Koberman know?”
“The fat man? No. This is a private war, Sabella.”
“Cozy-cozy,” I said. My teeth chattered, as Sand’s teeth chattered when I tried to drive him to the hospital. “But Koberman will still be looking for me.”
“I doubt it.”
His tone was unequivocal. He’d obviously warned the Hog away, perhaps merely by threats of violence. Jace is violence, or at least, violent power. I should know. I was held in the vise of it.
“Stop shaking,” he said, “I’m not going to hurt you.”
“Because you hated your kiddy brother after all.”
I’d tried to kill myself. If Jace killed me, it would settle everything. Apparently, I was not a survivor anymore. Even Sarah wasn’t.
“I didn’t hate him. You don’t hate the garbage.”
“The great Daniel would be proud of you.”
“Daniel,” he said, so soft I nearly missed it.
“Your father. You forgot? Your golden marvel god of a father that Sand worshiped, second only to you. Your family has a truly biblical ambience, the Patriarch and his two sons. One with the mark of Cain on his forehead.”
“You’re the lady with the incinerator,” he said, “and the sick dog.”
“And you still don’t know how he died, or why.” I paused. I watched the neons making flaming smoke of the clouds. “I’ll show you.”
“O.K.,” he said.
He turned me unexpectedly toward him, and our eyes met, and I thought of the dream of the deer and the hills and the man with the gun, and I leered at him, and in my imagination my teeth were long as daggers.
“You’ve made a mess of yourself,” he said to me. “Your hair, the way you’ve dyed your skin. You look as though you’ve slept hanging on a peg.”
“Now I really want you to see,” I said to him. “I want you to see what I did to Sand.”
I knew I was insane, but I couldn’t pull myself up. I’d raced to the brink, and leapt, and I was dropping through the air and I couldn’t save myself if I tried. I was even exhilarated, horribly excited. I did want him to see. I did want him to know. An ultimate witness, to condemn me. As my mother was the first.
“Come on,” I said. “We walk.”
He shifted his grip to my elbow, and we did walk, down the steps of the church, under the reflected glory of the emerald cross.
There was a bar three blocks away; I’d been there before. Someone would be loitering, looking for a girl. There always was someone.
We walked without speaking, but at the street, where you could see the bar’s bright sheen and three men leaning on the wall outside, smoking, I said to Jace, “Now for the demonstration. Let go my arm and watch.”
His grip came off me immediately and for a moment I felt disoriented, adrift. How could he trust me? Could he read me so well he knew on this occasion I was on the level? Then I was walking on. I went toward the three men, and they looked, and I smiled.
“Hey, girlie,” they said.
They reached for me. The one I wanted was in the middle, the youngest, the most tender shoot. “Last dance tonight,” I said. And I put out my hand, and the young one took my hand.
The other two laughed and congratulated us, and the boy and I came back up the street, past Jace, and Jace fell in behind us.
“Who’s he?” said the boy.
“My protector,” I said. “Don’t worry.”
“Who’s worried,” said the boy, “but most of you girls are free-lance. In case you have any ideas—” He revealed a switchblade, the old kind with the razor welded to the outer edge. This boy was younger than Sand. But then, Sand wasn’t innocent either. I’ve taken so many and thought of them as victims, but maybe I’m the victim.
“You don’t get it,” I said to the boy with the razor switch. “If you let him watch, you needn’t pay.”
“Oh really?” The boy grinned. He grinned back at Jace. “Be my guest, mister.” He’s stupid. He’s perfect.
A loading alley for robot carts ran between high steel walls. I led the boy, and we stepped over the rails, and Jace came behind.
“Here?” I asked.
“Freck it,” said the boy. “I thought you had a bed.”
“Come on,” I said. “Who needs beds?”
He acquiesced and slid his hands up under my skirt and I released the sealer on his pants.
I didn’t have any need, not really, and I was in complete control. Jace was standing a few yards off, black on black shadow, as in the dream.
I didn’t feel pity anymore. Or a desire to give pleasure in return. I hated this boy working away in me, squeezing me, grinding me back against the metal wall. I called softly to Jace, “Now watch me, honey.” The boy grunted his breathless contempt. I kissed his neck. He tasted of smoke and alcohol and darkness and sex. In the dimness, I wondered if Jace would see. Somehow, I knew he would. I was touching the vein, and the boy groaned. I was in control, but I bit hard and deep, almost carelessly. The boy yelped and then he reared against me, trying to thrust himself through me into the wall.
I took very little, then I let him go, and he fell away from me and on his face beside the rails.
I pulled my clothes straight automatically, practiced.
“Come and see, Jason,” I said.
He came toward me, and I was going to tell him what to look for when he leaned over the boy, grasped his loose head by the hair, and examined the throat. There was more blood than usual, and the wound was glaring black in the dimness.
“That’s what I did to Sand,” I said. “And he loved it. He begged for it. I tried to save his life when it was too late. But there are plenty I didn’t. I’m a lady with a past all littered with dead young gentleman callers.”
Then I went by Jace and rubbed the heal-fast coagulant jel into the wound. When I’d finished, I straightened and Jace took my elbow and we walked away.
I looked up at his face. Unreadable.
“You d
o understand,” I said. I looked unreadable too.
He didn’t answer.
“I drink blood. I need to. The juice in the container was blood. Does it surprise you a vampire has religion?” I couldn’t stop talking, and he apparently couldn’t start. “It shouldn’t surprise you. Jesus Christ, after all, was a vampire. Oh, yes, Jason, Jesus was a vampire. They drank blood at the last supper, and then the priests impaled him on a stake of wood. To be sure, they drove a wooden stake in his side. God made the sky go black by day out of pity for Jesus’s agony in the sunlight. When he was dead, they buried him, but he resurrected, the way a vampire is supposed to. You can’t keep a good man down.”
See, Jesus? You wouldn’t help me, so now I’m blaspheming you for all I’m worth. When I’m in hell, you can come and stoke the fires.
We’d crossed suddenly out onto one of the broad lit-up bridges of the Dale-Iles thoroughfare. A hundred feet below, an empty walkway, and traffic gushing on thirty-two lanes, like streaks of fire, a river of multicolored lavas. And all around, the distant volcanoes and the mountains rose in impersonal waterfalls of neon.
“All you have to do,” I said to Jace, “is lift me up over the rail and let me fall on the walkway. They threw Jezebel out of a window.”
Jace had let go of me again. He rested his forearms on the rail of the bridge. The streaks of car-fire burned across his eyes. He was alone. I wasn’t with him anymore.
“All right,” I said. “I suppose you’ll tell someone, sometime. Here’s my address: four on twenty-sixth, Iles. The name on the tag is Sarah Holland. I’ll wait for you, or who you send. Remember, every night you delay, I’ll be out here, busy.”
My head was up to look at him, and the wind, full of sparks and spirits of electricity and oxygen, blew back my cold-color hair. Then he turned his head and his eyes glared down at me, hard black surfaces, showing me what he saw. I’m dirt. I’m cheap and demented and filthy. He saw that. You don’t hate the garbage.