by Tanith Lee
How beautiful it is to wake with the dusk, when the silver webs of night begin to form, frost and ice, on everything. Even the ragged dress – once that of a princess – is tinselled and shining with this magic substance, even the mighty wings – once those of a prince – each feather is drawn glittering with thin rime. And oh, the sky, thick as a daisy-field with the white stars. Up there, when they have fed and have strength, they fly, or, Feroluce flies and Rohise flies in his arms, carried by his wings. Up there in the biting chill like a pane of ghostly vitreous, they have become lovers, true blind lovers, embraced and linked, their bodies a bow, coupling on the wing. By the hour that this first happened the girl had forgotten all she had been, and he had forgotten too that she was anything but the essential mate. Sometimes, borne in this way, by wings and by fire, she cries out as she hangs in the ether. These sounds, transmitted through the flawless silence and amplification of the peaks, scatter over tiny half-buried villages countless miles away, where they are heard in fright and taken for the shrieks of malign invisible devils, tiny as bats, and armed with the barbed stings of scorpions. There are always misunderstandings.
After a while, the icy prologues and the stunning starry fields of winter nights give way to the main argument of winter.
The liquid of the pool, where the flowers made garlands, has clouded and closed to stone. Even the volatile waterfalls are stilled, broken cascades of glass. The wind tears through the skin and hair to gnaw the bones. To weep with cold earns no compassion of the cold.
There is no means to make fire. Besides, the one who was Rohise is an animal now, or a bird, and beasts and birds do not make fire, save for the phoenix in the Duke’s bestiary. Also, the sun is fire, and the sun is a foe. Eschew fire.
There begin the calendar months of hibernation. The demon lovers too must prepare for just such a measureless winter sleep, that gives no hunger, asks no action. There is a deep cave they have lined with feathers and withered grass. But there are no more flying things to feed them. Long, long ago, the last warm frugal feast, long, long ago the last flight, joining, ecstasy and song. So, they turn to their cave, to stasis, to sleep. Which each understands, wordlessly, thoughtlessly, is death.
What else? He might drain her of blood, he could persist some while on that, might even escape the mountains, the doom. Or she herself might leave him, attempt to make her way to the places below, and perhaps she could reach them, even now. Others, lost here, have done so. But neither considers these alternatives. The moment for all that is past. Even the death-lament does not need to be voiced again.
Installed, they curl together in their bloodless, icy nest, murmuring little to each other, but finally still.
Outside, the snow begins to come down. It falls like a curtain. Then the winds take it. Then the night is full of the lashing of whips, and when the sun rises it is white as the snow itself, its flame very distant, giving nothing. The cave mouth is blocked up with snow. In the winter, it seems possible that never again will there be a summer in the world.
Behind the modest door of snow, hidden and secret, sleep is quiet as stars, dense as hardening resin. Feroluce and Rohise turn pure and pale in the amber, in the frigid nest, and the great wings lie like a curious articulated machinery that will not move. And the withered grass and the flowers are crystallised, until the snows shall melt. If ever the snows do melt.
At length, the sun deigns to come closer to the Earth, and the miracle occurs. The snow shifts, crumbles, crashes off the mountains in rage. The waters hurry after the snow, the air is wrung and racked by splittings and splinterings, by rushes and booms. It is half a year, or it might be a hundred years, later.
Open now, the entry to the cave. Nothing emerges. Then, a flutter, a whisper. Something does emerge. One black feather, and caught in it, the petal of a flower, crumbling like dark charcoal and white, drifting away into the voids below. Gone. Vanished. It might never have been.
But there comes another time (half a year, a hundred years) when an adventurous traveller comes down from the mountains to the pocketed villages the other side of them. He is a swarthy cheerful fellow, you would not take him for herbalist or mystic, but he has in a pot a plant he found high up in the staring crags, which might after all contain anything or nothing. And he shows the plant, which is an unusual one, having slender, dark and velvety leaves, and giving off a pleasant smell like vanilla.
‘See, the Nona Mordica,’ he says. ‘The Bite-Me-Not. The flower that repels vampires.’
Then the villagers tell him an odd story, about a castle in another country, besieged by a huge flock, a menace of winged vampires, and how the Duke waited in vain for the magic bush that was in his garden, the Bite-Me-Not, to flower and save them all.
But it seems there was a curse on this Duke, who on the very night his daughter was lost, had raped a serving woman, as he had raped others before. But this woman conceived. And bearing the fruit, or flower, of this rape, damaged her, so she lived only a year or two after it. The child grew up unknowing, and in the end betrayed her own father by running away to the vampires, leaving the Duke demoralised. And soon after that he went mad, and himself stole out one night, and let the winged fiends into his castle, so all there perished.
‘Now if only the bush had flowered in time, as your bush flowers, all would have been well,’ the villagers cry.
The traveller smiles. He in turn does not tell them of the heap of peculiar bones, like parts of eagles mingled with those of a woman and a man. Out of the bones, from the heart of them, the bush was rising, but the traveller untangled the roots of it with care; it looks sound enough now in its sturdy pot, all of it twining together. It seems as if two separate plants are growing from a single stem, one with blooms almost black, and one pink-flowered, like a young sunset.
‘Fleur de fur,’ says the traveller, beaming at the marvel, and his luck.
Fleur de feu. Of flower of fire. That fire is not hate or fear, which makes flowers come, not terror or anger or lust. It is love that is the fire of the Bite-Me-Not, love that cannot abandon, love that cannot harm, love that never dies.
THE VAMPIRE LOVER
He is with her tonight.
I know it. What shall I do?
Of course, there is no moral dilemma. Those doubts I had – my halting discussion with the priest left me chastened and horrified. Why then hesitate? Can it be – it must be so – the shadow has stretched out to touch me, too? Then I must hurry. It is no longer the single matter of her life and soul, but also of my own.
Mariamme (my sister) was pale. But this was no problem, for she was always beautiful. To say her hair was gold, as the singers always did, was not strictly true. She was a blonde, as our dead mother had been. When the sun met her hair – either Mariamme’s, or our mother’s in life – it gleamed more fiery white than gold. She had died, our mother, in trying to bear our father a son. At this time I was 13 years old, but my sister only five. Her grief was more easily expressed than mine, and the sooner forgotten. Her nurses loved her and each gladly became her mother, and she was my father’s favourite. He and I, alike in our darkness, were often in accord over things of the mind, but since intellectual women mystified him, he was also uncomfortable with me. I should have been his son, I suppose. But I was a woman, almost thirty years of age now, to Mariamme’s pure two-decades-and-one. I sat in the sun-arbour on the terrace of the Stone House, and watched her as she wandered to and fro. She seemed preoccupied, and how listless. Now and then she would indicate a flower to be plucked. ‘Yes, that one.’ The maid would snip it from the trellis, or perhaps, if she were not quick enough, one of the two or three gallants would break it less tidily. Such young men always provided Mariamme her own court. They were knights of our father’s, hut he made no objection. Chivalrous love, the woman-worshipped-as-Madonna, it was all the fashion. He had announced no plans to marry her to anyone as yet. She was so lovely, one might imagine he was saving her for some especially expedient match. But he liked her by
him, too. For myself, a political marriage had long ago been arranged; actually the second, for I had first married when I was 16, by proxy. The union, to the Lion House, would have been helpful to my father, but the prospective husband (he was 12) died of plague a month later, even as I was on my journey to him. Sent back again, I waited another ten years for my second betrothal. Though unblemished, straight, and healthy – and still a virgin – I was no longer young. My new bridegroom was some twenty years my senior, but, like the first, I had never set eyes on him. He had agreed to me by messenger. We were to wed when he returned from the long northern wars. Provided, of course, he did return. As yet he showed no sign of it. But I too was in no hurry. I would obey, when I must.
‘And this?’ said my sister, pointing to a smiling rose, with a finger on which three large jewels flashed.
‘No, another. That is the thirteenth on the stem –’ The gallants laughed, but they were in earnest, too, being superstitious to a man.
‘Then this?’ And the three jewels flashed again, and then more brightly as Mariamme put her hand to her forehead.
Her knights were alarmed. They supported her. But it was only a momentary weakness. Once she came to sit by me, and had begun to sip the cup of wine one of them poured for her, she was soon merry enough. Yet, she was very pale.
I tried to continue with my reading, but it became more difficult against the chatter, and presently one of the gallants had produced a lyre, and it was to be a singing game. Marking my place in the bestiary, an enormous book I carried with some awkwardness, I said I would leave them. No-one stayed me, I did not expect it, but as I rose, I noticed a strange little mark, to the left side of my sister’s throat. Pausing, and at the risk of offending with the interruption, I asked, ‘Why, Mariamme, have you been stung?’
‘Oh –’ she said, and a curious look came over her face. ‘No – I think – I scratched myself yesterday evening, when I undid my necklace.’
‘But your maids see to your jewellery,’ I said. ‘They must in future be more careful.’
‘No. It was my fault. I was – hasty – Oh, play for me!’ she cried suddenly to the gallant with the lyre. ‘A happy song, very fast.’
They took great pleasure in her changeableness. Only I found it peculiar. But then, I was not courtly-in-love with Mariamme.
Puzzled, I left them in the peach-leaf shadows of the arbour.
The flowers she had picked, or selected to be picked, were on the high table to grace our dinner, and my father was charmed. Despite this, Mariamme seemed excitable, half uneasy, as if afraid she might annoy him inadvertently – something that never happened; I was the one who did that. I gazed at my sister surreptitiously, but with an increasing sense of some strangeness. It came in a while to take my appetite, as plainly it had already taken Mariamme’s. Our father was concerned she did not eat, but she lowered her eyes and turned shy, and I saw him make the decision that this was all due to the ‘Moon’. He became gruff, then jovial, to offset the masculine gaff. However, her condition was nothing of the sort. Her sister, sleeping as I did in an adjoining chamber, I knew generally when it was that she bled, her seasons and pulses, as one knows weather in a familiar country.
Much later, I went to her room.
She was knelt at prayer before her icons, in her shift, her hair spangle-veiled by the candles. But when I entered she sprang up as if I had caught her out in some guilty act.
‘This is not like you,’ she said, ‘to come into my room at bedtime. I remember how I used to entreat you to, when we were children and I was so afraid of the dark –’
‘The dark never frightens you now.’
‘Ah, why should it? Night is as beautiful as day –’
I had noted the lower window stood wide open. The evening was mild, but not airless. I asked her why she had opened the shutters.
‘For the scent of the flowers on the creeper,’ she said. ‘No, you no longer scare me, unkind sister. Do you remember how you used to make me cry with your stories of huge night insects flying in between the sheets – or bats that would perch on me and end all tangled up in my hair –?’
I may have warned her of such things when she was little. All I recalled was her own fear of ghosts. But at this moment an odd thing happened. Like a black paper, as if summoned by her words, a bat did go flitting across the window, and up, out of our sight.
‘Well, so you see,’ I said. And I went to the shutters and drew them closed.
Mariamme observed me. She said nothing more.
High above her bed, the inner window of glass, lit by the great three-night candle behind it, blazed a sombre rich crimson, and now some draught from the closing shutters caused the light to flutter and cast shadow – as if somehow the bat had after all come in, and hid there, beating its narrow black dragon wings impatiently.
The disturbance of the red light caused me to see another thing that before I had missed. It was a vague trailing mark among the covers of the bed – pale, as if attempts had been made to erase it. But even countered by water and much scrubbing, I thought I recognised the stain of dried blood.
Now I said nothing and went away to my own chamber.
Two thicknesses of wooden doors separated me here from Mariamme, and the little stone annexe between. She seemed removed by miles, by mighty cliffs and forests. I lay awake a long while, and, intuitively, I listened, but all I heard was the faintest rustling of the creeper on the house wall as the night-breeze whispered to it; the hunting cry of a nocturnal bird in the woods.
The lights of my inner window – this a gift of glass our father gave us; it is an important symbol of status and wealth – were cool and customary blue. They trembled lake-like on my bed and soothed me. My outer window was shuttered.
Nothing would get in. This was my last, macabre thought, before I slept.
Next day, about noon, players came to the gates. Our father allowed them in. He was generally indifferent to such shows (as I was), but his household liked them, and Mariamme had adored all spectacle from the time of her childhood – he was in an indulgent mood. They put on their entertainment in the hall after the evening meal, having fed well themselves in the kitchen court. From the gossip, one heard they had been in the neighbourhood some weeks, nor were they strangers to us, having performed in the Mallet House at Mid-Winter, where some of my father’s people had travelled to see them: they were reckoned excellent of their kind.
It bored me, I fear, the whole business, but I must not go up to bed or book, my father had brought everyone in for the fun and would be offended. He himself sat stoically, even raising a laugh at some of the idiotic antics. Every actor was masked, naturally, in the tradition, which to me only enhances the preposterousness of the situation. There was a white-masked fool, gymnastic and limber, constantly cart wheeling and bending backwards – our father particularly remarked him, and called him out at one point to throw him some gold – at which we all clapped, the actors prudently included. But the jollity was marred nevertheless.
If he had meant this treat to rejoice Mariamme, our father seemed mysteriously to have failed. She had risen late today. I had not seen her until supper. If she had been out of sorts before, now she was wan and sleepy. Her face looked white as the white mask of the jester. When our father was amused, sometimes she would force a laugh, but otherwise, how drawn she seemed. Her hands shook, so the jewels spurted continuous fire, she trembled all over, and bit her lip. I found I could not take my eyes from her, and what they did on their stage of tables, mostly I missed.
But then there came a scene with death in it, the way these mountebanks invariably show it – a man, black cloaked and cowled, with a crown of staring bones. He entered with a swirl of his mantle, jumping from nowhere it looked, so some of the ladies screamed. My sister, too, started in her skin. Something made me say to her, ‘But you have seen them act this before, surely, at Mallet?’ And she answered, ‘Not death,’ and then toppled lightly out of her chair. One of her retinue of knights
caught her before she struck the floor.
Our father was enraged with the players, and turned them out of doors immediately. I could have told them, in their sulks, they were lucky to get off without being ordered a whipping.
Mariamme was put to bed. She would not consult the physician, and even the priest was refused. She wept and clung to our father’s hand. ‘You,’ he said to me, ‘must stay by her.’ Dismayed at her emotion, he left her to me, and for a while I sat by her bedside under the ruby flame of the inner window. I felt myself grown chilled as I sat there. I could not tell what it was.
Finally I said, for she did not sleep, ‘Why not undo the ribbon at your throat. Perhaps it makes you uncomfortable. At once, she raised her hand to cover throat and ribbon together. She stared at me with confused, frightened eyes.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘what do you know? Tell me now.’
‘I? What should I know, Mariamme? It is for you to tell me –’
‘I can tell nothing. But you are so clever. Do you hate me?’
I flinched at her words. They wounded me.
‘I am your sister. How can I hate you, and for what?’ (Her eyes now evaded mine.) ‘Mariamme,’ I said, ‘tomorrow, let the physician come and look at you.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I am not sick. Only –’
‘What, Mariamme?’
‘Nothing at all,’ she said hoarsely. And then, with wild desperation, ‘Please go – leave me. How can I sleep when you glare at me all the while? Let me alone!’
I got up. ‘Very well.’
She sighed deeply. She was frantic to have me gone, yet did not seem to understand her own vehemence. As she had writhed, the ribbon shifted on her neck. There, where I had seen the small freckle of blood, a thunderous bruise now swelled the white skin. I said nothing of this. Bidding her goodnight, I went out, closing her door, and presently mine. Now I too trembled. My hands were icy. My heart hammered.