by Tanith Lee
The garden and the trees turned brown.
Here I have been, then, thought Jehanine, by which she meant she had lived there thirty days or more, though she could not reckon them. A season was nearly gone.
She knew now by ear the call to all the offices, from Matines to the office of the evening star, Hesper, and to Complies which closed the day. She knew three ball games, and certain secular songs of the novices, though she did not sing them. She learned the uses of the herbs from the garden, and, by rote, paragraphs of herbal lore and myth, read from a book by an elderly lay-sister.
Who had she been once?
One twilight, she saw a white-robed woman walking before her down the roofed passage that ran between the church and the House of the Novitiate. At the opening of the passage the white robe blended out and was gone. Nobody was in the hostel cloister beyond. It was, then, a ghost. Jehanine knew fear, and disappointment.
In the hostel-cell where she still slept her few hours each night, she looked about. At a dying spray of vivid leaves in a cracked jar, a cross of wood on the wall and a pallet on the floor, a low straight chest which contained her cloak, and oddments of linen, and had on its top a comb and a small crock of water, in the shallows of which a fly had drowned. Such were her possessions, and two of them dead. She had never had anything much. A doll of her mother’s when she was a child that the half-sisters broke, carved sticks and pebbles a boy called Pierre had given her, then retrieved.
The ghost was common to all who could see it. It might harm her but was not hers.
The bell rang for the office of Hesperus.
That night the Mother entered the refectory. She opened the Bible on its stand and read these words: “God so hated His Son, that He gave him to the world that the world might have him.”
In a dream, Jehanine was seeing the City by night, and it was like a wasteland of rocks. Nothing moved, no lights showed. The moon hung low. Then in the east there seemed to be a bright star rising, which sent its rays across the roofs, and lit their edges. Brighter and brighter the star became, and then it opened like the petals of a flower, and things rushed out of it.
At first she thought they were insects, then birds, then men and women riding over the rooftops of Paradys. But on the church at home had been some rough-hewn gargoyles, and now she identified the galloping throng – they were demons, with the bodies of men, even sometimes with the breasts of women, but the horned heads of goats and snouts of lizards snapped and grimaced from their long wild hair. Their bodies were the colour of the tired low moon, and glimmered in the same way. The mounts they rode were of all manners: huge black dogs, winged baskets and poles, or other creatures like themselves –
They were horrible, yet they laughed and called to each other, and filled the air with a robust foulness.
Jehanine, dreaming, had a terror they would see and catch her up, but it was another they took, who had been standing waiting not far off. He leaped to join them, and in a moment he went by Jehanine, mounted on a monstrous beast part pig part bat. He was Pierre, but he did not see her and he rode away with the jolly host of Hell.
“Jhane!” cried the dark. “Jhane!”
“Jhane. Wake, Jhane.”
Jehanine opened her eyes and rose from sleep to fill them and her body.
Before her, dark on dark, a figure leaned. Jehanine was terrified, then stupefied. No monster, but haughty Osanne, who of all the novices had never before abbreviated Jehanine’s name in this way.
“What do you want, dem’selle?”
“Don’t call me that. I’m to be a holy sister. Say that. Say, sister.”
“Sister.”
“You trouble me,” said Osanne. She sat back now, beside the pallet. She wore a cloak over her shift, but her hair was unbound and coiled all about her restlessly. “Were you dreaming? Stop it. Attend. I want you to tell me why it is you won’t come into the shelter of this order? Stubbornness. Your low birth, your unlearning – such things don’t matter. Do you love God?”
Jehanine was silent. Osanne breathed more quickly.
“Answer me, girl – Do you love God?”
“If I must,” said Jehanine. How soft the night. Hell did not ride the roofs. The dream was dying.
“Sinner! Evil sinner. How can God live except by love? Every such word hammers in the nails afresh.”
“Demoiselle – Sister Osanne – leave me alone.”
“No. I must save your soul. I know it now. God has revealed it to me. Get up at once. Kneel by me here.”
“Go away,” said Jehanine.
“I’ll make you if I must. Stupid girl. Do you want to burn in the Pit for all eternity?”
“What pit is that?”
“Fool. The Pit of raging Hell. The cauldron of live fire where Lucifer is king. The torture never-ending. Didn’t you hear the lesson tonight that the Mother read at supper? God loved the world so well he sent his only Son, Jesus, the Christ, to be our saviour.”
“But she said –” began Jehanine. She stopped saying it.
Osanne, unheeding, curved forward like a snake, and gripped her, pulling her up from under the cover. Suddenly Osanne had seized her prey. She wound her arms about Jehanine and buried her mouth, hot as the fire of which she warbled, in Jehanine’s neck.
“Jhane, Jhane, pray with me now. I’ll save you. Dear sister in Christ. You have the marks of goodness on you. So fair, child-like, yet rough like a boy – put your arms about me, Jhane.”
Jehanine did so. Osanne fell upon her, and as they floundered on the pallet, enormous waves began to pour upon Jehanine, of alarm and physical pleasure and horror. The darkness of the room, half hiding everything, seemed to make all things foreign, removed and possible. Osanne squirmed and writhed. She lay beneath Jehanine now. She wrapped Jehanine with all her limbs (a demon, mounted), and abruptly let out a hoarse mad cry, a moan, a grunt, and fell back.
“What have you done?” she gasped. She pushed Jehanine away. “You’re evil. Dirty and foul. Possessed. A monster – one of the Devil’s minions – oh let me go –”
She crawled towards the open air, sobbing and gulping. The room seemed icy cold. How comfortless it would be in winter.
When Osanne, her sounds enfeebled and muted by dread of discovery, had gone, Jehanine dressed herself. She trembled violently as she had not done at the rape of her step-father.
Leaving the cell barefoot, she crossed through the yards into the south garden, and passed over it in the moonless nothing of the night. A small bakehouse, now seldom used, stood against the outer wall, and here a tree spread up, already leafless. Jehanine climbed it without effort, pulled herself atop the wall, and looked out not in dream, for the first time in those years of days, on Paradys.
Where the nunnery was situated she had never properly known. Now she saw the locationless gullies of alleys, hills of masonry, no lights, and the stars’ cooled clinker. Then she sprang from the wall, into an abyss two-and-a-half times her own height.
She fell into harsh and lumpy softness – a pile of sacks, filled perhaps some by meal, and some by goose-feathers, for elements of such dust and fluff puffed out at her impact.
“Well, you’ve made me wait,” said a voice. “That’s the only sly way, you see, that tree, then down. But I’d thought you would be sooner tired of them. Here. See what your friend has brought you.”
Jehanine, lying on the sacks, looked up through muffled lantern light, to a grinning face and two hands dangling a tunic, hose, a boot of sheer leather. It was a dream, like the other, and since dreams make their own laws, Jehanine got to her feet and grabbed the dwarf.
“Hey, hey. You can even go back. We’ll see to it, we will. But somewhere else first. Put these on. You can’t travel as a maiden. I’ll look the other way.”
Jehanine hit the dwarf across the face. This time, the blow met flesh and spun him. He dropped the samples of male attire, nearly the lantern. Jehanine bent to the clothes, found the complete set, and picked them up.
They were not her half-brother’s rubbish. These seemed unworn, garments of a lord of the alleys, gaudy, elegant – what a man might thieve who was clever at thieving.
It was a dream.
“Go over there,” said Jehanine. She started to pull up the drawers and hose under her skirt even as the dwarf turned away. She thrust and hauled on the robber’s clothes; they were a panoply. She made a bundle of her own, like a discarded skin, and left it rolled into the sacks. In a dream, who would discover it?
“Good! Come then, this way,” said the dwarf, skipping ahead.
His lantern suddenly blared out. There was no longer any need of caution.
Jehanine had forgotten the freedom of such clothing, how she had been a boy, a young man, but now her body itself remembered. She laughed suddenly, and the dwarf said, “This way, Jehan. Praise the Prince it’s a fine night.” They slipped between the alleys, down the long worm-burrows. They passed by loops of the river seen beyond black and rotting walls. Fires burned uncannily between some of the hovels, and now and then a weird-lit face peered at them. Up a cobbled lane two torches volleyed before a house with noisy windows. It was an inn with a swinging sign that showed a ghostly figure with wings – an apparition. The dwarf went through a side-entry and up a spine-broken stair, Jehanine following him. In the corridor, where her head, if not his, nearly brushed the sagging beams, he rapped on a door. It was opened from inside. They stepped into the hollow of a room, ringed by faces. Fat candles were blinking on jugs and blades.
“Here’s Fero.”
“Welcome to the Imago,” said the dwarf. Then, to the room at large, “You see, my mates, I brought you him, as I said I’d do. What do you think?”
Jehanine stood stock still. Was this another betrayal? Even in dreams, such might occur. She said, speaking low but loudly, “Who cares what they think. Who does the choosing here?”
There were men in the room and boys. Each was a thief, you could tell at a glance. In every belt at least one knife, in every mask the eyes of wolverines; they wore the dress and ornaments of men who clawed and snatched above their station.
The dream-dwarf, perverse and mad, had brought her to join them. Why should he? Well, he must have sniffed her criminal air.
“We choose,” said a man from the ring. “But you look agile and leery enough. The dwarf’s generally right. He found me, didn’t he?”
“Then,” said another, “we want the gift, the buying-in.”
“Do you know what he means, new lad?”
“I’ll tell him what I mean. I mean something precious from him to us. A Judas kiss. A game. Proof. So what’s he going to offer up?”
“His own self’s enough,” replied one.
The dwarf, Fero, idled, sidled from Jehanine’s side. Jehanine, Jehan, she-he stood alone, the door at her back, the rowdy inner inn and the black tunnels of night City beyond. She said, “You can have a gift.” She felt herself whiten to a skull, they saw it and attended. (But it was a dream.) “I’ve kindred in the City, one who wronged me. I’ll give you him.”
“What use is that? Is he wealthy?”
“Not much.”
One or two swore. A man came close and put his hand directly on her groin. She moved aside before he could tell he had touched only a cunning bulge of cloth – and bringing up her fist she mashed her knuckles into the base of his nose. As he left her, blinded by tears and roaring, the roomful laughed, commending her. She had seen her half-brothers and her step-father fight. She had learned their tricks, it seemed.
As the blinded robber crouched on the floor, the tangle of his body reminded her of Osanne. Jehanine kicked him in the back, and he fell down.
She said, “What I offer is my brother. I hate him. I can manage things so you’ll have him alone. He drinks late at the Cockatrice, and perhaps he’s there now. His clothes are good, strip him and leave him naked. He’s handsome. Do what you like. From his neck hangs a gold crucifix. There’s a gem in it.”
Her head whirled. She closed her eyes.
Someone caught her by the shoulders, and a cup bumped against her lip. She drank bitter wine.
“What is it, you boy, this vengeance?”
It was the man who had spoken first, and who was also the dwarf’s protegé. He apparently liked the look of Jehan and might protect him, so her. She pushed his arm off.
“My vengeance is your buying-in wanted gift. What more?”
Because it was a dream, she knew that her brother, beautiful Pierre, would be at the other inn. She knew that if she led them there, they would find him.
The dwarf sat on a table, drinking; he showed no inclination to make up the party, barely any interest, but six or seven of the fellowship were nudging at her now. Together they went down the twisted stair, with a clatter, and out. Jehanine did not know the way back to the Cockatrice, they did. They walked in a bunch, bravos, swaggering, not afraid. This was their holding, this trample of middens and slips along the river bank, these rat-holes. Sometimes they were challenged, from a wall-top or hovel’s depths, passwords were exchanged, whistles or dog-barks, and once, two of the men made water in a well, to pay out an old score. Then some invisible border was crossed. The formation of the band altered. They were more wary, and walked two by two or three, knives to hand.
“No knife of your own?” Jehan’s champion put his free hand on her shoulder. “This brother – did he sour you for your birthright, maybe?” he asked, continuing the earlier dialogue. “My whoresons brothers did that on me.”
Abruptly the inn of the Cockatrice appeared, surprising Jehanine with recognition.
“Wait here. I’ll go to see.”
“No jokes,” said one, but that was all. She might have known them all for years, grown with them from desperate infancy like flowers on the dunghills of Paradys.
She went towards the serpent-cock, boy-walking as her brother’s ungainly boots had taught her to. She spat, under the inn-sign. The inn was hardly awake, flickering with dying candles. All the drinkers seemed gone but for a sleeper at the hearth, and a man at his work with one of the wenches on a table.
But it was a dream, and so Pierre must remain. Where had he sat before, that night she came to entreat him? She could not be certain of the place.
Two men came down a stair. Brushing through the strings of onions, they yawned and grumbled. They had been with a girl, but she had turned them out before cockcrow. Old Motius would be aggrieved at their condition this morning. But old Motius was an intellectual dolt who conducted esoteric rituals, but thought mice ate the unground paint his pupils had stolen and sold. Motius was in love with Pierre. Oh, yes he was. One look from the lucent eyes, and the old fellow would probably pay for their harlots out of his own purse.
As Pierre came by her, Jehanine took his sleeve between her fingers.
He turned, gazed at her. His handsomeness, not spoiled by the debauch, turned her heart over. Seeing her, he seemed to see a spectre.
He said nothing. His companion said, in wonder, “Your living shade, Pierre.”
Jehanine said to Pierre, “You must come with me.”
The other student said, “Oh no. Come on, Pierre. This is some rogue.”
Jehanine stepped in their path. She shoved the student away from her brother. Being tipsy and fatigued, nor having either the strength of her hard life, he stumbled back and fell into the hearth, banging his head, landing among the bones and ashes. He lay there stunned, and presently threw up there, which caused discontent in several dark quarters of the inn.
While that went on, Jehanine drew her brother after her, staring in his eyes, beckoning to him but no longer touching. He followed, he did not seem to know why.
As they went out through the door, he said. “Who are you?”
“Your sister,” said Jehanine. But not aloud.
She led him almost listlessly to the alley where the Imago thieves waited. She pulled him by a leash of air. Then, in the alley, she took her brother’s hand and drew him forward
.
“See,” she said to the thieves. A light flared and went out. Three of them leapt at him and flung a sack over his head, shoulders and arms. Pierre struggled. They beat him and he fell and was scrambled away with. They dived and tore a route into a copse of gutted hovels, where ratlets swarmed from their advance.
She stood by, she watched, lamped in the glow of a far-off lightcast – some brothel’s beacon – as they removed the garments from Pierre’s body, the dyed leather belt and fashionable shoes. At his throat, the topaz glared. They were leaving it till last. Pierre lay moaning, his head still furled in the sack.
“Now what?” said one.
They crowded grinning, and slowly unravelled the cloth from their captive’s face.
“Your kin, decidedly.” They lifted him over on to his belly. “Do you want him?”
“Incest,” said Jehan. Jehan smiled. Then walked off and leaned on a post, not watching finally what was done to Pierre Belnard, turn by turn, by the gang.
But Jehanine heard Pierre scream more than once, a hoarse masculine shriek. She had not cried out at her own rape. Nor had she been so appreciated, for his abusers spoke love-words to her brother.
At length, there was silence, but for the heartbeat of the City, a strange noise Jehanine had begun to hear, compounded of every beating heart that inhabited Paradys. Uncovering her eyes, she noticed that the beacon light had grown in magnitude. Next a cockerel crew deep in the alleyways. Then one by one the bells sounded across the river, closer at hand, the tongue of Prima Hora, dawn.
Jehan’s protector, whose name she had picked out as Conrad, shook her shoulder now. He sweated, and his odour was ripe. She moved away from him. “You’re proved,” he said. “You’re one of us. Sin for damnable sin.” The others mumbled. “Now do it to him, too.”
“No,” said Jehanine.
She walked towards the heap of flesh that was her brother. He lay on his side now, senseless perhaps, breathing through his open mouth. He was naked, covered by blood and filth. She leaned down and drew up his head a little by the soaked silk of hair. The dawn was spilling on the world. His eyes spasmed open. He looked full at her, knowing her, if not who she was. It was a look so terrible, so agonised and ruined, so utterly devoid of any hope for help or pity, that it reminded her of the face of the crucified Christ, and she shuddered at it.
