The Secret Book of Paradys

by Tanith Lee

  There was a silence after this. Minutes passed again over the face of my clock, microcosm as it was, as all clocks are, of Time itself, that terrible enormous relentless thing we domesticate with porcelain and ormolu even while it preys upon us.

  Eventually I said, with care only to Vlok, not to the other, “Why did you wait so long to come to me?”

  “Till you had read the diary.”

  “You knew when I did?”

  “Tuamon.”

  “Why is the name changed? Why not Tiy-Amonet?”

  “Tuamon is the correct name. Tiy-Amonet was the name for the Roman’s use. Of course, she’ll want to be known by some other name now, of the City, the present day. For convenience.”

  “And a further question,” I said. He waited as I swallowed more than once. “Why do I have to be told all this?”

  “To finish.”

  The voice terrified me. It terrified me every time now. But I had to say: “Finish – what?”

  Another gap. Was it telepathy after all? Vlok said, as if instructed in the actual words, “He comes from Egypt. He was, and is, a sorcerer. You know about the hieroglyphs in their picture-writing? Well, mademoiselle, to an Egyptian sorcerer, writing is itself a magic, a sort of spell –”

  “And old habits die hard,” I said, “like mutilation for vengeance. Louis began to write about all this, and in all sorcery, every ritual must be completed for the safe-making of spell and mage.”

  “Exactly, mademoiselle.”

  “And so he – or she, you keep changing the gender now – wants me to complete the account. To write down what you’ve told me.”

  “Just so. Except it would be better if you begin at the beginning, that is, if you will re-write, or copy Louis’ account. A broken sequence – it needs to be re-started, and then carried through as one. Also, you see, you are a professional at this – it is, if you will, your special branch of magic. You assume therefore the place of the sorcerer himself.” He waited, then said, “And I am to inform you that it doesn’t in the least matter if your view of Tuamon is – unsympathetic. You are naturally afraid and averse to Tuamon, and he expects nothing else. You must write as you feel and see. It will be irrelevant to the ritual, or to the person of the sorcerer Tuamon.”

  “Yes. Very well, I do all that. Then what?”

  He gazed at me. He put on a look, of an agent whose client may possibly have been exposed to a swindle.

  “What could there be, mademoiselle?”

  “No, I’m not such a fool as to expect to be paid. I’m inquiring if I’m not to be killed when I’ve completed the task.”

  And then it – yes, it – it laughed.

  This was so awful to me that I found myself on my feet, running towards the door – Vlok caught me. He must have caught Louis this way dozens of times, there was a distinct sense of practice.

  “There’s nothing to be alarmed at. She doesn’t need your death.”

  “But if I refuse to obey the task, I’ll be punished?”

  Silence again.

  In the end Vlok said, “There’s one more thing that you have to be shown. Then you’ll be left to yourself. You’ll write everything down. Then publish, if you want to, or not. That isn’t of any importance. Just the act of the writing. You can even burn the diary, and your manuscript, providing your own work is finished. Then nobody will trouble you, mademoiselle, ever again.”

  I might have asked him if he liked being its slave, or if he grieved over Louis, or Curt. Or a hundred things. But I did not, and did not care. I cared only to have it over with. I said so.

  “Then I’ll just step down into the street. Tuamon will show you. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Good night, mademoiselle.” And so saying he nodded and walked out, closing my door behind him. I heard his feet go down the stairs as I stood alone in the room in the gas-light with that thing, and waited for the concluding revelation.

  I had wanted the key to the mystery, or it had made me want it.

  Before Vlok’s footsteps had died away, it moved. The dull fire shone around the edges of the body which had been Louis de Jenier’s body. It was taking off the woman’s coat, her hat and gloves, her dress –

  It was undressing itself in front of me, with no sensitivity.

  I said nothing, made no protest. I sank back into my chair, and gripped my hands together. I already knew.

  Louis’ frankness in his descriptions of the costuming of his rôles had told me anything I needed to know about his quite-ordinarily handsome male body. In these split seconds I became aware that this spider-witch, capable of producing from its own fleshly case a string of ectoplasmic gossamer, could thereby reshape and refashion as it chose. The smallness of the hands and feet, the truthful appearance of the breasts –

  A silken camisole, silk stockings, suede shoes. Every stitch.

  Yes. Now I understood. Presumably that would please, that I understood, so that I would write it accurately, here.

  Physically, Louis was a male. Temperamentally, emotionally, a male. Ethically, a female. He was like one of a pair of twins, boy and girl, torn apart at birth. The female twin had been lost to him. He recaptured her – not through male lovers, who offended the maleness of his body – but by clothing himself to her various possible forms. And in that way he had remade himself into the whole double blossom, both sexes.

  But Tuamon had always been that. His presence, now the woman’s garments were lying on the ground, was assertively masculine. The pose and the poise of him were masculine. Yet the face under the gleaming hood of hair was a girl’s face, with only a boy’s arrogance to the brows and lips, and the neck, the boyish shoulders and the arms and the firm apple breasts – a girl’s. There was strength in the limbs, in those rounded arms, and the long, muscled legs, the flat belly. And there was strength in the loins, which the room’s warmth, or the stillness, or arrogance itself, had caused to flower, so I should have no doubts. And then he – for it was, for all and everything, a man – he positioned himself, with no coyness or display, to let me view that the strong loins had also their vulnerability. That this man might be possessed as a woman, too.

  Tuamon, taking the feminine name Tiy-Amonet to smooth the sensibilities of a Roman commander attracted to otherness. Tuamon was hermaphrodite. Male and female, in all particulars. The face and breasts of a girl, the essence of a man. The loins of both.

  Timonie had been solely and only a woman. Outside and under the skin. She was discarded, and punished. But Louis, under the skin, under the skin of the soul, was potentially dual. He had been worth the centuries.

  The gas was turning blue, and that part of the room where Tuamon stood became a vast hollow drum. I thought I glimpsed – lotus pillars, the dune-shaped sarcophagae of Egypt – but then I saw instead an azure sphere, flashing and dazzling with movement and with integral life. In the heart of it, the fabulous monster basked, its eyes like port-holes on a sea of sky, through which passed colossal waves, tidal clouds, while the evening star hung on its forehead, the crescent moon and the full hung one from either ear. And on the disc of the full moon, a blue spider depended from a thread of pulsing ether.

  And I did not want the vision to end.

  I did not want the safe drab darkness to come back.

  And I thought of Louis, closed inside, the food of this power, and I did not feel anything but hunger.

  Then it too was done. Over and done.

  Reality flooded back to me, and I was ashamed and petrified. And in this state I sat, hugging close my mother’s shawl. I sat and the shadow-of-night gathered up itself, and masked itself again, and went by me like a burning whisper, and was gone.

  And after it was gone I remade the fire and turned up the lamp, and sitting at my desk, wrote this.

  THE BOOK OF THE BEAST

  THE GREEN BOOK

  EYES LIKE EMERALD

  PART ONE

  The Scholar

  She with apples you desired

  From Paradise came long ago:<
br />
  With you I feel that if required,

  Such still within my garden grow.

  Shelley

  By the end of the first night, he knew that his lodging was haunted. From the night’s first minute, he should have guessed.

  A hag greeted him on the threshold.

  “M’sire Raoulin?” squawked she in her old-fashioned way. And in the dusk she held high one quavering candle. He learned at once by that the interior would be ill-lit.

  “I am Raoulin. My baggage and chest have arrived?”

  “You are to follow me,” she said, like a portress of the damned in Hell, who could not be expected to have luggage.

  “To my host, your master?:”

  She said, “There’s no master here. There’s no one here. M’sire No One is the lord in these parts.”

  She led him in across a black cavern of a hall, over a blacker courtyard, up an outer stair, in at an arch, along two or three corridors, and in the light-watered darkness opened for him a wooden door with her keys. When she had lit a pair of candles in his apartment, she told him she would bring his supper in an hour, or if he liked company he might partake below in the kitchen with herself and the groom. Plainly he was not royalty, and she intended him to see she knew it.

  Out of malicious curiosity therefore he said he would dine below. She gave him directions he was sure he would forget.

  “And mind out, on the stair,” she said.

  “Mind what?”

  “For M’sire No One,” she replied, and cackled.

  She was a cheery eerie old soul.

  Raoulin was a tall, well-made young man, good-looking in his ivory-ebony mode, for he was by stock a black-haired northerner. His father owned horses and cattle, vineyards, orchards and numberless fields, and in the long low house, while the other sons toiled at the land or galloped off wenching, there was Raoulin, constricted by tutors. They swelled his brain with Latin and fair Greek, they made inroads on his spirit with philosophy and hints alchemical.

  Raoulin was to go to the City and study at the university of the Sachrist.

  When the hour came, he was not sorry. He had been set apart from his family by increasing erudition. It had come to pass he could not sneeze without being accused of some sophistry or conundrum. For the City, he had heard it was packed with churches, libraries and brothels. It was the epitome of all desired wickedness: teases for the intellect, pots for the flesh.

  The lodging was arranged via his father’s steward, who told him only the place had been, a decade before, a great palace, the home of the noble house of d’Uscaret. They had fallen on hard times, through some political out-management, the steward believed. For the mighty families of the City had, even ten years before, been constantly engaged with one another, fighting their blood-feuds on the streets and cutting each other’s throats besides in the Duke’s council chamber.

  Certain members of tribe d’Uscaret were still supposed to live in the mansion. It was said to be dilapidated but also sumptuous. A prestigious residence, a good address.

  But no sooner had Raoulin ridden along the narrow twilight street and seen the towers of the manse arising behind their ruinously walled gardens, the ornate, unillumined facade, like that of some antique tomb, than he was sure of poverty, plagues of mice and lice, and that the steward of his father, altogether fonder of the other sons, had done him a bad turn.

  Supper was not so bad, a large vegetable dish with rice, and a gooseberry gelatine, pancakes, and ale. Though money had been provided for his fare, Raoulin was not sure he would not be cheated. As it was, grandma tucked in heartily, and the bony groom, smacking lips and clacking their three or four teeth like castanets.

  “Perhaps,” said Raoulin, “you might get me some beef tomorrow.”

  “Maybe, if beef’s to be had. And my poor legs aren’t fit for running up and down to the meat market,” replied grandma.

  “Then send the girl,” said Raoulin casually. “And by the by, I hope you’ll see she’s fed too.”

  A silence greeted this.

  Raoulin poured himself more ale.

  The groom sat watching him like a motheaten old wolf, dangerous for all his dearth of fangs. The hag peered fiercely from her mashed plate.

  “We have no girl. He and I, is all.”

  “Then, she’s the lady of the house. I beg her pardon.”

  In fact, he had not thought her a servant, not for one minute. It had been a test.

  Now the hag said again, “Only us. And yourself.”

  “And M’sire No One. Yes, I recall. But in the corridors I passed this lady. A maiden, I believe.”

  Then the groom spoke. He said, “That can’t be, for let me tell you, sieur, there’s no other living soul in this house saving we and you.”

  “Oh, a ghost, then,” said Raoulin.

  His heart jumped, not unpleasantly. He did not believe in ghosts, therefore longed to have their being proved to him, like the existence of God.

  He had of course lost himself on emerging from his apartment. There were no lights anywhere, only the worm-runs of windowless corridors on which the occasional door obtruded. Now and then, from perversity, he had tried these doors. Three gave access to barren chambers, empty of nearly anything. One had a shuttered window, another a candle-branch standing on the floor. (The branch was of iron, worth little. The candle-stubs had long ago been devoured by vermin.) A few other doors resisted his impulse. He fancied they were stuck rather than locked. Presently he reached an ascending stair he was certain he had not seen on entry with the hag. He paused in irritated perplexity, wondering if it would be worthwhile to climb. Just then a woman appeared and went across the stair-top, evidently negotiating the corridor which ran parallel to that below.

  She did not carry a candle, and that he saw her at all was due to his own light, and the pallor of her hair and skin which caught it. Her gown was of some sombre stuff, high-waisted as was now not always the fashion, and she held her hands joined under her breast. A stiff silver net contained her hair; it glittered sharply once as she glided by. That was all. She was gone literally in that flash. Her face he did not really see, yet her slightness, something about her, made him think her girlish.

  Anyone else, going over the unlit upper corridor, must have glanced downward at his light. Not she.

  He had lacked the impertinence to pursue.

  He waited all through supper to see if any reference would be made to the fair passager – he had decided she was attractive; she had to be, being mysterious.

  “And if she is a ghost,” he continued, “whose ghost?”

  The groom and the old woman exchanged looks. Raoulin had seen such before. The camaraderie of age against youth, stupid cunning against stupid intelligence, the low against the better who was not better enough to get respect.

  “There’s no ghost here,” said the old woman at length. “You were dreaming, your head full of scholar books.”

  “All right,” said Raoulin, pleased by the heightening Stygian shade of deception, faithfully observed as in any romance. “Probably a trick of the candle.”

  Returning towards his rooms, he tried for the fork of the corridor where he had lost himself and found the stair.

  He could not regain it.

  Having gone up and down and round and about for quite an hour, having peered into further fruitless rooms of dust, mouse-cities, broken furniture, he only rediscovered his rightful corridor with difficulty. His heart, which had begun by beating excitedly, was now leaden with weariness. Reaching his bed, thank God aired with hot stones, he flung himself among the sheets and barely had space to blow out the candle before he was asleep.

  Here, unconscious, he dreamed the door to his apartment was stealthily opened. A slim shadow drifted over the outer chamber. He sensed it examining as it went the closed travelling chest, the books he had already set out, a small reliquary his mother had pressed upon him. Then, entering the bedroom, all in black night, the shadow cast around. White finge
rs, that glimmered in the void, traced his doublet where he had thrown it down, a purse of coins – he heard them chink – his dagger – he longed to warn her to be careful, the edge was newly honed.

  Then to the brink of his bed she stole, this immoderate phantom.

  In utter black, through sleep and closed eyelids, yet he made her out.

  A mask of Parsuan porcelain floated above him in a silver-grilled aureole-light of blondest hair. As he had known it must be, the face was lovely, and cool as snow. And the eyes – ! Never had Raoulin seen such eyes. Wide-set, carved a touch slantingly, fringed with pale lashes, and very clear. And oh, their colour. They were like the jewels he remembered from a bishop’s mitre, two matching emeralds, green as two linden leaves against the sun.

  Asleep, miles off, Raoulin attempted to order his body to speak to her. But the words could not be dredged up from the sea, his lips and tongue refused obedience.

  Drowning, he could only gaze on her as she drew aside from him, swimming far away, over the horizon of night.

  One day remained to Raoulin before he must present himself at the university. How he regretted its brevity. He had meant to use the time in exploration of the wicked City of Paradys, but now a morning sufficed for this. He visited the markets, and pried amongst the crannied shops, saw the shining coils of the river straddled by bridges, gazed on the great grey Temple-Church of the Sacrifice, where he must hear at least one Mass and report the fact to his mother.

  By early afternoon he had strayed back south-west of the City, to gloomy House d’Uscaret.

  In daylight, the upland streets – the mansion was on one of the many hills that composed Paradys – were not appetising. Nothing fell so low as the highmost. There were other large houses and imposing towers in the area, now gone to tenements, tiles off, stones crumbling, strung with torn washing. In the alleys was disgusting refuse. Every crevice seemed to hold debris or the bones of small deceased animals.