by Tanith Lee
“Sieur, you’ve been my saviour. I thank you for my life. But I don’t see why you let me keep it. For I believe you know why I shouldn’t be let live.”
These were the first conscious sentences he rendered the Jew.
They met in a parlour above the hall, about lamp-lighting, and the scent of flowers came in from the house vine, and olibanum from the antique lamp. There were a great many books, and some scrolls and ornate cases of leather. The two men sat facing each other over a table where there was wine to drink neither had touched.
“In honesty, Raoulin, I do know, for you spoke of it asleep, and I took the liberty to interrogate you.”
“And that – it – did it answer you also?”
“Not in words. It has no use for those. But it was aware, I think, in its primordial way, of our dialogue. Consider, it has no intelligence, only an instinct and an appetite. Even so, it may employ such knowledge as you yourself possess, to gain its ends. This is a power of desire more pliant and enduring than any of the desires of a man. It is a demon.”
“A demon. Yes.”
“I know its race, even. Out of Assyria, an utuk, having as its own form the body of a man, the head of a bird, but a bird of the beginnings, scaled not feathered, from the fifth day of the earth.”
Raoulin shuddered.
“Did I tell you all her story, too?”
“I have pieced it together. All your story and all the story of Helise d’Uscaret, who died and left her body for the demon to inhabit. For the matter of that, I sent Liva as a spy to the d’Uscaret mansion. He says the old kitchen woman and the groom go on about their doings as if nothing’s amiss. I conjecture that what you left upon that bed crumbled entirely, even to the bones. If they think anything, there, perhaps it’s that you and she have gone off together, in the way of heedless lovers.”
Raoulin said, “That must come. Where else can I go but after her, into the grave and down to perdition.”
The Jew replied, “God made all things. Even the creatures of his servant, the Devil. We are instructed to note the lesson their existence teaches. He never says we must offer them our throats.”
“Do you suppose I might prevent it – by abstaining? Heros made himself a priest, but the Devil won. My blood’s hotter than the blood of Heros. And when it works in me like yeast –”
“There now,” said the Jew. And he poured out the crystal wine, and gave it to Raoulin, as if it were medicine. “This is a clever enemy. It adapts itself as any beast will do. The ways of it are various. It can erupt inward, changing the victim to the semblance of itself, thereafter enacting by that body all it wishes. Or it passes into the body of a woman at intercourse, and her child, when it comes forth, will be the shell of the demon. It can do both, or either. It can lie down dormant too, even as with Helise, where it waited inside the womb, that terrible ambush ten years old. Only the key is constant, the procreative spasm. All the pure line of d’Uscaret were susceptible to it, but it can casually infect anywhere. Now that whole house has perished, only you are left to it. How can it let you die? It resisted the death of Helise until its transference was accomplished. The stabbing you gave yourself was sewn up in a day. I partly believe you might burn yourself alive, Raoulin, and this creature would find some means to build you up again. Death’s no answer.” The Jew sipped his wine. “Neither abstinence from the carnal act. The utuk provokes and seduces others to provoke. As you say, you’re not proof against it.”
The dark was in the windows now. Hesperus rang from a nearby convent. The nights were lengthening and drawing near.
“How can there be any escape?”
Haninuh looked at him steadily.
“You will have decided, perhaps, I’m versed in certain arts.”
“A magician.”
“If you will call it so.”
“Then – can you cast this out of me?”
“Once before,” said Haninuh, “it came, this thing, to mock me. I was unready then, knowing not enough. But after that failure, I studied in the school of demons, gathered together books, and artifacts from the Roman time here, when this began. Strange to say, I felt that the utuk would return to duel again with me. We’re ancient foes. Its primal memory and mine contain rank seeds of all those battles. The cities of the desert, the chariots, and the chains. Yes, I suppose I can cast it out of you.”
Raoulin started up. The Jew stayed him.
“This isn’t without great danger.”
“I’m ready to die,” said Raoulin. “You know as much.”
“Also you must give yourself into my charge. What must be done is in itself unholy. There will be for you shame, rank sweetness, confusion, and agony. You may die indeed, you may lose your mind for ever. But this I do promise, not your soul.”
Raoulin stood before him, white-faced, arrogant with fear and courage. In the dusky lamplight, his eyes were only black.
“Sieur magus, do what you must. I’m your slave. When will it be?”
“In seven days, that is the new moon, God’s remaking. Then.”
The Beautiful Jewess, eighteen years of age, sat playing with her cat on the floor of the bedroom. The cat’s play was more sedate than it had been, still adept.
Haninuh, having been admitted, stood gazing at them.
He saw the child clearly, as the kitten was still visible in the cat. But both were mature, and changed. Ruquel was a woman. He must acknowledge that.
Presently she looked up, and her smile faded into a serene strictness. It was his own habitual look, given back to him like a mirror.
“I’ve read the book, as you instructed, my father.”
“That’s good.”
“You’ve spoken to the young man?” He was touched at her way of referring to Raoulin, as if she were by far the elder. In some ways she was. Raoulin had not been wise, but he had, in the end, striven to be virtuous, prepared to sacrifice himself for the sins of other men.
“We’ve spoken. It shall be done.”
“And I?” she said. He was thankful for her quickness.
“As it’s set down in the book.”
She lowered her eyes. Her face shadowed with the self-consciousness of the girl she was. Then the woman governed the girl, she looked up again and said, “Yes, I’m willing. And I have the skills.”
“I know what’s asked of you,” he said. “Such a dance, though part of your secret training as in the days of Salomé, is a hidden thing. If you refused, I should have had to find some other, a paid dancer, and perhaps she doesn’t exist in this City. Those that tutored you know of none.”
“Besides, the paid one could command no magic.”
He had always allowed her that word, though it was not exactly accurate; it seemed to step appealingly from her tongue. She had from the first recognised she must be careful of its use with strangers.
“That’s true, she could not. But let me say this, too. I’d never have petitioned you, my own daughter, except” — he hesitated, wanting to spare her, yet sure that there must be no lies,—“except, Ruquel, that I noticed at once you love this man, love him as your bridegroom, and your husband.”
She waited, and then she said, “You’ll think me foolish. It happened the moment I saw him there. Perhaps even before, hearing the jar break on the street. He was at my door.”
“How should I think you foolish, Ruquel? You are a sybil. Your awareness has always been profound, even as a child. This love you have recognised, but not invented.”
“I honour you. I’d do nothing against my father’s wishes.”
“I know. It is your father instead requests of you a dishonourable task, which only your love for Raoulin can redeem. You understand, despite everything, he may die?”
“Yes.”
“You understand, though I can protect you by the powers I command, in this arena nothing is certain? We are bound to it by our gifts and his plight. There’s peril for all.”
“Yes.”
“You understand, my daugh
ter, you are my star?”
“Yes,” she said, smiling again, “I understand.”
Raoulin fasted on honey and curds and water, then on water only. The irritating hunger dissipated to a comfortable lack of all thought of food. Then he was cleansed with a potent cathartic herb. On the sixth day, the water was brought in a water-like goblet of glass. There was a drug mixed in it. His senses became abnormally clarified. His body was light, nearly weightless. He could smell the scent of flowering things and decaying things from streets away. He felt he could have reached up and clasped the vault of the sky.
That night, he supposed he would not be able to sleep at all, for everything had become so fascinating and had such nuances, even the creak of the mattress under him. But sleep discovered him and took him away up among the stars. He saw the City far below, he saw stars beneath him. When he woke at sunrise, he believed his soul had flown close to Heaven, and God had not flung him down.
Late in the seventh day, the woman brought him a bittersweet resinous drink. When he had consumed it, every doubt or fear he had had abandoned him. It was like strong wine, but without wine’s blurring or analgesic properties, without wine’s stupidity.
When Liva entered and asked that Raoulin go with him, Raoulin got up and did so, in a wild, still peace that was better than hope.
Nevertheless, Raoulin did not seem to take in the route they went by. Perhaps it only appeared irrelevant at that intrinsic moment.
Liva had brought him to a heavy double door of black wood, not ebony, something more essential, some tree that had altered into coal.
In the door were two handles of cold translucent onyx.
Liva had gone away. Raoulin gripped the door handles and turned them, one to the left and one to the right, or rather they seemed to turn themselves this way at the pressure of his hands.
Within, was midnight, without a star. But the Jew had already impressed upon him that he would come to the chamber and must go in. In he walked, and thrust the doors shut at his back.
Then there was nothing. Only the void.
There was only formlessness and darkness, but then the moon and the sun rose, and divided the day from the night.
After the great lights, came the fish and fowl like patterns, and the beasts and cattle, and there were mountains and valleys and enormous seas, and clouds and winds and stars, but in the end, men and women travelled across the plains, and he saw them though they had no names.
After this, he was aware he lay upon a mountain’s top. A million miles high, gleamed the crescent moon, like the bow of a kinnor.
On all sides, granite, obsidian, salt, the mountain slid to a wilderness.
He knew the loneliness of a single being upon the huge plate of the universe, who can only reach out to God.
His soul seemed to yearn upward. A vast silent finger brushed his forehead. Maybe it was only the wind in that place.
For hours he lay and marvelled, free of anything, and nearly free of self, lying there upon the stone of the mountain, with all night above.
Until, miles off, he heard the murmur of a drum.
He knew it, had heard it often. He tried to guess what it might be or mean. Then he realised that it came always nearer, that the beat intensified, and rumbled in the rock below him, and so strummed upward through his body and his bones.
He became aware of his body. Not any one portion of it, but every inch of flesh, each tier of the recumbent skeleton. The soles of his feet, his legs and thighs, the torso, neck and ears, the arms, the fingertips, the face, the scalp, even the hair, the teeth and nails, even the inner canals, links, crevices, membranes and nerves, each had a sentience, was possessed of a complete conscious concentrating awareness, yet it had life only through him.
The drum he identified now as a heartbeat. Every particle of his body, so autonomous yet so involved with him, responded to its rhythm.
The feeling was of a wonderful totality, and self-knowledge.
It was only then that he began to discern the chamber which contained the mountain top.
It was itself night-black. Its ceiling was enamelled with constellations, and figures of the zodiac, set out in all their stars, and through this the upper heaven glowed, and the new moon, resting upon Aquarius.
No walls upheld this ceiling.
The ground of the mountain was figured over on its blackness. Done in silver, like the sky, a five-pointed star seemed extending to infinity. And within it, a seven-pointed star had been fitted, and within that again, a star of three points, a triangle.
At the three points of the triangle, to each of which somehow he could see, was a smoking silver brazier formed as an animal. All were unnatural. To the north, at the apex, stood a winged bull with a lion’s head, from this the smoke rose white; to the west was a silver calf with the sun on its forehead, it had the tongue of a snake, the smoulder from this was nacreous; east was a scorpion or scarab-thing, with the head of a man horned and bearded like a goat’s, the steam from this one was transparent, remarkable only by a scintillant tremor in the air.
Within the triangle lay Raoulin, with his arms stretched up above his head towards the west and east points, his feet together pointing to the northern tip.
From the braziers came a mingling aroma, of balsam and hypericum, myrrh and orris.
In his ears he heard the rush of the perfumed smoke, and over and beneath, the drumbeat.
He felt no curiosity. He had no thoughts. He was utterly aware, cognizant, content.
A silver-white ewe came picking daintily over the rocks, some way beyond the stars which contained him, up on a peak in the sky. On her brow was a shining ray. She went around the wall of darkness, and was gone.
Then he heard two heartbeats, two drums. Another being, another life, was with him on the mountain.
Something uncurled, stretched itself within him. It was pleasant, had no urgency. He lay inside the triangle, his arms to the east and west, his feet pointing north, attentive.
There was a sudden sensation, like a kiss, on his breast above the heart. It did not startle him, he seemed almost to have expected it. After a moment, it came again, alighting over his ribcage, winging away. The touch was delightful and provocative, he longed for it to be repeated. For a while, nothing, and then, the kiss fell once more, more lingeringly, at his throat, and even as his skin tingled from it, again, over the nipple of his right side, so a string of fire was plucked there. After this, like a fine rain, the kissing came down glittering all across him. In a moment his whole body had become a lyre, sinuously strummed and vibrating – the rain of unseen sprites, to whom clothing was no barrier, fastened on him, their lips and fingers testing every atom of flesh and muscle, the framework of bone, for its potential pleasure. Even beneath him the rock itself seemed to give rise to these quivering entities.
Under the onslaught, he found he was unable to move, like one chained, at the mercy of the incorporeal delicious torture.
Dizzily his eyes remained fixed upon the rock in the sky, from which the second heartbeat seemed to have arisen. He could not apparently keep closed his eyes, though waves of sensation continually drove him to do so.
No, he could not close his eyes, and now upon the rock peak he saw a moon with a woman’s face, which hung there and regarded him, shameless, helpless as he lay. And as the moon stared, the beings which fastened on him stripped him naked, as if for her cajolement, as if to bare him to her light.
But the moon … had black hair, and a head-dress of silver discs which she shook with a sound that matched the sinful rain that kissed him.
The moon had a black cloak. She had white hands that stole out as the hands stole upon him, that made little motions like the circling and flittering of those that played upon his body.
He could not look away from her. (And yet, just then, at a distance, the ends of the earth, he saw a male figure was standing, with his back turned to the moon in her cloak, his head averted both from this and from the naked man bound inside
three stars. The figure perhaps had folded its arms across its chest, a wand in either hand, and before him was a kind of shallow basin upturned, or hollow mirror – )
But the moon had a cloak, and she cast it from her. She was all a woman, clad in a garment of silver scallops that covered her from the neck to the wrists and the ankles.
And then, on her arched bare feet, to the rhythm of the drumbeats, one faster, one slower and in counterpoint, she commenced a dance.
It was the dance of a snake. A swaying liquid coiling and uncoiling, like that of a river let along the ground. The arms followed the torso to and fro, the feet scarcely moved. It was not a spectacular or frenzied dance. It was immensely lambent, deeply suggestive and descriptive of the body of a woman, immeasurably cunning. It was the dance of Salomé before the king, which had hypnotised and driven him mad, and brought her, on a salver, the severed head of Jehanus. It was the dance of a snake.
As the languid pulses wove, the silver scallops began to drip away. Under them was a garment of thin stuff, perhaps byssus.
The shoulders of the dancer, her arms, rose from the silver like those of a maiden ascending from water.
Over the shoulders of the bound man, the unseen hands curved back and forth, to the pits of the arms, the line of the ribs, the flared points of the breast, and along the abdomen and the belly, like streams into the restless pounding groin.
As the silver rained off from the girl who was the snake, the rain poured on Raoulin, the torrent of hands and mouths. They stroked him, they teased and tickled him, they ran like threads of moltenness across his skin, over and beneath him. They had woken the root of life. He ached with lust and became lust, played, tautened, tuned, caressed by waters and airs and fire – and the drumbeat galloped, galloped, and the scales quickened like leaves and guttered from the girl’s body wrapped in its second byssus skin. But the byssus too worked gradually away from her, unfurling like the calyx of a flower, slipping from her breasts that were the cups of flowers, that now hid themselves again, that now were again and utterly unveiled, flowers starred with flowers, while the kisses of invisible lips visited like moths and tongues probed like trickles of silk, and hands feathered and persuaded and the girl was naked to her loins dancing upon the silver leaves of her dress, and the byssus unseamed like snakeskin and slid away like water from the moon belly with its tiny drop of shadow, the goblet of black hair, the stemmed thighs smooth like alabaster –
