The Secret Book of Paradys

by Tanith Lee

  In this instant Raoulin, who had forgotten his own name, felt a terrible resistance, some clutch upon the choking pump of desire, which strangled –

  Unable to move, his lust thrashed, trying to burst from the swollen blazing rod –

  (And the figure he had not properly seen, and had also forgotten, the figure which did not look at the dancer or the naked man, this figure now stretched out the wands in his hands and touched the metal surface before him. He spoke. The words made no sound. Instead they shouted out in the air above the triple stars of five and seven and three points.)

  Evil One show thyself and come forth!

  O dweller among ruins and maker of ruins

  Get thee up to where thy ruins are;

  For the Lord God has sent me

  He has elected me his priest in this,

  He has given into my hands the Seven Powers

  According to the word of the sixth Day.

  Evil One, Foul One, show thyself and come forth!

  And the snake dancer rippled her hands along her silver body and tore it in two pieces, flinging both aside, to reveal, under the third veil, the nude skeleton.

  The stifled death-throe of ecstasy was pierced by a white and screeking pin. It came from inside the young man’s loins. It rent its way through him, through the pelvis, spermary, and phallus. It was a birth. It thrust in surges similar to the birth-pangs of a woman. It seemed to rip his genitals like the beak of a vulture.

  He cried, every prayer and blasphemy, every obscenity and childish plea he had ever known. Then he only screamed.

  Strand by strand the rope of agony was pulled out of him.

  It began as a jet of sheer semen, opalescent in the uncanny light. But the fountain rose and did not slacken or end. The moonstone gush travelled upward, spilling with a fearful elasticity, forming into a springing plume.

  Until in its turn the plume, of a substance now composed not of any mortal sexual fluid, but of some astral plasmic material, coalesced, ran inward, began to construct another shape.

  The chamber of night had gone all to blackness again. It was once more the void. But in the void, terror was made manifest.

  Recreated without flesh, it was colourless, and dully shining. It had the limbs and torso of a man, yet lacking the procreative organ. It was winged. The head was the head of a bird of prey. As it was now, there were no eyes, only two sumps of cloudy darkness. It had no brain, this dark was not that.

  Alone upon its stage it stirred, the bird head looked about with the un-eyes. It was seeking for what had been delivered of it, and for what had brought it forth.

  Out of the black the figure of the magician Haninuh again grew visible. The two wands were gone from his hands, splintered at the impact of egression. But before him still there lay on the air the hollow length of metal. It was a shield of highly polished hide, iron-bound and gilded, with the lightnings and burning staff, from which stared a Medusa: a Roman relic of Par Dis.

  In the left eye of the Medusa glimmered a bit of quartz, or flawed corunda. It, like the demon, had no longer any colour.

  Haninuh straightened himself. He stood in the void and showed the shield before the demon.

  “Come thou,” said Haninuh, “for here thou art.”

  Then the demon spat and sizzled and swirled towards the shield of Retullus Vusca, and into the Medusa’s eye – which like itself had waited, waited: cut by the stroke of suicide from the entrails where, undissolved, this one piece had nestled like a child, washed out by blood under the hand of the dying Roman, thrust by him into the broken socket of the Medusa, his warning, all he could give, a jewel that was an eye – the utuk fell crackling, and met the shield, the eye, the gem, roared – like wind or fire – and was gone.

  The Jew bent a little, leaning on the shield after his battle, to see where the jewel-fragment lay, erupted from its setting of eleven centuries. The shield seemed battered at last, brittle, like clinker. And for the jewel itself, it was like a cinder rendered up from the common hearth.

  Haninuh spoke a Word over that cinder. Then he spoke a Word to the chamber and the blackness. To God he could not speak. For this, there were no words.

  The embers of a morning lay in the green tines of the cedar tree. It seemed a dove was murmuring there.

  “Oh that you were my brother that nursed at my mother’s breast. When I should find you I might kiss you, it would be no shame. I would bring you into the house and there feed you on fruit and quench your thirst with wine. His left hand under my head, his right hand caressing me, he will teach me love.”

  Raoulin’s lids lifted. Beauty sat by the bed and looked at him with gentle sombre eyes. In colour, no blacker than his own.

  “Who is this,” she said, “coming out of the desert, leaning upon her love? Under the tree I woke you; let it be as the place where you were born.”

  He was so weak he could not move, could not even speak to her. But he had never thought to see her again. He attempted, and failed, to find some means to offer her his voice.

  She shook her head, and touched his lips with her fingers.

  Upon the bed itself a striped cat stared at him, pitiless, guileless, angelic, and kneaded his feet.

  He slept once more, comforted under their gaze.

  Folded in a parchment, corded with seven charms, the amulet, or what remained of it, was buried in a clod of earth the size of a boy’s hand. This then was packed into a box of horn, and that box into another of iron. Between the two boxes was a space, where an alchemical substance, being intruded, began of itself to burn. The iron box was closed, and put into a tablet of lead.

  The whole was then carried to the midnight bank of the river, half a mile below Our Lady of Ashes, and thrown far out by the mighty arm of Liva. The tablet sank.

  It sank, perhaps, to the mulch of the river’s bottom, to wait once more, now for the deterioration of its containers, horn and iron and lead, earth, air, fire, and water. To wait out the river too, maybe, until that vast elder Leviathan of Paradys should shrink to a few puddles under some future sun. By then, the life of the amulet might also be eroded. If not, in that unpredictable to-come, some wandering one in the dry river-bottom would stoop and take up a lustreless stone, curious, and find the Devil still kept his court in the world. But possibly that day would never be.

  For Raoulin, he was a very long time ill in the house of Haninuh. But being excellently, and cleverly and lovingly, tended, recovered before winter sealed the City in its orb of ice.

  In the spring letters went from Raoulin to his kindred at the northern farm. But then the happiness turned like cream. For Raoulin had set himself to become a Jew by faith, conceivably more orthodox than his mentor. The reasons that he gave were unhelpful, for the actual spur had risen in him as fiercely and insatiably as young blood. (Perhaps too he remembered a Christian priest under the Sacrifice, who had turned from him in his hour of horrible need.)

  But his family cast off Raoulin. That was that.

  Among the scholars of Haninuh’s fraternity, this scholar found more than enough to study, and took to these new tutors, these new arcane formulae, with greed. For themselves, the Jews were kind to him. Even in Paradys, in their hearts, they reckoned their way was the only one, and had grown used to the insults and cruelties this knack provoked. For the gentile who approached them from the night, innocent, quietly asking, they could not but feel some wondering affection. As he grew in stature among them, they came to speak of their foundling with pride.

  By then, of course, he had wed Ruquel, Haninuh’s exquisite daughter, under the canopy.

  These two knew together more happiness than most, less pain than many. They seldom spoke of death. Like the draining of the river, such things were the concern of God.

  THE BOOK OF THE DEAD

  LE LIVRE BLANC ET NOIR

  Paradys too has its cemeteries, its little graveyards tucked out of sight, its greater yards of death that hug the churches, the cathedral that is called a Temple. It
has its places of graves, between the houses in sudden alleys. Between the paving stones, here and there you may look down and see a name that paves the way, a date of beginning and the other of surcease. Even under the house floors now and then they will raise a carpet and a board and point you a grave: Sylvie sleeps here, or Marcelin. Paradys is a city of the dead as she is a city of the live, the half-live, the undead, and perhaps the deathless.

  And here, on this hill, shrouded by the pretty park they have made where once the scholars bored out their eyes (but shells have burst there since), overlooking the coils of the river, is a great necropolis of Paradys.

  And here I have brought you, on this windy, colorless gravegray afternoon. To walk about, to look and see. If you wish.

  We have come at an opportune moment, too. For over there, where you note that line of carriages going up, the funeral is taking place of Baubon the clown.

  Baubon was immensely popular. To him of an evening, after their fancy suppers, went the women in spangles and pointed heels and the men in their capes, and white shirt fronts, like cats.

  The hearse is huge, scrolled like an urn and hung with black drapes. The black horses labor beneath the black plumes and blacker tassels. No motor cars spoil the effect. Even the mourners have had to hire chariots.

  Surprisingly, there are very few mourners (and no crowds rim the ground, held off by policemen). The chief mourner is a thin and white-haired man with the face of an elderly imp, enough like the mask of Baubon, publicly always seen in garish paint, to imply a brother or close cousin.

  The black coffin, ebony with silver handles, is unloaded – an enormous wreath of flowers balances white upon it – and the service begins.

  Everyone stands in silence as the priest speaks over the black (blacker even than the horses) hole in the ground. He has a pompous theatrical look, and the boy swinging the censer so adroitly, why he might even be that favorite of Baubon’s among the acrobats.

  A few women weep a few crystal tears. They are the ones able to cry without help in the theater. The men stand solemn. There are three eulogies spoken perfectly over the hole. We are not near enough to catch all the words – Genius, Unique, Mourned, Never-to-Be-Emulated. Then the coffin is lowered into the space. Earth and flowers rain down. A white rose …

  The celebrants shift from the grave in an exact ring, like circling black moths.

  The chief mourner shakes the priest by the hand.

  “Bravo, Jacques. It couldn’t have been bettered. No, not at The Tragedy herself.”

  And the old imp strokes the censer boy.

  A woman laughs.

  “Take off the lid, then,” says the brother of Baubon the clown.

  Two men scramble carelessly into the grave and haul off the coffin top, flinging away the exquisite floral tributes.

  In the coffin lies Baubon, in his patchwork and all his paint. As so many have seen him, laughing then, or crying, turning enormous cartwheels, falling from high towers.

  “Lid back on,” cries the brother of Baubon gaily. “That’s enough. No respect.”

  And there is much amusement, back goes the lid, and the flowers are slung on any how.

  Two gravediggers approach, and start to shovel in the black, moist soil.

  “Are you satisfied, Baubon?”

  “Quite satisfied.”

  “When we do it in reality, will you be watching then, Baubon?”

  “Who knows? That’s why I had my funeral now, to be sure.”

  Baubon is the imp. The priest an actor from the Comedy Theatre. The boy is … the boy.

  Staged, the funeral. And now the grave almost filled in. The black chariots roister away to some great restaurant where they will hold the wake of Baubon the clown and chief mourner.

  In five years, or ten, or more (or less), they will come again to do this thing. Then the crowds will press at the fences and the policemen hold them off. Then perhaps some of the tears will be real, and the single white rose, if it falls, will not give its life for nothing, only a game. Or is it a game? Is the real funeral not to be a game?

  And will Baubon watch then, as today?

  Perhaps the dead are always watching, and we should tread carefully and speak low.

  There will be no skulls in the grass. Though the recent storm shifted a tomb or two from its moorings, the staff of the necropolis came out like beetles in the rain and tidied everything. Even the shell that burst here was tidied. The necropolis has stood some while, two or three centuries. Always neat, even during the days of Liberty and Revolution.

  (The last carriages career down into the park. There an old gentleman and his lady are shocked to behold the hearse go by filled with laughing actresses.)

  In places there are great houses of death, you see. And in other places tiny markers half hidden in the grass and ivy, commemorative plaques for those who have gone down elsewhere into the dark that lies below, if not exactly beneath, everything.

  Are they truly there, under our feet? Walk softly, talk quietly.

  I will show you their shadows.

  Here is a grave, now. …

  The Weasel Bride

  In the long echoing street the laughing dancers throng,

  The bride is carried to the bridegroom’s chamber through

  torchlight and tumultuous song;

  I celebrate the silent kiss that ends short life or long.

  – Yeats

  There are stories in the country told today as though they happened only a week ago. In many ways customs have not altered very much, and every village is its own empire. It is possible to imagine such things still occur, in lonely woods, under the stare of a silver moon.

  A young trapper, walking home one evening across the water meadows, stopped in startlement, seeing a girl dancing on a hill in the moonlight. She was very beautiful, with long pale hair, but as she danced she wept and lamented. Pausing to watch, he also overheard her complaint. “Alas,” said she, “that I may only keep this human form in the full ray of the moon. No sooner does she set, than I must return to my loathsome other shape, from which only the true love of a man can rescue me, although that forever. But what hope is there of it, seeing he must court and wed me in my other form, before his kin, and in the church. I am lost.” Fascinated, the young man continued to spy on this strange maiden until at length the moon began to go down. The sky lightened, then grew black. The stars stung bright as the lunar orb sank under the hill. It was gone. At that moment, the maiden disappeared like the moon, as if into the ground. The young man ran up the hill and searched about, and as he did so he glimpsed something that flashed away into the bushes. It was a white weasel.

  Now the trapper had made up his mind that he would be the one to have this girl, no matter what the cost. Therefore he laid his most cunning trap, and baited it, and went down to his village. Here he started hasty arrangements for a wedding, telling all sorts of lies, and bribing the priest and the mayor to obtain consent. The following night, which happened to be a night of no moon, he hurried to the spot where he had left his trap. And sure enough, what should he find in it but the white weasel, caught fast and crying piteously. “Fear nothing,” said the suitor, “I shall befriend you, poor creature. Come, be my sweetheart, love me a little, and I shall wed you, before my kin and in the church, tomorrow morning.”

  Then he carried the weasel in a cage down to the village, ignoring her cheeps and struggles, which he guessed to be a part of the spell on her.

  In his father’s house, he had his mother and sisters put on the weasel a veil made from a lace handkerchief, and a garland made from a baby’s pearl bracelet. He was the head of his own household, his father being dead, and the three women were obliged to obey him, but they did so in terror, thinking he had gone mad. The weasel, however, was most gentle now, and bore with everything that was done. Only at her lover did she hiss and bare her sharp teeth.

  At sunrise, out they went, the trapper, his mother and sisters, and the bridal weasel in her cage
. The whole village was about and crowding to the church, and the priest was there in his habit, with his prayerbook, waiting. But when they all saw what went on, there was a great to-do.

  “Holy father,” said the trapper, “you must humor me in this. For I insist this creature shall be my wife, and nobody will gainsay me. Remember,” he added in a low voice to the priest, “my father’s coins which I have given you.”

  “God moves in His own way,” said the priest, and brought the young man and the weasel into the church and up to the altar. There, in the sight of the village and of the trapper’s sobbing womenfolk, the priest wed the young man to the weasel.

  Thereafter they repaired home for the wedding breakfast, and about noon, the young man took his bride away to the nuptial chamber, above.

  The husband removed his wife from her cage and placed her on the pillows. “Dear wife,” said he, “I will be patient.” And there he sat quietly, as the daylight streamed in at the casement and the weasel ran about the bed and climbed the curtains, and below the wedding guests, in fear and amazement, grew drunk on his father’s wine.

  At length, the afternoon waned, the dusk came, and at long last, the moon rose in the east and pointed her white finger straight through the window.

  “Now let us see,” said the young man, and he put his hand on the weasel and stroked her snowy back. But as soon as the moon’s ray touched her, she turned and bit him, under the base of the thumb, so his blood poured.