by Tanith Lee
They sipped, too, at the abandoned mugs of gin. But their systems had been denied alcohol so long they did not like it, indeed some wept and spat the gin onto the floor.
All about them, the madhouse was rife with searchers and destroyers, but here in this firelit heart they were in sanctuary. Had their warders returned here, they would have found these freed slaves easily. But they did not return. Only darkness and whiteness, with a flash of amber, came and filled the entry.
Then the people were afraid.
But Citalbo said, “No. This is the hour.”
And Maque said, “They’re mild birds. They don’t do harm.”
And Judit said, “He’s like a king, a great monarch. We must go with him.”
And so, as the Penguin moved from the entrance way, they went out, all of them. And in their path, right across the rooms of straw, there was a wall. And on the wall was a painting. It was of ice floes and sheets of ice, and beyond the ice were mountains. A marigold glow hung over it, and there before its face the Penguin was, as if it had been painted too, onto the wall.
“Penguinia,” said Judit. “I’ll give up my land, to be there.”
There are instants of immeasurable beauty. They evolve and are and cannot be argued with.
Out of Penguinia came the organ note that shook the asylum to its roots, and next came the wind of the snow. But it was not cold. It was warm as the fire on the hearth and much, much sweeter. And as this happened, as Penguinia breathed upon them, the wall of the painting opened, and became actual, like the gateway into a garden.
So they saw the soft, warm snows, and the trees blooming up from them with their apricot and orange fruit, and the sun purred on the ice, and a stream bubbled like champagne. Flowers grew in Penguinia, and beyond the slopes of white, a golden sea sparkled.
Some broke away at once and ran and ran through and ran out into the landscape of this country of heaven.
“I dare,” said Citalbo. “Let’s go there.”
And Maque and Judit and Citalbo walked up to the edge of the snow and stepped over among the flowers.
Then the others came after, all of them, the ones who slouched like sad apes, and the ones who shook and the ones who had cried alone in the night for years. And as the soft ground of Penguinia received them, they looked up in wonderment.
Judit bowed to the spirit, the great Penguin, and then alone hastened over the snow toward the sunlit sea, where the seals were diving and descending like mink ribbons.
“Worlds set like suns,” Citalbo said, “and rise like suns. That’s mathematics.”
“There’ll be huge white bears,” Maque said, “and little white foxes.”
“But kind,” Citalbo said, “here.”
Behind them the rooms of straw had become only a hole of darkness, which was dissolving.
Maque looked back.
Through the aperture, some of the warders appeared. They had blundered into the lower building from the yard. Marie Tante was there, and Tiraud. They gaped at Penguinia.
“Close the gate, quick,” said Maque.
On the platelike faces of the warders was a look that had nothing to do with reason or duty. It was a gaze of fury and jealousy, of wicked, blind human bestiality, which had been cheated.
But then the hole back into hell went out, like a momentary flaw in sight. It was gone, and the world was gone, and there was simply here, which would be kind.
Only Tiraud ran at the empty space and smashed at it with his stick. Only Tiraud roared.
Marie Tante had already dismissed the mirage. As what? She did not have the wit to specify.
Moule sniveled, thinking she had gone mad.
While all across the buildings of hell, the others bounded up and down, with their lights and instruments of hurt, seeking, stumbling, and in his flat, the collector of murdered birds and butterflies, Dr. Volpe, tapped at his piano in objectless fear. And the walls and planes, the walks and yards and lawns, slid and shifted this way, that way, and abruptly froze to stillness.
“What’s that noise?” said Desel, pausing on a stair.
“I smell gin,” said Bettile suspiciously.
Dr. Volpe stared inside the piano lid.
There was a trickling, and then a flow, like a thousand taps. That was all. And then there gushed from every pipe and drain, from every cup and bottle, out of every crevice and pore and tiniest crack, the Wave.
It reeked. It reeked of gin. It was gin.
Iridescent and limitless, it crashed through all the lower chambers, and up all the stairs. It plowed across the rooms like a liquid wind of steel. The lamps sizzled out.
They heard and saw it come, and smelled it come. This climax of poisonous despoilment.
There was a handful of seconds, during which not one moved, but everything in them lunged and boiled in an attempt to keep its life. But the very smell of the jolly fluid, on which they had sustained themselves, was vilely overpowering. Tears ruptured from their eyes and nostrils and dribbled, salivating helplessly at the onset of death. For death came, it swept in on them like the tsunami, the tidal breaker of an ocean. The putter-out of light.
Then they screeched. Each and all of them. They had been made one.
Drooling and retching, tears and snot running down their faces, they tried to get away before it, but the Wave caught them, effortless, and swallowed them. They were lifted off their feet, turned over, bobbed up to the very ceilings and peaks and slammed there.
Full. They were filled. Bellies, sinuses, lungs, arteries, blood. Brains. Spasms uncontrollable and useless convulsed bodies, drowning in liquid fires, everyone trying to heave inside out and so expel the invasion. Mindless, soundless sneezing, spewing, acrobatic in the wet globe of rushing spirit. Drowning. Gin skins.
They gave up their ghosts through their mouths, and there came then the last squeezed fistful of seconds, during which hallucinations settled on them, devils and nightmares, the beasts of the labyrinth of an alcohol-drenched mind, the children of the Minotaur.
And so Marie Tante was skinned in slices by bald, taloned things, and Moule was choked with skeins of hair, and Bettile beheld swimming toward her the net of her shawl, which tore off her breasts and reached in for her heart, and Tiraud lay on a dissecting table, conscious, while his organs were prized out of him, and Desel was stretched on a rack until he broke.… And in his apartment, Dr. Volpe was trying now to burst open his window, and it bit at his hands, and so he witnessed his plants had hold of him like things of the sea, and as they held him the eggs hatched, and out erupted prehistoric birds to peck his eyes and liver, while the butterflies flew in the flood of gin and scratched him with their pins.
When the twenty-one overseers of hell were dead, the Wave sank swiftly down, leaving only its tidemarks on the walls, and here and there a body, stuck against the plaster, or on the stairs, or the floor.
The Wave melted and only the night replaced the Wave. And presently the moon rose over the pristine buildings, and the lawns and the hothouse, which had grown cold. The moon was round, and white as snow.
The penguins waddled and preened on the flowery ice. The people played.
The man who was tormented by insects held out his hands, and the butterflies that now flighted around him sat like fiery papers on his fingers. The man who swayed was dancing. The woman who mourned, sang. The man who grinned was solemn, not a trace of a smile, as he paced beside a small pale fox. Citalbo walked with bears. Maque sailed the golden sea.
On Judit’s head was a starry crown.
It was dawn forever. And a day.
TWELVE
Paradise
See, the Minotaur has two daughters; call them
“Left” and “Right.” Sometimes.
John Kaiine
“Do you remember our uncle’s dog?” Felion asked Smara.
“No,” she said. “He can’t have had a dog.”
“Yes, a feral dog from Clock Tower Hill. It lived with him to a very old age and died in
its sleep.”
Smara laughed. “I do remember now. He said it could purr.”
They sat facing each other, over the woven carpet they had brought to sit on. They were at the heart of the ice labyrinth, had been there most of a day, picnicking on bottles of river water, fried lentils, and dry bread soaked in wine.
Above, the shadow of the ice bird hung as if against a starry night. Both of them had noted this. The torch burned steadily. It did not seem the ice had melted at all.
“When we were born,” said Smara, “we were energy. But it became flesh. It became us. If we’d died at birth, where would it have gone?”
“Back into our mother.”
“But she might have died too.”
“Why do you ask?” he said. “We didn’t die.”
“I dreamed someone dropped our mother into a well,” said Smara softly.
“She threw herself off a tower.”
They drank the water of Lethe, and stared at the patterns in the carpet.
Each of them recalled the hours in the other City, the amber light, the sun and moon and stars. But all this seemed far off. And what they had to do – that was farther still, perhaps unreachable. Both had killed so often, it was nearly a commonplace, a piece of work that required cleverness, quickness, application, and toil. But simple. Now, eventually, they had arrived at a killing that would be momentous: the murder of their uncle’s heir, which would cement their chance in the world beyond the maze.
Sometimes Felion, or Smara, would have got up, but some laxness or nervous gesture of the other’s put them back again.
At last he said, “Shall we do it now?” Smara said, “Suppose she isn’t there?”
“We must want her to be there. We must want to meet with her. And if she isn’t, we must wait in the house, for however long it takes her to come back.”
They rose.
Smara wore the earrings Felion had recently brought her, and he the ring she had awarded him.
They had agreed. They would use, since it was the term of poison, the means they found to hand in the artist’s studio, for these would surely be unique, unlike anything they had employed ever before.
They left their carpet and their picnic lying, and walked out along the left-hand way, into the labyrinth.
“If we’re separated,” he said, “we must each try to find the other. By thinking of the other. That seems to be the way. We always do find each other again.”
“And we’re always parted.”
They did not touch, they did not hold hands. They carried nothing with them save the torch.
The labyrinth seemed, now, very silent. No visions had assaulted them when they first came in, and none flowered out on them now. They might have been in an ordinary cold, weird corridor, some vein of their uncle’s house, going nowhere very special.
And then they turned a turn and found the exit point before them.
“Can you see anything out there?” Felion asked Smara.
“No,” she said, “just darkness.”
“Yes, only darkness. No moon. No stars. We’ll have to trust it. It seems to demand that. Don’t be afraid.”
“I’m not,” she said. “Only cold.”
He put down the torch. They went forward, without faltering, side by side. And side by side they passed through the exit of the labyrinth. And were parted from each other as day from night.
The woman was there. Before him. In the studio. She had her back to him, and she was naked.
Felion kept entirely still.
Overhead was the skylight. Black, moonless. And the lights in the studio were so bright he could not see the stars.
But the woman was clear. Her white body and long fleecy hair.
And as he watched she turned about. She saw him at once, but in a misty way, amused rather than amazed. She was drunk or drugged. In her hand was a tube of orange paint, with which she had been daubing her slim, smooth body, shapes like islands.
“Well, hallo, hallo,” she said to Felion. “Have you been hiding here long? Have you enjoyed the show? My, I thought the door was only set to recognize me. And all the while she’s had another secret lover.” The girl paused. “I’m glad I told them all those lies now, about her. About her violence. What a cat. She deserves it.” She shook her hair. “But you’re a real beauty. Oh, yes. Who are you?”
“Felion,” he said.
“Felion. What a pretty sound. And I’m Asra.”
“So that’s your name,” he said.
She wiggled the tube of paint down her skin, leaving a glowing trail like a snake of alien blood.
“Do you like my canvas? It’s a new gimmick, edible paint. It tastes of oranges – yum. I thought she might like to lick it off. But now that I’ve seen you, perhaps you’d like to? Just think, if she comes back and finds us together. You know what a beast Leocadia can be.” Asra, Felion’s uncle’s heir, the artist in her studio, dipped the edible paint against, between, her loins, and squeezed. “Won’t you try a little?”
Felion moved toward her, and reached on the way the table with its paraphernalia of materials.
Another tube of the orange paint was there.
“And is this edible,” he asked, “or toxic?”
“Oh that’s the real stuff. No, leave that alone. Look, there’s plenty here. Why don’t you let me put a little on you?”
Felion left the table, the other tube of toxic paint in his hand. He came up against Asra, against her satin body, smearing it slightly, and then stepped around her, behind her. He slid his left hand about her silky throat and up over her lower face. In a second he had blocked off all her air, and she was kicking and writhing, her feet off the floor. He let her drunkenly struggle for half a minute, not exerting enough force to choke but only enough to stifle.
Then he slapped away his hand from her and pushed instead the opened tube of toxic paint between her lips. As her mouth gaped wide to gasp the air, he compressed the tube strongly.
The finesse of many murders had made him more than competent.
He held her as she convulsed, as he had never held a woman in the death throes of love.
When Asra, his uncle’s heir, was dead, he raised her and hung her over the easel in the middle of the room.
He stood a moment, taking in the picture that she made.
Then he walked over against the wall.
“Smara!” he called.
The wall opened, and there, simplistically, was the way back into the ice. Smara must be there. Or she would meet him there, as before.
He glanced behind him, but the studio was already reeling away, swaying and bucking, on a chain of light. He seemed to have lost hold of it, all connection to it. He had a sense of panic – but then he only stepped over into the labyrinth; he had done what he came for. He must find Smara. Then they must return at once, outside the house. They must go back to this City for good, the City of the sun and moon, and nothing would stop it. They could never be separated again.
Even as he emerged into the heart of the ice (so quickly he got to it), Smara ran into the space after him, as if she had only been concealed somewhere in the wall, and it was a game. She was giggling.
“I did it!” she cried. “Without you.”
“What did you do?”
“I killed her,” said Smara, happily. “And then I came here, to look for you.”
Felion said, “Wait. You killed her?”
“I went straight into the studio. The room you described, with the skylight. I think it was afternoon. She was blind drunk, going about in front of a canvas smothered in daubs of paint. There was a bottle of white spirit I knew was poison. I ran at her and tipped half of it down her throat before she realized what was happening.”
“But Smara,” he said, “I killed her.”
“You?”
They stood as if frozen in the heart of ice, in the silence, and in the shadow, for neither he nor anything had bothered with the torch, which had gone out. They stood and stared at eac
h other.
“If we both,” he said, “killed a woman in that room, which of us killed her?”
Smara said quietly, “Or did neither of us kill her?”
“We must go back,” her said. But they started together as if magnetized.
And from above came a huge crack of noise, like the thawing of a frozen sky. Stars rained over them, but they were stars of ice.
Felion and Smara looked upward, and framed by a smothered darkness, like Paradise, they saw the bird of ice, a column with a great beaked head, leaning over on them as if it meant to speak. Neither of them uttered a sound. They flung their arms about each other, and through their skulls swirled the images of their lives, bright as sparks, and over these a closing curtain thundered like a wave.
The ice statue crashed directly onto them, crushing their bodies together, so that the bones of each broke through the other’s skin and mingled, and next mashing them down deep into the ground surface of muddy glass, from which their picnic had vanished. The bird beak of white obsidian went through their hearts, and pinned them one to the other, and pinned them to the earth. The bulk of the bird thing cracked on them like a boulder, covering them, stoppering them beneath into the floor of the labyrinth.
When the silence came again, it was imperfectly. For it was full of a faint tiny sound, like dripping water. The shadow and the cold wavered and dulled, and a sort of rain began to fall, but there was no one to see or hear it. No one to wonder what it might be. If it was anything at all.
EPILOGUE
Paradis
Boys and girls come out to play,
The moon doth shine as bright as day.
Nursery Rhyme
Between waking and sleeping, twilight illusions would come to her, not really dreams. As she grew older, she liked these times, and sought them out. From them she had garnered much of the material that now she painted, but always the backdrop of these pictures was the same. She had come to love and want to paint the same vision, over and over, only subtly altering it here and there, adding, as years passed, the diamonté trees and glimmering fruit and bonbons, the animals, the ship on the sea, and the dancers on the shore.
