by Tanith Lee
—
The small crystal goblet slipped out of Lisel’s hand, empty, and broke on the floor. Lisel started. Dazed, she looked away from the fire, to Anna the Matriarch.
Had Lisel been asleep and dreaming? What an unpleasant dream. Or had it been so unpleasant? Lisel became aware her teeth were clenched in spiteful gladness, as if on a bone. If Anna had told her the truth, that man—that thing—had deserved it all. To be betrayed by his servants, and by his wife, and to perish in the fangs of a wolf. A werewolf.
Grandmother and granddaughter confronted each other a second, with identical expressions of smiling and abstracted malice. Lisel suddenly flushed, smoothed her face, and looked down. There had been something in the drink after all.
“I don’t think this at all nice,” said Lisel.
“Nice isn’t the word,” Anna agreed. Beautiful reclined at her feet, and she stroked his hair. Across the big room, the stained-glass window was thickening richly to opacity. The sun must be near to going down.
“If it’s the truth,” said Lisel primly, “you will go to hell.”
“Oh? Don’t you think me justified? He’d have killed your mother at the very least. You would never have been born.”
Lisel reviewed this hypothetical omission. It carried some weight.
“You should have appealed for help.”
“To whom? The marriage vow is a chain that may not be broken. If I had left him, he would have traced me, as he did the child. No law supports a wife. I could only kill him.”
“I don’t believe you killed him as you say you did.”
“Don’t you, m’mselle? Well, never mind. Once the sun has set, you’ll see it happen before your eyes.” Lisel stared and opened her mouth to remonstrate. Anna added gently: “And, I am afraid, not to myself alone.”
Aside from all reasoning and the training of a short lifetime, Lisel felt the stranglehold of pure terror fasten on her. She rose and squealed: “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” said Anna, “that the liqueur you drank is made from the same yellow flowers I ate to give me the power of transmogrification. I mean that the wolf-magic, once invoked, becomes hereditary, yet dormant. I mean that what the goddess of the Wolfland conveys must indeed be paid for at the hour of death—unless another will take up the gift.”
Lisel, not properly understanding, not properly believing, began to shriek wildly. Anna came to her feet. She crossed to Lisel and shook the shrieks out of her, and when she was dumb, thrust her back in the chair.
“Now sit, fool, and be quiet. I’ve put nothing on you that was not already yours. Look in a mirror. Look at your hair and your eyes and your beautiful teeth. Haven’t you always preferred the night to the day, staying up till the morning, lying abed till noon? Don’t you love the cold forest? Doesn’t the howl of the wolf thrill you through with fearful delight? And why else should the Wolfland accord you an escort, a pack of wolves running by you on the road. Do you think you’d have survived if you’d not been one of their kind, too?”
Lisel wept, stamping her foot. She could not have said at all what she felt. She tried to think of her father and the ballrooms of the city. She tried to consider if she credited magic.
“Now listen to me,” snapped Anna, and Lisel muted her sobs just enough to catch the words. “Tonight is full moon, and the anniversary of that night, years ago, when I made my pact with the wolf goddess of the north. I have good cause to suspect I shan’t live out this year. Therefore, tonight is the last chance I have to render you in my place into her charge. That frees me from her, do you see? Once you have swallowed the flowers, once she has acknowledged you, you belong to her. At death, I escape her sovereignty, which would otherwise bind me forever to the earth in wolf form, phantom form. A bargain: You save me. But you too can make your escape, when the time comes. Bear a child. You will be mistress here. You can command any man to serve you, and you’re tolerable enough the service won’t be unwilling. My own child, your mother, was not like me at all. I could not bring her to live with me, once I had the power. I was troubled as to how I should wean her to it. But she died, and in you I saw the mark from the first hour. You are fit to take my place. Your child can take yours.”
“You’re hateful!” shrieked Lisel. She had the wish to laugh.
But someone was flinging open the doors of the hall. The cinnamon light streamed through and fell into the fire and faded it. Another fire, like antique bronze, was quenching itself among the pines. The dying of the sun.
Anna moved toward the doors and straight out onto the snow. She stood a moment, tall and amazing on the peculiar sky. She seemed a figment of the land itself, and maybe she was.
“Come!” she barked. Then turned and walked away across the park.
All the servants seemed to have gathered like bats in the hall. They were silent, but they looked at Lisel. Her heart struck her over and over. She did not know what she felt or if she believed. Then a wolf sang in the forest. She lifted her head. She suddenly knew frost and running and black stillness, and a platinum moon, red feasts and wild hymnings, lovers with quicksilver eyes and“ the race of the ice wind and stars smashed under the hard soles of her four feet. A huge white ballroom opened before her, and the champagne of the air filled her mouth.
Beautiful had knelt and was kissing the hem of her red cloak. She patted his head absently, and the gathering of the servants sighed.
Presumably, as Anna’s heiress, she might be expected to live on in the forest, in the château which would be hers. She could even visit the city, providing she was home by sunset.
The wolf howled again, filling her veins with lights, raising the hair along her scalp.
Lisel tossed her head. Of course, it was all a lot of nonsense.
She hastened out through the doors and over the winter park and followed her grandmother away into the Wolfland.
Black As Ink
The chateau, dove-grey, nested among dark green trees. Lawns like marzipan sloped to a huge lake like a silver spoon, the farther end of which held up an anchored fleet of islands. Pines and willows framed the watery vistas. There were swans. It was hopelessly idyllic and very quickly bored him.
“Paris,” he occasionally said, a kind of comma to everything. And now and then, in desperation, “Oslo. Stockholm.”
His mother and his uncle glanced up from their interminable games of chess or cards, under the brims of their summer-walking hats, through the china and the crystal-ware, astonished.
“He is scarcely here,” Ilena said, “and he wishes to depart.”
“I was the same at his age,” said Janov. “Nineteen. Oh my God, I Was just the same.”
“Twenty,” said Viktor.
“What would you do in the city, except idle?” said Ilena.
“Exactly as I do here.”
“And get drunk,” said Janov. “And gamble.”
“I told you about the business venture I—”
“And lose money. My God, I was just the same.”
“I—”
“Hush, Viktor,” said Ilena. “You should be sketching. This is what you’re good at, and what you should do.”
“Or take one of the horses. Ride it somewhere, for God’s sake.”
“Where?”
“Or the boat. Exercise.”
Fat Janov beamed upon his slender nephew, flexing the bolster muscles of his arms, his coat-seams creaking.
Viktor remembered the long white car left behind in the town, cafés, theater, discourse far into the night. The summer was being wasted, ten days of it were already gone forever.
He thought he understood their delight in the chateau, the home of childhood lost, suddenly returned into their possession. Seeing his elegant mother, a fragile fashion-plate with a hidden framework of steel, drift through these rooms exclaiming, recapturing, he had been indulgent—“Do you recall, Jani, when we were here, and here, and did this, and did that?” And the gales of laughter, and the teasing, somewhat embarrassing
to watch. Yes, indulgent, but already nervous at intimations of ennui, Viktor had planned a wild escape. Then all at once the plan had failed, And as the short sweet summer clasped the land, here he found himself, after all, trapped like a fly in honey.
“Just the place,” Janov said, “for you to decide what you mean to do with yourself. Six months out of the university. Time to look about, get your bearings.”
He had, dutifully, sketched the lake. He had ridden the beautiful horses, annoyed at his own clumsiness in the saddle, for he was graceful in other things. The boat he ignored. No doubt it let water. He observed Janov, snoring gently under a cherry tree, his straw hat tilted to his nose.
“I could, of course,” said Viktor, “drown myself in the damn lake.”
“Such language before your mother,” said Ilena, ruffling his hair in a way that pleased or irritated him, depending on the weather of his mood, and which now maddened so that he grit his teeth. “Ah, so like me,” she murmured with a callous, selfish pride. “Such impatience.” And then she told him again how, as a girl, she had danced by the shore of the lake, the colored lamps bright in the trees above, trembling in the water below. They had owned the land in those days. Even the islands had belonged to her father. And now, there were alien houses built there. She could see the roofs of them and pointed them out to him with contempt. “Les Nouveaux,” she called them. In winter, when the trees lost their leaves, the houses of the Invader would be more apparent yet. Only the pines would shield her then from the uncivilized present.
Viktor imagined a great gun poised on the lawn, shells blasting the bold aliens into powder. He himself, with no comparative former image to guide him, could not even make them out.
Presently she reverted to her French novel, and he left her.
He walked down into a grove of dripping willows and began to make fresh plans to escape—a make-believe attack of appendicitis, possibly, was the only answer…
When he awoke, the sun was down in the lake, a faded-golden upturned bowl. Through the willow curtains, the lawns were cool with shadows, and deserted.
Yes, he supposed it was truly beautiful. Something in the strange light informed him, the long northern sunset that separated day from dark, beginning now slowly to envelop everything in the palest, thinnest amber ambience, occluding foliage, liquid and air. One broad arrow of jasper-colored water flared away from the sun, and four swans, black on the glow, embarked like ships from the shelter of the islands. The islands were black, too, banks and spurs of black, and even as he looked at them he heard, with disbelief, a cloud of music rise from one of them and echo to him all the way across the lake. An orchestra was playing over there. Viktor heard rhythm and melody for the briefest second; Not the formal mosaic of Beethoven or Mozart, nor some ghost mazurka from Ilena’s memory—this was contemporary dance music, racy and strong, spice on the wind, then blown away.
Just as he had instantly imagined the gun shelling the island, so another vision occurred to him, in its own manner equally preposterous.
As he rose, loafed into the enormous house, found his way upstairs unmolested, and dressed sloppily for dinner, so the idea went with him, haunting him. Before the sonorous gong sounded, he leaned a long while at his window, watching the last of the afterglow, now the color of a dry sherry, still infinitesimally diminishing. A white moon had risen to make a crossbow with a picturesque branch: how typical. Yet the phantom movements of the swans far out on the sherry lake had begun to fascinate him. The music, clearly, had disturbed them. Or were they always nocturnally active? Viktor recalled one of Janov’s stories, which concerned a swan in savage flight landing with a tremendous thud on the roof of their father’s study. The swans were supposed to be eccentric. They fled with summer, always returning with the spring, like clockwork things. Ilena said they sang when they died and she had heard one do so. Viktor did not really believe her, though as a child, first learning the tale, he had conjured a swan, lying in the rushes, haranguing with a coloratura voice.
The gong resounded, and with sour contempt, he went downstairs to the china and crystal, the food half the time lukewarm from its long journey out of the kitchen, and the presiding undead of old suppers, banquets. “Do you remember, Jani, when—?”
“Do you recall, Vena, the night—?”
The idea of the boat stayed with him there. He took soup and wine and a tepid roast and some kind of preserve and a fruit pastry and coffee, and over the low cries of their voices he distinguished the lake water slapping the oars, felt the dark buoyancy of it, and all the while the music on the island came closer.
Of course, it was a stupid notion. Some inane provincial party or other, and he himself bursting in on it through the bushes. We owned this island once, he could say, erupting into the midst of Les Nouveaux. Yet, the boat rowed on in his thoughts, the swans drifting by, turning their snakelike necks away from him. The music had stopped in his fancy because he was no longer sure what he had heard at all. Maybe he had imagined everything.
“How silent Viktor is,” said Ilena.
“Sulking,” said Janov. “When I was eighteen, I was just the same.”
“Yes,” said Viktor, “I’m sulking. Pass the brandy.”
“Pass the brandy,” said Janov. “Eighteen and pass the brandy.”
“Twenty and I’m going upstairs to read. Good night, Maman. Uncle.”
Ilena kissed his cheek. Her exquisite perfume surrounded her, embraced him, and was gone.
“Do we play?” said Ilena.
“A couple of games,” said Janov.
As Viktor went out there came the click of cards.
He waited in his room for an hour, reading the same paragraph carefully over and over. Once he got up and hurried toward the door. Then the absurdity swept him under again. He paced, found the window, stared out into the dark which had finally covered everything.
The moon had begun to touch the lake to a polished surface, like a waxed table. Nothing marred its sheen. There were no lights discernible, save the sparse lights of the chateau round about.
Viktor took his book downstairs and sat brooding on it in a corner of the salon, so he could feel superior as his mother and his uncle squabbled over their cards.
At midnight, he woke to find the salon empty. From an adjacent room the notes of the piano softly came for a while, then ceased. “Go to bed, mon fils,” she called to him, followed by invisible rustlings of her garments as she went away. Tied to the brandy decanter, with the velvet ribbon she had worn at her throat, was a scrap of paper which read : Un peu. Viktor grimaced and poured himself one very large glass.
Presently he went out with the brandy onto the lawn before the house, and scanned again across the lake for pinpricks of light in the darkness. Nothing was to be seen. He thought of the boat, and wandered down the incline, between the willows, to the water’s edge, thinking of it, knowing he would not use it.
“Paris,” he said to his mother in his head. “Next year,” she said. “Perhaps.” A wave of sorrow washed over him. Even if he should ever get there, the world, too, might prove a disappointment, a crashing bore.
The brandy made him dizzy, heavy and sad.
He turned to go in, defeated. And at that moment, he saw the white movement in the water, troubling and beautiful. About ten boat-lengths away, a girl was swimming, slowly on her back, toward him. With each swanlike stroke of her arms, there came a white flash of flesh. It seemed she was naked. Amazed, Viktor stepped up into the black recess of the hanging trees. It was an instinct, not a wish to spy so much as a wish not to be discovered and reckoned spying. She had not seen him, could not have seen him. As the water shallowed toward the shore, she swung aside like a fish. Amongst the fronded trailers of the willows, not ten yards from him now, she raised her arms and effortlessly rose upright.
Her hair was blond, darkened and separated by water, and streaked across her body so her slender whiteness was concealed in hair, in leaves, in shadows. The water itself ringed he
r hips. She was naked, as he had thought. She parted the willow fronds with her hands, gazing between them, up the lawn toward the chateau, or so it seemed. It was pure luck she had beached exactly where he stood.
He was afraid she would hear his breathing. But she seemed wrapped in her own silence, so sure she was alone, she had remained alone, even with his eyes upon her.
Another whiteness flashed, and Viktor jumped upsetting the brandy, certain now she had heard him, his heart in his mouth. But she gave no sign of it. A swan cruised by her and between the willows, vanishing. A second bird, like a lily, floated far off.
A white girl swimming among the swans.
The water broke in silver rings. She had dived beneath the shallows and he had not seen it. He stared, and beheld her head, like a drowned moon, bob to the surface some distance off, then the dagger-cast of her slim back.
Without sound, she swam away toward the islands of invasion.
“My God,” he whispered. But it was not until he was in his room again that he dared to laugh, congratulating himself, unnerved. Lying down, he slept uneasily.
He was already in the grip, as Ilena would have said, of one of his obsessions.
—
A day like any other day spread over the lake and the chateau, plaiting the willow trees with gold. Before noon, Viktor had one of the horses out and was riding on it around the lake, trying to find if the islands—her island—was accessible from shore. But it was not.
From a stand of birch trees it was just possible, however, to see the roofs of a house, and a little pavilion like white matchsticks near the water.
Viktor sat looking at it, in a sort of mindless reverie.
When he was thirteen years old, he had fallen wildly in love with one of the actresses in a minor production of The Lady from the Sea. This infatuation, tinged by tremors of earliest sexuality, but no more than tinged by them, was more a languid desperate ecstasy of the emotional parts, drenching him in a sort of rain—through which he saw the people he knew, and over the murmur of which he heard their voices, yet everything remote, none of it as real as the pale rouged face, the cochineal gown and thunderous hair. Never since had he felt such a thing for anyone. Not even that hoard of young women he had gazed after, then forgotten. Certainly not in the few, merely physical, pleasures he had experienced with the carefully selected paid women his walk of life gave access to.
