by Tanith Lee
“You had your escort.”
Lisel had choked back another flood of sentences; she did not want to get on the wrong side of this strange relative. Nor had she liked the slight emphasis on the word “escort.” The handsome ghastly dwarf had gone forward into the hall, lifted the hem of Anna’s long mantle, and kissed it. Anna had smoothed off his hood and caressed the bright hair beneath.
“Beautiful wasn’t afraid,” said Anna decidedly. “But, then, my people know the wolves will not harm them.”
An ancient tale came back to Lisel in that moment. It concerned certain human denizens of the forests, who had power over wild beasts. It occurred to Lisel that mad old Anna liked to fancy herself a sorceress, and Lisel said fawningly: “I should have known I’d be safe. I’m sorry for my outburst, but I don’t know the forest as you do. I was afraid.”
In her allotted bedroom, a silver ewer and basin stood on a table. The embroideries on the canopied bed were faded but priceless. Antique books stood in a case, catching the firelight, a vast yet random selection of the poetry and prose of many lands. From the bedchamber window, Lisel could look out across the clearing of the park, the white sweep of it occasionally broken by trees in their winter foliage of snow, or by the slash of the track which broke through the high wall. Beyond the wall, the forest pressed close under the heavy twilight of the sky. Lisel pondered with a grim irritation the open gateway. Wolves running, and the way to the château left wide at all times. She visualized mad Anna throwing chunks of raw meat to the wolves as another woman would toss bread to swans.
This unprepossessing notion returned to Lisel during the unusually early dinner, when she realized that Anna was receiving from her silent gliding servants various dishes of raw meats.
“I hope,” said Anna, catching Lisel’s eye, “my repast won’t offend a delicate stomach. I have learned that the best way to keep my health is to eat the fruits of the earth in their intended state—so much goodness is wasted in cooking and garnishing.”
Despite the reference to fruit, Anna touched none of the fruit or vegetables on the table. Nor did she drink any wine.
Lisel began again to be amused, if rather dubiously. Her own fare was excellent, and she ate it hungrily, admiring as she did so the crystal goblets and gold-handled knives which one day would be hers.
Presently a celebrated liqueur was served—to Lisel alone—and Anna rose on the black wings of her dress, waving her granddaughter to the fire. Beautiful, meanwhile, had crawled onto the stool of the tall piano and begun to play wildly despairing romances there, his elegant fingers darting over discolored keys so like Anna’s strong yet senile teeth.
“Well,” said Anna, reseating herself in another carven throne before the cave of the hearth. “What do you think of us?”
“Think, Grandmère? Should I presume?”
“No. But you do.”
“I think,” said Lisel cautiously, “everything is very fine.”
“And you are keenly aware, of course, the finery will eventually belong to you.”
“Oh, Grandmère!” exclaimed Lisel, quite genuinely shocked by such frankness.
“Don’t trouble yourself,” said Anna. Her eyes caught the fire and became like the eyes of the wolf at the carriage window. “You expect to be my heiress. It’s quite normal you should be making an inventory. I shan’t last forever. Once I’m gone, presumably everything will be yours.”
Despite herself, Lisel gave an involuntary shiver. A sudden plan of selling the château to be rid of it flitted through her thoughts, but she quickly put it aside, in case the Matriarch somehow read her mind.
“Don’t speak like that, Grandmère. This is the first time I’ve met you, and you talk of dying.”
“Did I? No, I did not. I spoke of departure. Nothing dies, it simply transmogrifies.” Lisel watched politely this display of apparent piety. “As for my mansion,” Anna went on, “you mustn’t consider sale, you know.” Lisel blanched—as she had feared, her mind had been read, or could it merely be that Anna found her predictable? “The château has stood on this land for many centuries. The old name for the spot, do you know that?”
“No, Grandmère.”
“This, like the whole of the forest, was called the Wolfland. Because it was the wolves’ country before ever men set foot on it with their piffling little roads and tracks, their carriages and foolish frightened walls. Wolfland. Their country then, and when the winter comes, their country once more.”
“As I saw, Grandmère,” said Lisel tartly.
“As you saw. You’ll see and hear more of them while you’re in my house. Their voices come and go like the wind, as they do. When that little idiot of a sun slips away and the night rises, you may hear scratching on the lower floor windows. I needn’t tell you to stay indoors, need I?”
“Why do you let animals run in your park?” demanded Lisel.
“Because,” said Anna, “the land is theirs by right.”
The dwarf began to strike a polonaise from the piano. Anna clapped her hands, and the music ended. Anna beckoned, and Beautiful slid off the stool like a precocious child caught stickying the keys. He came to Anna, and she played with his hair. His face remained unreadable, yet his pellucid eyes swam dreamily to Lisel’s face. She felt embarrassed by the scene, and at his glance was angered to find herself blushing.
“There was a time,” said Anna, “when I did not rule this house. When a man ruled here.”
“Grandpère,” said Lisel, looking resolutely at the fire.
“Grandpère, yes. Grandpère.” Her voice held the most awful scorn. “Grandpère believed it was a man’s pleasure to beat his wife. You’re young, but you should know, should be told. Every night, if I was not already sick from a beating, and sometimes when I was, I would hear his heavy drunken feet come stumbling to my door. At first I locked it, but I learned not to. What stood in his way he could always break. He was a strong man. A great legend of strength. I carry scars on my shoulders to this hour. One day I may show you.”
Lisel gazed at Anna, caught between fascination and revulsion. “Why do I tell you?” Anna smiled. She had twisted Beautiful’s gorgeous hair into a painful knot. Clearly it hurt him, but he made no sound, staring blindly at the ceiling. “I tell you, Lisel, because very soon your father will suggest to you that it is time you were wed. And however handsome or gracious the young man may seem to you that you choose, or that is chosen for you, however noble or marvelous or even docile he may seem, you have no way of being certain he will not turn out to be like your beloved grandpère. Do you know, he brought me peaches on our wedding night, all the way from the hothouses of the city. Then he showed me the whip he had been hiding under the fruit. You see what it is to be a woman, Lisel. Is that what you want? The irrevocable marriage vow that binds you forever to a monster? And even if he is a good man, which is a rare beast indeed, you may die an agonizing death in childbed, just as your mother did.” Lisel swallowed. A number of things went through her head now. A vague acknowledgement that, though she envisaged admiration, she had never wished to marry and therefore never considered it, and a starker awareness that she was being told improper things. She desired to learn more and dreaded to learn it. As she was struggling to find a rejoinder, Anna seemed to notice her own grip on the hair of the dwarf. “Ah,” she said, “forgive me. I did not mean to hurt you.” The words had an oddly sinister ring to them. Lisel suddenly guessed their origin, the brutish man rising from his act of depravity, of necessity still merely sketched by Lisel’s innocence, whispering, gloatingly muttering: Forgive me. I did not mean to hurt.
“Beautiful,” said Anna, “is the only man of any worth I’ve ever met. And my servants, of course, but I don’t count them as men. Drink your liqueur.”
“Yes, Grandmère,” said Lisel, as she sipped, and slightly choked.
“T
omorrow,” said Anna, “we must serve you something better. A vintage indigenous to the château, made from a flower which grows here in the spring. For now,” again she rose on her raven’s wings; a hundred gems caught the light and went out, “for now, we keep early hours here, in the country.”
“But, Grandmère,” said Lisel, astounded, “it’s scarcely sunset.”
“In my house,” said Anna, gently, “you will do as you are told, m’mselle.”
And for once, Lisel did as she was told.
* * * *
At first, of course, Lisel did not entertain a dream of sleep. She was used to staying awake till the early hours of the morning, rising at noon. She entered her bedroom, cast one scathing glance at the bed, and settled herself to read in a chair beside the bedroom fire. Luckily she had found a lurid novel amid the choice of books. By skimming over all passages of meditation, description or philosophy, confining her attention to those portions which contained duels, rapes, black magic and the firing squad, she had soon made great inroads on the work. Occasionally, she would pause, and add another piece of wood to the fire. At such times she knew a medley of doubts concerning her grandmother. That the Matriarch could leave such a novel lying about openly where Lisel could get at it outraged the girl’s propriety.
Eventually, two or three hours after the sun had gone and the windows blackened entirely behind the drapes, Lisel did fall asleep. The excitements of the journey and her medley of reactions to Madame Anna had worn her out.
She woke, as she had in the carriage, with a start of alarm. Her reason was the same one. Out in the winter forest of night sounded the awesome choir of the wolves. Their voices rose and fell, swelling, diminishing, resurging, like great icy waves of wind or water, breaking on the silence of the château.
Partly nude, a lovely maiden had been bound to a stake and the first torch applied, but Lisel no longer cared very much for her fate. Setting the book aside, she rose from the chair. The flames were low on the candles and the fire almost out. There was no clock, but it had the feel of midnight. Lisel went to the window and opened the drapes. Stepping through and pulling them fast closed again behind her, she gazed out into the glowing darkness of snow and night.
The wolf cries went on and on, thrilling her with a horrible disquiet, so she wondered how even mad Anna could ever have grown accustomed to them. Was this what had driven grandfather to brutishness and beatings? And, colder thought, the mysterious violent death he was supposed to have suffered—what more violent than to be torn apart by long pointed teeth under the pine trees?
Lisel quartered the night scene with her eyes, looking for shapes to fit the noises, and, as before, hoping not to find them.
There was decidedly something about wolves. Something beyond their reputation and the stories of the half-eaten bodies of little children with which nurses regularly scared their charges. Something to do with actual appearance, movement: the lean shadow manifesting from between the trunks of trees—the stuff of nightmare. And their howlings—! Yet, as it went on and on, Lisel became aware of a bizarre exhilaration, an almost-pleasure in the awful sounds which made the hair lift on her scalp and gooseflesh creep along her arms—the same sort of sensation as biting into a slice of lemon—
And then she saw it, a great pale wolf. It loped by directly beneath the window, and suddenly, to Lisel’s horror, it raised its long head, and two fireworks flashed, which were its eyes meeting with hers. A primordial fear, worse even than in the carriage, turned Lisel’s bones to liquid. She sank on her knees, and as she knelt there foolishly, as if in prayer, her chin on the sill, she beheld the wolf moving away across the park, seeming to dissolve into the gloom.
Gradually, then, the voices of the other wolves began to dull, eventually falling quiet.
Lisel got up, came back into the room, threw more wood on the fire and crouched there. It seemed odd to her that the wolf had run away from the château, but she was not sure why. Presumably it had ventured near in hopes of food, then, disappointed, withdrawn. That it had come from the spot directly by the hall’s doors did not, could not, mean anything in particular. Then Lisel realized what had been so strange. She had seen the wolf in a faint radiance of light—but from where? The moon was almost full, but obscured behind the house. The drapes had been drawn across behind her, the light could not have fallen down from her own window. She was turning back unhappily to the window to investigate when she heard the unmistakable soft thud of a large door being carefully shut below her, in the château.
The wolf had been in the house. Anna’s guest.
Lisel was petrified for a few moments, then a sort of fury came to her rescue. How dared the old woman be so mad as all this and expect her civilized granddaughter to endure it? Brought to the wilds, told improper tales, left improper literature to read, made unwilling party to the entertainment of savage beasts. Perhaps as a result of the reading matter, Lisel saw her only course abruptly, and it was escape. (She had already assumed Anna would not allow her grandchild to depart until whatever lunatic game the old beldame was playing was completed.) But if escape, then how? Though there were carriage, horses, even coachman, all were Anna’s. Lisel did not have to ponder long, however. Her father’s cynicism on the lower classes had convinced her that anyone had his price. She would bribe the coachman—her gold bracelets and her ruby eardrops—both previous gifts of Anna’s, in fact. She could assure the man of her father’s protection and further valuables when they reached the city. A vile thought came to her at that, that her father might, after all, prove unsympathetic. Was she being stupid? Should she turn a blind eye to Anna’s wolfish foibles? If Anna should disinherit her, as surely she would on Lisel’s flight—
Assailed by doubts, Lisel paced the room. Soon she had added to them. The coachman might snatch her bribe and still refuse to help her. Or worse, drive her into the forest and violate her. Or—
The night slowed and flowed into the black valleys of early morning. The moon crested the château and sank into the forest. Lisel sat on the edge of the canopied bed, pleating and repleating the folds of the scarlet cloak between her fingers. Her face was pale, her blonde hair untidy and her eyes enlarged. She looked every bit as crazy as her grandmother.
Her decision was sudden, made with an awareness that she had wasted much time. She flung the cloak round herself and started up. She hurried to the bedroom door and softly, softly, opened it a tiny crack.
All was black in the house, neither lamp nor candle visible anywhere. The sight, or rather lack of it, caused Lisel’s heart to sink. At the same instant, it indicated that the whole house was abed. Lisel’s plan was a simple one. A passage led away from the great hall to the kitchens and servants’ quarters and ultimately to a courtyard containing coachhouse and stables. Here the grooms and the coachman would sleep, and here too another gateway opened on the park. These details she had either seen for herself as the carriage was driven off on her arrival or deduced from the apparent structure of the château. Unsure of the hour, yet she felt dawn was approaching. If she could but reach the servants’ quarters, she should be able to locate the courtyard. If the coachman proved a villain, she would have to use her wits. Threaten him or cajole him. Knowing very little of physical communion, it seemed better to Lisel in those moments, to lie down with a hairy peasant than to remain the Matriarch’s captive. It was that time of night when humans are often prey to ominous or extravagant ideas of all sorts. She took up one of the low-burning candles. Closing the bedroom door behind her, Lisel stole forward into the black nothingness of unfamiliarity.
Even with the feeble light, she could barely see ten inches before her, and felt cautiously about with her free hand, dreading to collide with ornament or furniture and thereby rouse her enemies. The stray gleams, shot back at her from a mirror or a picture frame, misled rather than aided her. At first her total concentration was taken up with her safe
progress and her quest to find the head of the double stair. Presently, however, as she pressed on without mishap, secondary considerations began to steal in on her.
If it was difficult to proceed, how much more difficult it might be should she desire to retreat. Hopefully, there would be nothing to retreat from. But the ambience of the château, inspired by night and the limited candle, was growing more sinister by the second. Arches opened on drapes of black from which anything might spring. All about, the shadow furled, and she was one small target moving in it, lit as if on a stage.
She turned the passage and perceived the curve of the stair ahead and the dim hall below. The great stained window provided a grey illumination which elsewhere was absent. The stars bled on the snow outside and pierced the white panes. Or could it be the initial tinge of dawn?
Lisel paused, confronting once again the silliness of her simple plan of escape. Instinctively, she turned to look the way she had come, and the swiftness of the motion, or some complementary draught, quenched her candle. She stood marooned by this cliché, the phosphorescently discernible space before her, pitch-dark behind, and chose the path into the half-light as preferable.
She went down the stair delicately, as if descending into a ballroom. When she was some twenty steps from the bottom, something moved in the thick drapes beside the outer doors. Lisel froze, feeling a shock like an electric volt passing through her vitals. In another second she knew from the uncanny littleness of the shape that it was Anna’s dwarf who scuttled there. But before she divined what it was at, one leaf of the door began to swing heavily inwards.
Lisel felt no second shock of fear. She felt instead as if her soul drifted upward from her flesh.
Through the open door soaked the pale ghost-light that heralded sunrise, and with that, a scattering of fresh white snow. Lastly through the door, its long feet crushing both light and snow, glided the wolf she had seen beneath her window. It did not look real, it seemed to waver and to shine, yet, for any who had ever heard the name of wolf, or a single story of them, or the song of their voices, here stood that word, that story, that voice, personified.
