by Tanith Lee
Hrothgar flew out and off his body and circled the villainous healer’s dirty room. The man watched, his mouth gaped open. “His horror,” said Hrothgar, with neither passion or rage, “was a vision to me. An education I had never, till then, received.”
Hrothgar, as an owl, put out the old man’s eyes, then eviscerated him with his claws, and left him there. Next flying up to a window just broad enough to allow escape—for an owl’s method of flight is that way easier—with one wing Hrothgar tipped a candle off its spike.
He left the house to burn, the town to burn if it would.
“I supposed my own human body would be burned up with it. But I was dead, and this my newest life. It suited me. You’ll believe, I had never enjoyed my wretched slavery as a man.”
A long way off, high among great trees, he watched and saw the scarlet smoke above the town. Then he flew on.
As an owl he lived a great while. Years, he thought, though keeping no calendar, he never afterward learned. He became a man again only when he saw a young woman that he fancied. It was not, he told me, myself. And I saw he did not say this to be harsh to me, merely to be factual.
When returned to the human form, he was full-grown and strong. Besides, he had acquired the talents of magic. He could accomplish much.
“Every useless lying conjure of my former master’s in me became reality. It seems I knew what should be done, and therefore could do all. Like the sun will know when to rise, and when to set. And perhaps it knows this from watching other suns, in the time before time, that only seemed to do it.”
After they had made sexual love, the girl he had taken and brought to ecstasy, changed into a bird. She might then alter at will and as she wished, or even to amuse Hrothgar. Later, some years later, the same skill was born in a young man that Hrothgar lay with. These two were the first lovers. But he had had many lovers since then.
It seemed to him, he told me, that he did not cast any spell upon them. Did not infect them with his sorcery. Instead, they themselves had attracted his notice and his desire through that very unknown, yet potent ability of shape-shift, carried dormant within their bones.
So it had been too, he said, with me.
When he told me that, I wept again. I could not help it. It was a foolish jealousy, in part. For he had never especially valued me as a woman, only noted and wished to let out my other self, the swan—which locked up inside me, must have cried out to him for rescue. Yet too, that inner life of mine, the swan, had been the best for me of all my existence. My true life. My only life.
I thought, if I had continued among the reeds of the lake, mated with my perfect, adopted son, borne others of our breed, I might have forgotten him, Hrothgar. And maybe that was how it always was. How it had been for all those others he had fathered of themselves. Even ultimately for him also, the Enchanter.
But he looked over at me when I cried my tears. For the first, and steadily.
“Otila,” he said. His face was neither cruel nor kind. “Yes,” he said. “Weep.”
My soul knew what he meant by this. My soul then wept. Tears that were like fiery liquid glass ran out of my eyes. But my ignorant mind understood nothing. Until he drew close, and held me as the best of fathers will. And told me why I cried. Told me why I should, from that minute, inside the silence of my soul, cry forever, until my useless mortal time is worn away.
• • •
“To be this other, this true self, we must steal from ourselves. We must rob ourselves of humanness, and glory in the theft. So I, so you, Otila. For our humanity is also a thief.” So he said, that night.
• • •
The gods decree it is a crime for humans to kill themselves. Even in extremity they must labor to survive.
By this it seems they wish further to punish us.
Maybe they are only sorry that we become dust after life, and so strive to keep us animate.
Or else we are fire and stars after life, and they are envious, and grudge us.
• • •
I discovered, when several of my years had gone by, that he did send rewards, as he had said he would, to Signian and the Princess, his mother. These were not gold or jewels. Signian, who bathed very seldom, took a bath that next summer, and was sinisterly drowned in the metal tub. He died thrashing and calling in front of his steward and servants, who tried frantically to save him. Something weighted him beneath the water, they said, struggle as he and they would to hoist him out. Orjana died of grief, or I have heard a tale she hanged herself. But self-murder is forbidden, as the killing of swans is forbidden, to any but the royal class.
• • •
“I can afford you sexual love,” he said. “If you want. But you’ll find only ashes in it now. We are nolonger of the same tribe, you and I, Otila, my poor Otila. All that, for you, is done.”
It was love anyway that had destroyed me.
Not any love for my Creator, Hrothgar the Enchanter. No, it was my other love. My son—my lover—
In fury and despair I had run ashore, changing as I went from swan to mortal woman, and shown myself like this to the Prince who had slain my love. I had thought it was the courage of the swan that made me do this. But it was not the swan. It was my human fury and my mortal anguish, those sins which, though they may make us brave, we are ever warned of, for they destroy us.
He had no name, my son. Nor I, as a swan.
We had no need of names.
We had had no name even for love. For love is beyond all namings as all true things must be. Such is the most real nature of magic. It is met with, not taught or learned. It is ourselves. But these—we lose.
Hrothgar it was told me that, despite my own view, I had acted not as my actual self, who was a swan, but as my other, ingrained, thieving unreal self. A mortal thing. And by doing this, I smashed the enchantment. Gave everything away. And so the hunter captured me. And with his poisoned and filthsome and irrelevant sexual acts, he confirmed my wreck, scorched out of me what truly, truly only I was—as no fire or acid could have done. Had I been struck by whitest lightning, like the birch tree whose paleness changed my hair, or by the flaming spear of some downfalling star—or by the wrath of the gods themselves—I could not have been separated from the creature of the air, the spirit I had been. Live or dead, a swan I must have stayed.
And a swan, I would have mourned by loss, my beloved. I would have mourned him. But not been stripped of my self.
Never now could I shape-shift anymore. Never would I become again a swan.
All that while in the hell-house of the Prince, I had deceived myself, making out I was constricted, kept from change and flight by walls of stone. As I was. But the stone was my heart.
And there is no mourning either, as no penance or sweetness, that can bring solace for the loss of self.
There is no world in which to live thereafter, either this or another.
There is nothing. No thing. None.
And He? Hrothgar’s action of seeking me in the palace, of setting me free, even of punishing my two principal jailors, his former action too, when he had killed the man who beat him—were these not the revenges and honor of a human man? I said no word of them to him, as already now I knew. For him it had been different. For he had gone through the lightning and the star, the wrath of gods—he had died, was dead. His body burned but he, having become his true self, might do as he wanted. He was an Enchanter. If of the same tribe, as he had said, he was of the royal class. A Prince. Having gained a privilege that could not be mine.
And he also, having told so much, said of this no word. He read my heart. My untaught lesson was over and complete.
He held me through the night, my father the Enchanter. I felt no hint of feathers under his tactful skin, no shift of wings at his back. In his black hair no redness shone, even from the clear fire. His eyes showed nothing amber, golden.
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I thought of the black crows he had liberated, and with a dull start of the horses too, from which he must have liberated the selves of birds—perhaps not in any way of sex, but more as I had seen him do with the sheep whose fleeces glowed . . . What birds, then, would the sheep become?
But I recalled mostly the black crows, how they flew away into the moonrise. I thought of my three children who had lived, and who winged also away.
And I thought of my death, which now was all the life I had.
From one prison I had come. Yet out into the vast prison of the earth I must wander. Wingless. Alone.
When morning began, soft as flowers, Hrothgar left me and walked away. He showed me no sign of anything but his male humanness. I recall the path twisted there. I saw him last, as at the first, from the back.
There was even drink that stayed hot by the fire and a crust of the dark bread, as at our former meal. They did not vanish until I spoke to them, and said I would not eat or drink. And then I wept again, for with their going, the end began.
These were my last tears.
I have shed none since that can be seen. My weeping is tearless. What, after all, have I to do with water? It shames me that I breathe—for the gods know now, I can have nothing ever to do with the air.
Let me have only the earth. Or fire.
They are still mine. Burn or bury me.
• • •
Twice ten years are gone since that morning by the shore. I dwell far inland of the lake. I do not see the water. I whore for my food, if ever I want any. My hair, that was made black in that kennel of a palace, grows out now gray, as with the Princess it did.
Sometimes, in the blundering and unmusical assault of man-woman congress, I feel a faint fluttering at my womb, as if the soul of a bird flew there, trying to come in, to make itself within me, to be born of me. But I am barren, and now old.
In the winter dawns, above this ramshackle village of scavengers and thieves, sometimes I see swans fly over, not white but black on the golden sky. Then for the splinter of an instant, I spread my wings, and am among them. But this is not what occurs, and indeed, I never dream of it. Nor of the Enchanter. Nor ever, ever, ever of what I would wish to dream of most. My life. My life as a swan—
The Beast
WHEN HE SAW the rose, he knew that only one woman in the world could wear it: his daughter. The image and the certainty were so immediate; total. He stood staring.
It was made of amber, rich yellow amber, and the unfolded petals were smooth, translucent, without any of the normal bubbles, or trapped debris. Near the center hung a drop of “dew”—a single warm and creamy pearl. The necklace was a golden briar. It was perfect. And he visualized Isobel, her massy sweep of white blond hair swung loose from the icy line of its side part. Her pale skin, the mouth just touched with some pale color. The evening dress he had recently bought her in ivory silk. And the rose, on the briar, precisely under her throat.
“He has some fine things, doesn’t he? Have you seen the jade horse?”
“Yes, I did.” Always polite, and careful, he turned from his scrutiny and regarded the other man. They sipped from their glasses of some flawless champagne that came, not from France, but from the East.
“I’ve heard he collects anything exquisite. Will go to great lengths to get it. Even danger. Perhaps your own collection might interest him.”
“Oh, I’ve nothing to match any of this.” But he thought, I have one thing.
After the brief evening was finished, when they had regained their coats from the golden lobby and gone down the endless length of the glass tower, back into the snow-white city, he was still thinking about it. In fact, if he were honest, the thought had begun at the moment he met their host, the elusive and very private Vessavion, who had permitted them into his home, that mansion perched atop the tower of glass, for reasons of diplomacy. There had only been the six invitations, six men known for their business acumen, their wealth, their good manners. It had been meant to impress them, and because they were, all of them, extremely clever, it had done so.
He wondered, going over what he knew of five personal files in his mind, as his chauffeur drove him home, if any of them had a daughter. But even if they had, it could not be one like his. Like Isobel.
He had always given her the best. She was due only that. And Vessavion—Vessavion also was the very best there might be, Six and a half feet tall, probably about one hundred and eighty, one hundred and eighty-five pounds—this was not from any file, there were no accessible files on Vessavion—blond as Isobel, maybe more blond, the hair drawn back and hanging in a thick galvanic tail to his waist. Gray eyes, large, serious. A quiet, definite and musical voice, actor-trained no doubt. Handsome. Handsome in a way that was uncommon, and satisfying. One liked to look at him, watch his spare elegant movements. A calm smile revealing white teeth, a smile that had nothing to hide and apparently nothing to give, beyond a faultless courtesy amounting, it seemed, to kindness.
The car purred through a city made of snow. Lights like diamonds glittered on distant cliffs of cement. They came over the river into the gracious lowlands, and entered the robot gates of his house. It was a good house. He had always been proud of it. The gardens were exotic. But Vessavion, in the middle of that multitude of rooms, Vessavion had a garden that was like a cathedral, open to sky almost it seemed of space, flashing with stars.
She was in the library, sitting by the fire, an open book on her knee. She might have been waiting. He looked at her. He thought, Yes.
“Was it wonderful?” she asked, cool and sweet. There was a lilt to her voice that was irresistible, like the slight tilt to her silvery eyes.
“Very, I hope you’ll see it. I left him a note. Something of mine that may interest him . . . The African Bible.”
“You’d give him that?”
“In exchange—for something else. Perhaps he’ll refuse. But he does collect rare and beautiful things.”
She was innocent of what he meant. She did not know. He had begun to keep secrets, her father. It had started five weeks before in the doctor’s office. Time enough for truth later. Truth was not always beautiful, or desired.
Vessavion’s answer came the next day. It was as if Vessavion were somehow linked into his plan, as if this had to be. He invited the owner of the African Bible to a small dinner. The visitor had a daughter, Vessavion had heard. She must come too.
Conceivably, Vessavion had even known of Isobel. The father knew there were files also on him. Had Vessavion perhaps seen some inadequate, breath-taking photograph?
The dinner was set three nights before Christmas. It was well-omened, the city in a Saturnalia of lamps and fir trees, wreathes and ribbons. He said to Isobel, “Will you wear the ivory silk for me?” She smiled. “Of course.” “And, no jewelry,” he said. She raised her eyebrows. “Do you think he’ll hang me with jewels?” “He may. He might.” “I’m quite nervous,” she said. “I’ve heard about him. Is he really—is he handsome?” “Tonight,” he said, “you’ll see for yourself.”
• • •
The elevator took them up the tower of glass, and at the top the doors opened into the golden lobby, with its French gilt mirrors and burnished floor. A servant came, like all Vessavion’s slaves, virtually invisible, and took away their outer garments. They walked into the vast pale room where the log fire was actually real, pine cones sputtering in it on apple wood. On the walls two or three beautiful paintings from other centuries, genuine, obscure, and priceless. Lamps of painted glass. Brocade chairs, their unburnt wood carved into pineapples. For the season, a small rounded tree had been placed, dark green, decked with dull sequins of gold, a golden woman on its top holding up a star of crimson mirror. And there were boughs of holly over the mantle of the fire, and tall, yellow-white candles burning. It was charming, childish, almost touching. But then, had it been done only to please Ve
ssavion’s guests? Perhaps even to please a woman?
On a silver tray by the fire were three long slender goblets of some topaz wine. Vessavion came in. Immaculately greeted father and daughter. They drank together.
But the father had noted Vessavion’s face when he beheld Isobel. There was no subterfuge at all. Vessavion’s face changed, utterly, as if a mask had lifted from it. Underneath it was just the same face, handsome, strong, yet now alive. And it was young. The father thought, He’s only two or three years older than she is. I can see it, now. This delighted him very much.
Isobel had changed a little too. For the first time in a decade, she was blushing, softly, marvelously, like milk-crystal filled by sunlight. Her eyes shone. No man who liked women could have resisted her.
They ate the delicious meal—fish from somewhere cold, perhaps Heaven, a soufflé made of clouds—the invisible servants attending to everything, wines floating down yellow-green, red, and clear as rain. There was a blue liqueur.
All the time, he listened to them talking, the girl and the young man, without hesitations. He felt, the father, the pleasure of a musician, whose music plays at his will alone.
He thought, I must relinquish that. Now they are each other’s. He was glad. He had not wanted to leave things in a muddle. It was not he felt she could not manage without him, not because she was a woman. No. Women were vital, survivors, even ruthless if they had to be. It was only, he had not wanted to make her work at things like that. She was meant to soar, not brood among the cobwebs and dusts. And it would be all right. Yes, now it would.
It came time to reveal the African Bible. Vessavion took the huge black book and opened its clasps of platinum with his strong, graceful hands. He read, his lips moving silently. Evidently he understood the esoteric language into which the Bible had been translated. When he glanced up, he said, “I do want it. But how can it be priced?”
