Darkness, I

by Tanith Lee

  He smiled. ‘Never. What sins? My sister.’

  They made the offering at the fire, the only fire which had kept alight, and round them the yellow jasper of the daylight began to come, through the miniature pores of those rooms.

  ‘We’ll be together again,’ he said. ‘There will be a way. You’re mine, until death and beyond death. Until Ra dies on the River under the world.’

  She lowered her eyes and the fire smoked. Had the gods heard?

  When the door was opened, they went out, and in the corridor she saw a scribe painting writing upon the wall, a beetle above the sun. He used a can of red spray paint, and over its acidulous smell came the aroma of Heinz tomato soup from the thermos at his side.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Waking was more curious than the dream. Anna was in her Egyptian ‘flat’, under the mountain. And this morning, at sunrise, it was Cain who had kissed her. He had done no more than that.

  The dream concerned things Anna had never, until now, thought of. Sexual things that seemed a long way off.

  Besides, the man in the dream, the priest called Reptah, was not Cain. Did not resemble him in any way.

  Yet it had been so explicit and so evident. Everything. Even to the stars on the ceiling of the room, to the drop of blood that beaded her finger from Reptah’s bite. To the pain and deliciousness of his penetration into her body.

  Reptah also had seemed familiar. As if she had seen him often. But she never had.

  It was very late in the day now, probably, for she had slept for hours after returning into the pyramid, the mountain.

  She had felt calm and almost pleased, at first. Before she slept. Awake, she felt dismay. She was confused. And sitting on the side of her sloping bed, which was not designed specifically for sex, Anna cried. She was all child, very young, and lost. She wanted Althene. There would be no Althene. ‘Mum’ did not come, was not invited, as Harpokrates, Cain’s pet, would surely understand by now.

  Cain had said Althene was his own son—his daughter.

  But even that would not count.

  Anna had asked Cain for a music centre, and he had said this might be arranged. A clock—and he had laughed. Sekhmet, Lady of Time. She was to be Cain’s. Not Reptah’s. Whoever Reptah had been—or was.

  The woman called Ast came presently, and the repetitive ritual of bathing and anointing took place. Anna was dressed in the white Greek dress with a zip, and made up in a modern way.

  Anna did not ask any questions, and Ast only informed her that later someone would come. Not who, or why, or when.

  She fastened a necklace of hammered golden shells about Anna’s neck. The necklace was genuinely, appallingly old.

  It was not to be a feast. It was a cosy little dinner party, more Greek or Roman than Egyptian, perhaps. In a white marble room that led from Nuit’s Hall, there were low couches with cushions by the low tables. The women—two of them—sat upright, and the men reclined. There were four men.

  Lamps hung down. There were tall flowers in vases.

  Somewhere music played, but it was ordinarily classical; it was Bach. Some concealed music centre supplied it.

  The first woman was Lilith. She wore one of her long black dresses. No ornament beyond a garland of dark red blooms, and a single dark red ring. The other woman wore draped clothes, like Anna, several pieces of jewellery that might have been real or superb copies of ancient embellishments. She had also a garland of fresh yellow flowers.

  The four men had on contemporary dress, expensive, very casual, shirts without ties, no dinner jackets. As if one could be formal here only one way.

  The fifth man, Cain, had on dark blue, the tunic garment that was habitual to him. No jewellery, no rings. He did not recline, but sat, like the women.

  There were bowls of nuts and sweets and fruits on the tables already, and flagons, Roman-looking jugs.

  The men, and woman, who were not Lilith and Cain, were already, as before, utterly drunk and noisy.

  There was something new about them. Something too alert, feverish and brilliant. They were afraid, of course.

  Cain beckoned Anna to his side. She sat on the couch with him. He looked serene and friendly, at odds with all the rest of it. Lilith seemed only blank. Her tigers were not there. The boy, Harpokrates, also garlanded, came suddenly visible, sitting on a small child’s chair, of gold, in Cain’s shadow. Harpokrates was drinking wine from a small gold child’s goblet.

  ‘Describe the wine,’ Cain said to him. The loud room hushed and listened respectfully.

  ‘Roseate,’ said the child.

  The five guests made boisterous sounds. Lilith took no notice. Anna saw on her the mark of extreme old age, not senility, but pure self-removal. She might have been floating on a cloud. Only her albino tigers connected her to the ground, and they were absent.

  How strange then that she had awaited Anna by the undersea window, had talked to Anna at any length. Why had that happened. Had Cain sent Lilith to do it? Or had it been some flash of awareness, that occurred like a planetary juxtaposition, once in a year or a hundred years only. Lilith had been a huntress for those moments, a slow and serpentine archer, sending off narrow arrows into the smoking air. But now, the quiver, empty. She was a doll which had come to life for half an hour, to show it could. No more. No less.

  A girl dressed for Egypt came and placed on Anna’s hair a white garland, like that of the boy.

  ‘And now, you describe the wine,’ Cain said, more intimately, to Anna.

  She sipped it, she said, ‘Burgundy.’

  ‘Wrong,’ he said, ‘but not inept. Your father-mother will have taught you things.’

  ‘Yes,’ Anna said.

  Cain said, ‘And did she make love to you?’

  ‘No.’

  Cain said, ‘What an opportunity missed.’ His eyes had heat in them. He was intent, it seemed, on making her aware that he himself desired her. This was bizarre, after her long coherent dream, in which another man had been her lover, had taken her virginity and carried her through the River of Death and up again, into the morning.

  Anna watched Cain. She seemed now to have the strength or only the temerity. She had known at once, obviously, his intention in bringing her to him. He had kissed her. But now was he too late after all? As if he guessed as much, he had asked her if anyone had been before him.

  ‘Is this a Roman dinner?’ Anna said. ‘They won’t serve dormice?’

  ‘No. Dormice aren’t to be had. A French meal. They,’ he indicated the drunk noisy guests, ‘like it. A treat for them.’

  Lilith sighed.

  Anna heard her, and glanced again.

  Lilith sat quite still, her beautiful cat’s head poised on her ringed paw. Slowly she raised a green goblet and drank from it the leaden roseate wine that tasted like Burgundy.

  Anna said, softly, to him, ‘Does she hate me?’

  ‘Like the wicked step-mother in the fairy story? She hates no one. Her feelings are atrophied and must be manipulated. Perhaps we can do that. Or another. But not now. Not yet.’

  Cain’s Egyptian slaves came in with dishes that might have come from anywhere modern and expensive. The food was French, as he had said, or somewhat French: a white fish baked and stuffed with Brie and garlic, vegetables in pastry, with butter, chilled soup, strawberries that were sweet only by means of sugar.

  The Bach played without pause. The tape or CD never ended, nor did it seem to repeat anything, yet it probably did. That then was like everything else, repetition that seemed always subtly altered, developed, but which maybe was quite static, stuck.

  There had been something else, like this. Some other place.

  Anna thought of the Scarabae house above the common. No, not there. Another house, earlier... A spangled dress, a great cat, a grave—a knife seemed to turn, painless and bright, in her brain.

  She said, to him, ‘Who are all these people?’

  ‘You asked me before.’

  ‘You didn’t an
swer.’

  ‘They’re mine.’

  ‘Are they old? Have they lived for hundreds, thousands of years?’

  ‘Who knows?’ he said, smiling. ‘You sound like a little girl. Your little-girl’s voice, I would call that. But you’re not, are you, my Anna-Ankhet?’ He gave her a strawberry, particularly bloodily red. The colour of Sekhmet—

  ‘You,’ she said. ‘And you, look young. But you’re not. You’re Scarabae.’

  ‘How tactful, my child. I don’t look young to your young eyes. But then, I’m one of the very first,’ he said. His voice was almost skittish. ‘What is my name? Don’t you recall? I killed my brother on the edge of a field, under the jealous eye of God. And God thrust me forth to endow the earth with my murderous children, and branded me, so they would beware of me, those children of others who already existed.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Ah, you believe it.’

  ‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘In some way, it is.’

  ‘Eat the strawberry I gave you.’

  ‘It doesn’t taste of anything.’

  ‘Strawberries are always tasteless. They only have a smell which is confused with taste.’ He looked at her. ‘The food comes to us from far off. It loses its savour. And we have no clocks. Here it’s always day, or night. Anna will want to go away.’

  ‘You won’t let me.’

  ‘No, I won’t let you.’

  She felt then a curious exhilaration. She said, randomly, ‘Someone may come here, to find me.’

  ‘Yes. How do you know?’

  ‘Althene—’ Anna said.

  ‘Not Althene. Althene could never find the way.’

  Anna bit into the strawberry. It tasted, now, red, but like red satin, material not fruit.

  ‘What a prize you are to me, Anna. You must never leave.’

  The meal was ending, with decanters of brandy, which had the aroma of smoke and pears. Even the little boy, who had stayed silent, was served a thimble of this.

  The guests, as formerly, had grown more vociferous, smothering the Bach.

  ‘Why are they so frightened,’ Anna said.

  ‘Can’t you imagine?’

  ‘Of you.’

  ‘Of me, but for a definite reason. No, don’t try to deduce. Observe.’ He smiled out over the white room.

  Then he stood, and massive soundlessness resulted. Even the Bach had ceased.

  The woman in the Augustan jewels and yellow garland put her hand to her face, leaned sideways, and suddenly vomited, sharply, loudly, on the marble floor.

  Cain, indeed no one, took any notice.

  Cain said, ‘The food, the music and flowers. And now, our lottery.’

  In at the door from the red Hall outside, walked a woman in a black robe. She was picturesque, almost funny, for she wore a crude bony mask like a skull. No one laughed.

  Between her hands, which were smooth and quite youthful, she carried a copper bowl.

  The stink of the jewelled woman’s vomit had grown strong, as if it too had a special purpose.

  The woman in black went to her, and offered the bowl. Quickly the sick woman thrust in her hand and drew out a small clay thing. She threw this down between her feet, and it broke. That was all. But the woman put her fist into her mouth and began to sob.

  Death passed on with her bowl.

  She came to the four men who had reclined, and who now sat bolt upright. They reached into the bowl and took, each of them, a thing of clay.

  And each cast the clay down, where it broke.

  Inside two of the objects, something black, like a calcified pea, rolled out.

  Anna wanted to jump up and clap. The scene was absurd, theatrical and stupid. If the woman in the yellow garland had not been sick, Anna would have thought it all a game.

  But the two men who had thrown the black peas stood up.

  They looked identically drained and grey, though one was still foolishly smiling.

  Cain moved across the room.

  He embraced the two men, fondly, tenderly.

  Then the death woman went out of the room into the Hall of Nuit, and the two men followed her.

  In the red glowing gloom outside, there was movement as if of many people, and a scuffling, and the note of a blow.

  That was all.

  Cain returned to Anna. He ignored the rest of them, but for the boy. He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. Cain said, ‘Anna, now I shall test you. Are you ready?’ She only stared at him. To the boy he said, ‘And you? Will you let me down, will you fail me?’

  ‘No, Uncle Kay,’ said Harpokrates. His eyes gleamed from the wine and the drop of brandy, and his garland was tilted, a small roue.

  Cain glanced over at the woman who had vomited. She had stopped sobbing. ‘Why were you so afraid? Don’t you want to make me happy?’

  ‘Forgive me,’ said the woman. And then a stream of foreign chatter came from her (like the sickness), high and hissing.

  Cain turned his back on her, and she grew dumb.

  The Hall was very red, as if seen through a filter, as if lenses had been fixed across Anna’s vision.

  Red, the marriage colour.

  Sekhmet’s colour.

  The woman’s colour of sex, and birth, and life. Of fire. Of blood.

  In this red sea, they moved.

  Lilith and Cain, and after them Anna and the boy, Harpokrates.

  There was no one else. Everyone had vanished. Save for the groups of gods about the Hall, Isis who was Eset, and her husband Ousir-Osiris, Set and his wife Nebthet. The Greek sphynx crouched in her cave of shadow—her whiteness blushed by red.

  Harpokrates had taken Anna’s hand. Not, she thought, for consolation, but in a kind of determination to lead her on.

  She felt a weight of terror. It was inescapable. She would not, futilely, have attempted to run away.

  Sekhmet stood up, her face like a gas-mask of gold, the flattened bottle of the muzzle, the neat rounded ears, and roundly slanting eyes.

  To the colossal crimson pillar before her, the two men had been fastened, one each side, the men from the feast who had worn French and Italian clothes, hand-stitched shoes, and drunk too much and laughed hysterically.

  They were naked now, blushed over their own yellowish white, like the evil sphynx.

  Each man was in the shape of an X, the legs spread, as the arms were. They were chained by chains of bronze—so it seemed.

  The head of one lolled. That must be the one who had—how had he thought he could?—attempted to resist. This, whatever this was and would be, was too absolute to evade.

  The other man was awake.

  His eyes were shut and he whispered something over and over, his face pressed into the cornelian limb of the column. Drool ran from his mouth. Was he praying?

  They had stopped.

  The child dropped Anna’s hand.

  The redness, the darkness, were so strange, that everything appeared two dimensional or partly as if it was not there. The torches burned from the miasma in spurling flights of yellow that seemed to make no true impression—

  Cain.

  Cain stood apart, and now a new type of power had come to him, that made him taller and more bulky. His shadow rose behind him, thrust out like a roar of blackness, yet beside him it looked worn, worn away, as if he had outlived it.

  He put his hands out, parallel with the burning gems of the floor, and drew them in and took hold of his blue tunic. He tore it open with one vast tug, and in two pieces the garment sheered off from him.

  He was, like the men tied to the pillar, naked now. His body was darker than theirs, terracotta in the blood-light. His black hair spilled down him like a rain of molten ink, and at his centre, from the black nest of his loins, a weapon towered, so sure it seemed almost false, almost some monstrous joke in some antique carnival of history where doubtless he had sported.

  Anna was jolted, jarred. In her dream... she had seen a man revealed. Not like this. That had been a rod of
power, but not this power. This was like a sword—

  Cain strutted. Yes, he strutted forward, behind the prow of the great warlike erection.

  The light went with him and smote on him and bled. A deeper, denser redness washed over everything.

  Anna saw through blood.

  She saw Cain reach the conscious man chained by bronze to the pillar, and make some manoeuvre upon him, which drove the weapon of flesh into the body of the man.

  The man shrieked.

  Then Cain rode him.

  Anna saw this, through blood and fire and smoke. Angles of arms and legs, the two serpents of torso on torso, adhering, slamming away, and back. A rhythm—she knew it from her dream. That was bliss. This was horror. Agony.

  The man screamed over and over.

  The shadow leapt and fumed across the Hall, in strips upon the pillars, going up into the arch of Nuit herself, as if to break into her also, to burglarize her womb—

  And then, from the dance of snakes, Cain’s face flashed snake-like forward. There were two white bars like lightning.

  The man who had screamed, screamed yet once again, and from the side of his neck jutted out a huge bursting of redness that was black, that jetted away, that sprinkled down.

  Cain had—

  Cain had bitten out his throat.

  Cain drank from the tap of blood, from the hose of it, stemming its violence.

  And then he disengaged his body.

  He stepped lightly and couthly away.

  He was still big, engorged. But, for the moment, finished. His strength was no less.

  Down his body, from his lips to his groin, over his legs on to the floor of jewels, the blood of his victim shimmered and ran like scarlet paint. But riper, more wet. The wettest liquid in all the world.

  And he spoke to them, across the little distance, in his sane, beautiful and civilized voice.

  ‘Come, Harpokrates. Come, Anna. Come and taste this blood.’

  Harpokrates, his face clean and eager, started instantly forward.

  And in that microcosm of time, Anna saw Cain see something other than his lust, and his taken children. Saw him see something behind her in the cavern of the shadow.

  Perhaps only because it meant she need no longer look at him, Anna turned.