by Tanith Lee
And sure enough, far off over the Hall, someone had come in.
There were others there, farther than he, an escort who had evidently had to allow him, but who dared not themselves venture so near.
He wore dark clothing, and over that ran a whiteness, just as the redness had poured down over Cain.
A tall man with white hair, dressed for the upper earth of ice. Bringing ice with him.
Anna, through all the blur and density of the Hall, made out his face. Eyes like glaciers, mouth like a line in snow.
She knew him.
Knew.
And in one split second, she remembered.
All of it.
Not Egypt, not anything momentous or wise between.
Only that one last time. The time when she had known him, maybe, the very best. When he found her and had her, and had been hers, and let her go. Betrayed her. Worse, not wanted her.
Her hand clutched at her left breast. Something hurt her there, as if she had been kicked.
She staggered, righted herself. Her brain boiled with things more awful even than she had just witnessed.
But it was not the white-haired man at the Hall’s end who spoke to her.
It was Cain.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Ruth. Ruth, come here to me. Come and taste the blood, Ruth.’
And Ruth turned about and went to him, to Cain.
‘It won’t be as you remember,’ he said. ‘This will be sweet. Better than strawberries. Better than wine.’
And she walked to the corpse on the pillar and put her lips against its shattered neck, the mess of glands and veins and meat, and sucked the blood.
It was sweet. It was better.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Malach advanced through the hall of the Mountain King, the Hall of the Snow Queen. The servants of Cain had not dared stop him, or keep him from this central area. Cain was Cain, but they recognized Malach, too. Not so much who he was; what he was. Another king, a knight-priest-king, off the board of snow and darkness.
He wore the black thermal clothes he had put on for the waste. All but the hood and head coverings. Stripped of those, his hair flamed round him, extravagant, a banner.
Only he moved. The rest of them were a tableau.
Cain in his clothing of clay-red nakedness. Anna, who had been, and was, Ruth, still as a narrow white pillar at the side of the corpse. Only her lips were red, as they had once been painted to be. Something had ordained that her lips had kept a perfect shape, outlined in blood like lipstick. And then a single thread of scarlet slipped down her chin, and on to the breast of her white dress. The left breast. As if someone had thinly stabbed her.
Behind these two, Cain, the girl, the other man, unconscious but not dead. Then the child standing in his white and gold, and the fourth, black, pillar, of Lilith.
Malach negotiated all the distance.
He halted within ten feet of Cain, and of Ruth-who-was-Anna.
His face was composed of hollows, plains, like the world above. A snowscape. His paleness made his eyes far darker, almost black. He looked now, but for the pale hair and skin, very like the man in Anna’s dream. Reptah, the priest of the god.
But she did not know him for that.
She knew him only as Malach, now. Ruth’s Malach.
‘Well,’ he said. And then something short and rough, in Latin. Cain laughed, a braying noise.
Nothing else.
But it was Lilith who moved now, gliding, as if she went on wheels, to the dead thing. In a golden chalice she caught the last spasms of the blood.
Going around Anna-Ruth, around Cain, she came to Malach, and offered him the cup.
He looked at her, then dipped in two fingers.
They emerged bright red.
And these he touched to his lips.
Lilith, expressionless, turned from him. She took the cup to the goddess Sekhmet, and set it in the dark stone-woman’s hand, which was humanly curved to receive it, under the muzzle of the lioness.
Malach looked at the young girl in red and white.
He said, flatly, ‘Hunger.’
‘Full,’ she said. She smiled, and wiped the blood off her face with her hand.
‘Anna,’ Malach said, steady, still flat. He too licked the blood off his lips. They were pale again.
‘Not Anna,’ said the girl. ‘And not to you.’
Cain laughed once more—now the briefest, most urbane sound. A host at a flawless dinner party where something had gone, just a whisper, amiss.
‘You don’t belong to him, Anna,’ Malach said. ‘Understand this. You’re free to choose. That’s why I came to find you.’
‘So I could choose you?’ she said. She grinned. She raised her head, and the cascade of white hair swung off her, and around her again like thick shining smoke.
She might have been his daughter, his sister. It appeared she had remade herself in his image. But that was before she remembered what he had done to her, for she had forgotten but not forgiven, and now she remembered, too.
He had taught her to kill choosingly—always, with him, choice. Spare this one. Take this one. Some things belong to some people by right. A gift. A caress. Or even death. But he was always the arbiter. He the instructor, the ultimate judge.
And finally she had made her inevitable mistake, even after his tuition. She had killed a man that Malach had not reckoned deserved his death. And so Malach left her. Don’t say my name, he said to her. And screaming his name, they had carried her away to prison. But later she escaped, and in the wet wood, the knife went through her heart—
His had been the first of the knives. Her heart had already died. She had loved him. He had told her she was his soul. Yet he left her. He left her. And now, here again, too late.
‘Anna,’ he said.
In his face, behind the stone and snow, she glimpsed his strength, and his need.
‘Don’t,’ she said to him, ‘say my name.’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘You bear a grudge. Petty, Anna. After all this.’
‘Then I’ll be petty. I’ll be so petty and so mean and so changed. You won’t know me. Then you can go away.’
Cain said, gently, ‘Is that all you want, Ruth?’ And conversationally Cain added, to Malach, ‘Your dog-team, of course, will be well treated. But, perhaps, not such niceness for you.’
‘No,’ said Ruth.
Ruth recalled Malach’s beauty, his naked beauty, how she had watched him sleeping, aching with yearning. She had wanted to die for him. She met death over and again in his arms, death that burned—
And he was mixed now with the other image. The body of Reptah lying on hers in the chamber of the temple thousands of years before.
Something like orgasm moved through her now. And at the core of her belly an apple of glass broke. She felt the first blood-offering of Anna’s young, young body sink through her loins, and the red rose of it bloomed on her dress. So that she was wounded twice now.
She had wanted to die for him.
She had died.
Anna who was Ruth crossed quickly over the small space, and reaching Malach, she looked at his eyes. She had grown during her time in the white mountain. Although he was taller than Cain, she could reach.
She spat into his face.
The spit, like silver, struck him.
He did nothing. Did not even wipe the spit away.
And she, she saw that Malach loved her, as Ruth had never truly known, despite the words he had spoken, despite his going away.
She was now Ruth and Anna. She was Anna, but Anna knew.
‘No,’ Anna said, ‘it isn’t all I want. Cain, take him somewhere for me. Tie him up and hurt him. For me. I want him to suffer now. I want him to suffer very much.’
Chapter Thirty-Six
Violet crocuses had come up on the common, and in the gravel before the house.
Behind the house there was nothing unwise enough to emerge so early.
Dark-haired Sam, the gardener, h
ad been cutting back the wild grass with a strimmer, leaving clots of grass intact around the old apple tree and the fountain with the fish. Nearby Terentia sat on a bench that had been bought, with the toy lion in her lap. She wore a long thick black jumper and over that a long black wool jacket, and a trailing, beaded black silk scarf.
Sam and Terentia did not speak, but they were involved, Miranda thought, in that silent communication so often found among the young, or very old.
Miranda had assumed it was good that Terentia should sit and watch Sam. Sam had not minded. He had seemed to switch his interest to Terentia as soon as he saw her, which was on the second occasion that he called at the house. He had been very respectful to Eric, and to Michael.
A strange boy. Like the eponymous hero of some short story entitled The Lodger’, or ‘The Dark Young Man’.
Sasha was not in the garden, but in front of the TV in her room, knitting another long black wool coat.
Eric was also in his room. He had leaned away from his re-writings of history and begun instead, with the aid of a jeweller’s glass screwed into his left eye, to carve a tiny wooden figure. It was of a woman, and it had the head of a fox. Wooden memory?
They kept to their rooms now, like insects keeping to cells. Only Miranda did not do this.
She got easily, in her black jeans, on to the back of Connor’s bike, and Viv yipped excitedly in the saddle-bag.
He had come back before he said he would, before the spring, unless the token crocuses made it all right.
‘It means darkness,’ said Miranda, absently.
‘What’s that?’
‘Sam, in hieroglyphics.’
‘Old Egyptian? You sound like Red...’
‘Darkness strimmed the grass,’ said Miranda. She laughed.
‘Ready?’ asked Connor.
‘Oh, yes.’
He wondered, incoherently, if they would ever have sex, and if then he would also politely inquire if she was ready to begin.
The bike started with a thunderous roar and he heard Miranda exclaim. Not fright, possibly approbation.
Then they soared off down the drive, away from the dark glow of the looming house.
Miranda held on to Connor, her hands clasped on his leather belt. She wore the spare helmet. She and Viv gazed out through their goggles, and the world whirled by.
Miranda did not foolishly try to speak.
There was the silence of the bike’s guttural roaring.
At turns, Miranda leaned, fearless and proper, as he had told her. Through the maze of buildings they went, under the red heights of buses, through currents of diesel and pollution, and now and then the rain slanted, light as mist, wavering, gone.
By twelve o’clock they had reached the outposts of the suburbs, and they pulled up in a pub yard. The owner knew Connor, and came out to admire his bike and his bint.
Miranda looked a wonder in her black long-booted legs and slender body swathed by dauntless black velvet already veined from the road. Her hair foamed forth from the helmet. Her teeth were so white—like a child’s. Had the originals dropped out and new ones grown, or had she just had everything capped. They did not look false.
They, Connor, Miranda and Viv, ate steaks and jacket potatoes, with two bottles of creamy red Gallo wine, Miranda’s choice. Miranda paid overtly and stylishly, as if she enjoyed it. Connor was proud of her. She and Viv had had most of the booze.
In twenty minutes, the land changed, the far-off hills keeping up with them, while the middle ground ran in the other direction. Factories, schools, marooned office blocks. Then open country broken only by barns and crooked houses, old churches, the occasional oast house with a skirt of village.
They scored through places that seemed to be called Whippum and Flittham and Burrow and Warry. There were new quaint pubs with four-feet-high doors and beams and bright modern signs showing merry harvesters and bulls and porcupines.
In a rainy lane a daylight fox stared at them from a hedgerow, like a dog-rose, and Viv squeaked in affront.
They reached the shore by ten past three.
It was the place he had wanted, not popular, bleak and flat, with the fields sheering off, black and drained green, and great flattened cedars trenching up, and the stony beach empty but for two or three symbolic-looking huts, a man and his Labrador, and beyond everything, the sloping water, grey as turned cream, with a yellowish lace at its edges, and far out a hollow colourless half-nonexistent sky.
The bike was stopped, on the muddy road above.
They sat, and looked at the end of the world.
‘Oh, Connor. It’s lovely. So devastated.’
‘Yes,’ he said, satisfied.
They walked along the beach, and Viv ran barking at the sea and the sea played with her, carelessly.
‘Used to come here as a kid,’ said Connor. It was a lie.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we lived by the sea a long while.’
They did not talk very much, and the wind swarmed in, bringing breakers to their feet.
When Viv was exhausted, she too came to Connor, to be carried.
After the man and the Labrador, no one else hove in sight. They walked, and turned back, and got on the bike, and followed the road along above the shore.
Finally there was a long, low, flat hotel, looking windblown and deserted, but it was curiously occupied and open, and in the bar a woman, bleak as the sea, switched on an electric fire for them and served them tea and biscuits.
‘You can’t have a drink until six,’ she announced. This was all she said.
Then they did talk. Connor, biker stories of the road, funny, sad, terrible stories, all true, scarcely embroidered, and she, strangely and perhaps disappointingly, London stories. The hotel where the piano played Cole Porter, and old men and young boys went mysteriously up to hidden rooms, the Indian gentleman who had wanted to give her an apartment, how she had been lost in Harrods one whole afternoon, never finding the way out until closing time.
‘You don’t,’ he said, ‘speak about the past.’
‘Oh, the past. There’s so much of it.’
‘Is there?’
‘Don’t you,’ elusively she said, ‘find it so?’
He thought, considered, and felt compelled to agree. Since he was a child, centuries seemed indeed to have gone by, and besides he had been so many different people. And he did not want to speak of his beginning, the dire father and hard-handed mother, the sister he had loved who ran off with a married man and must never be spoken of, and who he had never managed to find.
‘You told me once about a wedding,’ he said, as they drank the hot pale tea and dipped in the shortbread biscuits for themselves and Viv.
‘Did I?’
‘An old wedding. You rode there on a horse.’
‘Well, I’m old, Connor, you know. We did things like that then. But now I’ve ridden on your wonderful bike.’
‘We are honoured.’
She laughed. Pretty, her laughter.
There was a safe place for the honoured bike, and so presently they went out and walked again along the stones at the ocean’s rim.
The light of the day was going away inland, grey sunset without sun. But as the dark began, she turned to him and Connor said, politely, ‘May I kiss you, on the lips?’
‘What do you think?’ said Miranda.
‘I think that you’ll let me.’
‘Then I shall.’
So he kissed her, decorously, his mouth closed.
Hers was sweet with a fresh rosy lipstick. He liked its lollipop taste. Viv, jealous, ran off again and yapped at the sea. Which came in with a great wave and showered her.
‘Oh, poor Viv!’ cried Miranda, but Viv only leapt back, sneezed, and barked more furiously. ‘When I was a little girl,’ said Miranda, ‘once the sea did that to me. And I wasn’t brave. I cried. But then I pretended that my face was only wet from the sea water.’
He thought, where had that been? What mediaeval or Renaissance sh
ore. He did not ask. He kissed her again, and now he tried possession, and she allowed him to. Inside her mouth was all the soft sunset warmth the day had not provided, succulent, promising.
When he called, Viv ran up. Miranda took off her red silk scarf and dried Viv, while Connor held them all together.
Back at the hotel, some lights had come on. The bar looked like the Mary Celeste, the tea things uncleared, the bottles dimly shining.
‘Will you take a drink?’ the bleak-sea woman asked, rising up from below the counter, where perhaps she had lain folded.
‘It isn’t six yet,’ said Miranda.
‘Oh, well. Have the first one on the house.’
The electric fire burned bright. The woman made no demur at pouring half a pint into a bowl for Viv. She said, ‘There’s a room, if you want it. But I expect you’re staying at the King’s.’
‘Never heard of it,’ said Connor. ‘We were going back.’
Miranda said, ‘It would be nice to stay. Yes, I’d like that.’
Connor hesitated, and the woman said, ‘You can have the best double for a single. Out of season.’
Connor looked at Miranda. Miranda said, ‘That will be lovely.’
Resigned, Viv buried her snout in her drink.
In the night Connor woke, and watched Miranda sleeping peacefully and silently beside him.
Her naked shoulder gleamed in a ray of moonlight through the window, which had net only halfway up. They had left the outer curtains undrawn.
It was a quarter moon, a young-girl moon.
Miranda’s body was mature, the moon at its ripened half, maybe. White and lush. The muscles firm. No inch or ounce of spare flesh, all taut and smooth as a white sweet plum.
They had lain in the sideways position. He did not think she had come, and yet, could not quite be sure. Her pleasure and contentment were very great, and completely genuine. Probably—for it was surely real, Miranda’s age—she had not made love with a man for a while. Years, decades. She had said something... relearning her lines.
She had enjoyed him, any way. She had kissed his closed eyes.
And he, he had liked it very much. Too much. She had excited him in an odd new way. The way of the goddess on the hill. The way of perverse things, definitely. Too bad. A good lay. A glorious fucking lay.
