The Book of the Beast

by Tanith Lee

  The nurse was also at the door, and outside a throng of women and a few men had gathered. There had been exclamations. Now a silence. Into this, Ruquel descended.

  The nurse, seeing her, made a motion she should not approach. "Why not? What is it?"

  The nurse put her hand over her own eyes. Though she was protective, she knew Ruquel had not been trained to docility, or ignorance. "An awful sight. A young man has slain himself at our door."

  Ruquel stopped a moment, very pale and straight, then she came down the last of the stair and crossed the hall. Liva too gave way to her in the door.

  He lay, the suicide, with no doubt across the very threshold, as if the angel of death, in a passover, had thrown him there. His black hair streamed on the cobbles, his face had been calmed by the darkness of his sleep, all but the eyes. Closed, they had about them a strange tension, as if he had been weeping. One seemly thread of blood ran from the corner of his mouth. His hand rested quite gracefully and couthly on the hilt of the knife, which otherwise was sunk into his breast.

  Ruquel regarded him. The watchers observed the Beautiful Jewess went whiter than her own whiteness. Then she knelt down, and put her fingers to the temple, the throat, of the cadaver. Then she set her hand in the air over his lips, and brought it away.

  After a minute, she lifted her long-lashed eyes and announced: 'Liva, you must bring him into my father's house. He isn't dead."

  Someone in the street protested. Ruquel did not take notice, but as Liva was leaning forward, Ruquel touched his arm, and said quietly, "Take care as I did to have no contact with the blood." Without a question Liva nodded. He leaned and gripped his burden, the weight of a full-grown man, like that of a child.

  Ruquel rose. "You know that my father has tutored me," she said to the street. "The muscle in the young man's chest is very hard, and he, it seems, very weak. He could not complete the blow."

  When the door was shut, the nurse said, "If he lives, they'll say your father, or you, raised him from the dead."

  "So be it," said Ruquel, with an abstracted smile.

  Haninuh, when he returned from an excursion into the City that twilight, was met by his daughter at the

  door. Though the house was always well lit, it was the hour of lamp-lighting, and Ruquel presented to her father a poetic oriental image as she stood before him, limned by the ivory candle-lamp she bore, in her silver earrings and little velvet cap, and barefoot as about the house she always was. The striped feline sounded its timbrels at her side.

  "Welcome, my father."

  The rite of homecoming was performed swiftly but warmly.

  "You have a guest," she said then. "We housed him in the Cedar Chamber."

  "Oh, does he have a liking for trees?" (The chamber was painted over one wall to the ceiling with a cedar tree; some guests had declared they heard all the owls and doves of Lebanon mewing in its branches.)

  "He likes nothing, being nearly dead."

  Haninuh frowned. "He's a man of the City?" This was a Jew who never spoke of "gentiles". "I have not seen him before. If my father has seen him, how can I say."

  But she revealed, as they climbed the stair, the morning's astonishment, passing on to the afternoon's labour. In an interpolation, she stressed the care she had felt prompted to take with regard to bodily fluids, the protections she had formed. She was very skilled herself in medicines, for the Jew himself had taught her, and in other elements more mysterious.

  "Will he live?" asked Haninuh therefore, in the corridor.

  "It's for my father to say. I trust he will." Ruquel turned her candle from a draught, and her face was veiled in shadow. "But, he longs to die."

  "Why so, I wonder? You name him a young man, and sound but for the wound."

  They reached the door of the Cedar Chamber. Inside, a lovely lamp of Eastern filigree hung from a stand and dusted the air with frankincense. The great tree spread over the plaster, and the nurse kept watch in its shade. In his bed, bathed and made clean, the suicide lay on his pillows, like a saint of wax.

  The Jew went to a basin and washed his hands. He spoke inaudible words. Then he proceeded to examine the unconscious man thoroughly. At length, he straightened up and replaced the covers.

  "He gives little enough sign of life. But life persists. Rarely have I seen such a wound seal itself so rapidly. I know your cleverness as a doctor, Ruquel, but from what you tell me, this is not so much your wisdom as some connivance in the flesh. Spirit and body are at odds."

  Later, when they took their supper together, the father questioned the daughter over again, and they discussed their visitor broodingly.

  "How is it, finding him thus, you thought he might survive?"

  "I hoped for it," said Ruquel simply. "At first I could find no tremor of the heart. But at my touch it came as if to meet me. And then seemed to grow stronger."

  "I cannot think he and I have been familiar with each other," said the Jew, "yet there's about him something I know or imperfectly remember. Well. Until he wakes, speculation bears no fruit. Before you sleep," he added, "if you're willing, go to the room and make music on your harp."

  "Your will is mine," she said.

  "And am I to think," he said, "you do it only to please me?"

  The harp which Ruquel brought to the Cedar Chamber was a model of the little kinnor, a crescent of bow-horn which she leaned to her shoulder, from which crescent ten horsehair strings stretched to a horizontal bar of ereb willow. Beneath, the unstretched tails of the strings provided a fringe that, occasionally, the striped cat was wont to bite.

  The nurse nodded in her chair. Liva was soon due to take his watch.

  Ruquel sat where she could see the mosaic of the filigree lamp upon the sick man's face.

  She plucked chords of a twanging fluidity from the harp, and, as the music found its way, sang very low a melody without words, old as the Jordan, perhaps.

  She had serenaded him for less than three minutes when a sigh, more a convulsion, rushed in and out of him. His eyelids fluttered and one arm sought from the covers. (The nurse slept on.)

  Ruquel did not stop her music, but now her eyes were fixed only on him. The wordless song flowed and twined among the reedy pangs of the harp. Another three or four minutes elapsed.

  Abruptly, with no further prologue, the eyes of the young man opened wide. Ruquel ceased playing and singing.

  She was intensely unnerved, as if fire had been thrust into her face.

  She had known that his eyes would be dark as her own. But the eyes looked at her now. Focused on her with feral acuity. They were brilliantly, violently and unhumanly green. Emeralds set in optic sockets.

  Mastering herself, Ruquel said, "Sieur, you're with friends. Lie quietly. I shall fetch my father." But the young man said, "It hears the music. It knows your song."

  "Who?" said Ruquel, holding back her terror with a rein of steel.

  Then he sagged into the pillows, and he only said, "My God, my God. Didn't I die? It's all to do over. If you're kind, fetch your father, someone, to brain me with a mace. Then burn - then burn the body."

  Raoulin slept the slumber of opiates. In that deep sea, he lost himself, and coming back to shore learned a month of days had been sunk there too. He did not protest. In sleep he had been incapable of harming another, or of facilitating - that , which was now his constant companion, the unborn child of death and destruction caged in the male womb of his loins.

  Somewhere in the sleep there had been dreams. He recalled none of them, and was glad of that. Sometimes, also, he believed Haninuh the Jew had questioned him, and he had answered. And perhaps it, too, had done so. And he seemed to have heard the soft jangle of the kinnor, then, across dark reedy waters under a lion moon.

  There came an evening, when Raoulin had returned from the places of drugged sleep, and he was shown his body, a little emaciated, but with the wound healed to a plaited line. If he should move suddenly, then

  the muscle quirked and pained him, that w
as all.

  The strong man came and lifted him, and the woman washed him and he was fed. There were some days of that, and some nights of shallow dozing, for sleep had been too long with him and now proved elusive.

  He was afraid they would let the beautiful daughter in to tend on him. He was afraid of what the demon would make him do. And of the aftermath.

  But the daughter did not come near him now.

  There began to be days of letting him out to walk in a small enclosed court with fruit trees in pots, and herbs and flowers and a little sunken well. One day, as he marched aimlessly about there, to toughen himself - because they had said he must - he beheld a striped cat, which arched its back and hissed at him, then jumped up a series of perches to a window above, where it vanished. This furred angel was her messenger, he thought, the room must be that of Ruquel. And he longed to see her there, for an instant,

  for she was safe enough at that distance from him, he was not vital enough as yet to go after her. She had been very beautiful, very gentle.

  He must not try to reason where her room lay inside the house. In any case, there was the giant, thank

  God, to protect her. And the Jew… surely the Jew was a magician.

  As he patrolled the courtyard, Raoulin kept thinking of Ruquel, as of something precious he could never hope to see or touch, some prize once within his grasp, and now lost for ever, like the hope of Heaven. And added to this forfeiture there came to be the remembrance of his family, his friends, the university, the City, time, youth, and the world.

  Then he sat down on the plot of grass beside the well, and he cried, and he was so weak his body was rocked and racked with it, this grief. But all the while, even as he wept these scalding tears, he sensed the other, waiting, waiting there,

  within him, for the hour he would belong to it and exist only to achieve its will.

  "Sieur, you've been my saviour. I thank you for my life. But I don't see why you let me keep it. For I

  believe you know why I shouldn't be let live."

  These were the first conscious sentences he rendered the Jew.

  They met in a parlour above the hall, about lamp-lighting, and the scent of flowers came in from the house vine, and olibanum from the antique lamp. There were a great many books, and some scrolls and ornate cases of leather. The two men sat facing each other over a table where there was wine to drink neither had touched.

  "In honesty, Raoulin, I do know, for you spoke of it asleep, and I took the liberty to interrogate you." "And that - it - did it answer you also?"

  "Not in words. It has no use for those. But it was aware, I think, in its primordial way, of our dialogue. Consider, it has no intelligence, only an instinct and an appetite. Even so, it may employ such knowledge as you yourself possess, to gain its ends. This is a power of desire more pliant and enduring than any of the desires of a man. It is a demon."

  "A demon. Yes."

  "I know its race, even. Out of Assyria, an utuk , having as its own form the body of a man, the head of a

  bird, but a bird of the beginnings, scaled not feathered, from the fifth day of the earth." Raoulin shuddered.

  "Did I tell you all her story, too?"

  "I have pieced it together. All your story and all the story of Helise d'Uscaret, who died and left her body for the demon to inhabit. For the matter of that, I sent Liva as a spy to the d'Uscaret mansion. He says

  the old kitchen woman and the groom go on about their doings as if nothing's amiss. I conjecture that

  what you left upon that bed crumbled entirely, even to the bones. If they think anything, there, perhaps it's that you and she have gone off together, in the way of heedless lovers."

  Raoulin said, "That must come. Where else can I go but after her, into the grave and down to perdition." The Jew replied, "God made all things. Even the creatures of his servant, the Devil. We are instructed to

  note the lesson their existence teaches. He never says we must offer them our throats."

  "Do you suppose I might prevent it - by abstaining? Heros made himself a priest, but the Devil won. My blood's hotter than the blood of Heros. And when it works in me like yeast - '

  "There now," said the Jew. And he poured out the crystal wine, and gave it to Raoulin, as if it were medicine. "This is a clever enemy. It adapts itself as any beast will do. The ways of it are various. It can erupt inward, changing the victim to the semblance of itself, thereafter enacting by that body all it wishes. Or it passes into the body of a woman at intercourse, and her child, when it comes forth, will be the shell of the demon. It can do both, or either. It can lie down dormant too, even as with Helise, where it waited inside the womb, that terrible ambush ten years old. Only the key is constant, the procreative spasm. All the pure line of d'Uscaret were susceptible to it, but it can casually infect anywhere. Now that whole house has perished, only you are left to it. How can it let you die? It resisted the death of Helise until its transference was accomplished. The stabbing you gave yourself was sewn up in a day. I partly believe you might burn yourself alive, Raoulin, and this creature would find some means to build you up again. Death's no answer." The Jew sipped his wine. "Neither abstinence from the carnal act. The utuk provokes and seduces others to provoke. As you say, you're not proof against it."

  The dark was in the windows now. Hesperus rang from a nearby convent. The nights were lengthening and drawing near.

  "How can there be any escape?" Haninuh looked at him steadily.

  "You will have decided, perhaps, I'm versed in certain arts." "A magician."

  "If you will call it so."

  "Then - can you cast this out of me?"

  "Once before," said Haninuh, "it came, this thing, to mock me. I was unready then, knowing not enough. But after that failure, I studied in the school of demons, gathered together books, and artifacts from the Roman time here, when this began. Strange to say, I felt that the utuk would return to duel again with me. We're ancient foes. Its primal memory and mine contain rank seeds of all those battles. The cities of the desert, the chariots, and the chains. Yes, I suppose I can cast it out of you."

  Raoulin started up. The Jew stayed him. "This isn't without great danger."

  "I'm ready to die," said Raoulin. "You know as much."

  "Also you must give yourself into my charge. What must be done is in itself unholy. There will be for you shame, rank sweetness, confusion, and agony. You may die indeed, you may lose your mind for ever. But this I do promise, not your soul."

  Raoulin stood before him, white-faced, arrogant with fear and courage. In the dusky lamplight, his eyes were only black.

  "Sieur magus, do what you must. I'm your slave. When will it be?" "In seven days, that is the new moon, God's remaking. Then."

  The Beautiful Jewess, eighteen years of age, sat playing with her cat on the floor of the bedroom. The cat's play was more sedate than it had been, still adept.

  Haninuh, having been admitted, stood gazing at them.

  He saw the child clearly, as the kitten was still visible in the cat. But both were mature, and changed. Ruquel was a woman. He must acknowledge that.

  Presently she looked up, and her smile faded into a serene strictness. It was his own habitual look, given back to him like a mirror.

  "I've read the book, as you instructed, my father." "That's good."

  "You've spoken to the young man?" He was touched at her way of referring to Raoulin, as if she were by far the elder. In some ways she was. Raoulin had not been wise, but he had, in the end, striven to be virtuous, prepared to sacrifice himself for the sins of other men.

  "We've spoken. It shall be done."