Tanith By Choice: The Best of Tanith Lee, Page 2

“Mirror. Whom do you see?”

  “I see you, mistress. I see a man in the forest. He went hunting, but not for deer. His eyes are open, but he is dead. I see all in the land. But one.”

  The Witch Queen pressed her palms to her ears.

  Outside the window, the garden lay, empty of its seven black and stunted dwarf trees.

  “Bianca,” said the Queen.

  The windows had been draped and gave no light. The light spilled from a shallow vessel, light in a sheaf, like pastel wheat. It glowed upon four swords that pointed east and west, that pointed north and south.

  Four winds had burst through the chamber, and the grey-silver powders of Time.

  The hands of the Witch Queen floated like folded leaves on the air, and through dry lips the Witch Queen chanted:

  “Pater omnipotens, mitere digneris sanctum Angelum tuum de Infernis.”

  The light faded, and grew brighter.

  There, between the hilts of the four swords, stood the Angel Lucefiel, somberly gilded, his face in shadow, his golden wings spread and blazing at his back.

  “Since you have called me, I know your desire. It is a comfortless wish. You ask for pain.”

  “You speak of pain, Lord Lucefiel, who suffer the most merciless pain of all. Worse than the nails in the feet and wrists. Worse than the thorns and the bitter cup and the blade in the side. To be called upon for evil’s sake, which I do not, comprehending your true nature, son of God, brother of The Son.”

  “You recognize me, then. I will grant what you ask.”

  And Lucefiel (by some named Satan, Rex Mundi, but nevertheless the left hand, the sinister hand of God’s design) wrenched lightning from the ether and cast it at the Witch Queen.

  It caught her in the breast. She fell.

  The sheaf of light towered and lit the golden eyes of the Angel, which were terrible, yet luminous with compassion, as the swords shattered and he vanished.

  The Witch Queen pulled herself from the floor of the chamber, no longer beautiful, a withered, slobbering hag.

  Into the core of the forest, even at noon, the sun never shone. Flowers propagated in the grass, but they were colorless. Above, the black-green roof hung down nets of thick green twilight through which albino butterflies and moths feverishly drizzled. The trunks of the trees were smooth as the stalks of underwater weeds. Bats flew in the daytime, and birds who believed themselves to be bats.

  There was a sepulcher, dripped with moss. The bones had been rolled out, had rolled around the feet of seven twisted dwarf trees. They looked like trees. Sometimes they moved. Sometimes something like an eye glittered, or a tooth, in the wet shadows.

  In the shade of the sepulcher door sat Bianca, combing her hair.

  A lurch of motion disturbed the thick twilight.

  The seven trees turned their heads.

  A hag emerged from the forest. She was crook-backed, and her head was poked forward, predatory, withered and almost hairless, like a vulture’s.

  “Here we are at last,” grated the hag, in a vulture’s voice.

  She came closer and cranked herself down on her knees and bowed her face into the turf and the colorless flowers.

  Bianca sat and gazed at her. The hag lifted herself. Her teeth were yellow palings.

  “I bring you the homage of witches, and three gifts,” said the hag.

  “Why should you do that?”

  “Such a quick child, and only fourteen years. Why? Because we fear you. I bring you gifts to curry favor.”

  Bianca laughed. “Show me.”

  The hag made a pass in the green air. She held a silken cord worked curiously with a plaited human hair.

  “Here is a girdle which will protect you from the devices of priests, from crucifix and chalice and the accursed holy water. In it are knotted the tresses of a virgin, and of a woman no better than she should be, and of a woman dead. And here –” a second pass and a comb was in her hand, lacquered blue over green –” a comb from the deep sea, a mermaid’s trinket, to charm and subdue. Part your locks with this, and the scent of ocean will fill men’s nostrils and the rhythm of the tides their ears, the tides that bind men like chains. Last,” added the hag, “that old symbol of wickedness, the scarlet fruit of Eve, the apple red as blood. Bite, and the understanding of Sin, which the serpent boasted of, will be made known to you.” And the hag made her last pass in the air and extended the apple, with the girdle and the comb, towards Bianca.

  Bianca glanced at the seven stunted trees.

  “I like her gifts, but I do not quite trust her.”

  The bald masks peered from their shaggy beardings. Eyelets glinted. Twiggy claws clacked.

  “All the same,” said Bianca, “I will let her tie the girdle on me, and comb my hair herself.”

  The hag obeyed, simpering. Like a toad she waddled to Bianca. She tied on the girdle. She parted the ebony hair. Sparks sizzled, white from the girdle, peacock’s eye from the comb.

  “And now, hag, take a little bit bite of the apple.”

  “It will be my pride,” said the hag, “to tell my sisters I shared this fruit with you.” And the hag bit into the apple, and mumbled the bite noisily, and swallowed, smacking her lips.

  Then Bianca took the apple and bit into it.

  Bianca screamed – and choked.

  She jumped to her feet. Her hair whirled about her like a storm cloud. Her face turned blue, then slate, then white again. She lay on the pallid flowers, neither stirring nor breathing.

  The seven dwarf trees rattled their limbs and their bear-shaggy heads, to no avail. Without Bianca’s art they could not hop. They strained their claws and ripped at the hag’s sparse hair and her

  mantle. She fled between them. She fled into the sunlit acres of the forest, along the broken road, through the orchard, into a hidden passage.

  The hag reentered the palace by the hidden way, and the Queen’s chamber by a hidden stair. She was bent almost double. She held her ribs. With one skinny hand she opened the ivory case of the magic mirror.

  “Speculum, speculum. Dei gratia. Whom do you see?”

  “I see you, mistress. And all in the land. And I see a coffin.”

  “Whose corpse lies in the coffin?”

  “That I cannot see. It must be Bianca.”

  The hag, who had been the beautiful Witch Queen, sank into her tall chair before the window of pale cucumber green and dark white glass. Her drugs and potions waited ready to reverse the dreadful conjuring of age the Angel Lucefiel had placed on her, but she did not touch them yet.

  The apple had contained a fragment of the flesh of Christ, the sacred wafer, the Eucharist.

  The Witch Queen drew her Bible to her and opened it randomly.

  And read, with fear, the words: Resurgat.

  It appeared like glass, the coffin, milky glass. It had formed this way. A thin white smoke had risen from the skin of Bianca. She smoked as a fire smokes when a drop of quenching water falls on it. The piece of Eucharist had stuck in her throat. The Eucharist, quenching water to her fire, caused her to smoke.

  Then the cold dews of night gathered, and the colder atmospheres of midnight. The smoke of Bianca’s quenching froze about her. Frost formed in exquisite silver scrollwork all over the block of misty ice which contained Bianca.

  Bianca’s frigid heart could not warm the ice. Nor the sunless green twilight of the day.

  You could just see her, stretched in the coffin, through the glass. How lovely she looked, Bianca. Black as ebony, white as snow, red as blood.

  The trees hung over the coffin. Years passed. The trees sprawled about the coffin, cradling it in their arms. Their eyes wept fungus and green resin. Green amber drops hardened like jewels in the coffin of glass.

  “Who is that, lying under the trees?” the Prince asked, as he rode into the clearing.

  He seemed to bring a golden moon with him, shining about his golden head, on the golden armor and the cloak of white satin blazoned with gold and blood and ink and s
apphire. The white horse trod on the colorless flowers, but the flowers sprang up again when the hoofs had passed. A shield hung from the saddle bow, a strange shield. From one side it had a lion’s face, but from the other, a lamb’s face.

  The trees groaned and their heads split on huge mouths.

  “Is this Bianca’s coffin?” said the Prince.

  “Leave her with us,” said the seven trees. They hauled at their roots. The ground shivered. The coffin of ice-glass gave a great jolt, and a crack bisected it.

  Bianca coughed.

  The jolt had precipitated the piece of Eucharist from her throat.

  In a thousand shards the coffin shattered, and Bianca sat up. She stared at the Prince, and she smiled.

  “Welcome, beloved,” said Bianca.

  She got to her feet and shook out her hair, and began to walk toward the Prince on the pale horse.

  But she seemed to walk into a shadow, into a purple room; then into a crimson room whose emanations lanced her like knives. Next she walked into a yellow room where she heard the sound of crying which tore her ears. All her body seemed stripped away; she was a beating heart. The beats of her heart became two wings. She flew. She was a raven, then an owl. She flew into a sparkling pane. It scorched her white. Snow white. She was a dove.

  She settled on the shoulder of the Prince and hid her head under her wing. She had no longer anything black about her, and nothing red.

  “Begin again now, Bianca,” said the Prince. He raised her from his shoulder. On his wrist there was a mark. It was like a star. Once a nail had been driven in there.

  Bianca flew away, up through the roof of the forest. She flew in at a delicate wine window. She was in the palace. She was seven years old.

  The Witch Queen, her new mother, hung a filigree crucifix around her neck. “Mirror,” said the Witch Queen. “Whom do you see?”

  “I see you, mistress,” replied the mirror. “And all in the land. I see Bianca.”

  Red as Blood

  Chosen by Stephen Jones

  Tanith Lee’s story “Red as Blood” was first published in the July 1979 issue of Edward L. Ferman’s The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Not only was it nominated for a Nebula Award, but Lin Carter selected it for the sixth volume of his The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories and it also became the title of the author’s second collection from DAW Books, Red as Blood or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer (1983) – which is where I originally discovered it. Written at a time when re-imaginings of fairy tales were not as popular as they are today, the story is an atmospheric reversal of the Snow White legend – an idea that has since been (over)used in literature, movies and TV. But Tanith did it first and, as always, she did it better than most. From the subject matter, you may think that this is one of the author’s superlative fantasy stories, and it is – to an extent. But it is also one of her equally superlative horror stories as well...

  – Stephen Jones

  Stephen Jones is one of Britain’s most acclaimed horror and dark fantasy writers and editors. A multiple winner of the World Fantasy Award, Bram Stoker Award and British Fantasy Award, he has more than 135 books to his credit.

  The Gorgon

  The small island, which lay off the larger island of Daphaeu, obviously contained a secret of some sort, and day by day, and particularly night by night, began to exert an influence on me, so that I must find it out

  Daphaeu itself (or more correctly herself, for she was a female country, voluptuous and cruel by turns in the true antique fashion of the Goddess), was hardly enormous. A couple of roads, a tangle of sheep tracks, a precarious, escalating village, rocks and hillsides thatched by blistered grass. All of which overhung an extraordinary sea, unlike any sea which I have encountered elsewhere in Greece. Water which might be mistaken for blueness from a distance, but which, from the harbour, or the multitude of caves and coves that undermined the island, revealed itself a clear and succulent green, like milky limes, or the bottle glass of certain spirits.

  On my first morning, having come on to the natural terrace, the only recommendation of the hovellike accommodation, to look over this strange green ocean, I saw the smaller island, lying like a little boat of land moored just wide of Daphaeu’s three hills. The day was clear, the water frilled with white where it hit the fangs in the interstices below the terrace. About the smaller island, barely a ruffle showed. It seemed to glide up from the sea, smooth as a mirror. The little island was verdant, also. Unlike Daphaeu’s limited stands of stone-pine, cypress and cedar, the smaller sister was clouded by a still, lambent haze of foliage, that looked to be woods. Visions of groves, springs, a ruined temple, a statue of Pan playing the panpipes forever in some glade – where only yesterday, it might seem, a thin column of aromatic smoke had gone up – these images were enough, fancifully to draw me into inquiries about how the small island might be reached. And when my inquiries met first with a polite bevy of excuses, next with a refusal, lastly with a blank wall of silence, as if whomever I mentioned the little island to had gone temporarily deaf or mad, I became, of course determined to get to it, to find out what odd superstitious thing kept these people away. Naturally, the Daphaeui were not friendly to me at any time, beyond the false friendship one anticipates extended to a man of another nationality and clime, who can be relied on to pay his bills, perhaps allow himself to be overcharged, even made a downright monkey of in order to preserve goodwill. In the normal run of things, I could have had anything I wanted, in exchange for a pack of local lies, a broad local smile, and a broader local price. That I could not get to the little island puzzled me. I tried money, and I tried barter. I even, in a reckless moment, probably knowing I would not succeed, offered Pitos, one of the younger fishermen, the gold and onyx ring he coveted. My sister had made it for me, the faithful copy of an intaglio belonging to the house of Borgia, no less. Generally, Pitos could not pass the time of day with me without mentioning the ring, adding something in the nature of: “If ever you want a great service, any great service, I will do it for that ring.” I half believe he would have stolen or murdered for it, certainly shared the bed with me. But he would not, apparently, even for the Borgia ring, take me to the little island.

  “You think too much of foolish things,” he said to me. “For a big writer, that is not good.”

  I ignored the humorous aspect of “big,” equally inappropriate in the sense of height, girth or fame. Pitos’ English was fine, and when he slipped into mild inaccuracies, it was likely to be a decoy.

  “You’re wrong, Pitos. That island has a story in it somewhere, I’d take a bet on it.”

  “No fish today,” said Pitos. “Why you think that is?”

  I refrained from inventing a tale for him that I had seen giant swordfish leaping from the shallows by the smaller island.

  I found I was prowling Daphaeu, but only on the one side, the side where I would get a view, or views, of the small island. I would climb down into the welter of coves and smashed emerald water, to look across at the small island. I would climb up and stand, leaning on the sunblasted walls of a crumbling church, and look at the small island. At night, crouched over a bottle of wine, a scatter of manuscript, moths falling like rain in the oil lamp, my stare stayed fixed on the small island, which, as the moon came up, would seem turned to silver, or to some older metal, Nemean metal perhaps, sloughed from the moon herself.

  Curiosity accounts for much of this, and contra-suggestiveness. But the influence I presently began to feel, that I cannot account for exactly. Maybe it was only the writer’s desire to fantasize rather than to work. But every time I reached for the manuscript I would experience a sort of distraction, a sort of calling, uncanny, poignant, like nostalgia, though for a place I had never visited.

  I am very bad at recollecting my dreams, but once or twice, just before sunrise, I had a suspicion I had dreamed of the island. Of walking there, hearing its inner waters, the leaves brushing my hands and face.

  Two weeks went by, and pre
cious little had been done in the line of work. And I had come to Daphaeu with the sole intention of working. The year before, I had accomplished so much in a month of similar islands – or had they been similar? – that I had looked for results of some magnitude. In all of fourteen days I must have squeezed out two thousand words, and most of those dreary enough that the only covers they would ever get between, would be those of the trash can. And yet, it was not that I could not produce work, it was that I knew, with blind and damnable certainty, that the work I needed to be doing sprang from that spoonful of island.

  The first day of the third week I had been swimming in the calm stretch of sea west of the harbour, and had emerged to sun myself and smoke on the parched hot shore. Presently Pitos appeared, having scented cigarettes. Surgical and government health warnings have not yet penetrated to spots like Daphaeu, where filtered tobacco continues to symbolize Hollywood, or some other amorphous, anachronistic surrealism still hankered after and long vanished from the world beyond. Once Pitos had acquired his cigarette, he sprawled down on the dry grass, grinned, indicated the Borgia ring, and mentioned a beautiful cousin of his, whether male or female I cannot be sure. After this had been cleared out of the way, I said to him,

  “You know how the currents run. I was thinking of a slightly more adventurous swim. But I’d like your advice.”

  Pitos glanced at me warily. I had had the plan as I lazed in the velvet water. Pitos was already starting to guess it.

  “Currents are very dangerous. Not to be trusted, except by harbour.”

  “How about between Daphaeu and the other island? It can’t be more than a quarter mile. The sea looks smooth enough, once you break away from the shoreline here.”

  “No,” said Pitos. I waited for him to say there were no fish, or a lot of fish, or that his brother had got a broken thumb, or something of the sort. But Pitos did not resort to this. Troubled and angry, he stabbed my cigarette into the turf half-smoked. “Why do you want to go to the island so much?”