The Book of the Beast (12 page)

It did not always come to shelter by day in the Tower of the Birds. No, only seven or eight times did they detect it had entered there, going over the roof and in at that round window inaccessible to any other. It would possess scattered eyries. The vaults of chapels, wild land about the old City wall; it had been seen climbing the turret of a ruined church, by a man who took it for a monkey—but some, hearing the rumour, knew otherwise. Elsewhere, near the markets, two fornicators were scared in a corn-bin by a beast they swore was a giant beaked lizard that had on man’s clothing.

Yet the human memory, some urge, brought it now and then to d’Uscaret, and most often by night.

It could be slain. No legend had ever prohibited that. How, was less sure. And they were afraid, sickened, loathing. Something must be put between them and the actuality.

A drinker and feeder, it had another proclivity. The horrid reports had made this obvious.

Lord d’Uscaret stood before the narrow monk’s bed, and pointed to Helise, his daughter by marriage.

Tut her there. Tie her. The cord round her waist, with enough slack. Let her go about the room if she wants. He’ll smell her the sooner and come in.”

Like a bitch-dog then, they leashed her by a rope-girdle and a long tether. Nowhere in the room was anything that she might employ to hack herself free. She would not even have thought of it. The inevitability of their plan, of which she was so strategic a part, of which she had at that time scant grasp, gave her over for their use.

They did not assure her men would be waiting, with drawn swords, with javelins and clubs, below in the lobby under the twisting stair. They were not, anyway, there for her protection.

A watch would be kept on adjacent heights of the building. She would not even need to scream. She was the bait inside the trap, the distraction, the scapegoat for all their sins.

Like Psyche, sacrificed on the mountain to save the rest.

“He may not come tonight, or tomorrow,” said d’Uscaret. “We may have to wait.”

A priest in black said solemnly, “We must go down and pray.”

They were glad to leave the chamber, with its strange tang, faint, like that of a hawk’s mews. Glad to leave the scapegoat. The priest, who she had not seen till he spoke, did not offer her word or look.

She roamed a while on her leash, up and down. She could not quite get far enough to right the triptych, or to finger the elements on the table.

For her sustenance had been left white bread in a napkin, fish and mushrooms, cheese and grapes, milk and wine, and sweets.

She ate with appetite. She was not frightened. She sang softly to herself, for company, as she had done in childhood.

When the dark began to come, she spread herself on the low bed. He had slept here, her husband.

She lay and thought of him, and suddenly her body was alive with desire. She longed to feel his weight lowering itself upon her, his caressing ravishments, the thrust of him against her womb.

She remembered a tale at least as antique as the dooms of d’Uscaret, of the monster transformed to human beauty through love’s kiss.

Was it a miracle she might accomplish, she who had sent him into Hell, to bring him forth again into the light?

She lay in the blackness, and her body moved with the rhythms of fire. She slept, and dreamed his weight crushed her, his strength pierced her. She was opened out, stretched to her limits, her brain shattered in stars.

But nothing but dark and dawn entered the chamber, the thirty-ninth night, the fortieth day.

The window was a bowl of jade, translucent twilight. Helise gazed at it, surprised to have slept so long.

On the floor the panier and plate were empty. The food had not been replenished. A mouthful of wine was left. Shadows curtained the room, and silence had spun her web there. Helise shifted again on the bed, and sang a phrase of song, to hear the web quiver, then regather on the frame of the dusk.

The rope had begun to chafe her ribs where it had ridden up over her gown.

She lay and watched the window ebbing from green jade to marzipan grey. She might sleep again.

Sleeping was benign. She had dreamed of loveliness, though she could not recall it now.

Drifting, she heard a mild scrape-scrape at the window as if far away. A leaf or branch, unsettled by some evening wind. Or a bird against the panes. She was not inclined to look, to try to make it out.

She drifted on, borne by a smooth river, the room a dark forest that rustled gently, and blew upon her an open breath of sky, until she bumped against the wharf of awareness, and her eyelids raised themselves.

Where is this place? Not a forest, but a chamber, its one green eye now black. The aroma of a mews was stronger.

Then she heard. A crisping of garments, a step on the floor. She heard, there in the darkness, unseen, a
breathing
.

‘
Is
it you, my lord?” she called softly, “my Lord Heros?”

And the breathing was arrested, began again, and drew nearer.

Somewhere deep-buried by forty days in a wilderness, Helise d’Uscaret knew that she should, at this second, be whimpering or shrieking, weak with horror, tearing at her fetters, crying to God. But all she felt was a slight curiosity, a glimmering want, to see again what she had shaped him to. And even in that, lust moved, lust murmured like a tide within her. She was under a spell. She was the Devil’s dupe. She was damned as he was.

“Is it you, my lord?” she said again, and held out her arms.

The reek of a preying bird was thicker, musky, and there was too another darker flavour, like the scum of a marsh. The stink did not repel Helise. It intrigued her. Even the butcher’s whiff of blood did not offend.

“Heros,” she said.

She felt more than saw a blacker blackness between her and the window, beside the bed. Then the eyes, catching some flake of light from the sky, flashed, and turned on her their soulless motes. The eyes of Satan, pendant there in nothingness, this they might have been. But she was not afraid.

Then, from the bedfoot, the heat of a body came crawling up on her, the weight of the body covered her, and two hands slipped across her, her breast and throat, and there the talons scratched her, but it was glancing and inadvertent.

In the dark, she put up her own hands and touched the roughness of the scales, and the emerald eyes floated, watching her, seeing her as she could not see, in the dark.

He had not harmed her before. She had not been told what had been done, out in the City. Her images of those things were nebulous.

Something swung across her face. It was the wicked beak, but she did not realise. Instead the questing, ugly, (invisible) tongue extruded, and sipped at the skin of her neck, strayed across her breastbone.

Sinuous and serpentine, it described the mound of one breast.

Lying on her, the monster from the myth made love to her in the blind dark, as in the blind dark the Unseen had made love to Psyche.

Helise, who should have doubted, should have lit the lamp of her ordinary virtue and cancelled love with howls and screams, clung to darkness, which had the arms, the muscled back, the thin pelvis of a man, and which filled her with the organ of a man.

She must not cry aloud, even in ecstasy—

Just at that moment, as she twined him with her limbs, on the crazy threshold of abandonment—just then, Psyche after all kindled her lamp.

Beneath his body, some black filaments of clothes, her eyes dazzled—she was conscious the door had been pushed wide, and the torch glare streamed into the chamber.

Her silence, as maybe her screaming would have done, had betrayed them.

Helise attempted to speak. To rouse her lover, to ward off the spurl of fires and men, the glint of weapons that came pouring down on them.

But the lover of Helise, he knew. He knew, and did not leave her. As his loins thrust on, frantically, against her and within, the head of the monstrous bird was turned, to look sidelong into the crowd of assassins.

A look. It stopped them. The men fell back. The weapons were folding over like blades of grass before a scythe.

A sound came out of it, the thing that rode upon her, and turning again, it buried its fearful head among the pillows.

Helise clutched at the shuddering muscles, cloth, silk, flesh, scales—the crowd in the room had no meaning. Enormous beats began to echo through the core of her, and in the insanity of delight, she beheld a woman like a long opaque shadow, push by the wilted kindred, the strengthless swords. In the carnivorous hands of Lady d’Uscaret was a soldier’s spear. Her eyes were all the face she had. Her eyes were no longer black, but blazing green.

The shock of the javelin, rammed into the body of her son by this woman, who thrust with death as he himself thrust with the weapon of life, rocked both lovers like the quake itself. And Helise felt the point of the spear, tearing through his heart, prick out to graze her breast.

She gaped her mouth to scream after all. And on a back-cloth of lights and shadows, where the woman seemed to topple away (like a flat figure in a church window), there was a spurt of blood, a falling, a throe, of generation and of terminus.

Helise, between all the many gates of Hell, was thrown into the Hell of ecstasy.

She shrieked and writhed and a spear seemed to enter her also.

In this state she was, flailing and lurching on the bed like a broken snake, until they dragged the dead thing out of her and off her, on to the floor.

Then, only then, the delirium guttered and extinguished. And she was left behind.

She lay, covered in his blood, soaked by that, by tears and sweat, and the waiting-woman of the mother of Heros leaned over her and said, “Drink this.”

Helise drank. She had no choice, for they held her.

Long after, she became convinced that all the people had gone away.

When she sat up, it was so. The chamber was black and shut, as earlier.

When she stumbled from the bed and pulled herself on hands and knees across the floor, she encountered a bloody spear, but nothing else.

They had taken their dead away. They had left her here with their poison in her to die in her turn.

Already she could taste death, and in her arms and legs it stole like cool water. There was no pain.

Sitting by the hearth, she attempted to perform a contrition. Would God hear? God had never heard her.

Eventually she was in the fireplace. Still, she was not afraid. Her body was cold, but for her heart, and then her heart was cold too.

She felt it cease, she felt herself die. It seemed irrelevant, pointless.

What happened was this:

The Lady of d’Uscaret went to her own chamber, and there she hanged herself. She was buried in state in a family mausoleum near the Temple-Church. It was explained she perished of sadness, learning her son had been killed by robbers on his journey. His body had been lost in foreign lands.

For the bride of Heros, who took her life at news of his death, there could be no holy ground. But out of compassion they made her a bed in the walled garden.

Not much after that, a feud sprang up between the houses of d’Uscaret and Lyrecourt. Its foundation was obscure, some insult or obtainment. Despite the stern jurisdiction of the Duke, the flower of d’Uscaret’s young men were soon mown down, and the lord himself was slaughtered like a pig on his way from Mass. At least, his soul went well-prepared to Heaven.

Inside a year, all the candles of d’Uscaret were put out. A few of the kindred, obscure relatives, old women and men, lingered in the mansion with their elderly servants.

A decade, and d’Uscaret had become little better than a lodging house.

Though there were yet some who, passing it at dead of night on the street, would cross themselves under its walls, not knowing why.

The Widow

Be a god and hold me

With a charm! Be a man and fold me

With thine arm!

—Browning

As if from the tomb, sleepily, he rose up from her narrative. (Which might be apposite enough.) She had anyway bewitched him. He had seen what she said, in vivid pictures, masterful paintings come to life.

Raoulin stirred, and stretched himself, as he would not have done so freely in the presence of a lady. He took care not to look at her directly, but into the pallid glow of the fire, which had either been fed while he sat entranced, or which magically never went out.

“But Demoiselle Helise,” said Raoulin, sportive with the supernatural for there seemed nothing else to be, “if you died, here you are, and you haven’t yet given me the alchemical formula for that. Besides—am I to take you for twenty-five or twenty-six years? Not more than eighteen, surely?”

“Time for me has made a stop,” she said. Her liquid voice thrilled him. The voice of a sorceress. One could not be blamed for anything under the same roof as a witch.

At his own thought Raoulin struggled briefly. He reached back after the dead prostitute, the anguish that had brought him here. But a balm had been salved over them. They did not hurt any more.

“Shall I,” she said, “conclude my story at once?”

Then he had to look at her. Into her eyes like emerald. He nodded. She said, “That part’s swiftly told.

The poison my husband’s mother had administered was insufficient. I did not die, but lay inert, flexible and wholesome, and with a slight breathing that some doctor ascertained. They did not have the heart for more murder, to finish off the bitch’s work. The feud was out with Lyrecourt, the Duke’s frowns glowering. And there was Heros to be seen to. His corpse had rotted in one night, with a fearful stink, all bits, human and avian. So they made my tomb, and named it for me, and laid the box of his bones there under a proud drape. For me, I was hidden again in this room, and sometimes tended. After many months, it seems I began to revive. I recall nothing of that period, not for three or four years, rather as the infant does not. Then I became myself, and remembered what I had been and what they had done to me.

I was content to be hidden, and to hide. I heard tidings of their various deaths from servants. One evening I was told how Lord d’Uscaret, my second father, had been bled on Satan’s Way, under the Temple-Church. I laughed and had to pretend it was weeping, because I was still nervous of my jailors.”