The Book of the Beast (13 page)

Helise put up her hand and rested it on her delicate chin. “You see, Sieur Raoulin, it had driven me mad.

You can’t anticipate from me any fine feelings. I cackle at corpses, I burst into tears at the newborn baby’s cry.”

Raoulin shivered. It was not her words, only some latent truth inherent in them for all mankind.

“When most of d’Uscaret had gone, I began to win out of my prison. I was let go about. I caused no trouble with my walking of the corridors, my occasional peeking into cupboards. I learned a little, but did not take up arms. Like the old ones dying here, I was only and all acceptance. Now they think of me as a part of the masonry. I do as I wish. The two servants feed me and serve me when necessary. Of course, I’m spoken of as one deceased. They recall that much, it must never be admitted, my resurrection.”

When she said this, Raoulin was not moved to horror or distress for her. She seemed only reciting the part of a character in a drama, and not even very well. Her passions were dead even if her heart went on beating. But she startled him next.

Her voice had an avidity when she said, “Yet, I’ve waited.”

Raoulin found himself, bewitched or not, on guard.

“For what, lady?”

“Why,” she said, “I think, for you.”

“For me? I can’t assist you—or, if you’ve some petition I could go to the courts with it—my father has some influence, but not in the City—and do you think—the tale, being or seeming, improbable—’

“No, m’sieur. Be at ease. I want nothing like that.”

Raoulin was ashamed of his reluctance, yet now, as reality came back to him, uncomfortable as blood returning to a numbed foot, he began to yearn to be done with this. In the eldritch room he had formerly deemed coy and feminine, the miasma of her history shimmered. What hour was it? Surely Laude had struck—

“I might have roamed the City, but that wasn’t in me to do. My early training was as a daughter of a noble house. You’ll understand, Sieur Raoulin, only aged men have recently entered d’Uscaret.”

Raoulin found himself staring at her again, into the jewel eyes.

“Women also may burn,” she said. “I’ve been chaste as the nun for all these years of my widowhood. The last violation, the monstrous intrusion—never, since then.”

While she had recounted those things, though they seemed enacted before him, they had not aroused.

But now, abruptly, with an extreme pressure, lust possessed him. He got to his feet, not meaning to, and clumsily jarred the table where the wine cup stood—and he thought of the wine, Ysanne’s drugs of Alexandria. And through the murk two ideas struck clear, like rocks in a flood. That despite everything, she was a woman of a line older than the City, higher than he could ascend with safety, and, of course, that though his flesh throbbed for her, he did not want to lie down with her, even in a falsehood, the resurrected girl who had pleasured a demon.

But there in the firelight of the sorcerous hearth, Helise d’Uscaret was combing her blonde hair with her fingers, she was shaking her tresses so they flew about her like white foam from the sea. She was putting up her hands to the nape of her neck, the lacing of the gown. “Come here,” she said, “and help me.”

And he discovered he was there behind her, eagerly fumbling at the undoing of her dress. And as it slipped from her shoulders, she drew his hands around her body, over the shift, to her breasts and belly.

The fire shone through the linen as through the strands of her hair. The scent of her drenched his lungs, his mind.

“There’s a pact between us,” she said. “This must be.”

“Amen,” he muttered, and pulled her around to have her mouth.

Indeed, could you credit her story? Yes, she was insane a little. The prologue to an enticement, all that rigmarole, with the old hag of the kitchen an accomplice.

Somewhere in his brain, like a bell distantly tolling, some tocsin of unease kept on. But he forgot it as he brought her by the carved posts of the bed, and she threw off the shift and lay down before him like a nymph of pearl.

She gave a low laugh when he entered her. It deterred him half a second. Then she had flung up against him, and he could do nothing but begin with her that dance of death called procreation, the invention of the fiends.

Her cries came like those of one under torture. He lifted himself, and saw her, her face contorted with ravening agony or joy, her whole body pulsing as if rivers broke beneath her bones, as if she must dissolve. One look and he too was set off, like cannon by tinder. He leaned on her groaning and an exquisite needle seemed to pierce through the centre of his loins, into his spine, so he also shook and struggled to be impaled or to get release.

And at the height of it, somehow he began to see her again, to see what clasped him and gave him this, and even in the instants of orgasm, some quarter of his brain started to rip at him, to tear him back into his senses. That quarter howled. Then sight and thought smote him together like blows.

Raoulin shouted out—not in pleasure, not now. He tried to spring backwards, and fell heavily against a post of the bed. There, he lay. He lay looking at Helise. At what Helise had become.
Became
.

The fever-image had been correct. For she was, it was a fact, dissolving. Her flesh was slopping off, the skeins of muscles showing, melting in their turn, pouring over the bones like heated wax. And the bones themselves were sere. As they came poking up through the deliquescent body, it was revealed they were old bones, meant to be naked a decade at least.

She—no longer
she -
was a sludge, silt or mud, upon the sheet. And the bones rattled slightly, settling in their improper bed. About the skull, the brittle flax of hair, going every minute more to mould and dust.

And in the death’s-head, all stained with the passage of sudden decay, two green gelatines were fixed, the eyes of what she had become, of what had allowed her corpse to live,
in waiting
, all these hungry years.

From The Amethyst

The Roman

Easy is the descent to Hell

Black Dis gates stand open night and day.

—Virgil

The Roman stood under the wall of the Insula Juna, listening to his wife crying in the room above.

The apartment was on the first floor of the block; in the street, it was but too easy to hear her lament, through the hot noisy afternoon air. Perhaps she cried more loudly only to be heard by him, her heartless husband. Once she detected the sound of his horse’s hoofs she might leave off.

Better get on then. Better allow her the chance.

He beckoned briskly, and the boy came from under the platanus tree with his cavalry mare. Vusca tipped him a silver denarius, that was the sort of times they were. The boy ran off, and the soldier mounted up and started the mare moving.

Lavinia’s threnody unravelled along the walls.

As he rode through the shadier back lanes around the temple of Venus, and out on to the broad East-West Road, he thought of Lavinia as she had been, the girl he married. He first saw her in an orchard, just west of the town. He had gone out for the hunting, and come back chastened by un-success. The sun was low behind him, the dusty road fringed with dark trees that glowed after the day as if they kept the heat. On a curve of land that looked down to the cemetery and the town’s west gate, was a villa one always passed going this way. It was a modest building, by now in need of some repair.

Like all Par Dis, it had seen kinder days. Then, over a low wall, appeared the orchard, and by the plum trees in the mellowed light, this girl. Her skin was luminous, succulent. Her dark hair, drawn back into a simple knot, had mostly come unbound. He fancied her at once, and hoped she was some nicely-dressed slave. But although she looked admiringly at him in his leather tunic, the casual-wear of the Fort, and as recognisable as full parade armour and cloak of Tyrian purple, she did not answer his polite greeting, and next ran away. She was fourteen. She was not a slave, either, as he presently managed also to find out.

When he started to find excuses to go back along that road, when he started to gossip with the stray servants, or beg a drink of milk at the villa farm, when he saw her very often and realised that she herself found excuses to be there at such times as a passing officer might happen by, then he learned she was the ward of the house.

She was a Christian, as well. That he liked even less. He was himself a Mithrian, and had the mark between his brows. He sensibly worshipped Mars, too, the Warrior, for his profession, and gave seasonal respects to Jupiter the Father. The odd mysteries of Jusa Christos put him off, what he knew of them. It sounded like Greek Dionysos, without enough wine.

He began to frequent the house, though, and became friendly with her uncle, the guardian. He was allowed to talk to her, then, and here and there they sneaked off and furtively fondled. He saw he would only get what he wanted by marrying her and that there were advantages in that—for though rough, the villa had some money in it. Then he wondered if they would insist he become a Christian. But that was not their formula. Apparently he might do as he wished, providing he let her practise her own religion.

He saw later, once he had wedded and bedded Lavinia, had had her, and installed her in married quarters at the Insula Juna, that the whole point of this understanding was that she should then attempt to convert him, day and night long. Those were the first arguments.

He did not mind it too much. He was a Centurian Velitis. His bed was in the Fort.

She next withheld her favours, to punish him for not wanting some priest to push him in the river, half drown him, tell him all his sins were washed out, and now he must love his enemies.

“You forget, Vinia,” he said. “I’m a soldier.
My
enemies I kill.”

“The armies of the Emperor are upheld by Christian legionaries,” she said promptly. Obviously someone had told her what to say. It was probably true, and if it was, accounted maybe for the great running cracks that were dismantling the Empire. There were certainly no legions left by now in this hole of Par Dis where, like a fool, seven years before their meeting, he had got himself sent. Someone had said the best means to promotion were the difficult and savage postings. And Par Dis, with its town of baths and basilica and circus, was not even so bad. It had originated from some silver mines, hence the name (for Pluto-Dis, god of the Underworld and its riches). But the silver ran out after a few decades. The Empire had been ever-stretching in those days, however, and saw no harm in making a frontier station on the site. There were already roads, a fort, a native settlement. The walls and town were added. The river was useful in the trading way, and sometimes provided fine oysters.

The oysters were all gone now, like the silver and the two legions. Only men of the Auxilia, native companies under Roman officers, held the line in this flung forth province.

He had had his promotion. He had reached centurion, with a command of skirmish cavalry. There he stuck.

It was a curious idea: when he was travelling the miles here from Rome, to begin all this, Lavinia had been seven years old. For seven more she grew up, lying in ambush for him on the west road, coming out with the plums at the fatal moment.

When she would not have him, he went with the amiable whores at the
She-Wolf
. One evening the drunk uncle stormed to the Fort, and made a fool of himself (and of Vusca) over it. How could he (Vusca) be such a barbarian, wasting his strength on these women, neglecting his wife, when all she longed for was to bear him a son.

This turned out to be a fact. Lavinia had now decided to pine not only for a Christian husband, but for a baby.

She went and lived in the villa a while. When she returned to the married quarters, they were reconciled.

She had become thin, scrawny with dissatisfaction, or sadness. Her mouth turned down and there were two cut lines either side of it. He did his best. But he did not seem able to please her now, even in bed. They tried for her baby in grim sweaty grindings.

One day she was pregnant. He, less interested than she, made the correct offerings. He supposed she merely praised her ghastly slaves’ god, who refused presents with typical petulance.

It was a bad winter. There were wolves at the gates. Uncle went wolf-hunting and was mauled. He died a week later and when Lavinia heard she miscarried in the fourth month.

After this, she did not conceive again. They eventually left off the dutiful grindings. He went back to his whores and she went off to her Christ. When Lavinia met her husband, she would cry. She greeted him in tears as if after an absence of months. Then they would talk, attempting to be rational. But soon her niggling would commence, her whining. She could not seem to control it, like foul breath. At last he shouted, or he was cold, or he mocked her. Finally all he was able to do was leave her, and hear her crying again, from the street below. He tried to enact this repetitive scene as seldom as he might. He had only come here today because she sent him a wild message. He had got the impression she was ill.

But she only said she had had some dream. Her god had told her something or other. And that Vusca and she must return to full relations.

She was using her god now to drag in the erring spouse. If he had been a Christian, it might have worked. He could not think why she wanted him. As lovers they had nothing, and as two people, nothing.

She stood there, fragilely brittle and dry as a dead leaf somehow preserved. One tap, and she would be in pieces. His annoyance would not resist that. They might separate, he said. L^e was not, after all, by blood more than somewhat Roman, and had relatives in the north. Surely she would prefer to go to them.

And perhaps, if there were a divorce, she might (he grimaced, who would want to?) remarry, more happily.

To a Christian, divorce was unacceptable.

She had not married a Christian, he reminded her.

He, she said, had undergone a Christian marriage.