The Demoness - Tanith Lee, ebook, CALIBRE SFF 1970s, Temp 2
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The Demoness
Tanith Lee
Tanith Lee has made her reputation by successfully mixing science
fiction, heroic fantasy, and fairy tales, often turning fantasy conventions
upside down. Her examination of the ambiguities of moral behavior can
be found in her novels
Death's Master, Dark Dance,
and
Darkness, I.
A
World Fantasy award-winner, she lives in London, England.
She waited in her high tower.
Day in, day out she waited.
The tower was white and stretched beneath her, far, far, to the sweep of
the bleached dunes and the gray glister of the sea.
Her world was all gray, all white, half-tones, glitterings, without shape.
A world colorless, and abstract. And she too was white, her foamy dress,
her feet, her narrow hands—all white as the chalk hills that ran distantly
above the sea. But her long, long hair was red, blood red, red as an
eruption of magma out of the white volcanic crystal of her flesh. She did
not look at her hair; obscurely she feared it. She bound it on her head in
braids.
She was waiting, and not certain why she waited, or for whom, or for
what.
She did not think of her past or her future, or really of any particular
thing. She had no memory, or so it seemed, only an empty page from
which words had faded. She watched the gulls dip in on the wind,
screaking in their wind voices. She came out of the tower at certain times,
and went in again at certain other times. Like a figure on a clock. She had
no ambitions or yearnings, nor any hope. She was, in the sense that she
existed. She was, but that was all.
Time passed, but time had no meaning. It might have been yesterday or
tomorrow when she saw him.
 He was riding up the beach in the dawn, a man in gold on a golden
horse, its mane like blowing corn, scarlet reins and golden bells on them,
its hooves striking up the sand. He dazzled her eyes. He wore a kind of
armor that was either too antique or else too recent for her to recognize it.
Tassels swung from his shoulders, his hair was ragged and bright like the
ripped-out strings of a golden harp.
She felt a quickening as she leaned down from the length of the white
tower.
Am I waiting for this man? He
was a burning ant on the beach,
but soon he rode under the arch of the tower. An echo came, and then his
feet loud on the stairs. She heard him pass through room after room,
stopping sometimes. She imagined him examining certain things. But all
the while he was drawing nearer. She turned to face the door through
which he would come. Her heart beat. Without thinking, she reached up
and let down her hair.
He stood still in the doorway looking at her. He was stern; she wanted
to make him smile. He stared in her face.
"Where is Golbrant?" he asked her.
She put her hand to her mouth. She shook her head.
"He that passed by here, thirty days gone, riding to Krennok-dol. He
that had a harp on his back and a scar like a cross on his brow."
She shook her head once more, and her heart beat fast and she put her
hand on her throat and waited.
"Golbrant," he said, his eyes narrow and very bright, "my brother by
vow, not blood. He to whom the Sisters said, 'Beware the white woman
waiting for death in the tall tower by the sea."'
He came forward and seized her by the hair, and twisted it around his
hand until the pain filled her skull like a silver cloud.
"Where is Golbrant?"
he hissed, and then he met her eyes.
This was how it was to her. His eyes were like a summer garden. She
wanted to draw from them those vistas of amber shades and yellow darts
of sun, she wanted those hopes, those ambitions and yearnings she saw in
them to fill her emptiness, her darkness, with their purpose and their
light. She was hungry and thirsty for his reflected life as the fish for water,
the wings of the bird for air. And her eyes began to breathe, to drink like
beasts at a pool, and she put out her hands to his neck and drew herself
against the hard armor, and clung to him tight. He spat a curse at her,
and tried to shake himself free of her hands, her eyes, but could not. There
was a kind of pleasant deathly heaviness in her embrace, her gaze, like
 sleep, except where it filled and curdled in his loins. She drew him down.
She drowned him in her eyes and her body. He swam in the current of her
flesh, and the tide took him away, and he was lost in the tunnel of the
pleasure she had to give him. Such pleasure it was no woman before or
since had been, would be. It was the whole store of her pleasure, held for
him. She was the jar that contained the oceans, the fountainhead; he
strove to reach the source and cried aloud to reach it.
But at the last his body checked itself. Out of desire came a great
numbness, and then a revulsion of the pale thing wriggling beneath him.
He understood then what he would have given her along with the life that
ran out of him.
And then he twisted aside. He pulled his body free, and he turned his
head, shielding his eyes as if from a dreadful and consuming glare.
“So, what they said of you is true, white woman," he muttered in sick
cold anger, more to his own self than to her. “You devour the brain's
knowledge and the mind's reason with your look and your womb. Yes, I
felt it leaving me, and I would be hollow after as the bone of marrow when
the wolf has had it. Is this then how you dealt with Golbrant?"
Her gaze was darkening, dimming, going out. She lay on the ground.
She did not understand. And yet there was a faint memory, a memory like
a dream, of a man on a dark horse, dark-haired, with a harp on his back
with a woman's face, and a jagged crisscross above his eyes. She had
waited for him too, she remembered now and he had come, across the
long rooms, up the stairs of the tower. But he had not flinched aside, the
light had passed from him to her. She looked up at the man whom she had
almost possessed, for she recollected now, abruptly, what it meant when
she lay with men. It was neither a shock nor a surprise, and not abhorrent.
It seemed natural, for what did she know of the natural order of things to
make this one thing that was hers seem strange and dark and evil?
"He is dead," she said softly, an explanation only.
The golden man drew his sword, swung it to lop her head from her
shoulders, but it was not the habit of the warriors of Krennokdol to kill
women, however great their anger. So he halted, and after a moment he
sheathed the sword again.
"Live, vampire," he said, his eyes now blind with hate, "but never
practice on a man again to take his wits, or I'll see your head on a pole
yet."
It could make no sense to her; she was not quite human, human values
and laws had no meaning. Yet she stared at him, and she loved him,
 because he had won free from her and had no need of her any more.
He strode from room to room, searching for his vow-brother, Golbrant,
but Golbrant had staggered from room to room when his self and his
sanity had gone from him, and had fallen down from the high place into
the sea. The waves had carried him off like sour green vinegar dogs, and
the vulture gulls had picked at him, and the fish, so that now he was ivory
on the ocean floor, with no mark on him any more to say who he was,
except the gold harp turning green in the sand at his side.
While the warrior searched, the woman followed him. She could not tell
him where Golbrant had gone, could not remember, though no doubt he
guessed. She stared at his back, stared at his face when he turned. Her
love was all-devouring; she would have eaten him if she could. Her love
was like that.
But he thrust her aside, and went down the stairs of the tower, away
from her and away. He found the horse and rode it off up the sea road into
the chalk stacks that margined the shore.
For three days she wandered in the tower. She did not bind up her long,
long hair. She did not go out above the bleached strand. She was no longer
waiting. Golbrant and all the other men who had sunk like ships in her
deadly embrace, lost their wills and their minds in her eyes and her womb,
were quite forgotten again, shadows at the back of her thoughts perhaps,
no more. But him she remembered, the warrior on the grain-yellow horse,
his narrow bright eyes, his flax hair, his anger and his going away.
On the dawn of the fourth day she went down the stairs of the tower,
and out, and up the sea road after him.
She had never left the tower before, not in all her years since she had
become what she was. There had been no desire before: now there was a
compulsion.
The sun cracked open the gray sky, and the sun and her blowing hair
were two bright dabs of scarlet in the colorless land she was leaving.
After some days the land changed color. It changed from white to black.
Hills like black crouching crows stood guard on either side of the road.
The sky was dark with storms. Now her feet were red as her hair because
the sharp black tones bit them like snakes. She was one of those who had
no need to eat or sleep, so she simply walked day and night. She followed
the hoofprints of the horse, and sometimes there were droppings; here
and there a piece of his cloak night have caught on brambles, or she would
 come to the cold ashes of a fire and run her fingers through them and
touch the ash with her tongue because he had lain by them for warmth
when they were alive three nights before.
Then there was a black river in the twilight. There was a round blue
moon overhead that looked almost transparent, and great clouds beating
by like angry birds. And there was an old devil-woman crouched by the
rushing water tending a bluish fire and a caldron of death over it. She was
wrapped up in something black, only her eyes showed and her skinny
hands stuck out, all bone. When she saw the white woman walking along
the river bank she screamed out:
"Krennok-dol lies that way! That way! Over the river."
Then the devil-woman left her brew and went up to her, and turned her
to look out across the river.
"No way for you to cross. The bridge is down; he did it, knowing you
followed after. He was afraid, the horse leaped and struck sparks from its
iron feet, knowing the vampire girl came behind them. I gave him a charm
to protect him from you, but it will do him no good. Look at you, all
hunger. Is this your love then, to follow a man who runs in terror, a man
who hates you in his loins and sword arm? Didn't you drive to death his
vow-brother, Golbrant the Good?" Here the devil-woman spat. "What is it
makes you hurry after the sword stroke which is all he wants to give you?"
But the white woman was already wandering down the bank away from
her, searching, searching for a place to cross, though there was none at all,
and anyone could see it but her. The devil-woman ran after her, skipping
like a ghastly black goat, for she had goat horns on her head, being what
she was. She tapped the woman's shoulder.
"Do you know his name even? No. Well, there's too much of him in the
world. If you want him, walk into the water and it'll carry you over, unless
you're afraid to do it. A long search you will have, but when you find him,
he will be yours. Only remember the price he pays for it. Witless he will be
then, but what a joy to you—if you keep him from the tall crags and death.
Like your child and your man, all in one, for ever and ever."
She heard, and though it was only a shadow on her thoughts, yet she
understood. At the brink of the river the devil-woman whispered:
"If you let him go free, you will be dust, for a sword will strike off your
head. Let nothing and no one come between. Remember."
Then she thrust with her bony hands, pushing the woman down into the
water. The white woman had no fear. Her hair and her dress floated her
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