“Silence,” said the magician, in the voice of God. Furian put his head on his arms and said no more. When all the screaming ended, the beasts of the four masks flowed off from the wreckage they had made; they fluttered and rolled down the steps and met together on the obsidian floor. And here they tore in turn each other apart, fur and wings and skin and pelt, eyes and teeth, and as they rent and twined and sundered, they melted down like lead in a fire, but not to gold, only to a filthy clinker, which finally, mercifully, was without life.
FURIAN ASSISTED CALYPSO to sit up. She had gone down not far from the bloody mess of Lepidus. Her gown was wetly splashed, but it did not show.
“Let me alone,” she said. “Get away.”
“Yes, but first this comes off.”
He eased at her mask. The fastenings were complicated. She had knotted ribbons in under her hair, to be sure.
“No—no, don’t. I’ll die.”
“You’ll die if you wear it.”
“Take it off and my face will go with it.”
Furian leaned and kissed the tops of her soft breasts. She moaned. He said, “Trust me, it won’t.” When he pulled the mask away, she was pale and wasted.
In her autumn countenance, the lines had deepened. Her eyes were sick, yet lit now by two waking stars. “Am I alive?”
“Alive.”
He kissed her lips, and standing up, got her to her feet. Abruptly she put her refound face into her hands and wept. He heard in it the name of Juseppi. He left her, and walked slowly to Shaachen across the floor. The paper circle had burned up. It was charcoal. Shaachen was kicking it aside, while the magpie, only of usual size, sat clucking on his shoulder and letting go clotted streamers of clean green excrement.
“Birdshit, the gobs of God,” commented Shaachen. “Why did you use her?” said Furian. “But then, you don’t mind the occasional death. It’s science, isn’t it.”
“If I might save a life, I take the risk. To live is worth a risk. But this Mask Guild within a guild, to kill was the pastime. So I came to see to them, if I could.”
Furian looked down. Across the circle, Eurydiche lay. Her hair had come loose, and spread like white silks in the sinking light, from which all redness had been bled. She was made of milk-white flesh, not glass. In her eyes the flames winked blue, as if her lashes fluttered as they never could. Ashes of white roses. Ashes of the moon.
He knelt beside her and brought her against him and held her. He stared into her face.
“She was willing to die for you,” said Shaachen, “you can never forget it. Is this love?”
Yes, love. Insane and unspeakable and undeserved, and unbelieved, until too late.
“And so she’s dead.”
“Touch the neck. Do you know nothing?”
Furian put his finger against her throat. The pulse of Eurydiche was as faint as the beating of a moth. Even as he felt it, it stumbled, ceased, turning his bones to water. Then resumed, reluctantly. If she breathed, he could not see it.
“Dying then. She’ll die.”
Shaachen flapped his hands. He was as ever ruthless, experimental. “I may save her. You saw. I’m crafty.”
“You can’t. You blasted her apart. She’ll die. She’s dead. Even you can’t bring her back from that.”
“Don’t look back into your past,” said Shaachen. “You’ve lost what you cared for, so must lose everything? Don’t you know the story of the first Eurydiche? Her lover glanced back at her, though warned not to. They were coming up from the Underworld, no less, and she was yet half dead. She couldn’t, that way, bear his eyes, and was driven down again. If he’d waited, the sunlight would have made her whole. Impatience. Men are fools.”
Furian put his face into her silver hair. He thought,
And after you darkness.
EPILOGUE
The Heart
AS THE WEEKS PASSED, the season faded into winter. Along the canal a wanderer now and then went up and down, sometimes a boat with vegetables and fruit, once a procession with priests and incense, bearing an image of the Virgin Maria, to bring the rain. The Carnival was gone, like a gaudy cloud, behind the pale lemon sun.
While she lay in the narrow bed, the girl, recapturing the ability to breathe and be, thought of her small life. It was a dream, and glided before her in a dream’s fashion, sad and surreal. She remembered the first house, among the fields, the mountains far away with their salty snows. But her mother was a memory less actual than the pious nuns, who were callous to her, telling her always to thank God and Christ, although she did not know for what. This era ended in the blaze of glory, her father. Another house followed, comforts, pleasures, learning. Until the summer day the fire was turned upon her. The rape. How she had blamed herself. Her fault, his savagery, (although again, she did not know why.) And afterwards she was bereft, for now she could never love him any more.
Her life then, without love. It was filled presently by the panoplies of sex. How awful, this vast procession, colors and glitters, ways and means. Hollow, and worse, for now, here, there, for one second, some mirage of sweetness—never to be found. Mostly, let it be said, abjection, misery, and shame.
All the mystery of the City and the earth lay beyond her secretive house. She thought her father took her to these feasts and festivals of Carnival, to punish her, since she had brought him down. She knew he used her as a whore for others. Some were partial to her sort, her freakish looks. Returning, she was drained as a leaf hidden from the light. And from light, she hid herself.
She had no scope for other things. She read of other worlds she might not enter. What was crying like? This constant weightless passage of unliquid tears, the phantoms of water, through the caves of her heart?
For she was empty. She was not alive. She lived, moved, and was asleep. Always, always asleep. She knew no other state.
One night. One night at her father’s bidding, present at a place of masks where she might wander, among the groves and lamps, a man approached her.
He too was masked—and yet
At once she knew him. As if she had known him since her childhood. As if he were her brother. He spoke to her beneath the sheltering trees.
“Who are you, Madama?”
She could not speak, of course. Yet her heart broke, at the wonder of his known and beautiful voice, into a stretching ache, a flowering hurt of smile. And he said, cool as her tears that never fell, “Keep smiling.” As if he knew it all.
From that moment, even as he left her, she became a part of him. And when at last she saw his face—mad from fever and anger, white and stripped of everything but nothingness, it was yet the face of the lover she had always had within her. Her own face, only made other, made male, made human. Made divine. The guardian angel vowed to her by God.
Nevertheless, within her sphere, Lepidus remained a power. It was he who had told her so much of Furian, explained that Furian, if with her, would be kept safe—although Lepidus had not said from whom or from what—himself. So she gave Furian over to Lepidus. And at the first, (lying) death of Lepidus, when all the temple—harsh and barren, the palace of some heartless god—crashed round her, adrift, she clung to Furian. Then lost him also, as she had dreaded she must, for in an earthquake nothing stands. As the lagoon closed over his head, too stunned to feel, she had known merely the sentence of desolation that is in the gift of every limitless desert.
Later, when Lepidus reappeared, reborn, and told her that Furian also lived, a terrified lightness dashed her up. And as she hung from these killing talons, Lepidus told her all the rest. What she had been constructed to be, his focus of murder, Nemesis. (This, the second rape.) In her newest hell, she did not blame herself, did not question. She wanted only the incredible miracle that had released her before, love—Furian—to cleanse her and repair her. As he had cleansed and repaired her of all injury and sexual taint. Furian alone could give her back what the heartless always take away—her heart. And when it seemed Furian, although he said he love
d her, did not wish to love her, would not believe or accept her, she began to die. To which death, the death of her life before was a shining thing.
It was Shaachen who offered her real death in exchange for Furian’s continuance. Paramount had been her wish to save her lover. But also it was her honor. She had been the cause of death; this then justice. But more than that. To die for Furian would prove to him forever what she could not otherwise display, that she loved him more than life. Even he could not argue with her death. He could not distrust her. Though he must remain alone, he must always know he had been loved.
The Jewish alchemist, in the winter days when he began to talk to her, told her firmly that he had promised her death because her sacrifice must be total in order that his magic work. She did not mind. She thanked him, writing in her fine controlled hand, for the opportunity he had given her of vindication. Not once did she inquire how she had been saved. what bizarre sorceries and medicines had brought it about. Nor how they had escaped from the Island of Smokes. She did not therefore know at first that Lepidus was no more on his pinnacle. How the hirelings of the Guild, flying in fright from the sounds in the chapel, had given no trouble. Of the reeking fish boat. Of arms locked round her, of silent words pressed into her skin and hair. She did not even know she was in Shaachen’s disreputable palace. She asked only one thing, she asked it every day. Will I see Furian?
“Not yet,” said Shaachen. “Not until you are entirely alive. He doubts me. I won’t let him near, till he can have no doubts.”
Nor would he speak much of Furian. Only that Furian had written to his father, and been answered. Only that Furian had gone to this church or that, or to the Primo. That he had prayed.
For what? she asked.
“For you. For himself. For all the world.”
At last Shaachen related to her that Lepidus was dead. He did not describe the manner. She knew that it had been through her, and by her consent. When Shaachen seemed reticent, Eurydiche wrote, My only father is Furian. He is my brother and my son. My other self. I need no one else.
“One day he’ll die,” said Shaachen, moving from the reticent to the crass.
Then so will I.
“Not for a long time,” said Shaachen, perhaps compassionate. “Not now for a long time.”
Occasionally she saw the woman who had been on the Isle of the Dead. Unmasked she had a handsome face, which day by day took on a bloom. She wore fine gowns and grew sleek. Once this woman, called like Eurydiche by a Greek name, Calypso, put her hands on her hips and spoke at some length. She had the story to give she was a rich man’s daughter who had wed for love and so lost everything but for a crumbling floor in some palace. Her husband had been too good for her and died. “Now I’m here,” she added, bridging her tale obliquely. “You’ll think I’m a harlot, living off an old man. Well, he’s fair to my boy. And he may be elderly, Signore Shaachen, but he knows more of the bed than any young one.”
This educated old man one morning showed Eurydiche a letter he had written, dedicated to no one. Perhaps Furian was to read it, or the Alchemist’s Guild. Shaachen’s hand-writing was crabbed, and the magpie had trodden on the paper, further muddling some passages.
Shaachen’s gist was that the Orichalci tribe, The Enemy, had put Lepidus under their curse for his presumption in appropriating their magic, and his villainy in misusing it. This curse drove him on to make all his mistakes. To hazard his powers against the rogue force of Furian, and the colossal force of true love. While blinding him to the talents of one such as the canny and venturous Shaachen. So such curses worked, little in themselves, building from the flaws of character, the inner qualms, of those on whom they had been set. He might have taken a lesson from what he had done to Furian at eighteen. Lepidus had been played like an instrument and sent at last out of pitch After she had read this—it took a while, there were long portions of self-congratulation—Shaachen stood her up.
She wore a dress of jasper velvet, and he fussed a moment with her sleeves, like an old servant woman. Then told her she was now alive, and might go into the other room and try the harpsichord he had put there for her.
The room was long and reverberant, and veiled with webs and dust, through which the inconstant winter sunlight ebbed or flamed. The harpsichord was old, unpainted with stained yellow keys, where lay a black feather sheened with blue.
She touched the feather, then sat down.
It was a song she tapped quietly from the instrument, but not the lover’s song Cloudio del Nero had made for her, which now the faithless City had quite forgotten. This was a tune of her childhood, and in her head she heard the words she could not sing.
If he is mine then he will come to me.
If he is mine, I will be his.
If I am his he will be mine.
She heard his step, as once before, and as before, made out she had not.
He put his arms about her so tenderly, so unbelieving. He drew her up, and turning to him, she saw the face of her father, her brother, her lover, her son. Furian. Her other self.
“You are alive,” he said. “You are. In God’s name, you are.”
He was empty as a shore from which the sea had gone, the emptiness that had been in her, so long, so long ago. But now, her eyes on his face, and as he looked at her, she saw the sea return, the waters of great oceans, and cover him with truth and light, with strength and happiness and life. And with eternal life.
Tanith Lee, Faces Under Water
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