Tanith Lee - Bite-Me-Not or Fleur De Feu.pdf

(58 KB) Pobierz
Default
Default
TANITH LEE (born 1847) began her career in England writing stories for young readers, but with the
American publication of her first adult novel, THE BIRTHGRAVE (1975), she won an instant reputation
as a fantasist. A prolific author, Lee followed up her first success with a long list of novels that cover the
range of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and sword-and-sorcery.
Her short novel Sabella, or the Blood Stone (1980) crosses genre categories as it tells the tale — erotic,
colorful, and intense, like most of Lee's stories — of a female vampire on a future Mars .
"Bite-Me-Not" is a good example of Lee's rich style and imagination and promises to be one of the most
memorable vampire tales of the 1980s.
Bite-Me-Not
or, Fleur De Feu
(1984)
BY TANITH LEE
CHAPTER I
In the tradition of young girls and windows, the young girl looks out of this one. It is difficult to see
anything. The panes of the window are heavily leaded, and secured by a lattice of iron. The stained glass
of lizard-green and storm-purple is several inches thick. There is no red glass in the window. The colour
red is forbidden in the castle. Even the sun, behind the glass, is a storm sun, a green-lizard sun.
The young girl wishes she had a gown of palest pastel rose—the nearest affinity to red which is never
allowed. Already she has long dark beautiful eyes, a long white neck. Her long dark hair is however
hidden in a dusty scarf and she wears rags. She is a scullery maid. As she scours dishes and mops stone
floors, she imagines she is a princess floating through the upper corridors, gliding to the dais in the
Duke's hall. The Cursed Duke. She is sorry for him. If he had been her father, she would have
sympathized and consoled him. His own daughter is dead, as his wife is dead, but these things, being to
do with the cursing, are never spoken of. Except, sometimes, obliquely.
" Rohise !" dim voices cry now, full of dim scolding soon to be actualized.
The scullery maid turns from the window and runs to have her ears boxed and a broom thrust into her
hands.
Meanwhile, the Cursed Duke is prowling his chamber, high in the East Turret carved with swans and
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Tani...20-%20Bite-Me-Not%20or%20Fleur%20De%20Feu.html (1 of 22) [10/16/2004 3:37:22 PM]
Default
gargoyles. The room is lined with books, swords, lutes, scrolls, and has two eerie portraits, the larger of
which represents his wife, and the smaller his daughter. Both ladies look much the same with their pale,
egg-shaped faces, polished eyes, clasped hands. They do not really look like his wife or daughter, nor
really remind him of them.
There are no windows at all in the turret, they were long ago bricked up and covered with hangings.
Candles burn steadily. It is always night in the turret. Save, of course, by night there are particular sounds
all about it, to which the Duke is accustomed, but which he does not care for. By night, like most of his
court, the Cursed Duke closes his ears with softened tallow. However, if he sleeps, he dreams, and hears
in the dream the beating of wings… Often, the court holds loud revel all night long.
The Duke does not know Rohise the scullery maid has been thinking of him. Perhaps he does not even
know that a scullery maid is capable of thinking at all.
Soon the Duke descends from the turret and goes down, by various stairs and curving passages, into a
large, walled garden on the east side of the castle.
It is a very pretty garden, mannered and manicured, which the gardeners keep in perfect order. Over the
tops of the high, high walls, where delicate blooms bell the vines, it is just possible to glimpse the tips of
sun-baked mountains. But by day the mountains are blue and spiritual to look at, and seem scarcely real.
They might only be inked on the sky.
A portion of the Duke's court is wandering about in the garden, playing games or musical instruments, or
admiring painted sculptures, or the flora, none of which is red. But the Cursed Duke's court seems
vitiated this noon. Nights of revel take their toll. As the Duke passes down the garden, his courtiers
acknowledge him deferentially. He sees them, old and young alike, all doomed as he is, and the weight of
his burden increases.
At the furthest, most eastern end of the garden, there is another garden, sunken and rather curious,
beyond a wall with an iron door.
Only the Duke possesses the key to this door. Now he unlocks it and goes through. His courtiers laugh
and play and pretend not to see. He shuts the door behind him.
The sunken garden, which no gardener ever tends, is maintained by other, spontaneous, means. It is small
and square, lacking the hedges and the paths of the other, the sundials and statues and little pools. All the
sunken garden contains is a broad paved border, and at its center a small plot of humid earth. Growing in
the earth is a slender bush with slender velvet leaves.
The Duke stands and looks at the bush only a short while.
He visits it every day. He has visited it every day for years. He is waiting for the bush to flower.
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Tani...20-%20Bite-Me-Not%20or%20Fleur%20De%20Feu.html (2 of 22) [10/16/2004 3:37:22 PM]
Default
Everyone is waiting for this. Even Rohise, the scullery maid, is waiting, though she does not, being only
sixteen, born in the castle and uneducated, properly understand why.
The light in the little garden is dull and strange, for the whole of it is roofed over by a dome of thick
smoky glass. It makes the atmosphere somewhat depressing, although the bush itself gives off a pleasant
smell, rather resembling vanilla.
Something is cut into the stone rim of the earth-plot where the bush grows. The Duke reads it for perhaps
the thousandth time. O, fleur de feu —
When the Duke returns from the little garden into the large garden, locking the door behind him, no one
seems truly to notice. But their obeisances now are circumspect.
One day, he will perhaps emerge from the sunken garden leaving the door wide, crying out in a great
voice. But not yet. Not today.
The ladies bend to the bright fish in the pools, the knights pluck for them blossoms, challenge each other
to combat at chess, or wrestling, discuss the menagerie lions; the minstrels sing of unrequited love. The
pleasure garden is full of one long and weary sigh.
"Oh flurda fur
"Pourma souffrance—"
Sings Rohise as she scrubs the flags of the pantry floor.
"Ned ormey par,
"May say day mwar—"
"What are you singing, you slut?" someone shouts, and kicks over her bucket.
Rohise does not weep. She tidies her bucket and soaks up the spilled water with her cloths. She does not
know what the song, because of which she seems, apparently, to have been chastised, means. She does
not understand the words that somehow, somewhere—perhaps from her own dead mother—she learned
by rote.
In the hour before sunset, the Duke's hall is lit by flambeaux. In the high windows, the casements of oil-
blue and lavender glass and glass like storms and lizards, are fastened tight. The huge window by the dais
was long ago obliterated, shut up, and a tapestry hung of gold and silver tissue with all the rubies pulled
out and emeralds substituted. It describes the subjugation of a fearsome unicorn by a maiden, and
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Tani...20-%20Bite-Me-Not%20or%20Fleur%20De%20Feu.html (3 of 22) [10/16/2004 3:37:22 PM]
Default
huntsmen.
The court drifts in with its clothes of rainbow from which only the color red is missing.
Music for dancing plays. The lean pale dogs pace about, alert for tidbits as dish on dish comes in. Roast
birds in all their plumage glitter and die a second time under the eager knives. Pastry castles fall. Pink
and amber fruits, and green fruits and black, glow beside the goblets of fine yellow wine.
The Cursed Duke eats with care and attention, not with enjoyment. Only the very young of the castle still
eat in that way, and there are not so many of those.
The murky sun slides through the stained glass. The musicians strike up more wildly. The dances become
boisterous. Once the day goes out, the hall will ring to chanson , to drum and viol and pipe. The dogs will
bark, no language will be uttered except in a bellow. The lions will roar from the menagerie. On some
nights the cannons are set off from the battlements, which are now all of them roofed in, fired out
through narrow mouths just wide enough to accommodate them, the charge crashing away in thunder
down the darkness.
By the time the moon comes up and the castle rocks to its own cacophony, exhausted Rohise has fallen
fast asleep in her cupboard bed in the attic. For years, from sunset to rise, nothing has woken her. Once,
as a child, when she had been especially badly beaten, the pain woke her and she heard a strange silken
scratching, somewhere over her head. But she thought it a rat, or a bird. Yes, a bird, for later it seemed to
her there were also wings… But she forgot all this half a decade ago. Now she sleeps deeply and dreams
of being a princess, forgetting, too, how the Duke's daughter died. Such a terrible death, it is better to
forget.
"The sun shall not smite thee by day, neither the moon by night," intones the priest, eyes rolling, his
voice like a bell behind the Duke's shoulder.
"Ne moi mords pas," whispers Rohise in her deep sleep. "Ne mwar mor par, ne par mor mwar…"
And under its impenetrable dome, the slender bush has closed its fur leaves also to sleep. O flower of
fire, oh fleur de fur. Its blooms, though it has not bloomed yet, bear the ancient name Nona Mordica . In
light parlance they call it Bite-Me-Not. There is a reason for that.
CHAPTER II
He is the Prince of a proud and savage people. The pride they acknowledge, perhaps they do not consider
themselves to be savages, or at least believe that savagery is the proper order of things.
Feroluce, that is his name. It is one of the customary names his kind give their lords. It has connotations
with diabolic royalty and, too, with a royal flower of long petals curved like scimitars. Also the name
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Tani...20-%20Bite-Me-Not%20or%20Fleur%20De%20Feu.html (4 of 22) [10/16/2004 3:37:22 PM]
Default
might be the partial anagram of another name. The bearer of that name was also winged.
For Feroluce and his people are winged beings. They are more like a nest of dark eagles than anything,
mounted high among the rocky pilasters and pinnacles of the mountain. Cruel and magnificent, like
eagles, the somber sentries motionless as statuary on the ledge-edges, their sable wings folded about
them.
They are very alike in appearance (less a race or tribe, more a flock, an unkindness of ravens). Feroluce
also, black-winged, black-haired, aquiline of feature, standing on the brink of star-dashed space, his eyes
burning through the night like all the eyes along the rocks, depthless red as claret.
They have their own traditions of art and science. They do not make or read books, fashion garments,
discuss God or metaphysics or men. Their cries are mostly wordless and always mysterious, flung out
like ribbons over the air as they wheel and swoop and hang in wicked cruciform, between the peaks. But
they sing, long hours, for whole nights at a time, music that has a language only they know. All their
wisdom and theosophy, and all their grasp of beauty, truth or love, is in the singing.
They look unloving enough, and so they are. Pitiless fallen angels. A traveling people, they roam after
sustenance. Their sustenance is blood. Finding a castle, they accepted it, every bastion and wall, as their
prey. They have preyed on it and tried to prey on it for years.
In the beginning, their calls, their songs, could lure victims to the feast. In this way, the tribe or
unkindness of Feroluce took the Duke's wife, somnambulist, from a midnight balcony. But the Duke's
daughter, the first victim, they found seventeen years ago, benighted on the mountain side. Her escort
and herself they left to the sunrise, marble figures, the life drunk away.
Now the castle is shut, bolted and barred. They are even more attracted by its recalcitrance (a woman
who says "No"). They do not intend to go away until the castle falls to them.
By night, they fly like huge black moths round and round the carved turrets, the dull-lit leaded windows,
their wings invoking a cloudy tindery wind, pushing thunder against thundery glass.
They sense they are attributed to some sin, reckoned a punishing curse, a penance, and this amuses them
at the level whereon they understand it.
They also sense something of the flower, the Nona Mordica . Vampires have their own legends.
But tonight Feroluce launches himself into the air, speeds down the sky on the black sails of his wings,
calling, a call like laughter or derision. This morning, in the tween-time before the light began and the
sun-to-be drove him away to his shadowed eyrie in the mountain-guts, he saw a chink in the armour of
the beloved refusing-woman-prey. A window, high in an old neglected tower, a window with a small
eyelet which was cracked.
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Tani...20-%20Bite-Me-Not%20or%20Fleur%20De%20Feu.html (5 of 22) [10/16/2004 3:37:22 PM]

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika:

Zgłoś jeśli naruszono regulamin