Already the jungle has begun its steady creep towards my father’s house. Liana vines entwine themselves around my father’s butchered corpse. Within a week the marble steps will be cracked and broken, no longer visible from above. Within two, it will be impossible to tell what kind of structure once stood here. The grasses will thicken with tentacles and roots, the soils seethe and churn with carnivorous microbes.
I have freed my father’s slaves. Some of them have ransacked the house and run into the jungle. A few of the hardy ones may survive this time. The others have joined the servants in commandeering the Vazquenadas’ silver ships. I watch their contrails blaze across the sky as soft flames of dawn kiss the horizon.
The hangars are empty, the Ann Elisabeths all dead. I killed them, as I myself should have been killed all those years ago, spared the indignities of this pointless existence rather than mutilated with my father’s machete blade in an effort to spite my faithless mother.
I stand here now before the Link, trying to compose a final message to Harmon. My embroidered dinner gown is soaked with blood. I want to tell him of the pain he has wrought, but in the end I will send no message. I will say nothing. The encroaching jungle will speak for me. It will tear this mansion stone from stone, wiping our human stain from its memory forever. The jungle will have the final word. It will cover my father’s wicked bones, claiming the gold he and my heartless Harmon loved above all else. It will leave no trace of poor Luisa Alice and her beloved swallowtails.
THE WOMAN
by Tanith Lee
1. The Suitor
Down the terraces of the Crimson City they carried her, in her chair of bone and gold.
The citizens stood in ranks, ten or twenty men deep.
They watched.
Some wept.
Some, suddenly oblivious of the guard, thrust forward shouting, calling, a few even reciting lines of ancient poetry. They were swept back again. As if a steel broom could push away the sea of love.
But Leopard did none of these things.
He simply stood there, looking at her. At Her. He thought, and even as he thought it he chided himself, telling himself he was quite mad to think it, that her eyes for one tiniest splinter of a fractured second—met his. Knew his—knew him. Knew Leopard.
But then the chair, borne by its six strong porters, had gone by.
All he could see were the scarlet, ivory and gold of its hood, and the wide shoulders of the last two bearers.
Many of the citizens had fallen on the ground, lamenting and crying, cursing, begging for death. Like a tree which had withstood a lightning strike, Leopard remained on his feet. He was upright in all senses, bodily, mentally, in character and in his moral station. Also sexually.
For he had seen her. At last. His predestined love.
The Woman.
In the village where he had grown up, the birth of Leopard had been a great disappointment. He had been aware of a coldness among his family from an early age. By the time he was six, his mother was dead of bearing another son, and Leopard began to see neither he, nor his newcomer brother, were liked.
One day, when he was a little older, and had been playing ‘catch’ with the boys on the flat earthen street, under the tall rows of scent trees, Leopard heard one of the village’s pair of ancient hags muttering to her sister: “Accursed, that boy. And, too, the infant boy that came after him.” “Why’s that?” quacked the second hag. “Ah. The mother was frightened by a leopard when she carried that older one. So he was turned into something useless.” “And the infant?” “Think of his name,” said the first hag. Then both old women nodded and creaked away into their hut. Leopard felt ashamed. He had vaguely thought he was called Leopard for the beast’s silken handsomeness and dangerous hunter’s skills. It would seem not. While his poor little brother, Copper Coin—had Mother been scared by a piece of money?
Copper Coin, however, rather than cursed, actually proved very useful later on, when he became popular for his beauty, and their family grew both respected and well-off.
Today, several years after, Leopard removed himself from the crowd and strode away along the wide white streets of the Crimson City, to the wine-house Copper Coin now owned. Leopard had a thing of wonder to tell Copper. Leopard’s heart buzzed and sang within him.
A single enormous scent tree reared outside the wine-house; it was somewhere in the region of three hundred feet tall. At this season it rained down orange blossoms that smelled of incense and honey.
Patrons sat in the courtyard to catch the perfume on their hair, skin and clothes. And while they did this of course, ate and drank. Trade was bustling.
Inside, Leopard had to wait. His beautiful brother was occupied for another quarter of an hour with a favoured client.
Leopard drank hot green alcohol and ate two or three river shrimps roasted with pepper. Seeing who he was, the food and drink were on the house.
Then the client, dreamy-eyed and flushed, rattled down from the upper apartment. He passed Leopard without seeing him though Leopard had met the man before. He was a prince of the High Family of the Nine, immensely rich, always courteous and good-natured. But also he was crazily in love with Copper, and usually came out of the bedroom in a trance, between shining joy and dark despair. This morning Leopard sympathized. For now he, Leopard, was also insane with love.
The servant took Leopard upstairs.
Copper, just fresh from the bath and belted in a dressing-gown of embroidered white silk, lay on a couch. His hair, worn some inches longer than any merely male man would wear it, coiled over his shoulders, gleaming black as sharkskin.
“Gorgeous as ever,” remarked Leopard, between praise and banter. “Prince Nine tottered down, almost dead of love.”
“So I should think. We were together three hours. It wouldn’t look good for me, would it, if he pranced out bored and burping. But you,” added Copper, “you’re pale as a marble death-stone.”
Leopard stared at Copper. Then Leopard went and kneeled at his brother’s feet and laid his head in Copper’s lap. Murmuring gently, Copper stroked Leopard’s own hair, shortly thick as a cat’s fur. There was nothing sexual between them. Copper had become like a mother-sister for Leopard at about the same time Copper also found his own inner femaleness.
“Ssh, what is it, darling?”
“Oh gods of the seventy hells—”
“Don’t invoke that uncouth nasty mob.”
“The eleven heavens then. Oh Copper, Copper—did you know?”
“Know what, my baby?”
“She was shown in the city today.”
“The Woman? Gods, yes, I’d forgotten. No wonder half my best lads’ clientele was absent. Damn it, there was I cursing them. And they too stupid to remind me.”
Leopard shook, but with laughter.
He sat up and gazed into his brother’s exquisite and surprised face.
“Listen, Copper. I applied.”
“You—my own spirit! When? ”
“Last Rose Moon.”
“Three months ago? And all this while you never told me—”
“I was afraid I’d be thrown out from the first examination. But I passed them all.”
Copper sank back on the cushions, fanning himself.