Status Updates From Forests of the Night

A volume of extraordinary things...

She presages not my finish, but rather those lands that my soul has travelled, those high mountains I have scaled, and never knew I did. Through her I see what is in me, and only death can liberate this plaintive, perfect thing. Forgive me then, O Lord, that I await him without dismay. Forgive me that I have seen, after all, where the stars burn through the fabric of Immensity.

-Rachel

If I dream again tonight, her hair against the candlebranch, the white moon faces that tilt together, the angry words, the shadow of the Shadow — let me not mind them, or my wasted life. I have formed Rachel, as if I had made her from the substance of the starry twilight.

There is but one road, journey where we will and how we may. If life is the revery of God, what will our awakening be? But for this day and night we are here. The world hangs like a mirror, reflecting not what we are but that which to ourselves we seem to be. Only when the mirror is broken, only then …

And considering too that other life, the incestuous pairing that, maybe, she had not wanted, the sin, the shame, the black forecast of the angel yet to come upon us, sensed in my dream — Now I could thank God that here she stood before me, flawless and free, unsullied by anything, undespoiled by me.

For I had given her the one pure gift to use as she would, and could. By fathering, in a season not of love, a son I despised, I had crafted the instigation of Rachel. His seed, without me she should not have lived, here in this second world where once before she had lost her chance, or had it ruined.

‘I am glad of it. She was dear to me, and you greatly resemble her.’

At that, as if I had asked it of her, she undid the cloth from her hair. Out rushed, like a river of silk, the raven storm with its polish of greenish lights. She stood before me, serene and motionless, to let me see that she was here, even she , and yet — should I not be aware of it — as though within a cage of glass.

‘Rachel,’ I said again, as if never in my whole life had I said the name. And found nothing else to say.

‘Rachel,’ I said, ‘this is how you are called?’

'Yes, lord.’

She spoke firmly, clearly. She knew the house and its ways, as it knew her. Looking up again, she smiled at me. Her smile was a woman’s smile, my mother’s, one who knew, also, me. She had no pretence, no lies. She was older far than I, yet she observed, with minutest tact, the forms, as do kings who need not.

In several of these short stories Tanith Lee plays with time. I enjoy TL's time fuckery (like in The Winter Players & I Bring You Forever, which are all time faves for me). I'm a bit confused here. This reads like a dreamy incestual time lapse of a wife, sister, and granddaughter? All Rachel connected to the MMC throughout time & different lives. Hmmm. This is strange, but beautifully written.

And I have hours now when it suggests itself to me that God, even He, passing in His enormous power and silence, mislays the places of our being, and because of it, does not remember us, for we are small and fleeting, and the wind that blows for ever, how can it know the chaff, the little seeds and grains, we are so slight and so soon over.

That the child was to be born, my child and hers. And then golden noon went to afternoon and faded to a purple night, and the summer stars lit like torches, like blossoms on a purple pool, and the lights were going to and fro in the women’s quarters, about my wife’s apartment, like little stars that had come down there to her help, the tapers of angels.

-Rachel

‘You,’ she said, ‘you. You might have brought the best of the world to me, and I, perhaps, some comfort to you. But it is too late, you are a shadow, you are the demon’s toy and trick. Zhoreb loves me, Zhoreb desires me. Therefore I no longer believe in Zhoreb’s love and desire. Perhaps I am to blame. I made you a god. You are only a man.’

-Black as a Rose

‘Too late,’ said Jalasil. ‘My heart had died of the wounds you gave it. If you had wanted me at the start, ah, how it might have been — sun and moon, earth and heaven. Stars would have fallen.

-Black as a Rose

Then the white queen left her chair. She left her body and bones and old pale blood, for she was white now inside and out. She flew up into the window embrasure. From the prison towers only the souls of dreamers or the wings of birds could get out. Up like arrows flew two ravens, one black as pitch, one white as snow, and away together over the trees, the wall, the road, the world, into the sky of spring.

-LRB

‘Despite all sins and stupidities,’ said the raven. ‘I love you yet and yet have waited for you, gentle, fair Blanche. And you, whether you wished it or no, waited for me in your bone tower, and at the last as at the first, you were kind.’

‘I would,’ he said, ‘have waited all my life for you. And since you may not be real, I may have to wait, still. Having seen you, I can hardly do otherwise. Unless you consent to stay.’

‘I think I may be permitted to stay until sunrise. It seems to me I am in league with darkness. Until dawn, then.’

As she entered, she found the young king of whom the raven had told her. He was dark as she was pale, his own hair black as the branch of a tree against the snow. He was handsome, too. And she felt a pang of love, and another of dismay, though not surprise.

The doors glanced open without a sound. Or else she thought that they did. She came across several lamplit rooms into a moon-tinctured walk where only glow-worms and fountains flickered, and nightingales made music like the notes of the stars. At the end of the walk, Blanche the white queen saw a golden salon where candle flames burned low. She had known the way.

At midnight she woke, perhaps from sleep, and she was no longer in the tower.

...

A moon, the condemned white widow-queen of heaven, blazed in the west, and lit the way beyond the walls of the garden, on to the straight road that led to the city.

...

‘This is only a dream.’ And bitterly, wistfully, she laughed again. ‘All things are possible to a dreamer. If this is the raven’s gift, let me be glad of it.’

‘And now,’ said the raven, ‘tell me, if you will, about yourself.’
So the white queen — she had no one else to talk to — told the raven how she came to be there, of her wedding, and her husband one hundred and two years old, and of following his cadaver with her white rose, and the torchlit journey here by night, and how it was since the torches went away.

Ah, this has the fairytale Tanith Lee feel I like so much

The white queen brought him a dish of wine and some cold meat.

‘My thanks again.' He ate and drank tidily.

The white queen, seated in her chair, watched him in awe and in silence.

When the raven had finished his meal, he arranged his feathers. Eyes black, and beak like a black dagger. He was altogether so black the white queen imagined he must be as black inside as out, even his bones and blood of ebony and ink.

She was to commune with no one, and would be served invisibly. Such things as she might need — food and wine, fuel, clean linen — were to be brought by hidden ways and left for her in caskets and baskets that a pulley device would raise and lower at a touch of her fingers.
Here then, and in this way, she would now live until she died.