Law of the Wolf Tower: The Claidi Journals Book 1, Tanith Lee [pocket ebook reader .TXT] 📗

Perhaps I should say, we share this tiny room in the Maids’ Hall, and have three narrow mattresses, and one mirror and one chest. These are not our possessions, you understand, but things lent to us, like our clothing, by Lady J and her mother, the Princess Shimra.

Sometimes we steal two or three flowers from the Garden and put them in a jar in the narrow window. But flowers don’t last, do they.

Nothing to write.

NTW.

There seems no point, really, I sternly say to myself now, in having thieved this book, so craftily and unsensibly, if I’m not going to put anything in it.

Any news? Well, today was the Ritual of the Feeding of the Red Birds.

We went to the Red Aviary, a bird house full of feathers and trills and tweets. They fly about freely here, between the trees that grow up through the floor into the glass roof. They look, the birds, like flying flowers of crimson and scarlet, but the squeaks are sometimes piercingly loud, and also droppings fall on everyone, despite the parasols we dutifully hold over our ladies’ heads.

The birds today are fed special grains and seeds, dyed matching or toning bird colours.

I like the birds a lot, but the smell is pretty overpowering.

Later there was an ordinary storm. Colossal bangs of thunder as if gigantic trays were being dropped in the sky. Lady JL is loudly afraid of the thunder and the lightning, but I ran off and watched from an upper window. Next, summoned back to her, she said where had I been, told me where – she was wrong – then that I was a lazy slut, and predictably cracked me over the hand with her cane. Only one hand, though, the left one, so I can still write this.

Oh, and Daisy, who has been eating so much at dinner every night, making up for the nine missed ones, was violently sick all over the Maids’ Hall floor, which had just been cleaned.

I ask myself, if you are reading this, (and haven’t got bored with it all, as bored as I get with it all, and flung it on the rubbish dump or in a fire) I ask myself, what you might find interesting to have me tell you.

Because perhaps you don’t live in the House or the Garden, but have somehow come from somewhere else. This seems unlikely, but then you aren’t real, are you, just some wonderful intriguing imaginary person I’ve made up. My fantasy.

So, I’ll pretend you’re keen to know … Shall I?

Or not.

I’m sort of an orphan. My parents aren’t dead – although I suppose they might be, in fact, by now. That’s a grim thought. But I can’t even really feel much about it, because I never knew them.

There are so many Rituals. The House and the Garden live by them. What else is there to do? But the Rituals are taken entirely and stonily seriously. They’re immovable. And if you profane a Ritual – if you break one of the idiotic rules of this place – you’re punished.

Sometimes they’re only slight mistakes and the punishments aren’t too bad. (Let’s say you miss lighting every single candle in the Lighting of the Candles Ritual, or do it in the wrong order. Then you might only have to stand in the Black Marble Corridor for a few hours, something like that – though your lady would probably beat you, too.) But for profaning some of the most important Rituals and rules, the punishments are fierce. The worst punishment, of course, is to be exiled to the Waste.

It’s a death sentence. At best, if you do survive, a living nightmare. Hell-on-earth.

The Waste is the worst thing in the world.

This is what they tell you.

It is always stressed how grateful we should be, that we were born here, the House, the Garden, this earthly paradise, and not out there, in the Waste. I can recall them drumming this into me when I was a child, a baby, and crying for my mother and father. To be an orphan, and the maid of a (cruel) lady in paradise, was better than existing in the Waste.

The weather there is unthinkable. White hot heats, freezings, rains of stones, gales that tear up the dry starving landscape. There are terrible mountains of black rock, and from there the dust storms come which sometimes pass over the Garden. In the Waste you go hungry always, and thirsty. Water is poisoned. Nothing grows, or if it does, it’s horrible to look at and disgusting to eat.

No wonder the people and things that survive out there are peculiar and dangerous. Madmen, murderers and monsters roam.

From a couple of the highest towers of the House, if you’re willing to climb hundreds and hundreds of stairs – I have – you can just glimpse something beyond the edges of the fortressed Garden walls. That must be the Waste. But you can’t see much. Only a sort of threatening, shimmering vagueness. A pale shadow.

Once a lion got into the Garden. A monster lion from the Waste. This was in the year before I was born. It was an ugly and lethal beast, foaming flame, they say, from the mouth. So they killed it.

But why have I gone on so about all that, the outside world, which I’ve never even seen?

Because my parents profaned one of the greatest Rituals. (I don’t know which one.) They were promptly exiled to the Waste.

Now I can’t sleep. There are clusters of huge blistering blue-white stars.

Tomorrow is the Ritual of the Planting of the Two Thousandth Rose.

We have to be up extra early, before dawn.

I feel strangely guilty, since I think I’m going to stop writing in this book. Which makes me aware that I’ve mistreated it, the book, I mean, taking it and then spoiling it with my writing. And then worse, stopping.

But what is there to say? I’m sorry,