Killing Violets, Tanith Lee [the two towers ebook .TXT] 📗

Miraculously, Lilith had thieved a map from her father, (men made roads, women dispensed beverages.) Lilith could read the map – yet also she seemed homing in on the capital, unstoppable. Anna never doubted her.

Trees in rain poured close about them, and sometimes broke apart on the blank tundra of a reaped field.

They did not pass the village. They seemed to pass nothing, other than trees and fields, and now and then some saturated black shed, or a cottage squashed back from the road in clumps of briars or apple trees, perhaps with a wet dog barking on a chain.

Then the day turned, a sort of limbo of partial darkness began, greenish dusk that did not lessen or increase.

In this, an occasional light now aqueously splashed, spilled down the windows and away.

Lilith told Anna many things. All her (eventless) life. Her dreams. How wild this was. What she expected Anna to do for her and produce for her, like a good fairy, out of thin air.

Anna listened placidly, and shared the gin.

Sometimes there were distant churches. They reminded Anna, for a reason she could not fathom, of lighthouses.

Darkness did come eventually, evolving like a new element, finding its way uncertainly at first, and then with total confidence.

In the dark there was nothing but night and rain, and lights like arrows now, fired right by them, or possibly at them, and missing.

Lilith stopped the car.

“Have to make a visit,” said Lilith.

Anna mystified, still benign.

“You know,” said Lilith primly. “It’s a long journey, this. I’ve drunk too much. Better not have any more.”

A fox, she got out of the car. She wore the green Paris dress, and a smart mackintosh Raoul had bought Anna. Lilith’s head was tied in a lurid scarf with two holes and one frayed end. But she was a fox, anyway.

The fox took herself into the rain-gusting bushes by the side of the road. The curtains of rain closed her behind them.

Anna put the gin bottle to one side, and opened her bag quietly. Presently she glanced at her own face in the hand-mirror they had left her. There she was. Anna Moll. Pale in darkness, curiously incomplete. It seemed to her that a feature had been rubbed out from her face. The nose, was it? Or the lips. Not, definitely not, the eyes, which had been filled up by the pupil, and become black.

Then Lilith returned from the bushes, glittering in headlamps and water.

Her eyes belonged to a witch. She was demon, fox, creature.

“Onna Lonun. Only a few miles. I seen them posts.”

I must try to understand her. Keep hold until we get there.

The car was persuaded again to start, and they drove on, through the tunnel of the dark. And soon, soon, there began, like the product of some scene-shifter’s art, to be streets, and short stacks of brick villas, and new masses of blinking spear-cast lights.

“Is it far?” Anna, softly.

“Not far. Where do we have to go to get with your friend?”

“Oh, he’s got a wonderful apartment near…” Anna tensed her mind, “near the Houses of Parliament – near the river. A huge drawing room, and a room full of dolls.”

Lilith sneered. A man with a room of dolls.

Anna explained the dolls were valuable. They had come from Russia before the great revolution which deposed the Czar.

“Worth a bit,” said Lilith.

“Oh, yes.”

Lilith began again to fantasise aloud about her famous fate. She was going to rule the world.

Anna was so cold. Her soaked dress hadn’t quite dried to her body. She felt feverish and lax. Inside all this, her brain ticked heavily like the kitchen clock.

She saw it was a city now. Even the rain was thinner, and catching the lights, sparkled.

Spidery buildings craned to a purple sky. And there – was that a river?

It was late, no one about. (Had they ever stopped for petrol? Had Lilith seen to it?) Things had rolled from Anna’s mind, but that didn’t matter.

There was only one more thing to do.

“Stop over there.”

“Pull over? What for?”

“Just to get my bearings. Look, there’s a pub there. We can go in and ask.”

Lilith grunted gracelessly. She pushed the fanfare scarf off her head. She drove into the side street, a sort of alley, with rotten walls rising up from it, and a lamp chilled blue, and the rain like sapphires…

“You go in that pub, Annie. Um nod gumma do it.”

Annie, Lilith’s slave. Her bitch dog.

“Of course I will, Lily. Oh Lily,” as the car pulled up with a deadly ending squeal, “we’ve done it. You’re so clever. And you’re going to be a queen. Let’s just have a taste of the gin.”

“Uv had anuff.”

“No, you must. To toast your future. Look, Lily. I brought one of their cups. I stole it. You mustn’t drink from the bottle, m’lady. You’re going to be a queen.”

Lilith’s face, stretched tight with unknowledge and disdain, bloomed in a foul, condescending little smile.

“A wull thun.”

And Anna drenched into the teacup painted with birds, the gin, which she had topped up with poison as Lilith made water in the rain.

Lilith did not even notice Anna didn’t drink. Anna was a bit-player, the Heroine’s servitor.

“Here’s to you, dearie,” said Anna. “All the best.”

And Lilith put the cup to her lips, and drank down all the gin.

Meaning To Continue

That was a strange day. Anyone might have thought so. The rain had stopped, and there had been a week of sunshine, and the city became, somehow, even more bizarre, threatening, in the heat, and the long dry evenings when the sun refused to go down beyond the sooty buildings. The birds here flew round and round, chirruping, as if they were insane. And this day concluded in a sunset that seemed never likely to stop, carmine and peach, and people were standing on the streets or hesitating getting off the buses; coming to windows; pointing, staring at the sunset, as if they had never seen such colours. As if never before had any day