(I've already blogged about half or so of the stories in Dreams of Dark and Light: The Great Short Fiction of Tanith Lee; feel free to follow this link to my January blogpost about the book and from there follow further links to still more blogposts about Lee stories--here at MPorcius Fiction Log we offer readers an endless spiral of links with which to while away the hours.)
"The Dry Season" (1981)
"The Dry Season" first appeared in Lin Carter's Demons and Daggers, the fifth Flashing Swords anthology.
Marsus Seteva is a Remusan soldier, leader of a unit marching to the desert city of Thraistum, where he will take up command of the city garrison. Remusa is much like the Rome of the (I guess) early Imperial period, and Thraistum is a walled town on the edge of the Remusan empire, whose natives are permitted to practice their own religion though the Remusans maintain political control. The place is dry and the local water tastes bad to Remusans, and Lee uses lots of water imagery and metaphors and talks a lot about thirst and dust and so forth in the story--for example, Seteva dreams of fountains and oceans at night.
The Thraistum religion calls for the annual sacrifice of a virgin to ensure the arrival of the rainy season; the next sacrifice is scheduled to occur just a few days after Seteva takes over the garrison. Seteva decides to forbid the sacrifice, even though Remusa has permitted it to go forward every year since taking over the town. Is he taking this risky course because he is some kind of reformer who finds the murder of a young girl unjust and not in keeping with Remusan values? Or is it mostly because he has, unaccountably, fallen in love with the virgin who has been awarded the honor of being sacrificed?
Everybody in the town tells Seteva that prohibiting the sacrifice won't work--the priests refuse to cancel this essential ritual, and even the virgin is eager to be sacrificed, believing that, like a warrior slain in battle, she will immediately upon death enter paradise. On the day of the sacrifice Seteva rashly interferes, and the disaster that occurs is worse than he could have imagined.
Lee is a smooth and evocative writer, and this story is both easy to read and full of vivid images and totally believable characters and instances of human drama. Notably, the story has no supernatural element; there is a ton of religion in the story, including a religion whose mythology echoes the Old Testament in the same way Remusa echoes ancient Rome, but religion in the story is basically like religion in real life.
Is there any "point" to this story? Perhaps it is about irrationality. The Thraistum religion is irrational (as one minor Remusan character points out, a healthy young woman is an asset to the community so destroying her is a waste) but even more destructive is Seteva's irrational interference in local customs, which leads to chaos and death on a large scale and destroys his career--and he doesn't even get the girl! Lee may also be making the observation that empires that don't interfere with the culture of the colonized are more stable and efficient than those that try to "civilize" those that come under their political power. I also wondered if this story was inspired or influenced by British reactions to suttee--the third story we are talking about today indicates Lee spent some time thinking about India.
Good.
"Elle Est Trois (La Mort)" (1983)
Our main characters are three friends, starving artists in an unnamed big city that I thought of as Paris as I read the story; a cathedral called Notre Dame aux Lumineres, and its clock, figure in the imagery of the story. The story's episodic plot consists of each of the men seeing what is almost certainly an hallucination of a woman as he has a brush with death.
The first artist is a poet who has writer's block and has not eaten in days. As he stands by a bridge over the river he thinks he sees a young woman, a suicide, floating in the water, but then realizes that was an optical illusion--that is just garbage in the water. Then he sees a strange woman standing under a lamp; he approaches, and she vanishes.
The versifier goes to the café where he meets artist #2, a painter. The poet's story reminds this impecunious Apelles of something that happened to him as a kid. He was very ill, and while laying in his bed in the attic, feverish, experienced repeated hallucinations of a little girl his age with weird eyes; again and again she came to visit him by walking in through a window that lead out to a small balcony. This girl never spoke but entertained the sick child with her marvelous dancing and acrobatics. One night, when he was almost recovered and had regained much of his strength, the pale little girl with the queer eyes, by gestures, enticed the feverish child to come out through the window and join her in cutting capers on the railing of the balcony. The young painter was saved from a fall of five stories by his father, who dashed through the window just in time to rescue his son as he began to slip from his precarious perch.
The third artist is a composer; this Beethoven-fan also has writer's block. He is a drunk and a womanizer who seduces one woman after another--women are so hot for this guy that he has more lovers than he can handle, multitudes of girls are eager to move in with him and clean his flat and give him money even though he cheats on them. However poorly he treats these women they won't leave him--he has to throw them out when he gets bored of them, as he inevitably does. Anyway, after he drinks with the poet and painter he goes home, very drunk, where the most recent girlfriend he threw out is awaiting him. She chops him to bits with a meat cleaver, but we are told that when he sees her he doesn't see her, but has a sort of hallucination of the epitome or avatar of woman as "The Slaughterer," a figure in dressed in red with all kinds of glittering bladed weapons and sharp tools hanging from her belt.
Finally, the story circles back to the poet. Lee does a recursive or self-referential thing in which she talks about the way the poet, if he knew about his two friends' hallucinations of dangerous women, might write a story in which he connected his own hallucinations with theirs, maybe by having them all at the time of their brushes with death wearing the same cursed ring or something like that. Lee herself does not connect the hallucinations, at least not so obviously.
(This reminded me of that scene in Neon Genesis Evangelion in which the characters are briefly depicted in a stereotyped high school comedy setting--the creator pointing out to the audience the simpler story he could have told.)
The story ends with the poet using opium to break his writer's block. As he does so, he hallucinates a beautiful pale woman coming to him, and we are told he will die within a year as the opium ruins his body.
"Elle Est Trois (La Mort)" is well-written, and the images of the various deadly women are good (the pale little girl with weird eyes and the red-clad woman with all the shiny blades at her belt reminded me of images you might see in one of those crazy and gorgeous Italian crime/horror movies like The Red Queen Kills Seven Times or The Perfume of the Lady in Black), but I have to admit I have a simple enough mind that I would probably prefer the story to connect the three images of death via some hokey device like a cursed ring than to point out to me how silly such devices are.
"Elle Est Trois (La Mort)" first appeared in Whispers IV, and it was a big success. It won a World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction, and has been reprinted in several anthologies.
"Tamastara" (1984)
The narrative switches back and forth between what we might call a (grim dark) action-adventure component and a philosophical/religious component. The latter consists largely of a kind of Hindu guru ("the pandit") offering guidance to a woman musician and teaching some students; he talks a lot of goop about reincarnation and how events in earlier lives can influence the subconscious psychology of people in their current lives and other mumbo jumbo. Lee fills the story with French and Hindi words (I assume that is what they are.) A signifcant one: Tamas Tara, "the poem of the Dark Star," "a scar" left by "samsaranic trauma," a subconscious, unrecognized memory of a moment of terror in an earlier life which can cause nightmares or inexplicable phobias or whatever in this life.
The action/adventure portions of the narrative star a young terrorist, Renard, who has landed his space shuttle in India and hidden it in a ruined temple. He was part of an operation to take over or blow up or whatever a weather control satellite. The mission went awry, and he jumped in a small (ten-foot) shuttle and escaped back to Earth; he expects that some of his comrades will soon join him in a different shuttle. As he roughs it, waiting in this abandoned temple, a woman comes from out of nowhere to talk to him. She says her name is Tamastara. Then she vanishes--was she a ghost? An hallucination?
The young terrorist's fellows finally arrive. Their leader has Renard tied up and says he has to be killed in order to set an example for the other members of the terrorist army; many people are to blame for the screw up on the satellite, but Renard will be the scapegoat. The terrorists set up an elaborate sort of time bomb and fly off in their shuttle. Renard is lying there, tied up, with minutes left to live, urinating and shitting on himself in fear (Lee goes for realism in the violent elements of this story), when Tamastara reappears. She can't save Renard from the bomb, but she comforts him in his last moments and, I guess, gets him to repent of his atheism and recognize that death is not real, that his soul will live on.
In the final section of the story all this stuff is explained. The woman musician is "Tamastara," and she is also the reincarnated Renard. She was having severe psychological problems and the guru used his computer to send her soul back in time twenty-five years to meet her earlier incarnation as a man of murder who was himself murdered and comfort him. Easing the horror of Renard's last moments means no Tamas Tara was inflicted on his/her soul and thus cured the subconscious psychological issues she was suffering in her current incarnation. Now the pandit will erase the musician's memory of her trip back in time, because the technology of time travel must be kept out of the hands of others.
When I first read this story it was a little hard to grok; until that last explanatory section it is subtle and mysterious, and the philosophical sections describing all sorts of bunk about the soul and the caste system are boring. I didn't find the solution to the mystery very satisfying, so I felt like the work of reading the story during the confusing and boring parts didn't yield a sufficient pay off. Besides that, I have no sympathy for violent terrorists, and my interest in Hindu theories of the soul and Lee's take on them is very limited. The story works--it is well-written and constructed and I guess it is ambitious to try to integrate ancient mystical beliefs with computers and satellites--but I didn't find "Tamastara" fun, or moving, or interesting; maybe other people will? I have to judge this one merely acceptable.
"Tamastara" first appeared in the collection of which it is the title story, and has only ever been reprinted in Dreams of Dark and Light.
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