She’d kill to sustain it.
My Generation
by EMMA BULL
Why Light?
by TANITH LEE
My first memory is the fear of light.
The passage was dank and dark and water dripped, and my mother carried me, although by then I could walk. I was three, or a little younger. My mother was terrified. She was consumed by terror, and she shook, and her skin gave off a faint metallic smell I had never caught from her before. Her hands were cold as ice. I could feel that, even through the thick shawl in which she’d wrapped me. She said, over and over, “It’s all right, baby. It’s all right. It will be okay. You’ll see. Just a minute, only one. It’ll be all right.”
By then of course I too was frightened. I was crying, and I think I wet myself, though I hadn’t done anything like that since babyhood.
Then the passage turned, and there was a tall iron gate — I know it’s iron, now. At the time it only looked like a burned-out coal.
“Oh, God,” said my mother.
But she thrust out one hand and pushed at the gate, and it grudged open with a rusty scraping, just wide enough to let us through.
I would have seen the vast garden outside the house, played there. But this wasn’t the garden. It was a high place, held in only by a low stone wall and a curving break of poplar trees. They looked very black, not green the way the house lamps made trees in the garden. Something was happening to the sky; that was what made the poplars so black. I thought it was moonrise, but I knew the moon was quite new, and only a full moon could dilute the darkness so much. The stars were watery and blue, weak, like dying gas flames.
My mother stood there, just outside the iron gate, holding me, shaking. “It’s all right. just a minute. only one. ”
Suddenly something happened.
It was like a storm — a lightning flash maybe, but in slow motion, that swelled up out of the dark. It was pale, then silver, and then like gold. It was like a high trumpet note, or the opening chords of some great concerto.
I sat bolt upright in my mother’s arms, even as she shook ever more violently. I think her teeth were chattering.
But I could only open my eyes wide. Even my mouth opened, as if to drink the sudden light.
It was the color of a golden flower and it seemed to boil, and enormous clouds poured slowly upward out of it, brass and wine and rose. And a huge noise came from everywhere, rustling and rushing — and weird flutings and squeakings and trills — birdsong — only I didn’t recognize it.
My mother now hoarsely wept. I don’t know how she never dropped me.
Next they came out and drew us in again, and Tyfa scooped me quickly away as my mother collapsed on the ground. So I was frightened again, and screamed.
They closed the gate and shut us back in darkness. The one minute was over. But I had seen a dawn.
Fourteen and a half years later, and I stood on the drive, looking at the big black limousine. Marten was loading my bags into the boot. Musette and Kousu were crying quietly. One or two others lingered about; nobody seemed to grasp what exactly was the correct way to behave. My mother hadn’t yet come out of the house.
By that evening my father was dead over a decade — he had died when I was six, my mother a hundred and seventy. They had lived together a century anyway, were already tired of each other, and had taken other lovers from our community. But that made his death worse, apparently. Ever since, every seventh evening, she would go into the little shrine she had made to him, cut one of her fingers, and let go a drop of blood in the vase below his photograph. Her name is Juno, my mother, after a Roman goddess, and I’d called her by her name since I was an adult.
“She should be here,” snapped Tyfa, irritated. He too was Juno’s occasional lover, but generally he seemed exasperated by her. “Locked in that damn room,” he added sourly. He meant the shrine.
I said nothing, and Tyfa stalked off along the terrace and started pacing about, a tall, strong man of around two hundred or so, no one was sure — dark haired as most of us were at Severin. His skin had a light brownness from a long summer of sun exposure. He had always been able to take the sun, often for several hours in one day. I too have black hair, and my skin, even in winter, is pale brown. I can endure daylight all day long, day after day. I can live by day.
Marten had closed the boot. Casperon had gotten into the driver’s seat, leaving the car door open, and was trying the engine. Its loud purring would no doubt penetrate the house’s upper story, and the end rooms that comprised Juno’s apartment.
Abruptly she came sweeping out from the house.
Juno has dark red hair. Her skin is white. Her slanting eyes are the dark bleak blue of a northern sea, seen in a foreign movie with subtitles. When I was a child I adored her. She was my goddess. I’d have died for her, but that stopped. It stopped forever.
She walked straight past the others, as if no one else were there. She stood in front of me. She was still an inch or so taller than I, though I’m tall.
“Well,” she said. She stared into my face, hers cold as marble, and all of her stone still — this, the woman who trembled and clutched me to her, whispering that all would be well, when I was three years old.
“Yes, Juno,” I said.
“Do you have everything you need?” she asked me indifferently, forced to be polite to some visitor now finally about to leave.
“Yes, thank you. Kousu helped me pack.”