Lovers and Other Monsters Read online

  “Stop, Richard! Stop this painful sound. It pulls at me in places I have never felt.” As she spoke, her flight continued. Diving and stalling, diving and stalling.

  He took no pleasure in her pain, but fear would not let him stop, so she took the matter into her own hands. Her feathers drew themselves under the skin of her wings and her upper body began to change. It started much slower than the beach transformation and it was incomplete. Her face and head remained intact, as did her legs, but her torso, arms and wings took on an entirely alien appearance. Odd, gelatinous ooze covered her scaling breasts and her arms increased in diameter and darkened in color. The music now had little effect on her. She landed on the deck beside him. He stopped playing, closed his eyes and prepared to die.

  “No, sweet Richard, I will not kill you. That mercy is for you to decide. And if you will not give me the ecstasy of your music... I will find it ... in the songs of my young!”

  She raised her arms to expose the back of her wings. Each one had a perfect row of six egg-shaped nodules pulsating from their protrusion on her lower back.

  The sight revolted him.

  She picked up the emotion. “So quickly you turn! So easily you judge! If you will not play for me, you will play for no one!” She opened her mouth. The familiar fire sprayed forth, bathing the guitar and his hands in flame. He screamed as both turned to ash in seconds. He fell against the cement deck, holding his smoldering stumps in the air.

  The numbness of shock crept over him. He watched, zombielike, as she changed to her angelic form and flew into the darkness and out of sight over the buildings... south towards Olympus.

  He sat there for many hours, until the grey ridges of dawn hinted over the horizon.

  Then, just as the sun threatened, he climbed to the railing and took one step out.

  Darrell Schweitzer

  Minotauress

  Darrell Schweitzer, editor of the new Weird Tales magazine, is the prolific author of many fantasy stories set in a world with its own complex legendry (see, for instance, “Mysteries of the Faceless King” in my collection Weird Tales, the Magazine that Never Dies). But in the next selection, the erudite Mr. Schweitzer turns to Greek myth, speculating on the possibility that the Minotaur slain by Theseus may have produced offspring.

  IT BEGINS, as always, with the stirring of my womanly parts. The human portion of my body yanks my dreaming mind back across thousands of miles, away from the marvelous fair in the equally marvelous country of my dreams that is called France. One minute I am dressed as a great lady, in veils and fine gown, attended by many servants. The sun is hot, the sky a brilliant blue, the crowd around me chattering with countless voices. Jesters leap and tumble. A colorful madman in rags and streamers staggers above the crowd on stilts. A column of knights in full armor rumble by, pennons flapping from their lances. One by one the knights salute me, for in this dream-France I am a famous lady indeed.

  Then I am hauled in, like a fish on a line. Here. Into this dark place which smells of earth and ancient stone.

  Here. The pain-which-is-also-pleasure scars through my flesh like a rivulet of molten iron. Memories arise, too many at once, like a flock of screeching birds, like many-colored paints stirred into a pot, and I awaken in utter darkness, momentarily befuddled, as if my tens of centuries of life are not sufficient to accustom me to this place.

  I listen, very carefully, for the expected sound, and there it is, as faint as a single drip of water at first, then a patter, again and again and again, a torrent, louder even than the murmurous riot of that fairground crowd in my beloved dream-France.

  The sounds are echoes, striking, rebounding, striking, rattling through the walls of the great labyrinth which is my home, the entirety of my waking world. Sometimes a single piece of plaster falling can re-echo for hours. I have never learned to tell how old a noise is by merely listening to it. But I know from these particular sounds that I have company, that the intruders might have been inside the labyrinth for half a day.

  My body stirs in an odd mixture of lust and hunger, gladness and fear. I rise from the soft, dry dirt which is my bed. On hands and knees, I shake my flesh clean. My breasts drag along the floor.

  The sounds again. Words now, in some language I know from my centuried dreams. One voice is loud, supremely confident, the other cringing—like a little boy who’s been beaten and is pleading not to be beaten again. Yes, they are male voices. I can tell that much, whatever the distance.

  The weak voice wants to retreat, to desist from whatever it is they are to do.

  Ah, my sweet ones, it is entirely too late already, for is this not the labyrinth built by the peerless Daedalus, which may be only confounded by a ball of yarn? You didn’t bring any knitting supplies on your little expedition, did you? No, I thought not.

  Grunting, I heave myself upright, one hand against the wall, my massive body unsteady on such tiny, cloven-hoofed feet. I lumber forward, shoulder and thigh scraping niter from the wall; ungainly, yes, for am I not a monster like all my kind?

  ❖

  I find my two guests in Death’s Waiting Hall, where the twisting tunnels open out into a spacious, pillared room. Light filters in from some deftly concealed skylight far above, illuminating little. The place is positively thick with shadows. For all my thousand and some years of habitation, there are still secrets of this place unknown to me. I have never found that skylight.

  One of the intruders holds a torch aloft. The two of them recoil in horror at the decor: the bones and armor of fallen warriors, an untidy heap of swords and greaves and breastplates, plumed helmets gone to rust, even one or two full suits of metal like the torchbearer wears; and among them all countless bones, shattered arms, splintered ribs, vertebrae and teeth like dice thrown in some forgotten game. There are more skulls than I could ever count, even many centuries back when counting and reassembling these remains was a hobby of mine. And among them, sacred and untouched, lies the huge skeleton of the progenitor of my race, Asterius, who died here, slain by Theseus.

  I bow my massive head, lowing softly, spittle dripping from nose and lips, my horns swaying slowly from side to side.

  Like the madman on stilts, I stagger forward.

  The cringing fellow screams, “Holy Mother of God save us! A monster!” He tries to flee, but the armored man grabs him by the scruff of the neck like a cat hauling a kitten, swings him around to face me, and forces the torch into his hands.

  “Hold this, you idiot! It’s going to be easy....”

  He slides his sword from his scabbard with a rasping sound, and advances. Yes, it is so easy. I stand there, stupidly, my head swaying, my breasts rolling, until he is very close. For all his bravado, he is amazed at the sight of me. He stares, wide-eyed. His breathing is harsh and heavy. But he does not hesitate, and draws his arm back, ready to plunge the sword into my vitals. Then faster than his eye can follow I lash out with one hoof, smashing his right leg, all but severing it. He screams. His sword flies off to join my disorderly collection. Down he tumbles, blood spurting, but before he hits the floor I hook him under the chin with my right horn and fling him across the room like a ragged sack of bones. The thud of him striking the far wall echoes and re-echoes for several minutes like the sound of thousands of hands beating softly on hide drums. Gradually it subsides, like the sighing of the sea.

  All this while the other intruder just stands there, his mouth agape. The torch crackles. Glowing cinders drop to the floor.

  This room is well named. Death resides here, among the pillars. The two of us converse sometimes. I think he likes to rest in the dark between his labors. There is a truce between us, for I am the last on all the earth of my kind or any of the related, ancient kinds who may not die until slain.

  Therefore Death waits on me here, and when it pleases me, I grant him audience or even, occasionally, an offering. I look for him now. Something shifts in the distance, but I think it is only a shadow or a trick of the eye.

  I am alone wit
h my remaining guest, who is short and dark compared to his companion. He seems little more than a boy. As I approach, his reaction is startling.

  “Holy Theotokos, Mother of God, pray for me now at the hour of my death—!”

  He screams and drops to his hands and knees, repeating something I cannot follow. His torch rolls away among the bones. As I stand over him, I realize that his speech has changed. Where before he spoke some language I knew only from dreams, now, as his voice occasionally surfaces from the babble, his language is distinctly Creek; but not the flowing, musical Greek of Ulysses and of the honey-mouthed assassin Theseus. No, the words are strange, dark, the accent distorted like something echoed in the depths of my labyrinth. But Greek, actually spoken rather than dreamed.

  Like some ancient Greek who might conceivably worship me.

  I reach down and touch him on the shoulder, but he recoils, rolling until he is some distance away, sitting with his back to the wall.

  “Holy One—”

  Now it is I who kneel, because it is painful to be on my feet for very long. I crouch down, spreading my legs apart, and I lean forward, supporting the heavy, upper part of my body with my arms. I hiss softly through my bovine nostrils.

  “You call me holy—”

  He waves his hands frantically, as if swatting bees. “No! No! You are a devilish monster! Mother of God—!”

  “But you called me holy, as I am in a little way, descended from a divine ancestor.” I mean, not Asterius, but Poseidon’s bull.

  He has no answer to that. I lean over farther and gaze into his eyes. Mine are my best feature, purest azure, like the pure summer skies of my dream-France. They startle most people into paralysis.

  The boy is calmed by them.

  “You know who I am,” I say softly.

  He gulps, then forces himself to speech. “I know you are a creature out of an old tale. I never believed it before now, not even when I—when Guildo and I”—he glanced over at his former companion—“when we uncovered the entrance to this place—”

  “Uncovered it? Does not the entrance to the labyrinth stand clearly marked, behind the altar in the garden of the palace of King Minos?”

  He is more puzzled than afraid. Good. I’ve got him talking.

  “L-Lady, we followed rumors, what the country folk told us, and he had to dig to find the opening, in a mound overgrown with trees and haunted by vipers.”

  “Ah.” Somehow it almost figures. I range far and wide in my dreams, but in waking life, of course, I have never been outside. I have no idea what changes the eons have wrought in the immediate neighborhood.

  “Yet you came here.”

  “Yes.” It was obviously a difficult confession for him to make, as if of a great crime. “Guildo came... for gold. To steal. I came... to die.”

  “Do you despise life so much after so short a time, child?”

  He bows his head and speaks very softly. I must lean forward, straining to hear. “Lady, I am almost twenty.”

  “The blinking of an eye, then.”

  “I am a worthless traitor, Lady. I do not deserve to live any longer. Yet no Christian may take his own life, even if he is already damned. Therefore I thought...” Once more his gaze rested upon the fallen Guildo.

  “You thought to end up like him.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Explain yourself, child. This is most extraordinary.”

  Again, his reaction is likewise extraordinary. He slumps to the floor and begins to weep. Between his sobs I make out snatches of the story, how an Emperor Isaac was cruelly blinded by an Emperor Alexius, and a Prince Alexius, son of Isaac, who was to become Emperor Alexius, went into barbarian lands for aid, whereupon the Franks—I cannot believe they were the same as the French of my dreams—drove one Alexius away and made another emperor, but strife arose between them and yet another Alexius slew the former one, I’m not sure which—

  “Stop! My head spins. Your words are all ajumble. What is your name anyway, child?”

  “Alexius.”

  I sigh, and my mind drifts back over many years. “I remember a time when everyone seemed to be named Gaius. It was terribly confusing.” I laugh gently, snorting, and that, perhaps, shocks him even more than the color of my eyes.

  “But now great Constantinopolis, the heart of the world, the city of the Romans, is fallen to the Franks. The great treasures of mankind, all the beautiful things gathered by so many emperors, are now burnt or carried off or melted down to make coins for barbarian soldiers. And when this happened, where was I? Was I there to defend the city and die? No, I was on the wrong side!”

  Human politics are more labyrinthine than my labyrinth. But there is more to this story than politics. One of such an age as almost-twenty does not come to death-seeking grief over politics.

  “You loved someone very much,” I say.

  He looks at me, amazed, as if I can read his mind. I try to smile, but my face is not built for smiling.

  “There was a girl. Eudocia—”

  “Ah...”

  “We were to be wed. But I left her, to go off and serve Alexius—the Prince—and his father the Emperor Isaac Angelus. I would come back rich, I told her. I would be a great lord. But—”

  “But things did not work out as you expected.”

  Once more he sobbed. “No, Lady, they did not.”

  “They never do, Alexius. Now tell me the rest of the story.”

  “I suffered for my prince, in prison, and for his father. Then I escaped, and escaped again when they both were dead, but the Franks caught me.I should have died then. But Guildo spared me, if I would swear service to him. The world was ending. My lords were dead. I thought I had nothing more to lose. My death would serve no purpose. So I swore. And when the final assault came and the city was violated, there I was, a servant of the barbarians, watching from the deck of a Venetian galley, a worthless traitor—”

  “I think you have grown very old in your nearly twenty years, Alexius. But perhaps you are overambitious when you take all the world’s burdens onto yourself.”

  “... then Guildo quarreled with a knight over a share of the loot and killed the man, and was outlawed, so the two of us fled here, to Crete, where still our enemies dogged us. We forced our way into farmhouses, demanding shelter. More than once we murdered when we thought we were betrayed. Then, one night, as we hid in some ruins, I told him the old story... of your kind... and it seemed to drive him mad. He was crazed with the idea of stealing the treasures of this place. I wasn’t so sure there would be any treasures. Didn’t Lord Theseus bear them away?”

  “Only what he could carry.”

  “So here we are.” Once more he is weeping. He lies on his side, his face in the dirt. “Now you will kill me, Lady. Now you will kill me.” He seems drained of all fear, merely stated what he takes to be an obvious fact. He is not even pleading.

  “No, I will not kill you,” I whisper. “You, perhaps, will find your comrade’s sword and kill me, for that is the way of things. I am weary now and will sleep. Many of my kind are slam in sleep.”

  He cannot speak. His face is wet with mud and tears. I crawl over to him and very gently lick him clean with my long cow’s tongue, then lie down beside him.

  “If only men could live as beasts, Alexius. They would be free of sorrow then.”

  ❖

  Asterius, the great Minotaur, son of Pasiphae and the Bull from the Sea, was likewise a dreamer. There was little else for him to do during the long years of his imprisonment, between bouts of devouring youths and maidens given him in sacrifice. I think he fought in the end because he was unable to overcome his own fierce nature, but he was weary and he wanted to die. Theseus was his liberator.

  Meanwhile, Asterius dreamed, and his soul wandered among the lands of men as my soul does; the last of his descendants, I am as great a dreamer as he.

  I don’t think mankind ever knew that there were more of us, that sometimes before he devoured them or
they died of fright or madness, Asterius had his way with the maidens, that some of them actually sought union with him in their frenzy and their pain, as if it were a kind of escape. I think that we, the sons and daughters of the bull-man, were the last of the gods’ secrets, one they never got around to revealing before they, too, finally died.

  The boy Alexius was genuinely surprised to see me. I wasn’t accounted for in the tale, as he knew it. How then did he expect to die in the labyrinth? Killed by ghosts? By his treacherous companion? Smitten by the outraged Mother of his God? I don’t know. Such things confuse me, even in my dreams when I am truly alive.

  So I lie beside Alexius and my soul ventures forth, into the many lives I share all over the world, opening them one by one like books in a library. I am in France again, in a castle listening to a storyteller while the curtains of rain outside the window whisper like the echoes in my labyrinth. The story is one of romance and of heroic lovers, of how for his sins a knight was commanded to love a loathly lady who was more beast than human woman. True to his vows, he did, and by his love she was transformed into the fairest of all maidens.

  Yes, I know that story. The French lady remembers it, as if in a dream.

  And I dream of fire, too, and of blood, and of screams in the night. I behold the great city of the Romans, Constantinopolis, burning as Frankish knights rage through the streets, slaying, raping women and boys. They quarrel like frenzied dogs over cloths and gold and the precious relics of dead holy men. It is all strange to me, something I can never understand because my nature is not entirely human.

  Some of these Franks were men the French lady had known as gentle poets and lovers, now transformed by their greed into beasts, into monsters.

  My spirit wanders. In still stranger lands, men from East and West battle one another for the honor of the same god, a single god intolerant of all others, whom each faction knows by a different name.

  Has it not always been the way of men to fight?