Tanith Lee - All the Birds of Hell.pdf

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TANITH LEE
ALL THE BIRDS OF HELL
Tanith Lee's most recent books include Faces Under Water and a young adult novel
that's due out in England very shortly, Law of the Wolf Tower. Her last
appearance in these pages was exactly two years ago, with her retake on the
Cinderella fairy tale, The Reason for Not Going to the Ball." She returns now
with a very different sort of story, a dark and dazzling vision of a world
locked in winter for fifteen years...
ONCE THEY LEFT THE CITY, the driver started to talk. He went on talking during
the two-hour journey, almost without pause. His name was Argenty, but the
dialogue was all about his wife. She suffered from what had become known as
Twilight Sickness. She spent all day in their flat staring at the electric
bulbs. At night she walked out into the streets and he would have to go and
fetch her. She had had frostbite several times. He said she had been lovely
twenty years ago, though she had always hated the cold.
Henrique Tchaikov listened. He made a few sympathetic sounds. It was as hopeless
to try to communicate with the driver, Argenty, as to shut him up. Normally
Argenty drove important men from the Bureau, to whom he would not be allowed to
speak a word, probably not even Goodday. But Tchaikov was a minor bureaucrat. If
Argenty had had a better education and more luck, he might have been where
Tchaikov was.
Argenty's voice became like the landscape beyond the cindery cement blocks of
the city, monotonous, inevitably irritating, depressing, useless, sad.
It was the fifteenth year of winter.
Now almost forty, Tchaikov could remember the other seasons of his childhood,
even one long hot summer full of liquid colors and now-forgotten smells. By the
time he was twelve years old, things were changing forever. In his twenties he
saw them go, the palaces of summer, as Eynin called them in his poetry. Tchaikov
had been twenty-four when he watched the last natural flower, sprung pale green
out of the public lawn, die before him -- as Argenty's wife was dying, in
another way.
The Industrial Winter, so it was termed. The belching chimneys and the leaking
stations with their cylinders of poison. The rotting hulks along the shore like
deadly whales.
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"The doctor says she'll ruin her eyes, staring at the lights all day," Argenty
droned on.
"There's a new drug, isn't there --" Tchaikov tried.
But Argenty took no notice. Probably, when alone, he talked to himself.
Beyond the car, the snowscape spread like heaps of bedclothes, some soiled and
some clean. The gray ceiling of the sky bulged low.
Argenty broke off. He said, "There's the wolf factory." Tchaikov turned his
head.
Against the grayness-whiteness, the jagged black of the deserted factory which
had been taken over by wolves, was the only landmark.
"They howl often, sound like the old machinery. You'll hear them from the
Dacha."
Yes, they told me I would."
"Look, some of them running about there."
Tchaikov noted the black forms of the wolves, less black than the factory walls
and gates, darting up and over the snow heaps, and away around the building.
Although things did live out here, it was strange to see something alive.
Then they came down the slope, the chained snow tires grating and punching, and
Tchaikov saw the mansion across the plain.
"The river came in here," said Argenty. "Under the ice now."
A plantation of pine trees remained about the house. Possibly they were dead,
carved out only in frozen snow. The Dacha had two domed towers, a balustraded
verandah above a flight of stairs that gleamed like white glass. When the car
drove up, he could see two statues at the foot of the steps that had also been
kept clear of snow. They were of a stained brownish marble, a god and goddess,
both naked and smiling through the brown stains that spread from their mouths.
There were electric lights on in the Dacha, from top to bottom, three or four
floors of them, in long, arched windows.
But as the car growled to a halt, Argenty gave a grunt. "Look," he said again,
"look. Up there."
They got out and stood on the snow. The cold broke round them like sheer
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disbelief, but they knew it by now. They stared up. As happened only very
occasionally, a lacuna had opened in the low cloud. A dim pink island of sky
appeared, and over it floated a dulled lemon slice, dissolving, half
transparent, the sun.
Argenty and Tchaikov waited, transfixed, watching in silence. Presently the
cloud folded together again and the sky, the sun, vanished.
"I can't tell her," said Argenty. "My wife. I can't tell her I saw the sun. Once
it happened in the street. She began to scream. I had to take her to the
hospital. She wasn't the only case."
"I'm sorry," said Tchaikov.
He had said this before, but now for the first time Argenty seemed to hear him.
"Thank you."
Argenty insisted on carrying Tchaikov's bag to the top of the slippery, gleaming
stair, then he pressed the buzzer. The door was of steel and wood, with a glass
panel of octople glazing, almost opaque. Through it, in the bluish yellow light,
a vast hall could just be made out, with a floor of black and white marble.
A voice spoke through the door apparatus.
"Give your name."
"Henrique Tchaikov. Number sixteen stroke Y."
"You're late."
Tchaikov stood on the top step, explaining to a door. He was enigmatic. There
was always a great deal of this.
"The road from Kroy was blocked by an avalanche. It had to be cleared."
"All right. Come in. Mind the dog, she may be down there." "Dog," said Argenty.
He put his hand into his coat for his gun.
"It's all right," said Tchaikov. "They always keep a dog here."
"Why.?" Said Argenty blankly.
Tchaikov said, "A guard dog. And for company, I suppose."
Argenty glanced up, toward the domed towers. The walls were reinforced by black
cement. The domes were tiled black, mortared by snow. After the glimpse of sun,
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there was again little color in their world.
"Are they -- is it up there?" "I don't know. Perhaps."
"Take care," said Argenty surprisingly as the door made its unlocking noise.
Argenty was not allowed to loiter. Tchaikov watched him get back into the car,
undo the dash panel and take a swig of vodka. The car turned and drove slowly
away, back across the plain.
The previous curator did not give Tchaikov his name. He was a tall thin man with
slicked, black hair. Tchaikov knew he was known as Ouperin.
Ouperin showed Tchaikov the map of the mansion, and the pamphlet of house rules.
He only mentioned one, that the solarium must not be used for more than one hour
per day; it was expensive. He asked if Tchaikov had any questions, wanted to see
anything. Tchaikov said it would be fine.
They met the dog in the corridor outside the ballroom, near where Ouperin
located what he called his office.
She was a big dog, perhaps part Cuvahl and part Husky, muscular and
well-covered, with a thick silken coat like the thick pile carpets, ebony and
fawn, with white round her muzzle and on her belly and paws, and two gold eyes
that merely slanted at them for a second as she galloped by.
"Dog! Here, dog!" Ouperin called, but she ignored him, prancing on, with
balletic shakes of her fringed fur, into the ballroom, where the crystal
chandeliers hung down twenty feet on ropes of bronze. "She only comes when she's
hungry. There are plenty of steaks for her in the cold room. She goes out a
lot," said Ouperin. "Her door's down in the kitchen. Electronic. Nothing else
can get in."
They visited the cold room, which was very long, and massively shelved, behind a
sort of airlock. The room was frigid, the natural weather was permitted to
sustain it. The ice on high windows looked like armor.
Ouperin took two bottles of vodka, and a bunch of red grapes, frozen peerless in
a wedge of ice.
They sat in his office, along from the ballroom. A fire blazed on the hearth.
"I won't say I've enjoyed it here," said Ouperin. "But there are advantages.
There are some -- videos and magazines in the suite. You know what I mean. Apart
from the library. If you get...hot."
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Tchaikov nodded politely.
Ouperin said, "The first thing you'll do, when I go. You'll go up and look at
them, won't you?"
"Probably," said Tchaikov.
"You know," said Ouperin, "you get bored with them. At first, they remind you of
the fairy story, what is it? The princess who sleeps. Then you just get bored."
Tchaikov said nothing. They drank the vodka, and at seventeen hours, five
o'clock, as the white world outside began to turn glowing blue.. a helicopter
came and landed on the plain. Ouperin took his bags and went out to the front
door of the Dacha, and the stair. "Have some fun," he said.
He ran sliding down the steps and up to the helicopter. He scrambled in like a
boy on holiday. It rose as it had descended in a storm of displaced snow. When
its noise finally faded through the sky, Tchaikov heard the wolves from the wolf
factory howling over the slopes. The sky was dark blue now, navy, without a
star. If ever the moon appeared, the moon was blue. The pines settled. A few
black boughs showed where the helicopter's winds had scoured off the snow. They
were alive. But soon the snow began to come down again, to cover them.
Tchaikov returned to the cold room. He selected a chicken and two steaks and
vegetables, and took them to the old stone-floored kitchen down the narrow
steps. The new kitchen was very small, a little bright cubicle inside the larger
one. He put the food into the thawing cabinet, and then set the program on the
cooker. The dog came in as he was doing this, and stood outside the lighted box.
Once they had thawed, he put the bloody steaks down for her on a dish, and
touched her ruffed head as she bent to eat. She was a beautiful dog, but wholly
uninterested in him. She might be there in case of trouble, but there never
would be trouble. No one stayed longer than six or eight months. The curatorship
at the Dacha was a privilege, and an endurance test.
When his meal was ready, Tchaikov carried it to the card room or office, and
ate, with the television showing him in color the black and white scenes of the
snow and the cities. The card room fire burned on its synthetic logs, the gas
cylinder faintly whistling. He drank vodka and red wine. Sometimes, in spaces of
sound, he heard the wolves. And once, looking from the ballroom, he saw the dog,
lit by all the windows, trotting along the ice below the pines.
AT MIDNIGHT, when the television stations were shut down to conserve power, and
most of the lights in the cities, although not here, would be dimmed, Tchaikov
got into the manually operated elevator, and went up into the second dome, to
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