Tanith Lee - Venus Rising On Water

VIP免费

2024-11-23 0 0 63.46KB 34 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

The Master of Rampling Gate

Venus Rising on Water

Tanith Lee

Like long hair, the weeds grew down the façades of the city, over

ornate shutters and leaden doors, into the pale green silk of the

lagoon. Ten hundred ancient mansions crumbled. Sometimes a

flight of birds was exhaled from their crowded mass, or a thread of

smoke was drawn up into the sky. Day long a mist bloomed on the

water, out of which distant towers rose like snakes of deadly gold.

Once in every month a boat passed, carving the lagoon that had

seemed thickened beyond movement. Far less often, here and there,

a shutter cracked open and the weed hair broke, a stream of plaster

fell like a blue ray. Then, some faint face peered out, probably

eclipsed by a mask. It was a place of veils. Visitors were occasional.

They examined the decaying mosaics, loitered in the caves of

arches, hunted phantoms through marble tunnels. And under the

streets they took photographs: one bald flash scouring a century off

the catacombs and sewers, the lacework coffins, the handful of

albino rats perched up on them, caught in a second like ghosts of

white hearts, mute, with waiting eyes.

The dawn star shone in the lagoon on a tail of jagged silver. The sun

rose. There was an unsuitable noise — the boat was coming.

"There," said the girl on the deck of the boat, "stop there, please."

The boat sidled to a pavement and stood on the water, trembling and

murmuring. The girl left it with a clumsy gracefulness, and poised

at the edge of the city with her single bag, cheerful and undaunted

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruis...Tanith%20Lee%20-%20Venus%20Rising%20On%20Water.html (1 of 34)24-2-2006 20:27:01

The Master of Rampling Gate

before the lonely cliffs of masonry, and all time's indifference.

She was small, about twenty-five, with ornately short fair hair, clad

in old-fashioned jeans and a shirt. Her skin was fresh, her eyes

bright with intelligent foolishness. She looked about, and upward.

Her interest clearly centred on a particular house, which overhung

the water like a face above a mirror, its eyes closed.

Presently the boat pulled away and went off across the lagoon, and

only the girl and the silence remained.

She picked up her bag and walked along the pavement to an

archway with a shut, leaden door. Here she knocked boldly, as if too

stupid to understand the new silence must not yet be tampered with.

Her knocking sent hard blobs of sound careering round the vault of

greenish crystal space that was the city's morning. They seemed to

strike peeling walls and stone pilasters five miles off. From the

house itself came no response, not even the vague sense of

something stirring like a serpent in sleep.

"Now this is too bad," said the girl to the silence, upbraiding it

mildly. "They told me a caretaker would be here, in time for the

boat."

She left her bag (subconscious acknowledgment of the emptiness

and indifference) by the gate, and walked along under the leaning

face of the house. From here she saw the floors of the balconies of

flowered iron; she listened for a sudden snap of shutters. But only

the water lapped under the pavement, component of silence. This

house was called the Palace of the Planet. The girl knew all about it,

and what she did not know she had come here to discover. She was

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruis...Tanith%20Lee%20-%20Venus%20Rising%20On%20Water.html (2 of 34)24-2-2006 20:27:01

The Master of Rampling Gate

writing a long essay that was necessary to her career of scholastic

journalism. She was not afraid.

In the façade of the Palace of the Planet was another door, plated

with green bronze. The weed had not choked it, and over its top

leaned a marble woman with bare breasts and a dove in her hands.

The girl reached out and rapped with a bronze knocker shaped like a

fist. The house gave off a sound that after all succeeded in

astonishing her. It must be a hollow shell, unfurnished, half its walls

fallen…

These old cities were museums now, kept for their history, made

available on request to anyone — not many — who wished to view.

They had their dwellers also, but in scarcity. Destitutes and

eccentrics lived in them, monitored by the state. The girl, whose

name was Jonquil Hare, had seen the register of this place. In all,

there were 174 names, some queried, where once had teemed

thousands, crushing each other in the ambition to survive.

The hollow howling of her knock faded in the house. Jonquil said,

"I'm coming in. I am." And marched back to her bag beneath the

leaden gate. She surveyed the gate, and the knotted weed which had

come down on it. Jonquil Hare tried the weed. It resisted her

strongly. She took up her bag, in which there was nothing

breakable, seasoned traveller as she was, and flung it over the arch.

She took the weed in her small strong hands and hauled herself up

in her clumsy, graceful way, up to the arch, and sat there, looking in

at a morning-twilight garden of shrubs that had not been pruned in a

hundred years, and trees that became each other. A blue fountain

shone dimly. Jonquil smiled upon it, and swung herself over in the

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruis...Tanith%20Lee%20-%20Venus%20Rising%20On%20Water.html (3 of 34)24-2-2006 20:27:01

The Master of Rampling Gate

weed and slithered down, into the environ of the house.

By midday, Jonquil had gone busily over most of the Palace of the

Planet. Its geography was fixed in her head, but partly, confusedly

for she liked the effect of a puzzle of rooms and corridors. Within

the lower portion of the house a large hall gave on to a large

enclosed inner courtyard, that in turn led to the garden. Above,

chambers of the first storey would have opened on to the court, but

their doors were sealed by the blue-green weed, which had

smothered the court itself and so turned it into a strange undersea

grotto where columns protruded like yellow coral. Above the lower

floor, two long staircases drew up into apparently uncountable

annexes and cells, and to a great salon with tarnished mirrors, also

broken like spiderweb. The salon had tall windows that stared

through their blind shutters at the lagoon.

There were carvings everywhere; lacking light, she did not study

them now. And, as suspected, there was very little furniture — a

pair of desks with hollow drawers, spindly chairs, a divan in rotted

ivory silk. In one oblong room was a bed-frame with vast tapering

pillars like idle rockets. Cobwebby draperies shimmered from the

canopy in a draught, while patches of bled emerald sunlight hovered

on the floor.

Jonquil succeeded in opening a shutter in the salon. A block of

afternoon fell in. Next door, in the adjacent chamber, she set up her

inflatable mattress, her battery lamp and heater, some candles she

had brought illegally in a padded tube. Sitting on her unrolled mat

in the subaqueous light of a shuttered window which refused to

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruis...Tanith%20Lee%20-%20Venus%20Rising%20On%20Water.html (4 of 34)24-2-2006 20:27:01

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Tanith Lee - Venus Rising On Water.pdf

共34页,预览4页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Tanith Lee - Venus Rising On Water

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: