Tanith Lee - Death Dances

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DEATH DANCES

Tanith Lee

Death came to Idradrud at suns' rise. She had appointments to keep.

The city lay along the banks of its river, a river green as jade and thick as

soup, sprinkled with garbage, rotting hulks, and slave-powered quinqueremes

floating towers. The tiered towers on the banks kept still, save in the

occasional spring earthquakes, which revived religion in the city as only the

plague could do otherwise. Domes and minarets and steeples stood against the

Great Sun and the Sun-Star on the yellow-green sky. But closer to the earth,

the

slums that were the truth of Idradrud, and the cut-throat alleys which

bisected

them, huddled in the warming sludge and muck. Diseased-looking steps piled

into

the water. There were those who got their living from the river in an

immemorial

way. Not by plying goods or hauling sail, not by catching the

slightly-poisonous

fish or the now-and-then-lethal oysters, but by detaining the corpses to be

found in the water, stripping them of valuables, clothes, bones, and hair

even—to be sold later for wigs. This trade was carried on by boat, or

sometimes

it was performed by those who, holding breath a long while, swam deep down

into

the jade broth, down to the bottom, and searched about there in the smoking

mud.

Along among the quays, there was a gaudy stretch or two. Tenements dressed

with

balconies, awnings, birdcages, and evil exotic flowers. Here was a narrow

house

with its skirt in the river, pink plaster and ornate scrolling—all battered

and

peeling from sun and wet.

Bitza, as she gazed forth from a window, saw all those other buildings, hers

and

the rest, upside down in the water, one with a young woman gazing out of a

window, and an eel snaking by through her hair. But she is free, thought

Bitza

on reflection, of her reflection.

Bitza, the Harlot in the Pink House, was not beautiful; but she had learned

give the impression of enormous and indefinable beauty, and was much desired.

Even lords came to her slum palace to visit her. She might have been rich,

but

was not entirely honest. Certain enemies of her youth had died in mysterious

circumstances. But she was concerned for the poor and gave most of her

fortune

away in the interests of caring for them—namelessly. Once, she had been poor

herself, and dreaded the idea of it. Now her fine dark hair was curled and

streaked with gilt. Her large eyes were perfectly shaped, the primeval colour

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Tanith Lee - Death Dances

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