Tanith Lee - Bite-Me-Not or Fleur De Feu

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TANITH LEE (born 1847) began her career in England writing stories for young readers, but with the

American publication of her first adult novel,THE BIRTHGRAVE (1975), she won an instant reputation

as a fantasist. A prolific author, Lee followed up her first success with a long list of novels that cover the

range of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and sword-and-sorcery.

Her short novel Sabella, or the Blood Stone (1980) crosses genre categories as it tells the tale—erotic,

colorful, and intense, like most of Lee's stories—of a female vampire on a future Mars.

"Bite-Me-Not" is a good example of Lee's rich style and imagination and promises to be one of the most

memorable vampire tales of the 1980s.

Bite-Me-Not

or, Fleur De Feu

(1984)

BY TANITH LEE

CHAPTER I

In the tradition of young girls and windows, the young girl looks out of this one. It is difficult to see

anything. The panes of the window are heavily leaded, and secured by a lattice of iron. The stained glass

of lizard-green and storm-purple is several inches thick. There is no red glass in the window. The colour

red is forbidden in the castle. Even the sun, behind the glass, is a storm sun, a green-lizard sun.

The young girl wishes she had a gown of palest pastel rose—the nearest affinity to red which is never

allowed. Already she has long dark beautiful eyes, a long white neck. Her long dark hair is however

hidden in a dusty scarf and she wears rags. She is a scullery maid. As she scours dishes and mops stone

floors, she imagines she is a princess floating through the upper corridors, gliding to the dais in the

Duke's hall. The Cursed Duke. She is sorry for him. If he had been her father, she would have

sympathized and consoled him. His own daughter is dead, as his wife is dead, but these things, being to

do with the cursing, are never spoken of. Except, sometimes, obliquely.

"Rohise!" dim voices cry now, full of dim scolding soon to be actualized.

The scullery maid turns from the window and runs to have her ears boxed and a broom thrust into her

hands.

Meanwhile, the Cursed Duke is prowling his chamber, high in the East Turret carved with swans and

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gargoyles. The room is lined with books, swords, lutes, scrolls, and has two eerie portraits, the larger of

which represents his wife, and the smaller his daughter. Both ladies look much the same with their pale,

egg-shaped faces, polished eyes, clasped hands. They do not really look like his wife or daughter, nor

really remind him of them.

There are no windows at all in the turret, they were long ago bricked up and covered with hangings.

Candles burn steadily. It is always night in the turret. Save, of course, by night there are particular sounds

all about it, to which the Duke is accustomed, but which he does not care for. By night, like most of his

court, the Cursed Duke closes his ears with softened tallow. However, if he sleeps, he dreams, and hears

in the dream the beating of wings… Often, the court holds loud revel all night long.

The Duke does not know Rohise the scullery maid has been thinking of him. Perhaps he does not even

know that a scullery maid is capable of thinking at all.

Soon the Duke descends from the turret and goes down, by various stairs and curving passages, into a

large, walled garden on the east side of the castle.

It is a very pretty garden, mannered and manicured, which the gardeners keep in perfect order. Over the

tops of the high, high walls, where delicate blooms bell the vines, it is just possible to glimpse the tips of

sun-baked mountains. But by day the mountains are blue and spiritual to look at, and seem scarcely real.

They might only be inked on the sky.

A portion of the Duke's court is wandering about in the garden, playing games or musical instruments, or

admiring painted sculptures, or the flora, none of which is red. But the Cursed Duke's court seems

vitiated this noon. Nights of revel take their toll. As the Duke passes down the garden, his courtiers

acknowledge him deferentially. He sees them, old and young alike, all doomed as he is, and the weight of

his burden increases.

At the furthest, most eastern end of the garden, there is another garden, sunken and rather curious,

beyond a wall with an iron door.

Only the Duke possesses the key to this door. Now he unlocks it and goes through. His courtiers laugh

and play and pretend not to see. He shuts the door behind him.

The sunken garden, which no gardener ever tends, is maintained by other, spontaneous, means. It is small

and square, lacking the hedges and the paths of the other, the sundials and statues and little pools. All the

sunken garden contains is a broad paved border, and at its center a small plot of humid earth. Growing in

the earth is a slender bush with slender velvet leaves.

The Duke stands and looks at the bush only a short while.

He visits it every day. He has visited it every day for years. He is waiting for the bush to flower.

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Everyone is waiting for this. Even Rohise, the scullery maid, is waiting, though she does not, being only

sixteen, born in the castle and uneducated, properly understand why.

The light in the little garden is dull and strange, for the whole of it is roofed over by a dome of thick

smoky glass. It makes the atmosphere somewhat depressing, although the bush itself gives off a pleasant

smell, rather resembling vanilla.

Something is cut into the stone rim of the earth-plot where the bush grows. The Duke reads it for perhaps

the thousandth time. O, fleur de feu—

When the Duke returns from the little garden into the large garden, locking the door behind him, no one

seems truly to notice. But their obeisances now are circumspect.

One day, he will perhaps emerge from the sunken garden leaving the door wide, crying out in a great

voice. But not yet. Not today.

The ladies bend to the bright fish in the pools, the knights pluck for them blossoms, challenge each other

to combat at chess, or wrestling, discuss the menagerie lions; the minstrels sing of unrequited love. The

pleasure garden is full of one long and weary sigh.

"Oh flurda fur

"Pourma souffrance—"

Sings Rohise as she scrubs the flags of the pantry floor.

"Ned ormey par,

"May say day mwar—"

"What are you singing, you slut?" someone shouts, and kicks over her bucket.

Rohise does not weep. She tidies her bucket and soaks up the spilled water with her cloths. She does not

know what the song, because of which she seems, apparently, to have been chastised, means. She does

not understand the words that somehow, somewhere—perhaps from her own dead mother—she learned

by rote.

In the hour before sunset, the Duke's hall is lit by flambeaux. In the high windows, the casements of oil-

blue and lavender glass and glass like storms and lizards, are fastened tight. The huge window by the dais

was long ago obliterated, shut up, and a tapestry hung of gold and silver tissue with all the rubies pulled

out and emeralds substituted. It describes the subjugation of a fearsome unicorn by a maiden, and

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