Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer: Expanded Edition

Table of Contents

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright © 1983 by Tanith Lee.

Expanded edition copyright © 2014 by Tanith Lee.

All rights reserved.

* * * *

“Paid Piper” originally appeared in
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
, copyright © 1981 by Mercury Press, Inc. “Red As Blood” originally appeared in
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
,copyright © 1979, by Mercury Press, Inc. “Thorns” originally appeared in 
Young Winter’s Tales
,copyright © 1972 by Macmillan, Ltd. “When the Clock Strikes” originally appeared in
Weird Tales
copyright © 1980 by Lin Carter. “Wolfland” originally appeared in
The Magazine of
Fantasy & Science Fiction
, copyright © 1980 by Mercury Press, Inc. “The Waters of Sorrow” was written especially for this volume, but was published first in the online preview edition of
Weird Tales
. Copyright © 2013 by Tanith Lee.

PAID PIPER

In the late summer afternoon, the river lay thin and shallow among its smooth stones. A young girl kneeled there, washing her long dark hair. Her name was Cleci, and she was fourteen.

Up on the left-hand bank stood a group of lindens. Their leaves were powdered by the summer dust, which floated in the air like smoke. Beyond the lindens was the village of Lime Tree, which was called for them. It was a large, sprawling, prosperous village, of many narrow streets and open squares, that stood in the midst of its own wheat fields. While beyond the right-hand bank of the river, these fields ran off into Lime Tree’s vineyards, where the red grapes ripened on their stocks.

Lime Tree understood why it was so prosperous. It wisely worshiped the rat god, Raur, and Raur therefore kept his folk in order. Other places might be plagued by vermin, who spoiled the crops and fouled the granaries, but not Lime Tree village. Lime Tree took gifts to Raur in his whitewashed temple by the ford. After the harvest, in thanks and homage, they would lay wheat sheaves, apples and wine on his altar.

Last Spring Festival, Cleci, along with thirty other young girls, had been made a Maiden of Raur. This happened to all the many daughters of the village when they were about fourteen or so. It meant that they were allowed into the sanctuary, to gaze on Raur for the first time. Cleci thought him very beautiful, for he was five feet tall, and carved in flawless marble, with rose-opal eyes. His rat’s face was intelligent and amenable. The rich people of the village kept white fur rats in gilt cages, and Cleci had determined she too would have a white fur rat to talk to and to play with. She began to save up her coins, of which she got but few. She was the washerwoman’s daughter, and her father was dead. She would fetch the washing, help wash it in the tubs of scalding water, help dry it in the yard, then carry it back to the houses it had come from. Already Cleci’s hands were rough, and she put them behind her back now, when she went to the temple, in memory of Raur’s soft silken paws.

* * * *

Every fifth day Raur was worshiped, but in winter, spring and late summer, there was a great festival. Lime Tree would deck itself with ribbons and banners. There would be eating and drinking and dancing in the streets. And Raur’s image would be taken out of its sanctuary, though veiled—the Lime Treeans were only permitted to look at him face to face on special occasions—and up and down the byways on the shoulders of his priests. Finally he would be borne through the fields to safeguard and bless them. When night fell, there would be bonfires and singing. Cleci was looking forward to the Summer Festival, which was now less than a day away.

That was why she had stolen the hair-washing hour away from her mother. The washerwoman cared more for the cleanliness of the garments of paying neighbors. But Cleci had now rinsed her hair, and sat combing it into a dry dark shining in the wide westering bars of the sun. As she did so, she mentally counted her coins. There were only ten, however, and counting did not increase them. Which was a pity, since she would need twenty times that number to purchase a white rat from the priests.

Suddenly, all the birds in the lime trees stopped singing. Then a new bird began to sing.

Cleci lifted her head, astonished, wondering what the bird could be. Its voice was much fuller and more mellow than that of any she had ever listened to. And, if possible, more sweet. Yet the trillings and flights of music must definitely be those of a bird, for only something natural could sound so primitive, strange and marvelous. Then the song broke into a double cascade of extraordinary harmonizing notes, took on, in addition, a wild, dancing rhythm, and began to come along the right-hand bank above her. She realized it could not be a bird after all. She stood up involuntarily, to see. And so she saw the Piper.

There had, once or twice, been minstrels—pipers, harpers—who had passed through Lime Tree. But never one who made music like this. Or who looked like this.

His hair grew to his shoulders, and it was a curious somber red, like no hair she had ever seen. There was a full, loose wave in it, too, like the shapes the wind made of grasses, clouds or smoke.… His skin was fair, not tanned at all, and his eyes were large, and blue as distance. His breeches were also blue, but the blue of a storm sky, and his sleeveless jacket the dark crimson of old wine. The pipe was of a pale plain wood and hung from a cord about his neck. He looked young, yet somewhere in his eyes he was much older. Yet his smile was the same age as Cleci.

“Who are you?” he said to Cleci, after he had smiled at her and filled her with a bizarre elation.

“I’m Cleci. Who are you?”

“Who do you think I am?”

“I thought it was a bird, singing.”

“Ah,” said the Piper. He tilted back his head on his young, strong neck, and looked up into the linden tops. And all at once three or four birds flew from the branches, dipped across the river, swooped to him and dropped, soft as leaves on to his shoulders.

“Oh,” said Cleci. “Oh.”

“Oh, yes,” said the Piper. The birds kissed him on the lips with their sharp pointed beaks. Other birds were drifting down into the grass, hopping past his feet. A snake coiled round his ankle. A butterfly flickered in his red hair.

“Oh,”
sighed Cleci.

“I saw a temple by the ford,” said the Piper. “Who do you worship there?”

Cleci blinked.

“Raur,” she said with automatic pride. “The rat god.”

“Why?” said the Piper.

A great stillness came when he asked her, as if the land listened too.

“Because…” said Cleci. “Because he keeps his creatures from harming us. And because—he’s beautiful.”

“Is he?”

The Piper looked at her. Suddenly she felt ashamed. She did not know why. She stared at the ground and said, “Excuse me, please. I must be getting home.”

And then she turned and ran, straight through the shallow river, up the slippery stones and up the bank. She ran under the lindens and toward the village. She was afraid.

* * * *

When she got home to her mother’s small house, the washerwoman scolded her. For running off, for washing her hair. All through the scolding, Cleci thought of the Piper. All through supper, Cleci thought of him. And as the day went down through a rift of swarthy red in the west, and the east closed to a shadowy blue, still Cleci thought of him. But by then her fear had gone, and a weird disappointment taken its place. She had begun to think she had dozed at the river and dreamed him. She dared not tell her mother, certainly, for her mother would scold her for that too. For dreaming, particularly for dreaming of a young man. Or was he so young as he looked? Could he possibly be as old as that something inside his eyes? “You,” her mother would say, “you dreamed of being a princess when you were ten.
When I am a princess,
you would say. Doing the washing cured you of that. Then you wanted to be a priestess of Raur. As if they take anyone, boy or girl, who isn’t from a rich man’s house. Then, since you were Raur’s Maiden, and saw a white rat in the miller’s hall that day, all you would talk of was having a white rat we could never afford. And now you’ve met a beautiful young piper by the river. A likely tale!” No. Cleci would not tell her mother, for this was what her mother would say, and it was all true. It made Cleci despondent to think he had only been a dream. For there should be such people in the world.

“You’ve not eaten your supper,” Cleci’s mother scolded her. The washerwoman wrapped up the bread and cheese and put it away carefully for tomorrow.

Cleci went to the open door and looked out into the narrow street. The roofs leaned near to each other overhead, and the darkening sky rested on the gap between.

Suddenly all the dogs in Lime Tree, and there were a great many, began to bark and yelp and howl.

“Whatever’s up?” said the washerwoman, as she lit the clay lamp. “They sound like a pack of wolves, they do.”

But then the dogs fell silent. Down the street came floating, soft as the cool air, ripple on ripple of exquisite melody. It was an evening song, delicate yet piercing like the first stars coming out overhead. The pipe sounded deeper now, darker, old as the earth, or nearly.

A light fell over Cleci’s shoulder onto the road. She realized her mother had come to the door, the lamp in her hand.

“Why—” said Cleci’s mother, “whoever’s that? He’s a rare musician, whoever he is.”

The Piper came walking along the street like a lynx, yet every fifth or seventh step, he would give a curious little skip, and the music would skip with him. He held the pipe sideways-on to his lips, and his cheeks scarcely altered their shape at all as he blew.

Other lights were falling out of doors and windows as people came to see. No one spoke at first, merely watched, and listened. But that changed presently. For behind the Piper, drifting like mist in his footsteps, came most of the dogs of Lime Tree, all that had been able to slip their ropes. And none of the dogs fighting, not even glancing at each other, a brindle, low-backed army, gliding to the tune of the pipe.

Cleci heard, along the way, the bursts of exclamation and oaths which marked their progress. Then the river of music came in again, filling the holes these sounds had punctured in the atmosphere. Cleci’s mother did not speak, but she let out a great sigh, as if she had been holding her breath her entire life, and now could let it go. She set her free hand on Cleci’s shoulder, and for once the contact was aware and gentle.

Just then, the Piper went by their door. He angled his head to look at them, but said nothing. Cleci wished she could touch him, to be sure he was real. Then he had gone.

Paws slid across Cleci’s feet.

People stood in the street, staring, as the wonderful music faded like a scent.

“Where’s he going?” she heard someone ask. They had not thought—or dared—to question the Piper himself.

“Toward the miller’s house, looks like.”

The miller was one of the important men of Lime Tree village, being one of the richest. His eldest son was a priest of Raur.

“Did you see the dogs?”

“The dogs were after some food he had, obviously.”

“What does he want?”

“How do I know? Why are you asking
me
?”

“Tomorrow’s Festival Day. Maybe he wants to play for the dancing. For a fat fee.”

“Ah. That will be it.”

“Ah.”

Cleci felt a strange excitement under her ribs, like pain. She wanted to scream or laugh or sing. She wanted to be quiet as a stone.

“He’s only another vagabond,” her mother suddenly said, and Cleci turned and saw her mother, a worn, raw-handed stranger, her eyes tired to death, and greasy hair hanging in them. “Just another beggar.” And Cleci hated her mother with a dull and grinding hate.

One last absconding dog rushed noiselessly up the street, pursuing the invisible tide of music that had flowed away there.

* * * *

Cleci took her white Maiden’s Dress out of the chest and put it on. It was not yet light, and so she was able not to observe the whiteness of the Dress had faded. She tied a scarlet ribbon at her waist. The baker’s wife had given it to her because it had a tear but, tied carefully, the tear was not apparent.

Her mother anxiously grumbled, because today she was not allowed to work.

All through the night, perhaps once every hour, at the moment when it turned over into every next hour, Cleci had awakened. She had wondered what the miller and the baker and the smith, and the other important rich men, had said to the Piper. She had wondered if the Piper would lead Raur’s Procession as, very occasionally, the most accomplished minstrels had been chosen to do.

Even before the sun was up, Lime Tree was hanging banners from its windows, but the colors did not show, or the paintings of magic scenes to do with the rat god: Raur turning a plague of rats and mice aside from the village; Raur battling a giant crow like a black dragon.

“I must go now,” said Cleci to her mother.

“There’ll be enough Maidens,” said Cleci’s mother disparagingly. “They won’t miss
you
.”

But Cleci ran out of the door and along the street.

As she ran toward the temple, the sun rose above the winding clutter of houses, and all the banners burst open like flowers into green and crimson and violet. Gilt discs sang on streamers in the dawn wind, and little effigies of Raur, made of clay or pastry, bounced lightly on their strings.

The river was the color of the sky. Even the lindens were streaked by cool gold. Cleci picked a spray of blossom, thoughtlessly killing it, because it was beautiful, and put it in her hair.

Lime Tree was prosperous, and had many children, many young men and girls. All told, this year, there were a hundred Maidens, for a girl remained a Maiden till her wedding day, when she would be about fifteen. Then she became a Matron of Raur.

* * * *

The Maidens came together on the bank above the ford, like a flock of white ducks. Next, the boys arrived, with their rat masks made of thin wood, their wooden swords, their skin tabors, and all their shouting. Raur would be carried out into the morning on the shoulders of the priests; the Maidens and the boys would follow Raur back into the streets, and the rest of the village would pour after them.

Sugar plums were being given out. The masked boy rats had some difficulty getting them through their mouth-holes. The Maidens ate with dainty self-consciousness, and wiped their sticky fingers on the grass. Today it did not matter so much that Cleci was the washerwoman’s daughter. Some of the girls actually spoke to her. One of the baker’s daughters even said loudly to her: “How nice that ribbon looks on you. I can’t see the tear in it at all.”

“Look! There’s our illustrious daddy!” cried another daughter, more loudly still, over all the general noise.

Out of the temple walked Lime Tree’s eminent men. The baker and the butcher came first, then the miller, the smith and the wainwright. Last, but not least, the vintner. Behind them, however, came only empty air. Cleci strained her eyes, trying to find the Piper in it. Perhaps, he would come out next, with the priests.