that makes things happen. But it doesn’t last. You were right about that. It does change you, though; enough to feel a stranger in this world, but not enough to belong in theirs.”
“Tell me what happened,” Zenna said. “Please.”
Ariel did so. She spoke the words of a story so unlikely, she could hardly believe it herself, yet it had happened.
“I should hate you,” Zenna said, “because it feels like you took something that was mine. But I’m glad it changed you. We are similar now.”
Ariel tried to smile. “We can outrun time.”
“For now.” Zenna held out her hand. “Come on. Maybe we are not as stupid as they think.”
Hand in hand, two girls run through the moonlit forest. They run so fast they are merely blurs of light. They run so fast they cause cracks in the bark of trees that leak a green-yellow radiance. It is the were-light of seeing.
LA DAME
Tanith Lee
Tanith Lee was born in the UK in 1947. After school she worked at a number of jobs, and at age twenty-five had one year at art college. Then DAW Books published her novel The Birthgrave. Since then she has been a professional full-time writer. Publications so far total approximately ninety novels and collections and well over three hundred short stories. She has also written for television and radio. Lee has been honored with several awards: in 2009 she was made a Grand Master of Horror and honored with the World Fantasy Convention Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013. She is married to the writer/artist John Kaiine.
Lee’s fictional vampires are truly too numerous—and too diverse—to cover here. They range from the fairly conventional ancient female vampire of “Nunc Dimittis” (1983) to the “alien vampire” Sabella (mentioned in the introduction) to the surreal story-within-a-story “The Isle is Full of Noises” (2000). While “La Dame” is one of Lee’s most original vampire variants, it also harkens back to some of our most primal beliefs about the sea and ships…
“The game is done! I’ve won! I’ve won!”
Quoth she, and whistles thrice.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Of the land, and what the land gave you—war, pestilence, hunger, pain—he had had enough. It was the sea he wanted. The sea he went looking for. His grandfather had been a fisherman, and he had been taken on the ships in his boyhood. He remembered enough. He had never been afraid. Not of water, still or stormy. It was the ground he had done with, full of graves and mud.
His name was Jeluc, and he had been a soldier fourteen of his twenty-eight years. He looked a soldier as he walked into the village above the sea.
Some ragged children playing with sticks called out foul names after him. And one ran up and said, “Give us a coin.”
“Go to hell,” he answered, and the child let him alone. It was not a rich village.
The houses huddled one against another. But at the end of the struggling, straggling street, a long stone pier went out and over the beach, out into the water. On the beach there were boats lying in the slick sand, but at the end of the pier was a ship, tied fast, dipping slightly, like a swan.
She was pale as ashes, and graceful, pointed and slender, with a single mast, the yard across it with a sail the color of turned milk bound up. She would take a crew of three, but one man could handle her. She had a little cabin with a hollow window and door.
Birds flew scavenging round and round the beach; they sat on the house roofs between, or on the boats. But none alighted on the ship.
Jeluc knocked on the first door. No one came. He tried the second and third doors, and at the fourth a woman appeared, sour and scrawny.
“What is it?” She eyed him like the Devil. He was a stranger.
“Who owns the pale ship?”
“The ship? Is Fatty’s ship.”
“And where would I find Fatty?”
“From the wars, are you?” she asked. He said nothing. “I have a boy to the wars. He never came back.”
Jeluc thought, Poor bitch. Your son’s making flowers in the muck. But then, the thought, What would he have done here?
He said again, “Where will I find Fatty?”
“Up at the drinking-house,” she said, and pointed.
He thanked her and she stared. Probably she was not often thanked.
The drinking-house was out of the village and up the hill, where sometimes you found the church. There seemed to be no church here.
It was