'Lily Juice'

by

Liz Williams

I

write to summon her. She drifts up through the page, swimming in words: first mist, as the letters that I have so recently inscribed begin to blur and dim, shadowy in the flicker of the lamp. Then the air above the page starts to curdle and congeal. Her eyes are always the first to appear, black as a nightjar's wing, rimmed with kohl. She knows how little I can resist those eyes. She murmurs that all I need to do is to stop writing, stop drinking, and then she cannot come. But she knows, too, that I cannot stop.

* * * * *

The house is old. The current building is, so my patron told me, Venetian, but the cellars are clearly more ancient: great blocks of roughly cut marble, cool as snow in the summer, but icy to the touch when the winter storms reach the Cyclades to lash up the straits around the island and whip the olives into leafless frenzy. I do not like to venture into the cold shadows of the cellar in winter, but I am obliged to do so, for that is where the wine is kept, and without the wine, I can no longer write. My host and patron, whose name must not be revealed, was most particular on the subject of wine, as befits a Venetian and an aristocrat, no matter how far he may have fallen.

"You have my permission to broach any of the reds," he instructed me when I first arrived, indicating the racks of dusty bottles with a sweep of a languid hand. "Many are old vintages, laid down by my ancestors in the last century, from our vineyards here on Naxos. There is no limit to what you may touch. Also, here - the rose, with which you may care to refresh your palate. But these - the whites - these you must leave alone."

I replied that this was in perfect accordance with my tastes, which did not - as far as the matter of wine was concerned - run to the light and delicate, but to the broodier heaviness of claret and port. I explained this to my patron and thought that I detected a distant flicker, deep within his gaze, of something that I could not identify.

He said, "And your work - the stories, the poems... do these, too, mirror darkness and blood, sweat and senses, rather than the delicate, the pretty and the refined?"

I forced a laugh, answering, "That depends entirely upon your own - predilections. If your literary desires are directed toward the saltiness of the lash, seaweed odours, of musk and pain, then I shall take care to tailor my work accordingly. But if you prefer oblique imagery, the flutter of petticoats and the revelation of an ankle, then this is what I shall take care to give you."

In response, I received only a chilly, complicit smile. He turned to go, then turned back. "You know why I have been confined here, why I can never be permitted to leave, why I must have some outlet, at least, for my desires?"

I nodded. I knew very well. The trial had been sensational and its outcome had even reached London. I remembered reading a pamphlet that depicted the case: the sketch of the woman, her ruined face concealed behind the betraying charity of a veil, had haunted my imagination for days. When I received the invitation from the man who was to become my patron, I could not resist. At summer's end I took a carriage for the swelter of Athens, then a packet from Piraeus to Naxos. A mule, led by my patron's ancient retainer, brought me here to the house named the Khora.

Legend says that it was upon this island that Theseus abandoned Ariadne, leaving her for another. I thought of her sleeping on a summer shore, waking to find her lover gone...I thought of how angry she must have been. But it was only a story, nothing more. My first sight of the Khora was through seaspray and storm, a shaft of sunlight striking down through the flying foam to illuminate the mansion in a watery haze. High on the cliffs, a graceful crumble, it seemed an unlikely prison. Now, of course, I know better.

* * * * *

When I arrived, it was some time before I found myself able to set pen to paper. The season did not help: it was, as I have indicated, a time of storms. After the heat of the summer, such an atmosphere was not conducive to the writing of erotica. After a week, however, during which my patron grew increasingly restless, the weather settled down into a false idyll of cloudless days and chilly nights. Then, in a room lined with crimson stained-glass windows and the stifling heat of a brazier, I was finally able to work.

Fuelled by the fire of the reds from the cellar, I gave my patron what he wanted. The first few pages, which I had taken care to steep in a sultry atmosphere of violence and anguish, were rejected for being 'too pretty.' I gritted my teeth and recalled with an almost hallucinatory vividness the transcripts of the trial: the details that had so clearly been omitted, the lines between which I was forced to read, the torment driven by a patient and watchful calculation. It was not, let us say, to my own tastes, but the results were pronounced by my patron to verge on acceptability.

I found myself drinking more and more of the claret, resulting each morning in a head stuffed with cotton wool, a mouth filled with mossy velvet, a feeling of claustrophobic malaise. Every time I ventured into the cellar I became increasingly aware of the rack of the whites, cool and luminous, seeming to beckon from the edges of my vision.

Eventually, I began to dream of those pale, forbidden wines. At first, the dream came once a night, a clockwork nightmare.

A slender girl, dressed in white, stood beside a pond among a gnarled tangle of vines. She regarded me gravely, with no discernible emotion, then reached out and plucked a single lily - moon-coloured and tinged with pink - from the depths of the pond. She took it in her hands and wrung its wan neck, then crushed the petals. A bead of moisture dripped into a bronze jar that stood at the fountain's rim.

Each time I awoke, feverish and damp, on the brink of climax. I became obsessed with the identity of the girl, certain that she was real. The dream began to prey upon me. I was sure that it was connected to my desire for the white wines. Moreover, I was awaking every morning with a pounding, thunderous headache, the onset of some inner storm. I forced myself to give up drinking for three long days and did not write so much as a word. My patron's thin Venetian mouth began to grow narrow, like a lizard's before the sudden quick snap of the tongue.

And so it was that, on the evening of the fourth day, I took the long, chilly flight of stone steps down to the wine cellar and laid my trembling hand upon a bottle of the white.

I did not know what I half-expected to happen: perhaps a shriek to ring out, or a great bell begin to toll. Needless to say, nothing of the kind occurred. I stood in the clammy depths of the cellar, clasping an innocent bottle of wine.

Making sure that my patron had been bolted into his rooms for the night, I took the wine back up to my room and set it upon the desk. It seemed almost to glow within the dusty glass and I glanced up at the window, expecting to see the moon. But the night was starless, coated with cloud. Taking hold of the bottle, I uncorked it with difficulty. There was a sound like a sigh as the cork finally pulled free. I poured a glass of the vintage. It was a very pale gold, like the petals of the marguerites that filled the ruined garden, but it smelled strange: a musky, subtle odour that I could not identify. It occurred to me that the bottles had been left there for too long, the wine had spoiled, and this was why I had been forbidden to touch it. But in that case, why had my patron not simply remarked upon it? I took a cautious sip. My mouth filled with fire. I gasped, and the wine slid down my throat with an oystery smoothness, leaving exhilaration in its wake. The next sip tasted of molten gold, warming me from head to toe. The wine had not spoiled. It was a superb vintage, a world away from the heavy ports and clarets, and I felt then that I had never truly tasted wine before.

Sitting down at the desk, I started to write with a feverish burn of inspiration, aroused to a degree to which - jaded as I perhaps was - I had become unaccustomed. In the early hours of the morning, the latest pages complete, I fell back exhausted onto the bed.

Next day, I slipped the pages beneath my patron's door. He retired to his rooms and I did not see him again until the early evening. He came to find me in the kitchen, eyes alight. I had rarely seen him so animated.

"Magnificent," was all that he said. "More." Turning on his heel, he strode from the room, which was just as well. I felt that my face flamed with guilt: the forbidden wine rising like thin and delicate blood in my veins. But the prospect of some unknown penalty was hardly enough to act as a preventative. Later that evening, I retrieved another bottle from the cellar and settled down to work. It was not until I took the first astonishing sip that I realised something: last night had been the first night for a week in which I had not experienced the dream. It was as though the wine had burned it away.

I worked like this for three days, and although I drank twice as much again as I had imbibed of the reds, I did not suffer from the same heaviness on the following morning. Instead, I felt filled with a light, blazing clarity of vision, as in the aftermath of sickness when a precarious health is starting to return. I felt like a hollow reed, through which the breeze of inspiration has no choice but to travel.

And then she came.

* * * * *

It was on the fourth evening after I had first discovered the whites. The autumnal storms had scoured the coast clean and the sky was cloudless. A thin new moon rose in the west, hanging low over the distant bulk of the islands. There was a purity about the night, somehow, and this provided me with added inspiration. I sat at my desk, and wrote, and drank, and wrote some more. The moon sank down. Beyond the window, all was silent apart from the sudden sharp cry of a vixen, across the water. It startled me and I glanced up from the page.

She was there in the window, reflected behind the circle of lamplight. At first, I could see nothing but two dark eyes, wells of blackness against the night. I thought I was imagining it. Then I looked back. The eyes were below mine, hanging in the air just above the page, gazing at me. I stumbled up. She began to take form from the page, the words that I had so recently inscribed swimming up from the parchment in inky veils, until she stood before me in a luminous swathe of indigo. It concealed her as greatly as any Persian maiden: I could see nothing of her face except her eyes. But gradually, one by one, the veils began to peel away. I could see individual words and phrases, dropping like petals to the floor and fading into ash.

She reached out a pale hand and beckoned. Tottering, nothing more than a puppet, I went forward with the wine firing my veins.

I do not remember much of what happened next, but it does not really matter, for when I woke, or came round, that morning, I found that details of what I vaguely recalled as our encounter had been written down. I read through it with arousal and longing and shame. I had never done such things before, and some of them I had never imagined. But I gave the account to my patron anyway, with some small adjustments.

"It is the best you have written yet," he hissed at me, the next evening.

"More like this, do you hear me? More!"

Despite the taint that now clung to me, faint as the breath of wine from a freshly opened bottle, I needed little urging. Once more I raided the rack of the whites, and once more, she came.

I spent the nights with her murmur in my ear, her voice echoing about the room like the sound of the sea.

"Do me justice," she hissed and whispered. "Justice, for me..."

And at last I thought I knew who she must be, and what I must accomplish on her behalf. I began to make plans.

* * * * *

Of course, however, it could not go on. The wine was not limitless, after all, and it was only a matter of time before the loss would be noted. My patron came to me in a rage, on a day not long before the winter solstice.

"The whites!"

"What of them?" I asked, as indifferently as I could, though it was pointless to deny it, since a bottle of the wine stood on the table between us with its lambent, betraying glow.

"You know perfectly well!" He raised a hand, but before he could strike, I caught him by the arm.

"Do not touch me! Do you think I am no more than a girl? No more than her, whom you so abused? Whose spirit talks to me in the darkness? The ghost of the girl you tortured, murdered, raped?"

His thin mouth tightened. "'No more than her', you say? Oh, but I think you are much, much more." Wrenching his arm free from my grasp, a tiny knife appeared from his sleeve. "You really believe that she is the ghost of the girl I murdered? You truly think that? Then think again...But I see that my mistress has already made her mark upon you." His face contorted with a jealousy that I did not, at that moment, understand. "Let me, then, make mine."

I felt a razor's slash across my cheek. I snatched at the bottle and clubbed him with it. He reeled back, and I struck again. The bottle shattered into a hundred pieces. Each drop of the remaining wine seemed to catch the light as it flew outward. I held a shard of glass and I did not stop. I sliced at his throat, until the red drops mingled with the white. It would make, I thought later as I looked down upon the mess, a perfect rose if one could only bottle it.

* * * * *

I buried his corpse beneath the flagstones of the Khora. I did not think he would be greatly mourned or even missed, but there might have been awkward questions on the part of the old retainer. With him, I took the time to be a little more creative. It seemed the right thing to do, though I could not have said why.

Now, it is still the depths of winter. The storms confine me to the house, but soon it will be spring. I have had to be a little sparing with the wine, but once the warmer weather comes, I shall seek out the lily-filled vineyards of Naxos, island of dark goddesses, of abandoned, angry Ariadne, and insist upon a further pressing. I think that it will soon be time for something more adventurous than erotic literature. I think that I have written enough.

* * * * *

(c) Liz Williams, All Rights Reserved

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