October 11th – Emma Frances Dawson – ‘An Itinerant House’ (1897) – Read it here.
Catch up on the challenge here.
“Houses seem to remember,” said he. “Some rooms oppress us with a sense of lives that have been lived in them.”
A cursed room in a house… a lady scorned by her lover who marries someone else… it’s all very dramatic. I enjoyed the galvanism aspect, used here as a form of early defibrillation.
I toyed with the idea, because of the cursed room, of re-posting Love Song for The Crows for this day, but then I thought I’d play with the resurrection aspect.
“‘Better dead than alive!’ True. You knew I would be glad to die. What right had you to bring me back? God’s curses on you! I was dead. Then came agony. I heard your voices. I thought we were all in hell. Then I found how by your evil cunning I was to be forced to live.”
It reminded me a lot of Wake Not The Dead by Ernst Raupach (often misattributed to Johann Ludwig Tieck in English translations, as it is in this version linked here).
I thought I’d have a go at a necromancy scene for this – this isn’t attached to any plot or story, I just had the idea and wanted to see where it went. I’ve used French names as a stand in for now, as I have no idea where or when this should be set, but perhaps it would make sense in the world of Yelen & Yelena.
I also wanted to think about how necromancy might work in different ways, to avoid the agonies of being dragged back to life. So I came up with something just for a short scene, and here it is:
“This is sex magic,” Gaudin said, stopping abruptly as the thought occurred to him. His shovel bit the dirt and remained there. “You mean this is for fertility rites.”
His companion, a shorter, fatter man, continued to dig by the light of their dim oil lamps.
“It is, isn’t it?” Gaudin, the taller and stronger of the two, had been making better progress, and now without him the effort of his companion was doubled. Gaudin wiped sweat from his weathered brow and frowned. “I wouldn’t have agreed if I’d—“
“It’s never been done before,” his companion grunted. “Nobody thinks of it. It’s always blood, and skulls, and dribbly candles, done by some red-eyed horse-wit who looks like a rabid squirrel. But think about it – we’re calling something from the earth, like seeds long-buried. The dead don’t like being woken anymore than a sleeping acorn does, but there’s ways of making that waking feel natural.” He stopped, out of breath from his speech on top of the physical exertion, and panted over the handle of his shovel. “And,” he said at last, “It’s not just anyone. It’s for Isabeau.”
“She’s been sleeping for four hundred years,” Gaudin said softly. “Shouldn’t we let her sleep?”
His companion, Faubert, shook his head, but there was doubt and sorrow in his eyes, the shadow of it caught in the flicker of the lamps. “I can’t,” he whispered. “You know it.”
Gaudin sighed. Ever since Isabeau Montclerc’s portrait had been rediscovered in the Chateau, Jehann Faubert had been a man obsessed. Lady Isabeau had been known only in fable and story prior to this discovery, and her powers greatly feared. It was said that she won the Battle of Montparnasse with an army of skeletal warriors, commanding the dead to rise from the field and come under her dominion, until the opposing army found themselves a third of the size and fighting the corpses of their own comrades. Isabeau Montclerc rode a immense black stallion called Bright Eyes, whom she had raised from a colt, and whose hide nothing could pierce.
Not only was she the most talented necromancer of her age, or of any age, and skilled at the art of defensive magic, she was also a wonderful pianist, painter, and dancer. The portrait uncovered at the Chateau was one the Lady Isabeau had painted of herself, while facing the great gilded mirror in the Blue Salon.
Faubert had never been the same man since that day. He was convinced that Lady Isabeau was the only salvation for their province as it stood on the brink of total destruction, the armies advancing through the land as what had come to be colloquially termed the Cousins’ War raged on. Gaudin, for all his education and common sense, had come to agree with him. There were no other choices, and the attempted resurrection of the greatest warrior and magic practitioner of a bygone age was the best chance they had.
Still, the methods Faubert proposed for the resurrection were– unorthodox.
“I’m not sure about this,” Gaudin said. “I’m not saying you’re not good. As far as soilwork goes, you’re the best, in my estimation. Ah! Well, you know what I think.” He looked about them at the silent forest, and shrugged himself deeper into his cloak. “And what if she doesn’t want to be woken?”
“You saw her painting,” Faubert cried, ruddy-faced. “Those signs, the symbols, the hidden clues, tell me I imagined it! She left instructions. And the look in her eyes, tell me I imagined that.“
In truth, Gaudin was not sure what he had seen in the face of Isabeau Montclerc, and could not answer his friend. The portrait’s eyes were painted so skillfully that they captured every speck of light, and so alive that they spoke to one’s soul. But what the painted Isabeau said to Gaudin, and what she said to Faubert, were clearly not the same things. For Gaudin, standing before that glorious artwork, Isabeau appeared as a terrible queen, and spoke to him in imperious, wordless visions of willing servitude. It had chilled him to his core – for in that moment he knew he would bend the knee only to Isabeau Montclerc from that moment on, and his life was in the hands of a woman long dead, and his heart ached with the melancholic weight of that dreadful knowledge.
Faubert, as always, took things further.
Now they were here, in the depths of night, digging up an ancient forest.
“We need four more layers of soil,” Faubert insisted. “And then we shall have enough. Four more layers down and we will be at the level she may have walked, think of that! And then we can begin.”
Gaudin cast a look at the samples of earth already recovered and put by in boxes. He nudged one listlessly with the toe of his boot. “But then you’re proposing fertility rites…”
“She must waken layer by layer, like a plant, you cannot simply drag someone back through all this distance of time, things go wrong.” Faubert began digging again. “Like those deep water pearl divers, you know, when they return to the surface too quickly.”
“But fertility rites…” There was something that Gaudin couldn’t shake about that, about what he and Faubert would be doing later on, that distressed him. The idea that anything about his own profane body would be involved in the rites that would raise the Lady Isabeau – he was unworthy, for all his lineage and good name, so desperately unworthy, that it appalled him.
“We are following her instructions,” Faubert snapped, out of patience. “Really, how can you be so prudish, when you have done so many of them before? It is only soil.”
“But it will be sprinkled onto her,” Gaudin mumbled, blushing hard. “It will touch her skin…”
“Her bones,” Faubert corrected. “It will become her skin.”
This was nearly too much for Gaudin, who felt himself swooning as if the trench they had dug had cracked open the Lady’s grave. He leaned heavily on his shovel. “Please,” he said faintly, “Why not try the traditional way after all?”
But Faubert only scoffed, and kept digging. “That is not how she wanted it. After all this, at this moment of crisis – after all we have seen – wouldn’t you do anything for Isabeau?”
Gaudin couldn’t understand how Faubert used her name so familiarly, like a close, departed friend, and realised that while she saw him, Gaudin, as a vassal, she had spoken to Faubert as a peer, a fellow practitioner. For the first time in all their ten-year friendship, the claw of envy pierced Gaudin’s breast.
But – those eyes, the portrait, the approaching doom.
“For Isabeau,” he said at last, “And for us, too.”
Faubert nodded, and Gaudin resumed digging.
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