Into Gold

by Tanith Lee

When Prince Draco sees the mysterious woman from the East, she entrances him as no one has before. His second-in-command Skorous suspects that she has secret motives when he learns that she has the power to transform things into gold. Is this her only power, or has she bewitched Draco's heart?
Tanith Lee, one of the best fantasists writing today, has crafted a masterful tale of desire and deception. She has written over a dozen novels, and has won the World Fantasy Award for her short fiction.

Genres: Fantasy, Short Stories

50 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1991

About the author

Tanith Lee was a British writer of science fiction, horror, and fantasy. She was the author of 77 novels, 14 collections, and almost 300 short stories. She also wrote four radio plays broadcast by the BBC and two scripts for the UK, science fiction, cult television series "Blake's 7."
Before becoming a full time writer, Lee worked as a file clerk, an assistant librarian, a shop assistant, and a waitress.

Her first short story, "Eustace," was published in 1968, and her first novel (for children) The Dragon Hoard was published in 1971.

Her career took off in 1975 with the acceptance by Daw Books USA of her adult fantasy epic The Birthgrave for publication as a mass-market paperback, and Lee has since maintained a prolific output in popular genre writing.

Lee twice won the World Fantasy Award: once in 1983 for best short fiction for “The Gorgon” and again in 1984 for best short fiction for “Elle Est Trois (La Mort).” She has been a Guest of Honour at numerous science fiction and fantasy conventions including the Boskone XVIII in Boston, USA in 1981, the 1984 World Fantasy Convention in Ottawa, Canada, and Orbital 2008 the British National Science Fiction convention (Eastercon) held in London, England in March 2008. In 2009 she was awarded the prestigious title of Grand Master of Horror.

Lee was the daughter of two ballroom dancers, Bernard and Hylda Lee. Despite a persistent rumour, she was not the daughter of the actor Bernard Lee who played "M" in the James Bond series of films of the 1960s.

Tanith Lee married author and artist John Kaiine in 1992.

Reviews

[Meredith is a hot mess · Rating 5 out of 5]

All day the birds call, and at night the owls come out. There are other things of earth and darkness too. One ceases to be surprised at what may be found in the forests, or what may stray from them on occasion

"No," she said. "Gold is only the clue. For those things which are alive, laved by the flame, it is life. It is immortal and imperishable life.

And then I opened my eyes, and I saw her. There were no others, no Other, they had gone with the tearing. But she-She was no longer veiled. She was very tall, so beautiful I could not bear to look at her, and yet, could not take my eyes away. And she was golden. She was golden not in the form of metal, but as a dawn sky, as fire, and the sun itself. Even her black eyes-were of gold, and her midnight hair. And the tears she wept were stars.



My all-time favorite short story by Tanith Lee. The writing is so gorgeous I feel I can't write a review. I just want to quote from the story.

It's available for free in Open Library, HERE, on p.427. This short story is also in Redder Than Blood.







Art is In Sleep Of Death What Dreams May Come by Diana Van Damme

Fave quotes & excerpts

All day the birds call, and at night the owls come out. There are other things of earth and darkness too. One ceases to be surprised at what may be found in the forests, or what may stray from them on occasion

Discipline is its own ritual, and drug.

_____________________

p.433

When we reached the camp, it was midnight. Our torches an theirs opened the dark, and the flame outside the Mars Temple burned faint. There were stars in the sky, no moon.

The wheels turned idly now this way, now that, in a wind that came from nowhere and went to nowhere, a demon wind out of a desert. Across the space, wide as night, was an opaque dividing curtain, and on the curtain, a long parchment. It was figured with another mass of images, as if nothing in the place should be spare. A tree went up, with two birds at the roots, a white bird with a raven-black head, a soot-black bird with the head of an ape. A snake twined the tree too, round and round, and ended looking out of the lower branches where yellow fruit hung. The snake had the face of a maiden, and flowing hair. Above sat three figures, judges of the dead from Aegyptus...The sun and moon stood over the tree.

Her eyes were very black, black as the eyes of the jackal-dog, blacker than the night. Then she blinked, and her eyes flashed. The lids were painted with gold.

What followed I took for an hallucination, induced by the incense, and by other means less perceptible. That's not to say I did not think she was a witch. There was something of power to her I never met before. It pounded from her, like heat, or an aroma. It did not make her beautiful to me, but it held me quiet, though I swear never once did I lose my grip either on my senses or my sword.

First, and quite swiftly, I had the impression the whole tent blew upward, and we were in the open in fact, under a sky of a million stars that blazed and crackled like diamonds. Even so, the golden wheels stayed put, up in the sky now, and they spun, faster and faster, until each was a solid golden O of fire, three spinning suns in the heaven of midnight.
(I remember I thought flatly, We have been spelled. So what now? But in its own way, my stoicism was also suspect. My thoughts in any case flagged after that.)

There was a smell of lions, or of a land that had them. Do not ask me how I know, I never smelled or saw them, or such a spot. And there before us all stood a slanting wall of brick, at once much larger than I saw it, and smaller than it was. It seemed even so to lean into the sky. The woman raised her arms. She was apparent now as if rinsed all over by gilt, and one of the great stars seemed to sear on her forehead.

Forms began to come and go, on the lion-wind. If I knew then what they were, I forgot it later. Perhaps they were animals, like the skins in the tent, though some had wings.

_____________________

But Draco lay looking at her now, burned up by another fever. It was her personal gold he wanted. "Out, Skorous," he said to me. "Out, now." Slurred and sure.
So I said to her, through my blunted lips and woollen tongue, "Listen carefully, girl. The witchery ends now. You know what he wants, and how to see to that, I suppose. Scratch him with your littlest nail, and you die."

Then, without getting to her feet, she looked up at me, only the second time. She spoke in Greek, as at the start. In the morning, when I was better able to think, I reckoned I had imagined what she said. It had seemed to be: "He is safe, for I desire him. It is my choice. If it were not my choice and my desire, where might you hide yourselves, and live?"
_____________________

It was like the oven of the hallucination in the tent, the thing she had made, yet open, the shape of a cauldron. Rough mud brick, smoothed and curved, and somehow altered. Inside, the fire burned. It had a wonderful color, the fire, rubies, gold. To look at it did not seem to hurt the eyes, or dull them. The woman stood the other side of it, and her child in her grasp. Both appeared ilumined into fire themselves, and the darkness of garments, of hair, the black gape of the doorway of the forest and the night, these had grown warm as velvet. It is a sight often seen, a girl at a brazier or a hearth, her baby held by, as she stirs a pot, or throws on the kindling some further twig or cone. But in her golden arm the golden child stretched out his hands to the flames. And from her moving palm fell some invisible essence I could not see but only feel.

Then Zafra spoke the Name. It was so soft, no sound at all. And yet the roots of the forest moved at it. My entrails churned. I was on my knees. It seemed as though the wind came walking through the forest, to fold his robe beside the ring of golden red. I cannot recall the Name. It was not any of those I have written down, nor anything I might imagine. But it was the true one, and he came in answer to it. And from a mile away, from the heaven of planets, out of the pit of the earth, his hands descended and rose. He touched the child and the child was quiet. The child slept. She drew Draco's son from his wrapping as a shining sword is drawn from the scabbard. She raised him up through the dark, and then she lowered dhim, and set him down in the holocaust of the oven, into the bath of flame, and the fires spilled up and covered him.

No longer on my knees, I was running. I plunged through the black waves of heat, the amber pungence of incense, and the burning breath of lions. I yelled as I ran. I screamed the names of all the gods, and knew them powerless in my mouth, because I said them wrongly, knew them not and so they would not answer. And then I ran against the magic, the Power, and broke through it. It was like smashing air. Experienced-inexperienceable.

But I held in my grip only a child of jewel-work, of poreless perfect gold, and I sensed his gleam run into my hands, through my wrists, down my arms like scalding water to my heart.

Someone said to me, then, with such gentle sadness, "Ah, Skorous. Ah Skorous."
I lay somewhere, not seeing. I said, "Crude sorcery, to turn the child too, into gold."

"No," she said. "Gold is only the clue. For those things which are alive, laved by the flame, it is life. It is immortal and imperishable life. And you have torn the spell, which is all you think it to be. You have robbed him of it."

And then I opened my eyes, and I saw her. There were no others, no Other, they had gone with the tearing. But she-She was no longer veiled. She was very tall, so beautiful I could not bear to look at her, and yet, could not take my eyes away. And she was golden. She was golden not in the form of metal, but as a dawn sky, as fire, and the sun itself. Even her black eyes-were of gold, and her midnight hair. And the tears she wept were stars.

I did not understand, but I whispered, "Forgive me. Tell me how to make it right."

"It is not to be," she said. Her voice was a harp, playing through the forest. 'It is never to be. He is yours now, no longer mine. Take him. Be kind to him. He will know his loss all his days, all his mortal days. And never know it.'"

And then she relinquished her light, as a coal dies. She vanished.

p.448

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We share a secret, he and I, that neither has ever confided to the other. He remains uncomfortable with the boy. Now the princedom is larger, its borders fought out wider, and fortressed in, he sends him often away to the fostering of soldiers. It is I, without any rights, none, who love her child.

He is all Draco, to look at, but for the hair and brows. We have a dark-haired strain ourselves. yet there is a sheen to him. They remark on it. What can it be? A brand of the gods-(They make no reference, since she has fallen from their favor, to his mother.) A light from within, a gloss, of gold. Leaving off his given name, they will call him for that effulgence more often, Ardorius. Already I have caught the murmur that he can draw iron through stone, yes, yes, they have seen him do it, though I have not. (From Draco they conceal such murmurings, as once from me.) He, too, has a look of something hidden, some deep and silent pain, as if he knows, as youth never does, that men die, and love, that too.

[Netanella · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 superb shiny GOLDEN stars for this wonderful historical fantasy piece, Into Gold. The story is set in the dying years of the Roman Empire, when Rome herself has fallen and her commanders are left stranded in distant provinces across her once far-flung empire. In one such outpost at the junction of West and East, Draco and his Captain Skorous allow a travelling caravan rich in gold to enter their walls. When it departs a few days later, it leaves behind a mysterious Eastern woman, Zafra, gilt in gold and said to possess immense powers of witchcraft...

[Glen Engel-Cox · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like so much of Lee’s work, this is almost indescribable. A fantasy story about a minor prince and the Captain of the Guard who supports him, loyal to a fault, but with no other place to go, and the woman that the prince takes as his lover and wife and, eventually mother of his child. But she’s a witch woman, and the Captain doesn’t trust her, and therein lies the problem. Lee was great at providing just enough lush description to make her work exotic without overwhelming it, and her characterizations here are some of the best in the genre. Recommended.

[Karl · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is Pulphouse paperback #32.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This story was reprinted in Modern Classics of Fantasy.