Tamastara

by Tanith Lee

Genres: Fantasy; Dark Fantasy; Dragons & Mythical Creatures; Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology; General Fiction

Synopsis

For the first time in e-book, a collection of tales inspired by the mythos and culture of India. 

Seven stories for seven nights.
 
Tales of ancient nagas, the shapeshifting race of Serpent-People, and of assassins, who bear the names of demons. Tales of majestic tigers, the bond between hunter and hunted, and of warriors, the spirit of the Kashatriya caste. Tales of love and beauty, of transformation and reincarnation—the experiences over lifetimes that shape a soul.
 
In this collection of short stories, Tanith Lee explores the mythos and culture of India, vividly imagining fantasies inspired by Indian folklore and Hindu theology. 

Release date: March 22, 2022

Publisher: DAW

Print pages: 221

Sample

Foreign Skins
I
After the summer rains, the road up to the bungalow was for a while a river of red mud. As the mud dried, drowned things came to light; rats, a long-tailed bird, a mongoose.
“There was also the body of an old woman,” said the man, uncaringly at his breakfast in the verandah. “A corpse some of them made a whole lot of fuss about.”
“David,” said the woman.
The man, her husband, glanced at her in slight though exaggerated inquiry. “What about David?”
“He’s listening, dear.”
“Let him listen.”
“But Chaver, dear—”
“Death’s a fact. Isn’t it, old chap?” Across the table, the eight-year-old boy, pale still despite the heat of a mighty sun, nodded. “That’s right,” said the man. “My God, Evelyn. He’s got to get used to it. He’ll see it all round him in this place.”
“Yes,” said Evelyn, and she touched her napkin to her lips.
“What was I saying?” the man she had called Chaver asked them. When they could not or would not tell him, he shook out his paper, somewhat late as it always was up here, and began to read, dismissing them.
That evening, as the stars were lit across the sky and grasshoppers whirred in the bushes, a woman came up the garden’s impeccable path, between the orange trees, and halted by the rhododendron under the veranda. Dark as the dusk, making no movement, she stood there for some while, until the doors of the dining room were opened. Then the thick amber lamplight fell on her and there was shouting.
“What in God’s name is all this noise?” demanded Chaver Finlay, striding up to the doors in his punctilious dinner jacket.
“A beggar woman,” said the house servant who had shouted. “I tell her, she must go.”
The man looked. He saw the woman by the ghostly rhododendron tree, in the light a creature of darkness, which folded its hands and bowed to him, and said in perfect English, “Lord, I seek shelter. I lost my home in the rains, and all I possess. I have been wandering a great time.” She was clad, he saw, in a piece of filthy sackcloth, probably come on at the wayside. Under the rag, she appeared supple and beautiful. Her hair was plaited into a black snake-tail that fell behind her. Her face was a fine one, with a delicately rimmed Asiatic mouth, the nose somewhat long but slenderly shaped, her eyes large and wide-spaced. On her wide low forehead, suggestive of intelligence and calm, there was no mark of caste. Nor did she have any jewelry, even to a glass bangle or a silver stud in the nostril.
“Well,” said Chaver Finlay, who was rather fascinated by these women. “Well. Go to the kitchen. Tell them I said you get food. And see if Asha can’t find you something to wear.”
“The Lord is very kind.”
He liked, the man, to be called “lord,” as they so often called him, in their own tongue or his. Tall and well-made, deeply tanned, hair and eyes black as the hair and eyes of any native, he found himself now, as often, stimulated by the contact of this world, so unlike his beginnings, so appealing to his spirit—or what he took to be his spirit. His work, which had to do with local government, was dry and uninspiring. He saw little connection between the work and the people, who continually intrigued him, that the work was ideally meant to serve.
Sitting at dinner, too, he compared Evelyn irresistibly and without quite knowing he did so, to the indigenous womanhood. Alas, poor Evelyn. How utterly unlike. Unlike to such an extent that it was almost a joke, Thin, but without any of the angular, heroic grace of the village woman. Fair, and suffering for her fairness, burned a dreadful pink that was not becoming, even when heavily powdered. The alien sun was not kind to Evelyn. It seemed to have bled out the color of her eyes which once, in a cooler clime, had enchanted him for two whole months. And the boy . . . the boy seemed set to go the same way. “Eat up your meat, David,” the man said absently. Milksop. Could he have bred a milksop? Little and thin and pale, if not yet burnt. The blue eyes were so rarely raised to meet his father’s, the father did not quite remember how they looked. Of course, Evelyn had spent a lot of time with the boy, and there were no other boys nearby for him to play with, to get some sense and some backbone thumped into him. Except the native children. But that was out of the question.
When the meal was over, the servant brought the decanter and glass and a box of cigarettes. Applying the lighter deftly, the servant said, “That woman is outside. She wishes to come in and speak to the Sahib, but I have said—”
“Whatever you said, go and tell her she may.”
Evelyn lifted her sandy eyebrows. She got a word of explanation, before the vagabond entered.
Finlay had a desire to draw in a great breath of pleasure at her apparition. Asha had obviously given of her best, an outfit of singing green and saffron, which the stranger wore as if it were her own. Even the black, black hair had been oiled before rebraiding and the oil’s somber perfume seemed to glow inside his nostrils like the whiskey on his palate.
She gave him again the obeisance, her eyes unlowered, huge black coals with all the lamplight held in them in two little golden beads.
“I have come only to thank you,” she said.
Finlay lounged a fraction. “But you’d thank me more if you could stay.”
She said nothing, and the other woman in the room gave a quick sharp rustle, like something in undergrowth. Finlay did not look at either of them. He refilled his glass.
“I assume you’d like to, because you told me you lost everything in the flood. Even your . . . Mother, would it have been?” There was a silence. When he looked up again, the dark ghost shook her head slowly. “It’s just,” he said, “an old woman was found about half a mile down the road, dead in the mud. Without clothing. The body was badly decomposed,” Evelyn made a verbal noise this time, “and rather curiously—but of course, the kites had got there, too, by then—” Evelyn’s noise was louder. “I merely thought, two strangers in these parts might have been traveling together.”
“No, lord.”
Finlay smiled, basking in that word.
“Well then, if we kept you, what could you do?”
“Really,” said Evelyn. “I don’t think—”
“Now, now,” he said, all velvet, “we can’t turn the homeless away, can we?” And she became once more dumb, only a pity it wasn’t permanent. His dark ghost meanwhile had turned her eyes aside. She had fixed them, those lenses of coal and gold, on his son. Ah, yes. The surest way to the father’s good graces, through his male offspring. As for David, he looked quite mesmerized, the little brute. “My son,” said Chaver Finlay to the woman, “is something of a dunce. At languages, particularly. Our dialects round here fox him, don’t they, old chap? On the other hand, your English is excellent, and I heard you exchanging words with my man, out there, in a splendid version of local lingo. Perhaps you might be helpful in this way. Do you think you could teach the boy something?” (And I’m sure you could teach him a great deal. Only he’s a touch young for that. I, though . . . ) He only felt Evelyn on this occasion, her loud protests were mute, a sort of vibration. Evelyn did not like the new schoolteacher. But David did. His small pallid face was full of expectation. And Chaver liked her a lot.
“If you wish,” she said, “I will try.” She went on looking at David, and then slowly she smiled at him. Chaver Finlay would have preferred to have that smile himself, instead of its being wasted on the brat. But never mind. She would smile at the man soon enough. He offered her board and lodging now, and a small sum in annas, which she accepted as if it neither insulted nor amazed her, nor mattered, part of the Eastern Act, as he sometimes termed it.
“Come up to the house after breakfast, about nine o’clock. All right? My wife will see David’s in proper order for you. What are we to call you?”
That brought her eyes back to him. She regarded him for some moments, as if considering. Why, she’s inventing a name for herself, he thought. Are you that notorious, my beauty? And he resolved to check this tomorrow in the official offices, which was an oddly exciting idea, and would make a nice change from memoranda on irrigation and outbreaks of fever.
Then she said the name, and he missed it and had to ask her to repeat what she had said, as if testing her.
“Agnini,” she told him, with no trace of reluctance.
“Oh,” he said, teasingly, “then will you keep lightning from striking the house, O daughter of Fire? That should be worth a pa’i or so more.”