Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer: Expanded Edition (11 page)

THREE

The moon rose late upon the walled garden. It hollowed the sky above to a milky blueness, and touched the formal walks below with dainty traceries like lace, and in the wilder grottoes found out the pale limbs of nymph’s and the mirrors of water. Passing the sundial, making of it a moon-dial, the moon let fall a long veil on to a lawn hedged by the briers of a savage shrubbery, and so found Jaspre too. She sat upon the ground. Her hands, which had been dishes for her tears, now lay as if slain in her lap. Her eyes were dry, her heart a desert.

Her flight had brought her here, close to the outer wall, and she had glimpsed above it those claws of the blasted trees which were all she had ever seen of the outer world. A waste wilderness must lie beyond the wall. And now, her life was such a wilderness. She could not mourn. She could no longer weep. Not grasping the essence of annihilation, she wished only to cease, to be no more, as if sunk in some profound sleep devoid of wakening.

It was unnecessary for her to search about herself. Even when the moon blushed through the garden, there was, for Jaspre’s desolation, nothing to gaze on. And then some dormant nerve, rousing in spite of her, caused her to glance, to see the lawn, the dense shrubbery, and, seated between the two, the still shape that was neither plant nor statue.

Jaspre’s hands revived and sprang together. She started up, young enough to experience terror even in her misery. But the shape ascended with her, steeped in moonlight. So she saw—not image, not dream—but an actual man, and scarcely seven paces away. His unknown features were handsome, even in the mezzotint of the moon, though drained by the moon as if seen through a fine gauze. His hair looked dark, his eyes brilliant. His clothes were quite alien to her, being classically functional—the wear of a woodsman or a hunter from one of her painted books.

She said nothing. Her sheer innocence did not provide for her the ready suspicion and the outcry of another. Yet she feared, feared till he spoke. And then his voice lulled her by its gentleness, by the curious words he offered.

“Sweet girl, your hair, which is like the sun by day, becomes the moon by night.”

“How do you know me?” Jaspre asked, wonder easing her anxiety as anxiety had eased her despair.

“I do not know you. The witch’s house is avoided. But once, I came through the wood, and heard melody and singing. It was not she. A creeper robes the wall. I climbed it. I saw you. I see you now. But know you I do not.”

Jaspre turned a little way, toward the distant house from which the wide length of the garden separated her. It was an intuitive response, to evade him. And yet it was the house she now wished to evade, and all remembered and familiar things, tainted by her failure, the harsh and hating phrases of the woman this man named “the witch.” She had flown here, and could not fly back into such dismal shelter. Entrapped, she shuddered. She had been kept from her own kind. She guessed this was a crime—to converse with a man. She had been offered to a god. Who had refused her. A fresh dawn of pain broke on her, a fresh river of tears.

“Why do you weep?” the man murmured. He had drawn closer and though she had turned from him, she did not move away. “Do you fear me so very greatly?”

“No,” she said. Her tears were once more ceaseless.

“Is it then that hag who mistreats you?”

“I am worthless,” said Jaspre. “I desire only to die.”

“You are lovely,” he said. “You must live.”

“I was born for one purpose, and cannot hope for it.”

“What strange purpose can that have been?”

Her tongue could not render all his titles, yet: “A lord,” she sobbed, snared by the unique and final easement of confession, confiding. “A prince of a prince—and he does not want me. I am vile to him.”

“He told you this?”

“My lady told me it was so.”

His voice was already murmuring at her ear, and now his arm slid around her. In her grief and wretchedness she leaned against him, aware this was some further sin, yet unable to deny herself the comfort of it.

“Silver maiden,” he said, and held her so she might rest “Say I am a prince. Will you take me as your lord instead?” But Jaspre, truthful in her naïveté, answered quietly,

“You are not a prince.”

“Yes,” he said, and laughed. His laugh was like warm music, and she recalled that other laughter in her dream, so terrible, so cold, and the destructive icy flame that leapt from it. “These are merely the clothes I wander in. Trust me, I have finery, I have horses flowered in metal and jewels. I have a kingdom, and rule there.”

“No,” she said, but she laid her head against his shoulder.

He smiled. His lips found her hair, her forehead, eyelids, lashes, and her tears ended.

“Will you take me, then, for myself alone?”

“Take you for yourself?” she whispered.

“As love, as lord. Your prince, if no other’s, gorgeous Jaspre?”

“How do you know my name?”

“I heard her call you, the hag in the house.”

Jaspre raised her eyes. She beheld him again, more sufficiently now. Remotely, the darkness of his hair calmed her, a reminiscence. And it seemed to her that, although he was not the statue, nor a god, yet he was more wonderful than the phantom she had been given to, his eyes like stars, his face like an angel’s—and though she had been allowed her life that she should serve one alone, and that the demon prince Angemal, yet it came to her all at once that to love him had been her error. Then, the man who stood with her, holding her in his strong arms, warming and soothing her with his nearness and his own human beauty, kissed her mouth. The kiss was like no other touch, no other sensation ever before felt, or looked for. It seemed to her indeed she slept and had passed thereby into some other world. Or that, for the very first, she had awakened.

From the depths of this extraordinary state, as if beneath water, she heard him say, “You are imprisoned here. Come with me, I will release you from your jail.”

Metaphysically she struggled then, with everything, and with herself. And was brought at last to say: “No. I may not leave this place.”

“Yes. You may, you shall.”

Jaspre hung her head, the comprehension of the wrong she did now awesome, almost pleasing, yet dreadful and to be dreaded.

And in that moment flame burst like lightning from the far-off shadow of the house. A lamp had been kindled in Jaspre’s apartment.

“She searches for you,” he said. “Go in to her. Tomorrow, at moonrise, return to this spot. You will find me here.”

“No, I shall not return.”

“It is a charm I set on you.”

“No. No.”

“I will draw you back to me. You shall see. By a chain of stars.”

“No.”

A footstep clacked upon a path.

His arms let her free, and Jaspre moved toward the footstep like a clockwork thing. Deception was new to her, a sword which cut her hands. She did not look back, but beyond the clouded shrubbery, beyond a hedge, a walk, a tree with the moon like a white fruit in its branches, his voice stole once again to her ear, a moth of sound, no more, that replied only:
Yes.

The woman stood, black on the lighted window, one foot on the paving which led into the garden, waiting. She spoke to Jaspre, toneless now, and cool, no longer harsh. There was in this mode a sort of forgiveness, a promise of leniency. Conjured before Jaspre’s dazzled eyes, the image of Angemal in his black garments formed, and faded. The unknown lover’s mortal kisses lingered on her skin.

* * * *

The world was round and moved upon its axis, so the young girl knew quite well from her studies. The stars were fixed, it was the Earth which traveled, save for those wandering errants, the planets, which came and went on their own invisible roads across the dusks of morning and of evening and the enormous night of the outer spaces, which held everything. And yet, how contrary perception, which knew as well, and better, that the sun, the moon, the stars arose and set. The earth was flat beneath a dome of ether which flooded with light or dark only as the fire of the sun illumined it or went out.

And so with Jaspre’s world, which had become two things: The impossible, which was reality, the reality which was impossible.

The witch’s servant and doll, pressed now into rituals of fast and trance, into kneelings upon stone, crystals told like a rosary in her hands, incantations hymned, a pilgrimage along the inner path to him, the god of shadows, the prince of darknesses. Perfection to be made more perfect, fineness to be refined, until acceptable, until irresistible. This, the world as it was. And in the garden, the other earth, the landscape of truth growing every second more actual, making all else a ghost, and yet never to be realized. This, the deception, the mirage.

They walked under the black leaves, the silver branches. They leaned together on pillows of moss, only their hands linked, now and then their lips brushing, but as the leaves brushed overhead, like children. His patience in all seduction was inexhaustible, this stranger from beyond the wall. He spoke of the world’s wonders, of seas and citadels, mountains, markets, the swarms of mankind, urging her to seek them with him. He mentioned a towered city and she knew he lied when he seemed to say that it was his. “I will not come away with you,” she said. “Tomorrow, do not wait for me here.” But always he returned, and Jaspre also. She came to gaze on him, to gaze and gaze, entranced by his features, the graceful gestures which he made. These trances were unlike the trances of the insularium. She fasted only in his absence. Like a certain flower, her love died in one area, sprang upward in another. To Jaspre now he was more handsome than the dream of Angemal. She worshiped at a human altar. The inspiration of the witch’s god—Ahriman, Asmodeus, Bel, Satan—fell from her like charcoaled petals, and seemed done.

She felt no danger. Nor it seemed did her lover. His constant pleas, disciplined and never actually pleading, that she should escape with him at once, always
now
this night, this, or this, it had no slightest savor of panic. It seemed he thought time ever on his side, eternity before them in which he might persuade, in which she could decide.

And she, trained like a vine to the surface of her passions, heights but not depths, beheld all as it was, developing upon it her longings and her theme. She never checked at the sweep of a bird’s wing over the moon, a shimmer of taloned briers, rustling among grasses. She had no guilt, no apprehension. She had a distant fear, but not of any subtle thing. She seemed to sense the abyss of the tower descending before her, and the great fall she must accomplish, and the ultimate rejection, no longer despair, but a terror past enduring. Yet, it was to come. It was the earth-turning sunset, moon-set. A fact that all evidence perceptible assured her was not so.

* * * *

“How old are you, Jaspre?” the woman asked.

“I am fifteen years of age, my lady.”

“You are pale and sullen. Do you mean to be?”

“No, my lady.”

“Give me your hand. Do you see this faint scar on your wrist? Do you remember how it came there?”

“I remember a binding. When the binding was taken away, I saw the mark.”

“Tonight you may not wander in the garden. In an hour, when the twilight is finished, you will enter the insularium.”

* * * *

The woman sat brooding in her stone house on fifteen years of power that had not yet come to her, on a statue with jeweled eyes, fingers, feet, until her servant advanced into the room, that tall man, the dark-skinned Eastern mute.

In his language of signs, which she had taught him and which only they knew, he spoke to her. He had watched the portico. It was ever the same. A young man would appear, slender, his movements catlike and elegant, his face in shadow, the moon at his back. And Jaspre would go to him. They would lie together, but not in carnality. She was a virgin yet, the pure child who was the price, the bargain, the golden rope into Hell the Underworld.

Demons had tempted maidens with apples. Peerless maidens, exquisite youths, these were the apples with which demons were tempted. Reared from birth to particular ways, definite forms, pliant, sweet, unblemished. Once bitten into, bruised, the spoiled fruit was useless and must be flung away.

Plucked then, but untasted. Perhaps only readied the more certainly…

But the woman saw suddenly with her inner eye, the scavenging father, the lustrous whore, mother to the child. And these devils of the mind, cringing before her also jeered. “Why,” the man said, filthy and golden, “he is one step from enjoying her, one minute away from getting her, maybe, full of a pair of twins—a son, a daughter. A powder then, a herb, to make the trouble go away—”

The woman dismissed him, this vision. Next, her flesh and blood servant was sent out. Only then was one darkened window opened upon the night-bloomed garden.

Black before moon-rise, it stretched its vistas out for her, a carpet, a maze. Nothing stirred, no white figure, the too-early moon of Jaspre. Not even the foliage of a forbidden tree rippled in the low wind.

Presently the woman passed from black night to a black lacquer door, and down into her sorcerous cellar.

FOUR

Jaspre descended to the insularium, the first short prelude to that greater, abysmal descent. She knew, her very spirit guessed, that this night was the ending. And she was dull with terror, lax with it, she walked like one almost asleep.

Within, her mind turned drearily about and about.

Her blonde slippers on the stair, she thought of her lover, the moon’s rising and his arrival in the garden to find, at last, she had not come to meet him. Her flaxen dress brushing over the occult threshold, she wondered how long he would linger before he went away. On each occasion of their parting she had said farewell to him as if forever, dimly acknowledging this last night would claim her finally, fold her away into its obscurity. From which, her instinct told her, she would not return. Her impulse was not to resist. Such seeds as resistance had never been planted in her character. She was just that creature her mentor had trained her to be—pliant, sweet—only he had left any imprint on her psyche, molding her gradually and mysteriously to other patterns. Yet he had been, it seemed, too gradual, too patient, too much an optimist. Seeing the shadow of the chamber spread like a deep well before her, Jaspre felt a moment’s wilder fright, picturing how he might come to the house to seek her, batter on its doors, invite the wrath of the woman’s cold and unstressed powers—but he, too, feared.
The witch,
he had called her from the first. He had never gone close to the inner walls of the house. No, he would not risk himself in such a way. He would merely suppose the immaculate idyll ended, and so it was. He would hasten to safety. Jaspre mourned and she was glad it should be so.