Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer: Expanded Edition (3 page)

His voice smiled, but you could hear there was a knife in him, in his very soul.

“Corrupter!” bawled one of the priests. “Blasphemer!”

Other priests took up the cry. All at once, most of the crowd was thundering. Only here and there someone wept, usually a woman.

“The fee I wished for,” said the Piper, and even over the din they heard him, “was to win your love away from that statue of a rat, which is not any kind of god, whatever you may say.”

Screams of outrage roiled on the slope. Again the Piper spoke, and again they heard him.

“But you won’t pay my fee, will you? You won’t open your cage and follow me.”

From somewhere a stone whirled over the sky and aimed to smash the Piper on the cheek, then another and another. A rain of stones and clods of earth flailed around him, and then ended, because none of the missiles had hit its mark. Like frightened wretches who have pulled the tail of a chained lion, only to find the chain is unfastened, the crowd collapsed on itself. The priests flung themselves down the hill to the feet of Raur the rat god. They tugged off his veil, and there he was, in all his marble magnificence, for the people to cling to. He would keep them sane and safe. He would drive off the rats and make sure that the granaries were full, and that some would get rich and all could dream of it. He would ensure there was always a profit to bicker over, someone better off to be jealous of, someone to cheat, someone to hate. And if any struck you in the face, Raur the rat would be sure to lesson you that you in turn must strike them back.

“Save us!” the priests and people yelled to Raur, clasping his chilly smooth sides.

Cleci remembered how she had hidden her rough hands from him, embarrassed to be poor.

The Piper watched the people on the hill, silently. And, just as before, his quiet spread to them, and their noise went out like the flames that were somehow going out on all the torches.

“I can’t force you,” he said at length. They all heard him, and most of them shuddered. “There would be no point in that.”

“Our god is protecting us,” someone screamed.

“Go away, you evil magician. Take your devil’s music and go.”

The Piper turned. It was odd. He appeared to be limping. Perhaps one of the stones had hit him after all.

All the stars seemed to die.

From the depths of the crowd, a woman squealed spitefully: “He’s just a great tall insolent child. A wicked child that needs whipping.”

At that, the Piper turned back. His face was a white blank that seemed to have no features.

“Am I to be wicked for you?” he said softly. “Yes, perhaps I can be. I’d forgotten that. As for children… I couldn’t lead you aside from your ugly rat god. But it seems a pity to me your children should be enslaved to him, as you are. I think I will take your children away from you.”

On the hill, empty of day, of winds, of stars, of kindness, the crowd trembled.

“Yes,” said the Piper. “My fee. Not your gold, and not your love. Your children I’ll have.”

Someone whimpered.

Cleci stared, but the Piper was not on the hill any more.

Then she felt a sharp pinch on her arm. The miller’s daughter hissed at her: “Why, you little thief. You’ve stolen my ribbon. Give it back, or my daddy will have you ducked in the river.”

Cleci tore the blue ribbon from her waist and threw it at the miller’s daughter. Cleci jumped up before she knew what she was doing. She ran away, up into the night-black vineyards.

* * * *

The only light in the vineyards seemed to be Cleci’s own dull whitish dress. No moon showed, and no stars. The black sky must be choked by black clouds. The vines hung around her, also black. Once she turned her foot, and looked down and saw a silvery thing. One of the priestesses’ bells, dropped during the Procession.

The day seemed a hundred miles away, and she knew he was nearer. She had only, it seemed to her, to wish to find him, and she would do so. But she was afraid. She could not bear to find the Piper, though she had come looking for him. She cried, and rubbed her eyes on her hair and her sleeves, till the scent of her tears blotted out the sweet tang of the grapes.

“Don’t cry,” he said to her eventually, out of the dark.

“Why not,” she said. “You have spoiled everything.”

She was so afraid of him, she did not become any more afraid from speaking to him in this way, though she understood by then he was supernatural, and a god.

“I regret the spoiling,” he said from the darkness, “but I would do it again.”

“Why must we love you, and not Raur?” she demanded. “Why?”

“You know why. Of them all, you know.”

“Yes…because he’s only a stone. But you are—”

“Yes. I am.”

“Then, what difference does it make to you?” she asked him, sensing omnipotence, fire, aeons, and all of them his.

“Because, quite simply, unless I am believed in, I shall die. And when I die, Cleci, some part of the spirit of humanity dies with me.”

“Yes,” she said. She sighed, and sat on the grass between the stocks. She could not see the grapes, or his hair. If she had been able to, they would have been the same red. “Couldn’t you,” she said, “perform some magic to convince them?”

“The magic is everywhere. They’re not convinced. Water can be turned into wine, or blood. I shall have to die for them, before they believe in me.”

“I believe in you,” she said.

“I know you do. That is why I am here.”

“But the children,” she said. “You mustn’t take the children away.”

“I’ll spare you,” he said.

She said hotly, “I’m not a child.”

When he laughed gently, she knew for sure how dangerous he was. The others had been determined not to know, averting their eyes from the truth of him. He was like a snake, coiled in the shadows, smooth as amber, with the bite of death in his mouth which had made music.

“You spoke of love, but you’re cruel,” she said.

“Yes. Love is cruel, when denied. I’m sorry for your village, but I would do that again, too, if it were to be done. I will be remembered. Somehow.”

“They’ll remember wrongly.” She looked away into the vines and the night. She knew she would not see him physically anymore. “How,” she said, “will you take the children? Will you play the pipe and make them follow you, as the dogs and rats followed you? Will you pipe them into the deep water below the ford and make them drown?”

“No, Cleci,” he said. “It’s easier, and more vile, than that. But still, recollect when you are older, I promised I would spare you, and I shall. Because you believed in me, and through you I can exist. A while longer.”

“How long have you lived?” she murmured, dazed.

“I was born on the day the first men thought of me. I shall die on the last day, when the last man forgets.”

She beheld his loneliness then, like a pale mote in the night. She stared at it, and pictured him, a god who was lonely and dying. And somewhere in that staring, sleep came, and the night folded itself behind the world.

* * * *

When the sun rose, she got up and looked about her, and saw only the fields and the vinestocks, the shallow river, the dusty lindens, and the sprawling village. And when she had gone home alone, she saw the poverty of her mother’s house. And when her mother slapped and cuffed her for being gone all night, and called her horrible names, Cleci saw that, too. Yet through it all she dimly perceived, as if through smoke or water, how the earth had been, and how it still might be, under its veil of misery and lies.

* * * *

In the days which followed, and in the weeks which followed these, the Piper was spoken of in fear and whispers, and later in noisy jibes and sneers. No one heard the pipe, and soon no one listened for it. The children ran about the streets and yards, and along the river bank. Despite his threat, he had not taken the sons and daughters of Lime Tree. Not only was he a vagabond and blasphemer, but a charlatan also.

Not until the first still-births occurred at the summer’s end, did any nervous awe steal through the prosperous village. And then, when winter had come, and spring and summer, and another summer’s end, and no fresh births with them, only then did a leaden horror blow through Lime Tree like the winter winds. And like the winds, which stripped the lindens of their leaves, so Lime Tree lay under the snow, stripped of its future. No new life was conceived, or born, and would never be. He had said he would take their children, in place of their love and their gold, and he had done it. Lime Tree withered among its wheat fields, and year by year its crops grew thin, its vines tarnished, and, one by one, its lindens died.

When Cleci was eighteen, the river mysteriously silted up. That was the year her mother died, too. She died of hard work more than anything, for hard work does actually kill, when it is too hard, too hopeless, and has too meager a reward.

Cleci went away to the south, and some years later, when she had borne her first child, she carried him to the shrine she had made, and laid an offering on the altar—grapes, and a lock of her own dark hair, and a flask of wine. And, as each of her children grew, she taught them who they must worship.

She did this not out of fear of him, but out of pity. Because she had come to see the ultimate terrible truth behind all others. Which was that the stupidity and avarice and hatred of mankind had finally begun to make him also stupid, avaricious, hating, and cruel beyond reason. Even though he was a god, a god of love.

RED AS BLOOD

The beautiful Witch Queen flung open the ivory case of the magic mirror. Of dark gold the mirror was, dark gold like the hair of the Witch Queen that poured down her back. Dark gold the mirror was, and ancient as the seven stunted black trees growing beyond the pale blue glass of the window.

“Speculum, speculum,”
said the Witch Queen to the magic mirror.
“Dei gratia.”

“Volente Deo. Audio.”

“Mirror,” said the Witch Queen. “Whom do you see?”

“I see you, mistress,” replied the mirror. “And all in the land. But one.”

“Mirror, mirror, who is it you do not see?”

“I do not see Bianca.”

The Witch Queen crossed herself. She shut the case of the mirror and, walking slowly to the window, looked out at the old trees through the panes of pale blue glass.

Fourteen years ago, another woman had stood at this window, but she was not like the Witch Queen. The woman had black hair that fell to her ankles; she had a crimson gown, the girdle worn high beneath her breasts, for she was far gone with child. And this woman had thrust open the glass casement on the winter garden, where the old trees crouched in the snow. Then, taking a sharp bone needle, she had thrust it into her finger and shaken three bright drops on the ground. “Let my daughter have,” said the woman, “hair black as mine, black as the wood of these warped and arcane trees. Let her have skin like mine, white as this snow. And let her have my mouth, red as my blood.” And the woman had smiled and licked at her finger. She had a crown on her head; it shone in the dusk like a star. She never came to the window before dusk: she did not like the day. She was the first Queen, and she did not possess a mirror.

The second Queen, the Witch Queen, knew all this. She knew how, in giving birth, the first Queen had died. Her coffin had been carried into the cathedral and masses had been said. There was an ugly rumor—that a splash of holy water had fallen on the corpse and the dead flesh had smoked. But the first Queen had been reckoned unlucky for the kingdom. There had been a plague in the land since she came there, a wasting disease for which there was no cure.

Seven years went by. The King married the second Queen, as unlike the first as frankincense to myrrh.

“And this is my daughter,” said the King to his second Queen.

There stood a little girl child, nearly seven years of age. Her black hair hung to her ankles, her skin was white as snow. Her mouth was red as blood, and she smiled with it.

“Bianca,” said the King, “you must love your new mother.”

Bianca smiled radiantly. Her teeth were bright as sharp bone needles.

“Come,” said the Witch Queen, “come, Bianca. I will show you my magic mirror.”

“Please, Mamma,” said Bianca softly, “I do not like mirrors.”

“She is modest,” said the King. “And delicate. She never goes out by day. The sun distresses her.”

That night, the Witch Queen opened the case of her mirror.

“Mirror. Whom do you see?”

“I see you, mistress. And all in the land. But one.”

“Mirror, mirror, who is it you do not see?”

“I do not see Bianca.”

The second Queen gave Bianca a tiny crucifix of golden filigree. Bianca would not accept it. She ran to her father and whispered, “I am afraid. I do not like to think of Our Lord dying in agony on His cross. She means to frighten me. Tell her to take it away.”

The second Queen grew wild white roses in her garden and invited Bianca to walk there after sundown. But Bianca shrank away. She whispered to her father, “The thorns will tear me. She means me to be hurt.”

When Bianca was twelve years old, the Witch Queen said to the King, “Bianca should be confirmed so that she may take Communion with us.”

“This may not be,” said the King. “I will tell you, she has not been Christened, for the dying word of my first wife was against it. She begged me, for her religion was different from ours. The wishes of the dying must be respected.”

“Should you not like to be blessed by the Church,” said the Witch Queen to Bianca. “To kneel at the golden rail before the marble altar. To sing to God, to taste the ritual Bread and sip the ritual Wine.”

“She means me to betray my true mother,” said Bianca to the King. “When will she cease tormenting me?”

The day she was thirteen, Bianca rose from her bed, and there was a red stain there, like a red, red flower.

“Now you are a woman,” said her nurse.

“Yes,” said Bianca. And she went to her true mother’s jewel box, and out of it she took her mother’s crown and set it on her head.

When she walked under the old black trees in the dusk, the crown shone like a star.

The wasting sickness, which had left the land in peace for thirteen years, suddenly began again, and there was no cure.

* * * *

The Witch Queen sat in a tall chair before a window of pale green and dark white glass, and in her hands she held a Bible bound in rosy silk.

“Majesty,” said the huntsman, bowing very low.

He was a man, forty years old, strong and handsome, and wise in the hidden lore of the forests, the occult lore of the earth. He could kill too, for it was his trade, without faltering. The slender fragile deer he could kill, and the moon-winged birds, and the velvet hares with their sad, foreknowing eyes. He pitied them, but pitying, he killed them. Pity could not stop him. It was his trade.

“Look in the garden,” said the Witch Queen.

The hunter looked through a dark white pane. The sun had sunk, and a maiden walked under a tree.

“The Princess Bianca,” said the huntsman.

“What else?” asked the Witch Queen.

The huntsman crossed himself.

“By Our Lord, Madam, I will not say.”

“But you know.”