White As Snow (Fairy Tale) (11 page)

Read White As Snow (Fairy Tale) Online

Authors: Tanith Lee

“Yes … madam.”
“Behave properly. Ask me nothing. Don’t talk at all, or I shall be angry.” Arpazia spoke without emphasis. She needed to employ none. Coira was already overmastered by total horror.
Not even an unmother. A fiend.
The fiend’s eyes gleamed pale. Narrow fingers with three rings emerged from the crow-wing of hair and sleeve. “Take my hand.”
Coira did as she was told.
In the past, sometimes, she had been allowed to ceremonially touch this hand. Now it did not feel as it had before. It was hot, bony and hard, like the talons of the dreadful bird the woman now resembled.
The queen snatched her mantle round her. Dragging the mantle, the child, she stalked over the room, and Coira had to run to keep up.
The shadows were drawing in now in packs. A guard leaned on a pillar, inclining his head, glance following them only a short way.
As they crossed the queen’s garden, the land grew dark. The sea, also a shining shadow, had parted from a sky like a fading brassy shield.
The queen opened a door.
Coira stumbled on the uneven, treacherous stair below, and the Woman, her stepmother, tugged her on, twisting the child’s arm in its socket. But Coira had learned silence, and did not cry out.
So they went down and down together into darkness, leaving the sky behind.
 
 
On the meadow, the shadows rose up and became girls. Unspeaking. they wandered behind Arpazia and the child, up the hillside and into the woods.
Coira had been run out, but the queen no longer walked so swiftly. Stumbling frequently, Coira just managed to keep up; once, when she half fell, the Woman adjusted her, as before, simply by straining on the child’s arm.
The sky was now somber but still lucid against the darkness of the earth. The moon had risen early and the child stared at it, for never had she seemed to see it so round or so adamantine. In color it looked not white, more blue, but a deadly blue. like cut slate.
Then, when they entered the blackness of the woods, filtered only with thin glints of sky, Coira felt the night-trepidation common to ancient peoples, the deep tingling terror that was less fear than instinctive knowledge and awe of elder forces. These woods were full of this, alive with this, such power—but the witch seemed not to recognize it. Or if she did, it was familiar to her, and she gave no sign.
An owl called through the trees. The hair rose on Coira’s scalp, and behind her a rippling whisper moved through the young women who followed them.
Much of the wood still had its leaves, though many were withered. Now and then some fell, with an eerie effect, like bats or great beetles tumbling softly through the dimness, brushing the head or wrist.
When they went by the waterfall, however, the trees there were quite bare, but for one crippled pine. The water glittered starkly in moonlight. It seemed to the child that something looked out with glittering eyes from a cave above.
Ahead, red light began to burn.
The moon was already gone from the lawned avenue under the trees. But tonight they had lit fires there, each in a circle of stones. As the witch-queen walked, holding her child by the hand, they must wend around each fire. A crowd was standing among the trees, to either side. It reminded Coira a little of a procession to Mass, or to the Oracle on the terrace. A vague chanting rose like the fire smoke. The witch-queen took no notice of it.
Arpazia walked the length of the avenue, and suddenly a being came out from between the dark and the light.
Despite herself, Coira uttered a little noise.
“Quiet,” said the witch-queen.
Coira thought the figure was not human. Then she saw that it was a man. He was clad in a belted robe of deep red, and his head was crowned, as she had seen the head of her father. But this diadem was of tangled things, branches, thorns—and because of the thorns, Coira was reminded of pictures she had been shown of the Christ. And, as the Christ before his suffering, this man was handsome.
Arpazia stopped still. Her bird’s face was lifted harshly, her lips drawn thin.
The young man in the wild thorn crown looked once at her, then he knelt down by the child.
“Don’t be afraid.”
He reached forward and firmly undid the fettered knot of their hands, Arpazia’s and her child’s. Coira’s hand, extricated, was bloodless and marked with the edges of rings. The young man rubbed her hand gently in both of his. “There’s nothing to harm you,” he said again. “You are the Maiden.”
Coira regarded him. She adored him at once for his looks and his attentive gentleness to her. But she had been well taught what love was worth. She retained her silence.
Her mother-stepmother spoke, rasping and low over their heads.
“Well, I’ve brought the girl, as that woman told me. Now do you have something for me? A drink of herbs, she said.”
“Not yet.”
“When? Are you angry with me?”
Coira heard the breaking change, the abrupt note of anxiety in the witch queen’s voice.
The man rose. High into the sky above Coira he stood, facing her stepmother. “Nothing can die, kill it as you will.”
“I couldn’t come to you—that was my only fear—I didn’t know what I should do—how can you understand—it’s you I want—” Hushed, rushed now, the new frightened childish voice of the queen.
“Not—not a child—such pain—never—and if Draco learned—no—no—”
“It is your right,” he said. “So, you give your child back to the wood.” This was all he said. The voice conveyed little, to one who had not heard him speak before in love.
Flame-lit, more than a man, he moved ahead of them, toward the altar in the trees. Only then did Coira see the axe slung in the folds of his robe.
 
 
From inside its lid, the mirror watched. But the moon, lying down in the black sack of the wood, had closed her stony eye. Or seemed to.
The mirror saw the Hunter King invoke the night, and the spirits of the dead who were, that night, there to dance with them. He did not dance, but sat on his boulder-throne. The witch-queen sat on hers, beside him, as on other nights she had done. But the child sat between them on the turf, and sometimes the king smoothed her hair, and once, when the child turned up her face to gaze at him, for her he had a smile. No one, ever, had looked at her in this way. It had been exactly the same for Arpazia. Human, they recognized, mother and daughter both, true tenderness, goodness, even if it came too late and could not be let in.
Tears ran down the witch-queen’s face—or was this an illusion of the shifting fires? She had ceased to resemble a bird, but she appeared old, in the sidelong light of the dancers’ torches.
Nevertheless, when he handed her the black cup, she took it, drained it, and cast it angrily down in the grass. After that, the queen did not look at the Hunter King, nor he at her.
She said, very quietly, some while later, “Are you done with me only for
this?”
The mirror saw that he answered, “Of course, only for that.”
She whispered then. “You are unjust. So, I was nothing to you. I might denounce you and have you killed.”
Her whisper-words hung in the air, and went out, leaving only some burn marks.
But this was a night of death, of the dead. And soon, through the flame-smoke dark, the King of Death was seen riding his chariot along the aisles of the woods. Perhaps not seen with the eyes, but with the mind—for the dancers described him in their chant, and the Orion King stood and saluted him, and certainly (oh yes) the mirror saw him. King Death wore the blackest mail, heavily jeweled, his black hair coiling under the helm which masked his face, that none could make it out. His chariot was bleached as bone, and the midnight horses blew fire from their nostrils—emerald fire, like elf-lights from a swamp.
Arpazia did
not
see King Death. She had turned her head, as usual. But she felt the deathly drink she had taken go seeking through her belly, finding a way into the seed in her womb. It was a frightful sensation, yet she was glad of it.
The mirror saw how the Hunter King presently led Arpazia’s child to the slab of altar. He lifted her up there, and the crowd sang a whining plaint, as if she were to die. But the little girl seemed half asleep now, not taking much in. And the Hunter King only circled the axe over her head three times, to show the King of Death (who was called Hadz) that she was selected for him, betrothed to him, a living sacrifice. But this was also true of all things that lived. She was not scapegoat, but emblem.
Then the King of Death drove his chariot away, and the Hunter King picked up the child and carried her to a mound of moss and grass, where he set her down. She was fast asleep now. It was likely she had not known anything of what went on.
Soon after, both the mirror and the witch-queen saw how a young boar came stepping through the wood, heading straight through the crowd to the altar. It was glossy black, Death’s animal, its tusks clean, white as milk, and the inside of its mouth a fresh red. It was evidently bewitched, and knew its hour had come. Calmly it let the women garland it with berries. The Hunter King brought it a bowl to drink from, and it bowed to him and to the god, and drank. It made no protest, showed no distress, as he clove its skull with one blow of the axe.
Arpazia knew what they would do. That they would eviscerate and portion up the dead boar, Orion the most skilfully, because of his trade. They would mix pieces of its organs with ale or wine, and eat and drink from this mess to gain vitality, and to honor the coming of winter, which was the year’s night. She had seen two other sacrifices through the summer. She had not liked them, though she would eat meat in the palace without a qualm.
Now the Hunter King brought her nothing. So Arpazia got up and went among his people. She took two tiny slivers from the bowl, which tonight held the sliced lungs and liver of the healthy boar. She ate them boldly. (But later in her chamber her body would throw them back up. The Smoke Crone had lied, or been wrong. The herbs of abortion were not so mild as she had specified.)
Another woman carried the queen’s daughter home in the hours before dawn. She was a woman of Draco’s camp, who had her place now in the palace at Belgra. She put the little girl down in the passage which led to her own room. “Wake up, puss. That way’s your bed.”
“Where is—?” The child peered round her, lost in familiar things she no longer recalled, “—the King—” she finished.
The woman, who knew which king the child meant, shook her head and put her finger across her lips. “You mustn’t speak of him.”
Then the door of Coira’s apartment was flung wide, and the nurse was there, holding up a lighted candle. “What time is this to send her back? Couldn’t she have kept her till morning?” Where the light fell, hard as steel, Coira rubbed her eyes and blinked. But the other woman was gone. Her un-mother was gone, the crowned king too, and all the magic of the wood. And Coira was, as always, unwelcome.
Jam Alba Quam Nix Shining White as Snow
T
HAT WINTER, JUST BEFORE MID-WINTER-Mass, Queen Arpazia went out in her former way of the summer, to look for her lover. Draco had sent messengers: he would visit Belgra Demitu for the Mass. There was the usual uproar of preparation, which gushed round Arpazia like a swarm of ghosts. She walked from the palace on a glassy morning, when the keen wind brought the smell of snow from the mountains.
Dressed in her furs and jewels, she expected, as formerly, no one would challenge her. It shocked her therefore when they did. First guards in the palace, on the terrace walks. Then, as she crossed some open ground, a laborer gaping, and in the town itself the people scattering away from her, and soon she heard the sniggering of men. For sure they knew her, but now showed her no regard. They thought her a freak, and funny.
Naturally this would be because she had fallen out of favor with the Woods People; she grasped this, but did not care.
She had waited, in vain, for only one person, having sent him,
by servants, or more naively, urchins, gifts to show her love, and three ill-written letters. Had he received any of these? Now she sought for him, Klymeno-Dianus, Orion-in-the-Wood.
At the door of the
Stag
inn, paying no attention to the men who sneered at her, she sent a loitering slave to ask for him by his daylight name. The slave went. But then one of the men called to her vulgarly, “Eh, Queen, you won’t find him here. He’s gone, Queen. Far away.”
She did not turn or look. The slave came back and echoed, “Gone, Lady.” As she moved away, the men laughed again, and another brayed, “Won’t
I
do, Queenie?” But a third muttered, sounding embarrassed, “She’s too old for such games.”
Arpazia kept the blood from her face, kept it white and still. She went to an alley where Klymeno had once mentioned there was a man who had hunted with him, and who hired a cart.
The man came at her knock. His chin dropped two miles. “Yes—madam?”
“Where is Klymeno the hunter?”
“Gone to the west, lady. I know no more than that.”
“When will he return?”
“Maybe … never.”
“Perhaps you’re lying. Do you know who I am?”
“Yes, madam.”
“Then take me in your cart up to his house in the woods.”
“Madam—”
She ripped the necklace off her neck and slapped it into his hand. It was one of the castle “treasures” Draco had returned to her, after their wedding.
The man took the necklace, shoving it under a filthy sack in the corner as though ashamed of it. Then he drove her in his cart behind a donkey, along the road, among the bare, seared winter olives, with the sea on their right hand gray as tears.
Arpazia could not avoid comparing this journey with another, and another man, another donkey even, those travels she had had with her lover. Now, for the very first, she felt ridiculous, seated up
high on the rough cart in her queen’s garments and jewels.
In the end, they reached the hut among the cold-cracked woods. A pheasant clucked over and over through the trees as Arpazia looked in at the door to where, as winter had begun, they had made their love. Nothing was there, only the blackened area that had been the hearth.
When she regained his cart, the man spoke heavily. “Some say Klymeno died in the wood. A boar gored and did for him.” Then he saw her face. out of which a demon grimaced. He added hastily, “It’s only a tale. But Klymeno’s gone. Perhaps he will come back one day.”
Arpazia wanted to walk down to the land’s high edge and throw herself into the sea. But she was afraid of death, had always been very afraid of that. The carter took her back to the very spot where
he
had normally taken her. From there she climbed up an uneven path toward the palace, and black cypresses cawed in the wind.
A hole had been rammed out from the middle of her body and her soul. She had felt something at work on this, all the days since the Scorpion Moon—when she had drunk the boar’s-tongue and heart-leaf, and she had eaten of a boar’s liver and lungs—and sicked it all up and been rid of Klymeno’s seed. She had felt it, the hole, being constructed, all that while, but now the damaged part entirely gave way.
She wished to die. She was afraid of death. A dilemma without solution.
 
 
King Draco had grown stouter. He had brought his mistress, a young, fattish, black-eyed girl, whom he treated very like a wife, and no one argued.
The bull and dragon banners blazed in the palace. There were feasts and drinking, and religious processions up and down that flashed with gold.
Arpazia paid no attention.
The king did not summon her, or call on her, or demand a single
thing. But one afternoon, after Draco’s departure, a man came to tell her that her apartments were to be moved. This would, apparently, be more convenient for her, the man said, bowing and beaming.
Some of the queen’s women went away. Arpazia was left with three or four. What did that matter? She hated them all. The new rooms were smaller, and in another part of the palace. But her clothes came in chests, her furniture, and her ornaments, or most of them. The famous mirror was brought, carried by three men who crossed themselves when they had put it down.
Arpazia heard some chatter from her remaining women. It seemed Draco had given one of his legalized bastard sons the governance of Belgra Demitu. The man, Prince Tusaj, came to see Arpazia in the early spring.
About nineteen or twenty, to her webbed gaze he looked like Draco, when she beheld him first in the forests. But Tusaj was cleaner and not gross, and combed his tidy beard with perfume.
“Gracious madam.” He was nothing if not polite. It was tact, but tact through unease. He knew her reputation and believed in sorcery.
“What do you want?”
She
was never courteous now. She had forgotten how to speak to mighty men.
With her lover she had only offered total assent—yes, yes, until that last time. Or if she had been sharp, he had never heeded or minded, as he had not minded her claws in him during the sexual act. Only one thing had her lover minded. That last time. Sometimes since she had thought,
If I had put the black cup aside. If I had kept his seed, swelled up
—
given birth
—
even if Draco had had me stoned
—But then she would think, as in the past,
You wretched fool. Do you learn nothing? He valued you as a slut—as a vessel. Or less, less: some scheme of his or theirs, his people. You were nothing to him. He’s gone.
Prince Tusaj, vaguely discerned by her beyond the web of her thoughts and inner horrors, said grandly, “Although he takes the other lady as his queen, in Korchlava, you won’t be deprived of your
title here. In arcane law, a king might possess more than one wife. King Draco keeps to that, for your sake, madam.”
“She’s no longer young,” said Tusaj, later, at wine with his new-minted nobles. “Nor beautiful. Strange, I’d thought her dazzling once, but then I was only a randy boy. No, she’s like an icon, ivory, jet. Hard as that, too.”
“Watch out she doesn’t set her imps on you.”
“Oh.” Prince Tusaj laughed off the very thing he mistrusted. But he had been wary with her, just as his father Draco had. She should have nothing definite to complain of or want a witch’s vengeance for.
 
 
Time crossed Belgra Demitu, as all places. Sometimes time raced, months were consumed like days. At others, time lingered, wasting hours over a solitary minute.
The witch-queen looked at the older woman in the mirror. “What should I have done? Tell me.”
The older woman said, from the mirror, “What your nurse told you, when you were a girl.”
“What was that?”
“To take a drop of your own red menstrual blood, and mix it in his food or drink. That would have bound Klymeno to you forever. He could never have left you then, whatever you did.”
Arpazia sat, reminiscently repeating rhymes the elderly nurse had quavered, in the castle among the forests. How odd she should feel this curious nostalgia.
In the mirror she saw tall black trees.
“Make a spell with your vein’s blood to call him back,” said the shrouded old woman in the mirror.
Arpazia got up and took the little paring knife, the one which had slit the skin of Draco. She nipped the skin of her palm and caught her breath. She let the blood fall, three drops, so red, into a tarnished silver bowl.
She plucked three hairs from her head. As she was burning
them off at a candle into the bowl, she realized the third hair was also silver. How could that be?
Arpazia went back to the mirror. She gazed at the woman there. “How old am I?”
“Not very old. Twenty-three or -seven or -eight years, no more.”
“I’ve made this spell before,” said Arpazia. “It doesn’t work. Am I still beautiful?”
“The most beautiful in the world.”
 
 
The queen went quite regularly to the Church of St. Belor. She sat listening with seeming patience to the angry diatribes of priests. They used as their text mortal sin and trees of poisonous fruits and suffering that made God happy. She received the sacred Host and sipped the Blood of Christ.
At other times, some ancient woman or other might go to see the queen. These were women who claimed kinship with the Smoke Crone who guarded the Oracle. Several times a year, the queen would go up into the wood. No one now invited her, nor shunned her. She did nothing there, simply stood looking on as the people danced and chanted, or when they sacrificed. Only when they coupled, she went away. There was a new King-in-the-Wood. She did not know who it was, under the stag’s mask and antlers. Even when she glimpsed the young man’s face, between fire and moonlight, it was nobody she had ever seen, she thought, by day. But, now and then, she noted Prince Tusaj among the people. naked even. his hairy barrel of a chest garlanded with ivy, drunk and merry. And one late summer he went off eagerly with a girl and a man, into the colonnades of the trees.
Belgra Demitu was theirs, the elder gods. A pagan country. They were easing it back from Draco and Draco was only a name there now. He never showed himself at the palace. He sent messengers. His fat girl queen had borne him five legal sons, and Korchlava was finally so great a city it was to have a cathedral.
There came a warm night in spring, when a man followed Arpazia
from the altar in the wood. He was not so young, but strong and willing. She let him lie with her in the grass, which was wet with rain. The roots of the trees hurt her back, and the man hurt her, for she had been a long while unloved. But her body spasmed, as it had with Klymeno. Almost like that. And later, when the man, whose name she never learned, teased her body, rather as Klymeno had done, in the fit of pleasure she bit him. But he did not like this. He called her a name for it, as if she were not any sort of queen, or any sort of lover.
A while after this Arpazia chose, for her personal confessor, a burly priest she had occasionally seen at the dancing in the wood.
When she showed him, after the confession in her rooms, that she would allow him to possess her, the priest hoisted up his cassock and obliged. He was a straightforward man, who would nevertheless do whatever she suggested. (Her suggestions were always made with her head turned from him, and sometimes with her eyes closed.) This priest, Brother Gaborus, announced to Arpazia that he did not count sexual appetite as a sin. God, after all, had created it. Arpazia scorned his words and thought him stupid. God had devised all delight as a trap, to damn men, and in the case of carnality and women, to enslave them by conception. But Arpazia had her herbs now.
Sometimes, however, she would wonder at herself. How should she like this thing so much, after Draco … how could such an action have two such dissimilar faces?
She did not discuss anything except her other sins with Brother Gaborus. She did not believe in his reality. Except as instrument, adjunct.
It was the same with everyone.
Even with her own self, perhaps.
For who was she, the being in the glass? The lovely being, who had two thin scars chisled between her brows, and another two, there and there, by her mouth? A narrow girdle of shadow had been hollowed under her belly. The buds of her nipples had swelled, as if to unfurl. Her shoulders were bones.
“Mirror, am I still beautiful?”
“There is none like you.”
True, since no other was real.
 
 
Seven years had passed, after the night of the boar’s-tongue and heart-leaf, the night of the liver and lungs. And after that, three years more.
The younger palace had aged and mellowed. Spring and summer, autumn, winter, dawn, night and the moon still came down the hills toward the sea.
But things moved to a different tempo, slower, circling over themselves, as if nothing were new anymore, nothing were old anymore. As if time had paused, stopped, lay like a snake, motionless, waiting to begin again.

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