White As Snow (Fairy Tale) Read online

  But when a new light showed in the doorway, the sun catching the figure of a man as he came out, Arpazia knew the perfect alleviation of the lost child found. And then the alarm of the child which thought it had sinned.

  “Yes? What do you want of me?”

  Was he as she recalled? No—yes—both of these.

  He did not know her. This was the worst blow. Even disguised, he should have known her.

  Klymeno, in this daylight: in ordinary woodsman’s clothes of thin leather, bare-armed, brown. His hair, a deeper brown. His lion eyes had kept their amber.

  Did he make believe he did not know who she was, or was this true? She had muffled her face in the cloak. She was not herself here, either.

  Then he saw her tears.

  “What’s the matter? Don’t cry.” He came right up to her and put back the hood. His hand slipped over her hair. “You,” he said, his voice low. “Why are you here?”

  She hung her head. Her tears stopped. She said nothing.

  It was as if she had gone blind and dumb, deaf too, and time had ended. He did not want her to have come here. Did not at all want her, now.

  “Do you know who I am?” he said to her.

  She heard him.

  But she said nothing.

  Arpazia gathered herself, put up her head. Her eyes met his and he saw they had, peculiarly, gone black, pupil and iris all one.

  “How I despise you,” she said, her voice lower than his, but sharp as the edge of something broken.

  He took hold of her, not roughly.

  She said, “Let go, or I will rip you up with my nails.”

  “Now I know you,” he said. Then he murmured softly, and pulled her in against him, held her without effort, and she could not struggle. “Beautiful Demetra, my darling wife.” His tone was full of love, of desire, of gladness. She turned once more molten in the fire of it.

  “That isn’t my name.”

  “Yes. By day. When you’re with me.”

  “I thought—” she said. She sighed.

  They stood by the inn door, he holding her, and she leaning against him. The sun moved slowly over the grassy alley.

  The cart was drawn by a donkey. The animal had white-lined hairy ears, like the donkey which had carried Christ on its back in one of her father’s books.

  Klymeno would not let her sit back in the cart. It had been stained by carcasses, and was black from old blood. She rode beside him, behind the white-eared donkey.

  They left the town and took a meandering track that ran in and out of olive groves and rocky places, above the sea. The water was the color of the lavender that grew wild by the roadside. Then the track curved up and they went up with it, into the hills. Once, through cypress boughs, she saw the palace, raised on its slope yet already below. It glowed in the sun, quite unfamiliar.

  The wood was not the same by day. It was deep green, dense green, violet in shadow, scattered with rifts of gold. She saw young does feeding, which did not run away, and later a foxlike animal trotted across the earth and tree roots which the track had now become. Her companion pointed out honeycombs like skulls, budding from some trees, frothing with bees. He and she did not talk, these were small observances of his, followed by her murmured assents. She said, always, Yes, yes. Yes, how green, yes, how gold. Yes, did a marten have her nest there? Yes.

  Arpazia was insane with excitement and dread. Inside her cool exterior, she was spinning and shuddering, terrified with happiness. Nothing lay behind her, and nothing before. Her existence was this moment. She had been right to think time had ended.

  She was not taken aback to find he lived in a ramshackle log hut among the trees. It did not matter where he lived, now. A stream went by the door, and he threw off his clothes and plunged in, washing away any odor of blood or sweat, which she had nor even minded.

  He came back to her naked, dressed in skin.

  He took her in his arms. The woods soughed at the warm waves of the wind that blew in from the sea. His body had the scent of leaves and grass and maleness.

  “Touch me,” he said. He put her hand on him, where he had risen up. She had not expected such a texture, nor the pearl of moisture. “Listen, if you’re with me here, I can’t hold off. Do you understand, sweetheart? It must be.”

  “Do anything to me,” she said.

  “Then I will.”

  Her stolen clothes were removed easily. She was nor shy. She paraded herself, letting him look at her, at her breasts, her belly, her sex. Then she put her hand on him again, and the stem of his lust moved in her fingers, urgent, and seeking her.

  As she lay near the wall of the hut, on the cloak, she saw above her the flame green of the leaves against the sky’s pulsing blue. Then she forgot such things. There was only him.

  When he pierced her, it was not a penetration, but a rejoining of something sundered, so needed and desired that she seemed mended by it. Less couth and more violent than he, she tore at his hair and dragged the grass up by its roots. As she had warned him, she plowed his body with her nails. But at the last, pulling back her head, she saw the paroxysm take him as it took her, too. Now she knew. This face of agony that was delight beyond life or death.

  Hurtled to earth, becoming more still than anything, she made him stay as he was, lying upon her, all his weight, rushing her. She wanted nothing else. He slept, his face turned into her neck. She loved him then, as they had told her a woman always loved her child. Nothing should harm him. She wanted only the best for him. She grew into his body, could no longer find how they were separate.

  IV.

  CANDACIS BURNED FOR FIVE DAYS IN the fever. At night she was worse, and became incandescent like her name, so they were afraid to have contact with her for fear of scalding.

  How disturbing it was, that luminously white little face, its bones showing, and the demented blackness of the eyes in circles nearly as black.

  The physician regularly let her blood. Afraid the leeches were too sluggish, he employed a tiny razor. The blood was rich, healthy, he said. The child must be strong, despite her looks and condition.

  Not once did he inquire why her mother, the queen, was never there.

  The physician, as most of them, one way and another, had heard about Queen Arpazia. She had a lover, some artisan of the lower town, or peasant—or was he a robber from the mountains, summering in the hills? It was with him the queen spent her time, day and night, while her daughter drowned in the cauldron of fever.

  The nurse called the child by an outlandish and archaic name of the region. The physician continually corrected her. Finally Kaya, the pert maid, announced, “We always call her Coira. She won’t know who you mean, sir, calling her by her princess name.”

  Probably the child did not know anything much, he thought. He considered, analytical and dispassionate, that her small brain might be scorched out by this illness. He had seen that happen before. They lived, but were impaired, unable to walk or see, or utter proper speech.

  The king would not be pleased. He liked his brats. But then, he preferred the boys.

  “Fetch that tincture from my rooms—the one mentioned, in the black bottle.”

  The slave ran out.

  Scowling, the physician began to grind a powder of pearl in his mortal.

  The child dreamed. She had been laid on burning wood in a brazier. The branches smelled sweet as they burned, and so, presumably, did she. There was pain, though not much; it was the relentless biting heat which frightened her the most. In the dream, her mother, the witch-goddess, bent above her. Her mother smoothed the child’s forehead kindly. “There, my dear. Not much longer. Soon my spell will have burned away all your frailty, all the human dross. Then you will be very fine, most beautiful, and you’ll live forever, invulnerable to hurt, surviving even death, an immortal.”

  This was like some story Coira had heard long ago, (even to the adult vocabulary) and as she tossed in distress in the dream, she partly knew it.

  Only one question
stirred on her burned lips.

  “Why did you send me away?”

  “Hush, my love. I would never send you away. You’re my own heart born again in flesh. How I love you, Coira, best of all.”

  The child exhaled, and the knotting of her muscles relaxed. A vise which had seemed to hold her rigid creaked open, and let her go. Then torrents of fragrant rain burst from her pores. Of course, they put out the fire.

  Coira’s mother, Demetra, laughed triumphantly as she plucked her daughter up into her arms. In the dream, it did not puzzle the child that the witch-queen’s hair had become blond, and her eyes like topaz. It was unimportant to Coira, providing she were loved.

  “The fever’s broken at last.”

  “Thank God for it.” (The nurse, crossing herself crossly.) “Hurry and change the bed linen. It’s wringing wet. She might as well have turned into a fountain. What a child! Always causing some nuisance.”

  All the months of summer came and passed, as Coira recovered. By the day she could walk, unaided, across her room, and sit in the chair to eat her bread and honey, the hills too were turning to a honey shade; the sea was streaked with gray.

  Coira had not heard the talk concerning Arpazia, nor had she seen her mother since the fever. Coira had asked after her only once. Then the girl, Julah, replied, “Oh, she won’t come in. She doesn’t care at all about you.”

  The child thought of her other, topaz-eyed mother, in the dream.

  She began to tussel with the two images: the loving, golden, kind mother; the chill, dark, uncaring mother who avoided her always.

  Perhaps, after all, the dark witch-queen was not her mother. Coira had heard of such things, and she had heard too of her father’s many women. He had had a previous queen, maybe, who had been cast off, or died. Perhaps Coira was that one’s baby, and now the other dark queen did not like Coira—not unreasonably, since Coira was not at all her daughter.

  The child said nothing of this to anyone. She took back her lesson of silence.

  In silence, then, she saw time slowly move, the seasons again decline. Draco returned briefly, and a Mass was held in the great church, to honor him—or God. Her father did not bother to visit Coira, (Princess Candacis). He had mislaid her, intent only on his other capital, a city far away. They had heard its name, now: Korchlava.

  Arpazia was not in the church for the Mass. Some of the townsfolk said Draco had forbidden her to be there. Others said she had declined to go—and such were the queen’s uncanny skills that the king had had to concede.

  The Virgo month. No one remembered Coira’s birthday, except, suddenly, for the nurse, who exclaimed, “Great Lord—are you seven today?” Coira knew that she was eight. But she did not argue. The nurse gave her a quick kiss, which meant nothing, to either of them.

  To Kaya the nurse remarked, thinking Coira did not hear, “That fever tweaked her brain. Be sure of it. I am. Thank God she doesn’t drool or topple over when she walks. If ever the king thinks of her, she can still be a credit to him.”

  “Has she gone dumb?” asked Julah.

  “Quiet, fool. She can speak. Didn’t she just ask you for her cup of milk? It’s inside, the damage. You mark my words. We’ll all see it, one day.”

  “The witch’s bad blood,” said Kaya. “They say she lies up in the wood, dancing on her back. She goes to the old stone in the wood, where they go, those bad ones, and she lies down there when the blood’s still wet from things they kill and lets him—”

  The nurse slapped Kaya. Kaya ran off and spat into the nurse’s clothes chest. Next she would insert a dead mouse there.

  Coira heard without understanding, and saw it all. In silence.

  V.

  ONE COLD MORNING THE WITCH-QUEEN opened her mirror.

  She looked into the glass, already touched with winter white, like the day, and her own snowy nakedness.

  “Mirror, am I beautiful?”

  The woman in the mirror smiled.

  “Beautiful.”

  “Am I the most beautiful in all the lands?”

  “In all the lands you are.”

  “In the wide world?”

  “In the wide world.”

  The mirror had no need to speak, although it did, to the witch queen. Turning this way and that, raising her arms, moving through the smoke of her ebony hair, pointing her pale feet, cupping her own breasts, the witch-queen saw well enough her rare loveliness, and the bloom on her now like nap on velvet.

  Arpazia went from the mirror, leaving it to watch.

  She chose a dress of blushing, sheer-spun wool bordered with silver, and her mantle of black fur. She no longer troubled with disguise. No one accosted her or asked her business or sent her back. Dressed as a queen, she was bowed to, and given right of way. She had even walked into the town just like this, in the autumnal fall days, and they kneeled on the street, and one woman brought her grapes and another a crimson rose.

  She could do as she liked.

  Even when the king had been here, rumbling through his town and palace with much noise and fuss, but absolutely no substance, even then Arpazia had more or less done as she wanted. He never came near her. He had some slut or other for his bed. He did not, this time, even send the token presents.

  None of these people—no people at all—were real for Arpazia. They never had been, even when they ruled and harmed her. They had, then, been more awful for their unreality. Only one other was alive in Arpazia’s world. She lived with him, inside the mirror. Indeed, now and then, she glimpsed him in the mirror, as before she had seen the raven and the owl, and the mythical hags of fate.

  He would appear naked in her looking glass—a momentary vision of his strong, lean body, now pale, now bronze, or his eyes, jeweled like a beast’s and, like a beast’s, looking out of the shadow there, beside the chest, or from deep under the cannopy of the bed.

  He lay in wait for her, too, in slumber. Sleeping or waking, ever-present. Like the god that he was.

  Arpazia slipped on her dainty boots. She drew heavy bracelets onto her wrists. She liked to dress herself richly, so he might take everything from her. Even her face would be painted, if not by her women—for she hated them flagrantly and did everything now for herself, saving the most menial tasks—she gave them those—to peel fruit or tidy her couch, like slaves. But Klymeno would kiss the cosmetics from her lips, and her own tears of orgasm would wash away the kohl.

  When Arpazia tried to do up the silver girdle at her waist, she found the clasp would not meet.

  She attempted to do up the girdle several times.

  Then she flung the girdle away in an icy blast of temper. But something else stayed with her. She had not been able to throw it away with the girdle.

  Something else … yesterday, a dress had torn at her waist. Mended, it tore again. And another gown had pinched her.

  Arpazia moved abruptly back to the mirror.

  “What is it? Show me what it is.”

  The surface of the mirror dappled like water. That was all. Arpazia turned. She regarded the profile of her body. Was there some change? Could it be—

  She stared deeply in at the glass and now, now—her gown became transparent, in one place, across her belly. She saw, a second time, her snow of flesh, and the black wood which flourished below, whose center was a rose. But then, straight through her belly she saw, straight through the crimson rose of her womb.

  “No.”

  The witch-queen pointed in at the little white fish which curled there, small as a seed.

  The glass went black. In blackness, she heard a woman in labor screaming and screaming.

  But Arpazia leaned in to the mirror. She glared down at the tiny little seed.

  “You shall be killed.” And her breath formed on the glass like mist.

  The Smoke Crone glanced up. From her hut door stretched the stone terrace, sunning itself. The weary olive trees, already bare, groped after the light. Everything old, old stones and trees, the mouth of the Oracle itself, to
day issuing nothing, the ancient woman. Everything old but for one thing, there.

  The Smoke Crone did not rise, though she identified Draco’s queen at once. It was true, Arpazia had also, a few times, been made Queen in the wood, but even so, the Crone, in the pagan hierarchy, had stayed her superior.

  “Are you she?” said the queen, having gained the doorway. She was brilliant in the early winter sunlight, and another than the Crone might have been dazzled. “Are you?”

  “I am.”

  “I’ve something I need from you.”

  “Lah-loh,” sang the Crone, “lah-loh-lullah-lah.”

  “Attend to me, old woman. Do you know who I am?”

  “Yes, a mortal. A rude one.”

  Arpazia flinched. Not believing in others, often they unnerved her.

  “I am—”

  “You are you and I am I. What do you want, Arpazia?” (The Smoke Crone never called a queen by anything other than her name.)

  Arpazia said, hurrying, “Your sister used to attend me. But no longer. They can’t find the old woman.”

  “My sister? I have no sister.”

  “Some kindred of yours. I was told you sent her to me, when you wouldn’t come yourself.”

  “I am too old to come to you.”

  By this, and Arpazia knew it, the Crone meant she was too mighty to have done so.

  Arpazia turned her head. She said to the cold sunlight, “You know what I do. That I’m Woods Queen with Orion.” Despite herself, saying his holy name, her face flooded with heat. But the thought did not come to her, This is his child in me. She did not think of it as a child at all—as she had never thought it of the child she had borne.

  “He’s called Klymeno, too,” said the Smoke Crone. She stroked something lying over her knee. Arpazia had believed it was an old shawl—but it was a lizard, scaled and sentient, not woven. “And Dianus is his name, too. Orion you see, was Dianus, when he became the companion of the moon goddess, but later on she killed him with her arrows of death. Then she put him in the sky, all stars. But Klymeno’s the friendly aboveground name of King Death himself. Did you know?”