White As Snow (Fairy Tale) Read online

  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.

  II.

  WAS A CHILD ONLY THE SUM of its parents? Her father had been the monstrous, ignorant Draco. Her mother was the mad witch-queen. No doubt, she had a thread of both of them, wound in her blood. But Candacis (Coira) was also herself. Her roots ran back, like those of a plant, to other progenitors. And she had been brought up in such a strange way, after all.

  Alterations had begun when she was eight. That was, after the night of the Scorpion Moon. But Coira did not recall anything of the ceremony at the altar, except as a sort of dream she might have had, something to do with the fever and her recovery. The dream was both wonderful and frightening. She never forgot it, but neither did she take it as actual.

  During the winter and spring after the dream, other events began.

  Coira’s nurse became friendly with another woman of the palace, who then often came to see her, in the child’s room.

  The other woman was more interested in Coira than in the nurse, as Coira noted quite quickly (although her nurse did not). There were outings then. They went to the market to watch traveling entertainers, who performed magical conjurings, or fought battles with wooden swords. Or the women, with Coira, went to the meadows, or down to the seashore, in a rickety carriage pulled by rams. Coira played in the sand, forming buildings from it, or hunted for shells. Sometimes the woman-friend of the nurse, leaving the nurse, would assist Coira.

  This woman was called Ulvit. She taught Coira rhymes, and now and then told her stories. She was not affectionate, but she treated Coira as a live and intelligent presence, more so, perhaps, than she treated the nurse. Ulvit knew many clever things, such as the name and nature of a shell Coira once discovered walking sideways. When Coira’s little palaces of sand were swallowed by the returning tide, Ulvit assured her that nothing was ever lost, once it had been constructed. Each creation had a soul, not only men and women. The beasts had souls, and the trees, the land had a soul—which sometimes became visible in a pale shimmering at twilight. “And even a palace made of sand has a soul. And a song. And every word we speak.”

  “Even wrong words?” asked Coira with cautious sagacity.

  “Yes,” said Ulvit.

  Meanwhile the nurse, left on her own, started a courtship with the driver of the ram-carriage. A decade or so before she had given her own child away in order to tend the queen’s. She did not know where it was, but perhaps hankered after it. Though so brisk with babies, she was now sentimentally broody. And after two years, this developed into a marriage. With a perfect equilibrium then, Ulvit, as the nurse abandoned Coira, assumed the role of her nurse.

  It was Ulvit who forewarned of the coming of Coira’s first menstrual blood. Ulvit suggested this was not to be considered fearful or aggravating, but as a privilege given by the gods to women, because, in this instance, they had been thought the more deserving of childbearing.

  Ulvit was, of course, a pagan woman from the wood. through she never took Coira there by day, let alone to any night ritual, still she extended to her the teachings of this primal canon.

  So Coira grew now, with two distinct sides. The silent, loveless, white, light side, where everything was clear and plain and harsh. And the shadow side, softer and secretive, kind in its own elemental way, philosophical, and convinced of spirit.

  But even this was not the sum of Coira. She was so young in the world, it was not possible yet to ascertain what she might be.

  When Coira was thirteen, her two maids—who were seldom with her—also left her entirely. Kaya had fallen pregnant to a guard, and wed him. Julah, bitter in virginity, went inland to be a nun.

  Eventually Prince Tusaj sent for Coira. That is, he sent for Candacis, King Draco’s legal daughter.

  “I’d heard of her, but forgot the girl. He seems to have forgotten her. But I’d better look her over. She must be marriagable by now.”

  They had told him her age. The nurse had got this wrong, clipping a year from Coira’s aggregate. Coira herself had come to say she was only seven, then only nine, eleven, twelve, thirteen, although she
knew, too, that she was eight, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen … (Perhaps Ulvit may even have assisted in this. In some occult way, was it an advantage to have two ages, as to have two names?)

  The prince squinted at Candacis. He liked to collect curiosities, a lynx, a hunchback. But this girl would not be one of them. She was not, he thought, prepossessing. Overly slender, almost breastless, too white of skin and with colorless eyes. Like her mother. “But she’s sound in lung and limb, and not a booby. Though she has a crazy look.” Like the mother, too.

  Tusaj asked Candacis politely if there was anything she lacked or might especially want. He hoped she would be modest in her desires. She was. She told him, No.

  Humbleness and lack of ambition were always estimable in a woman.

  Coira was not concerned with the court. Used to the palace, she accepted it, and even her royal status, when occasionally it was recognized. But she expected nothing, yearned after nothing. Wants had been excised by her mother’s aversion to her. Even in the long-ago dream, she had not looked for anything from the gentle man in red, who held her so carefully and stroked her hair. The sun itself warmed, but that was its way. Why should it notice her, and why should he?

  Candacis was not unhappy. Her life was almost rustic, yet she received a little tuition. She could read, she could sing. She could dance, and well, for Ulvit had taught her the formal measures of the court—later she might be called to engage in the greater feasts at Belgra. But also Ulvit had taught her dances of the wood. Coira had one gift that was always evident: she was unusually graceful. If she was not pretty, yet she drew the eyes, held them. Even Tusaj had been aware of that.

  Her hair was her glory. The prince had not observed it under its net and veil, but unbound, thick yet sheer, it dropped in a curtain of black silk to her knees.