White As Snow (Fairy Tale) Read online

  They had dressed Arpazia in the carmine dress, braided her hair, and placed on her head a slim golden circlet with a white veil. She was being taken to see her father.

  Arpazia had no memory of her mother. She had died, they told Arpazia, at the child’s birth. From the beginning, too, she had not had a father, only this remote figure called a father, old to her even when she was an infant, who now and then acknowledged her, gave her some strange inimical present, like the emerald ring too big for her, or the Eastern mirror.

  He sat in his library, and below, down the stair in the hall, there was a lot of noise, the clashing of the men in their mail, and sometimes women crying. (“What is it?” she had asked her maids, hearing these sounds at first distantly. “Has someone died?” The maids looked frightened. It was the old nurse who said, rocking herself slowly, half smiling—but without joy—“Most will.”) They were at war, it seemed. A horde marched toward them. Arpazia, too, became afraid, but only a little, for it was beyond her understanding.

  The library was a small room, its stone walls hung with carpets, or else shelves and great books heaped on, some large as a three-year-old child, or long tubes of wood or metal in which lay scrolls of yellowed paper.

  Arpazia’s father glanced up from a map he had been studying with some difficulty—his pale eyes, too, the girl had learned, were no longer much use to him.

  “Is it you, Arpazia?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  This question was not due to his eyesight, only his indifference, she suspected. He had other daughters in the castle, though none legitimate. Her own waiting-women were two of these.

  “Have they informed you?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “I expect you’re fearful. It is a terrible thing.” The elderly man raised his gray face and looked at everything, the room, his books, her, with a ghastly resignation. “This one who springs down on us is barbaric. And cunning. His symbol is a hlack hull sporting fire, but his name’s Draco—the dragon.”

  Arpazia felt a new, more positive fear. And yet, the gale of change blew in her face and never had she sensed her life or her youth so strongly.

  “What shall we do?” she cried.

  “Resist,” said the remote father. “Rut fail. I judge there’s little hope. Presently you should go to pray. Confide in the Blessed Marusa. The priest will shrive you. Wait meekly. When the hour comes, I’ll find you. I will see to it you suffer nothing at their hands.”

  Arpazia blinked. Was this magic he spoke of? He was very clever, she had always heard, intellectual and mentally powerful, if physically a poor specimen.

  “The nurse says,” she blurted, “you’ll give me wings to fly away—”

  He laughed. It was a horrible laugh. Not cruel, but nevertheless quite pitiless. “So I shall. She spoke well, the old woman. Tell her, I’ll give her wings, too. She has been faithful, and why should they have her, these brutes, to make a slave of? Tell her, Arpazia, she too shall have wings.”

  But as he said this, he did something at odds with the words, a piece of body theater that, without instructing the girl, yet forewarned her. He drew a long thin dagger and placed it, shining, on the table.

  I must be shriven and then will be pure for Heaven. Angels and the souls of the dead have wings.

  Arpazia backed a step away, but her father had already lost interest in her, taken up as he was with preparing his own self for death, and his castle—that no one should have the benefit of it after him.

  When the girl had returned to her own apartment, she found her nurse still sitting at the fireside.

  “He means to kill me!”

  “Your father? Oh yes.” The nurse was vague and dispassionate. Her abject fatalism might have bloomed for this moment. “He won’t want the barbarians to get you. They’d rip you in bits with their dirty ways. It is a favor to you. None of the other girls will get any assistance, they’ll have to see to it for themselves.”

  Shocked, Arpazia hissed, “He said he would kill you too.”

  “Good, good. That’s kind of him.”

  The girl screamed. But all over the castle women were doing that, screaming and weeping, just as the men shouted and cursed and drank, and the priest kissed images of the Christ and moaned long prayers.

  Arpazia ran to the window. There was a mark in the distance, above the forests, a sort of cloud. Something was burning, from the breath of the bull, from the fire of the dragon.

  But she must get away.

  She stood, irresolute. Nothing had ever happened to her. Unpracticed, she did not truly believe in this, and so, maybe, it would pass.

  II.

  THE HORDE ARRIVED. IT WAS INCREDIBLE, awesome as any natural disaster. The woods turned black and the snow vanished beneath the darkness of many thousand men, their horses, their fighting engines. Here and there danced a flick or lash of flame, the fires of the encampment, for which they felled the forest trees, or the scarlet of the evil banners.

  There was no discussion, no terms were offered or asked. Within three hours ballistas let loose huge rocks against the outer gates, and once something snorted fire. Night fell, and then they sent a rain of burning arrows across the castle parapets.

  The castle began to stink, not only of fire but of wretched fear and hate.

  A man guarded Arpazia’s door, then, near sunrise, when the lord of the castle dispatched his force, this man, too, was gone.

  The nurse slept, sitting in her chair, silent as one already dead. Arpazia marveled she had ever run to that shriveled breast for comfort, to that idiot’s face for guidance.

  Instead it was her second maid (the other was also gone) who crept close in the cold, diluted light.

  She was the bastard daughter of the lord, but had a look not of Arpazia, or her father, but of her own mother, a narrow-boned woman with coppery hair.

  “You’re icy. Here’s your fur. Arpazia—you won’t let him murder you?”

  Arpazia glanced at the girl. “Oh, Lilca—what can I do?”

  Years after, this foolish wail would haunt Arpazia, infuriating and shaming her. But by then she would have lost her patience with youth, as in youth she had no compassion for old age.

  “Couldn’t you run away, Arpazia? Who’d see, in the fighting? It’s better to chance the snow and the forests. God says it’s a sin to die, unless He allows it.” Arpazia huddled in the wolf-pelt. Lilca said, “I don’t want to die here. I’ll go with you.”

  As they slipped across the room, the sound of fighting began beyond the walls and woke the blind nurse. She turned her head like a statue given dreadful life. “Where are you going, Arpazia?”

  “To see—what they do.”

  “Stay here. It isn’t right you watch the battle.”

  “Just for a moment.”

  “Black is the wood,” sang the eyeless statue, blanched stone in the deadly ghost of dawn, “white is the snow—red the bloods that under it flow—”

  “Leave the wicked old beldame,” snarled Lilca, and pulled Arpazia away through the door.

  There was a narrow stair, well known. In the past it had led to a little summer garden with peaches and apple trees. The door was locked, but Lilca, revealing new talents, undid the lock with a paring knife.

  Outside, the garden was piled with snow and the trees were bowed white humps beneath it. Lilca drew her through a knot of these trees, and black claws reached from under the snow to scratch them. They were pressed now against the mass of the outer wall.

  “Shall we hide here?” Arpazia asked—stupidly, as she ever after thought.

  “There’s a door,” said Lilca.

  It was difficult to discover, the door, hidden in bare twisted creeper and the limbs of trees. A peculiar door, very low, the height only of a child—or a dwarf. Perhaps it had been guarded, too, but again the guard had vanished. Arpazia saw with dull astonishment that Lilca had, to this door, a key.

  Beyond was a devious passageway, in darkness. Above it hulked a roof of earth
and roots. The path stumbled down, snowless but deathly cold. It became totally black, then a faint light returned.

  Lilca reached up and began pushing at some slab above. It shifted an inch. Suddenly assistance came.

  To her amazement, Arpazia saw the slab, the top of some antique cistern, dragged away, and grinning men leaned through and drew her up, and Lilca up, into white daylight.

  Arpazia stood now in the forest. Glancing behind her, she could see the dim towering of the castle walls. There was no movement anywhere but for the soft drifting of smoke, yet she could hear the battle, grown thick and muddy, except when sometimes a wild shriek pierced through.

  Here, there were four strangers. They wore mail like her father’s soldiers, and for a moment she took them for castle men.

  One of them had pushed Lilca back against a pine tree, bundling up her skirts. The others laughed, encouraged him, and as he forced her, Lilca did not struggle, only began to sob, but in a sullen, uncomplaining way. And when a second, and a third man replaced the first, still she made no protest. Obviously it was the price she had known she would have to pay in order to elude death.

  The other helpful man said to Arpazia, “Don’t concern yourself. That’s all she’s worth. We won’t do you, lady. You’re for a higher table.”

  Because Lilca had betrayed the castle, allowing Draco’s army in by the secret door, Draco in fact had her hanged. He did not like faithlessness, and in those days sought always to make vivid examples of his moral stance.

  But to Arpazia, seeing she had been an innocent in the matter, he subsequently gave back several of her “treasures,” as he termed them, a reward for allowing him to sack the castle before her father Could burn everything. He even initially forgave her attempt to escape and curse him—evidently neither had worked. He told her, her behavior was not surprising. She was a virgin and virtuous. However, all that was later, in the palace by the sea.

  Arpazia knew nothing about the act a man performed with a woman, although she had sometimes heard of it. It was a sacred ritual intended to invoke pregnancy—or a dirty deed. Something delicious—or disgusting. So shrouded in mystery—and in mysterious, contrary chatter had it been—it meant nothing to her. It had no connection to any feeling she herself might ever have had, in dreams, or alone.

  What she saw the men doing to Lilca that morning she had not understood, and through their hurry, and Lilca’s acquiescence, Arpazia was not enlightened.

  The castle, her home, fell in the hour after she left it.

  Arpazia by then had been put into a tent of the war-camp, a makeshift leather thing that was full of baskets, bundles, and shed pieces of weaponry. They tied her hands together, and her feet; these quite loosely, at the ankles. And there were two old women there in the tent, sorting through the bundles and other stuff, who cackled at her, but nothing else. They were unlike the nurse, being sharp-eyed and lively. There was a brazier which kept them all quite warm.

  The girl was afraid, of course, but aware she did not now have to face her father with his implacable murdering dagger. What did she think would happen to her? In the after years, when, again and again, all these scenes returned in abrupt harsh flashes, like bitter lightnings, she would strive with her younger self, asking her what she had expected. Something nice?

  Probably nothing. The callow girl (that she would come to despise and separate from) had no imagination. Since she knew nothing, she had nothing to burn as fuel for thought. She had been taught to read and write a little but had not bothered with books, from the use of which she had been discouraged—learning was a male pursuit. Instead her head was packed with social songs of the castle, with fragmented myths, with the shadowy rhymes and chants and spells of the nurse, who had been reckoned a witch.

  Arpazia fell asleep finally, sitting there in the tent, as the scavenger crones picked through the incomprehensible muddle of odds and ends.

  Then mad shouting woke her, the noise of things crashing, and a wild victory paean ringing round and round.

  This filled her with alarm, but also, not knowing what to do, incapable of anything, as soon as it died down she fell asleep again.

  I should have chewed through the binding at my wrists. I should have done it so the women never saw. Untied the rope from my ankles. Crept away. Even if they had killed me—

  At last she woke and it was dusk. The hags were gone, and a man was pulling her to her feet. She found they had cut the tie at her ankles..They let her walk across the camp, through the churned snow.

  Campfires and braziers burned, and the banners which also flickered like flames. She saw the emblem, the bull which blew fire.

  Men dragged things, some of which were carts loaded with their spoils from her castle, or simply cartless spoils—carpets, furniture, chests, objects she had seen often, but never like this. Some men dragged the bodies of other men, she did not know why. Horses restlessly trampled at their pickets, shaking their heads. A few were running about riderless, calling. A woman went by in a necklace of gold, crying her eyes out. There was the smell of roasting meat, beer and death-kept-cold. And there was still some occasional screaming, from the surgeons’ area. But generally the atmosphere was jolly.

  The dusk changed from blue to steel to firelit red, as she crossed the camp. No one paid Arpazia much attention.

  The man who escorted her was one of the four from earlier, the very one who had assaulted Lilca first. He said nothing.

  Draco’s tent was like a great golden bulb, and outside was planted the largest bull banner, fringed with silver, and next to it the image of a dragon in gilded iron, on a pole hung with crimson tassels.

  The war-leader, soon to be a king, was sitting on a table, drinking wine. He was black with soot and splashed colorfully with a lot of fairly recent blood, but none of it was his own. This had been, for him, a lucky day.

  They had to stand and wait some while until he noticed them. Arpazia was used to waiting, though, on the whim of men.

  “Oh, Cirpoz—splendid. Is that the girl?”

  The soldier, Cirpoz, said, “Yes, sire.”

  “I’m not king yet,” said Draco, coyly. (Did she hear how coy he sounded? Would she have known to recognize such a thing?) Cirpoz grinned. He was apparently talented at grinning. “Well and good, then. His legal daughter.” Draco shot a look at her. He did not seem interested, and at that moment was not. She was used to that, too; possibly it was reassuring. “Don’t put her with the rest of the taken women. They’ll hatch some plot, like that other girl, the faithless bitch. Oh, put her in the back tent.”

  So Arpazia was escorted out again and put into the back tent, part of Draco’s traveling apartments on campaign. Here a slave woman presently came, undid the tie on her hands, and gave her a bit of greasy half-roast meat, which Arpazia did not want, and some goat’s cheese crumbled in wine, which she ate and drank. She was young, a fool, and hungry.

  For three days they traveled. Arpazia was in a wagon drawn not by horses but by bullocks, though their horns were gilded.

  She saw only a couple of female slaves, who attended to essentials. Sometimes she looked out between the leather flaps of the wagon, but the driver unnerved her, a big man who never spoke. There were soft rugs, and she slept a great deal. Asleep, she missed Lilca’s hanging.

  On the fourth evening after they had stopped, a bath was arranged in the wagon. Normally indifferent to bathing, she found it refreshing and hot. After she had dried herself, and put on again her carmine gown, someone came and took her once more across the camp.

  She had seen forests as they traveled, and once, miles away, a glimpse of mountains on the white sky, which she had taken for clouds, at first. Now she saw the forests had thinned. There was a vast, white-gleaming road below, which no one explained was a frozen river. She heard wolves keening in the distance. Out of doors, this would have upset her, but there were so many people here she was not afraid. The fool, the poor fool.

  Through its closed lid, still the mirror
watched:

  “I’ll find you a husband,” he generously said.

  She looked at him blankly. He accepted her lack of response as thrilled astoundment.

  “Don’t be troubled, Arpaida.”

  “Arpazia,” she corrected him. She should not have done so, and mumbled, “Forgive me. I’m sorry.” He was a man and a lord … even she had gathered that much.

  But Draco was only amused.

  “Try this fried cake. It’s got berry juice in it.”

  She was too nervous to enjoy any of the dinner. If she had been at the castle, she would have liked it. There was roast mutton, and warm bread, and roots cooked with spices. Two or three of his captains were there with Draco, and they sailed, glancing at her, knowing something she did not.

  He was dressed well, a linen shirt and velvet mantle trimmed by sables. And many rings, even an earring of gold.

  The captains started to talk and play a game with figures on a board. He drew her aside into his arm. Despite the clothes, he had not washed, or shaved. He was like some uncle from the past, a brother of her father’s; Draco, too, looked old to her then, she fourteen, and he in his twenties.

  Arpazia made no resistance. Why should she? She had been fondled by masculine relatives before, hugged, kissed. Even her father had once run his remote hands across her body, alerting her neither to excitement or unease, for she was indifferent and her father only analytical—there had been no sinister development.

  “You’re young,” Draco said. His voice was slurred, but she knew all that, too, the way men became silly when their breath was flavored by alcohol. “You’re a pretty little thing. Don’t mind it, I’ll see you safe, at Belgra. Give you a dowry, why not? You can have some of your own treasures back. Maybe not that mirror over there. I might keep that. It’s a fine thing. Glass. I’ve heard of them but never seen one like it. They say they’re magic. Best to keep the lid shut. Did you look in it and speak a spell to learn who your lover would be?”