Red as Blood: or tales from the Sisters Grimmer Read online

“Here we are at last,” grated the hag, in a vulture’s voice.

  She came closer and cranked herself down on her knees and bowed her face into the turf and the colorless flowers.

  Bianca sat and gazed at her. The hag lifted herself. Her teeth were yellow palings.

  “I bring you the homage of witches, and three gifts,” said the hag.

  “Why should you do that?”

  “Such a quick child, and only fourteen years. Why? Because we fear you. I bring you gifts to curry favor.”

  Bianca laughed. “Show me.”

  The hag made a pass in the green air. She held a silken cord worked curiously with a plaited human hair.

  “Here is a girdle which will protect you from the devices of priests, from crucifix and chalice and the accursed holy water. In it are knotted the tresses of a virgin, and of a woman no better than she should be, and of a woman dead. And here—” a second pass and a comb was in her hand, lacquered blue over green— “a comb from the deep sea, a mermaid’s trinket, to charm and subdue. Part your locks with this, and the scent of ocean will fill men’s nostrils and the rhythm of the tides their ears, the tides that bind men like chains. Last,” added the hag, “that old symbol of wickedness, the scarlet fruit of Eve, the apple red as blood. Bite, and the understanding of Sin, which the serpent boasted of, will be made known to you.” And the hag made her last pass in the air and extended the apple, with the girdle and the comb, towards Bianca.

  Bianca glanced at the seven stunted trees.

  “I like her gifts, but I do not quite trust her.”

  The bald masks peered from their shaggy beardings. Eyelets glinted. Twiggy claws clacked.

  “All the same,” said Bianca, “I will let her tie the girdle on me, and comb my hair herself.”

  The hag obeyed, simpering. Like a toad she waddled to Bianca. She tied on the girdle. She parted the ebony hair. Sparks sizzled, white from the girdle, peacock’s eye from the comb.

  “And now, hag, take a little bit bite of the apple.”

  “It will be my pride,” said the hag, “to tell my sisters I shared this fruit with you.” And the hag bit into the apple, and mumbled the bite noisily, and swallowed, smacking her lips.

  Then Bianca took the apple and bit into it

  Bianca screamed—and choked.

  She jumped to her feet. Her hair whirled about her like a storm cloud. Her face turned blue, then slate, then white again. She lay on the pallid flowers, neither stirring nor breathing.

  The seven dwarf trees rattled their limbs and their bear-shaggy heads, to no avail. Without Bianca’s art they could not hop. They strained their claws and ripped at the hag’s sparse hair and her mantle. She fled between them. She fled into the sunlit acres of the forest, along the broken road, through orchard, into a hidden passage.

  The hag reentered the palace by the hidden way, and the Queen’s chamber by a hidden stair. She was bent almost double. She held her ribs. With one skinny hand she opened the ivory case of the magic mirror.

  “Speculum, speculum. Dei gratia. Whom do you see?”

  “I see you, mistress. And all in the land. And I see a coffin.”

  “Whose corpse lies in the coffin?”

  “That I cannot see. It must be Bianca.”

  The hag, who had been the beautiful Witch Queen, sank into her tall chair before the window of pale cucumber green and dark white glass. Her drugs and potions waited ready to reverse the dreadful conjuring of age the Angel Lucefiel had placed on her, but she did not touch them yet.

  The apple had contained a fragment of the flesh of Christ, the sacred wafer, the Eucharist

  The Witch Queen drew her Bible to her and opened it randomly.

  And read, with fear, the words: Resurgat.

  —

  It appeared like glass, the coffin, milky glass. It had formed this way. A thin white smoke had risen from the skin of Bianca. She smoked as a fire smokes when a drop of quenching water falls on it. The piece of Eucharist had stuck in her throat. The Eucharist, quenching water to her fire, caused her to smoke.

  Then the cold dews of night gathered, and the colder atmospheres of midnight. The smoke of Bianca’s quenching froze about her. Frost formed in exquisite silver scrollwork all over the block of misty ice which contained Bianca.

  Bianca’s frigid heart could not warm the ice. Nor the sunless green twilight of the day.

  You could just see her, stretched in the coffin, through the glass. How lovely she looked, Bianca. Black as ebony, white as snow, red as blood.

  The trees hung over the coffin. Years passed. The trees sprawled about the coffin, cradling it in their arms. Their eyes wept fungus and green resin. Green amber drops hardened like jewels in the coffin of glass.

  “Who is that, lying under the trees?” the Prince asked, as he rode into the clearing.

  He seemed to bring a golden moon with him, shining about his golden head, on the golden armor and the cloak of white satin blazoned with gold and blood and ink and sapphire. The white horse trod on the colorless flowers, but the flowers sprang up again when the hoofs had passed. A shield hung from the saddle bow, a strange shield. From one side it had a lion’s face, but from the other, a lamb’s face.

  The trees groaned and their heads split on huge mouths.

  “Is this Bianca’s coffin?” said the Prince.

  “Leave her with us,” said the seven trees. They hauled at their roots. The ground shivered. The coffin of ice-glass gave a great jolt, and a crack bisected it.

  Bianca coughed.

  The jolt had precipitated the piece of Eucharist from her throat.

  In a thousand shards the coffin shattered, and Bianca sat up. She stared at the Prince, and she smiled.

  “Welcome, beloved,” said Bianca.

  She got to her feet and shook out her hair, and began to walk toward the Prince on the pale horse.

  But she seemed to walk into a shadow, into a purple room; then into a crimson room whose emanations lanced her like knives. Next she walked into a yellow room where she heard the sound of crying which tore her ears. All her body seemed stripped away; she was a beating heart. The beats of her heart became two wings. She flew. She was a raven, then an owl. She flew into a sparkling pane. It scorched her white. Snow white. She was a dove.

  She settled on the shoulder of the Prince and hid her head under her wing. She had no longer anything black about her, and nothing red.

  “Begin again now, Bianca,” said the Prince. He raised her from his shoulder. On his wrist there was a mark. It was like a star. Once a nail had been driven in there.

  Bianca flew away, up through the roof of the forest. She flew in at a delicate wine window. She was in the palace. She was seven years old.

  The Witch Queen, her new mother, hung a filigree crucifix around her neck. “Mirror,” said the Witch Queen. “Whom do you see?”

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

  Thorns

  It was almost sunset when he met the dark woman on the road.

  He’d been traveling for most of his eighteen years, across the dry orange lands in the west, the plains and green forests of the east and in wide-sailed ships on the back of uneasy, spiteful seas. Sometimes he rode with caravans and helped sell their wares, sometimes he’d stop at some great city or poor town and work for a bit, driving the chariot horses of lords, or else chopping up wood, whatever they’d pay him for. He had seen a good many strange things—huge beasts with gold towers on their backs, carrying kings, a serpent lady in a circus, scaled from chin to ankle; even once, in an Eastern city, a man brought back to life. But there was something about the dark woman standing on the road that tensed his muscles and shivered his spine.

  She was all black cloak and black hair blowing on the chilly upland wind, and somehow, though he looked straight in her face, he could never seem to see it properly, although perhaps this was a trick of the westering light

  She was standing in his p
ath, and when he came up level with her, one long pale hand snaked out and grasped his arm. He didn’t like her touch, it was very cold. She said:

  “Where are you going, Royal Born?”

  At that, he knew he was in the presence of something supernatural, for there was no other way she could have known he had once been a king’s son. Nevertheless he said lightly: “You’re mistaken, madam. Take a look at my rags.”

  “There was a towered palace in the north, sacked by enemies, and a little prince carried to safety by a serving man. Now the prince travels the world, having no birthright left, and you are he.”

  The hair seemed to rise on his head and he looked down at her hand. On one long white claw burned a strange ring, made of silver, and shaped like a wheel.

  “I shall give you land,” she said, “and riches, if you go no farther. You shall be royal again. I promise you.”

  He looked up the road to that parting in the hills he had been making for since noon.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “There is a thing there I would rather were left alone.”

  He realized then, of course, that if she had been able to stop him by sorcery she would already have done so, and not be trying to dissuade him here. So he shook off her hand and said: “That’s a thing I’d like to see.”

  She made no further move to detain him, but he never looked back till he reached the road’s crest where the rocky uplands fell away into a narrow valley below. Then he turned, but there was nothing on the road behind—except for a tall black stone standing on the path.

  —

  As it turned out, it was a dismal and infertile valley. Perhaps if he’d not met the dark woman, he’d have left it alone, for it seemed to offer little.

  The sky went up in a last blaze of scarlet, and a wood of dead trees wailed in the wind. He saw a few poor huts, but no sign of life in them, and the clouds changed from red to violet. Just then he heard the noise of water. He was thirsty, as well as hungry—hunger he was very used to. He came out of the wood, and found himself suddenly on the brink of a great slope. Here a stream flung itself off from its bed into the air, plunging down two hundred feet in a slender silver fall. Below stretched an inner secret valley, hidden from the hills above. And in the valley something gleamed like the ivory bones of a giant under the whitening moon.

  The prince drank swiftly at the stream. There was a curious compulsion on him. As the night darkened and the moon brightened, he climbed down the treacherous slope. Eventually he stood on the outskirts of a ruined city.

  It was the most beautiful city he had ever seen, perhaps because it was empty and desolate. The wind curled itself about the slim white towers and runneled down the colonades, and the stars glittered on fragments of colored glass still spiking in the narrow windows. At its center rose a low hill that seemed to be covered by a wood of some sort, he couldn’t be sure, for the moon had slunk behind clouds—perhaps the place was a park or garden run wild.

  He walked about in the city for an hour, and by then its beauty had begun to oppress him. Finally the sky clouded completely, thunder muttered and rain began to fall. He picked a way over toppled column’s and emerged into a tangle of pine woods. All the trees seemed crippled and curiously leaning, but after a time he came on a straggling village, and there were lights showing.

  The moment he got near, all the watch dogs started barking and snarling. Almost immediately doors opened and men ran out. Clearly they distrusted strangers. In the murky light he noticed something very odd. Not one of them had a knife, only thick wooden stakes angled at him.

  He’d thought from his welcome they’d prove unfriendly and send him away, probably with the dogs to see him off, but they seemed satisfied by his explanation of himself, and when he offered to help with anything they might need doing—in their fields or their houses, or chopping their wood— they seemed to warm to him. He was shown into the headman’s house—a rough botched affair like all the rest— and given food, and beer to drink.

  But the longer he sat there, the stranger things seemed. They gave him no knife, either, to eat his meat with. The garments of the men and the women were made of animal skins, unmended and full of rents, and bundled round them and tied with tough grass stems, dried and plaited together. There was not a scrap of wool or cloth to be seen. Later on he got a look at their work tools and was astonished to find them made of stone, even to the blade of the axe—he saw now why they were so pleased to have someone else labor with it for a change. He asked the headman about this, and he looked puzzled, and said that it was the same all through the valley.

  “Do traders never come here?” asked the prince.

  “Oh, seldom, sir. You’re the first we’ve seen in a year or more.”

  The headman’s daughter said sullenly: “Once a man came with colored stones that sparkled and they were on a sharp little stick that would go through clothes like so—but Old Man told me it was bad luck, so I had to give it back.”

  The prince glanced aside at the one they called Old Man, a hunched-over grandfather sitting close to the fire. He had turned his wrinkled face to look at the girl when she spoke. Now he chanted in a dry, quavering tone: “No needle, no needle, no blade and no dart.”

  “It’s just his way,” said the headman uneasily. “He’ll say that from time to time. But it’s best to be careful. No sharp things must come into the valley—that’s what all the old ones say.”

  The prince felt the hair stir again on his head. He looked about the room, and realized at last what was so wrong. Not only were there no knives, but no brooches on the women’s dresses or ornamental pins in their hair. And there was not one sewn-up seam in their clothing. He saw, too, why they wore skins—somehow they had never learnt—or else they had forgotten… He had recalled what was the most important item of every dwelling. You would always find it somewhere, in the corner of a village cot, in the upper rooms of the rich woman’s house. A spinning wheel.

  When they had gone to bed, the prince lay down by the fire on the hides they had lent him. But he couldn’t sleep, and presently he heard the shuffling steps of the one they called Old Man coming back across the red-glowing room. Old Man stood over him and the prince sat up.

  “Tell me, grandfather, why no spinning wheel to grace this house?”

  “Nothing sharp, nothing sharp, no needle, no dart,” Old Man chanted.

  “Why not?”

  “Death will come and the curse will fall, and the city will lie empty.”

  “Which curse is that, old man?”

  “She will send it, the dark one, the Thirteenth Lady.”

  The prince grew very cold, despite the fire.

  “It already came, grandfather.”

  “Thorns!” the old man suddenly cried out in a sharp and startling wail. “Thorns! Thorns! Thorns!” Then he bowed his head and whispered like a dry old leaf: “Seek the Oldest One, in the city. He will be there.”

  He turned then, and shuffled away. The prince lay down, and a black, dank shadow seemed to eat up the room. He fell at once into a deathlike and unbroken sleep.

  —

  In the morning he did what he could with the stone axe to repay them for his lodging. It was an icy but somehow airless day, and the pines craned about him like black shadows.

  At noon he set off back through the trees towards the city, and, as he went, he heard every dog in the village begin to howl.

  Why he went toward the city he was not sure. Perhaps he intended to search out in the ruins the ‘Oldest One’ the grandfather had whispered of—yet how he would find him he had no notion. Besides, he was uncertain altogether—he might have dreamed that dark conversation, even the black-haired woman on the road, the Thirteenth Lady with her silver wheel ring.

  In the city everything was as before in the pale cold daylight, except that now he could see the colors of the glass in the windows, red and gold and indigo. Then he looked up, and stared again at that central hill, covered by its black, thickly-clustere
d growth. The sense of compulsion came once more. “There is a thing there I would rather were left alone,” the sorceress had said to him on the road. He began to climb the slanting streets towards the hill.

  Another storm came sweeping over the valley as he climbed. The sky went black, dazzling with green lightning forks, and he hurried with his head bowed against the rain. Turning a corner, he came upon a huge circular wall, the boundary of some great house or palace in earlier times. He moved along in its sheltering lee, and then there was a pair of rusty gates. He pushed at them and they slewed apart. As he went between, the lightning opened the sky, and its livid fire burst on a solid shining darkness, and threw over him a shadow as black as ink. Slowly he raised his head, and saw then what grew on the hill.

  Thorns.

  A vast, rearing stronghold of thorns, taller than tall trees, black as night, thick stems interwoven and sharp with blades. A tangle of daggers dripping the diamond rain. The prince gazed at it and his heart lurched. He felt the cold hand close again on his arm. Strewn among the knots and claws were white human bones, and further on a skull hung like an open rose. A mad impulse took hold of him when he saw the skull; he drew his knife and raised it to slash at the thorns. A voice came then, behind him.

  “No, Royal Born. Not yet.”

  The prince turned about, still holding the knife. A man stood in the gateway. He wore skins like the people of the village, and he leaned on a wooden staff. He was old, older than Old Man. The flesh of his face and hands was like lizard skin or tree bark.

  “I mean you no harm, Royal Born,” he said in a voice as thin and as penetrating as the wind. “I am the Oldest One in the valley. I remember things, and I have waited for you.”

  “What is this place?” The prince cried out over the thunder.

  “A place of thorns,” said the Oldest One.

  Then he turned and moved down the street without a word, and without a word the prince followed him.

  —

  He lived in the lowest room of a thin tower, and he had few belongings: a lamp, a pallet and a little wooden chest. The chest caught the prince’s eye at once, for it was intricately carved and would have needed sharper tools than stone. A few pine branches burned on the hearth.