White As Snow (Fairy Tale) Page 4

  Primly, ignorantly, Arpazia said nothing.

  Half an hour later, by the water clock in the tent’s folded corner, he took her into another tent, which budded off from the end of the dining area.

  “You’re so young,” he said again. “I’ll swear you never had a suitor. I tell you what, little snowdrop, I’ll give you this ring—do you see?—with the pearl to match your skin—if you let me take a look at your breasts.”

  Draco meant to be canny. He had had countless willing girls, uncountable girls who were unwilling. This one he tried to woo. A woman of any age was acquisitive, so he had learned. And the Church constantly warned that laval rages of Hell smoldered between their legs.

  But this one, she stared at him as if he had gone insane.

  “Come on, pretty narcissus flower. Come, come on. Just a peek. You won’t mind, I promise.”

  And when Arpazia took a step away, just as she had from her father with the knife, Draco went after her, caught her to him, and lavished on her mouth a wet drunken kiss that had a wet drunk snake-tongue in it. And as he smothered her with his face, his free hand pulled the buttons off her dress, and felt its way in over two small full soft satin things, whose central points sprang up under his touch like startled hares.

  It was more than his intrusion, his maleness, which terrified Arpazia. Then again, her body had its own instincts.

  She fought him, and when she did he clasped her more closely. He was huge to her slightness, he sweated and blazed with heat and she could not breathe. If she noticed the genital dagger that pressed now, greedily, at her belly, was debatable. All of him was too big for her, too close, and too insistent. As well ask a girl not to run from an avalanche.

  “Come now. Here, have a taste of this wine. I’d never want to hurt you, snowdrop. Don’t make me do it—be my gentle girl?”

  She nodded into his neck, and so he partly released her, and began to push the wine cup instead against her lips.

  She struck the cup aside and jumped from him.

  “God in Hell!”

  She was away.

  Arpazia rushed out through the little tent, and across the main tent, and the captains came to their feet, ribald with mirth, and then Draco came pounding after her.

  “Shall we get up a hunt and run your rabbit down?”

  “Stay where you are.” His face was swollen with fury, and their laughter died.

  “She’s a dunce, Draco.”

  “Draco?” he said. “I’m to be your king.” And then he was out of the tent.

  He strode through his camp, which Arpazia bolted through.

  Men and women fell back from both of them, turning from her with an oath or derisive snigger, but from him with anxious fear.

  He let her run, allowing no one else to stop her. She would not get far. Let her wear herself out. He had done this before, knew it all. He put on a grim smile for those who watched, and now they began to salute him, wish him well in this latest enterprise. “There goes your fleet deer, sire!” And some girl cried, “Would it were I, Draco-king. I’d run that slow.”

  But she broke from the camp, Arpazia. She had darted up into the open edges of the woods.

  The lights were behind him. Here the luminous white uncrushed spaces, the black columns of the trees, the indigo sky with its fretwork of cold stars.

  “You little cunt, every step you’ve made me take you’ll pay me for.”

  He wanted her.

  The freezing air had fired him up more than the wine. His weapon hurt, and his whole groin, as it had not since he was a boy, and his first woman teased him.

  But she, this one, would hurt worse.

  In the end she stumbled and fell down, and then he ran. He was on her like a wolf. He flung her over and pressed her to the ground by his weight.

  “Now—”

  He tore her dress open and showed her white body to the heavenly stars. Her map was perfectly marked, and the dark forest citadel he must storm.

  Holding her hands above her head on the snow, he tore her open like her dress, in three ramming thrusts. She screamed and her eyes were wide, but she stared at the sky as he plunged within her, until his body arched, he called her foul names, and burst in glory. She had by then stopped screaming.

  “You little dolt. I would have been kind if you hadn’t resisted. There, there. You’ll live. And I’ll have got you with a boy. I’d bet on it. Every woman I’ve had, she bears. Bears boys.”

  Arpazia dizzily, crazily searched the sky. What was she looking for? Some rescuing angel?

  She did not even know what he had done. Only that he had damaged her. Only that this appalling event had definitely happened.

  “Here.” He hauled her up. “Take this ring. It’s gold. The camp isn’t far, you won’t come to harm.”

  Draco was tired. He had had enough.

  Arpazia turned, dropping the ring, and saw her own shape marked gravelike in the white snow, and her brilliant blood running over it from the hem of her broken dress, between the black trees.

  “Go on now,” he said. “And expect a boy.”

  When she saw her blood, this moment was when the rape occurred to her. She felt it, for it was not the pain or the fear. It was some other thing. It turned her inside out, and she fell again, and kneeling in the snow, and the blood, she cried, in a voice she heard and which was not her own: “May it be bloody on you as that blood, and black on you as the wood. May it be cold white as snow.”

  Draco paled. He signed himself with the cross.

  “You little cunt. Shut your slit. I can have you hanged, like the other dross. What are you, some witch?”

  She did not know what she had said.

  She did not know where she was, or who she was.

  “Black as the wood, white as the snow,” she shrilled, her face white, her eyes all black, “red as your blood that under it flow—”

  “You filthy bitch, shut your row.” He slapped her hard across her raised face, bent and retrieved his ring, and turning, walked off toward his camp. “Stay there and let the wolves have you.”

  Her nurse’s rhymes, heard all her years, writhed like tangled weaving in her head. But also cautionary tales of the forests—wolves. This idea must have been what eventually drew her from the ground and sent her down to safety, such as it was.

  Try as she sometimes, perversely, would, she never after recalled her return journey to the camp. Only the words ringing round and round, her curse on him which came back instead to her, black as wood, white as snow, red as blood.

  III.

  SHE KNEW THE CURSE HAD MISSED him and struck her when her belly began to grow hard and round. Despite never having had the act of reproduction detailed to her, she had often seen its result. She was terrified, of course. Yet again, ridiculously, she did not believe in this. At every waking, she would examine herself in frantic, hopeful fear, thinking the affliction must have gone.

  By then, actually from the moment she found herself once more in Draco’s victorious war-camp, Arpazia was no longer being cosseted.

  Through the winter daylight she walked with other women. Not those from the castle, it was true, who were all by then either dead or slaves. These free females were the followers of Draco’s army. They, with their men, had trudged for half a year up and down the land, through the thick forests, over wild grasslands, even in mountain country among the boulders and the ice. They were hardened women, and Arpazia unhardened. They chivvied and mocked her, but not much else. Nor did any of the men molest her. Some edict had apparently remained concerning her, the sole legal daughter of a castle lord.

  Her cloth shoes wore through in a day. Her feet were blistered and bleeding when she sat down dazedly on a prone tree trunk. A woman came and handed her, wordlessly, a pair of ugly boots that were too big and had been stuffed with straw. Now and then she was given a ride on a cart, among the loot, and among women temporarily weakened—for a day or so—by childbirth. At these Arpazia, as her own condition became known to
her, gazed in morose, disbelieving horror. Those sucking things clinging to their breasts, like parasitic grubs—

  The landscape altered. The forests spread away. The mountains curved, a motionless cumulus which had dropped from the sky and frozen into granite.

  The opaque frozen rivers came and went.

  Sometimes there were towns and villages where Draco had established his garrisons, crow’s-nest fortresses or long houses built of logs. Here his army was welcomed. There would be large meals, much drinking, the camp at play, and dancing with clapped hands. At one of these stops they celebrated Midwinter-Mass. Everyone was happy, except for their captives. That night, Arpazia caught sight of Draco in the distance. It was the only time she saw him during the remainder of the march.

  Probably the shock of what had happened to her kept Arpazia in her trance. Just as she could never after remember her return to the camp, she remembered this victory march to Belgra Demitu and the sea, only in weird, isolated fragments.

  Had she never thought again to attempt flight? If ever she had tried, they would have prevented it, since she was always in the midst of Draco’s own people, and they seemingly highly aware of her. Conversely, the lands here were all under his banner. Even the crude inn signs had been garishly changed—there a black bull snorting sparks, there a white bull galloping through a field of flowers.

  Otherwise the land was winter’s. King Death, in his night palace underground, would be less kind even than Draco.

  Mirrors taught: Perhaps there were always at least two sorts of reality, what you credited, and what was true.

  Arpazia lived in a limbo where none of this was possible. And she lived the reality, where each day and dark she was among the army, and her belly swelled with a child only fourteen years her junior.

  Did she ever consider her father—her nurse—coppery Lilca, who had betrayed her and died, for even if Arpazia had not witnessed the hanging, the camp women had carefully described the event. To Arpazia, these people, though dead, were alive still. And unimportant. They could not assist her; they never had.

  In the same way, even Draco, instigator of this nightmare, became mislaid. She recalled only his heat and beard and smell and mantle, as if a violent hairy suit of clothes had raped her.

  The thaw was beginning when the march reached a country above the sea, and looking down beheld the great town and the mystic ruins and palace of Belgra Demitu.

  Here, it was said, at time’s start, the earth had opened, and a young goddess was snatched into it in. one volcanic moment, from which drama the seasons had begun. Though many other places boasted this same spot, Belgra Demitu was named for it, and for the goddess-mother of the abducted maiden.

  Arpazia knew the legend, but not well. It had come to her outside its classical framework, some untidy tale of the castle.

  In the wet mist of that morning, she saw the land dropping in wide steps, and bare woods, and the always distant mountains, and a gap which held, as the sun shed the mirage of its new light, a filled void. The sea? All around her, shouts confirmed: The sea.

  The town sprawled on and on, and on the terraces rising from it, was a temple built in another dawn, and the ancient palace, its columns and olive trees scorched by winter. The second palace grew out of its toppled stones.

  A thin smoke rose from the town, and from one place on the terraces—there it was, the arcane Oracle of long ago, still fuming up to tell its riddles. A woman tended the Oracle, although the Christ had his church nearby. There was, too, a sacred spring. It had been the goddess Demetra’s once, or her daughter’s, having leapt from the soil at her clutching hands, when she was dragged underground. Now, the spring was sacred to Christ’s Mother, the Virgin Marusa.

  Climbing the hill, the women crossed themselves, all at once demure and pliant, wanting God to like them.

  Arpazia did not notice the spring.

  Her malediction had not reached him, but perhaps he felt it draw close, then turn aside. As they approached the palace by the sea, Draco began to think about the girl. He remembered forcing her, and that aroused him. Then he thought of her blood on the snow and was perturbed. He did not know why, for he had seen plenty of blood, some quantities of which were female.

  Bad dreams hovered over Draco. He could not recollect them on waking, but he kept their feel, like a low sound in the ear. There was no menace to them, no compunction even, it was simply that they did not go away. He decided he had offended his own high codes. He should have taken more care of her. She had been gently reared, was royal, with the same watered royalty that ran through his own veins. But then, he did not bother to seek her out, and contrasting with this laziness, his sense of wrongness waxed. Was she a witch? Had she somehow affected him? Best go to God then, take God like the bath he would have at Belgra Demitu, to scour off the muck of campaign.

  Draco stood before the priest, looking angry, and the worse for a night’s banqueting and drinking; miserable.

  These powerful men were like little boys, the priest thought, partly to leaven his own unease. But one must be cautious.

  “Father—I require a penance.”

  “My lord Draco, you are to have your coronation here in a month. There will need to be many cleansings—”

  “No, Father.” Impatient. The priest waited, covering himself with a calm skin against Draco’s potential for rage. “War—is only war. I took the land for God. And I was assisted by Heaven. How else did I do so much?”

  “God wills that you be king, Draco, my son.”

  “Yes. I believe that, Father. But something gnaws at me.”

  The priest still waited.

  Draco walked about. A man of action, unwilling ever to be much at rest. The mind was the same. It strode from idea to idea, but the ideas of a little boy … A proud and brash little bully, who had been first treated harshly, then rottenly spoiled by fate.

  “Let me have confession,” demanded Draco.

  He kneeled down, and they began.

  When Draco had finished, the priest saw that his future king was now wrung-out, like a woman after tears, and malleable. You might take a certain pleasure in rubbing a king’s nose in his own mess.

  “She was of royal blood. Naturally what you did affects your honor. You, the king. And—she’s with child by your deed, you say?”

  “So they tell me. They always are, if I have them.”

  “Then, my lord, the teaching of the Church is clear.” It was. “You must marry her.”

  Despite everything, the priest anticipated a vile mouthful in response. Nothing came at first. Then the kneeling bully said, quietly, “You’re in the right. That’s my penance then. I’ll wed the girl.”

  She had been lying sick, the baby in her womb making her puke, when they came to tell her. The insanity of it was only at one with all the rest.

  Arpazia went to the altar of the church at Belgra Demitu in her fourth month. She wore a gown of sky blue, Marusa’s color, heavily embroidered with gold. Her rounding belly scarcely showed, but where it was noted, they took it for a benign omen. The naive among them even reckoned that it was only her proper womanly shape, the correct contour of a maiden made to conceive and carry to term.

  The ceremonies resembled, for Arpazia, certain festivals at the castle, when she had sat crowned by a garland beside her father. She experienced the same slight nervousness, boredom, if none of the excitement she had felt as a child. The priests did put a small garland on her head—not blossom, a crown—and a dark ring on her middle finger. Bells rang, which roared inside her skull. A crowd was cheering. She wished it would end quickly. That she was getting married did not impress itself upon her, for she was in an unusual state of mind and body. She passed across the rituals and left the feast early to throw up in a bowl held by her new waiting-women.

  He arrived much later.

  “You’re ill. I won’t tax you. Do you understand you’re a queen? There, little queen, you’re safe. Sleep well.”

  He was blind drunk
, and meant the sentimental words. He had realized, after all, she was only a woman and could not be much trouble to him.

  So Arpazia lay alone in the wide marriage bed, with its strewing of asphodel and hyacinths, the early flowers that had been just in time. And she wondered why she had a knife, used to pare the nails, still in her hand. She let it slide out on the floor.

  It reminded her of Lilca, however. So dreaming, she had to watch Lilca, dangling from a rope, her heels kicking as if in one of the clapping dances of the war-camp.

  IV.

  DRACO RETURNED TO VISIT HER about twenty days later.

  “Are you well, at last?” he courteously, impatiently asked.

  Arpazia was afraid, trembling, and did not know why. Could not recall why. Then she recalled. He had torn her open in order to stuff her belly with his devilish seed, this “son” the women promised her, and the physician too, as if a son were something she longed for, like a precious toy.

  “No, I’m sick, still,” Draco’s queen muttered.

  “What? Ah, come, no need to be nervous of me. We’re as we should be, now, aren’t we, little queen. Sinless in God’s sight.”

  He was alight with lust, as before.

  To Draco, this lust was his virtue. There were a hundred women he could have had, including the one he liked most often in his bed, a girl of the hills, unroyal and besotted by him—and barren.

  Arpazia, for her part, had discovered she had again picked up a small knife from her cosmetics table. It was currently used to grind kohl she did not need to darken brows and lashes.

  Draco had not seen. Arpazia dropped the knife in dismay. She had no notion of how to kill him, and besides incoherently knew that to kill him might only harm her worse. And she might have cut herself.

  (She was of course still asleep at this time, entering the fifth month of her pregnancy, tranced. If she had not been so, probably she would have stuck the knife in him at once.)