The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-six (21 page)

— You’re lying. You know I’ll have you beaten.

The laborers looked at one another. They knocked him down, kicked him into the gutter, and buried him in laughter.

After a spell, Meir rolled himself over, roused by an odor stronger than smelling salts. The beggar Issachar was leaning over him, wondering if he was hurt. Meir staggered to his feet, mumbling about having stumbled on a loose paving stone. Then he asked if the beggar had perchance been up all night. Issachar nodded his hooded head; he couldn’t afford to rest. The scholar asked if he’d seen Yod.

— The girl with tawny skin and star sapphire eyes? I was just with her.

— With her? What do you mean? Where?

— Behind the tavern in the alley. She begged me. I couldn’t turn her away. How often does a beggar have a chance to give?

— You raped her.

The scholar lunged at Issachar, but the beggar’s stench—guardian angel of tramps—knocked Meir back into the gutter. Issachar did not laugh at him, nor did he run. The beggar simply stood his ground. At last, Meir apologized. Climbing to his feet again, he asked where Yod had gone. Issachar unfolded a finger, long and crooked. He pointed toward the woods.

Of course Meir was learned enough to know that the forest was where evil thoughts fled as imps and sprites to become full-grown demons, and that even a golem couldn’t long withstand their nocturnal torments. He headed for his library, but wound up, agitated beyond reckoning, at the house of the rabbi.

Selig was still in bed, smothered in children, regaling them with old folktales while they giggled and stole sips of sweet tea from his chipped cup. Meir’s appearance stilled them. They stared at him—a man beaten and broken like a wretch from their grandfather’s legends—and scrambled.

Selig gently grasped his hand. He pulled Meir close and quietly observed that the scholar had not followed his advice.

— But I did. I made Yod feel.

— I don’t think that was my suggestion. You know I’m not a clever man. Tell me what happened.

The scholar gave him a thorough accounting. He omitted nothing.

— Then you’re free of her.

—
Free
of her? I
need
her.

— There’s plenty of mud by the river. If you’re so desperate for a mistress, why not make another?

— She wouldn’t be Yod.

— That depends on what you name her.

— You don’t understand, Selig. I made her feel.

— You made her
feel
? You’re in love, Meir. There’s nothing to be done, unless you’re prepared to pursue her.

For all his erudition, the scholar could not find fault in what the rabbi said, and, in his desperate state, the alternate solution that he found in his books—burying the girl’s name in an unmarked grave—seemed downright ludicrous. That morning, he pawned his library and took a loan in gold against his home. From a peddler, he bought a cart horse with legs more bowed than his own, and, after several failed attempts to mount her, hobbled through town on the old nag’s back. Everyone stopped to taunt him, the Kabbalah-conjurer who held himself so high and mighty above them, only to be cuckolded by his own golem. They threw rotten fruit and clots of dirt, and made such lewd remarks about Yod that Meir wondered who—man, woman, or child—hadn’t molested her.

The forest was so vast that the demons spoke seven different dialects. Some lived in the trees, sailing on the winds, while others were subterranean and blind. Obviously, their cultures also differed. The largest were beasts of destruction, ground-dwelling brutes who’d fell whole civilizations and foul themselves when they were done. The slightest of them, airborne wisps as gentle as dust, thrived on deception, sweeping societies with rumor and prejudice, high on their own delusion. But neither of these demons concerned people much: The workings of natural disaster were too calamitous, and of human nature too ubiquitous, for folks to address. Theft and rape and murder, on the other hand, were demons of a scale that everybody could grasp, and in many countries bordering on the forest, princes offered a bounty on such evils. Peasants would band together after dark, significantly decreasing the local crime rate, even if no demons were actually caught.

Folks learned to season their vigilance with cunning. They set traps and lay in wait. And one night, in a small principality where river met sea, some old peasants made a catch.

While not exactly beastly, the creature clearly was no ordinary girl. Sprawled on the ground, stark naked, bleeding where the trap clasped her ankle, she stared at her captors through star sapphire eyes, mouthing the word
hurt.

The language she spoke was foreign to them. They suspected that it might be a hex. They gagged her and bound her in rope. To the palace, they dragged her through the dirt. They hollered for their prince. They called for their reward.

The prince met them in the courtyard. The farmers tipped their hats as His Majesty approached, but they did not lower their voices. Each shouting to be heard over the rest, all of them tried to impress the young royal with how courageous they’d been to capture such a demon. When the prince saw the girl lying at their feet, though, he no longer heard their boasts. He got down on his knees like a commoner, to untie her.

He broke through the knots with strong hands. The peasants looked on in horror. Did His Majesty know the danger of releasing such a fierce beast within the palace gates?

— She isn’t a demon.

— She came from the forest. You can be sure she is one.

— Look at her slender waist, her wide eyes. She’s probably an abducted princess. A girl like this could get taken up by the devil himself.

She shivered. The prince wrapped his own velveteen robe around her bare shoulders. He asked her where she came from. When she didn’t respond, he surmised that she must be an exotic princess indeed, and led her to his chambers to investigate further. The peasants demanded their bounty. The prince replied that if anyone ever again called her unnatural, their reward would be the gallows.

The next day, His Majesty announced that he was marrying her. His courtiers, many of them old enough to remember the day his father married his noble mother, and most of whose daughters had been his mistresses on the basis of princely promises, wanted to see her credentials. They asked from what court she’d been abducted. Touching her tawny skin, he deemed her pedigree Arabian or African. They demanded to know her name. Turning his royal back, he said that they could address her as Your Majesty when they met her the following morning at his wedding.

Yod, of course, had never before been bathed in rose water. She’d never had her hair woven into a hundred sinuous braids, laced with strands of seed pearl, and she’d never been stitched into a gown of fresh magnolia petals, embroidered with pollinated thread. Yet almost every incident in her brief life had been unprecedented. She hadn’t the experience to know surprise. As the prince set her with his finest gems—clusters of diamonds around her neck, crystal crown upon her head—he was reassured that he’d chosen his wife well: To carry such magnificence so lightly, he surmised, her gentle blood must flow back, unobstructed, to the Garden of Eden.

Watching her saunter down the palace steps in slippers of gold leaf, even his haughtiest courtiers laid their nobility humbly at her feet, in deepest bows and curtsies. They all listened as the prince exchanged vows with his betrothed. Yod pronounced her words precisely as he’d taught her. She didn’t yet know what they meant, but when she kissed him, her lips expressed perfectly how she felt.

For many months after that, the prince wasn’t seen except with his princess. They shared his throne, and together wielded his scepter, for their fingers were always entwined. The arrangement suited his subjects: Considering them no different from herself, the princess embraced their concerns with trusting fervor. They adored her openly, honoring her with garlands of fresh flowers each day—and every night, behind closed doors, she quenched her husband’s jealousy.

And how he sated her! Every pleasure that old Meir had promised, that he’d urged her to yearn, her young husband provided, and desired in kind. In his hands, his wife softened. Her tawny skin warmed. Her sapphire eyes burned.

Yet a golem, even a royal one, lacks human perception. Yod didn’t notice, less than a year into her marriage, the flicker in her husband’s gaze when he looked at courtiers’ newly adolescent daughters, nor did she discern meaning in their giggling when, for misbehavior that mystified her, he called them to the throne for a spanking.

Then he decreed that, as an anniversary gift, his dear princess would spend a month at his country’s famed rejuvenating baths.

— You need a rest.

— I’m very happy in your bed.

— You don’t want to lose your youth.

— I’m not as fresh as I used to be?

— You have wrinkles behind your knees.

— Doesn’t everyone?

— Don’t contradict me. Are you trying to be ugly?

Yod shook her head. The prince patted her on the chin. But when she sought his mouth, he turned his shoulder.

The dress she wore for her voyage, a whole garden of orchids woven together at the stem, was more glorious even than her wedding gown. Her hair was braided with ribbons of gold leaf, and her tiara was cut from a single slice of lapis. In her open carriage, traveling through the countryside with her ten-car entourage, she embodied the prince’s prestige—reminding the peasants of his palatial majesty—and the courtiers he sent to watch over her would have made much of the occasion had the princess not looked so sickly. The flowers wilted on her feverish body, and her crown weighed so heavily on her head that, when she stood, she had to be held up by two chambermaids. By the time Yod got to the sanatorium, she needed one.

The baths could accommodate a hundred women and men, yet, to protect Her Majesty’s highborn modesty, the facility was given to her alone. Early each morning, she was packed in cool mud, which dried in the sun until noon. Then she was steeped in hot springs until dusk, and soaked in cold baths until she could count a thousand stars above. At last, to take in the air, she was put to bed on a hammock, so exhausted that her dreams were a blur. In those nightmares, she couldn’t distinguish between pain and pleasure, nor could she tell whether the man administering it was the prince or Meir.

The thirty days and thirty nights passed, ripples in the ancient baths. On the final morning, the fields were filled with daisies, newly in blossom. Yod sent her maids to fetch as many as they could carry. With her own fingers, she tied them in a chain, and wrapped them around her body until she’d made a dress. The handful she had left, she linked together in a tiara.

The courtiers, who scorned such common flowers, had other ideas about how she ought to be attired. They brought out strands of rubies and emeralds from treasure chests as large as wardrobes. They reminded her that, after all, she was a princess.
Just so,
she said,
I’ll wear what I please.

She sat high in her carriage, anticipating how her husband would embrace his bride in full bloom, never again letting her out of his sight. She passed through the palace gate. Trumpets sounded. Nobles gathered. Only nowhere in their midst did she see the prince.

Before she could ask questions, she was ushered to a banquet to celebrate her return, seated at the end of a long table. All the way at the opposite end, past legions of gentry, His Majesty reclined, a young girl on each side. The princess recognized them, two sisters, twin daughters of his bursar, whose giggling naughtiness had merited them great fits of spanking by His Majesty in the weeks before the prince sent Yod away. She watched his gaze shift back and forth between them, identically plump and blond and hazel-eyed, and, while she could appreciate their need for discipline—they ate with their fingers from His Majesty’s plate, and whispered in his ears with their mouths full, wiping their greasy hands clean on his velveteen gown—she didn’t understand why their father never glanced in their direction, nor why personal responsibility for their supervision should fall to her husband. Yet whenever she sought to catch his attention, to remind him that she was home, one of the twins would tap on his shoulder or tug on his ear, and a matron sitting near Yod would inquire about her mud bath regimen.

She was obliged to describe her days over and over again, and by the nineteenth time, the prince had slipped away. The hour was late. The table was cleared. And still the women held Yod in conversation. She yawned. She announced that she was going to bed. They asked if she planned evermore to sleep in a hammock.
Never again,
she declared, and wouldn’t be detained by their banter for a moment longer.

Straight to her husband’s chambers Yod went. The door was shut. Behind it she heard a loud moan, and then another, much softer. Her hand fell on the latch. When it didn’t give, she broke it, and entered.

The prince had both twins in bed with him. The one named Raina clutched his scepter. The one named Raisa wore his crown. And, in the light of a single white wax candle, both glistened with his semen.

Without a word of explanation, His Majesty turned his back on Yod. The girls, though, climbed out of bed and, brash in their naked white flesh, strutted up to the princess. Raina plucked a petal from her daisy-chain dress and twittered,
He loves me.
Raisa yanked a petal and warbled,
He loves me not.
They started to giggle, and within a minute had her stripped of every petal—taunting
loves me, loves me not—
leaving only an uncomely tangle of stems on her murky skin.