White As Snow (Fairy Tale) (26 page)

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Authors: Tanith Lee

BOOK: White As Snow (Fairy Tale)
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“Has she been cut, my lovely one?”
Hadz pulled the glass away from Coira. He took no notice of its rarity, nor its teeth. Juprum pulled him back, and got Hadz’s fist in his face as recompense. But Juprum was used to that.
“No, no, Prince—you’ll damage your hands. Let me do it.”
So Hadz stood away, and the guards and Juprum gingerly picked off the glass.
She had not been cut—oh, just two or three little red kisses, on her shoulder, and on her foot, and her palm. They scarcely bled.
But over there, the other woman had sat down, and she had been cut rather more—her cheek, her arms, her knees, the length of her hack. Her grimy dark and pallor was brightly dyed.
Her eyes were wide now, like those of a half blind, uncanny owl. But she did not speak. She seemed to be searching round after
something she had no vitality to get up and look for.
When Hadz towered over her again and screamed at her in his fury, she only shook her head. Perhaps she was dazed.
So he turned from her.
“Who is she?”
“Some old witch—”
“Find out who she is.”
What would that be worth? But they never protested the orders of Hadz, Hell’s Prince.
Some of his scum of guards went out at once to inquire, glad enough to go.
They found out, too. A few of Elusion’s inhabitants had bellyaches from her wares, and were cursing her. There had been something in her fruit which did not agree with everyone, though others who had eaten it had nothing to report. But then the man spoke up who had witnessed her come into Hell from the hill, following the one now know as the witch who served Hadz.
“Her mother she said she was. I could see it, too. They had the same face, though one was a hag.”
Then Hadz, in another place of darkness, bent to Arpazia again. “Your daughter? You were her
mother
? Mothers love their children. Why did you poison her?”
Arpazia heard his voice, and the other voice that spoke beneath:
“You killed … don’t you know how you hurt me? The child in you—you and I both … you crushed it out …”
“Yes, I killed her,” Arpazia murmured. “I came to find her and do it. I didn’t want the child, I never did. It was with herbs I had, in a black cup. She’s dead now. Now there’s only me.”
The mirror, standing in the air, closed its single huge eye.
 
 
Dwarves constructed the girl’s coffin, an irony of which Hadz was unaware. For they were not the seven who had entered Elusion with her, of course. Those seven were gone. But these other dwarves had a reputation for being talented artisans. One of them
had already made for Hadz his exquisite ruby ring.
The coffin was unusual. Hadz had wanted it to be as it was, something rare, unlike all other things. And, he had come to understand, such mirror-glass was fabulous, a sorcerous artifact from the East.
“She’s so beautiful,” he said, on the third day, lamenting, weeping even, cheated. Juprum was not so afraid of these tears; they did not denote pain. “She’s not gone rotten, she doesn’t reek. Look—she’s pliable still.”
“It’s curious, my prince. But it can’t last. She doesn’t breathe; I can find no pulse-beat. Better to put her away while she’s fresh, and not spoil your memory of her.”
Juprum did not know if Hadz, during these days when he kept the corpse in the High Chamber of his palace, took advantage of her state to copulate with the dead witch. Juprum hoped not.
The coffin was made of the broken mirror. A coffin of glass. Each piece of any size had been set into a frame of heavy iron, then all was decorated by leaves of gold and flowers of silver, with jewels from Hadz’s treasury. Hadz loved the result dearly. It was the most bizarre object imaginable.
Gazing at it, once it was sealed, Hadz at last noted that he could see himself reflected there over and over. Which was almost better than being able to see straight in at the coffin and observe the wonderful dead girl.
“She and I were equals in beauty. What was her name?”
Juprum had already told him he did not know. Hadz tended to forget.
“I never heard it, sir.”
“A witch’s name?”
“Perhaps, my prince.”
Juprum had seen that the coffin, fashioned so elaborately and in such a hurried, short space of time, had many little portions that were not properly joined or closed. With the days, the months, the stink of death would issue from this coffin (then God help the dwarvish artisans). Then it would need to be moved out of the mansion’s
hall. Juprum would prefer that, and said nothing about having the cask more tightly corked.
Soon, with luck, Hadz, who was currently obsessed, must lose interest in it.
He had already forgotten the mother—if so she was. Juprum, aware that Hadz might recall her eventually, had seen to it that her cuts were dressed, and that she was fed. Once he went himself to look at her, where she paced about in the hut, one of several kept as the prince’s dungeons. Outside the metal wall, you could hear Lethe Pond wiggling on its stones.
“How are you today?”
“I am well enough,” said the old witch in the queenly voice she sometimes assumed.
“Are you still pleased you killed her?”
“Killed whom?”
“Your child, you old beast. Your daughter.”
But then she did not reply. She went up and down, round and about, pacing out the hut. Her face was gravely marked. A bandage on her wrist had come away. The dried blood was black.
Juprum was offended, despised her. Whatever other crimes were committed, mothers must not kill their own children. Even a bribable God would never forgive that.
T
HE MIRROR’S SOUL SAW COIRA, walking across the sky.
It was that time between day and dusk. Traces of the sun still lingered below, but here and there stars were piercing through. The land was like a shadow, miles down. Coira looked at it, holding back her blowing hair. She walked on small banks of cloud, like steppingstones or ice-floes in a transparent river.
She was puzzled, thinking she should descend, but not knowing
how. Then she saw Hephaestion in the distance. walking toward her.
Coira straightened. At first he seemed as he had always been, and delight suffused her. But then, as he came nearer, she saw he was the same height as herself. Then she drew herself together, unsure.
He paused, across a floe of cloud. He gazed back at her. Soon, by some unknown process, he was no longer her height, but his own, as she remembered him.
While this happened, more stars appeared, but the sky did not lose any of its clarity.
“Have you come back?” she said.
“I don’t know. I’m dreaming of you,” he said. “I’m convinced I’m dreaming. Why are you here?”
“I died,” said Coira, but hearing the words, she checked and grew still. “How can I be dead?”
“Coira, don’t be dead. Why would you die?”
“My mother—my mother came to me, and I was somehow drunk—and like a child. And then I fell asleep. But all I can taste is honey, only it’s so bitter. Oh, I know what it is—yes, Ulvit once warned me. Sometimes the bees gather from the wrong plants. Not everyone is harmed—but some—sometimes whole families. The honey from the flowers will be like deadly venom to one, and like nothing to another. Poppies can be the worst, she said. Perhaps—but I can’t recall any remedy. Besides, it’s too late. It must have been the fruit we ate. We shared apples. The smell—perhaps that made me drunk. She ate it too. We slept. But I’m dead. Oh. what shall I do—where shall I go?”
He stood across from her on the cloud. The space of open sky between them was too broad to jump, too deep to wade across.
“If you were dead, Coira girl, you wouldn’t be here, but in the other life.”
“Yes. What is it, then? What am I to do?”
She began to cry.
He could not reach her, and this broke her heart, but he had
left her anyway. He had left her and her mother had wished her to die, and brought the baleful honey-apple to see to it.
As she wept she became totally a child. She shrank as he had done, and now she was as short as Hephaestion. Her hair poured all round her, heaped over the cloud as it had never heaped round her when she was a little girl.
“I’m in a tomb, I know that I am,” she sobbed. A voice in her head upbraided her:
Don’t speak. Trust no one. Trust has brought you to this, you fool. Be silent.
Then he sprang across the cloud and caught her to him. The same height again, he seized hold of her, more tightly than the wicked stepmother who had stifled and poisoned her.
“Try to see where you are,” he said. “Where they’ve put you. Then show me.”
She looked, but not with her eyes. Deep down in her mind, or the mind of her wandering spirit, she saw an iron hull with gold and silver briars that clambered over it, and set in these, luminous gems of emerald and violet. But there was water on the iron, too, sheets of it, gleaming.
“Do you see?” she asked. How could he? But he did. “Yes, Coira. It isn’t water. It’s the witch-glass we fixed to the wall. It’s the mirror.
Hers.
”
“I’m shut inside the mirror,” she whispered.
“Break out,” he said.
“How?” she implored.
“I’ll go across and wake myself up. Then I’ll come back for you. I’ll find you, Coira, wherever you are. I’ll set you free. Sweetheart—don’ t be afraid.”
He was gone. She spun about in terror and her foot slipped from the shining icy cloud.
How much the stumble had cost her. She fell with one shriek, from sky to earth.
It was done in a second. She struck the ground with a blow that shook her into bits, and at its impact, the thump of it between her shoulders, she choked.
Still half-detached, she heard herself crowing for her breath, heard and vaguely felt an acid vomit fly from her throat, rolled sidelong, striking her body now against the hard shell which contained her.
Her voice was pushed away from her. It called piteously, even though she knew she must stay silent. “
Help me
—
help me
—”
Who would help her?
She was hated.
Darkness closed her eyes.
 
 
The howling of Hadz brought his faithful old servant running, as always it did. In abject fear for him, Juprum rushed into the High Chamber among the bright torches. Behind the drape of black silk, where Hadz had insisted the coffin be placed, Juprum found his prince lying full-length on top of it, beating with his fists.
“My prince—my dear one—”
“Be quiet, you cunt.
Listen!”
“To what—to what, my best angel?”
But Hadz had grasped him; he pulled Juprum forward, twisted him and ground his ear against the adorned sarcophagus.
So, in this position, pinned against shards of glass, Juprum too heard. He heard the little struggling moth-voice flittering about in the coffin.
And Juprum crossed himself. For he was always respectful in the chancy presence of an ultimate master. (God.)
 
 
That day, King Draco rode through his spring city wearing a vermilion mantle trimmed by panther-skin and gold, with his queen beside him. On her knee was the latest child, a fat, heavy boy who grinned his first teeth like a wolf. He resembled his father. The boy waved a rattle of silver; and the wide neck of the queen had embedded in it a necklace of fifty pearls.
The city saw them. Korchlava called acclaim. Canopied carriage
followed carriage. Horses nodded burnished heads, manes and tails plaited by bells. Asphodel was tied on bridles, and hyacinths. They had grown just in time.
Draco was still a king in red, at his prime. And she, his queen. Her belly might already be rounding again. She was the moon at full, the Nubile Woman.
Hephaestion watched them all go by, pushed though he was this way and that by the holiday crowd. As by his thoughts.
It was a festival of the Christ. The city people were exchanging red-painted eggs which symbolized Christ’s blood, expected to be spilled for them in due course.
But it was not the season of poppies, yet somehow he thought of them. The poppies were in a girl’s hand, as she was pulled screaming down into the earth, which covered her over, swallowed her.
Only the dead went into the earth.
And the physicians brewed a drug from poppies, which, in the correct amount, made men glad and drew away their hurts. He had seen that in the mines. But the draught could also suppress breathing and induce death, if made too strong.
Why keep thinking of it? A dream he had had … He could not recollect it, only Coira crying, as she had not done, when he left her. No, she had been composed and stony-eyed. What would he have done then, if she had wept? In the dream, he had wanted only to hold her.
In God’s name, why think of her now? She was behind him. There was only this bloody world, this land of giants shoving him about, jeering, all these subhuman superiors. He would have to do tricks, clown, stupid things, to earn his living. And that must come to be, when his valuables ran out. Look forward then, there would be enough dross there. Let
her
alone. She had not tried to hinder his leaving. “Farewell,” she had said. Why then did he hear her calling him now,
Help me
—
what shall I do?
She would never have gone on like that. She had learned silence.
Yet that night, after seeing King Draco, he dreamed again of
the mirror they had tied on the wall. Someone was trapped inside—he heard them calling. Then it shattered, and seven pieces jumped from it, and each piece of glass was a woman, perfect and entire, her black hair furled around her and her eyes flaming.
After which there flew out of the glass a white owl, then a raven black as the soot, and last a nacreous dove, mourning, calling,
Help me, calling, Where shall I go?
Which clung to his shoulder with its coral claws, beating with its snow-white wings.
Don’t leave me! Never leave me!
So he took hold of it in his hands to save it from itself—but it broke in fragments, since it, too, was made of glass.

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