Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice

by A. S. Byatt

  The Princess did not leave the tree for the rest of the day. Look, she said to Hugh, at the rich patterning of the colours, look at the way the light shines in the globes of the fruit, the seeds of the pomegranate, the petals of the flowers. Look at the beetles in the clefts of the trunk, like tiny jewels, look at the feathers in the spun-glass tail of the bird. What kind of a man would have made this?

  ‘Not a prince, a craftsman,’ said Hugh, a little jealous. ‘A prince merely finds the best man, and pays him. A prince, at most, makes the metaphor, and the craftsman carries it out.’

  ‘I make my own weaving,’ said the Princess. ‘I design and I weave my own work. It is possible that a prince made the castle, the hive and the tree.’

  ‘It is possible,’ said Hugh. ‘A prince with a taste for extravagant metaphor.’

  ‘Would you prefer a necklace of bears’ claws,’ asked the icewoman, ‘if you were a woman? Would you?’

  ‘A man and his gifts are two things,’ said Hugh. ‘And glass is not ice.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked the Princess. But Hugh would say no more.

  The princes arrived, after a month or two, in person. Five had made the journey, Prince Boris, the plump dusky prince who had sent the pearls, the precise, silk-robed prince who had sent the silk robe, the curly, booted and spurred prince who had sent the chess game, and Prince Sasan, who arrived last, having travelled furthest. Prince Boris, the King thought, was a fine figure of a man, strong like an oak-tree, with golden plaits and a golden beard. His pale-blue eyes were icy pools, but there were wrinkles of laughter in their corners. Prince Sasan rode up on a fine-boned, delicate horse, black as soot, and trembling with nerves. He insisted on seeing to its stabling himself, though he was accompanied by a meagre retinue of squires with the same sallow skins and huge brown eyes as the envoys. His own hair was black, like his horse, and hung, fine and dry and very straight, in a dark fringe, and a dark curtain, ending at his shoulders. He was a small man, a little shorter than Fiammarosa, but his shoulders were powerful. His face was narrow and his skin dark gold. His nose was sharp and arched, his brows black lines, his lashes long and dark over dark eyes, deeper-set than the envoys’. Prince Boris had a healthy laugh, but Prince Sasan was cat-like and silent. He made his bows, and spoke his greetings, and then appeared content to watch events as though he were the audience, not the actor. He took Fiammarosa’s hand in his thin hand, when he met her, and lifted it to his lips, which were thin and dry. ‘Enchanted,’ said Prince Sasan. ‘Delighted,’ said the icewoman, coolly. That was all.

  The visits were the occasion of much diplomacy and various energetic rides and hunting expeditions, on which, since it was high summer, the Princess did not join the company. In the evenings, there were feasts, and musical entertainments. The island prince had brought two porcelain-skinned ladies who played exquisite tinkling tunes on xylophones. The curly prince had a minstrel with a harp, and Prince Boris had two huntsmen who played a rousing, and blood-curdling, duet on hunting-horns. The Princess was sitting between Boris and the curly prince, and had been hearing tales of the long winters, the Northern Lights, the floating icebergs. Prince Sasan beckoned his squire, who unwrapped a long black pipe, with a reed mouthpiece, from a scarlet silk cloth. This he handed to the Prince, who set it to his own lips, and blew one or two tentative notes, reedy, plangent, to set the pitch. ‘I based this music,’ he said, looking down at the table, ‘on the songs of the goat-herds.’ He began to play. It was music unlike anything they had ever heard. Long, long, wavering breaths, with pure notes chasing each other through them; long calls which rose and rose, trembled and danced on the air, fell, whispered, and vanished. Circlings of answering phrases, flights, bird-cries, rest. The Princess’s mind was full of water frozen in mid-fall, or finding a narrow channel between ribs and arches of ice. When the strange piping came to an end, everyone complimented the Prince on his playing. Hugh said, ‘I have never heard such long phrases ride on one breath.’

  ‘I have good lungs,’ said Prince Sasan. ‘Glassblower’s lungs.’

  ‘The glass is your own work?’ said the Princess.

  ‘Of course it is,’ said Prince Sasan.

  The Princess said that it was very beautiful. Prince Sasan said:

  ‘My country is not rich, though it is full of space, and I think it is beautiful. I cannot give you precious stones. My country is largely desert: we have an abundance only of sand, and glass-blowing is one of our ancient crafts. All Sasanian princes are glass-blowers. The secrets are handed on from generation to generation.’

  ‘I did not know glass was made from sand,’ said the Princess. ‘It resembles frozen water.’

  ‘It is sand, melted and fused,’ said Prince Sasan. His eyes were cast down.

  ‘In a furnace of flames,’ said Hugh, impulsively. ‘It is melted and fused in a furnace of flames.’

  The Princess trembled slightly. Prince Sasan lifted his gaze, and his black look met her blue one. There were candles between them, and she saw golden flames reflected in his dark eyes, whilst he saw white flames in her clear ones. She knew she should look away, and did not. Prince Sasan said:

  ‘I have come to ask you to be my wife, and to come with me to my land of sand-dunes and green sea-waves and shores. Now I have seen you, I – ’

  He did not finish the sentence.

  Prince Boris said that deserts were monotonous and hot. He said he was sure the Princess would prefer mountains and forests and rushing cold winds.

  The Princess trembled a little more. Prince Sasan made a deprecating gesture with his thin hand, and stared into his plate, which contained sliced peaches, in red wine, on a nest of crushed ice.

  ‘I will come with you to the desert,’ said the Princess. ‘I will come with you to the desert, and learn about glass-blowing.’

  ‘I am glad of that,’ said Prince Sasan. ‘For I do not know how I should have gone on, if you had not.’

  And amidst the mild uproar caused by the departure from protocol, and the very real panic and fear of the King and Queen and Hugh, the two of them sat and looked steadily across the table at the reflected flames in each other’s eyes.

  Once it became clear that the Princess’s mind was made up, those who loved her stopped arguing, and the wedding took place. Fiammarosa asked Hugh to come with her to her new home, and he answered that he could not. He could not live in a hot climate, he told her, with his very first note of sharpness. Fiammarosa was glittering, restless and brittle with love. Hugh saw that she could not see him, that she saw only the absent Sasan, that dark, secret face imposed on his own open one. And he did not know, he added, having set his course, how she herself would survive. Love changes people, Fiammarosa told him in a small voice. Human beings are adaptable, said the icewoman. If I use my intelligence, and my willpower, she said, I shall be able to live there; I shall certainly die if I cannot be with the man on whom my heart is set. He will melt you into a puddle, Hugh told her, but only silently, and in his mind. She had never been so beautiful as she was in her wedding gown, white as snow, with lace like frost-crystals, with a sash blue as thick ice, and her pale face sharp with happiness and desire in the folds of transparent veiling.

  The young pair spent the first week of their marriage in her old home, before setting out on the long journey to her new one. All eyes were on them, each day, as they came down from their bedchamber to join the company. The housemaids whispered of happily bloodstained sheets – much rumpled, they added, most vigorously disturbed. The Queen observed to the King that the lovers had eyes only for each other, and he observed, a little sorrowfully, that this was indeed so. His daughter’s sharp face grew sharper, and her eyes grew bluer and clearer; she could be seen to sense the presence of the dark Sasan behind her head, across a room, through a door. He moved quietly, like a cat, the southern prince, speaking little, and touching no one, except his wife. He could hardly prevent himself from touching her body, all over, in front of everyone, Hugh commented to himse
lf, watching the flicker of the fine fingers down her back as the Prince bent to bestow an unnecessary kiss of greeting after a half-hour absence. Hugh noticed also that there were faint rosy marks on the Princess’s skin, as though it had been scored, or lashed. Flushed lines in the hollow of her neck, inside her forearm where the sleeve fell away. He wanted to ask if she was hurt, and once opened his mouth to do so, and closed it again when he saw that she was not listening to him, that she was staring over his shoulder at a door where a moment later Sasan himself was to appear. If she was hurt, Hugh knew, because he knew her, she was also happy.

  Fiammarosa’s honeymoon nights were indeed a fantastic mixture of pleasure and pain. She and her husband, in a social way, were intensely shy with each other. They said little, and what they said was of the most conventional kind: Fiammarosa at least heard her own clear voice, from miles away, like that of a polite stranger sharing the room in which their two silent selves simmered with passion. And Sasan, whose dark eyes never left hers when they were silent, looked down at the sheets or out of the window when he spoke, and she knew in her heart that his unfinished, whispered sentences sounded as odd to him as her silver platitudes did to her. But when he touched her, his warm, dry fingers spoke to her skin, and when she touched his nakedness she was laughing and crying at once with delight over his golden warmth, his secret softness, the hard, fine arch of his bones. An icewoman’s sensations are different from those of other women, but Fiammarosa could not know how different, for she had no standards of comparison; she could not name the agonising bliss that took possession of her. Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost. Touching Sasan’s heat was like and unlike the thrill of ice. Ordinary women melt, or believe themselves to be melting, to be running away like avalanches or rivers at the height of passion, and this, too, Fiammarosa experienced with a difference, as though her whole being were becoming liquid except for some central icicle, which was running with waterdrops that threatened to melt that too, to nothing. And at the height of her bliss she desired to take the last step, to nothing, to nowhere, and the next moment cried out in fear of annihilation. The fine brown fingers prised open the pale-blue eyelids. ‘Are you there?’ asked the soft whisper. ‘Where are you?’ and she sighed, and returned.

  When the morning light came into the room it found them curled together in a nest of red and white sheets. It revealed also marks, all over the pale cool skin: handprints round the narrow waist, sliding impressions from delicate strokes, like weals, raised rosy discs where his lips had rested lightly. He cried out, when he saw her, that he had hurt her. No, she said, she was part icewoman, it was her nature, she had an icewoman’s skin that responded to every touch by blossoming red. Sasan still stared, and repeated, I have hurt you. No, no, said Fiammarosa, they are the marks of pleasure, pure pleasure. I shall cover them up, for only we ourselves should see our happiness.

  But inside her a little melted pool of water slopped and swayed where she had been solid and shining.

  The journey to the new country was long and arduous. Fiammarosa wrapped herself in a white hooded cloak, to reflect the sunlight away from her, and wore less and less inside it, as they rode south, through dark forests, and out on to grassy plains. They embarked, in a port where neither of them spoke the language, in the Sasanian boat that had been waiting for them, and sailed for weeks across the sea, in breezy weather, in a sudden storm, through two days and nights of glassy calm. Sasan enjoyed the voyage. He had a bucket with a glass bottom which he would let down into the green water to watch the creatures that floated and swam in the depth. He wore no more than a wrap round his narrow hips, and during the calm, he went overboard and swam around and under the boat, calling out to Fiammarosa, who sat swathed in white, wilting a little, on the deck, and answered breathlessly. He would bring glasses and buckets of the sea water on deck, and study the bubbles and ripples. He liked also to look at the sleek sea-surface in the moonlight, the gloss on the little swellings and subsidings, the tracks of phosphorescence. Fiammarosa was happier in the moonlight. It was cooler. She sat in a thin gown in the night air and smiled as her husband displayed his drawings and discoveries of translucency and reflection. He played his strange flute, and she listened, rapt. They sailed on. Every day was a little warmer. Every day the air was a little thicker, a little hotter.

  When they came to the major port of Sasania, which was also its capital city, they were welcomed into the harbour by a flotilla of small boats bearing drummers and flautists, singers and cymbalclashers. Fiammarosa nearly fell when her foot touched land; the stone of the harbour-steps was burning to the touch, and the sun was huge and glaring in a cobalt-blue sky with no clouds and no movement of air. She made a joke about the earth moving, after the movement of the waves, but the thought she had was that her temperate summers, with their bright flowers and birdsong, had no connection to this hot blue arch in which a few kites wheeled, slowly. The people had prepared a curtained litter for their delicate new queen, and so she was able to subside, panting, on to cushions, wondering if she would survive.

  The palace was white and glistening, as though it was moulded from sugar. It had domes and towers, plain and blind and geometrically simple and beautiful. It was designed to keep out the sun, and inside it was a geometric maze of cool corridors, tiled in coloured glass, lit only by narrow slits of windows, which were glazed in beautiful colours, garnet, emerald, sapphire, which cast bright flames of coloured light on the floors. It was a little like a beehive, and inside its central dome a woven lattice-work of coloured light was spun by tiny loopholes and slits in the surface, shifting and changing as the sun moved in the dark bright sky outside. Optimism returned to Fiammarosa when she saw these dark corridors, these dim spaces. Icewomen like bright light, bright cold light, off-white; and darkness and confinement oppress them. But the molten heat outside oppressed her more. And there was so much in the palace to delight her senses. There was fruit on glass dishes, pearly and iridescent, smoky amber, translucent rose and indigo. There were meditative fluteplayers dropping strings of sound all day into the still air from little stools under the loopholes on the turns of the stairs. There were wonderful white jugs of latticino work, with frivolous frilled lips, containing pomegranate juices or lemonade, or swaying dark wine. Her own apartment had a circular window of stained glass, a white rose, fold on fold, on a peacock-blue ground. Within the heavy doors hung curtains of tiny glass beads of every conceivable colour, shimmering and twinkling. Round the walls were candleholders, all different, a bronze glass chimney, an amethyst dish full of floating squat candles, a candelabra dripping with glass icicles. And her loom was there, ready for her, and a basket of wools in all the subtle shades she loved.

  In the long days that followed, Fiammarosa found that her husband worked hard, and was no sedentary or sportive prince. Sasania was, he told her, a poor country. The people lived on fish which they caught in the sea, and vegetables irrigated in little plots from the river whose mouth had formed the harbour of the city. Beyond the city, and a few other towns on the coastal strip, Sasan told her, there was nothing but desert – he described dunes and oases, sandstorms and dancing mirages with the passion of a lover describing the woman he loved. Ah, the space of the bare sand, under the sun, under the stars, said Sasan. The taste of dates, of water from deep cool wells. The brilliance of the shimmering unreal cities in the distance, which had given him many ideas for cityscapes and fantastic palaces of glass. Fiammarosa stretched her imagination to conceive what he was describing, and could not. She connected the distant shimmering to her imaginations of lost glaciers and untrodden snowfields. Sasan explained, enthusiastically (they were talking more easily now, though still like two tentative children, not the man and woman whose bodies tangled and fought at night) – Sasan explained the connection of the desert with the glass, which Sasania despatched in trading ships and caravans to the corners of the known world. Glass, Sasan said, was made of the thi
ngs which they had in abundance – the sand of the desert, three parts, lime, and soda which they made from the wracks, or seaweeds, which clung to the rocks round their coasts. The most difficult, the most precious part, he said, was the wood, which was needed both for the furnaces and for potash. The coastal woods of the country all belonged to the King, and were cared for by rangers. Glass, according to legend, had been found by the first Prince Sasan, who had been no more than an itinerant merchant with a camel train, and had found some lumps and slivers of shining stuff in the cinders of his fire on the seashore. And yet another Sasan had discovered how to blow the molten glass into transparent bottles and bowls, and yet another had discovered how to fuse different colours onto each other. In our country, Sasan said to his wife, princes are glassmakers and glassmakers are princes, and the line of artists runs true in the line of kings.