Beneath Ceaseless Skies #214

by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

  I loosened the grip but didn’t let go. “If you try to hurt her, I’m obligated to slice your throat open.”

  The man smirked. “Specificity may be your strongest suit. I’ll keep your threat in mind.” He gestured at the long, dark path before us. “I don’t know the way.”

  “Of course.” I stepped before him. I led us past the grove of Dante’s suicide trees, men who’d died for love or shame or the numb that gripped so many by the throat. This, too, I knew from books: men were also delicate, some with skin so thin you could tear it if you bit too hard. I longed to tell him of the treasured trees, to point to and tell her story so that she might be known again by someone more than me. It had been years since the Orangery had seen a tourist.

  “There are so many,” he said as we passed a grove thick as the porridge congealed on my stove. “Why do you women fear men so much that you would rather be tree than give a kiss?”

  “I am not a tree,” I said. The shadows reached across our path. I waited for it to recede before passing. “And I do not fear you.”

  “Well, these women feared us. You can’t tell me they didn’t.”

  “These are not all the changed women of the world. All forests are filled with them. You think of that next time you steady your ax. The women here are the lucky ones. The poorer women, women of lesser fame, aren’t so lucky.”

  “We use saws now,” he said.

  I eyed the ax.

  “Just for show.” He ran his finger along the blade. “See? It’s dull.”

  When we came to the grove where I had christened the new Daphne earlier that evening, I slowed. Would he sense the true Daphne out there, farther along the trail?

  “Why have we stopped?” He squared his arms on his hips and glanced about us. “Is it safe to stop here?”

  The trees mumbled. I worried that they might release their potent poison and kill us both, but these trees were older, less apt to react to human presence. Besides, the trees of the Orangery had grown fond of me, and I of them. My stomach turned at the thought of my betrayal: to lead such a dangerous creature into their midst. But he couldn’t harm them with me there, my hand against the hilt of my blade. My presence was the reason no rabbits bounded along the paths, no insects dared to feast upon the trees’ succulent leaves.

  “Do you not sense her here?” I said. “We’re in her presence as we speak.”

  Apollo the lumberjack looked madly about, as though his franticness might call her forward from the darkness rather than send her slithering back into it as frightened trees may do.

  “No, no,” he said. “Which is she? It’s been so long.”

  “Over there.” I pointed to the tree with Daphne’s plate at her roots.

  “How little she has changed.” He wrapped his arms around the mislabeled tree, rubbed his cheek upon her, and caressed a low-hanging leaf. “She’s better than I remember her.”

  “Yes, she has flourished here.”

  “I never intended to take her,” he said. “But I wonder if she might be allowed to come if persuaded?”

  “You may try, but you will fail.”

  “Would you like to come with me?” he asked the tree. She didn’t speak in return. Likely the warmth of such a stranger did nothing to impress or provoke her. I wanted to laugh with the other trees whose branches began to rustle.

  “They speak,” he said. “But she doesn’t.”

  “She doesn’t.”

  “What do they say?”

  “We don’t love our strangers here,” I lied. “They ask when you will leave.”

  “Daphne?” said Apollo. “Perhaps if I sing?” He sang three lines of an ancient song. The trees’ branches rustled faster, stronger.

  “We best go now,” I said. “She’s given her answer.”

  “She has said nothing!”

  “Then you must accept that she’s forgotten you.”

  “I won’t,” he said. He reached into his pocket and pulled from it a vial. I drew my blade and moved forward. But he had turned the vial upside down, the clear liquid already soaked into the dirt at her roots. I couldn’t kill him until I knew the consequence of his actions, and any possible remedy.

  “What was that?” I asked, for it looked like the very syrup we kept locked away at the Orangery: the changing syrup.

  “You know what it was,” he said, dropping the glass. “I thought perhaps a second dose would reverse it.”

  “You know that’s not how it works.” I dropped my blade but pulled a rope from my deep pocket, the same rope I used sometimes to train the trees’ limbs, when they asked to be trained. “Your hands.” He obliged me this, allowed me to tie his hands behind his back.

  “Worth a shot,” he said, his voice shaking. “I can’t go on living without her. I’ve spent all my life looking for her. You must understand what it is to have loved and to have such love taken from you.”

  “Guardians of the Orangery do not love.” I picked up the blade, pressed it again into his flesh. “Walk.” I pushed him until he did so, led him back along the trail the way we had come. I didn’t expel him from the Orangery in case his syrup wasn’t as he had described it. In the morning I would lead him from the Orangery so he would never again find his way back.

  I didn’t have that chance, for when I returned in the morning to the tree I found there a woman, naked and shivering in the dirt, her eyes still sealed with sleep. I didn’t know her by name, and I knew that upon awakening she wouldn’t be able to tell me. The women of the trees forgot their names when the bark encased them. Few ever remembered. I bent and brushed the long brown hair from her face. Her blue lips tremored.

  “Are you alive?” I asked. She didn’t stir until I pressed my fingers to the pulse point at her neck, where a faint beating could be heard beneath the skin. “Apollo, what did you do?”

  I carried her limp body in my arms back to the cabin. I fixed a bed of leaves and grass on the floor of the greenhouse and placed her upon it. I went inside my hut to Apollo, who slept on the hard dirt floor where I’d left him after checking his pockets for more of his poison. They were empty.

  “What did you find out there?” he said, sitting up to face me. I’d left his hands tied behind his back.

  “You know what I found,” I said. “Change her back.”

  “I want to see her.”

  I knew he would and wanted him to. Would he finally recognize that she was not the woman for whom he had come? I led him to the greenhouse and watched as his lips contorted with understanding.

  “This is your doing, then,” he said.

  “Change her back.”

  He shrugged his broad shoulders. Though I had imagined the pressure of his lyre, the handle of his ax, looking upon him as he looked lustful upon even this stranger woman, I had nothing but contempt for him. To want a man was not to love him. To want a man was not to give in to him, either.

  “I’m bored of you,” I said. “Change her back now or I’ll gut you.”

  “You won’t,” he said. “Because then you won’t know where I came upon the syrup, or how to reverse it. Which I will tell you, of course, but I want to see her, the real Daphne. I want to kiss her goodbye.”

  I shoved him back into my hut and locked the door so that he could not escape. I went into the greenhouse and looked upon the woman, barely breathing in the dirt. She, a woman of the woods, might know better than a Guardian what needed to be done. I breathed breath into her mouth, careful not to place my hands upon her skin. She fluttered to life, gasping and clawing at herself. Her breathing sounded like the rustling of leaves.

  “What have you done to me?” She scurried into a corner behind a pot filled with herb seeds. “Take it off.” She scratched first at her cheeks then down her torso, her legs, until quick as the swing of an ax lines of blood trailed a map of fear down her body.

  “Stop, stop.” I rushed to her, pried her hands from herself. There was no escaping skin, except by way of bark. But even then it was still trapped beneat
h, never gone, as easily accessed as by a syrup poured on the roots. No matter how deep they ran, they could be fooled in an instant. I held her hands too hard, fearful of cracking the fragile bones but more fearful that she might unravel herself on my watch, before I had a chance to know her, the only one of my watch that had ever changed back. For that, and even though it wasn’t her choice, I knew her to be strong. One can learn from strong women. “If you kill yourself, we won’t have a chance to speak. And I want to speak with you. I will help you, but please don’t leave me yet.”

  She calmed, or at least her body stopped its thrashing, though now it leaked sap from its eyes, and I saw that the blood down her legs was not blood but a red thick as sap.

  “What am I?” she said. “What have you made me?”

  “I did nothing to you.” I let go her hands, which fell to her sides in the dirt. I tore strips from the frost covers that lay along the greenhouse shelves and went about wrapping her from her ankles up her legs. “There. You’ll bleed less. You won’t scratch beneath them, will you?”

  “If not you, then how did I get like this?”

  “You were like this once.” I squeezed her hand. It was limp in mine. “Do you remember?”

  She shook her head, slow at first then more rapidly, until her hair swayed about her shoulders.

  “Change me back.” She gripped my arm with all her returned strength. “I don’t want this.”

  I fixed her a bed in the dirt and locked her within the greenhouse. “Block this door,” I told her. “And let no one but me through.”

  I walked along the dirt paths until I came upon the true Daphne. I knelt at her roots. There were many reasons I was hesitant to allow the changed Dryope to use the last remaining syrup we had locked away: I didn’t want to use our only syrup, the only remnant of a time when women could change should they need to. I didn’t want to reach a time when I needed the syrup but couldn’t use it. I’d always imagined myself joining the Orangery in the end of my days, when another Guardian came to take over my post. And then, buried, another reason: a fascination I had with her, a loneliness I longed to discard, a desire to know the life of these women from the inside out.

  Even for all that, I didn’t want, either, to bring the man to his victim, to allow him that which he desired. I’d give up the syrup, that much I knew. I would change her back because it was the right thing to do. That was what she desired, and to give in to the women of the woods was my one and only lot in life.

  I laid my palm upon the ridges of her roots.

  “You are safe,” I said. “I won’t bring him here.”

  * * *

  Guide

  And here, my friends, we have our belle of the woods. Please remain calm. Don’t touch her, no. Don’t speak too loudly. Don’t speak her name. She’ll go if startled, though it will take you a moment to realize. You’ll look where there was tree and see only shadow. That’s the way of a virgin. Don’t hold hands in her presence. The chaste don’t approve of skin on skin.

  She, friends, is called Daphne. No longer does she bear her plaque. We only know her by the scar, here, in her breast, where Apollo found her once again and, in his rage, tried to cut her down. The very same man, yes, from the stories. The very same man who burst in through these walls uninvited. I have told you what we do to uninvited guests. We did that to him. So do not touch.

  Daphne hated Apollo straightaway upon meeting him, and who could blame her? Daphne the water girl had gone into the woods to fetch a jug for the young sporting kids in town, as was her daily task. She watched the children because she didn’t long for her own, because she was impartial enough to their begging mouths not to give in to every whim. She was walking along the path to the winding river that cut through her father’s vast swath of land when she came upon Apollo entwined with a woman upon the roots of my own tree. She saw them but passed without comment, for sex didn’t bother her but also didn’t interest her in any of its forms. She didn’t, like her mother, tend a garden. She didn’t, like her sister, lie with fools when she ran out of songs to sing.

  On her way back up the trail, she found Apollo waiting for her, sprawled nude across the dirt like an egotist. The nameless naked woman was nowhere to be found.

  “Beautiful girl,” said Apollo. “But so stern. What do you have to be upset about, stern girl? You know they say laughter is the best medicine. You’ll find me a funny, funny man.”

  “Where’s that woman who was wrapped around you a moment ago?” Daphne searched the shadows, for she had heard of lover pairs tricking strangers into the woods. “I don’t have any money if that’s what you’re after.”

  “Don’t you worry about her. She had elsewhere to be.” He rose and offered her an acorn in his palm. “I don’t want to take from you. I want to give.”

  “I’m in need of nothing.” She shifted her water jug from one hip to the other. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

  She hadn’t been taught to be a rude girl, but she needed a man’s excusing like she needed a knife in her eye, so she went on past him without awaiting his reply. He gave none, nor did he shout across the woods to her as she walked away.

  Instead, the next day when she woke, she found he had penetrated the only weakness in her walls; her father at their breakfast table sat with the man, sharing the seeds of a pomegranate. Daphne’s typically still heart hammered with fear.

  “What is he doing here?” she said, gathering her robe around herself. Never before had she felt the need to cover herself in her own kitchen. Never before had she felt the need to run and never look back. She stayed where she stood, however, and her father patted the seat beside him.

  “This, Daphne, is the mighty Apollo.” He looked to the man. “Forgive her behavior the other evening. She is uninterested in the goings-on of our city and doesn’t know the faces of our heroes. That’s one of the reasons I love her so. She is her own world.”

  “I don’t know the name Apollo.” Unwilling to be inconvenienced, she grabbed a handful of seeds from her father’s bowl and shoved them in her mouth. They stained her hands. She wiped the red down the front of her robe.

  “Her own little world,” her father said again.

  Apollo leered at the red where she’d left it. “Yes, I see that. I would still like to offer my hand.”

  Daphne knew these words; she had known their time might come, though always she had hoped that her father would not ask this of her. She shook her head and backed into the hall.

  “You haven’t, father,” she said.

  Her father beamed. “Daphne, dear, aren’t you thrilled? The day all girls dream of.”

  But he knew, didn’t he, that she was not most girls, that she hadn’t dreamt of it. She had thought she made it clear when, at night, she followed him outside to name the constellations instead of staying in with her mother and sister content to laugh over their baking and coo over the neighborhood children. She had thought it was clear when she didn’t attend the dances with her sisters but stayed home to help her father chop wood for their fire, when she asked him to teach her how to make a home all on one’s own. Never before had he mentioned a husband. Never before had he mentioned that she would one day have one.

  She ran back to her room and escaped through her window. Her robe blew out behind her as she ran. She didn’t get far before they found her.

  She was married in a private ceremony in their kitchen, where Apollo slipped a ring of wood around her finger. It left splinters in her skin when she tried to remove it. They didn’t sleep in the same bed, a courtesy Apollo said he would grant her for their first year of marriage.

  “You will love me,” he said. “I’m sure of it.”

  Each night he played one of his famous tunes on his lyre. Each night he replaced the names of other women with hers and sang of her beauty, and when that didn’t work he sang of her intelligence, then her kindness. But she was cold toward him.

  The men in the local tavern laughed when she entered with Apollo, hand-i
n-hand, for he asked her each day if she would grant him the pleasure of her flesh, but her fingers laced in his were all she gave. The men at the bar elbowed Apollo for stories of the ice queen’s body. “Is her hair down there frosted?” they asked. “Does she make your cock cold?”

  “We haven’t made love,” he told them, proud of this, his latest wickedness. “I haven’t touched a woman since we married.”

  “What point is there to that, then?” said the men. “Ay, well, perhaps she needs another man to warm her up.”

  Apollo fought the men and won his brawl. He was a brute, after all, even if he didn’t look it. They didn’t go back to the tavern. At home he grew impatient; he demanded that she bring him things to fill the void the lack of her body left: food, blankets, drink. Sometimes she did. Sometimes she didn’t. That she could still say no left her with the last vestige of hope she had in her gut. At night she repeated the word: no, no, no. In the morning she practiced saying it, to everyone, until eventually she no longer visited any family at all.

  Like all women in her town, Daphne carried a particular syrup close to her breast. Like all women of her time and place, she had been given this concoction upon her thirteenth birthday. There are some fates, her mother said, better than growing up.

  One year of marriage brought Daphne no more fondness for her husband. She felt no despair for her lack of love. Love was a frivolous thing, fine for others but wholly uninteresting to her. Sometimes, in her bed at night, as naïve as we all once were, she considered that her marriage to Apollo might not be the worst fate life could have given her. Other men might have demanded her care instead of her cooking. Other men might have bruised her bodily. Other men might have disallowed her the small pleasures of morning walks, evening sweets, the secret space of her own bedroom.

  But he had promised her a year and only a year, and no matter how sweet his treacly song, he was a man of his word.

  He came into her room without requesting permission. Daphne sat carving notches into the wood of the desk where she did her sketching; she drew the woods where once she had fetched water, to which she would no longer return for their bad luck. After all, it had been those woods that had brought her Apollo. He touched her face without asking, drawing one long nail along her chin. The point left a red almost-scratch behind. She wished it were a cut deep as death, for then she could hate him. The syrup itched her skin where it lay against it. He kissed her rigid mouth.