Singing My Sister Down and other stories

by Margo Lanagan

  For he was not all ogre. He was his father’s son too, and Bolto was fine-blooded. Nobler blood bred truer, and he could summon it to quell his more monstrous instincts. See, now, how well he could control them?

  Live as hunters do, and common men, Bolto had said, in the throne room, among the few servants who had not deserted him.

  Torro had stood straight and met his father’s eye. This was no time for weeping or protesting. Bolto knew his death was approaching with the enemy’s army; he had seen the panic in the streets.

  Keep your head down. Bolto had never looked more kingly, though there were few enough here to be impressed. Survive in any way you can. Leave the country and wait outside. When it’s safe again, come back and reclaim this throne.

  And then Christman and Docker had bundled Torro out of the castle and set him on the road with all those others fleeing. Most ran with nothing; others clutched weapons and tools or led donkeys. One man’s sack slipped and burst, and all his treasures sprayed across the cobbles. He cried out and flung himself after them; Torro leaped over the scattered goods and ran on.

  More ale and more spirits were passed from man to man around the fire. More songs were sung, not weird, goose-fleshing ones but the usual tales of hunting and love and war.

  No ogress strode among them to disturb the proceedings, no dazzling princess flew down from the thicket to claim him. Stories and fire wove together to brighten and warm a chilly night, to frighten people and to reassure them, to keep children in check and remind grown-ups that they didn’t know everything.

  Below, the ground was as steady as it ever was, and the stars wheeled in their same patterns above; the fire, collapsing the burnt bed frames one into another, was a tiny, makeshift flaring of wishes and terrors, audacious against the darkness.

  He woke early and completely next morning, his eyes wide and his mind cleanly intent. His snoring companions sounded to have many hours more sleep in them.

  The room did not sway around him when he sat up, despite the plentiful ale he’d taken the night before. The window was wide and full of weakening stars. All night the magic had been pouring in, preparing him, summoning him. He got up and crossed the room to peer out at the wildwood’s dark mass under the greying sky.

  He dressed and took up his coat and boots. Very softly he made his way out of the inn. He put on the coat against the morning chill, and sat on the bench by the door to pull his boots on, the forest frowning over him. He moved the gate’s catch silently and edged out of the narrow yard.

  Almost immediately he was in the shadow of the trees. A noise began in the undergrowth, a squeaking of stalks and a deeper creaking. He stepped back and the noise died. No beast came forth or rustled away. It was himself had made the noise – his princeliness had moved things. The decision was his, to wake this thing or leave it lie.

  He went forward again, and again the dimness churned before him. He put his hands against the brambly wall. Thorns and leaves dissolved from his touch and a hollow sank away in the surface. He grasped a leaf, but it shrank out of his hand, back into its shoot. He caught a stem of vine and it lashed free and snaked away into the wall.

  The darkness made space for him. He took one step, and then there was room for another. A ropy carpet lay beneath his boots. Tangled walls flinched from his hands. The strong sudden smells of sap and disturbed earth surprised him – this had looked such a dead place. The magic purred all around, pleased to be fitting its last piece, himself, into place and to be drawing to its end. He had met magic like this once or twice before, though he’d not gone headfirst into it like this. He had only brushed its wickedness with his shoulder as he passed. He had stood aside as others fell beneath its rumbling wheels.

  The thicket knitted itself back together behind him, squeaking and whispering, to keep out anyone who was not the son of a king. Now he was beginning to see its movements before him better. What had seemed a languid retreat was frantic movement, unravelling and re-ravelling anew with his every step. A single star found a path to his eye through the thinning entanglements overhead, and before him extended a corridor, still-walled and silent, leading up the hill.

  His boot-toe caught against something and he nearly fell. The back end of a large hunting dog lay in the path, its fore-half in the hedge. Not under the hedge; the dog had lain down and the hedge sprouted over it, binding it firm to the ground with a century’s tangling.

  Torro bent and examined the dog. It gave off no dead-smell, and its ribs lifted and sank with its breathing. He pushed his fingers into its warm curly grey fur. Its pulse beat under his fingertips.

  He straightened and went on. In a little while he found a half-grown-over horse, its rider clasped upright in the brambles. Then here a milkmaid leaned midstep where the spell had caught. In her pail fresh milk glowed, dawn-lit. The magic ached in his face.

  And then he came to the castle, a high green mound, the ivy crawling off it as he watched, like rats or dogs surprised in devouring a carcass. As it cleared, there showed an open gate, and some porters fallen asleep while they played at cards, their drinking cups still half full of wine. He took one cup and sniffed it, and it was as good as the day it had been poured.

  But it was the wine of a hundred years ago. Bolto had poured them glasses of such wine in the banquet hall, from his own castle’s cellars. Taking a mouthful, his father had winced and laughed at the sweetness. As well drink apple juice! he’d cried. As well drink sugar-water! And Torro’s mother had laughed too, and caught Torro’s eye and pretended to choke on the stuff. And he understood that however much he enjoyed this wine, he was never to ask for more.

  In the courtyard, Torro paused and looked back. The ivy slithered back over the gate. The weeds he had trampled straightened again between the flags. All about, guards and cooks and clerks and stewards and chambermaids stood and sat, knelt and lay asleep, bedded in ivy and on stone, their clothing – the ruffs and cuffs and collars of former times – bright and unweathered. Another kind of magic compounded the air here. It had been set against the main, wicked spell, but was only able to do so much against that hard-flung enchantment.

  He followed the smell of children to the crowded kitchens. He passed the cooks standing asleep at butcher’s block and tureen, and found scullions leaning dreaming against the washing-barrel, found a tiny girl sitting in a corner shelling peas, found a kitchen-boy beside the fire’s motionless gleaming, propped against the handle of a spit loaded with half-roasted partridges and pheasants.

  He stood a long time examining these children, breathing their scents, lifting their clothing to look at their calves, at their thighs where he could see them, but not allowing himself to touch their skin. This was not what he was here for – the magics told him plainly enough. His worse nature had diverted him from the path a truly noble man would have taken.

  Another scent drew him back to that path, a scent of child and then some, child with a honeyed, murmuring admixture of magic. It took him past horses and hunting dogs and a dovecote full of well-fed, roosting birds, through a counting-house lined with full coffers, and an unplundered armoury. Well-dressed servants, tall and short, old and young, plump and lean, slept on or against the furnishings, relaxed in the middle of their duties.

  Finally he climbed the stairs to the royal family’s private apartments. The king’s wide chamber was empty but for an enormous desk. The queen’s held nothing but that fragrance – now like a nightmare rose that will not stop bursting open, spreading layer after layer of petals, cloud after cloud of heaven.

  It dragged him towards the door to a third chamber. The charm beat through the wood like an impassioned heart. He reached for the latch. It lifted without his touching it, and the door swung open.

  He stepped into the heart of the magic, the air rich and taut around him, the room so gilded and mirrored that it was hard to tell its size. He stood breathing the laden air, trying to tell what was real from what was only reflected, only magic-dazzle. At last he made out the tr
ue location of the high bed, with cloth-of-gold curtains looped back against the posts.

  On that bed a magicked maiden lay, asleep like all her household, as naked as the day she had been born. But she was no baby. Her scent had promised him a child, but breasts and hips had begun to round her out. Her skin was like pearl, her hair like silk, her face serene.

  And she was his, defenceless in her sleep, to do with as he would. Marto or Zand would have climbed between her legs in an instant, she was such a beauty, and so unguarded. And indeed Torro’s man was stirring in his breeches – but not wanting that.

  He paced back and forth around the bed. She should wake, and stop him. The spell should end now, and the whole castle rouse itself and bustle on all sides, and make his next move impossible. It was time, wasn’t it? A hundred years, didn’t the sinewy man say?

  Kiss the girl, he’d said. Claim her fortune.

  Torro hung his own face above the maiden’s, daring her long lashes to rise, her eyes to look upon him, to see the blur of ogre across his noble features. ‘Wake!’ he muttered. Should he take and shake her? It would make no difference. And he was afraid to touch her skin.

  Fatedness crawled in his bones. He knew what he ought to do. Another life flowed from his kissing her, and he examined it closely, all its comforts and privileges.

  But it was like tracing the pattern in a rich cloth while a high wind fought to snatch it from his grasp. And after an exhausting time, following the thread that began with the surprise and awe on Zand’s and Marto’s faces, and ended with Torro’s triumphally reclaiming Bolto’s castle, he let the whole cloth be torn from him by the force of his other nature. And his actual future lay before him, simpler, closer to his heart—

  But impossible, indefensible. He could not believe it of himself.

  And he could not forgo both lives. He could not turn his back on this glorious corpse and retrace his steps through the sleeping castle, through the diminishing thrall, away through the untwining hedges and the melting trees and the flinching ivy. The magic had brought him, and now it held him as mercilessly as it held her, churning close around them.

  Enough time passed that the impossible, the indefensible, the unbelievable, became the only thing to do. Such a dreadful quiet came on him that he felt he must at last be seeing sense. He took his knife and stood beside the bed whetting the blade, examining his mind one last time, stone and metal singing softly among the cushions and drapes.

  Finally he pocketed the stone, and put out his hand and glided it along the princess’s naked flank, and down her thigh, to the swell of her calf. His mother’s blood rushed back at him, up his arm, hot, hungry.

  The princess didn’t wake. The kiss was the thing – only a kiss would wake her, and he would not touch his lips to hers.

  Instead he sank the point of the knife into her thigh and slid the blade along the bone. The flesh gave, soft as milk-fed veal after her short lifetime of royal foods a hundred years ago. The blood sprang out brightly – she was rich in blood, this princess, as she was rich in everything. The golden bed drank it up.

  Now he had the piece in his hand. It was meat like any other meat, and yet it was not. It was the meat that his kind, his mother’s kind, would always hunger for. He could never have lived in a place like this, with a girl like this, so soft, so sweet, so constantly tempting. Had he kissed and woken her, and taken her and her fortune home, all they would have done was breed, and anguish themselves fighting off his mother’s hunger. For peace, he must seek out an ogress, or a woman of a similar mix to himself, who would understand this, the battle with it, the heady shame of losing that battle.

  And then the meat was in his mouth. He could have gulped it down as a dog does, barely tasting it, his hunger was so all-commanding. But he made himself taste it, chew it, distinguish the silken side from the side downed with the princess’s soft leg-hairs. He must take note of every sensation. He was not all ogre.

  She died as he cut a second piece from her thigh, her blood spreading wide in the golden coverlet. The magic went with her, the air easing, growing ordinary. And he grew ordinary too, grew pure along with it. His ambition had held him back from this decision, his obligations towards his father, towards his nobler birth. And now they were all gone from him.

  He cut. He ate. If anyone came they could pull him off her, could kill him where he stood; he was not going to cease consuming this soft lovely flesh until he was made to.

  No one came. No one stopped him. He ate and ate of her, each mouthful as gratifying as the first. There was some magic in him, that he could keep on and on like this. He hummed, as he carved and chewed and swallowed, the song the children had sung the night before, the lullaby his mother had grumbled at him, their secret. An immense restfulness grew in him; it was his mother he loved. Not all his father’s hopes for him and for their country, not the strongest, darkest spell, could set him against his mother’s blood.

  The sun was well up when he wiped his knife clean on the bedsheets and sheathed it. The forest outside screeched with insects and birds. He laid the princess on her back again, tore down a bed-curtain and covered all but her untouched face, the skin no longer pearly, the eyes no longer in any danger of opening awake. The air hummed, not with magic now but with the several flies that had lifted from her body as he turned it.

  He went to the dressing table and washed his face and hands. A golden comb lay there, and he took it and combed out the princess’s hair across the pillow. He felt tender towards her, married to her more completely than any bishop could join them. He was taking her out into the world, but safely, inside him. How could she have lived, a hundred years in the future? That was an exile much harsher than his own, from Bolto’s ruined kingdom, would ever be.

  He closed the door behind him and went down through the castle. All the servants had sunk from sleeping into death, all the fires, all the horses and dogs and the doves in the cote. The sun beat down on the unbreathing bodies, and flies drank from their eyes and mouths, and the air was only air, pulseless, breathless, unmagical. The taste of the princess was in his mouth, and the feeling of her in his mouth’s memory. The satisfaction of her was in his stomach; she would last him a good long while.

  The ivy shrivelled as he approached the gate, fell withered and brown as he stepped out. A pallor struck the bramble forest nearest him, a shock of death in the green as if a giant tongue of flame had licked it. He walked through the fading, crackling foliage to the other side of the castle, and there he crawled swiftly through the brambles, killing whatever he touched. Century-dead stems shattered against his head and arms. Behind him the tunnel of his passing stayed open, dust swirling in the few fine stripes of sunbeams.

  He emerged above empty fields. Brushing off dust and dead leaves, he skirted the wildwood, staying well clear so as to keep it green and hide the path he had taken.

  At last he reached the top of the town. Tonight a dance would commemorate the ogress’s departure and the children’s survival. Preparations had already begun, and children were shouting their excitement in the streets. Their smell disturbed him not at all.

  Marto and Zand sat in their shirtsleeves on the bench against the back of the inn, smoking pipes in the sunshine.

  ‘There you are!’ Marto cried. ‘Find a blind girl, did you?’

  ‘Of course he did,’ said Zand. ‘Look at the way he strides.’

  ‘Yes, if that’s not a man that’s just unburdened himself on a woman, I don’t know what he is.’

  Swiftly Torro unfastened the gate and stepped into the yard. He looked each man steadily in the eye. ‘We must leave this town. Now. Quietly. And with no appearance of fleeing.’

  ‘We must what?’ said Zand. ‘What have you gone and done?’

  But Marto was already knocking out his pipe. ‘Come, Zand.’ He rose from the bench. ‘The tale of it can wait.’

  And they plunged after Torro into the inn’s darkness.

  MIRKA HAD SHAVED ELSE’S head, and Else had hal
f-shaved Mirka’s, when the knock came. First on the wall and then on the door.

  ‘Are you Tyton girls in there? It’s Jiran Gust.’

  Else jumped back, her hands slimy with soap, hair draggling from the shaving-stone. ‘We’ve not even hung up the flag!’ she hissed.

  ‘So he doesn’t know.’ Mirka got up from the bench, lathered and half-haired as she was.

  ‘You can’t let him see you!’

  Mirka opened the top of the door.

  Jiran Gust’s eyes and mouth went wide. ‘Taris?’

  ‘She died in the night,’ Mirka said.

  Jiran’s face reddened and he began to sweat. ‘You should put up a flag so people know.’

  Mirka shrugged. Usually she would have apologised. Today she didn’t see why she should. ‘Did you have some business with my gran?’

  Jiran Gust looked at his feet. He wasn’t the sort of man to shuffle and squirm. ‘I was just making sure. I mean, I knew she was ill . . .’

  He faced Mirka again, pulling crossly at his shirt. ‘Everyone.’ He swung his top half to wave at the village behind him. ‘We’re all concerned.’ He swung back. ‘We were hoping she could be persuaded to allow the valley to retain her moon-piece.’

  Mirka looked him up and down, this man who had never spared her a civil word, who’d never persuaded anyone of anything.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. She didn’t even have to think about it – Grandma spoke straight through her, in that soft, neutral voice – the voice that above all didn’t want trouble.

  Jiran Gust took a step back as if even that had offended him. ‘There’s no of course about it!’

  ‘Why, what would we do without light in the night-time?’ Mirka thought aloud. Else was at her elbow, cloth and warmth and nervous breath.

  Jiran Gust let his tongue run on. ‘Well, when my mother took her piece to the grave? And then the other two did the same, because they had no minds of their own?’