Redder than Blood

by Tanith Lee

  After it had gone down, with one treacly little plop, I stood there thinking I’d been dreaming. I even started to search about for the golden ball, in case that too was a dream, a bad one.

  The sun went into the blacker lower third of the forest, and the sky above grew coppery. Crickets started across the fields. An owl called early for the shadows.

  Then the water parted again, and up came the necessary golden ball, real and actual and there. It was clasped by two scaly frog hands.

  I went gingerly down and took the ball, snatched it. I held it to my breast with all my fingers.

  Then the frog-thing’s face broke the water. Even then, I could see how sad its face was, the way certain animal faces are. Its eyes might have been made of tawny tears.

  “Remember your promise.”

  “Yes.”

  As I hurried back toward the pile of the house, I heard it coming, hopping, after me. Not looking, I said, “Go away!”

  “If I belong to you,” it said, “I must be with you. Every minute. Day and night.”

  Then I saw, the way the maiden does, always too late, in the tale, what she has agreed to.

  “You can’t! You can’t!”

  “You promised me.”

  I started to pray then to God, in whom I believed, but from whom I expected nothing, ever. He’d never answered any of my youthful prayers. And didn’t do so now.

  But the frog-thing came to me, quite near. It stood as high as my knee. It had frog legs, huge webbed feet, without claws. Sunset gleamed on its scales. In its scratch of a voice it said, “I won’t speak to them. I won’t tell them you lost the ball. I can do things they’ll like. Find things. It will be all right.”

  But I ran away. Of course. Of course, it ran after.

  In the garden, by the broken statue of a god, an old god even more deaf than God, I had to stop for breath. The golden ball had weighed me down. I hated it. I hated it worse than the frog-demon. In that moment I knew, too, how much I hated my father.

  The frog had reached me without trouble. It hopped high, right up on the stone god’s arm. And out of its mouth it pulled a most beautiful flower. Perhaps it had brought it from the lake. Creamy pink, with a faint perfume, thinner and more fresh than roses.

  The demon leaned, and before I could flinch away, it had put the flower in my hair.

  I thought, out of my new hatred for my father, Anyway, he’ll kill this thing as soon as he sees it.

  I tossed my head, and the flower filled the air with scent. I hated everyone by now, and all things. Let them all kill each other.

  “Come on, then,” I said, and went toward the house, and the frog-thing hopped along at my side.

  • • •

  They called it Froggy. That was their way. They used to throw it scraps from the table. It wouldn’t ever touch meat. It had a little fish, and it liked green things, and fruit, but I don’t know how it ate for it seemed to have no teeth. And this I never learned.

  In the beginning, they were more circumspect with it—after, that is, the first outburst.

  When I came into the hall, the women were at the hearth, and the boy was turning the smaller spit for the dead hares my father had taken in the forest. The house had a kitchen, but it was only used when there were guests. Half the time the bread was baked here, too.

  The owl-shadows were gathering, red from the fire, and one of the men was lighting the candles. In all this flicker of red and dark, no one saw the frog for some while.

  I got up to my mother, who was wearing her better hall-dress that had only one darn in it. She took hold of me at once, and called her maid to comb my hair.

  It was the maid who saw the frog first. She screamed out loud and pulled out a clump of my hair.

  “Uh—mistress—ah! What is it?”

  I was too ashamed to speak. My mother naturally didn’t know. She peered at the thing.

  It stood there patiently, looking up at her with its sad face. It had vowed not to speak to anyone but me.

  The maid was crossing herself, spitting at the corner to avoid bad luck.

  At the fire they had turned and were gawping. And just then my father stormed in with his men, and three of the hunting dogs, stinking of blood and unwashed masculinity. One of the dogs, the biggest, saw the frog at once. He came leaping for it, straight up the hall. As this happened, the frog gave a jump. It was up a tree of lit candles, wrapped there about one of the iron spikes, and the wax splashed its scales, but it didn’t make a sound.

  The dog growled and drooled, pressed against the candle-tree, its eyes red, its hair on end.

  My father strode over at once.

  He said to me, as I might have known he would, “Where’s your golden ball, girl?”

  “Here, Father.”

  He looked at that. Then up the candle-tree. My father frowned.

  “By Christ,” said my father.

  Although I hated him, hate can’t always drive out fear, as love can’t. In terror I blurted, “It came out of the lake. It followed me home. I couldn’t stop it. It wants to be with me.”

  My mother put her hand over her mouth, a gesture she often resorts to, as if she knows she might as well not cry out or talk, since no one will bother.

  My father said, “I’ve heard of them. Water demons. Why did it come out? What were you doing?” He glared at me. This must be my fault. And it was.

  “Nothing, Papa.”

  He folded his arms, and lowered at the frog. The frog eased itself a little on the stand. Leaning over from the waist, it bowed, like a courtly gentleman, to my father. Who gave a bark of laughter. Turning, he kicked the dog away. “It’s lucky. They bring good luck. We must be careful of it.”

  He ordered them to carve some of the half-raw hare, and offered it to the frog, which wouldn’t have it. Then one of the women crept up with a cup of milk. The frog took this in a webbed paw, and had a few sips. Despite its frog mouth, it didn’t slurp.

  Once they had driven the dogs off, the men stood about laughing and cursing, and the frog jumped on to the table. It got up on its hands and ran about, and the men laughed more, and even the women slunk close to see. When it reached the unlit candles at the table’s center, it blew on them. They flowered into pale yellow flame.

  This drew applause. They said to each other: See, it’s good magic. It’s funny. And when it scuttled over to me and jumped out and caught my girdle, hanging on there at my waist so I shrank and almost shrieked, they cheered. I was favored. They’d heard of such things. It would be a good year, now.

  It was. It was a good year. The harvest was wonderful, and some gambling my father did brought in a few golden coins. Also, the frog found a ruby ring that had been lost or hidden—by an ancestor in the house. All this was excellent. And they said, when they saw me coming, the demon at my side, “Here’s the princess, with her frog.”

  But that was after. It took them a little while to be so at home with it. And that first night, after my father encouraged me to feed it from my plate, let it share my cup of watered wine, when it started to follow me up the stone stair, where the torches smuttily burned, he stood up. “Put it outside your door,” he said. “We don’t know it’s clean in its habits.” This, from one who had, more than once, thrown up from drink in my mother’s bed. Who defecated in a pot, who occasionally pissed against indoor walls. The servant women being expected to see to it all.

  When we reached my room, I tried to shut the frog-demon outside in the passage. But it slipped past.

  “I must be with you,” it said, the first time it had spoken since we came in. “Day and night. Every minute.”

  “Why?” I wailed.

  “Because I must.”

  “Horrible slimy thing!”

  I tried to kick it aside. Did I say I was a nice girl? I hadn’t learned at all to be nice, and was almo
st as careless and cruel to servants and animals as the rest of them.

  But it eluded my foot, which anyway was only in a threadbare shoe, not booted like the feet of the always-dog-kicking men.

  It wasn’t slimy. I’d felt it. It was dry and smooth, its scales like thin plates of polished dull metal. When it sprang lightly on my bed, I took off my so far useless shoe, and flung it. But the frog-demon caught my shoe, and put it on its head like a hat.

  At that, finally, I too laughed.

  I didn’t want it on my pillow. But on to my pillow it came. Its breath was cool and smelled of green leaves. In the dark, its eyes were two small lamps.

  It sang to me. A sort of story. At last I lay and listened. The story was the accustomed kind my nurse had told me, but I was not yet too old for it. A maiden rescued from her brutal father by a handsome prince. Even then, even liking the tale, I didn’t believe such men existed. I knew already what men were, and, without understanding, what they did to women, having seen it here and there, my father’s men and the kitchen girls. It had looked and sounded violent, and both of them, each time, seemed to be in pain, scratching and shaking each other in distress.

  Even so. No one had sat with me and told me a story, not for years.

  In the night, I woke once, and it was curled up against my head. It smelled so green, so clean. I touched its cool back with my finger. It was mine, after all. Now I too owned something. And it would only talk to me.

  • • •

  Already when I look back, my childhood seems far away, my girlhood even farther. Old women speak of themselves in youth as if of other women. I am so old, then?

  During the time they all came quite round to it, and called it Froggy, and the Princess’s Frog, I must have been growing up with wild rapidity, the way the young do, every day a little more.

  While it performed tricks for them, found for them things that had been lost, seemed to improve the hunting, the harvests, and the luck, I became, bit by bit, a woman. You see, I don’t remember so much of it, because so much was always the same. It’s all, in memory, one long day, one long night. The incidents are jumbled together like old clothes in a chest.

  I recollect my bleeding starting, and the fuss, and how I hated it—I do so still, but the alternative state of pregnancy appeals less. I recall the bear in the forest winter who mauled one of the men, and he died. I remember the priest coming on holy days, and blessing us, and that he too liked to touch the buttocks of the maids, and once of the kitchen boy, who later ran away.

  The priest looked askance at Froggy. He asked was it some deformed thing from a traveling freak show, and my father prudently said he had bought it for me, since it was clever and made me laugh. Also, he said, it was fiercer than the dogs and would protect me. That was a lie, too. The frog was only gentle. Although, in the end, the dogs respected it and gave up trying to catch it. The biggest dog would let Froggy ride him, and all the while Froggy would murmur in the dog’s ear. This was after the big dog was bitten by a snake in the forest, and ran home yelping, with terror in his eyes, knowing he would die of snake-bite, or the men would cut his throat.

  But Froggy, when the dog fell down exhausted, scuttled over and latched its wide mouth on the bite. Froggy sucked out the poison, and dribbled it on the floor with the blood. Everyone stood back in astonishment, one of the men muttering, stupidly, if the dog died it would be Froggy’s fault. But the dog recovered, and never forgot.

  The women took to tempting Froggy to lick cuts on their hands to make them better. Froggy never refused. They said it was because they rubbed on honey first. They called this a ‘frog’s kiss’.

  It never spoke to anyone but me.

  And I remember one afternoon, when I had the by-now familiar black pain of menstruation in my belly, and I was lying in the spring grass, and Froggy was sitting quietly on my stomach, where the pain was, kneading me gently, until I was soothed and slept and the pain died.

  The sun was in the orchard trees, that were just then losing their blossom, and all this yellow-white-green shone behind my frog, all puffed with light. The frog sang or chanted. Some old tale again. What was it? A knight who rescued a maiden. I saw for the first time how beautiful it was, this creature. Its amber eyes like jewels, the smooth pear shape of its body, like burnished, carven, pale, dark jade. The paws that were webbed hands and feet, and had no claws. The sculpted mouth, with its rim of paler green, toothless and fragrant. The healing tongue.

  I smiled at the frog, not from amusement, but from love. I loved it. It was my friend.

  After this, I seemed to learn things. The meanings of birdsong. The ways of animals, and of weather. I was more gentle, too. Who had I learned that from but Froggy? There was no one else.

  My mother pulled me to her about this time. She was, despite the luck, still unchilded, and my always-displeased father had slapped her. There was a bruise under her eye where one of his rings had cut her skin. She seemed proud of the bruise, often touching at it in the hall, as if to show off that her husband still paid her attentions.

  “Look at you, such a big girl. You must have more binding for your bosoms. And you mustn’t run about so much.” Sometimes I would receive these lessons, no one else took any notice of her. Finally neither did I. But now she added, playfully tweaking my ear, “You must have earrings. He’ll want to find you a husband soon. He’s mentioned it. A man with land and soldiers. You’re a pretty girl, if only you’d leave off these sluttish ways. Do you ever comb your hair? I’ll send you the girl to brush it every night with rose oil.”

  I thought of my father, planning to marry me to some large, uncouth and appalling landowner, someone like himself. From my thirteenth birthday, until now, I’d tried never to think about it. But I was fifteen. The awful appointment approached.

  I ran off as soon as I could, the frog bouncing after me like a jade ball—the golden one had long ago been put into a coffer.

  In fact, I don’t remember I ever spoke of my troubles to Froggy. He was always there. Every minute. Night and day. He knew. And when my stomach hurt he kneaded it, or when I woke crying from a nightmare he comforted me, or made me laugh. I’ll say He, now. I might as well.

  I sat on the old stone horse statue at the foot of the garden, which now I was tall and agile enough to climb, and Froggy sat in my lap, plaiting for me, web-fingered, a crown of red daisies. Butterflies danced, and the willows by the lake looked very bright. Later there would be a summer storm.

  Froggy told me a story. It was new. A prince was cast into a dungeon. His lady came to find him and rescued him by putting magic on the bars.

  At first I didn’t know why the story was so strange.

  Then I said. “But it’s the man who rescues the maiden. She’s weak and helpless. She can’t do anything. He’s strong and clever. It has to be him.”

  “Oh, no,” said Froggy. “Not always. A man may be made weak, and overthrown. And do you think men are so clever, then?”

  I shook my head. I gabbled, in sudden horror and fear. “I’ll have to marry one of them. He’ll take me away.” And then I said, “He may be unkind to you as well.”

  “But I shan’t be with you,” said Froggy softly. “If you marry this man.”

  Astounded I stared. He raised his wonderful topaz-amber eyes. “Not be with me—but you’re always there.”

  “Then, it would be impossible. He’d kill me, you see. Or I’d die.”

  I put my arms round Froggy and held him. He never struggled, as an animal, a puppy or a cat, would do. I laid my cheek against the crown of his head, the scales of smoky jade. “You’re my only friend. Don’t leave me.”

  “It must be. If you marry the man your father finds you.”

  My tears will have streamed over him. But I said, at last, “It won’t happen. I’ll stay here. I won’t be married. Never.”

  I might as well have said, Night w
on’t fall, or the sun won’t rise tomorrow. Before when I first bled, and ran about screaming, thinking I was dying—no one had bothered to prepare me—Froggy had calmed me instead—before I bled, I’d never have thought such a filthy thing was possible. And with marriage, the threat had always been there, as long as I could recall.

  • • •

  My husband-to-be visited us just before Christmas that winter.

  He was like the bear they said had killed my father’s man, and clad in a black bearskin cloak, with clasps of gold. He had a gold stud in his ear, too. His boots were leather, his shirt embroidered. His men were well-turned-out and armed to the teeth. He stank of everything. I can’t begin to itemize his smells. He was about forty, and I nearly sixteen.

  I, contrarily, had been bathed in the porcelain chair-bath, and my hair had been washed and brushed with rose oil. I had on my best, newest dress, without darns, and earrings of gray-white pearl, and a ring of gold.

  When he saw me, he struck a pose, my intended husband; he bowed and fawned, as if I were some great lord, or a bishop, or a king. Everyone laughed heartily, and he straightened up all good nature.

  “You see, I like her. I’ll take her.” Then he kissed me. He had shaved, but already his skin was rough and he scraped my mouth. But that would be nothing.

  The dinner was lavish. My frog did wonderful tricks, lighting the candles, cutting a fruit with a tap of his hand, finding things people had hidden, and juggling the bones of some poor little birds we had eaten.

  In the end, we were able to go, the women and Froggy, to leave the men to get spectacularly drunk. My mother took me to her bower, the shabby room that led from the bedchamber. She sat me by the fire to pat my flushed face and feed me sugared walnuts.

  “What a good girl. He liked you so. Oh it will be a lovely wedding. The church all hung with flowers. The day after your birthday. And you must have three new gowns, your father says. He’s a generous man. And your husband will shower you with things in your first months. He’s rich. Be careful to please him and you may even see yourself in silk!”