Oddest of All

by Bruce Coville

  The trees were ancient, thick, gnarled. Their roots, which rumpled the leaf-covered ground, seemed to reach up to grab my feet as I passed, resulting in more falls than I care to remember.

  Unseen creatures moved and muttered in the branches above me and the undergrowth beside me. Mushrooms of an unnatural size, some a sickly blue gray color, others a violent red, grew in clusters beneath the trees.

  I could not bring myself, in this forest, to use a hatchet and blaze a trail. I had considered bringing ribbons to tie around branches as markers, but I was fairly certain that when it was time to return I would have found the ribbons missing. Either that, or there would have been a hundred times more than I had originally brought, fluttering in bright profusion for the sake of my bafflement. So I carried a pad and made careful notes and sketches to help me remember my path.

  · · ·

  It comes closer. Melusine’s heart stirs, fluttering like a caged thing trying to escape. Sorrow and memory—which are really the same things for her—rise like a flood, threatening to drown her.

  What can it be? she wonders, raising her head to the sky. Do you know, Mother? Are you watching?

  I know you’re still alive, somewhere.

  Can’t you ever relent?

  · · ·

  As I made my way through the haunted forest my thoughts turned, naturally, to my father and his great crime.

  Like everything in our family, it had to do with family. His brother, in this case.

  Father had had nine brothers in all—nine uncles that I never knew, for all were dead before I entered this world. What I do know, both from Father and from the tales, is that each was stranger than the one who came before, each born with his own curse and his own special gift.

  Father was the seventh. He was named Geoffroi, but everyone called him Geoffroi the Tooth, or Geoffroi Big Tooth, or simply The Tooth. This was because of the boarlike fang, bigger than a thumb, that jutted up from the side of his mouth. That was his curse, of course—that, and his ferocious temper.

  The gift was his enormous strength. But that combination of strength and temper was a curse in itself. As might be expected, he was both respected and deeply feared in the lands surrounding my grandparents’ castle.

  Mostly feared.

  One day my father and his younger brother, Froimond, got into a fight. No one knew, later, what it was about; some small thing that grew out of all proportion, probably. Terrified of his brother’s temper, Froimond took refuge in a monastery.

  Driven into a frenzy at not being able to reach Froimond, Father started a fire at the monastery gate. It quickly spread out of control. In the end it burned the place to the ground, killing the abbot and all the monks. A hundred God-fearing men perished in that blaze—a hundred and one, if you count my uncle.

  When word of this atrocity reached the castle, it drove my grandfather to speak the words that changed everything.

  · · ·

  Memories crowd Melusine’s mind more than usual tonight. As she gazes into the pool it seems she can see once more the face of her beloved Raymond.

  How long has it been since his death, how many centuries?

  How long has she lingered on in this loathsome shape?

  How gladly would she lie in the earth at his side if only she could!

  She sighs, remembering how she had loved him from the moment of their meeting, first for his tender sorrow, his boylike confusion over the accidental killing of his friend. Then, and more deeply, for the way he looked at her. Last, and most of all, for the unquestioning way he accepted her condition that if they married she must be left to herself on Saturdays, and he must never question why.

  No, she thinks now. Not my condition. The condition set by my vengeful mother.

  She closes her eyes, admitting ruefully that it was her own impulsive act of vengeance that had driven her mother to curse her thus.

  Is it in our blood, she wonders, this thirst for vengeance? Is that what drove my poor son to commit his horrible crime— the blood Geoffroi inherited from me, and I from Mother, fallen angel that she was?

  She corrects herself. Not was. Is. Eternal and undying.

  She wonders if this fault in the blood is why her mother was one of the Fallen.

  But what failed creator is this, who could not make his angels better beings?

  Extract from the Testimony of

  Raymond de Lusignan

  (as offered to the abbot of the Monastery

  of Saint-Denis in the year of the Lord 953)

  ______________________________________________________

  The abbot asks if I didn’t realize there was something strange about Melusine. Of course I knew she was different. How could I not? But I was so dazzled with love for her that I willingly accepted her single condition for our marriage: that I must not seek to know what she did on Saturdays. Did this trouble me? How could it not? But her love was so pure and strong that I set my concerns aside. When did mortal man ever have so beautiful a bride—or a better helpmate? I would have been lost without her, for she brought to our marriage both wealth and cleverness, first guiding me as I made my peace with Count Aimeri’s family for his accidental death, then as we built our home.

  And then she gave me my sons.

  Guy was the first, Guy with his startling eyes, one green as the forest, one red as blood. Then his nine brothers, each with his own deformity and his own gift.

  At first, love blinded me to their oddities—love for the boys and, even more, my love for their mother. So when the whispers began, the dark mutterings that Melusine had a secret lover and our children carried demon blood, I ignored them. You know how the peasants will talk. Besides, in the six days we had together every week, Melusine was so tender and so true, so attentive to me and to the boys, that I could not doubt her love.

  She used to sing to me at night, you know. Her voice was like the sound of a mountain stream. I think that’s what I miss most of all. Her singing.

  Excuse me. I know, I know, it seems strange for me to weep, even now, even after all this. But it was a happy time.

  The last happy time.

  My brother was jealous of that happiness. He had found little enough in his own life, despite his wealth, which was far greater than mine, and despite his favored position as firstborn. Perhaps that is why he could not simply be glad for me. Perhaps that is why he worked so hard to poison my mind against Melusine.

  No. I must not blame my brother for my fault. Love should have been enough to shield my heart from his poisonous tongue. But his constant whispers, his sneers, his insinuating questions—these things wore away at me as water wears on a rock.

  One thing I know: I should never have let him into our home on a Friday night. It was defiant of me, I think—a way of showing I had nothing to hide. But in truth, I had much to hide—not about my wife, but about my own heart, which was tender and raw, harrowed by the doubts he had already planted there. When Melusine excused herself just before midnight all it took was his raised eyebrow, his amused and scornful grin—not even a grin, just a twitch at the corner of his mouth—to drive me to rash action.

  In that moment I decided to break my vow to Melusine and spy on her, both to quiet my brother and to set my burning heart at rest.

  Near the end of my third day in the forest a light rain—little more than a mist, really—began to fall. I was leaning against a tree to rest when I heard the singing, clear and rippling as water over stone.

  I knew at once it must be her.

  Following her song, as my grandfather had so many centuries before, I pushed my way through the thickly growing ferns. Rounding a massive tree, I came to a thick wall of fog. I plunged in, certain I had come at last to the place I sought. I stumbled ahead blindly, but after no more than five feet the fog thinned. Soon after that the land dipped, and I found the closest thing I had yet seen to a trail—a little downward twisting path that led between two ever-steepening banks, mostly rocky but dotted with clusters of
primrose and eglantine. In the gray light, drops of water stood like jewels on the richly colored petals.

  Beneath her singing, enhancing its beauty like a skilled accompanist, was the crystalline music of flowing water.

  The rain stopped. The sun, low in the sky, sent shafts of light sideways through the forest, illumining the soft mist from within. The trunks of the trees stood upright within that mist, rising like bars all around me.

  The path grew steeper, the banks higher. The light was nearly gone when I tripped, righted myself, and saw her.

  Extract from the Testimony of

  Raymond de Lusignan

  (as offered to the abbot of the Monastery

  of Saint-Denis in the year of the Lord 953)

  ______________________________________________________

  As I have said, every Friday without fail Melusine retreated at midnight to the tower room she had claimed as her own. On that fateful Friday I waited some ten or fifteen minutes after she had climbed the stairs, then ascended to the room myself, my way lit by the torches that always burned in the wall mounts.

  Her door was closed. I pressed my ear against it and heard, faintly, two things: the plash of water, and my wife, singing. A new flare of jealousy scalded my heart. Was she singing for someone else?

  With the point of my dagger I widened a hole between two of the door’s broad planks. It took time, for I had to work silently. I had not forgotten the promise I had made when we married, after all, the promise that I would not ask Melusine what she did on Saturdays, or seek to know it in any way. Nor had I forgotten that she had told me that if I broke this vow all our happiness must end. But in my jealous passion it seemed as if all my happiness had ended anyway. And I kept telling myself that if I could only do this in silence, and if she proved innocent—as some part of me yet believed she would—then she would never know, and all might still be well.

  I finished my work and returned my dagger to its sheath. Then I pressed my eye to the hole I had made.

  At first I couldn’t see anything in the dim light of her chamber. Then my eye adjusted and I spotted her. It was all I could do to keep from crying out in horror. Staggering back, I fled down the stairs as silently as I could.

  I did not speak of what I had learned. And when Melusine appeared in her usual form on Sunday she did not act as if she realized I had spied on her. But despite the fact that I now knew she had not betrayed me with any other lover, our happiness was doomed. Oh, my wife had been faithful. But I—I had betrayed her trust completely.

  How, then, could love survive?

  On the far side of the pool, at the water’s edge, sat my grandmother.

  I had known what to expect, of course. I had read the descriptions in the legends, in my grandfather’s testimony.

  It was something else entirely to see her.

  From the waist up, she was, even after all these centuries, the most beautiful of women, with abundant tresses of thick, red gold hair that tumbled past her shoulders, flowing like a liquid sunrise over her bare breasts. But at her waist came a grotesque change, for there her body shifted to that of an enormous snake. It was hard to guess the length of this abomination, which coiled beneath her; I imagine it was twenty feet at the least.

  Rising from her back, looming over her golden head, was a pair of batlike wings. Even folded and at rest they had a demonic look that I found terrifying.

  Her song faltered, then stopped. She stared in my direction. A look of puzzlement crossed her face, then she cried in astonishment, “You can see me!”

  After all these years, and even knowing what I would find, I felt as if my tongue had turned to stone. A handful of seconds passed, feeling like a century, before I managed to stammer, “Should I not be able to?”

  “It has been a long time since anyone could,” she replied. She sounded nervous, uncertain.

  “We share the same blood,” I said, by way of explanation.

  She slid into the pool—the same pool where my grandfather had first met her, first fallen in love with her. The great tail slithered in behind her. To my surprise, she was able to hold her entire torso, as well as several inches of her serpentine lower quarters, above the water. Arms extended, she glided toward me, propelled only by the powerful muscles of her serpent portion.

  I thought of what I carried in my pack and felt a moment of uncertainty. Even in this form my grandmother was the most enchanting woman I had ever seen. Now that we were face-to-face, could I really give her what I had spent so long in search of?

  · · ·

  He has my mother’s eyes, thinks Melusine, staring at the young man who has invaded her clearing.

  Those eyes disturb her, for they stir memories of her past—of her mother and the curse she had pronounced as punishment for Melusine’s rebellion.

  Melusine tries to press back the rising memories of what happened after the night Raymond spied on her and the curse came to its fullness. They flood in anyway, carrying with them all the sorrow and loss of that time.

  She had known he had done it, of course—had felt a cold chill in her spine the moment his eye fell on her. But she had not spoken of it, loving him anyway, despite his failure. Perhaps loving him even more for the very humanity of it. And desperately, desperately hoping that if his betrayal remained secret, the doom laid on her might not be stirred after all and they could stay together.

  Extract from the Testimony of

  Raymond de Lusignan

  (as offered to the abbot of the Monastery

  of Saint-Denis in the year of the Lord 953)

  ______________________________________________________

  Here is how my faithlessness was revealed.

  In the weeks that followed my spying on Melusine I tried to pretend that it had not happened. Yet the tender closeness we had once enjoyed now seemed forced and stiff.

  I have thought about this often in the years since I came here to the monastery, where there is so much time to think, and I wonder if in every marriage there are not things that should remain secret. How much of ourselves can we ever share? Is anyone ready to see the all of it, the deep and secret parts that we ourselves sometimes fear to peek at, much less reveal?

  Though I do not have the answer, this much I now believe: Regardless of what you know, there are words you should never speak, for once uttered they can never be taken back, and instead will hang in the air like a curtain of venom between you and the one you love.

  Thus it was with me and Melusine when we learned of Geoffroi’s crime against the monastery.

  From the moment I discovered Melusine’s secret I had begun to think about the boys, of course. It seemed clear that their strangeness had come from . . . from whatever she was. I loved my sons none the less for that. But now I worried about them all the more. And the whispers that I had shut out for so many years began to pierce my defenses, landing like arrows in my heart: “They are demon seed,” the wagging tongues said. “The blood of Lusignan is tainted forevermore.”

  Which is why, I confess, when word came of Geoffroi’s atrocity my first, horrified reaction was not sorrow for the lives lost but shame for my own family. In a moment of black rage I turned on Melusine and cried, “Foul serpent! You have contaminated the blood of a noble line!”

  Would that someone had cut my living tongue from my mouth before I uttered those loveless, heartless words.

  Melusine shrieked and bolted from the room. At first I thought that terrible cry, torn from her heart and echoing still in my ears today, was one of rage. All too soon I realized it came from terror.

  She ran for her tower. I sprang up to pursue her, but she was faster than I, as she always had been.

  She did not go all the way to her chamber. Halfway up the long, winding stair she sprang to the sill of a window and flung herself out.

  “No!” I cried, love rising over my anger. “No!”

  I was but an arm’s length behind her. As I clasped the sill to lean out I saw with astonishment tha
t her foot had impressed itself into the solid stone, leaving a deep print. I looked down fearfully, expecting to see her dashed to her death on the rocks below. But a wild cry caught my attention, drawing my eyes upward. What I saw then was worse than my wildest fears could have guessed. My beloved wife, my Melusine, was suspended in midair. Caught between earth and heaven, she writhed and twisted, screaming in agony. Her clothes vanished in a burst of flame. Before my terrified eyes her legs fused into a single thick trunk. It lengthened and lengthened, stretching beneath her in loathsome coils. Blue gray scales slid across its surface, as if she were being sheathed in armor by some invisible smith.

  She screamed again. I saw blood spurt from behind her as leathery wings, pointed and demonic looking, ripped their way from her shoulders.

  She began to cough. Soon her entire body shook with great spasms, as if she were trying to vomit something forth. At last some small black thing burst from her mouth and fluttered away. Melusine wailed in despair, a sound more heart-wrenching even than her screams of pain, and stretched her arms longingly toward the winged thing. But it quickly flew out of sight.