by Tanith Lee
Some supper was served them, and Draco sat graciously talking to her, telling her about the fresh fighting he would have to have, trying to pretend it irked him although in fact he had grown restless at his palace.
While they—he—ate, some gifts were brought in for her. There was a necklace, bracelets, and other such things. Then they brought her own mirror..In her trance, Arpazia had forgotten the mirror. Very likely she would have forgotten it anyway. She stared at it, thinking, What is it?
“You must have this frippery back,” he announced. “It’s no use to me. Mirrors—women’s nonsense. And they’re afraid of it. A witch’s glass.”
Arpazia got up and drifted over to the mirror, as if she must—men always gave orders, even inadvertently. She undid the clasp of the lid, and opened it out, and when she looked into the glass, did not see herself, gazed straight past herself, at the room beyond, its painted walls and long narrow windows, her bed, the carved chair with King Draco in it.
She saw Draco, the dragon-bull, as if for the first time, in the mirror. He was almost faceless, a suit of flesh with hot appetites.
But behind Draco, one door stood open, and Arpazia and the mirror saw into a part of the old palace, an ancient colonnade of pillars which ran through under a high-walled terrace, like the defile of a mountain. Antique oil-lamps hung and lit the walk, and here and there a bay tree stood in a pot. The view was an orderly compendium of dark and light, but suddenly something seemed to shift and separate.
Arpazia started—and her trance, like a pane of glass—like the glass pane of the mirror itself—seemed also for one second to tilt.
A child darted along the colonnade, on which the paint was firm and new. Her corn-colored hair streamed back—if it was able to … Her eyes—if they had been real—were like new-minted coins—
Arpazia was aware the almost-child, rushing through the mirror, must not reach her. So she clapped the lid shut.
“Gently,” reproved ungentle Draco. “That’s a costly possession. You should be careful of it.”
Then he sent the servants out and led Arpazia to the bed.
She did not struggle now, or even tremble, she was too heavy and weary, too lost, adrift, tranced. Draco had her quickly. The wall candles burned down behind his head, consumed by the minute of his panting fire. He hurt her, but not as much as before. “There,” he said.
Then he got up and shook himself free of what he had spent. She was nothing to him, this sulky doll. Was she unhinged? She looked asleep. It occurred to him that one day he might wish to be rid of her, and if she was mad, that would be much easier.
Asleep … Of course, she did not slumber, physically, throughout all those next five or more months. Yet she did sleep a great deal, both day and night, whenever she could. It seemed she had only to let go of her body, to float miles out, to be gone. There were few dreams that she remembered, and those she recalled were mild, pleasing: childish.
Otherwise, she got up, and let herself be tended. Clothes were put on her, and her hair combed with essences and twined with ornaments. She would sometimes eat and drink, move about, along the colonnade, for example, the pillars of which were faded and pocked, to a walled garden, from where it was possible to look out at the sea.
Day would come down the hills, and the shadows of clouds. Then summer came down them.
Blushes of bronzy green over the woods, green veils, shimmering webs that wrapped the olive trees. Soon leaves thick as clusters of grapes, and the grass banded with wild flowers, lilac, milk-blue, the ruby powder of poppies, quivering with bees and the chorus of crickets. By then the mountains had blurred, losing their hard edges of white. Next the green fields were split with yellow. A tarnish of mellowness. The sea was like an Eastern turquoise.
It became the birth month of King Draco’s queen. The month which belonged to the Virgin Marusa, the Virgo.
Draco was unaware of this birthday element, and anyway there had been disturbances among some of his conquered towns. He had left to skirmish through the summer, and would not return until the leaves again were gone.
“Into her eleventh month, and no sign. Is it dead inside her, do you think?”
She heard them whispering, the unkind, soulless waiting-women, as if she were deaf, or rather as if they noticed the trance she was in, and thought it made her deaf, which it had not.
The mirror watched, through its lid, which also reflected somewhat, like an ordinary inferior mirror of polished metal. It caught the late summer glow of sky and hills and the black ripple of a crow that sailed above the orange groves.
Draco’s queen woke and sat up in her bed. She had been asleep for over ten months—almost like a girl in one of the stories her nurse had told her.
It was her fifteenth birthday. She did not know it.
Yesterday the physicians had examined Arpazia. She let them. It was never so bad as what Draco had twice done. The medicine, though, was sour, so she did not swallow it. She would do little, unless coerced, and none of these dared to force her to anything, now.
Today Arpazia was puzzled. Nothing seemed different in this day, but she had woken up, and why?
The room was softly hot; it smelled of honey and fruit. This, with the occasional whiff of sulfur from the Oracle, was the summer smell of Belgra Demitu. Even asleep, the girl had learned that. She had learned everything, asleep. And, also, that she was queen, and now the women whispered: “The physician brought her a draught to hurry the child—but she threw the draught out through the window.”
The girl looked down at the round hard moon of her belly. It would never alter. Then she looked across at the mirror with its closed lid.
Leaving the bed, she walked to the mirror. Perhaps she had not undone the clasp since that last night with Draco.
The lid folded away. On the glass, the backdrop, a window of sky and flying crow …
But who was this?
No longer a girl or a maiden. Now a woman, a taut white moon fruit, juicily swollen to ripeness.
Arpazia stared at her belly through the thin shift. As she saw in through the linen, she saw in next through her own body—
Inside her belly was a black bowl, and in the bowl a red apple, but the heart of the apple was white. The flesh of the apple was a white serpent lying coiled there. Like herself, though taking sustenance and sometimes moving, it had been asleep. Now Arpazia saw it had woken, and this in turn had woken her—
Her first scream was of terror. Only the second scream demonstrated pain.
Then her blood poured out of her again, and as the mirror watched, with its strange, apparently callous, crystal eye, Draco’s queen entered the house of agony called childbirth.
“See, lady. It lives—”
Kill it, she shrieked in her mind, kill it as it kills me—
But the pain had drawn off, all across the room, which now was dark and lamplit. Pain sat in the corner, folding up the instruments of the pain-trade, putting them lovingly away.
“Ah, but madam, alas—”
Arpazia opened her eyes. Is it dead after all? She would have killed it herself, if she could, as she had begged them to do—had she done so?
“Not a son, lady. And after such dreadful labor.”
“A poor little girl. But she’s perfect, madam. Here she is.”
They put something against her heart. The mother did not take hold of it, and it rolled from her. The women caught it at once.
“She’s too weak to embrace her child.”
“Too daft. Look at her!”
From the shadows, the faces peering and leering, like masks worn in the old pagan worship Arpazia had, maybe, heard sometimes went on here. Animal masks at that, unfriendly and savage.
“I don’t want it,” she must have said. Something mewed, insubstantial and far off. “Take it away.”
Arpazia thought, They will thrown it in a brazier, to burn it. But that will only strengthen the thing. It was nothing to her, it belonged to pain.
Yet pa
in, no longer involved, had crept out of the door, and there in the mirror, which throughout the flurry no one had closed, an amber flame seemed to stand upright, almost in the shape of a gleaming woman. But this was a trick of the lamplight.
Milk was pressing from Arpazia’s breasts like tears. She saw this, repelled. And then, despite what she had said, they thrust the thing again into her arms and somehow now she did hold it. It sucked on her, hurting her. A thread was drawn through her breast into its mouth, this tiny, milking grub.
She had no more stamina to resist. Oh, let it murder her then. That was all it wanted to do. To eviscerate and drain her. She could see what it was, plainly enough: The curse that she had conjured. White, with one delicate crimson silk of blood left unwiped, and the one black curl of hair on its head.
Arpazia dreamed she was wandering in a cavern. her only illumination a torch held high in her right hand.
Before her, a staircase of volcanic rock descended into blackness. And something tugged a thread out through her heart.
I am searching, but for what? For myself, for the child I was.
But these thoughts, which in later years would come—if without language—to overlay the dream, were not then considered. Only the awful grief of the dream, its desolate sense of robbery, and loss.
The Maiden: The Witch
I.
NATURALLY, TO BEGIN WITH, SHE never knew the Woman was her mother.
What did the word “Mother” mean?
She had a nurse, who had given her milk, and next there were two attendants who—she had heard murmured—were also daughters of her father. The word Father she comprehended. And Daughter. And, Witch.
“There is the witch.” “What does that witch say?” “Careful, the witch may hear you!”
At seven years of age, she had finally realized this narrow figure of a woman, stalking to and fro against a distant window, this briefly felt, cold, pale hand with its three large jewels, this head of hair turning away its polished darkness—this composite, had something to do with herself.
Soon after her birth, the child was christened in the town’s great church of St. Belor. The name she received had belonged to queens in history. It had a meaning to do with fiery whiteness: Candacis. But no one, save her father, (the king) called her by it. The name the ordinary women in her world called her, was Coira. While the Woman, stalking like a leopard in a cage (so the ordinary women said), never called the child anything.
Although the Woman did, now and then, speak to her.
“Is it you?”
“Yes.”
“Say, ‘Yes, madam,’” breathed the anxious nurse in the child’s ear.
So the child said, “Yes—ma-madama—” stumbling not in fear, but from unfamiliarity. She had never, until then, been required to give anyone a title. Even the king did not, apparently, insist on it, until his offspring were ten or eleven.
What did the Woman (the witch) say then? Nothing. She turned her head, and the child saw the back of her, hollowly straight and slender, and the smooth black hair that shone, held fast in a stiff net of metallic wire and under a thin trailing veil like silver-powdered steam. Awestruck, Coira only watched.
Yet “Who is she?” Coira presently asked, that is, she asked years in the future, seven years old now, when they had met the Woman (witch) as they sometimes did, in a corridor of the new palace. The maid and the nurse had curtseyed, bowing their heads. The Woman flowed by like water. Her mantle was edged with black bear fur that matched her hair, for it was an icy spring. Coira knew the Woman, knew the Woman was a ruling being in her child’s life. But never before had she thought to ask Why?
Had they never said once to the child, prior to that hour, “Your mother”? Something like, for example, “Your mother will be in the High Chamber today, with the king. You must kiss her hand, as you do his.” Possibly they had said this. But Coira did not understand. Come to that, the huge gaudy man, lifting her up and laughing in her face his wine-breath and beard, he was nothing to her either, even if she knew his mighty part in the scheme of things. He liked the child, however. He always did like his children, when small. He said so. He brought her presents, toys, and so on. He felt too warm.
The hand of the woman was cold, like cold weather, stone, those things.
Yet, on the day that seven-year-old Coira had asked, “Who is she?” and the nurse exclaimed and crossed herself as if at a blasphemy, and one of the maids said, “Your mother—who else?”—that day Coira saw how beautiful the Woman was.
The next instant the other maid said spitefully, “Don’t let the witch find out you didn’t know her! She’ll throw you in a spell-pot, boil you up.”
The child felt a ribbon of fear rustle through her stomach. But she was not especially fearful, not then. The fear went away, and the memory of beauty flooded back. “Hush now, she’s the queen,” added the nurse to the maids. But she too called the queen the witch. It was a habit they had all got into.
The nurse was only in her twenties, the attendant girls were children themselves, ten or so, the age when the king’s legal progeny were expected to address him as sire. Except, of course, not being legal, they had had to do that from the start. They respected him. He was a man.
The queen was a foreigner, an upland forest woman. And everyone knew she practiced witchcraft, spoke to demons and sprites when alone in her rooms. (They heard her talk to them.) She had a sorcerous mirror which no one else ever dared look into. This would show her secret things, and out of it flew evils in swarms, causing minor accidents about the palace, fevers, falls, and bad dreams.
In a way, they instinctively segregated the child from her mother for the child’s own good. And the witch besides made no effort to commune with her child, and had borne no others—it was said she had refused even to suckle the baby, and that instead imps had feasted on her milk.
Coira’s attendants now began to tell her such stories.
And so, to the sense of the Woman’s distance, and of her beauty, the appalling allure of magic was added.
The king did not appeal to Coira, and she felt no desire to woo him. No, the one she now wanted to win was her witch-queen mother.
In the early summer, the ancient Oracle at Belgra Demitu was honored. This was a pagan rite, like the Midwinter festival- and like the festival, which had become Midwinter-Mass, the Church winked, pretending it was something else. For the smoking Oracle, and the spring too, had been dedicated to the Blessed Virgin. Originally, they had both belonged to the goddess Demetra, the Corn-Queen, whose daughter was snatched underground in the myth.
Perhaps Coira had not been brought to the ceremony before. Infants might be noisy, but she, if anything, was too quiet and still. Certainly she did not remember the rite or the king’s part in it. The question she asked immediately was, “Will she be there?”
“Who?”
“The witch.”
“Don’t call her that! Do you mean the queen?”
“My mother,” said the child, proudly.
Yes, said the nurse, Queen Arpazia, King Draco’s wife, would go with the rest to show her duty to the Oracle.
The child had been trying very hard these past two months, as chill spring melted to summer and the shadows and the sun-born green came down the hills, to see or to find her mother, the Woman-witch queen. But Coira, mostly, was not successful. By arrangement, the rooms where the child lived were far away from the heart of the palace, away from the apartment of the queen. The king never allowed children, once out of babyhood, near his women, not wishing to trip over them.
Once only, having evaded her own attendants, Coira had discovered a garden. And she had seen, not her mother, but the mantle trimmed by bear-fur, left lying on a bench. She had meant to go and pick up the mantle. To smell it and hold it, searching for the Woman’s magical essence. Before she was able to do so, one of her maids ran up and dashed her away, scolding birdlike in alarm.
That morning of the rite, Coira was dressed in a l
ittle white gown. Her hair had been washed. Now the nurse combed it.
“Such a shame you’re not a pretty child,” said the nurse regretfully, since Coira (Princess Candacis) was currently the nurse’s own property. Draco had no other lawful daughters, but some of his by-blows were charming, and all his sons were thought manly and good-looking.
Coira’s skin, like her mother’s, was too pale, and did not take the sun. Her eyes were changeable, never blue but sometimes a strange gray, or even black, the iris and pupil seeming all one. Her mouth was too well-shaped for her age, precocious and red, although her cheeks were always colorless. Coira looked, the younger maid had said, as if she had been eating pomegranates greedily—or had put on the salve from an adult’s cosmetic jar. Her hair, though, was a splendor. Heavy silk that shone, and black as a crow’s wing.
They had tried to explain about the Oracle. In the mythic past, kings had come to ask their fates from it. Though it answered in riddles, it never lied, if you could only decipher the message.
“Is it God?” asked the child, idly. Had they known, she was only being polite, for her mind was just then solely on her mother, and the chance of seeing her.
“How could it be God, God pardon you? God’s in Heaven.”
But the younger maid, Kaya, said, “Once. Once it was a god, Nursey.”
Coira, her interest caught a moment, asked, “Isn’t it a god now? Then why does the smoke still come?”
“It does, and there you are. And sometimes it speaks.”
“How does it?”
“It gurgles to itself.”
“Stop, you’ll scare the child,” rasped the nurse.
“What does the gurgle say?”
“Feed me. It says feed me a sweet young maiden seven years of age, gobble, gobble.”
“Stop that. It says nothing of the sort.” The nurse was firm, and this reflected in the way she roughly pulled the child’s hair now with the comb. “The gurgling is right down in the rock under the hill. It’s because of the spring of water. And the smoke smells bad sometimes, don’t we all know that. And that’s from vapors under the ground.”