White As Snow (Fairy Tale)

by Tanith Lee

  The maid, Kaya, said, “He is down there, they say.”

  Coira looked less sure. “Who?”

  “The wicked god that dragged the goddess-girl away under the earth. He saw her playing in the ripe corn, and thought he’d like her for his own. So he opened the earth and drove out in his chariot drawn by seven black horses, each snorting fire—or they might have been seven black bulls, like the king’s banner. And he seized the girl round the waist and carried her off. The poppies she’d been gathering fell on the field like blood, and her tears like diamonds, but the next moment she was gone and the earth closed over. And he wouldn’t give her back, even though her mother was Demetra, the Corn-Queen. But he’s Death, and rules the land of shadows.”

  “Be silent you bad girl!” cried the nurse. “These are pagan things, and you’ve no business to know them, let alone tell her.”

  Kaya shrugged. She had a sly face and foxy hair.

  “You,” she retorted, “gave her the name.”

  “Only in fun,” whined the nurse, uneasily.

  The child looked from one to the other. It was her second maid, Julah, who primly said, “Coira is the pet name of the corn goddess’s daughter, the one the god stole.”

  The nurse put down the comb, turned and slapped Julah across the face. Julah screamed. Kaya stood grinning. “The Princess Candacis was born in harvest month. She belongs to the Virgin, the holy Virgo,” shouted the nurse.

  But Coira thought, If I am the goddess’s daughter, my mother is the goddess. She did not think this in words, she thought it in a formless way, only the more marvelous since untrammeled by language.

  Draco led the procession down the terraces.

  In seven years, he had grown affluent, and thickened slightly, like a gourd. There had been minor skirmishes, a couple of raids into other territories. These had kept him occupied and assured of his manhood and power, but had not refined him at all. His brain had thickened too, becoming more hard, less flexible, and there had been little pliancy to begin with.

  He walked down the hill. That was the tradition. All the kings and men of war who had once come to ask things of the Oracle, had walked, leaving their chariots, later their horses, sometimes even their attendants behind.

  But two priests of the Christ walked directly after the king, and then there were boys from St. Belor with censers. The flavor of the incense mingled with the scent of ripening oranges; today, ironically, the Oracle’s sulfur was scarcely to be detected.

  After the priests and the church-boys came the king’s noblemen and his captains, not clad in mail but in their summer linens and silks. The silken women walked behind, some with their hair unbound and crowned with flowers.

  The palace had let them out like creatures from a cave. Its stone and wood walls were turned sidelong to the morning sun, as they grew from the elder masonry, and from between the stems of faded russet pillars that had been young when other gods moved over the earth and Christ Himself was not yet born.

  The way to the Oracle led by the ruined temple. The space was full only of sunlit age and lizards. Few glanced. By night trysts were kept there, and cats fought under the moon. And yet, too, occasionally after sunset, no one would go there, the temple was left alone. Even the lizards ran away … .

  The king had reached the terrace of the Oracle.

  Draco gazed earnestly at the great stone, and the small dark hole lying half under it. It was no bigger than his fist, the hole, and this morning the smoke was very faint. But that, given the smoke’s foul odor, was to the good.

  From her hut on the terrace side, the elderly woman had come out. She wore a fine white garment, one of which was given her new each month. Her veiled head was like the head of a tortoise. She was the kind of crone the king would have pushed from his path without thinking, but this one he superstitiously revered, since she served the smoke.

  Now a priest cried, “Holy Marusa of the corn, mild Lady who smiles upon the fields and leads the bees to their work among the flowers, we come to thank you for your kindness and your intercessions.”

  Only crickets answered. Birds rose singing, uninvolved.

  Then the crone spoke, as if the priest had not.

  “Who comes here, to question the Lady?”

  And her voice, unlike that of the priest’s, called from another world, and the crickets and the birds fell silent.

  “I am King Draco.” He had learned his lesson but enunciated as he did in battle—he was too loud.

  One of his gentlemen handed the king a platter and flask. Draco cast grain about the timeless stone, poured wine on its old purple veins. The smoke stirred, just a little, sleepily.

  The crone raised sticklike hands against the sky. “She thanks you for your offering, Draco.” The Smoke Crone of the Oracle never addressed a king by any title other than his name. “What questions would you ask?”

  The court waited; on its edges the people of the town, peasants and villagers from the woods beyond. Draco thought they came to stare at him, and was quite wrong.

  “Are we to be prosperous?” barked Draco.

  The Oracle did not respond. That mysterious liquid rumble it sometimes gave did not come.

  Draco shouted on hoarsely, “Is there more fighting to be done? Besides, will my new capital be built by winter?”

  His questions hung, unimportant, on air. Then the Oracle gurgled. Draco started, nearly dropped the plate he still held. The noise in the rock was loud, and now suddenly the smoke gushed out, dingy and thick, and the king jumped back. So did the two priests. Only the old woman stood her ground, used to it.

  Stupidly, Draco said, “Is it angry, lady? The other place—my other city—it’s only to show them, there, I’m king. Belgra will still be my town.”

  The Crone’s reptilian eyes glinted. She fed the lizards in the temple, he had heard, and fondled them like children. But that was because she was an old virgin.

  “No, Draco. She isn’t angry. Build where you think fit. Today, the smoke is simple to read. Your lands will be prosperous, and there will be no more wars, not in your time. But your other capital, your city, will not be ready by winter. You’re never there long enough to see it properly done.”

  A cloud crossed the sky. There was nothing in that. Nor in a gout of strong stinking smoke from under the stone. But the court muttered and Draco scowled, feeling he had been reprimanded in public by this old nanny.

  She smiled, lowering her eyes and pulling her veil across her mouth to hide it.

  Knowing now her mother was a goddess, the child had understood she would see her at once in the crowd. Her mother, the queen, would shine through all the others on the terraces, as a flame shone through the side of a lamp of clay or alabaster. Nothing, no one, could really come between them.

  Had Coira decided anything concerning her mother’s always-coldness to her? Of course she had.

  Gods must be worshipped. Even the gentle meek Christ demanded it, and his Father, Almighty God Himself, was jealous and raging if ignored. While Coira had not known to worship, what else could the goddess do but fail to notice Coira in turn?

  The nurse drew her charge along just at the rear of the ranks of noblewomen, some way from the nurseries of Draco’s valued sons.

  Showing off in their richest best, the noblewomen had no interest in this white-faced female child the king had probably forgotten. One snapped at the nurse, “Keep back. She’ll tread on the border of my gown.” Humble, the nurse obeyed, hauling Coira away like a rowdy dog—for they must all descend decorously. Maids tenderly lifted the trailing trains of gowns, green as the woods, blue as the sea.

  Coira looked, looked for her queen.

  All that while (the nurse pushing and pulling her, the women swaying and frivolously pausing, everyone-and-thing so vastly high up, the adult world of giants), Coira had little room to behold anything else.

  Then they stopped, and the sun beat down.

  Trapped in the depths of this forest of dressed human forms, th
e child craned about. She did not ask the nurse where her mother stood. Everyone was now religiously quiet, as in the church, where Coira’s penalty for speech was a sharp pinch, and afterward three or four stinging slaps across her legs.

  Now one of the priests was calling something out about the Virgin Marusa.

  Somehow—obviously by divine design—the mass of gleaming women separated. A gap was there, like a window.

  Coira stared through, and downward.

  Her father (the king) was on a lower terrace, shouting as he did at supper in the palace hall. Coira did not listen. She rarely interpreted what was said by these giants. Even when they spoke to her, it was generally a kind of nonsense.

  But above the king, drawn aside among the olive trees, the queen was standing with her girls.

  She was, as Coira had known she must be, totally apart.

  Coira drew in her breath involuntarily. Her eyes were wide.

  The queen was rather far away, and so made smaller, and somehow more absolute. She wore a dress of ivory silk, stitched with gold threads. Her hair was not unbound, but held in an openwork golden tower, which showed its glistening darkness. A veil poured from the tower like a soft red flame.

  The queen’s face was impassive. That is, it was empty. But so beautiful, so fair, so perfect. Less a face than an instant of revelation.

  Physically unmoving, rigid as if bolted into chains and shackles, the child’s spirit galvanically strained to fly out of her body, to leap and hurl itself at the feet of her queen.

  And suddenly, exactly then, evidently the goddess Arpazia became fiercely aware of this intensity of worship.

  She did not move, did not turn or look about. It was not that at all. She seemed merely to straighten and grow taller, and her face tilted up into the light, and her eyes, though fixed apparently on nothing, widened with a flash, just as the eyes of the child had done a moment before.

  II.

  FALLING TO LIFE, THEY WERE BORN on the same day of the same month; they also fell in love at the exact same moment—but not with each other.

  Arpazia had stayed three hundred and thirteen days in her first trance, until the violence of childbirth, in her fifteenth year, woke her up. Yet after she had given birth, she entered a second trance, unlike the first. This second trance was to last for seven years.

  That night of the birth (her birthday), when she would not let the baby suckle on her any longer, the women brought a wet nurse. She was a girl not many years older than the queen.

  Arpazia had lain back, not caring, and prepared to die.

  But she did not die. Her traitorous body grew well, thoroughly repairing itself. A morning came when the worst of the physicians had stood over her. “Madam, you’re quite yourself. The king, when he returns, may be admitted without fear. I assure you, you can give him many more healthy children.” Then, leaning near to make her particularly glad, he added, “Of course, of course you were disappointed. But the little girl does very well. And I don’t doubt your next will be the son you crave.”

  When he said this Arpazia had burst up from her bed shrieking. She had flown at him half naked, her hair like two great beating wings.

  Later, to excuse his own fright, he remarked generally that some women were dangerously unstable at such times. But also he was perhaps the first to compare the queen to a sorceress. “What true woman behaves in such a fashion to her doctor? She had an uncanny look. I’ve suspected things. She mumbled to herself, spells, perhaps against the baby—it came very late. The women say she hates the child. And she sits talking to that vain-glass of hers. She’s from out of the forests. She’ll have witch blood in her.”

  From the bottom of her second trance, Arpazia saw how they tried, from malice, all of them, to wake her.

  The women soon desisted. This second trance was different. She could reach up out of it and smite them, just as she had sprung at the physician, or pushed the baby from her breast.

  In the initial months of the second trance, Arpazia became a woman and a queen, a witch and a bitch, and left her mark in scarlet blows and purple bruises, in shards of broken things and torn garments.

  “She has the temper of a fiend!”

  “Another would only scold—she says no word but strikes like a snake.”

  “Best be wary of her. Look where her biggest ring cut my cheek, when she lashed out at me.”

  For, too, this trance had decided on the value of armor. Each day the queen, the bitch-witch, rose and was washed, perfumed, and clad in valuable stuffs, which she chose—and which, if then disliked, she rent. Her hair was rubbed with silk, combed—God help them if they accidentally tugged, or a coil was misplaced. Collars of silver and gold rings were applied. Finery. Mask and mail. Anything disapproved of was cast on the floor or across the chamber.

  Then, only then, did she go to the mirror.

  She undid the lid of it, and sat before the glass. If they made any sound, she sent them away, usually after flinging something at them.

  Them, she despised. Her enemies. Servants, slaves, nobles—all women, all men, were now that. And she despised herself, what she had been.

  But in the glass, the young queen could see herself as she had become, and was. Not transparent in her flesh, the fetus—the growth—showing through and stirring in the cup of her breached womb. Now she was an icon. Solid, and impenetrable.

  She had learned her name and title. Before, it meant nothing. Now it was a part of her armor. Queen Arpazia.

  That year Draco did not return to Belgra Demitu until Almost the Midwinter-Mass. He had won another fight, and found that place he would come to want for a city—his “capital,” scent-marking like a wolf, not with glands, but buildings. When he came back, he was full of this, boylike and noisy in his happy humor. When the queen did not appear, and did not receive him, sending one of her females to say she was not well, he shrugged. (He did see the baby. It was not a son.) He summoned his favorite, the barren hill-girl, and lay all night with her in the king’s bed.

  But later he met his queen, and saw she had grown up. She was a woman. Taller, slim as a sword, with pale hands and a high white brow. Her beauty did not please him so much. Where she had been toothsome she had become gorgeous, where she had been bendable, breakable, she now seemed hard. Cold-water eyes—he did not like those, either.

  In the end, two nights after the Mass feast, he went to her rooms, out of common good manners, to show he still valued her as a wife.

  There had been a brief scene with his favorite. He had told the girl where he was going. Quite properly she never made a fuss if he took another. Now she only made over herself some peasantish sign.

  “Don’t do that, puss. You’re a Christian, and in front of your king.”

  “Pardon me, lord. But—they say things of the queen. Go cautious, lord.”

  “What? What things?”

  “That she casts spells. Has got an imp—”

  Draco hit the girl, lightly. “Stop that.”

  But the memory stayed close as he went into the apartment of his wife, and saw at once—in the absence of normal feminine things—embroidery, lap dog, trinkets, cradle—Arpazia’s vain-glass, that mirror, standing wide open, as if parading itself.

  Arpazia had risen from her chair.

  Yes, she was a beauty, but now she looked too old to him; he preferred very young women. By the Christ, he had been informed she was fourteen, a year back. She would be fifteen or so now. She looked more like twenty, thirty, and frigid as a nun.

  She had been difficult from the beginning. He recalled abruptly how she had led him that prance over the snow, and then cursed him. A witch? Very likely. But God, and his own male strength, had kept him sound.

  “Well, madam. Here I am.”

  A servant hurried to bring him a filled cup. Though he had had plenty, Draco drank it. He waved the servant out. Now they were alone, as man and wife should be.

  It was a freezing night. The mountaintops had changed to marble, the sea
was almost white.

  Braziers and candles burned, but after the hall and his own chamber, this room was not warm. Chilled no doubt by her. He must warm her up.

  Draco crossed the space and took hold of his wife by the waist and drew her in. She did not resist, but her whole body, as he held it, had become inflexible, rigid as a pole.

  “Come, come on. Give me a kiss. The physician says you’re in good order by now. I’ve been at war. It’s a long while since we had a dance.” He spoke coarsely, to show her he was master here; not so coarsely as he had in the forest. All that was done. She had been virtuous and afraid then—to her credit, yes, yes. Now she was lawfully his before God, and must thank him.

  He did kiss her. Her teeth were closed. He drew back and took a breath. “Now, is this kind?” A second kiss. The same. All altered.

  “Did I wed you for this, you sulky slut? Get a crown on you for this? Unlock your doors, or do I ram you? Is that what you like, eh? A bit of a battle? I’m used to those, I can give you a fight easily enough, if you like.” And he drew back his arm, slowly, to show her its muscle.

  Her expressionless face was like white eggshell.

  “Have your way,” she said. She did not even speak the same. “But expect nothing.”

  “I expect my way. That’ll do.”

  So he got her to the bed, threw her over, yanked up her clothes and forced himself into that tepid, hard, ungiving body, dry to annoy him, which moved only at his thrusts.

  Her face was like that of something dead. The eyes were glazed. Just like that other bed of snow—

  Perhaps it was only the drink in him, he had drunk a lot, that turned the course of his energy astray. He crammed on and on, trying to rub up a spark. But he began to see he went nowhere in her lifeless body. Necrophily was not for him. He needed under him a reaction—the spurs of enjoyment, failing that, the spur of another’s panic and pain. He shouted in her dead face then, in her glistening eyes. Still raised over her, still inside her, he caught sight of himselƒ, across the room, in the edge of the mirror.