White As Snow (Fairy Tale)

by Tanith Lee

  Quite how he did so, he was afterward unsure, for the mirror did not seem to be at the right angle to picture him. Was that some of her sorcery?

  What he saw was distorted. The man-creature in the glass was swarthy with hearty meat and drink, panting and piglike. While she—she was simply a mound of velvet that might only have been one more cover on the bed. As if she were not there at all.

  It put him off. That, and the drink, and the girl with her averting sign, and this one’s uselessness.

  He pulled away, left her. He did up his clothing, and swore so the room rang like a bell.

  Then he meant to thrash her. Her face should have it first, let them all see the brand of his displeasure.

  She was upright, standing there all ready, the frozen hag.

  She said, “Do what you want.”

  “You know I can’t. You cuntess, you’ve spoiled it. Well—you I’ll spoil the next—”

  “Beat me if you want. If you make another thing in me”—thing, she said, not baby, thing—“I’ll cut it out of my inside, as I should have, with the other. And if you beat me I’ll cut my throat—so you’d better see to it first, as my father wanted. But I’ll scratch out your eyes. I’ll tear you and then I’ll cut my throat”—her voice was rising now, like a low, cold-frozen gale from the sea—“or I’ll hang myself the way you hanged Lilca—they’ll all see—they’ll say, ‘Look what she did to escape her life with King Draco.’”

  And then this monster gave a laugh. It was not loud, nor dramatic. And although her voice had risen, this was soft, nearly lyrical. Yet it struck him like a shriek.

  She had lost her fear, it seemed, of being cut. The voice of the forest was still in her. She said now what she should have said before; she had the strength to say it, for she had not yet realized she might be afraid to die.

  Draco again raised his arm. But like his erection, the penile upthrust of anger did not sustain itself. Instead he felt queasy.

  Had she put something in the wine her servant gave him? She was mad enough.

  “These are fine grounds for divorcement, woman. Shall I cast you out?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I would like that the most.”

  “Be damned in Hell, you fucking sow. I’ll keep you, then. You’re mine, till Isay so. Till / want. Do you hear?”

  “Have what you want, king,” she sang at him.

  And then she threw something right at him.

  He gave a cry—of abject terror—she had terrified him—and he was uncertain why. But the tiny knife, which all this time she must have kept clenched in one hand, nicked his cheek. (“Her ring caught me …” just what her women were always saying.)

  Then he wished to kill her himself. He felt the cold eye of the mirror watching him.

  He thought, over there, unseen now—but if he could see it—in the spider web of glass, two others, a man with a knife through him, and an ice-woman cackling, old as the hag of the moon.

  “Beat me, hit me,” she invited once more, murmuring now, almost caressing. “I’ll curse you, Draco. They taught me curses. The last came back on me, but if I die, where can it go but to you?”

  The blustering boy, capable of so much, was not clever enough. He rolled around and his guts heaved. He threw up on the floor. And as he spewed, he knew she laughed again, whether he heard her or not.

  Finished, he wiped his lips. (Did he glance to see if he had upthrown lizards, frogs?)

  “Yes, you make me sick,” he croaked. “Stew here, then. Do as you like.”

  He could always have her murdered, he thought as he left. But he was, this rough hooligan, also devout. He would not dare without a better excuse.

  But was she a sorceress? The Church then would decide.

  Rumbling, belching, and retching through the corridors, under the flaming torches, between the antique pillars, servants and guards alike sidling back from him, he heard her nagging voice go on in his head. What she might say to the priests—how she had bested him—

  Better to leave it. She was only a woman.

  He visualized the other place, the city he wanted there. Far off from all this, and her.

  He vomited throughout the night, and otherwise had evil dreams, but waking in the morning he was fresh again, despite all that. Then he decided he was not afraid of her—the idea did not occur to him, in the morning, that he could be. She was nothing, ugly, and growing old. Besides, she produced girls not sons. And he was busy.

  Six days later, Draco rode away again, to his skirmishes and little glamorous wars. There were plenty of girls to be had, and the new capital to be seen to.

  So then. The nature of Arpazia’s first trance had been inertia, severance. The second trance was composed both of severance and its defense, and of her loathing of self.

  Maybe she had only gone mad. That was one other answer to her riddle. She had ceased bothering about death, even when personified as a king. She had died, was dead. (This would pass, but how could she know it would pass?) The embryo, dividing her from herself on entering, had left her in two pieces. Her childhood had run out with the parturition blood, and become another being: obviously, a child. And the woman remained, crazy, in her hollow fortress.

  Like other outlaws who had survived great horrors and no longer knew to fear them, Arpazia grew terrible.

  They should have sent her away. Instead they kept her. But kept, too, on her kind side—for she was a queen, and a witch. The witch-queen.

  The years continued. As the girl christened Candacis, and called Coira, grew from baby to child, the candle of Arpazia meanwhile burned down, melting the ordinary wax from her and leaving only the flame.

  Because of all of this, others had begun to consider the queen. Others watched her. Bright eyes, as if of birds among the vines, of foxes on the hillsides. To her, they were all her enemies. Why should she take special note of any glance? She only talked to the woman she saw in her mirror, who would always answer.

  “Her mirror is her tool of sorcery.”

  It was.

  She saw things in it, and the mirror, surely, saw things in her.

  “She talks to demons.”

  Yes, to one: herself.

  At twilight, looking in the mirror, conversing with her reflection, the lamp or candle sinking, she beheld a crow which sat above the window, blinking orichalc eyes. Later, a white owl. Or two shadows stood behind her, one of whom held a spindle with white wool on it. Or a tree grew in the corner, laden with rosy fruits, while a serpent twined the trunk.

  Had her women too seen such images? Did they ever risk, if she should not be there, opening the mirror and asking some question of their own? Did they get an answer?

  She is a witch.

  On the terrace of the Oracle: the ancient crone who cuddled lizards in the temple ruin, visited the smoke every dawn. A day came before the rite was due in summer, late in spring of that year when Coira was seven, and Arpazia twenty-two years of age.

  Through the half-light, the Crone approached the Oracle and bent to the stone. If any watched, it was only what she always did.

  But she too had her questions.

  “Holy and holy. Is she ours, that woman in the High House?”

  The Oracle smoke might be tampered with, and frequently was. Now, not interfering, the crone gave her gift of oil, and read its pattern, plain to her as language.

  Though she reverenced the Christ when she must, in the church, the Smoke Crone knew quite well who He really was, the young god of joy, who must be sacrificed and rise again. There was to the compendium of any god more than one, or two—the usual number being three.

  She may be ours, the smoke had said.

  When the rite came, the crone would speak to Draco and send him off to his new capital. She must do it in careful, tactful words, saying the city was missing his attention, like some sickly woman or hound. But she would see him away, and so leave Belgra free of him, for her people—and for the elder powers which had always been, would always be, when all
the rest was gone.

  When the child looked across the hill of terraces, and saw her mother in the white dress stitched by gold, Coira fell deeply, spiritually, asexually yet physically in love. It was the adoration of the priestess for the goddess. Of the body for the vision of its soul. Great love indeed.

  And in this selfsame moment, Arpazia, looking in quite a different direction, woke from her second, seven-year-long trance. And also fell into the vortex of love. But it was to her like the smashing of a vessel. As if she had been one of those many items which, through the seven years, she had flung, and which had shattered. Or as if she had been a mirror and, falling, broke into a million sparkling splinters.

  What she had seen was not the daughter of her womb. It was a young man of about her own age, standing some way from her, lower down the hillside, under the terraces of Belgra Demitu.

  She did not ask Who is that? She thought nothing. Flown into a million bits, still her mirror gaze was fixed.

  And he, too, gazed at her. Through the crowds, across the light, the shadow, he smiled one lightning smile, blinding her.

  Arpazia woke from her second trance to the noon sun in her eyes.

  III.

  THAT VERY EVENING, THE CHANGE arrived. As such things often were, it was unlooked for. However, she had wished for it so much, considered it so repeatedly, constantly, that she seized her fate at once.

  The day of the Oracle’s rite was arranged oddly. No doubt the priests had done this, in order to upset the holiday, which was a pagan one.

  After the king gave his duty to the smoke, there was a feast, which continued through the afternoon. Then, after sunset came a Mass at St. Belor, and everyone must go to church and sit there for two or three hours, heavy with food and drinking, longing to sleep. Between the banquet and the service, the prudent stole away to rest, or to indulge other desires.

  Coira’s nurse had slipped off to a meeting with some lower steward. She had been tipsy, or might not have risked it. Kaya and Julah she admonished. They must stay put and care for the child. But Kaya had her own lover, a boy of twelve, a blacksmith’s apprentice. And Julah, peeved to have nobody to abscond with, pretended she had, and also flounced away.

  Coira had dozed, then made believe she did. She heard them all go.

  When the doors were shut, Coira got up. She had been undressed to her shift for sleep. She herself now accurately donned her white dress and combed her hair.

  She went out barefoot on the cool stone floors of the new palace, the colder tiles of the old. The way to the small garden remained in Coira’s mind like a map drawn in fadeless lines. In the corridors she passed few persons. Most of the place was locked away with its secrets, or asleep, or else still junketing in the hall. The occasional scurrying servant or wandering lover paid no attention to a small child in white. She was neither often seen or known.

  She found the garden, which was vacant, muffled in late afternoon sun. From the garden a strange old colonnade ran along under the wall of the elder palace. Coira went that way quietly, once or twice touching the glossy leaves of bay trees in pots. She had at this point a curious sensation, the child, as if she were walking down deep underground, which must have been caused by the shade of the high walls.

  There were two doors of heavy wood, braced in bronze and with gilded shapes on them of fruit trees. They had a pair of round handles, like golden oranges, but these were too high up for the child to reach.

  Was this the queen’s door? Surely it was.

  Coira raised her hand to knock or scratch, then hesitated. It was not, even now, doubt. The child felt her mortal smallness, and thought she would not be heard. She had been frequently ignored.

  “Now, my pretty,” said a voice, unknown yet familiar, “all alone? Have they let you get out?”

  Coira turned. In a core of darkness under a single pillar, a woman seeming just as old, stood pale, slender and curved like a gibbous moon.

  The child looked at her. She said nothing. Through all her peculiar childhood, she had learned this one useful trick.

  But the old woman appeared amused. She was not (though she closely resembled her) the Smoke Crone. She said, “I’ve come to call on her majesty. And now here you are, to call on her, as well. You must go first. What better?” And she stepped forward and rapped sharply on the left-hand door. “No one else is there,” said the crone, gossipy. “She’s sent them out.”

  A voice called, “Yes, enter.” The queen’s voice? The child did not know.

  “Go in,” said the crone, bending even more to the child, “and you’ll see, she’ll be looking for me, up in the air over your head.” And she laughed, the crone, like a goose gaggling softly.

  But she turned one golden handle, and when the door opened, the child walked through, alone.

  As the old woman had predicted, the queen was watching above the child’s head for someone of the normal adult giant’s height. Then her eyes glided downward and struck the face of the child with two glittering bright blows.

  “Where is she?” said the queen. Always they were asking, this mother and daughter, these elusive enigmatic questions about or of each other.

  “She said I should come in first.”

  “Were you with her? Are you hers?” asked the queen, apparently surprised.

  “No. She was there, by the door.”

  “What do you want?”

  The witch-queen seemed distracted. She turned away. She had, as always, no attention to spare.

  Coira swallowed, her heart drumming and her eyes too large. Now she must make the goddess see her at last. Plainly it had not happened as yet.

  “I am Coira,” announced the child bravely.

  “Yes?” said the queen, her back to the girl, not hearing her, or only partly. Not knowing the name, perhaps. (They had called her baby Candacis.)

  The queen wore the gown she had had on earlier, ivory and gold, but the headdress and veil had been removed from her high-coiled, flawless hair. She paced across the wide room, as Coira had seen her do so many times, pacing across distance and windows. Then she reached what Coira took to be another window. It had an open metal shutter, like a door, but it gave on another room, identical even to the gilded water clock dripping in a corner. And next Coira became aware the queen had materialized in the other room, also, while still remaining in this one. There were two of her. She stood there, facing herself, both ways.

  Coira was amazed but enchanted. This was true magic. It was miraculous.

  And stealing forward, gazing only upward now to the adult height, as the queen herself had done, Coira missed her own reflection as it entered the scope of the sorcerous mirror. She saw only the witch-queen facing the witch-queen, her wonder doubled.

  The child was now too moved even to need to be brave. “You’re so beautiful—more beautiful—the most beautiful in all the whole world.”

  The fierce cry penetrated the heart of Arpazia, which today had begun to thaw and crack in pieces. She glanced over her shoulder and down in astonishment, at the little creature, like a dwarf, on her floor.

  “Am I?”

  “Yes—so beautiful. More beautiful than anyone. Like the goddess.”

  “Hush,” said Arpazia, as she had in the past, but not to this child. Yet Arpazia looked back into the glass. She saw her beauty as if for the only time in her life. Her eyes darkened. “Yes. I am.”

  And “Yes,” answered the queen in the mirror, “you are.”

  But then she felt something rest against her leg, as a tall dog might do. It was this girl-child again, leaning on her, staring up.

  Whose was she? Oh, she’s mine. Oh. His.

  “Where is your nurse?” said the queen. Her face became an egg’s shell. The shell peered at Coira.

  Coira knew better than to say where the nurse was. She did not want to discuss the nurse. She wanted her mother to take her hand. Coira reached up and instead took hold of the tips of the queen’s jeweled fingers.

  “Let go of me,”
said the queen, not loudly, not even cruelly. “Why are you here and not with your nurse? You must go away at once. You said an old woman was outside. Send her in to me.”

  Coira’s heart also cracked.

  It was not to let love in but to let it out, like venom from the bite of a snake.

  When Arpazia looked round again, the dwarvish child had vanished and the crone replaced her in the space of the room.

  But the crone, too, was the wrong crone.

  The queen tapped her foot.

  The crone said, knowing the queen’s mind, still amused, “She’s the guardian of the Oracle, she mustn’t leave her spot on the terrace. I’m her kin. She sent me.”

  Arpazia said, “I hear from my servants she—you, too, then—are a sort of law in the town. They are your people, not the king’s.”

  “Ah, lady,” said the crone slyly. She denied nothing.

  “Your people, then,” said Arpazia, “are too bold. You must reprimand them. I’ve heard talk here of your dancing in the woods. Godless pagans. You make the pious priests angry.” Then Arpazia grinned, saw herself do it in the mirror. But perhaps only the queen in the mirror grinned.

  This second crone said, “Will you like to come and dance with us, Queen?”

  Years ago … those years came back to the queen, and the engorged face of Draco. She said, “That is a lewd term, to dance.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “One of your young men was insolent to me, at the ceremony this morning. He offended me, and I asked my women, ‘Who is that man, daring to make faces at me?’ They said he was one of your people, you pagans the priests may one day burn for your godlessness.”

  “Oh, we’re godly,” said the old woman.

  The queen asked, almost shrilly, “Who is that man? Tell me his name. The king—” She faltered, for now she had mentioned the king twice and he was nothing to her, nothing but insane, bad things. Her white cheeks were flushed a moment. (The little girl had flushed in just that way, walking into this chamber, although she had been dull white as a headstone, walking out.) “Who is that young man?”