White As Snow (Fairy Tale)

by Tanith Lee

  “I’ll tell you a name we give him, lady. We call him Orion.”

  Arpazia barked—a crazy laughter—somehow she had heard the name.

  “A star!”

  “A hunting star, lady.”

  “The king”—oh, again—“he shall hear how your Orion leered at me—” But the queen was blushing. Years fell from her with the clatter of shed armor. She stood in her expensive lovely gown, naked before the old woman, and hid her young face in her hand.

  The old woman bowed her head at this nice outcome. They had hoped she might see him—and he was handsome, the young man who had smiled at the queen. And the hand of the old gods was on him. Those gods needed no help. They liked to play, sometimes. But for the pagan kind, in the days of the Christ, a queen’s favor was worth courting. Perhaps. Always other currents moved, changeable, deep … the gods, liking to play …

  Outside, in the corridors, and in the back of her skull, the crone heard the child she had met noiselessly crying, needles of her smashed heart raining from her eyes as she wandered about. Pain and weeping—the lot of human things.

  “Three nights from this one, at Full Moon,” said the crone, “we are going up to the wood. King Draco will be gone by then, off to his new city. And half the priests—well, lady, they kneel to the Christ one day and run with us the next. Nothing for you to fear.”

  “You presume—”

  “To invite you? Yes, yes, fair Queen. Look in your mirror. See your beauty. See your witch’s eyes. What do you say?”

  “Will he—”

  “Oh, he’ll be there. Under the trees.”

  “Then I shall avoid—”

  “A star in the dark. Hunting the deer. Apple grows to be bitten, lady.”

  Arpazia’s blood, red as apples, melted to fire.

  When she again looked up she was alone, and the evening was closing through amber to ash. A worrisome bell clanged. St. Belor was calling sinners to their unwanted Mass.

  The sultry church, dim with incense and drunken breath. The king’s head sometimes nodded, but soon he had himself in check. He feared God, and God was in this house.

  Above the aisle, rising from a moonblast of candles, the frightening figure of the Christ, thin as a bone and bleached as one, hammered with gory rubies to his golden cross. The eyes harrowed down, agonized—yet watchful. I have suffered this for you, said these awful eyes, so some might think, what will you give me in return?

  So it seemed tonight to the queen. She had eaten and drunk very little and she was wide, wide awake.

  She saw the church of St. Belor, as if for the first time. Its frescoes and goldleaf, the Christ, the statue of the Virgin Marusa, with a silver star on her forehead and the single diamond tear set under her right eye. The saint himself, Belor, waited servantlike behind her.

  Clad in Marusa’s blue, Arpazia had been married here.

  She had since come here every seventh day, to worship.

  It had meant nothing, she was not religious, and less so now. Yet, ironically, she heard tonight what the priest was saying as he stood under the anchor of the enormous Bible.

  “Septem Peccata, Septem Peccata. Against these foul Seven, at all times you must be on guard.”

  He was pointing up beyond the altar, near the roof.

  Arpazia, like the rest, looked there. She saw the grotesque carvings, devils and monsters, such as she had once been shown in one of her father’s clever books. Had such things made her afraid then? She did not recall. Now she found them contemptible, as she had come to find her younger self. And as for the demanding Savior, there smoldered in her a sort of hatred. If ever you suffered for me, what good has it done me? Where were you and your God when he had me down in the snow—what return must I give you for that?

  The pointing priest was indicating a line of misshappen crouching figures. Arpazia stared at them a moment. They were men, but crushed small—dwarves, and with curious animal attributes. One had the paws and claws of a bear, and one a peacock’s tail and lion’s ruff; one a spiked horn sticking up from his forehead.

  “The seven mighty sins of the flesh,” cried the priest, raging at the crowded church, these persons redolent of transgression. “Septem magna peccata carnis! See, there is Anger in his wrath, Pride in his vainglory, and Lust puffed by his own disgusting hungers—”

  Candle-flickered, the stone brutes writhed and cavorted, startling the queen. A stab of fire shot through her. The blood spangled, rose to her face as it had done when the hag stood before her, the weird woman with her chat of the wood.

  Arpazia lowered her eyes. Inside her lids, she saw the face of the young man. And then, that he was naked. Only the shadows of leaves half covered him, his body gleamed like marble.

  An elderly singsong creaked in her brain, shutting out the ranting priest.

  Black is the wood, black as the night,

  Hidden the roses red and white …

  And then Arpazia heard a girl’s voice, perhaps Lilca’s, whisper, “I couldn’t make him stop, I loved it so, what he did to me—”

  The queen’s eyes were fast shut. She shivered, but only once.

  As he raved, the priest spat foam, and here and there a woman fainted from too much wine or remorse.

  “She burns and her pillow’s soaked. That’s the fever-dews.”

  Kaya and Julah hovered meekly, as the nurse of Candacis, the king’s legal daughter, gloomed above her charge.

  “I didn’t dare leave her,” lied Kaya, glibly, “to try and find you.”

  “No, Kaya wouldn’t leave the bedside,” added Julah, squinting at Kaya to make sure her accomplicement was recognized. “But Coira didn’t know us at all, she got so sick. When we patted her, she cried out we weren’t there. She only wanted you.”

  The nurse, worn out with her own business, and the church lecture on the Septem Peccata, Pride, Anger, Lust, Envy, Covetousness, Gluttony, and Sloth—longed to lie down herself and slothfully sleep.

  “It’s nothing much. They take these fevers at her age. It’ll be gone by morning. There, there, Coira. Sip this water. No? Then you must do without.”

  The Witch-Queen: The Black Wood

  I.

  AND THE MIRROR GAZED through the night window, and met the slim white face of the three-quarters moon.

  I have passed this way before, said the moon to the mirror.

  I too, answered the mirror, began in the East.

  Already I must go on, said the moon. Farewell, until another night.

  But watching, the mirror still saw a moon, a face white as the moon, in a midnight of hair.

  “Am I beautiful?” the queen asked the mirror. Someone had taught her such a question but she had forgotten who. “The most beautiful in all King Draco’s rotten lands?”

  Yes. Look and see. Only the moon can compare, and the moon has moved out of your mirror now.

  “Will—” The queen meant to say, Will he think me beautiful? But the words would not come. Draco had found her beautiful, and so made her beauty vile. But that was then. Then she was that other stupid, wretched one, and now she was a queen, and wide awake—and still young, young as daybreak.

  Three hours after sunset on the third night, someone rapped lightly on the door of the queen’s apartment.

  Instead of calling to her maids—for she had sent them away—the queen went herself to undo the door and look out.

  No one was in the corridor. Then, they were.

  Having pushed off her earlier girl-self, the queen was brand new, nearly innocent again. So she, the witch, for a second took this manifestation for sorcery.

  But then she scathingly chided herself. (Her inner tongue, when critical, had remained as harsh for herself as her outer ways were hard on others.)

  “Are you playing a game there, old woman? Leave it off. Why are you here?”

  “Don’t you know, Queen? Aren’t you waiting for me, fair as the night, and King Draco gone since this morning, and you all alone.”

  “I should ha
ve them whip you.”

  “Oh, you should. But there is another king now. Another king tonight. Come and see, Queen.”

  They were in the colonnade. Trees sighed from the palace terraces, and it was dark, half the lamps unlit, yet the summer stars were blisters of white-gold. Arpazia drew the hood of her cloak over her head, to hide from them.

  A surprising turning. Had Arpazia never come this way before? They crossed an edge of her private garden, and it looked unknown, like a familiar scene glimpsed suddenly in a mirror. Even the sea was visible on the other side, beyond a stand of pines …

  The concealed door, which the hag unlocked, apparently without a key, reminded Arpazia of her first escape. She faltered, but then tossed the memory aside.

  Descending now a broken ancient stairway, loose small stones scattering from their feet. Between the oleanders and the olives, goats fed like blanched shadows. Out of a scabrous wall the old woman gripped in her claw a lantern.

  Then they went down into the velvet dark, under the terraces, where the tangled gardens had given themselves over to the elder gods of savage things.

  Above, behind them, the barely lit palace shone faintly as a ghost on the sequined sky. All of it seemed a ruin now—ancient, and barely substantial.

  Tall plants brushed by, and bowed to the queen. What were they? Not garden things, nor quite things of the forest …

  “Hemlock,” the old woman muttered. “White nightshade. Moly, known to the enchantress Kirsis …”

  Huge old white stones, and then a blurred milky statue which, as they turned from it, Arpazia saw held lightly in one hand, and smiling, its own raised phallus—

  “Stop,” said Arpazia. “I won’t go any further with you.”

  “Not far now, Queen.”

  Above, behind, from this fresh angle of the wild ground, the temple showed. Its pillars grew like plants themselves, petrified in darkness.

  And then they were on a walk, pebbled by great uneven round stones. Feather cypress trees, a scholar’s rack of pens, were sentinel on either side, and then both women slipped through a little gate and were on a meadow, waist high in the dry pale summer grass, and poppies inked black, under the stars.

  The land ran up into the trees there, just where a dreadful flaming face was now standing, the moon at full, a mask of beaten gold.

  The queen herself became the mirror of the moon. It shone right into her.

  I have passed this way before, said the moon to the mirror of the queen. And you?

  “Never,” murmured the queen.

  I see you climb to meet me, said the moon. I regret, by the time you have gone high enough up the hills, I shall have reached the summit of the sky.

  It was the hag, somehow privy to this uncanny conversation, who remarked, “Don’t mind it, moon. Our way lies down into the dark.”

  And exactly then the first trees were there, their limbs running deep into the earth, casting the black shade of their cannopy. This church was cool and fragrant.

  Arpazia had grown among enormous forests. She hung back once more. To enter here was to return into herself, her childhood, girlhood. Had that time been so occluded?

  “Where have you brought me?” she demanded of the hag.

  “Where have you brought yourself? Where do you think?”

  The woods were black as ebony. The roots of them hooped and humped like serpents away below ground. In the boughs, unseen presences pattered, whistled, cooed, shook their wings—but these entities were not all birds.

  Starlight had dripped through, and now the moonlight flung down blond carpets. A slender waterfall ran from the mossy mouth of a cave, dippered over rocks and dropped into an oval basin. The moon burned in the water, then the two narrow figures crossed against it.

  They had reached a natural avenue in the wood. All around, the thick screen of the trees, the sigh and soothe of the leaves. But here the wide path was like a lawn, the grass so closely cut that perhaps it had been scythed, or else sheep were brought by day to graze.

  The moon-carpet ran along the avenue, barred like the coat of an animal with shadow-stripes.

  No longer delaying, the queen would have walked on. It was the hag who stayed her now. They were still then, standing there, the lantern extinguished.

  Out between the trees presently, Arpazia saw beings evolve into the moon glow.

  At first she thought them supernatural. Then she knew that they were human, as she was, only made bizarre—as was she?—by the night and the black wood.

  Yet again, seen in the mirror of the night, despite her recognition of them, they were changed. Freed. Lawless.

  Palace girls and women from the town, even some of those who had been in Draco’s camps, mingled without a glance. Nobles with servants, with slaves also; and there, as the old woman had promised or warned, a priest from the church of the Christ, an old man, altered —made, not youthful, but without time.

  Arpazia began to notice other matters. The unbound hair, the bare feet and legs—and there, and there, the moon in little, glimmering breasts which seemed to look back at her from their nipples—

  And Arpazia experienced again, even at this allurement of her own sex, a scorching erotic thrill.

  She had never felt anything for women. Nor for men. That is, she had felt only uninterest, distaste, mockery—climaxing in horror and revulsion.

  There had been a slight sound as the crowd gathered in out of the wood. Though none of them acknowledged her, many turned and gaped a moment. These movement. little rufflings of garments, hair, rills of muted voices, insectile whispers, all these ended, and then there was silence again, only the rainy sound of the waterfall, the oceanic ebb and flow of the breeze among the boughs.

  Like the moon, something was approaching, coming toward them. And they awaited it, Arpazia too.

  She understood. Her heart raced already to meet him. For who could it be that was so anticipated—but he?

  Soon after, there was a difference at the avenue’s end. The moon had shifted further, to light that spot abruptly. Only then could you see that something stood there.

  Arpazia was struck to stone in heart-sinking disappointment. And fear. For it was not anything remotely mortal, there at the apex of the avenue.

  It was a beast. Some monster of nightmare, birthed by a demon.

  And a glad welcoming cry rose from the people in the wood. The breeze, lifting, called too. Bells tinkled, a thin piping circled, once, twice, three times, before that overlay of silence came again.

  The beast moved now, toward them, leisurely, down the avenue.

  Arpazia thought, Are you a fool still? You know you can trust no one, yet here you have let them lead you. You’re lost now in this wood. And they have summoned up this abomination. But then she thought, what did she care? Was it worse than Draco, that beast in a man’s hairy skin?

  She thought: Let it try me. Her nails and teeth were sharp, now. Look, fool, it isn’t all a beast. It has to walk like a man—

  Certainly it walked on two legs. Yet it had the head of a stag, crowned round and round with four branching antlers. And its body was a freckled panther’s, yet also partly a bear’s—and it had the shanks of a boar.

  But the bristled or hirsute skins shifted as it walked. Now one lean thigh showed an instant, the long, muscled calf of a man. And then he was nearer, quite near, and under the head of the stag, was the strong column of the young male human throat, and the massed dark hair, gilded as a carving, running out there.

  A man in a panther’s skin and the hide of a boar and the pelt of a bear, made king by a diadem of antlers—

  Still stone, Arpazia was locked now in a panic of shame and pride, anger and desire, alone among the crowd before and about him.

  For it was he. It was the one who had looked at her, woken her up. And beneath the plethora of the beasts, as in her waking dream, he was naked as the statue among the hemlock.

  II.

  SINCE, TONIGHT, SHE HAD BECOME a mirror, did she
reflect this elemental creature? Did he see himself in her surface? For now he stood not three feet from her. He was taller than she, as most men were, and both of the influencing men of her life—her father, Draco. But so unlike, this beast walking upright, to those two former men whose souls ran on all fours.

  He smelled of the skins he wore, yet also young and clean, and of the wood, its foliage and moss and sap, the secret crushed life of it.

  From inside the wooden stag’s head (like the moon, he wore a mask) she caught the dark gleam of his eyes, and it reminded her of the water she had passed, the basin under the waterfall.

  No one else was near, finally. They had drawn away. The old woman had drawn away.

  Arpazia stayed still as a stone.

  She looked up, into the mask, at his eyes. She felt the warmth of his body, mantled only in skins and shadows.

  “I know,” he said, “you are the king’s wife in the palace.” He spoke quietly, gently, and without hurry. “But here, Lady, as you’ve come here, the palace means little. Here in the wood, we’re not the selves we are back there, in the places of men. This is the place of the gods. Do you see?”

  Her lips parted to speak. She said nothing.

  He said, “Don’t be afraid. We won’t hurt you.”

  Arpazia’s eyes widened and words came from her lips. “Try. See what you get.”

  He laughed. The wooden head tossed up, just like a stag’s head, and the antlers rattled their terrible tines. But on his shoulders of panther’s skin the hair coiled, thick, shining. It was somber now, but in sunlight, as she had seen on the terraces, it had the rich color of beer. His hands, though now in the gauntlets of a bear’s paws, and clawed, were tanned. His throat was tanned, almost the shade of an olive under the moon. But at his chest the tan faded. He grew whiter, like marble.