White As Snow (Fairy Tale)

by Tanith Lee

  A star leapt in her belly.

  “Yes, Lady, they say you’re fierce. That’s good. Like a lioness of the goddess. But all I want is to make you my queen here, for tonight.”

  “Are you a king, then?”

  “One king. There are other kings.”

  “Draco,” she said.

  “Oh, not Draco,” said the stag’s mask, coolly.

  He drew the glove of fur and claws off from his left hand. She saw then the hand she remembered, and as he moved, the skins, parting, nearly down to his middle.

  He was hard and spare, muscled from his work, whatever that work was. The finest rivulet of hair described the center of his chest, down to where the cord of woven grass tied in the skins at his waist.

  “I’m the Hunter King,” said the mask of the stag. “Those other kings gave and allow me that. The Kings of the Air and the Wood. And the King of the Lands Below. Do you see what I mean? They’re gods.”

  “And you?” she said.

  “A man. And you, a woman. But tonight, my queen.”

  He took her hand straight up, in his bared hand, and at the touch of his flesh, his fingers wrapping her own, she could have sunk into the grass, for she had turned from stone to molten honey.

  When they walked back along the avenue, the moon was gone from it, and only shades pressed in on them, people and trees. But someone brushed off the hood of her cloak, and next her hair was loose and heavy about her, moving as if separately alive, and then a garland was on her hair, with the scent of myrtle and poppies.

  She thought, You stupid bitch, do you know what you’re at? Don’t you ever learn?

  But the hating inner voice was drummed away by the beating of her heart. And they were playing their music too, hollow reeds, shaken bells.

  At the avenue’s end, cobalt-black, a glade was shielded from the moon by massive oak trees. A primeval place it seemed to her. And on the corded trunks she saw the white gorings, the gouges of generations of boar tusks.

  They were igniting a hundred little clay lamps. The smallest reddest flames perched on them, forming a crimson mist.

  The altar they approached in the glade was ancient as the slab in the temple of Belgra Demitu.

  Someone else had taken away her cloak. But she was accustomed to all these servantly dressings and undressings. And her hand was fast in his.

  The King and Queen of the Wood were seated on two mossy boulders.

  Earthernware cups were brought them. The drink was ale with a malty syrup mixed in, sprinkled by wild mint.

  Arpazia saw her feet were bare.

  But really she could feel only his nearness and the pressure of his hand, and all the several callouses on it, which fascinated her. And she wanted him to speak to her. His voice was like the sounds of the wood, and like music, but also the voice of a man.

  Do you like men so much? jabbed the inner voice. You know what they do in the forest and the bed.

  When she thought this, her womb spasmed inside her, twisting, like the strings on a harp.

  Is this what women felt? But she knew better than to feel it.

  In the dim crimson light, these people were dancing, as they might in the formal dances of the court.

  Arpazia said, very low, “Do you think you can possess me?”

  “Only if you allow it.”

  “I won’t.”

  All she could see was the face of the stag, the rending horns.

  She thought of Rage, the unicorn, and Lust the stinging scorpion. She thought of Sloth, who had the paws and claws of a bear. But the Hunter King was not slothful. He was lambent with strength.

  He had not answered.

  She said, “It’s unlawful for me to be here. The king—”

  “Draco heeded the Oracle. He’s taken his soldiers, his own people, and left only those who mean little to him. And some of those are here. And one of those is yourself, Lady.”

  Arpazia thought of Pride, a lion with a peacock’s tail. Of Envy the snake and Covetousness the fox and Gluttony the boar.

  Proud panther-lion, was he gluttonous in his boar’s skin? Would he devour her?

  He had turned his head, and his hand twitched on hers. She fell down through the chair of rock, into the wet black depths of the wood, and there she felt his weight on her, hot as the sun by night.

  Arpazia tried to get up. But her legs had become very weak.

  “Drink the ale-cup, Persapheh.”

  “Why do you call me that—?” she stammered childishly.

  “That is your name, when you’re queen in the wood.”

  “No. That isn’t my name.”

  “In the wood it is.”

  It was the name of the goddess known at Belgra Demitu, who was three-in-one: Coira when a maiden, Demetra when a mother, Persapheh when, robed in hoar-frost and winter snow, she went below and became Queen Death. But Arpazia, who had heard the myth, did not recall.

  She tried to pull away her hand.

  But instead she found she had drunk some more of the drink, and now he stood and drew her with him, and they were in the dance, beside the prehistoric altar.

  Black stains marked it, as tusk-tears marked the oaks. Things had been sacrificed on it. And so they were still, for now she saw thin little bones like slivers of new quartz, lying in the grass.

  “There’s no killing tonight,” he said.

  And then he led her away around the altar and through the ebony trees and into the black between them, where the moon surely had never found her way, not once in a hundred years, but the moon besides was gone.

  “I won’t go any farther.”

  He stopped.

  “Why,” she said, “have you brought me here?”

  “Why have you come with me?”

  “I’ll give you nothing.”

  “I’ll give you everything.”

  Then he let her go and she almost dropped to the ground. She caught hold of a tree and the tree supported her. She watched him as he drew off the head of the stag.

  He came out laughing again, shaking back his brown lion’s hair. His eyes seemed all dark, like a cat’s by night, and they lighted once, as a cat’s would. And then he stripped away before her (as once the rapist had stripped her) his garments of skin. He stood there in the faint nocturnal glim, by which, now, she seemed to see as clearly as if at noon, naked from head to foot.

  He was like a column of marble, smooth and satin-slippery, yet warm, and at the center of him the warmth became another black wood, and then a great stem of flame, dark and perilous, upright as any castle tower.

  “I’ll kill you,” she said.

  But in reply he only shook his head, and putting his own bare hand upon the rod, with such grace and delicacy, he stroked it once, and twice, and three times, as a musician might an instrument of music, his eyes half closing at the pleasure, the melody it gave back.

  Arpazia put her face into her hands. She slipped down the tree and lay in the feral grass.

  He lay down beside her. He leaned across her and, lifting away her hands, he kissed her forehead, her fluttering eyelids. He kissed her mouth.

  Then she gripped him, as she had caught hold of the tree, yet still she fell away and away. They spun together, they might have been flying, and only he could save her from the fall and from the ground.

  His mouth was on her breasts, his hands stroked, making the music in her, as he had made it in himself.

  “Don’t do this,” she said. “I forbid it.”

  “No,” he said. “But perhaps …”

  And it was his mouth she felt upon the dark within her thighs, and the tongue tip, also like a flame, but the agile firefly flames on the red lamps, flickering and sipping.

  Arpazia lay on her back and saw the sky and stars between the arms of the wood which held them all up.

  What was she looking for? An angel—

  The angel had been cast out of Heaven, and was here.

  The long flame rippled on and on, and she danced to its musi
c, on her back. Then his eyes crested her body, looking at her as the moon had looked, as a beast would look, raising its pitiless and beautiful head from the thing it fed on.

  “Sweet as apples,” he said to her, but then he sank again and his hair furled over her belly and a burning wheel rushed through her womb, her spine, so she clutched the earth and danced on, kicking her heels. Presently her own high single cry burst from her, and it, too, flew away, without her, into the night.

  III.

  ARPAZIA WAS OBSESSED. BY him, after this act together in the dark night wood. Also obsessed by the act itself. She recreated the act, in her mind, even in sleep—and the throes of culmination overcame her. Awake, she touched herself with her fingertips, quick, light, almost as he had done. She thought of his body and his eyes gazing so savagely at her, so mercilessly, forcing her into the oblivion of joy.

  How many days and nights passed? Three or four. Not a great many. This was, in some sort, her third trance. But the object of her state, now, was not herself.

  She knew his name. Not the pagan night-name she was given for the wood. Near morning the old woman had guided her back again to the palace, or, at any rate, one old woman. They all of them looked alike to Arpazia, as, really, every woman had looked alike, and every man, until now.

  “Tell me his name,” Arpazia had hissed, on the meadow below the palace. Subterfuge was done with. The sky was pale-sick with dawn.

  The crone did not prevaricate, for a wonder.

  “As a man, he’s called Klymeno.”

  This, too, was the name of a god, but Arpazia did not realize, though she had heard it somewhere, once or twice, in this country by the sea.

  “What is he?”

  “By trade, do you mean? What do you think?”

  Arpazia could not think. Part of her, despite her questions, knew he was a being of otherness, and did not exist outside his own world.

  “I asked you, and you will answer.”

  “Will I? Oh, you’re queen again, are you?”

  “I am the queen, yes.”

  The crone said, “He hunts, that’s how he makes his living. He kills things in the woods and lugs the dead carcasses to the town.”

  Arpazia visualized him, thick with blood. Even this enticed her. That morning in her bed, she dreamed he hunted her, and he was naked as he had been in the darkness. His spear brought her down and pinned her to the earth. He ate her alive, tearing off chunks of her flesh as she choked with unbearable fear and ecstasy.

  This dream was repeated.

  He had not been gentle. What he had perpetrated on her, woken her up to, was more ferocious than any rape.

  Arpazia the queen possessed no agenda of the pagan doings of the town and palace. Because of that, she was at a loss. What would happen next? Besides, she could not wait. She had soon used her memory up.

  What he had done to her he had only done two times. Then he had kissed her, got up, and left her there. Afterward she did not know if he had taken his own pleasure separately, gaining it voyeuristically from observing hers. He vanished like a phantom through the trees, as did every one of them, these Woods People, but for the escorting crone.

  Arpazia found now she needed to know if he too had been pleasured. She had not seen it, and wanted to add this missing ingredient to her dreams.

  Or had he been ultimately indifferent to her—unmoved to any pleasure?

  How would he be, and look, suffering the pangs she had undergone? Here an image of grunting Draco intervened—she shook it off. This act had no bearing on the acts of Klymeno, performed with her.

  Or, had he been indifferent, unaroused?

  So the ideas superceded each other.

  Somewhere during this time, one of the queen’s women entered her apartments, and brought in another woman that the queen did not remember.

  “She’s the child’s nurse, madam.”

  Which child? Arpazia stared, blankly.

  The nurse of the Princess Candacis curtseyed, groveling.

  “Excuse my presence, Lady. I thought you should know. I should ask.”

  Know and ask what? What did any of this have to do with the queen?

  “What is it?” said Arpazia.

  The nurse stumbled on her words, guilty and unsure. “She’s in a fever, Lady. It doesn’t break—you know, well, all mothers know—that is—children take these things—but she doesn’t get well. That day of the feast—I had to go off—only an hour, I assure you, my sister was poorly—and those girls are useless—”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Will I get the physician, madam?”

  Arpazia turned away. She was like her mirror now, which stood closed in a corner. The queen had closed herself.

  “If you want.”

  “Thank you, Lady—yes, Lady. Oh, thank you.”

  Outside again, seething with humiliation, the nurse ranted to herself, “Unnatural mad bitch. She cares nothing for her own child—all left to me—whether it lives or dies.”

  That was true enough.

  Arpazia had already forgotten. But the entry of others—the nurse—had alerted her to the possibility of sending once more for the crone.

  Presently one of the attendants appeared again.

  “They can’t find the old woman, madam.”

  In a way, Arpazia seemed to have stepped out of a high window; she balanced now on the air, and might at any second crash to the ground far below. So she used no ruse. Anyone could see, she had moved beyond the limit of safe conduct. Yet she was aware of the live currents of secrets here, into which she had barely been admitted. This atmosphere she slightly heeded, and was just a little careful.

  But with Draco gone, all the palace grew lax, and did much as it wanted. Guards dozed and diced at their posts, or abandoned them. Maids ran off to gossip. Palace washerwomen left baskets of damp clothes unheeded in the yards and passageways. It was already very warm, bees heavy in the tall, untended bushes of blue lavender, the unpruned tamarisks scratching at the walls, lizards indoors and sunning themselves in the rays from windows.

  Arpazia said she would sleep. Her women were used to that. And they were always glad when she sent them away, as so often she did.

  The queen wiped the cosmetics from her face, let down her hair. She pulled off her royal gown and put on the dress of one of her attendants, indifferent to its scents of skin and perfume not her own. Arpazia covered herself with a plain cloak. Unable to remove her rings, she wound a bit of cloth around them, like a bandage.

  Turning then, she glanced into her just-opened mirror.

  She giggled like a girl. She looked extremely young.

  Who would know her, now she was disguised?

  This was exhilarating, to steal out and be at large, unguarded, unattended, and unwatched. (If, inwardly, she guessed that many knew her, saw her, she paid no heed. She and they were all caught in the same pretense together.)

  The town interested Arpazia fractionally. It was most bizarre, this agglomeration of people, like a swarm, all buzzing busily about each other, making sounds, gesticulating. Poverty and meanness, where she noted them, seemed exotic. The occasional elegance affected her similarly. But she was not very attentive.

  Did the hunter Klymeno reside in the town? The jumble of houses and hovels, the square with its booths and animals in pens, were not suitable habitats. There were chapels, but no church, since the great Church of St. Belor stood on the palace terraces. But there were many inns. She avoided their vicinity prudently, although once a man came careering at her from an inn doorway. Her eyes, under her hood, shot such a white look at him, he let her go and only called a foul name after her.

  Later on she paused by the shrine of a saint in a side street, a broad, unpaved alley. A tree had been allowed to grow here, and there was a well. Two women sat against it, their bucket and pitchers set by.

  “Where is Klymeno’s house?” asked the queen.

  It was the queen; she sounded royal suddenly, and ill-mannered.
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  One woman chuckled.

  The other said, “Well, high-nose, if it’s the hunter you want, he keeps no place in the town.”

  Instantly, despair. Her stricken face, just visible in the cloak, amused the amused woman further. The other seemed to think better of her rebuff. “You might find him at the inn. He may drink there, when he brings the meat.”

  “That venison goes up to the king’s house.” added the other.

  They were quiet, looking at the queen differently.

  “Which inn?” asked Arpazia. Her voice was almost frightened now.

  “The inn called Stag, where else?”

  Crippled by her lack of knowledge and education—no one had ever taught Arpazia good manners, charm, or discretion, only fear, arrogance, and paucity—she said, as if stunned, “One of you must show me the way.”

  “Must we?”

  They did not move.

  The unamused one said, “Better you find it yourself, Lady.”

  Arpazia went away.

  In another street, soon after, now no longer adventurous, only desperate and uncertain, she could not bring herself to ask directions of the grubby children, the hurrying priest. Then a journeyman came past, tools in a bag on his shoulder. “What do you seek, woman?”

  “The inn,” she said. “I must find the inn called Stag.”

  “I’m for there,” he said. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

  Had she noticed him among the trees of the wood, when the full moon hammered on the earth? Perhaps not. But he guided her through the alleys, over the square again, and along a grassy run between bulging walls, to a doorway. There was no sign but for a branch of antlers. Seeing it, her heart struck her so violently she almost dropped down.

  “Who is it you want here?” asked the journeyman.

  “He is called—Klymeno.”

  “The hunter? Yes, I know him. Stay here. I’ll see if he’s to be found.”

  So the queen stood at the door of the inn like a drab, waiting for her man, or for custom. Yet no one approached her now to jeer or scare.

  She began to cry, surprising herself. Unloved, uncared for, she had never been a protected child suddenly deserted in the adult world. So she did not know why she was crying, or for what comfort.