by Tanith Lee
Arpazia was reminded of her elderly nurse in the castle. Irritated. dismayed. Arpazia said, “I’m with child. I won’t bear this unlawful thing.” She added—words which had no meaning at all in her mouth, less meaning than the word child—“It’s not the king’s.”
“Not Draco’s, no, not his.”
Arpazia said, “Assist me to be rid of it.”
The Smoke Crone ran her finger fondly over the lizard. She said, “If I do—for I can, of course—if I help you slay your child, what service in return?”
“What do you want?”
“Let me think.”
Arpazia waited. The sun moved along the terrace, as it had in the grassy alley by the inn, five or six months before.
The Smoke Crone said, “I will give you a mixture of herbs, boar’s-tongue that speaks and grows from a boar’s dribblings. Other stuff.”
“Will it hurt?” asked Arpazia. “Will it be quick?”
“You’ll feel no more than with your usual courses. The life is smaller than a grain of sand. It has no soul in it yet, even though a soul comes to watch it through the window of your belly. I must give you heart-leaf, too, to send the soul away, or it may haunt you, after.”
The old fool, thought Arpazia. Mumbling, muttering. She trembled.
Haughtily she said, “I am grateful to you.”
“I’ve no need of it. This is what I’ll have. In seven days, take your other child into the wood.”
“Which other child?”
“Your daughter, the king’s get, the one they call Candacis.”
“What do you mean?”
“How long since you were in the wood at Full Moon?”
“They kill things, your pagan people, on their altar. Hares, a lamb—I don’t like to see it.”
The Crone laughed, a dirty coarse noise.
“Do you not, fastidious Arpazia? You were queen to Orion, but you don’t like the duties of the queen, only the pleasures the queen may have. Well. Draco is that way, too. He eats the land but gives nothing back. Such a shepherd wouldn’t die for his flock, even in battle. But that is the king’s duty, and the queen’s too. What can I tell you that you’ll hear? Are you a witch? They thought so. Take your daughter at the next Full Moon, into the wood. She is a snow-child, and a fire-child, and an earth-child, but you go up through air. She was conceived as you were, under the trees. In seven days it is the first Great Orb of winter, a Scorpion Moon.”
“Give me the herbal draught.”
“How eager you are to drink poison.”
Arpazia stood, staring away, tapping her foot.
The old woman said, “Klymeno will give you the drink, when you meet him on that night, in the wood.”
“No.
“No? Why do you dislike that?”
“His—it’s his—this in me.”
“Yes. You mean to kill his child. Give him the other one, then, in exchange. The little snow girl.”
Arpazia’s eyes sprang back, she was all attention. How exquisite, how youthful, how mad she looked, her long neck curving like a snake’s.
“Why?”
“A ritual. A symbol,” said the Smoke Crone. “That’s all. She’ll be made his daughter, she’s too young to be his queen. It has no worldly purpose. But it will please the gods.”
“I am Christian.”
The Smoke Crone put the lizard down on the warm stones, and got up. She walked past the queen as if the queen were not there, and Arpazia felt that she had ceased to be there. The old woman bent over the smoke-hole of the god and goddess who were under the terrace, under the palace and the world. She seemed to be gazing down at someone she knew well, respected, yet had no fear of.
Arpazia gathered her cloak of fur around her and hastened away, but not to her lover. in his hut among the trees. She went to her overgrown garden in the palace, and sat there on the marble bench. and bit her fingers till they bled.
There was often some sort of pandemonium going on in Coira’s room. Her nurse would be scolding or giving orders, and the two maids quarreling or mocking her, or pretending to obedience. Out of this evening’s muffled din, words emerged. “Coira! Come here at once. You’re to go to her, in her apartment.”
To whom?
Julah supplied an answer. “She’ll like that. To be noticed by the queen.”
Coira’s spirit stood up under the blows of their preparations—the wet sponge, the clean dress hauled on, the comb wrenched through her hair, and a necklace of gold-washed shells, the king’s long-ago gift, put round her throat as coarsely as a noose.
The light slanted. It was intense and oddly promising.
Despite herself, Coira had quickened. But, now, she was also apprehensive. The dark queen did not like her, was not her mother. Or could it be that the queen had softened, come to be interested in this child who was not her own?
Her nurse, ridiculously self-important, bustled Coira through the corridors, where translucent shadows stole out at this hour like animals from the walls.
At the doors with handles of metallic fruit, one of the queen’s own women shooed the nurse away, and took Coira in herself, holding the child’s hand with dry indifference.
“Here, madam. Your daughter.”
Coira waited in a pool of light at the chamber’s edge.
The attendant had gone. No one else was there, but for the figure which stood, back turned, outlined before a smooth silver eye. (The lid of the closed mirror.)
Coira knew the slender obdurate back of the witch-queen. Yet, this woman was not the same. Loose black hair rivered over the russet gown. Then she turned about. Her face appeared. And the face of the witch-queen too had altered its shape, as the moon did. Though beautiful, it had become the face of a bird of prey.
Coira shrank, but there was only the wall, and as the light slid from the window and the mirror’s lid, it stayed still about her, showing her up.
“What is it they call you? Not Candacis—some pagan name.”
“Coira … madam.” Another lesson the child had learned: her unmother’s title.
“You’re to come with me. You’re the king’s daughter and some of your people want to see you. Do you understand?”
“Yes … madam.”
“Behave properly. Ask me nothing. Don’t talk at all, or I shall be angry.” Arpazia spoke without emphasis. She needed to employ none. Coira was already overmastered by total horror.
Not even an unmother. A fiend.
The fiend’s eyes gleamed pale. Narrow fingers with three rings emerged from the crow-wing of hair and sleeve. “Take my hand.”
Coira did as she was told.
In the past, sometimes, she had been allowed to ceremonially touch this hand. Now it did not feel as it had before. It was hot, bony and hard, like the talons of the dreadful bird the woman now resembled.
The queen snatched her mantle round her. Dragging the mantle, the child, she stalked over the room, and Coira had to run to keep up.
The shadows were drawing in now in packs. A guard leaned on a pillar, inclining his head, glance following them only a short way.
As they crossed the queen’s garden, the land grew dark. The sea, also a shining shadow, had parted from a sky like a fading brassy shield.
The queen opened a door.
Coira stumbled on the uneven, treacherous stair below, and the Woman, her stepmother, tugged her on, twisting the child’s arm in its socket. But Coira had learned silence, and did not cry out.
So they went down and down together into darkness, leaving the sky behind.
On the meadow, the shadows rose up and became girls. Unspeaking. they wandered behind Arpazia and the child, up the hillside and into the woods.
Coira had been run out, but the queen no longer walked so swiftly. Stumbling frequently, Coira just managed to keep up; once, when she half fell, the Woman adjusted her, as before, simply by straining on the child’s arm.
The sky was now somber but still lucid against the darkness of the earth. T
he moon had risen early and the child stared at it, for never had she seemed to see it so round or so adamantine. In color it looked not white, more blue, but a deadly blue. like cut slate.
Then, when they entered the blackness of the woods, filtered only with thin glints of sky, Coira felt the night-trepidation common to ancient peoples, the deep tingling terror that was less fear than instinctive knowledge and awe of elder forces. These woods were full of this, alive with this, such power—but the witch seemed not to recognize it. Or if she did, it was familiar to her, and she gave no sign.
An owl called through the trees. The hair rose on Coira’s scalp, and behind her a rippling whisper moved through the young women who followed them.
Much of the wood still had its leaves, though many were withered. Now and then some fell, with an eerie effect, like bats or great beetles tumbling softly through the dimness, brushing the head or wrist.
When they went by the waterfall, however, the trees there were quite bare, but for one crippled pine. The water glittered starkly in moonlight. It seemed to the child that something looked out with glittering eyes from a cave above.
Ahead, red light began to burn.
The moon was already gone from the lawned avenue under the trees. But tonight they had lit fires there, each in a circle of stones. As the witch-queen walked, holding her child by the hand, they must wend around each fire. A crowd was standing among the trees, to either side. It reminded Coira a little of a procession to Mass, or to the Oracle on the terrace. A vague chanting rose like the fire smoke. The witch-queen took no notice of it.
Arpazia walked the length of the avenue, and suddenly a being came out from between the dark and the light.
Despite herself, Coira uttered a little noise.
“Quiet,” said the witch-queen.
Coira thought the figure was not human. Then she saw that it was a man. He was clad in a belted robe of deep red, and his head was crowned, as she had seen the head of her father. But this diadem was of tangled things, branches, thorns—and because of the thorns, Coira was reminded of pictures she had been shown of the Christ. And, as the Christ before his suffering, this man was handsome.
Arpazia stopped still. Her bird’s face was lifted harshly, her lips drawn thin.
The young man in the wild thorn crown looked once at her, then he knelt down by the child.
“Don’t be afraid.”
He reached forward and firmly undid the fettered knot of their hands, Arpazia’s and her child’s. Coira’s hand, extricated, was bloodless and marked with the edges of rings. The young man rubbed her hand gently in both of his. “There’s nothing to harm you,” he said again. “You are the Maiden.”
Coira regarded him. She adored him at once for his looks and his attentive gentleness to her. But she had been well taught what love was worth. She retained her silence.
Her mother-stepmother spoke, rasping and low over their heads.
“Well, I’ve brought the girl, as that woman told me. Now do you have something for me? A drink of herbs, she said.”
“Not yet.”
“When? Are you angry with me?”
Coira heard the breaking change, the abrupt note of anxiety in the witch queen’s voice.
The man rose. High into the sky above Coira he stood, facing her stepmother. “Nothing can die, kill it as you will.”
“I couldn’t come to you—that was my only fear—I didn’t know what I should do—how can you understand—it’s you I want—” Hushed, rushed now, the new frightened childish voice of the queen. “Not—not a child—such pain—never—and if Draco learned—no—no—”
“It is your right,” he said. “So, you give your child back to the wood.” This was all he said. The voice conveyed little, to one who had not heard him speak before in love.
Flame-lit, more than a man, he moved ahead of them, toward the altar in the trees. Only then did Coira see the axe slung in the folds of his robe.
From inside its lid, the mirror watched. But the moon, lying down in the black sack of the wood, had closed her stony eye. Or seemed to.
The mirror saw the Hunter King invoke the night, and the spirits of the dead who were, that night, there to dance with them. He did not dance, but sat on his boulder-throne. The witch-queen sat on hers, beside him, as on other nights she had done. But the child sat between them on the turf, and sometimes the king smoothed her hair, and once, when the child turned up her face to gaze at him, for her he had a smile. No one, ever, had looked at her in this way. It had been exactly the same for Arpazia. Human, they recognized, mother and daughter both, true tenderness, goodness, even if it came too late and could not be let in.
Tears ran down the witch-queen’s face—or was this an illusion of the shifting fires? She had ceased to resemble a bird, but she appeared old, in the sidelong light of the dancers’ torches.
Nevertheless, when he handed her the black cup, she took it, drained it, and cast it angrily down in the grass. After that, the queen did not look at the Hunter King, nor he at her.
She said, very quietly, some while later, “Are you done with me only for this?”
The mirror saw that he answered, “Of course, only for that.”
She whispered then. “You are unjust. So, I was nothing to you. I might denounce you and have you killed.”
Her whisper-words hung in the air, and went out, leaving only some burn marks.
But this was a night of death, of the dead. And soon, through the flame-smoke dark, the King of Death was seen riding his chariot along the aisles of the woods. Perhaps not seen with the eyes, but with the mind—for the dancers described him in their chant, and the Orion King stood and saluted him, and certainly (oh yes) the mirror saw him. King Death wore the blackest mail, heavily jeweled, his black hair coiling under the helm which masked his face, that none could make it out. His chariot was bleached as bone, and the midnight horses blew fire from their nostrils—emerald fire, like elf-lights from a swamp.
Arpazia did not see King Death. She had turned her head, as usual. But she felt the deathly drink she had taken go seeking through her belly, finding a way into the seed in her womb. It was a frightful sensation, yet she was glad of it.
The mirror saw how the Hunter King presently led Arpazia’s child to the slab of altar. He lifted her up there, and the crowd sang a whining plaint, as if she were to die. But the little girl seemed half asleep now, not taking much in. And the Hunter King only circled the axe over her head three times, to show the King of Death (who was called Hadz) that she was selected for him, betrothed to him, a living sacrifice. But this was also true of all things that lived. She was not scapegoat, but emblem.
Then the King of Death drove his chariot away, and the Hunter King picked up the child and carried her to a mound of moss and grass, where he set her down. She was fast asleep now. It was likely she had not known anything of what went on.
Soon after, both the mirror and the witch-queen saw how a young boar came stepping through the wood, heading straight through the crowd to the altar. It was glossy black, Death’s animal, its tusks clean, white as milk, and the inside of its mouth a fresh red. It was evidently bewitched, and knew its hour had come. Calmly it let the women garland it with berries. The Hunter King brought it a bowl to drink from, and it bowed to him and to the god, and drank. It made no protest, showed no distress, as he clove its skull with one blow of the axe.
Arpazia knew what they would do. That they would eviscerate and portion up the dead boar, Orion the most skilfully, because of his trade. They would mix pieces of its organs with ale or wine, and eat and drink from this mess to gain vitality, and to honor the coming of winter, which was the year’s night. She had seen two other sacrifices through the summer. She had not liked them, though she would eat meat in the palace without a qualm.
Now the Hunter King brought her nothing. So Arpazia got up and went among his people. She took two tiny slivers from the bowl, which tonight held the sliced lungs and liver of the healthy boar.
She ate them boldly. (But later in her chamber her body would throw them back up. The Smoke Crone had lied, or been wrong. The herbs of abortion were not so mild as she had specified.)
Another woman carried the queen’s daughter home in the hours before dawn. She was a woman of Draco’s camp, who had her place now in the palace at Belgra. She put the little girl down in the passage which led to her own room. “Wake up, puss. That way’s your bed.”
“Where is—?” The child peered round her, lost in familiar things she no longer recalled, “—the King—” she finished.
The woman, who knew which king the child meant, shook her head and put her finger across her lips. “You mustn’t speak of him.”
Then the door of Coira’s apartment was flung wide, and the nurse was there, holding up a lighted candle. “What time is this to send her back? Couldn’t she have kept her till morning?” Where the light fell, hard as steel, Coira rubbed her eyes and blinked. But the other woman was gone. Her un-mother was gone, the crowned king too, and all the magic of the wood. And Coira was, as always, unwelcome.
BOOK TWO
Jam Alba Quam Nix Shining White as Snow
The Poison Tree
I.
THAT WINTER, JUST BEFORE MID-WINTER-Mass, Queen Arpazia went out in her former way of the summer, to look for her lover. Draco had sent messengers: he would visit Belgra Demitu for the Mass. There was the usual uproar of preparation, which gushed round Arpazia like a swarm of ghosts. She walked from the palace on a glassy morning, when the keen wind brought the smell of snow from the mountains.
Dressed in her furs and jewels, she expected, as formerly, no one would challenge her. It shocked her therefore when they did. First guards in the palace, on the terrace walks. Then, as she crossed some open ground, a laborer gaping, and in the town itself the people scattering away from her, and soon she heard the sniggering of men. For sure they knew her, but now showed her no regard. They thought her a freak, and funny.