White As Snow (Fairy Tale)

by Tanith Lee

“I don’t want the town.”

  They glanced to and fro.

  They were not of the Wood, although perhaps they lived in the woods.

  Arpazia said, “Do you know where he is?”

  “Who, Lady?”

  “The hunter.”

  “Dead, Lady. Gone to the west.”

  “He was a Woodsman,” said the other. “Pagan.”

  “There’s a grave,” said the first one, taking care now. It came to Arpazia they were hoping to be of service, so she would give them something.

  “A grave,” she said.

  “He left off the pagan rites,” said the first woman. “He was the lover of the queen, in Belgra Town. But she cast him away. Then he lost heart. He didn’t worship the old gods of the wood any more, but nor did he go over to the Christ. So he had nothing to help him. When he hunted the boar it ripped him up and he died.”

  “That was years ago,” said the other. “My ma told me. Ten years or more.”

  The first one said, “In the end his own people, those Woods People, they put a stone over his mound, to mark it. He’d been a king among them, do you see.”

  “But where is it?” Arpazia asked.

  She walked down, over the hard-packed, ice-locked snow, and took off another ring—it slid easily—and put it in the first woman’s rag-tied hand.

  “I can’t take this!” But she shut the ring in her fist.

  “Where—ten me where—”

  They told her.

  Somehow, she did find the grave, and the stone like a pillar that stood up on it.

  Nothing sounded in the woods. The trees crowded into a great forest now, uphill, downhill, closing in. Evergreens and pines brought a darkness that even the white-shining snow could not erase.

  Arpazia wandered round the grave, round the pillar. A dead bird, frozen, flawless, a dove pink on the snow, lay under the pillar. She could imagine he would have picked it up and warmed it in his warm hands, giving it back its life. He only slew for food, or in sacrifice.

  But there was nothing for her there. He was gone. It began to be twilight again and she was irrationally frightened—having come into the waste of winter without a qualm.

  She gazed up, and the trees were columns of a church. The stars painted themselves on the ceiling. She heard wolves, or thought she did. “Shall I die here?”

  She would have to return to the camp—Draco’s place. No, no she must not. And … it was not that, now, no camp at all. Yes, even Draco had gone. How strange, for a space of seconds she had forgotten that all that was over long ago.

  III.

  ARPAZIA WANDERED THE WINTER earth.

  To her, the time was one nearly endless season of daylight, which eventually reached the shore of night. It was like a year, this day.

  She was very strong, in her thin, fey manner, or she could not have borne it. Of course, though her garments were no longer of the best, they had been. She was well-shod, protected by furs. And, in her past, when she had eaten she had been well-nourished.

  She walked. The ground was not so difficult, for the snow here was thick, softer and less slippery. She saw tracks in it, little taloned things, birds’ arrow-feet, the pads of bigger animals. She did not really know what any of them were, these writings on the snow.

  The nurse’s ancient rhymes went circling through her head in various forms, on and on, yet by now, like the scolding shrewish voice, mostly unnoticed.

  While the wood … white the wood …

  The trunks of the trees were black and grew near together. She sidled between them. She had no notion where she went. She was escaping a charge of witchcraft and the wolfish priests, who would burn her face and cut off her fingers. Maybe she would find his house—whose? He was dead. She had found the house; it was a tomb.

  Twilight began, and the shadows were blue. This was like moonlight, lacking a moon.

  Then, she saw the wolf.

  It was moving in front of her. Under a stand of whitened ilex, it paused and looked back.

  Was Arpazia afraid of it? The wolf seemed tattered, and not large, nor young. A she-wolf, a hag, like the queen.

  She said, “If you turn on me, I’ll rip you with my nails.”

  But she did not mean this, nor did the wolf take any notice. It went on, and she went on, and peculiarly now, she was perhaps following it.

  The forest presently opened into a glen. Trees bowed from the sides and a frozen stream ran through the bottom. A man was kneeling by the ice, in which he had made a hole, pulling out silver daggers. As she came closer, Arpazia saw that they were fish, which had been lying comatose under the ice.

  By then, the man had looked round, and seen the wolf, and called to it. “Here, Bully, Here, my girl.” The wolf trotted up to him. It was a dog after all.

  Then he spotted Arpazia.

  He got up, looking her over.

  “What are you?” he said.

  She gazed straight at him and knew she must not tell him she was the escaping witch-queen of Belgra Demitu.

  “I’ve lost my way.”

  “So you have. What do you want?”

  “I’m cold,” she said.

  He apparently took pity on her, or on her once-fine clothes.

  She found he was leading her up the glen, the she-dog trotting beside them. “Lean on me, woman,” he said. “You’ve lost your escort. What’s your name?”

  She must not say she was Arpazia, the witch. She remembered another name. “Lilca.”

  He would rape her, inevitably, the price for shelter or assistance. That had been Lilca’s fate. And something else had happened to Lilca.

  The man did not rape Arpazia.

  She found herself seated by a fire in a long, low room. Things hung from beams, skins, roots, bunches of wild garlic, and clinking charms.

  Arpazia’s hands and face burnt. Had the priests after all asaulted her?

  But her mind was clearing in sudden stages.

  There were some women that she thought were servants or slaves, and they were rubbing her hands with snow and then with oil from a jar, and a girl gave her a cup of barley beer.

  “I’m the king here,” said the man. He spoke without boasting, it was only a fact.

  One of the younger servant women turned out to be the man’s daughter. He called her that, she seemed to have no other name: Stir the supper, Daughter. Here’s fish, Daughter. Then he went out. The women, slaves, daughters, began to chatter. Daughter explained to Lilca-Arpazia that her mother was above in the upper rooms, nursing a sick child.

  Probably Arpazia slept. The women moved in and out of her awareness, and she smelled the fish frying and the rufous aroma of the stew.

  Later everyone ate, and Arpazia was included, at a wooden table.

  “Take some up to Mother, Daughter,” instructed the king. His wife too seemed to have no other name. Indeed, Mother was an important title, he said it gravely, giving it due weight.

  Arpazia had eaten little, but the hot ale had brought her alive, though she ached with tiredness and wanted only to sleep. Used to giving orders in her past, she had instead grown only self-reliant in isolation. Now she stood up, meaning to return to the chair by the fire and fall back as best she could into slumber.

  But noting her rise, the man said, “Yes, best go up and see how she is. She’ll be glad of your notice. Perhaps you know some medicine, too, a lady like yourself.”

  Arpazia only gazed at him. Yet now Daughter was there, leading her courteously out of the room.

  It was a big wooden house, and they had made a rough stair, up which the daughter, carrying a candle, now drew Arpazia.

  “You’ll understand herbs,” said Daughter. “Our little knowledge does no good.”

  Arpazia hesitated. Was the girl calling her a witch? Was this some trick? She said nothing.

  The girl went on, “I think he’s lost to us. I beg you not to say it to Mother. Father won’t mind so much, he’s two grown boys. They’re off to the inn to sell our wood. K
ing of woodcutters, that’s Father. But the baby’s her pet, she loves him most. Here now, mind your feet.”

  And they must step straight off the stair and in at a doorway.

  A fire burned in a brazier—there had been a hearth below. But the window had shutters, and there were seven candles alight.

  The mother was sitting on the side of a great wood bed, big enough for four or five persons. It had curtains of wool, which were roped aside.

  Her face, as she bent forward to what lay on her lap, was touched golden and tender by the firelight. It was the face, almost, of the archetypal Virgin Mother, Marusa, holy with its utter absorption, its unblinking and unswerving love.

  “Mother, there’s the lady here, the lady father met in the woods. She may know herbs—” then the girl stopped, for her mother had lifted her face.

  Arpazia saw that one of the reasons for its glistening golden quality was the streams of tears which had run, and now ran again, from her polished eyes.

  “No use, my dear.”

  “Oh—Mother—” stumbled the girl, her pragmatism thrown away, and she hurried to her mother and caught her hard in both her arms, trying to hold her safe from the pain.

  Arpazia who called herself Lilca, stood there staring.

  In a way, she was trapped, and had been tricked, for it was not quite easy, stiff with exhaustion, to turn at once out of the stair-girt room, or even to find the door. Instead she must look and see this ecstasy of gold-lit anguish.

  The woman and the girl wept together now. Arpazia saw that their tears fell like drops of diamond on to a child. He was two or three years of age, his head lolling peacefully against the woman’s side, as if he only slept, just as Arpazia had longed to.

  The woman spoke out of her weeping. “It’s a terrible thing, to lose your child. You’ll know, madam. You will have been a mother, too.”

  Arpazia nodded, separate to the scene of grief.

  She heard his voice in her head.

  Do you think that no one in this world can feel, save you?

  And she saw this was not so.

  She heard him say, her lover, his voice now canceling all the other voices that spiked and squirmed within her brain: “I loved our child in you.”

  Arpazia heard her own self saying, “My child died.”

  “Oh, the sorrows of the flesh,” cried the mother.

  Arpazia sat down on a stool by the doors. She could not stand up any longer.

  Oblivious to her once more, the other two women sobbed, and the dead male child took no note of them.

  But how the daughter held her mother. As if she were the mother, and the mother the crying child … Arpazia watched. Her head touched the wall behind her, and she slept.

  She walked through a dark tunnel of stone. Ahead there was the lid of a cistern, which, once raised, would show her something awful. However, there was another thing she must find, which would prevent this catastrophe.

  I killed her. I had her killed, your child and mine.

  Nothing dies, Arpazia. You killed it, here. Its inner life you couldn’t touch. Even that little seed in you.

  The woman was screaming and shouting, and there were other voices, angry, or trying to he calm.

  “No—no—no!”

  “What else, mother? It’s God’s law. How can we keep off from it? Even in this winter—the house—is warm … we must.”

  “Not in the ground! No! Not under the cold snow—”

  “What then in Christ’s name? What?”

  “No, husband, not in the cord.”

  Did Arpazia still dream?

  She saw them go out, one by one, the mother holding her dead child, and the daughter going behind her, and the man who was king of woodcutters, and some of their servants. Arpazia, too, she had gone after.

  They were in a yard, standing, all of them on the blue snow under a wide sky. The forest rose around, its church columns and fretwork of stars.

  “But on the Last Day,” said the daughter fearfully, “when we rise up—what will be left?”

  “Do you think all Christian souls that die in fire are doomed?”

  Two of the slaves brought a brazier which blazed and caused the snow to melt in patches. From an inch of black mud which then appeared, a green flower was seen, beginning to grow.

  “That is what God can do,” said the mother.

  The king shook his dead. He spoke some words. They seemed priestly and were to do with Christ, and resurrection. Then he carried the dead child to the brazier and laid him in on the burning wood. “We’ll have to answer to the priests, in spring.”

  She made no protest now, the mother.

  Arpazia thought, It will come alive again through the fire.

  But the dead child did not come alive. It was burned up, and the smoke blew dense and black round the yard, and the people there coughed. The odor was atrocious but far away. Some could not bear it and slunk off.

  In the end, only the mother and her daughter, and Arpazia, stood there, as the fire turned ashen and crumbled.

  “Come in now, Mother.”

  Arpazia turned, somnambulist, toward the loving, coaxing voice.

  But it was not for her.

  In the morning, when she woke in a small side room, not recollecting how she had come there on the pallet, she thought of the burning brazier and the dead child and believed she had dreamed it. But then, too, she had dreamed of Klymeno, and surely that had not been a dream at all.

  There was dried mint in the breakfast beer. It reminded her of the ritual drinks of the wood.

  “Will you want to go on somewhere, Lady?” asked the man, preoccupied and impatient. “The big inn, perhaps. You can take lodging there. My son will carry you at noon, when he goes with the wood cart.”

  She thought they had already taken wood to the inn, the daughter had said so. Perhaps they had, and more was wanted.

  Why would she go to the inn? What would happen to her there? She slid the third ring off her hand, and hid it (belatedly) in her mantle. The inn might accept the ring in payment.

  The son, a fat frowning rough boy of seventeen or so, pushed her up into the cart among the logs and branches, and they set off. There was no lamentation about the house as they left it, no keening or crying, no smell of burned meat, only the strokes of an axe, wood-smoke, and the cold-scorched pines.

  IV.

  BECAUSE THEY ACCEPTED THE ring, and without questions, Arpazia, now Lilca, stayed most of the rest of the winter at the inn in the forest. They gave her a large room, with an old pine bed, and also use of a small adjacent room, nearly a cupboard, but this one she never needed. The inn-wife brought her clothes, of good material, that had been left to pay inn debts. “You’re a lady, Mistress Lilca. I have a mirror, too. Should you like that? To see to your hair and such.”

  “I had a mirror,” said Arpazia.

  When that was all she said, the inn-wife told Arpazia, “You’ll have left that behind, when you came away. Or is it sent on ahead of you, to Korchlava?”

  They all assumed Korchlava would be her final destination. Or they pretended that they did.

  The wife’s mirror arrived and was placed in Arpazia-Lilca’s chamber. It was a treasure for the forest, three hands in width, and of highly burnished bronze, in a wood frame.

  Peering into its hazy depths, Arpazia could not see clearly what had become of her. But she did see that now her black hair was all woven with white and gray, as if she had brought the snow with her inside the inn.

  “Poor thing,” said the inn-wife to her uninterested spouse. “She’s not quite right in her mind. But you can tell, a fine lady once.” (The bartered ring was a black spinel of eloquent size.) “Her poor skin, all raddled and scarred with the cold. But, fair of face once.”

  One of the inn girls waited regularly on Arpazia. She was even awarded a chamber pot to save her nightly journeys to the unheated latrines. Mostly, she would accept no service. Half the time she sent them away, even when they brought her food
and drink.

  “Some great sadness in her life, poor soul.”

  “Oh, pin your tongue up, woman,” snapped the innkeeper, who was by then sick of it all.

  Guests would seldom see Mistress Lilca. They often heard her pacing about, up and down, round and round her room. But many paced this way, like cats in cages, when the winter confined them. And this was the worst winter for a century.

  “Has she no kin? No son, or even a girl-child to care what comes to her?”

  “I told you, wife, pin up your gob.”

  One night five priests stayed at the forest inn. They were bound for Belgra Demitu, for the Church of St. Belor, and had ridden through the icy days in a damp wagon. Now they sat sneezing ominously in their corner.

  The inn-wife knocked on the door of her favorite guest, and was admitted.

  “Mistress—have no fears. You may have heard, we’ve priests here. But they shan’t know about you.”

  Arpazia started and stopped dead in the middle of her paced floor.

  So, I have it, thought the inn-wife. She was one of those who came from Belgra when the prince, as they say, turned so religious.

  “I pay my honor to the Christ,” said the inn-wife now, crossing herself. Then she made an older, more secret sign. “But there’s the wood, too. I live among trees, how can I forget them? I’ve seen things these Christians never do. Even”—and her voice fell low, an animal going down on its belly—“King Death in his chariot of bone.”

  But Arpazia, who for a second had risen from her own shadows, afraid, had sunk back into them. She nodded and said, “Thank you. Please close my door.”

  The inn-wife obeyed, and said to herself, Yes, she was fine and high-up in the town, in her day.

  The curious thing was how Arpazia saw this woman, who was several years younger than she, and looked very much younger. To Arpazia, the inn-wife was her senior, and gradually from this and her attentions, Arpazia was coming to fear her—to find her important.

  Although others were all at once more real to her, they were still strangers. One image clung inside her mind the golden-faced woman, the mother and her daughter, weeping above the fire—but its meaning eluded Arpazia. She had begun to think it was herself she was seeing, as sometimes too, in memory, she saw herself witch Klymeno.