White As Snow (Fairy Tale)

by Tanith Lee

  Then Hadz, in another place of darkness, bent to Arpazia again. “Your daughter? You were her mother? Mothers love their children. Why did you poison her?”

  Arpazia heard his voice, and the other voice that spoke beneath: “You killed … don’t you know how you hurt me? The child in you—you and I both … you crushed it out …”

  “Yes, I killed her,” Arpazia murmured. “I came to find her and do it. I didn’t want the child, I never did. It was with herbs I had, in a black cup. She’s dead now. Now there’s only me.”

  The mirror, standing in the air, closed its single huge eye.

  Dwarves constructed the girl’s coffin, an irony of which Hadz was unaware. For they were not the seven who had entered Elusion with her, of course. Those seven were gone. But these other dwarves had a reputation for being talented artisans. One of them had already made for Hadz his exquisite ruby ring.

  The coffin was unusual. Hadz had wanted it to be as it was, something rare, unlike all other things. And, he had come to understand, such mirror-glass was fabulous, a sorcerous artifact from the East.

  “She’s so beautiful,” he said, on the third day, lamenting, weeping even, cheated. Juprum was not so afraid of these tears; they did not denote pain. “She’s not gone rotten, she doesn’t reek. Look—she’s pliable still.”

  “It’s curious, my prince. But it can’t last. She doesn’t breathe; I can find no pulse-beat. Better to put her away while she’s fresh, and not spoil your memory of her.”

  Juprum did not know if Hadz, during these days when he kept the corpse in the High Chamber of his palace, took advantage of her state to copulate with the dead witch. Juprum hoped not.

  The coffin was made of the broken mirror. A coffin of glass. Each piece of any size had been set into a frame of heavy iron, then all was decorated by leaves of gold and flowers of silver, with jewels from Hadz’s treasury. Hadz loved the result dearly. It was the most bizarre object imaginable.

  Gazing at it, once it was sealed, Hadz at last noted that he could see himself reflected there over and over. Which was almost better than being able to see straight in at the coffin and observe the wonderful dead girl.

  “She and I were equals in beauty. What was her name?”

  Juprum had already told him he did not know. Hadz tended to forget.

  “I never heard it, sir.”

  “A witch’s name?”

  “Perhaps, my prince.”

  Juprum had seen that the coffin, fashioned so elaborately and in such a hurried, short space of time, had many little portions that were not properly joined or closed. With the days, the months, the stink of death would issue from this coffin (then God help the dwarvish artisans). Then it would need to be moved out of the mansion’s hall. Juprum would prefer that, and said nothing about having the cask more tightly corked.

  Soon, with luck, Hadz, who was currently obsessed, must lose interest in it.

  He had already forgotten the mother—if so she was. Juprum, aware that Hadz might recall her eventually, had seen to it that her cuts were dressed, and that she was fed. Once he went himself to look at her, where she paced about in the hut, one of several kept as the prince’s dungeons. Outside the metal wall, you could hear Lethe Pond wiggling on its stones.

  “How are you today?”

  “I am well enough,” said the old witch in the queenly voice she sometimes assumed.

  “Are you still pleased you killed her?”

  “Killed whom?”

  “Your child, you old beast. Your daughter.”

  But then she did not reply. She went up and down, round and about, pacing out the hut. Her face was gravely marked. A bandage on her wrist had come away. The dried blood was black.

  Juprum was offended, despised her. Whatever other crimes were committed, mothers must not kill their own children. Even a bribable God would never forgive that.

  II.

  THE MIRROR’S SOUL SAW COIRA, walking across the sky.

  It was that time between day and dusk. Traces of the sun still lingered below, but here and there stars were piercing through. The land was like a shadow, miles down. Coira looked at it, holding back her blowing hair. She walked on small banks of cloud, like steppingstones or ice-floes in a transparent river.

  She was puzzled, thinking she should descend, but not knowing how. Then she saw Hephaestion in the distance. walking toward her.

  Coira straightened. At first he seemed as he had always been, and delight suffused her. But then, as he came nearer, she saw he was the same height as herself. Then she drew herself together, unsure.

  He paused, across a floe of cloud. He gazed back at her. Soon, by some unknown process, he was no longer her height, but his own, as she remembered him.

  While this happened, more stars appeared, but the sky did not lose any of its clarity.

  “Have you come back?” she said.

  “I don’t know. I’m dreaming of you,” he said. “I’m convinced I’m dreaming. Why are you here?”

  “I died,” said Coira, but hearing the words, she checked and grew still. “How can I be dead?”

  “Coira, don’t be dead. Why would you die?”

  “My mother—my mother came to me, and I was somehow drunk—and like a child. And then I fell asleep. But all I can taste is honey, only it’s so bitter. Oh, I know what it is—yes, Ulvit once warned me. Sometimes the bees gather from the wrong plants. Not everyone is harmed—but some—sometimes whole families. The honey from the flowers will be like deadly venom to one, and like nothing to another. Poppies can be the worst, she said. Perhaps—but I can’t recall any remedy. Besides, it’s too late. It must have been the fruit we ate. We shared apples. The smell—perhaps that made me drunk. She ate it too. We slept. But I’m dead. Oh. what shall I do—where shall I go?”

  He stood across from her on the cloud. The space of open sky between them was too broad to jump, too deep to wade across.

  “If you were dead, Coira girl, you wouldn’t be here, but in the other life.”

  “Yes. What is it, then? What am I to do?”

  She began to cry.

  He could not reach her, and this broke her heart, but he had left her anyway. He had left her and her mother had wished her to die, and brought the baleful honey-apple to see to it.

  As she wept she became totally a child. She shrank as he had done, and now she was as short as Hephaestion. Her hair poured all round her, heaped over the cloud as it had never heaped round her when she was a little girl.

  “I’m in a tomb, I know that I am,” she sobbed. A voice in her head upbraided her: Don’t speak. Trust no one. Trust has brought you to this, you fool. Be silent.

  Then he sprang across the cloud and caught her to him. The same height again, he seized hold of her, more tightly than the wicked stepmother who had stifled and poisoned her.

  “Try to see where you are,” he said. “Where they’ve put you. Then show me.”

  She looked, but not with her eyes. Deep down in her mind, or the mind of her wandering spirit, she saw an iron hull with gold and silver briars that clambered over it, and set in these, luminous gems of emerald and violet. But there was water on the iron, too, sheets of it, gleaming.

  “Do you see?” she asked. How could he? But he did. “Yes, Coira. It isn’t water. It’s the witch-glass we fixed to the wall. It’s the mirror. Hers.”

  “I’m shut inside the mirror,” she whispered.

  “Break out,” he said.

  “How?” she implored.

  “I’ll go across and wake myself up. Then I’ll come back for you. I’ll find you, Coira, wherever you are. I’ll set you free. Sweetheart—don’ t be afraid.”

  He was gone. She spun about in terror and her foot slipped from the shining icy cloud.

  How much the stumble had cost her. She fell with one shriek, from sky to earth.

  It was done in a second. She struck the ground with a blow that shook her into bits, and at its impact, the thump of it between her shoulders, she c
hoked.

  Still half-detached, she heard herself crowing for her breath, heard and vaguely felt an acid vomit fly from her throat, rolled sidelong, striking her body now against the hard shell which contained her.

  Her voice was pushed away from her. It called piteously, even though she knew she must stay silent. “Help me—help me—”

  Who would help her?

  She was hated.

  Darkness closed her eyes.

  The howling of Hadz brought his faithful old servant running, as always it did. In abject fear for him, Juprum rushed into the High Chamber among the bright torches. Behind the drape of black silk, where Hadz had insisted the coffin be placed, Juprum found his prince lying full-length on top of it, beating with his fists.

  “My prince—my dear one—”

  “Be quiet, you cunt. Listen!”

  “To what—to what, my best angel?”

  But Hadz had grasped him; he pulled Juprum forward, twisted him and ground his ear against the adorned sarcophagus.

  So, in this position, pinned against shards of glass, Juprum too heard. He heard the little struggling moth-voice flittering about in the coffin.

  And Juprum crossed himself. For he was always respectful in the chancy presence of an ultimate master. (God.)

  That day, King Draco rode through his spring city wearing a vermilion mantle trimmed by panther-skin and gold, with his queen beside him. On her knee was the latest child, a fat, heavy boy who grinned his first teeth like a wolf. He resembled his father. The boy waved a rattle of silver; and the wide neck of the queen had embedded in it a necklace of fifty pearls.

  The city saw them. Korchlava called acclaim. Canopied carriage followed carriage. Horses nodded burnished heads, manes and tails plaited by bells. Asphodel was tied on bridles, and hyacinths. They had grown just in time.

  Draco was still a king in red, at his prime. And she, his queen. Her belly might already be rounding again. She was the moon at full, the Nubile Woman.

  Hephaestion watched them all go by, pushed though he was this way and that by the holiday crowd. As by his thoughts.

  It was a festival of the Christ. The city people were exchanging red-painted eggs which symbolized Christ’s blood, expected to be spilled for them in due course.

  But it was not the season of poppies, yet somehow he thought of them. The poppies were in a girl’s hand, as she was pulled screaming down into the earth, which covered her over, swallowed her.

  Only the dead went into the earth.

  And the physicians brewed a drug from poppies, which, in the correct amount, made men glad and drew away their hurts. He had seen that in the mines. But the draught could also suppress breathing and induce death, if made too strong.

  Why keep thinking of it? A dream he had had … He could not recollect it, only Coira crying, as she had not done, when he left her. No, she had been composed and stony-eyed. What would he have done then, if she had wept? In the dream, he had wanted only to hold her.

  In God’s name, why think of her now? She was behind him. There was only this bloody world, this land of giants shoving him about, jeering, all these subhuman superiors. He would have to do tricks, clown, stupid things, to earn his living. And that must come to be, when his valuables ran out. Look forward then, there would be enough dross there. Let her alone. She had not tried to hinder his leaving. “Farewell,” she had said. Why then did he hear her calling him now, Help me—what shall I do? She would never have gone on like that. She had learned silence.

  Yet that night, after seeing King Draco, he dreamed again of the mirror they had tied on the wall. Someone was trapped inside—he heard them calling. Then it shattered, and seven pieces jumped from it, and each piece of glass was a woman, perfect and entire, her black hair furled around her and her eyes flaming.

  After which there flew out of the glass a white owl, then a raven black as the soot, and last a nacreous dove, mourning, calling, Help me, calling, Where shall I go? Which clung to his shoulder with its coral claws, beating with its snow-white wings. Don’t leave me! Never leave me! So he took hold of it in his hands to save it from itself—but it broke in fragments, since it, too, was made of glass.

  Blood-Red

  I

  IN THE UNDERWORLD EVENING he returned to visit her. “Are you well at last?” he ardently demanded. Coira felt weak and weightless. She gazed at him. Somehow, it seemed he knew her familiarly. Obviously, he had had time to look at her, to study her while she lay in her stupor, her sham death. To her, he was a stranger.

  “Perhaps I’m rather sick, still,” she said, carefully.

  “What? Oh, don’t be, my beloved. I want to see you in health at once. We’re meant to be together, you and I. God made us for each other.”

  He was alight with concupiscence. When he had been with her before, had this also been so?

  She could see, for him, it was a welcomed, rational state, and that he enjoyed it, and was almost impatient with her. She had come back to life. They had revived her and let her out of the coffin. She had had all that night, and all this day, to recuperate, to bathe and use the scented unguents, to make herself ready, to grow hale, enamored and willing. For it was Hadz who was her prince, and she had been made for him by God.

  Coira accepted there was little she could do. Hadz was insane. The whole of Elusion had always said so. Insane and liable to inflict harm. He would not be open to reason or denial. She must give in to whatever he wished with the best show of approval she could summon.

  But beyond his ghastly lust, still she felt mostly dead.

  She had not properly known what happened. The first awakening, the brief vomiting, and her agonizing first breaths, fading away once more, with her pleading cry left hanging in the void behind her. Before, there had been a sort of dream, but she could not recapture it. After her initial return, there was a murky nothingness, and in it horrible clanging blows came and went, burning the inside of her skull, roaring like church bells, so she thought she lay in St. Belor, under the floor of the church. But that, too, passed. And then she had been pulled out of the coffin, which axes had shattered.

  She thought later she had seen Prince Hadz staring down at her, and for a moment she had seemed to recognize his face. There was something in its pale-skinned glamour, its wildness of black hair, that was like—her mother, then like herself. But then she thought he was her lover, Hephaestion—but as they lifted her, and carried her away, she knew that he was not. He was taller than any of them. And at the back of his eyes skulked a bright something, half animal, half phantom, which she did not know, but which made her afraid.

  Despite all the ministrations of Hadz’s slaves, Coira lay very ill, and leaden with despair. Her return to life was worse, it seemed to her, than the onset of death.

  Besides, she could not remember why she had died. It had been a deliberate act, someone said. Who had slain her? Who? Ulvit—no, not now—then who had it been? Was it Proud? Or had Vinka done it in one of her fits?

  Yes, it had been Vinka. It had been a woman …

  As the awful night and day dragged on, the truth began to play a game with her mind, emerging, running to cover before she could quite see. In the end she did see it, the being of truth. It had the face of an elderly woman, scarred and sewn to its skull.

  “Who is she?”

  Your mother. Who else?

  Coira was so fragile, she lay there weeping, weeping, and weeping. Until she made herself stop. She was in Hell. No one could assist her. By some fluke, and because Prince Hadz itched for her, she had lived.

  Better get up then, use the hot bath full of scents which the memory of the apple infused. So, she made herself forget her mother. As every night, she would remember again.

  A girl came and washed Coira’s hair.

  Cleansed by such things, the Miasma seemed to leave her. Dry-eyed she let his minions tend her.

  Coira pulled round her a cover from the bed. They had not brought her any garments.

  She knew h
e would come in. She knew that maybe—doubtless—he had already seen her bare.

  Once an old man appeared, went round her, making sure that she was wholesome enough for Hadz. This old man reminded Coira very oddly of a maiden’s nurse—some male crone set to wait on the prince. At last she recollected she had met the old man before, when she had brought the Febrifuga leaves.

  The old man spoke to Coira. “You’ve had a stroke of good fortune. Be cheerful. Put this red salve on your lips. This kohl is for your lashes—they should have given you all this before. Yes, that’s better. You must be tempting for him. Don’t dare disappoint. I’ll flog you myself if he regrets you.”

  Too ill to rally to her own horror, Coira said nothing.

  And then, in the evening, Hadz arrived.

  She could no longer pay much attention to his looks. For her, it was as if she sat in this little chamber with a mountain cat. She could see its talons and the long teeth, tipped by blood. No jot of its prettiness.

  But the leopard sat down beside Coira on the couch.

  “You’re my lady in Hell,” he said, musingly. “They told you your name? Let me tell you. You are Persapheh.”

  Coira knew the name, which belonged to the stolen goddess-daughter when she was the bride of Death.

  She made no remonstrance, of course,.

  While they sat there, and he drank wine from a gold goblet, some gifts were brought in for her. There was a necklace of glaucous stones, and her own amber bracelet, which he slipped on to her wrist, it and his fingers like the shiver of a worm. But Hephaestion had given her the bracelet. She had been lucky to get it back.

  Then they brought in another thing. A monstrous and unbelievable thing. She stared at it, partly losing her breath again, thinking. What is it—what is it? Knowing.

  “She must have this back, my princess in Hell, my Persapheh,” he announced. He seemed amused, but also vaunting—avaricious, lusting again—wanting her body but also this other entity—which was nearly a body, too. “They’re afraid of it, those crawling vermin, those dung-fleas. The glass. Witch’s glass. But you are my witch, Persapheh-Hekatis, Lady of Hell. Well, beloved. Get up. Go and put it on.”