And the women! How soft they were under their armament, how pale and fragrant. How (and here their voices drop to whispers) when their legs were parted the tunnel there was shot with silver like a loaded vein of ore spiraling through the rock. How, when the women took them into their mouths, they afterwards spit into a little basin and what rolled there were opals, moonshot and fiery, which the women fashioned into pendants they wore around their necks and wove into their hair.
What could their poor wives do? Here were their husbands back and still in their prime, but after so many years they themselves had withered. These men seemed like strangers. Rough ghosts. They treated them like mothers and the babies they had left behind were now lank teenagers, bewildered and angry, leaning against the doorframes while their young fathers cuddled against the women’s sides and confessed.
In the Halls of the Mountain King, the women had birdcages woven of spun gold wire and inside them kept all manner of pretty things: a toad with a muddy stone set into its forehead, a white rat with a man’s wet eyes. Song birds fashioned of gold gears and silver wires with diamond-chip hearts twinkling in the machine-work of their chests. Their houses were carved directly into the living rock. Some were simple—a hearth, a low shelf for a bed, the woman sitting cross-legged on it whistling to her little bird who perched on her finger and whirred and tinkled back. Some were as elaborate as mansions with seemingly endless rooms opening back into the rock. Salt caverns and caverns of ice. Rooms hung all about with luxurious furs and a room whose walls were as thin as fascia stretched over a pulsing, purple organ. A room whose walls, when pierced with a knife, yielded a thick well of honey dripping amber to the floor, and in one crowded hall all manner of statuary: fawns and serpents, satyrs and goddesses with struck lapis eyes.
Once there was a young woman who married a man who was blind. This sparked all manner of cruel jokes in the village about the young woman’s looks, which were poor, and her prospects, which were few. What the villagers did not know, and wouldn’t truly have cared if they did, was that the woman, who had had all her life to live with her weak chin and hooked nose, her small eyes and fat, sagging cheeks, had married for love, not security. Her bridegroom, whose fingers were long and white and sensitive, knew exactly what she looked like and didn’t care.
For one year, they were very happy together. They lived in a cottage the young woman’s father had left her when he died and ate the vegetables from her garden, the animals she snared in the woods, and the bread her husband turned and oiled with his patient hands. In fall she chopped down trees and split them into firewood, and in the winter she built the fire up until it roared and they sat before it, her hand on her husband’s knee while she described to him the ordinary sights of her day and he carved figures from spare stove-lengths, the knife a wicked extension of his thumb. Then, one day in early spring when the lower slopes of the mountains were hazed magenta with blooming redbud trees, she returned home from the forest to find the cottage empty.
“Husband,” she called, slinging onto the table a rabbit she had snared and bled, its throat open in a second, wetter mouth, “wait until I tell you what I saw today.”
She meant to tell him about the bear she had stumbled across, still drowsy and weak from hibernation. She watched it from behind the safe tangle of a deadfall as it foraged on the forest floor, pried apart a rotten log with great delight and plumped back on its rear like a child as it scooped pawfuls of termites into its mouth. She imagined how her husband would carve the bear as she described it, capture exactly its clownish simplicity and even her little hidden fear, her voyeur’s thrill. She sifted through the woodbin for a suitable knot as she called again, “Husband?” into the empty house.
It was no use; her husband was gone.
Though she searched for him for many months, calling over the hills and valleys as they darkened into summer and then blazed with fall fires, calling, her voice thin and cracked, through the still blue winter, she never again saw him or heard his voice and lived her life alone in the cottage they had shared so briefly in what seemed to her another time.
She never remarried and took little notice as over the passing years her body hardened and curled. Her back bent under the weight of her solitary labors until, as she scramble up the rock falls and hopped nimbly over the mountain’s streams, she often resembled a beetle, round and hard. Though she never forgot her lost husband, and never passed a day in which she did not take one of his figures down from the mantle and turn it over in her hands, she reached a happiness of sorts. In the evening she sat before her fire and smoked a long clay pipe, the bowl comfortable with use. In the morning she woke under her quilt and heard what noise there was in the world. Birdsong. Snow tamping its hush down the long cut of her valley.
One morning, she woke to a different noise, one she couldn’t be sure she recognized. She tumbled from the bed so frantically she tangled the bedclothes about her waist and dragged them trailing behind her as she rushed out of the cottage, her gray hair wild. Often in the mountains, noises are deceptive. What seems near at hand fades into a murmur many ridges over; what seems impossibly distant turns out to be hidden inches away, tucked quietly under a leaf, or shrilling in the damp lee of a stone. But the source of this noise appeared precisely in the place it sounded. The woman stood on the slate doorstep her own grandfather had laid almost three lifetimes ago and stared at her husband, curled naked amongst the wild violets, pale and mewling as piteously as any newborn mammal who finds itself turned out into a world it didn’t expect.
He wouldn’t tell her exactly where he had been or how he had gotten there. He was very thin and his skin so sensitive that everywhere she touched a red weal came up in the shape of her hand. She sat him before the fire and fitted him with his own clothes which she had kept all these years at the bottom of a trunk. Blue breeches and a soft linen shirt. The green coat she had embroidered all over with knots of climbing roses because he liked the feel of their shape under his fingers. The clothes hung from him as if they had been made for a much larger man. When he moved too suddenly, flailing his hands as he told her his stories, the cloth split, purring along its seams with the exhaustion of its age. Try as she might, he could not be tempted to eat, and she couldn’t convince him, though she ran his fingers over and over her face, that it was indeed she, his wife, he was addressing.
He said he was cold, his fingers particularly cold, but when she built the fire up he claimed to be even colder and thrust his hands dangerously close to the flames. When night fell she took him into the bed with her and piled all her quilts high over them. She held onto him, trying to warm his body with her own. He ran his fingers over her back and up her legs. When he seemed not to find what he was looking for, he gripped her harder, digging his nails into her buttocks, scratching her stomach, pinching her breasts. He thrust against her side and when he came his semen spilled across the folds of her stomach and glittered there so strangely that when she held it up into the moonlight coming through the cottage’s rough window she was almost unsurprised to find herself holding a handful of diamonds, sharp and coldly shining.
The next day she sat her husband in front of the fire and watched for a long time as he carved strange, amorphous shapes out of a length of beech wood. Then she packed a small sack with some supplies, touched her husband’s fingers one more time to her cheeks and set off into the forest. For many days, the old woman traveled. She passed through her familiar lands and she passed out of them. At night she camped on the sides of strange ridges, making her fire under a ledge and watching as its smoke sooted the rock in cryptic figures. In daylight she trudged down into strange valleys—dark fens dripping with hairy creeper—and up again, always climbing higher, her pack slowly lightening on her back as she went through her food and did not bother to gather more.
At last she came to a place where the mountain ended. It was a sheer, rocky clearing, treeless and frosted with short grass. There was no shelter, no food. The wind blew in bullying
gusts across the rock face but she did not build a fire or even pull her cloak closer around her neck. The old woman sat and waited. For many days she waited. During the day the sky hung around her like a gray veil, but at night the air cleared and around her a vast canolpy of stars were sprayed like droplets of milk beaded on a bolt of cloth that was so black it was all different colors. Sometimes it seemed to the woman as if another mountain hung above her, an inverted mountain whose peak stretched to touch this cropped peak and which was well covered with trees rustling in a different weather. But this was impossible and when she focused her eyes she found the vision disappeared and around her was the world as it had always been, the sky far away and empty.
After a number of days, there was no way for her to keep count, the old woman opened her eyes to see a rocky spur rising up from the mountain where before had been only the sheer plate of the plain. The rock wall sloped upward until its rising edge disappeared from her sight. Water seeped over its face. The old woman rose unsteadily to her feet and ran her fingers over its rough wall. She followed the leading edge until she came to the mouth of a cave strewn with rubble. Up from the throat of the mountain came a warm breeze, the smell of sulfur, a whirring noise as if of many wings stirring in unsettled sleep.
The old woman paused, mindful of the stories she had heard about the world inside the world, but nothing changed, and as long as she stood there, rocking on her bent, exhausted legs, the breath of the mountain was warm, its smell foul, its sound a shifting flurry. She put her hands in her pockets and found they were empty, so she turned her pockets inside out and walked into the cave surrounded by their wagging tongues.
Down the old woman went, down and down. The walls of the tunnel fluctuated around her, sometimes soaring so far away she could hear her footsteps echoing, sometimes pressing so close she scraped her elbows and shoulders against the rock. Eventually, the walls of the cave opened and she found herself in a hot, round chamber lit with yellow light. All around the chamber were stacked looming heaps of paper, loose nests of paper, tumbling sheets, monoliths collapsing to drift over the floor. Through the air flew sheets of paper that dove and dodged and spun around each other, battened to the roof or walls, heaved off again, some as she watched rearing stricken and fluttering to the floor. From these came the whirring sound which had grown steadily louder as she traveled, and which was now a deafening racket. At the far end of the chamber sat a figure, naked and clearly well fed. Her blonde hair fell over her breasts like shoddy curtains whisked provisionally across the stage and the old woman realized that this was the Oracle she had set out to find.
“What do you say?” asked the Oracle, who had not once looked up. She batted at a flock of darting stationary, dug around in a heap of crumpled, lavender-scented notes. “I have almost no time to give.”
“Say it now,” the Oracle said, “if in fact you have a tongue to speak.”
But the old woman was struck dumb and could not make a sound. When she reached up to her mouth to see what was the problem, she found her tongue was gone—whether from lack of use or some other reason—and her mouth itself seemed a rank black cave, her breath a warm fug and the only noise that came from her throat a sort of whirring so soft it faded to a buzz in the cacophony of the chamber. The old woman was chagrined and stood with her hand in her empty mouth. She had come all this way, endured so steadily the long years of her life, but did not really know what she would have asked: What’s next? Perhaps, what now? What happens?
Soon the Oracle forgot her entirely, she was so busy, so far behind, and the old woman stood in a corner of the chamber for so long that the paper piled up against her legs and over her knees. Finally, the paper came up to her old, round head, which, in such poor light, looked as black and bare as a beetle, and there it threatened to bury her. All this time the Oracle sifted and heaved, muttered and scratched. The countless sheets of paper rose and blew around her in a loving funnel, smothering her yellow hair.
At the end of this story, the old woman had stood still so long, had been so quiet and so buried, that when she came to herself again she realized she had been transformed. She had become a beetle and a fine, big one at that. With no small wonder, the old woman who was now a beetle spread her new wings and buzzed heavily into the air. She circled the head of the Oracle three times and when she had done that, she bumbled back up the long cavern and into the light of day.
In no time at all, the old woman who was now a beetle flew the journey that had taken her so long on foot, and came again to the little cottage her grandfather had built in the bald on the side of her familiar mountain. There she found everything as she had left it. The shoots still poked their blind snouts from the soil; the violets still shivered in their bloom. Smoke rose from the cottage chimney in curls like skeins of unraveled wool and all the doors and windows were shuttered and locked, just as they were when she had gone.
“Zzzz” buzzed the old woman, “zzzz zz zzzz,” by which she meant, “I have not come so far to be stopped by a lock.”
Soon she found she was so small she could slip in between the door and its hasp and thus make her way back into her home. There she saw her little bed and her chair, the table at which she had eaten all her meals and the black pots and pans in which she had cooked them. She saw her winter boots slumping shiftless in the hall and the sprays of bittersweet hanging like tiny persimmons over the door. It was all just as it had always been and the old woman who was now a beetle flew around her rooms, her wings working furiously, and exclaimed in great delight at the simple beauty of her previous life.
Then, winging around the corner, she came upon her husband sitting before the fire. He was as gaunt and pale as when she had left, his fingers as callused and clumsy. He tweezed the wood as if he gripped it with pinchers, and the knife in his other hand skipped and stumbled. When the old woman saw this she was overcome with sorrow. She landed on her husband’s shoulder and called to him in her new buzzing voice. She rubbed her clever legs together and trundled the dear ball of her body over his lapel and onto the cool shaft of his neck, but it was no use. She was too small and he was too lost in the shape he felt turning out of the knot, the sweep of the knife’s awkward rhythm. Finally, the old woman who was now a beetle began to weep and in her distraction crawled up her husband’s neck and into his ear where she lodged herself behind the sharp bone of his jaw. There she stayed, buzzing to him what she had read scrawled across the Oracle’s papers—all of it out of order, fragmented, strange—and if you don’t believe me that there was no resolution after such a long journey and so many miracles, that so much has happened to her, one person in a world of so many, all I can say is they are both still there, just as I have described them.
You can go and visit them. See for yourself.
The Oracle
It is mid afternoon by the time our own journey ends. It is a crisp, clear day and we are high enough that the trees have thinned. The sky has moved far away, as light and clean as a sheet snapped high over the bed, drifting slowly down. We aren’t on a ridge, but rather on a slope of the mountain and there is no view. We might as well be surrounded by more versions of this—identical, hexagonal scenes of these massy pines and mounting rock slopes, this moss greening a thick verge by the water’s edge and that bare stone crumbling into the mountain like a toothless mouth. That Jacob hunched over a tent of pine needles, blowing the fire to life and that Daniel craning his neck to see sky between the shifting tops of the trees. Of course, this Alice putting bread and hunks of cold, greasy rabbit on our tin camp plates and that Ingrid, loosed finally from the confines of the sling, levering herself onto her side with one stiff leg.
It’s a pretty picture, actually. It comforts me to believe there may not be only one of me responsible for all my actions, though I know better. This is a singular place. I found it alone, have come here mostly alone and sense it still knows me first. Its awareness is an old one, cold and suspicious. As far as this place is concerned, the others—minus you
, dear Ingrid—may as well be stray dogs run up the mountain from the distant garbage-strewn fringes of the town and paused here to piss on the bushes and snap at their yellow mange before ranging on. Lean and vicious and temporary.
The clearing is made by two streams wending down the mountainside. The first is why Daniel believes we have come. For most of its length, it is a creek, cold and thin, but here, due to a little bevel in the granite of the slope, the water is thrown back on itself and has churned a deep channel where it masses before slipping over the edge and tumbling in a shining rope 100 feet or so to rejoin the course of its bed. The result is a pool where the water is so restless nothing that needs shelter can live. The water is sharp and clean and the bottom of the pool is visible at all its depths: the rock licked smooth, the water plants standing like a miniature forest drowned along with all its own streams and caves and dogs and men.
The second stream is poisoned. It is not really a stream at all, but seepage leaking from the ruin of a collapsed mine wall. Somewhere far above us is the original shaft, perhaps now relaxed into a half-healed scar. It’s possible all that is left of the shaft is a slope of rubble and broken beams grown over with beech saplings and tangles of blackberry vine, but I don’t think so.
Hex: A Novel Page 5