by Jane Yolen
I carried her limp body in my arms back to the cabin. I fixed a bed of leaves and grass on the floor of the greenhouse and placed her upon it. I went inside my hut to Apollo, who slept on the hard dirt floor where I’d left him after checking his pockets for more of his poison. They were empty.
“What did you find out there?” he said, sitting up to face me. I’d left his hands tied behind his back.
“You know what I found,” I said. “Change her back.”
“I want to see her.”
I knew he would and wanted him to. Would he finally recognize that she was not the woman for whom he had come? I led him to the greenhouse and watched as his lips contorted with understanding.
“This is your doing, then,” he said.
“Change her back.”
He shrugged his broad shoulders. Though I had imagined the pressure of his lyre, the handle of his ax, looking upon him as he looked lustful upon even this stranger woman, I had nothing but contempt for him. To want a man was not to love him. To want a man was not to give in to him, either.
“I’m bored of you,” I said. “Change her back now or I’ll gut you.”
“You won’t,” he said. “Because then you won’t know where I came upon the syrup, or how to reverse it. Which I will tell you, of course, but I want to see her, the real Daphne. I want to kiss her goodbye.”
I shoved him back into my hut and locked the door so that he could not escape. I went into the greenhouse and looked upon the woman, barely breathing in the dirt. She, a woman of the woods, might know better than a Guardian what needed to be done. I breathed breath into her mouth, careful not to place my hands upon her skin. She fluttered to life, gasping and clawing at herself. Her breathing sounded like the rustling of leaves.
“What have you done to me?” She scurried into a corner behind a pot filled with herb seeds. “Take it off.” She scratched first at her cheeks then down her torso, her legs, until quick as the swing of an ax lines of blood trailed a map of fear down her body.
“Stop, stop.” I rushed to her, pried her hands from herself. There was no escaping skin, except by way of bark. But even then it was still trapped beneath, never gone, as easily accessed as by a syrup poured on the roots. No matter how deep they ran, they could be fooled in an instant. I held her hands too hard, fearful of cracking the fragile bones but more fearful that she might unravel herself on my watch, before I had a chance to know her, the only one of my watch that had ever changed back. For that, and even though it wasn’t her choice, I knew her to be strong. One can learn from strong women. “If you kill yourself, we won’t have a chance to speak. And I want to speak with you. I will help you, but please don’t leave me yet.”
She calmed, or at least her body stopped its thrashing, though now it leaked sap from its eyes, and I saw that the blood down her legs was not blood but a red thick as sap.
“What am I?” she said. “What have you made me?”
“I did nothing to you.” I let go her hands, which fell to her sides in the dirt. I tore strips from the frost covers that lay along the greenhouse shelves and went about wrapping her from her ankles up her legs. “There. You’ll bleed less. You won’t scratch beneath them, will you?”
“If not you, then how did I get like this?”
“You were like this once.” I squeezed her hand. It was limp in mine. “Do you remember?”
She shook her head, slow at first then more rapidly, until her hair swayed about her shoulders.
“Change me back.” She gripped my arm with all her returned strength. “I don’t want this.”
I fixed her a bed in the dirt and locked her within the greenhouse. “Block this door,” I told her. “And let no one but me through.”
I walked along the dirt paths until I came upon the true Daphne. I knelt at her roots. There were many reasons I was hesitant to allow the changed Dryope to use the last remaining syrup we had locked away: I didn’t want to use our only syrup, the only remnant of a time when women could change should they need to. I didn’t want to reach a time when I needed the syrup but couldn’t use it. I’d always imagined myself joining the Orangery in the end of my days, when another Guardian came to take over my post. And then, buried, another reason: a fascination I had with her, a loneliness I longed to discard, a desire to know the life of these women from the inside out.
Even for all that, I didn’t want, either, to bring the man to his victim, to allow him that which he desired. I’d give up the syrup, that much I knew. I would change her back because it was the right thing to do. That was what she desired, and to give in to the women of the woods was my one and only lot in life.
I laid my palm upon the ridges of her roots.
“You are safe,” I said. “I won’t bring him here.”
GUIDE
And here, my friends, we have our belle of the woods. Please remain calm. Don’t touch her, no. Don’t speak too loudly. Don’t speak her name. She’ll go if startled, though it will take you a moment to realize. You’ll look where there was tree and see only shadow. That’s the way of a virgin. Don’t hold hands in her presence. The chaste don’t approve of skin on skin.
She, friends, is called Daphne. No longer does she bear her plaque. We only know her by the scar, here, in her breast, where Apollo found her once again and, in his rage, tried to cut her down. The very same man, yes, from the stories. The very same man who burst in through these walls uninvited. I have told you what we do to uninvited guests. We did that to him. So do not touch.
Daphne hated Apollo straightaway upon meeting him, and who could blame her? Daphne the water girl had gone into the woods to fetch a jug for the young sporting kids in town, as was her daily task. She watched the children because she didn’t long for her own, because she was impartial enough to their begging mouths not to give in to every whim. She was walking along the path to the winding river that cut through her father’s vast swath of land when she came upon Apollo entwined with a woman upon the roots of my own tree. She saw them but passed without comment, for sex didn’t bother her but also didn’t interest her in any of its forms. She didn’t, like her mother, tend a garden. She didn’t, like her sister, lie with fools when she ran out of songs to sing.
On her way back up the trail, she found Apollo waiting for her, sprawled nude across the dirt like an egotist. The nameless naked woman was nowhere to be found.
“Beautiful girl,” said Apollo. “But so stern. What do you have to be upset about, stern girl? You know they say laughter is the best medicine. You’ll find me a funny, funny man.”
“Where’s that woman who was wrapped around you a moment ago?” Daphne searched the shadows, for she had heard of lover pairs tricking strangers into the woods. “I don’t have any money if that’s what you’re after.”
“Don’t you worry about her. She had elsewhere to be.” He rose and offered her an acorn in his palm. “I don’t want to take from you. I want to give.”
“I’m in need of nothing.” She shifted her water jug from one hip to the other. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
She hadn’t been taught to be a rude girl, but she needed a man’s excusing like she needed a knife in her eye, so she went on past him without awaiting his reply. He gave none, nor did he shout across the woods to her as she walked away.
Instead, the next day when she woke, she found he had penetrated the only weakness in her walls; her father at their breakfast table sat with the man, sharing the seeds of a pomegranate. Daphne’s typically still heart hammered with fear.
“What is he doing here?” she said, gathering her robe around herself. Never before had she felt the need to cover herself in her own kitchen. Never before had she felt the need to run and never look back. She stayed where she stood, however, and her father patted the seat beside him.
“This, Daphne, is the mighty Apollo.” He looked to the man. “Forgive her behavior the other evening. She is uninterested in the goings-on of our city and doesn’t know the faces of our heroes. Th
at’s one of the reasons I love her so. She is her own world.”
“I don’t know the name Apollo.” Unwilling to be inconvenienced, she grabbed a handful of seeds from her father’s bowl and shoved them in her mouth. They stained her hands. She wiped the red down the front of her robe.
“Her own little world,” her father said again.
Apollo leered at the red where she’d left it. “Yes, I see that. I would still like to offer my hand.”
Daphne knew these words; she had known their time might come, though always she had hoped that her father would not ask this of her. She shook her head and backed into the hall.
“You haven’t, father,” she said.
Her father beamed. “Daphne, dear, aren’t you thrilled? The day all girls dream of.”
But he knew, didn’t he, that she was not most girls, that she hadn’t dreamt of it. She had thought she made it clear when, at night, she followed him outside to name the constellations instead of staying in with her mother and sister content to laugh over their baking and coo over the neighborhood children. She had thought it was clear when she didn’t attend the dances with her sisters but stayed home to help her father chop wood for their fire, when she asked him to teach her how to make a home all on one’s own. Never before had he mentioned a husband. Never before had he mentioned that she would one day have one.
She ran back to her room and escaped through her window. Her robe blew out behind her as she ran. She didn’t get far before they found her.
She was married in a private ceremony in their kitchen, where Apollo slipped a ring of wood around her finger. It left splinters in her skin when she tried to remove it. They didn’t sleep in the same bed, a courtesy Apollo said he would grant her for their first year of marriage.
“You will love me,” he said. “I’m sure of it.”
Each night he played one of his famous tunes on his lyre. Each night he replaced the names of other women with hers and sang of her beauty, and when that didn’t work he sang of her intelligence, then her kindness. But she was cold toward him.
The men in the local tavern laughed when she entered with Apollo, hand-in-hand, for he asked her each day if she would grant him the pleasure of her flesh, but her fingers laced in his were all she gave. The men at the bar elbowed Apollo for stories of the ice queen’s body. “Is her hair down there frosted?” they asked. “Does she make your cock cold?”
“We haven’t made love,” he told them, proud of this, his latest wickedness. “I haven’t touched a woman since we married.”
“What point is there to that, then?” said the men. “Ay, well, perhaps she needs another man to warm her up.”
Apollo fought the men and won his brawl. He was a brute, after all, even if he didn’t look it. They didn’t go back to the tavern. At home he grew impatient; he demanded that she bring him things to fill the void the lack of her body left: food, blankets, drink. Sometimes she did. Sometimes she didn’t. That she could still say no left her with the last vestige of hope she had in her gut. At night she repeated the word: no, no, no. In the morning she practiced saying it, to everyone, until eventually she no longer visited any family at all.
Like all women in her town, Daphne carried a particular syrup close to her breast. Like all women of her time and place, she had been given this concoction upon her thirteenth birthday. There are some fates, her mother said, better than growing up.
One year of marriage brought Daphne no more fondness for her husband. She felt no despair for her lack of love. Love was a frivolous thing, fine for others but wholly uninteresting to her. Sometimes, in her bed at night, as naïve as we all once were, she considered that her marriage to Apollo might not be the worst fate life could have given her. Other men might have demanded her care instead of her cooking. Other men might have bruised her bodily. Other men might have disallowed her the small pleasures of morning walks, evening sweets, the secret space of her own bedroom.
But he had promised her a year and only a year, and no matter how sweet his treacly song, he was a man of his word.
He came into her room without requesting permission. Daphne sat carving notches into the wood of the desk where she did her sketching; she drew the woods where once she had fetched water, to which she would no longer return for their bad luck. After all, it had been those woods that had brought her Apollo. He touched her face without asking, drawing one long nail along her chin. The point left a red almost-scratch behind. She wished it were a cut deep as death, for then she could hate him. The syrup itched her skin where it lay against it. He kissed her rigid mouth.
When his hands undid the first of her buttons, only then did she stand and go, running through the door of her once-secret-space of a bedroom and then through the front door of a house she hadn’t called home no matter how her husband insisted. Along the path she ran until she came to the woods’ threshold. As she went, she shed her clothes. A woman of the woods needed no clothes.
At the river she stopped. She closed her fist and pounded the tree where first she had seen Apollo and his lover entwined. Her knuckles bled when she pulled them away. She cradled the vial of syrup in her palm, the way we all did, the way you hold both a blessing and a curse.
“Go ahead and do it,” Apollo said, advancing toward her. His voice cracked under the strain of its want. “You all do it. Be like the rest of them. Leave me alone.”
Daphne knew that other women might comfort him. Other women might pull him close and pretend to love him to stop the flow of tears from his eyes. But men needed to cry the same as women. She wouldn’t comfort him like I tried to comfort him, those days we spent in the woods. She swallowed the syrup in one deep gulp.
GUARDIAN
Though I promised not to bring Apollo back to Daphne, I couldn’t control his desire to see her again. I turned and found him standing before me. In his arms Dryope the girl struggled to escape. He held the blade of his lumberjack’s ax to her throat. In her hands she held a vial of changing syrup, the very one I kept locked in the curio.
“If you let me take Daphne, I’ll let the girl go.”
“But your vial is empty.” I raised my hands in the air, conceded to victim-hood in the name of saving a girl’s life. “You have more?”
“I’ll take her wood,” he said.
“But she’ll die. She can’t change back if she’s dead.”
“She’ll be better that way. She’ll be mine that way.”
“And what do you intend to do with this other vial? The one you stole from me?”
“I’ll return it.” He grinned. “I brought that one for you. I know how failure makes a woman desperate.”
I tensed not from anger but from guilt. I didn’t want to give Apollo what he wanted, but it seemed I had little choice; Daphne couldn’t speak, couldn’t beg me to save her. Plus, if I let him go with what he wanted, I had a better chance of coming out alive. If I didn’t barter, if I gave nothing, he might kill the girl, kill me, kill Daphne: all of us. I was of a logical mind. Logic told me to take as few chances as possible. With the syrup, I could give the girl back the body she had chosen for herself, all those years ago. Without it, without the woman, we might all be no more than fodder for the swollen earth.
“You may have Daphne,” I said. “You have the word of a Guardian of the Orangery.”
Apollo let the woman loose. She ran to me, and I pried the syrup from her hands. Better to wait until Apollo had finished his deed. Better to wait until the monsters had gone before I let myself be alone once more.
He didn’t speak to Daphne but wrapped both hands tight around the handle of his ax the moment he was near enough. The woman beside me tensed and looked away. I didn’t look elsewhere. It was my burden to watch what I didn’t stop. In so many years, had the world not changed?
Apollo had claimed himself a lumberjack; what I knew of him, then, was that he, and others like him, had made a profession of hunting wood. And to what end? My hut was strong and warm and contained no wood of which
to speak. Though the Orangery had not changed, the world had surely grown around it, Apollo evidence enough of that.
Apollo struck. I uncorked the syrup and advanced upon him. He struggled to yank the dulled ax from wood grown thick with time, one hand pushing against the bark while the other worked at freeing the ax. With my knife, I pinned his hand to the bark. I pulled his head back with his hair and poured the syrup down his throat. He didn’t struggle, shocked, I think, to taste a liquid so rancid on the tongue, the bitterest medicine there ever was.
He stumbled from Daphne, roots forming their armor around his feet then up his legs, encasing his cock, his torso, the arm that still held tight to its ax, his face, its mouth hanging wide as though to wish liquid out. His tree was no more gnarled, no less beautiful, than any others in the Orangery.
I left him unmarked.
Without the syrup, I could not help the girl pursue her highest of desires—to change back—but I taught her to read, to write, to care for the trees. The wind outside the Orangery whispered through the cracks in the hurried patching I’d completed for the wall. I’d looked too long at Apollo’s naked body. I knew enough to understand that it wasn’t the thrill of a monster that so intrigued me but the thrill plain and simple, and if within the Orangery’s walls the tides could turn, why could a Guardian not leave her post to pursue a life of which she’d only read?
I went to find a man worthy of my skin, to sate the curiosity of my body. I went to experience stories with a different ending than the trees’. Perhaps, I thought, the women of the wood would like to hear them. Perhaps it would call them forth once more.
GUIDE
And this one, you ask? He was no one: an admirer of Daphne. We don’t even celebrate his name.
GUARDIAN
I watched the guide return to the cabin that once was mine, so many years ago. The roof was gone, given way to the sky.
“What happens when it rains?” I asked, stepping out from the shadows.