by Mary Brown
The bubble burst with the noise of a great crystal palace shattering around his ears, and the ringing and clattering echoed the great pain that suffused his head, his whole body. He knelt on the grass, his flanks heaving, a stink of singed flesh and horn in his nostrils, and knew without mirrored confirmation that his proud golden horn was no more. He was nothing now, a white horse with cloven hooves and no magic, but at least his beloved was safe and young again and beautiful, and would weep tears to heal the broken place where the horn had been, and together they would flee this horror, and find a kind of peace—
Not so. As he turned, he saw with dismay that the witch had escaped the destruction of her bubble and stood, tall, dark-cloaked and menacing over the senseless body of his prince. Even as the unicorn started forward to challenge her, the pain in his mutilated head receding to a dull, bearable ache, he heard her begin to chant a spell of such malevolence that he started back again, his great eyes wide with distress, realizing too late that without the magic horn he was impotent. The darkening forest seemed to close in against the reddening sky as between him and the witch there appeared a deep pool: not of water, but hard as diamonds and as clear, with the illusion of plants waving in invisible currents in its depths. And there, at the very heart of it, resting on a bed of pebbles, grey, blue and white, lay the prince, eyes closed, legs and arms flung carelessly as though he slept on some feather bed.
Vainly the unicorn stamped and pawed at the unyielding surface of the magic pond, neighing his distress. He turned once more to the witch and she answered his unspoken questions.
"Why? He refused me, that's why, even though I made myself young and beautiful as he: I was not to know he was a freak, a creature-lover, was I?" and she spat. "But no, he is not dead, he lies in spelled sleep. And the only thing that can save him—" and she laughed shrilly, confident in her revenge "—is a whole unicorn, who will sacrifice himself and his horn to pierce that sleep! And you—" she pointed derisively, "—you are hornless!"
And her shrieks of laughter pursued him like demons as he fled despairing into the forest.
The Gathering: Two
The Knight and a Lady
She was the fairest lady he had ever seen: eyes like sapphires, lips ruby-red, diamond-fair hair flowing down her emerald-green dress, skin translucent as pearl. Although the fire on which he had toasted the rye-bread of his supper had burned low this jewel-creature seemed to carry her own light and her voice was soft and caressing as she crossed the clearing towards him, her robes making the faintest susurration in the long, dry grass.
"All alone, fair knight?"
He rubbed his eyes, convinced he must be dreaming. Sure his eyes had been closed but a moment—too short a time for sleep—but what else in the world could this apparition be but a dream? This one must come from a towered castle somewhere in Germanica; she should live in pillared hall on the slopes of the Middle Sea; she would not have been out of place in a screened harem in the Great Desert; she could have come from anywhere beautiful, faraway, exotic: all he knew was that she did not belong here, on the scrubby edges of this shabby forest hundreds of miles from the nearest towers, halls or harems.
He pinched himself, half-hesitating even as he did so, for if this were indeed a dream, he would be fool to wake just as everything seemed to be going so nicely. The pinch hurt and she was still there so she must be real, and indeed now she was standing a mere foot or so away and her heady perfume flowed out round him like a bog mist, a miasma, near-palpable in its form. All at once he became conscious of the sleep in the corners of his eyes, his two-day stubble, untrimmed moustache and crumpled clothes. All else, sword, armour, purpose were instantly forgotten: she was all that mattered.
"I—I—" he stammered, for coherence was gone also.
"I—I—" she mocked, and laid her cool hand on his wrist, where it burnt like fire.
"L—Lady," he stuttered then recalled, by a tremendous effort of will it seemed, the courtesies and protocol demanded. Knights were always respectful and courtly; ladies, in return, gracious and yielding. The men were allowed a little flattery and boldness of the eye, plus a little twirl or two of the moustache and from the women one expected a fluttering and dimpling, a casting-down of eyes and an implied admiration. But of course at first one had to go through the preliminary ritual of polite verbal exchanges—How the hell did it go? Ah, yes . . .
"Lady, I am at your service, and with my sword will gladly defend you from all perils and dangers of this night." (When he had been a mere squire there had been the usual ribaldry with his fellows as to the true connotation of the "sword" and whether it was "night" or "knight.") "And if you will inform me of your desire, I—"
"Tu," she interrupted. "Tu es mon seul desir . . ."
Somehow her use of the Frankish tongue made this all much more difficult. Although he could not fault her courtly language, yet the words were in the wrong context: they were the words one would use to one's affianced or groom, and this one looked neither virginal nor a bride . . .
He found himself trembling, hot desire running like siege-fire into the pit of his loins. He gritted his teeth: this must be A Temptation, sent to test him; he had heard They sometimes took fleshly form, the better to ensnare and seduce. Sadly, Goodness usually came wrapped plain in everyday clothes and required effort of a different kind: a dragon slain (only nowadays there were none left), the routing of wolf or bear or somesuch. Anyway, This in front of him now, clad in shameless importunity and little else, was not Good, so therefore must be Bad, coming as It did in the middle of the night, that lonely vulnerable time when a man's strength is at an ebb and his resolve at its weakest. Still, if It were A Temptation, all one had to do was to summon up the required Formula, step smartly away, and deliver the words with clarity and feeling, and after a moment the temptation would disappear. Simple.
Pulling free of her hold he crossed himself.
"Begone, Foul Fiend!" he said, in capitals, and crossed himself once more, to be on the safe side. "For I Know You For What You Are . . ."
Initially he could not have wished for a more gratifying result. She hissed and drew back, her silken locks seeming to writhe like a nest of blond snakes, but before he could even draw breath for a sigh of relief that he had been right, everything was as it had been a moment since, only worse, for he found himself gazing, with a lust he found increasingly difficult to control, at a long, perfectly formed leg, bare to the thigh, and pointed, rosy-tipped breasts that spilled out like forbidden fruit, from a suddenly diabolically disarranged dress. These delights invited a more intimate examination than the eye alone could give, caressing hand or tongue or both, and he had to concentrate very hard on knightly vows, candled altars (priapic, phallic candles; bare naked, unclothed crosses—No! dear Lord, no . . . ), hard, penancing stone floors, the weight of mail, the chill of steel at dawn (better . . . ), chanting monks with tonsured heads, cold water and thin gruel, hair-shirts and such, before his rising excitement cooled sufficiently for him to be able to stand comfortably again. It did not help that instantly he wished to relieve himself.
Resolutely he drew his sword.
"Thou art an Evil Thing, a witch, and ere you suborn me further I shall set good Christian steel to your flesh . . ." It was all excellent stuff, learnt from The Knight's Manual, but unfortunately it seemed to have little effect on its intended victim. The manual had not provided for laughter, for disdain, for a flying-off of all clothes, for a moving forward until bare flesh was pressed skin-tight against his suddenly disarranged wear. Neither had it dealt with seeking hands that drew out a rebellious prick and caressed it unbearably sweetly.
If that had been all, then he would have been lost indeed, but even Evil makes mistakes.
"Swyve me, soldier-boy," she said.
Instantly his prick shrivelled like a salt-sprinkled slug and he felt as naked and cold as a fowl plucked living in a snowstorm. It was the words that did it. During his military service it had been an almost universal and convenient p
hrase that was accepted in all the stews and bordellos; it was used by the sluts on the quaysides, the wenches in the hedge, the girls (and boys) of the back streets all over the world, the preliminary to quick bargaining, the passing of coin, and even quicker release. It was a phrase become meaningless with time that nevertheless came trippingly off the tongue, alliteratively used as it usually was with other words than "soldier": sailor, sweetheart, sire, sugar, saucy, sheikh, sahib, sergeant, signor, senorita . . . But a lady would never say it, never, not even in extremis.
The court ladies he had known, in reality quite as randy as their stew-sisters, if not more so, were all brought up to use polite euphemisms. "Put the Devil in Hell" was a popular one, as was "Sheath the sword," and the less flattering "Pop the coney down its burrow." All these were perfectly acceptable, and the very words gave the actions a superficial respectability, so that the lady could ask whether the Devil found it warm enough yet, or the gentleman assure his partner that the scabbard was a perfect fit without blush staining either's cheek.
So, for the second time that night his proud prick took a tumble, for the words had dampened his ardour irretrievably. It was just like being asked to drink nectar from a piss-pot.
She sensed his withdrawal, and for an instant she seemed to him to flare and grow taller, then her face crumpled, her bosom sagged and she spat in his face from blackened, broken teeth.
"You will pay for this, my fine gentleman, you will pay!"
Considerably frightened, but more scared to show the fear, he recalled the torn edges of his dignity and neatly sewed them straight with the classic line: "Do your worst, foul hag: I am ready for you!" And perhaps he thought he was.
Stepping back, the once beautiful hair now a greasy grey thatch, she raised her left hand and pointed the index finger at him, the nail curved and blackened. She started to curse him, roundly and fluently. Shrinking back in spite of himself he forgot to cross himself: afterwards he wondered if it would have made any difference; on balance he thought not.
"I hereby curse you, and call the trees that stand and the stones that lie, the sun that rises and the moon that sets, the wind that blows and the rain that falls, the sky above and the earth below, and all creatures that walk, run, crawl, fly and swim betwixt and between to bear witness to the same . . ."
As if in answer there was a sympathetic growl of thunder: it had been a hot, sultry day.
"I curse you waking, I curse you sleeping; I curse you standing, sitting, lying; I curse you by day, I curse you by night; I curse you spring, summer, autumn and winter; hot or cold, wet or dry . . ."
So far, so good: it was the Standard Formula, nothing specific, and easy enough to be lifted by a bit extra to the priest and a few penances to the poor. The knight wondered if, after all, he was going to get away with it.
"And my special and irrevocable curse is this: may your armour remain rusty, your weapons blunted, your desires unfulfilled and your questions unanswered until you ask for the hand in marriage of the ugliest creature in the land!"
He started back, appalled, but before he could interrupt she went on: "May she not only be ugly, but poor, twisted and deformed as well! And may you be tied to her for life!" And she laughed, shrilly, exultantly. In a blind rage he snatched up his sword again from where it had fallen during the cursing and sprinted forward ready to run her through in his anger, female or no, but came bump! up against some invisible wall that snapped off his sword some three inches from the hilt and bloodied his nose. He went hurtling back as if he had been thrown in a wrestle, to lie on his back on the ground, his head ringing and the broken sword blade embedded in the turf an inch from his left ear.
When he finally rose to his feet, pale and winded, she had gone, leaving a foul, decaying stench that made him gag and pinch his nostrils. Gone, too, was his horse, probably miles away by now, to be appropriated by some grateful peasant in the morning, who would have great difficulty in persuading a fully trained warhorse to submit to the plough. He peered at his heaped armour; already small spots of rust, like dried blood, were speckling and spreading on the bright metal.
There was only one thing to do.
Falling to his knees he prayed: long, angrily and in vain.
The Gathering: Three-
Four- Five- Six- Seven
The Slaves of the Pebbles
One moment our little world was predictable, safe, ordinary: the next we were nearly immolated in a welter of flame.
Predictable, safe, ordinary: I suppose those words could be misleading. Perhaps I should explain that "predictable" meant that we knew tomorrow would be as miserable as today; "safe" meant housed and tolerably fed without outside interference, and that "ordinary" meant just that. It meant an existence we had always known, as far back as faulty memory would take us; it meant a crouching, fearful, nothing-being, prisoned, chained and subject to the whims of our mistress. She should have a capital letter: Mistress. There. For that is what we called her, the only name we knew, slaves as we were, and woe betide any who even thought of her with a small "m" for she would know, or pretend she did, and punish us, and we were so accustomed to her domination that we believed she could read all our thoughts, sleeping and waking.
We? Us? There were five of her creatures in that small hut on the edge of the forest. Slaves, I should say. I was the only one ever let out of the hut, and that for necessaries alone—a sack of flour, tallow for dips, herbs from the hedgerow—and then I was spat upon, ridiculed, even pelted with stones upon occasion by the superstitious villagers who called me her "Thing," her Familiar. Even those intermittent forays were no freedom, for the stomach cramps hit me even worse when I was from her side, only easing when I returned, so it was no wonder that people only saw me as a humped, ugly, deformed thing. I could not even speak properly, for the only tongue I heard was an occasional command, spells and the words of my friends, the others who shared my thrall.
There was Corby, the great black crow, Puddy, the warty toad, Pisky the little golden fish and kitten-cat Moglet, and though we conversed quite freely amongst ourselves when the Mistress was out, it was a language of squawks, hisses, spits, bubbles, and more thought-communication than human speech. I told you I was held near my Mistress by stomach-cramps, and the others, in addition to cages, strings and bars were held in the same fashion, by a pain that increased by degrees of hurt the farther we were from our jailer. The origins of all these hurts were concrete enough; small pebbles or stones that clung to our bodies as though they were part of us. For me it was a sullen red stone that stuck to my navel like a crab; for Corby it was a blue chip that stopped the stretch of his right wing; for Puddy a green rock on his forehead that gave him headaches; for Moglet a crippling glass piece that was embedded in the soft part of her left front pad and for poor Pisky a great moon-coloured pebble that quite filled his starving, round mouth. Why not pull them out? We had tried and all we had got was an intensification of the pain, till it grew too excruciating to bear and we had to stop.
Perhaps the worst part was that we could not remember them being put there, nor coming to this place nor, even, who we were. Yet there were tantalizing remembrances for us all of another life of freedom without pain, in another place, another time: yet so fleeting was this recall to all of us, swift as the space between puff and candle-out, that it was only when the flame dipped and wavered and bent a little before expiring that one remembered a swoop of wings, a cool stone grotto, the rasp of another tongue on one's fur, a gnat at twilight and—another name, clash of swords, warm arms, crying . . . We all had these moments, yet even as we snatched at memory, like a snowflake on the tongue it dissolved and all form was lost. Some things we could remember, though: apparently Corby remembered us all coming, except himself; Puddy remembered me, Moglet and Pisky; I remembered the last two, but Moglet remembered only Pisky, and he not even himself. The interval between arrivals none could judge, so it could have been seven hours, days, weeks, months, years between first and last. Neither did we
know why we were held thus, nor would She tell us, and all questions were answered by laughter, blows or the scorn of silence. Seasons meant little to us, cabined as we were, for we saw and felt little of sunshine or storm, light or dark, rain or warmth—the inside of the hut was always cold, a meagre fire kept burning and the one window shuttered fast, so that day or night, summer or winter were much the same to us. Sometimes birds whistled down the chimney or a hedgepig would pause on the doorstep when She was out, but always these encounters were reported to Her on her return by her Creature-in-the-corner, the broom that was her real familiar, and we were beaten for encouraging curiosity. Once, I remember, I asked a martin resting on the thatch whether it was spring or autumn, and when she heard of this from the sly, crackling spy, she had it beat me senseless.
Yet this Broom-Creature was not only violent towards us, for sometimes when the air, even inside, was sticky and hot, and it was difficult to sleep, She would take the thing into her arms and whisper to it and push the smooth, knobbed end under her skirt and it would jerk and throb until she cried out in what seemed pain and would thrust it from her, its tip swollen into the thickness of a man's fist and all glistening and wet with what looked like blood . . . But it was not real as she and we were. It was only a piece of wood bound with dried stems and twigs and she had to use words to bring it alive, the same sort of words she used to bring things into the hovel, things that were shadows so thin you could put your hand through them like smoke and yet which threw writhing coloured patterns on any surface they touched. These apparitions floated and gestured and whispered in an obscene language only she could understand and always after they had gone she became increasingly short-tempered and restless, and sooner or later would come the time when we would be caged and tied and she would begin the preparations for a Shape-Change.
In some ways I looked forward to this, for it meant that I was let out to gather plants and herbs for her spells: mugwort and valerian; comfrey and stinking hellebore; bryony and monkshood; oak galls and liverwort; fly agaric and pennyroyal. All the ingredients She used I did not know, for she had others in bottles and jars and boxes I was not allowed to see, locked away by magic words in cupboards and a chest. And of the mixing we saw little for She would go behind a curtained-off alcove at the other end of the hut when she was ready to begin. Then all we would know was the stink of dried, crushed and powdered ingredients in the smoke that rose from the blending of her concoctions, a stench that invaded every corner, lending foul odours to the dry bread we ate, the cold water we drank. We could hear a little of the muttered spells and incantations that accompanied all this and we were allowed to see all the transformation: I think having an audience for this somehow fed her overweening vanity, even of small account as we were.