Singing My Sister Down and other stories

by Margo Lanagan

  ‘It is my husband.’ The woman had me in her level sights, step after step forcing her man down the foul road.

  ‘So I see,’ I said, for all the children’s faces were this and that measure of his and hers.

  Rain spits speckled the husband’s dark face. He still dwelt there, inside the iron, though halted and insensible. The wife couldn’t know that – but even only hoping gave her strength to push him on. Such a strange thing, humans’ love. Ours dies and moves on as quickly as it first flames up, but earthlings cleave to one partner for life, and thus bring on themselves such grief!

  I covered his face again. Thin curtains of rain blurred the fallow fields, their marker walls, a distant farmhouse against a hill.

  ‘You’ll be wanting to know how it happened,’ she said.

  ‘I will not,’ I said. ‘I am not curious like your kind. And I have heard too much sadness today.’

  ‘But he’s bespelled!’ said a daughter. Even the thought of magic casts a spell on the unmagical.

  ‘Well, fancy!’ I said. I laid my arm on the corpse-boards, pillowed my head on it and tried to ignore the world, even if I couldn’t split, and fly, and fade.

  ‘He was coachman to our Lord Marcheford,’ said the mother. ‘And fast friends from their childhood with his elder son Edmund.’

  I gazed at the clouds, cursing the coachman for keeping me from floating away between their furrows.

  ‘He drove him out one day to the Lord Peynton’s estate,’ she said, ‘in the carriage and six.’

  Oh heaven, she would relate it all. I closed my eyes as she went on, the cruel iron to one side of me, the grieving wood to the other and below. Once my fire could have thrown her voice back down her throat. I could have turned them all into a grove of trees, or into their own shapes in mud, to melt away in the rain. Or indeed into everlasting iron, all of them, right down to the little suckler there. A sad tableau I could have made of them, forever anchored in this road.

  ‘But they never reached home,’ the mother said, and paused for me to gasp and marvel.

  A swift, a lucky swift, dived across the clouds.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she said.

  My jaw clenched on words that were useless without fire. How could this wife-of-a-coachman know a mind such as mine?

  ‘But Edmund was the solid son,’ she went on, ‘dutiful and steady as they come. Not to mention my Henry was with him. If my lord’s son had shown any flightiness, Henry would have stepped in to set him right. You never met a more loyal servant.’

  Her arrogance, in thinking I would care!

  ‘And then Lord Marcheford fell ill and died – from the loss of Edmund, I should think – and his younger son Nicholas leaped in to take his place, who was not at all the man his brother Edmund was. And he made accusations against my Lord Peynton – which was only a pretext, for he loves making war above all things, that Nicholas. He was just declaring on Peynton when they brought my husband home.’

  ‘Who did?’ I said. ‘Who brought him?’ My face of its own accord had turned towards the blanketed one. Who besides these, his flesh and blood, would feel such an obligation?

  ‘The prancing-boys,’ said a son, and an older daughter snorted.

  ‘Why, we hardly know what class of person they were,’ the mother said. ‘Not officials of any court. Yet not peasants either. Nor merchants. Nor fishermen.’

  I sat up as she rambled. The country was veiled thicker with the gentle rain, the farmhouse ghostly behind us.

  ‘But fine young men, they seemed,’ said the mother. ‘All of a family, by the look of them. Handsome and strange and . . .’

  ‘And a little bit simple, all six of them,’ said the snorty daughter.

  ‘I liked them,’ said another daughter.

  ‘Oh, they were likable enough,’ said the first. ‘But they talked in riddles. They didn’t explain anything.’

  ‘What did they tell you?’ I said.

  ‘That Edmund and Henry had come upon some witch. She took offence and cursed them.’ The mother looked to me as if for sympathy. ‘And then she set my Lord Edmund a task that might undo the curse, she said.’

  ‘Might?’ I said. ‘Such a tease.’

  ‘These young men had joined my husband and my lord in their quest,’ the wife went on. ‘They had travelled a long way as Edmund attempted to perform the task. But he failed. Three times, he failed.’

  ‘Yes, it’s always three.’

  ‘And each time Henry turned further into iron. Until he was iron entirely.’ Her eyes glistened with sadness, and the children were silent around her, one of the boys scowling at me. ‘That was the cost of Edmund’s failing,’ she finished unsteadily.

  ‘And the cost to Edmund himself?’

  ‘Oh, his life,’ she said, blinking away the glisten, and the daughter shot a look to the side. So, something worse than death. Worse than death and worse than iron.

  Well, that’s how it goes, my dears, with loyal humans. The fire crawls through the bond between you and throws a loop around your doting heart. It happens all the time. Magic is splashy stuff, wielded in a rage.

  ‘But what had Edmund done,’ I asked, ‘to draw the witch’s ire?’

  ‘I cannot imagine.’ The mother shook her head. ‘He was at all times so considering and good. And, as I say, he had my husband to protect him.’

  The daughter burst out, ‘But when Mam asked those boys about it, it was as if they couldn’t speak!’

  ‘Something so terrible must have happened,’ the mother said fearfully.

  ‘Or they did it.’ The daughter’s eyes flashed. ‘They were at fault and didn’t want to say so.’

  ‘Bearing home your own curseling is hardly the way of magicians,’ I suggested.

  ‘Anyway,’ said the mother, ‘I tried to make them stay and tell their tale to Lord Nicholas, but the idea seemed to frighten them.’

  ‘Because none of it was true,’ snarled the daughter.

  The mother tossed her head. To me she said, ‘It was odd – they would go no closer to the house than the stables.’

  ‘They loved the stables,’ laughed a son. ‘They all but wept for love of my lord’s horses!’

  ‘They did.’ The mother gave a watery smile. ‘The horses seemed to quite overwhelm them. But then I urged them on towards Lord Nicholas, and before I knew it they had fled up the road. I tried to hold them, I told his lordship. His lordship nearly . . .’

  ‘His lordship lost his mind,’ said the daughter.

  The mother sent me a fearful look. ‘He said that in failing to bring them I had failed him. He threw us out of the household, sent us all away.’

  ‘He didn’t like your story,’ said a son glumly. ‘He hates anything to do with his brother.’

  A few turns of the creaking wheels, a few dozen breaths, the slapping of their feet on the muddy road.

  ‘I didn’t like your story either,’ I said, lying back down. ‘It distracted me from my dying.’

  ‘Then it’s done some good, at least,’ said the impertinent woman.

  We caught up with the rest of the wanderers, drained off the road into a weedy field. Dusk was closing in and they had lit what they call fire. They sat in the glow and the roar of death. Trees’ tales whirled up into the air above them, never to be heard again.

  ‘Help me down,’ I said to the woman.

  ‘Do you need to relieve yourself, mother?’

  ‘I do not. But maybe I will throw myself on that fire.’

  ‘Oh, you’ll do no such thing. Here, sit on the rug there, under the cart out of the rain.’

  She forced me in among her children, some staring, some sleeping. She offered me meat cut from one of those field-fed beasts, dried and pulverised and otherwise interfered with. She offered me bread, which is seeds beaten to uselessness, then watered, then fired stiff.

  ‘I cannot eat this,’ I said. ‘It is neither fresh nor rotted down properly.’

  ‘There’s plenty,’ she i
nsisted. ‘Or there will be. Tomorrow the Lady Grofhurst is bringing food for everyone. Remember her fellow at the camp last night, him with the silly wig and cloak? People say she’s a miserable old widow, but she’s got two daughters with good hearts, and they’ve pleaded with her and turned her kindly towards us.’

  I pushed away the mother’s hand with the bread. ‘You eat it. Divide it among yourselves.’

  ‘Tut-tut,’ she said. ‘No wonder you’re unwell in your mind. What can I bring you, that you will eat? Have some water at least. A person can’t live without water.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘A person can’t.’

  ‘You certainly look well,’ she said. ‘Even with no food or water. Better than when we picked you up. A bit of a cart ride was good for you, I think.’

  A deep sigh came into me, airing and enlivening the earth of me. Curse this woman’s kind heart and her stories and her iron man above us!

  The family settled and murmured around me, nibbling on their dead food, smelling of it. Beyond the tents, dancing heads bobbed around the bonfire, and people crowed and made merry with noisemakers of string and wood and squeezed air, cheered by the prospect of food and kindness tomorrow. And all the while the fire exhaled, tearing the breath from the dead throats of trees, shrivelling their earth and flittering it to ash, to be blown about on the wind, to be ploughed away into some human’s field and become monotonous grain.

  A queen only sleeps in the winter. I sat up all night fighting the weight of the iron husband overhead, his crushing of me into unwanted life. And I must also undo the mother’s interference, all her mixing of my air and my earth back into each other. She had delayed me here, she and her gabby children. She had pulled these last two quarters towards each other, weaving their edges lightly back together. And the rain wetting me, even in my guise, had helped combine and meld them. Now the fire beckoned too: Do you really want to relinquish me, and all that I can do?

  All night, somewhere in the camp, an old man wept softly, on and on. At first it vexed me; his sobs seemed to pour from the frozen man above me. But I worked on, untangling and separating, and eventually the sound became like that of a running brook, always and never changing, only a different kind of silence.

  The family rose with the sun. Again the mother tried to force food and drink on me, for notwithstanding the iron I had worked myself closer to death in the night. She disliked the look of my face, she said.

  ‘Well, yours are no prettier to me this morning, either,’ I replied.

  ‘Rest here,’ she said, ‘We’ll go up to the road where the ladies are meeting us, and bring back better food for you.’

  She tidied her chicks’ hair, washed their travel-stained faces.

  One of the smaller daughters peered at me under the dropped backboard. ‘Are you going to die here, under our cart?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I told her. ‘There’ll be nothing left if I do. Nothing to tidy away. Or to drag around like this fellow here.’

  Even knocking on the cart bottom, even meeting the pert maid’s eye, fused my elements closer. I dropped my hand and stared out over the weedy field as the family stowed its bundles around me on the rug and above in the corpse-cart.

  Then they were gone, and all the able-bodied wanderers with them. The old man, who must have paused in his weeping to eat and wash, now returned to his despair. Other men too proud to face the Lady Grofhurst sat or paced about the camp, smoking what leaf they had left. I sat very still, meditating on the clear blue sky above the fields, on the quiet autumn earth on all sides, and on my innards, where I was sharpening the division between the two most satisfactorily.

  I ignored at first a sticky noise among the bundles, a small, damp concussion like a landing grasshopper. With the family gone I was prevailing better against the iron. The airy part of me was a leaf decayed to a pattern of veins, the earth near-breathless below.

  I let go the effort of the guise. Let anyone see, who cared to look, my tracery, my compacted earth, my claws, my whirling eyes, my wolf-teeth, my gown of leaf-rag, twig and cobweb, my tall headdress of feather and frost-sparkle. It was fading anyway. They could blame the sight of me on their hunger, their unsettlement.

  The grasshopper landed again, kicked. The fibres that had almost broken, almost released me, air from earth, firmed again, and held.

  I steadied my breath and bent my thoughts again to how little I had, how nothing was left to me to nurture and nourish, to bring through the seasons. I looked to the lacks, to the emptiness, to my desiccation, to the soon-to-be-ash of me. Just this last unlocking and I would be as gone as my Brindlewood, and goner – not even stumps would show where’d I’d been, not even drag-tracks in the earth and muddy gorges where tumbling timbers had torn straight the meandering line of the brook—

  Kick. Tap. This one small insect held me here.

  A snarl broke out of me. I threw aside bundles, brought my earthly hearing to bear on the movement. It was in that bag. I slashed it open and a soft wad of clothing fell out, and from that a pot, with a cloth tied over it. A cloth that was bumped by some jumping thing inside. Some creature captured by a child for a pet. One last little cruelty on me. I raked a claw through the cloth.

  And there he was in my hand, dull brown and damp, stuck about with tatters of the skin he had just burst free from. He pulled in his surprised limbs and sat, humble, rounded, hardly more than a creased stone. A stone with a pulse in his throat. A stone with another stone, bright red-gold, set in his forehead, between his eyes – which deep within held other eyes, younger, lordlier, beseeching.

  The fibres of me greened, thickened, tightened, tendrilled. The air screamed back into my hard-packed earth, lifting, sifting, crawling it to life. Out beyond the cart were the beginnings of fire, calling to me, laughing. Clearer and clearer grew the frog to my reassembling eyes. Brighter and brighter glowed his jewel.

  Until I was self enough, had strength enough, to thrust him into the bosom of my ragged gown. I pushed through the litter of bundles and crawled from under the cart, under the iron.

  I went on my hands and knees through the camp. Air poured down on me from the wide sky, mud gave up to me its earth and water both. In my bosom moved the frog lord, woken from a long sleep by his night beside the magic that had made him.

  Yes, now that I had seen him, held him, I knew him. He was one of mine.

  The crack of a twig and I spin and fling the curse. It flies, a fiery spittle, through the poised wood. His gaze runs up and down me, my spring self, entirely naked and unguised as no man should ever see me.

  He snatches off his hat – pheasant plumed, no less! He is tall, well formed.

  Words of greeting and flattery fall from his lips.

  Then the spell hits him and he is gone.

  And with a cry, a second man, hatted, coated and scarved, falls from among the oaks upon the place where his master stood.

  I woke drinking from a puddle in a wheel rut. The fouled water softened my earth better into my air, muddied me together.

  A man nearby shouted in horror, calling people closer, warning them away. I lifted my dripping chin from the puddle. There was enough of me to raise myself to standing, to walk on.

  ‘Who dares to trespass here?’ I cry.

  The loyal coachman scrambles up, fumbling his master away into his clothing. He would flee, but my thorn brake has hold of his arms and body, my vines his ankles.

  I stand over him in the merest of guises, the gauziest of gowns. ‘Offer up your name or I will separate you from it forever.’

  ‘My name is Henry Cogshall, ma’am. I am my lord’s coachman.’

  ‘Your lord?’ My laughter is chill perfume and petals falling around him. I peer into his small face. ‘Show me this lord,’ I whisper.

  He gazes in terror at my full lips pinked with spring, at the greening whorls of my eyes.

  ‘Show me this prince that you have in your pocket.’

  He brings him out, his sorry master, with all the forest c
linging to him and one frightened leg rowing the air.

  I laugh more softly. ‘How low is brought this lordship! But this is what will come of any man who trespasses and spies on me.’

  ‘I swear, ma’am,’ says the poor coachman. ‘I saw nothing. I was only pursuing my master to warn him—’

  ‘Of course you were.’ I knock his hat to the ground and run my claws through his hair, taking the measure of him.

  I woke at the campfire, stirring it, feeding it, blowing up more flame. The men stood off from me, shouting still, throwing stones that passed through my twigs and cobwebs, my frost-spikes, my rag-and-gossamer gown, that holed my airy earth-flesh. From the woodpile the widow Grofhurst’s servants had stacked I hooked one log after another into the fire pit.

  The flames embraced them and leaped high. I straddled the pit, threw my thickening skirt over. I put back my head and sucked down air as I drank up the heat, the light, the life, the power. Oh, how I loved it! How could I think of leaving it? I took it all; I left none for the men.

  I stepped – repaired, alight – off the ashes and turned toward the road. The men fled around me like hunted beasts, fell before me like toppling trees.

  When my hand leaves the coachman’s head he breathes again, swaying. He forces his gaze to stay on my face.

  ‘You are a better man than your master, little coachman,’ I tell him. ‘Should I reward you with what he sought?’

  He shakes and blushes. ‘Oh no, ma’am. I am spoken for! But, ma’am, if you could only change my master back! For if I return to the palace with only this frog, they will hang me for his murder.’

  I take off my headpiece, shake down my springtime hair, past my waist, past my hips, to my knees. It is water and rock-shadow beaded with frog- and fish-eggs; it is new leaves, baby soft, and rootlets reaching; it is a breeze made solid, bearing bees and the tiniest birds. It is a great NO flowing through a thousand tiny yeses.