Singing My Sister Down and other stories

by Margo Lanagan

  His face falls.

  And that is when I feel it first, when I weaken, when pity taints me. Is that the moment Brindlewood is lost, though this little coachman bears no axe and assumes no title over the land? Should I have stayed entirely cruel, fixed only on my realm’s wellbeing?

  ‘I cannot change him back,’ I say. ‘My part in this is done. But with your aid, and that of your beasts beyond, he might achieve the change himself.’ And I reach through the trees and make men of his carriage-horses, six fine companions, stout-hearted if a little simple, for his and his master’s lonely quest.

  ‘What must I do?’ the coachman says. ‘Whatever it is, I will do it, if it brings my master home.’

  I woke running, a rag-and-gossamer storm, flashing frost, rattling dead leaves, my feet barely touching the weedy clods of the field. I was whole again for this last little flight, fire binding my earth and air and water.

  The widow Grofhurst and her daughters – three clean, rich ladies – stood aboard a wagon, helping their servants hand down the last of the sacks of apples and of seeds both whole and beaten to dust, the haunches of smoked meat, the cheeses and barrels of ale.

  I reached the edge of the crowd around them. I clove it with a cry that used up half my fire, took half my air and water and earth with it. I ran on, not much more than a twiggy cloud to the people who hurled themselves yelping out of my path.

  ‘Mam, what is that creature?’ one of the iron man’s children cried.

  At the wagon, I stepped up onto the wheel-top, onto the tray. The women fell back before my speed and strangeness. I had the frog in one hand and I took one fine daughter’s head in the other, my claws in her hair.

  Lips touched frog, and I threw what fire I had left into their meeting. I threw everything. I used myself up, in a moment burned apart what I had spent days trying to unravel—

  And from pity, of all things. All the woods of the world will be cut down and burned, if my kind can’t bring ourselves to stay pitiless.

  The Lord Edmund fell from my hand like long hair tumbling free; then he formed on his feet, straight, strong and complete as I had just remembered him. Perplexed, too, to find himself a man again, and deep in a kiss with a stranger – as she too was frozen in surprise. But their faces drew apart gently. They saw each other, and they did not let go each other’s arms.

  But now I must let them go, let it all go. The earth of me fell as leaves and a scatter of soil at the lovers’ feet. The water steamed off the magic and was gone. The air of me cartwheeled up and over the boiling crowd, over the fallow field, over the dead campfire with the men gesticulating around it.

  On the cart, the horse-blanket stirred, and was thrown aside. Henry Cogshall sat up, bewildered. He looked around at the desolate camp. Looked up. His honest face, seeing mine and knowing what he saw, was the last thing that dissolved from my sight.

  ‘TODAY OF ALL DAYS, Harmon!’ said Nella. She closed the door behind the palace messenger and turned to me, wringing her hands.

  She was like this now, always anxious, always wanting me nearby. When we first wed, she was immensely sure of herself; at the twins’ birth I had been cowed by her strength. But now she was much more like a child herself, often needing direction and calming. She followed me to my wardrobe. ‘Can you not plead busyness?’

  ‘It’s the king’s daughter,’ I said. ‘Our children are only our children. The palace does not see them.’ I was a little flustered myself, putting on my palace clothes.

  ‘Should we postpone our dedicating, then?’

  ‘No, go on without me, Nella. I’ll be as quick as I can. How long can it take to dress a motionless body that doesn’t care how it looks?’

  ‘But how does all this fit together?’ She fluttered her fingers towards the nursery, the laid-out raiment, our babies only half-dressed for their dedication at the temple.

  ‘Call for my mother. She will know. I must be at the palace.’ And I left without kissing babies or wife.

  As I hurried down the avenue, the day took on a strangeness like a birthing-day’s. How could our princess be dead? Only a year ago I had been faithfully serving her, for those few dazzling months I spent as dresser under her wardrobe man Kinner.

  ‘But Kinner has been ill,’ this morning’s messenger had said. ‘His wife said the news itself might kill him, let alone the dressing of her. She says you will know what the princess liked, what will suit her.’

  ‘I will?’

  ‘Better than any other. Be quick! She must be ready when the king returns. He is being summoned from the lake-pavilion even as I speak.’

  So now I was trying to hurry without perspiring into my best clothes, searching the princess’s wardrobe in my mind. Something dark, something plain but fine . . . And the strangeness was in the air like the first autumn day without haze, a kind of terrible clarity.

  Everything about the palace was subdued: all the pennants were gone, the flowers were stripped from the star-bushes in the portico, and people fell silent at my approach.

  I presented myself to the door guard. ‘I come to dress the princess.’

  ‘She lies in her own chamber, Harmon. You may proceed there without guard.’

  So I entered the royal house, and walked there again, this time as a lone and competent man, a father and a robe-man myself, on call to the king-cousins. The passages and halls were familiar from my months at Kinner’s heel, yet they too were changed by my time away. The princess’s wing of the palace was musty and chill from being closed all these months; the rug underfoot felt slightly damp.

  Two carry-men passed me, with meticulous greetings. Kinner and I had met the queen in this same passage not ten months ago, hurrying, distracted, already looking ill. ‘Kinner, have you seen my girl?’

  ‘No, my lady.’

  She had whirled on past us, directing servants here and there. And when we reached the princess’s bedchamber there had been no princess to dress. I saw neither mother nor daughter again; the princess had vanished from court, and the queen died of the grief of it two months later. I had heard that the king in turn was almost lost to us, so sorely did he feel the queen’s absence, so great was his rage and bitterness against his only daughter. All the kingdom still lived under the shadow of it, though formal mourning for the queen was long done. That shadow could only deepen with today’s news.

  The bedchamber was dimmed, but even so I could see how bare and impersonal it now was. There were no clothes cast on the floor; the princess’s hunting trophies, mounted heads and horns, had been stripped from the walls; the sprawl of books and papers was gone from her desk, and a crystal pen-holder and two fragile open-fans lay there, the sort of ornament the queen loved and the princess loved to scorn.

  Two people conferred in whispers over the lidded casket, which lay on the floor. It was of plain flat-metal, the resin seal poorly applied and coming loose, the princess’s name roughly painted on its paper label.

  ‘Harmon, isn’t it?’ Tresor peered at me. He was one of the fussier housekeepers. ‘Well, you know what you’re here for, man,’ he said. ‘Get to it – we’ve no time for maundering. The king has only to come from the lake-side.’

  The woman beside him flinched; it was Allyn, the princess’s child-nurse. Her soft face was crumpled and dazed with simple grief.

  The wardrobe was as I remembered it, still sweet with grass-sachets against the moths and tawny-beetles, the coloured robes graded exactly as they had been in my mind. I went to the darkest section to start my search.

  As I moved the hung robes along their pole, I heard other people arrive in the chamber. Tresor said, ‘Do it, then!’ and there was the sound of tools against flat-metal.

  I chose the robe the princess had worn for her majority, the first garment she ever had a say in designing. Oh, the quarrels there had been over that! She wanted it stark black, and gave way only as far as a dark, dark blood-crimson. She wanted it entirely without ornament, and was forced to assent to a closely beaded bodic
e, and leaf-work along the arms in a satiny crimson thread. She and the queen came to raised voices and almost to blows over the neckline, which the mother wanted ruffed and spiked, which the daughter refused to adorn beyond the braid edging the high collar. I smiled, the queen’s furious face and the princess’s stubborn one as clear in my mind as if they stood before me now.

  Nails squeaked out of the casket rim in the adjoining room.

  ‘Off with you, now,’ Tresor snapped. ‘We will do the rest.’

  ‘The lid will be quite heavy—’

  ‘Out! You shall see nothing! Shoo!’

  I heard the tool-men leave. I went to the chest of underclothing, opened it, and bent close over the folded beauties there, shining, scented, all intricate work and light, fringe and petal-border, woven and stitched with all the queen’s love and ambition, to lie against her daughter’s skin.

  ‘Harmon?’ called Tresor. ‘We need you in here.’

  I slowly straightened and went back to the chamber. The nurse had her hands to her mouth. Tresor himself looked a great deal less imperious than he had sounded, facing me over the loose-lidded coffin.

  ‘Close the hall door,’ he muttered to the nurse. ‘You, Harmon, help me here.’

  I did as he bade me: I lifted one edge of the box-lid. So heavy, for such cheap metal! It must be lined with lead. We slid it until its weight tilted it towards me, affording Tresor the first view inside. The nurse turned from the door, gave a little mew and covered her face. Tresor became clumsy, and it was left to me to lower the lid to the floor. When I looked up, Tresor had placed shaking fingertips against his forehead, and was taking fleeting, fearful glances into the coffin. The nurse was weeping behind her hands.

  Our lady had not had an easy death. One of her arms lay loose in the casket beside her, still sleeved in its fighting-suit. One of her legs was missing from the knee down. The rest of her was caked with mud and dried blood, with glimpses of fabric here and there, glimpses – quick glimpses – of flesh hacked, in some places through to the bone.

  ‘At least – at least she does not give off a smell,’ said Tresor, his voice gone high and unsteady. ‘We had her brought straight from the battlefield, in the king’s flying-ship—’

  The princess’s face, though uninjured, was dark with blood and dirt. It was expressionless as I had never seen it, not even for a moment. Only now did I realise how very full of passions she had been, our princess, how they had continually stormed across her features, rage clouding and laughter bursting out – only now, when they were gone.

  Tresor controlled his ragged breathing. ‘I will leave her to you. Make her . . . make her easy for the king’s eyes. Allyn?’

  The nurse’s sobbing abruptly ceased, and she wiped her face on her hood.

  ‘There is not much time.’ Tresor went to the door. ‘I will post guard and messenger outside, and send you a more fitting casket. Cover her with a cloth before any enter – only we three must ever see her like this.’

  And he was gone.

  I had dressed and undressed this body many a time. And truth to tell, it was easier this day than on many others. The princess used to vent her resentment of court on us, twitching under our fingers as we adjusted strap and skirt-cloth, striding away before she was properly arranged.

  Allyn the nurse washed my lady’s face, slowly and assiduously, giving gentle moans now and again. When the princess’s loose arm moved with my snipping away the suit sleeve, she covered her face and sobbed again.

  I kept cutting, opening the rest of the suit. There were many scars on my lady’s body from her training, and her filthy hands bore calluses and cold-boils. They were different hands utterly from the ones I had gloved for her majority ceremony. And the rest of her body – well, it was a different thing, too. All the softness had gone from it; all her curves had been starved and marched and battled into angles.

  ‘How could the child do this to herself?’ whispered Allyn.

  I shook my head. ‘I never thought I would be glad that the queen is dead.’

  ‘Oh, yes – it’s a blessing she never saw this!’

  We covered the princess; the fine casket was brought in and the poorer one removed. Then Allyn and I lifted her onto the table, and Allyn set about washing the body while I cleaned the hair – and a poor, chopped tangle it was, to be soaped and rinsed and combed and perfumed. Allyn paused often, overcome, in her sponging of the mud from the battered skin. ‘Ah, my baby . . . a bare fourteen and the cause of so much sorrow . . . an axe has been here, look!’ Perhaps her weakness made me the stronger, or perhaps it was my long habit of adherence to duty, but I kept working, reverent but speedy. I was aware all the time of the king drawing ever closer to us. How fast? Was he prostrate with grief on a litter, or hurrying, on horseback?

  ‘Ah, but she is so ruined, who was so lovely!’ Allyn cried out when the corpse was clean and dry before us. She was right; the princess still appeared soiled, with all her bruises and grazes. We had wrapped the larger wounds to keep the trunk and limbs shaped right for clothing, and the white bandages made her skin seem all the darker with injury.

  ‘But she must not seem ruined,’ I said. ‘Not to the king. Fetch some powder, Allyn, and dust that bruise on her forehead.’

  I went to the clothing-table, and one by one I brought the many garments, layer over layer, that the princess would last wear. Allyn calmed once the first under-shift was in place, covering the bandaged leg. And she helped me – she was strong-bodied and could lift the princess for my dressing.

  This was not like dressing babies’ small, rubbery bodies, guiding these heavy limbs into sleeve and underskirt. It was very much like the time my lady spent all one night stalking a skunk-cat in the ravines, and had to be bathed and dressed in her sleep for a midday feast the next day – only this time she did not moan or try to squirm away from us. She was so obedient! – in this was she most different. Those calluses, those many hurts, were only what one would expect of such a fierce and fiery girl once she had her own way, once she freed herself from soft palace living.

  At last she was fully attired – the majority-robe and the two sleeve-layers beneath it held the loose arm in place. Allyn stood, awkward, holding one beaded court-slipper. The other was on the princess’s only foot.

  There was a knock on the door.

  ‘Stay away!’ I called out.

  ‘I am to tell you,’ cried the messenger, ‘that the king’s party has been sighted in the pass.’

  The nurse gasped and looked about, as if a foot might sprout out of nowhere for her to put the slipper on.

  ‘Very well,’ I called.

  ‘They are approaching with some speed,’ added the messenger.

  ‘Very well,’ I said again. ‘We will be ready soon, tell Tresor.’

  ‘But we cannot just leave a space here!’ hissed Allyn, shaking the shoe at me. ‘And the skirt – look how it falls where the leg is . . . is not there. He must not see that!’

  ‘A roll of cloth . . . and a little one to make a foot! You tie up the hair.’ I hurried into the linen-store to find something suitable.

  I had rolled the false leg and made the slipper appear filled, and Allyn had smoothed the hair back and fixed a knot of false hair behind the princess’s head, by the time the messenger knocked again.

  ‘The king is at the gate and coming!’

  The nurse and I exchanged a frightened look. ‘She must be in the casket,’ Allyn whimpered.

  ‘I will lift her. You hold the arm steady.’

  ‘But the leg—’

  ‘When she is in the casket.’ And I took the body in my arms, and we walked around the casket and gently-gently but swiftly – placed and straightened her. Allyn smoothed wisps of hair back from the face. I fetched my rolled cloths and quickly did the leg and foot work, and l was just bringing the blood-crimson hem of the robe down to cover all but the toes of the glittering black slippers when – thump! . . . thump! – the kingstaff struck the chamber door.

/>   Allyn leaped away from the casket, cast a clean cloth over the wash-table, and kicked the muddy washing cloths behind a cushioned bench seat. I gathered up the combs and bowls and hair-oil bottles, and was hiding them there also when the door began to open.

  Then I saw nothing but the carpet before my feet, as I stood beside Allyn in our deep bows to the king.

  Several people entered – those would be the princess’s five brothers as well as the king, and the king’s close-retinue, those dour women and men with whom he had kept company since his widowing. There was a moment’s pause, then someone strode towards the coffin. I straightened from my bowing to see the king, self-dressed in riding clothing, standing at his daughter’s foot. He put back his head and uttered a keening cry. Several other people took up that weird sound – the nurse beside me began straight away. But something stopped me joining in, something in the king’s face, some note in his voice. In the midst of the others’ keening, he ceased his own noise, and walked up to his daughter’s head, and bent over her.

  My breath caught. Only I could see them, the live face and the dead. Wake up, girl!, was my thought – I wanted her face to be animated, and thus protected, against this look her father cast on her. For though his stance was hunched and broken as for grieving, no tear fell from him; instead, his eyes shed only the cold light of an immense satisfaction.

  The keening ran and churned in the domed ceiling. The nurse was sobbing again, loudly now that it was proper, and she fell against me and I supported her. The king hung there over his daughter, his eyes bright, his gaze grim and greedy on her emptied face.

  And then the reality struck me, like a lance down my spine pinning me to the floor. I had held my princess’s severed arm, I had lifted and arranged her beaten head, I had carried her cold body in my arms. But only now did I truly apprehend that she had died – and died alone on a foreign battlefield, with her father’s curse on her head.