by Tanith Lee
We sat, he on the other log, I on my heels on the floor.
He tore the uncooked rabbit in three and ate it without ceremony, but also without any uncouthness. He ate the eyes and tongue, and the bones too he ate, I heard them crunch between his teeth. Even the teeth of the rabbit his teeth crunched and he swallowed them, those teeth of the rabbit.
Perhaps I ate. I think so.
The wine was sweet and strong, I had never tasted wine before. Perhaps, I thought without much awareness, this was not wine anyway.
The shadows deepened in the hut, but the fire kept bright and warm without any attention. And then four moths came in and perched, one against each of the four walls. They were little double flying flames. He must have made them, or summoned them.
All his meal was gone. Not a trace. Instead a tawny, barred feather lay on the log. This feather did not amaze me.
“I’ll tell you my name,” he said. “Hrothgar. Say it back to me.”
I said it back to him.
He did not ask my name, I had none, not really, just some scrap my mother and some of the villagers called me by. It had never been mine, and for myself I had never invented one.
“I will call you,” he said, “Otila. It’s a lucky name.”
I should have asked him why he gave me a name, and a rabbit to eat, and wine. Why he sat here.
He said, “Well, now I’ll be on my way.”
I said nothing. On the walls the lights faded. The jug and the cup were gone. On the dish were only the bones of the cooked rabbit that perhaps I had eaten, and a crust of the bread. No feather lay on the log.
Outside something called through the darkness with a wild unholy bubbling note.
I had the impression of shadowy flight, and twice red amber fire, heartless, soulless: two eyes. Was I still reflected in them, still swimming on their surface like a water-bird? I seemed to feel myself for a moment carried up into the sky, and all the night opening around me like a limitless roof stabbed with stars.
When I woke the night was nearly done.
I lay by the table, with my head on my arm. It was cold and the fire was out.
• • •
I put four young winter cabbages and some of the gourds into a sack, and some of the thin beer in the leather skin. I walked down with them, which took perhaps an hour, and into First Village.
A horrible place. Seldom had I been there, but the muck of it had, apparently, never quite been rubbed off from my mind. It stank too, of men and their dirt, and ill-kept beasts. Gray, tusked swine rooted in the alleys that were presently floored with hard snow. Smoke rose from chimney holes and murked the pale sky.
People rambled about, seeming busy and important in that slack aimless way they have, that way I have never grasped—either its reason, or how to pretend I am the same and so pass as human.
The upper village, built on an earthen terrace and now paved white, had the gods-house, a long low wooden shack. I went by and tried the mortal houses with my wares. I had never bothered with the lower alleys. I thought he would not be down there.
Six days had passed since the night when we ate the rabbits, and he ate one and its teeth.
In all the nights I had heard the owl call only once.
Yet I knew he had not left the vicinity of the forest, still haunted it.
Of course, he might be anywhere. But then, why not here?
As to why I sought after him I had no idea.
When had I ever had one? It was only that seek him I did.
He had told me his name.
At some of the doors where I rapped with my knuckles, they shouted me away. One, a rough-haired woman, came out, snatched up and threw a clod of hard snow at me. It glanced off my hip.
Then I turned a corner, and a man walked up and bought two of the cabbages and took a drink of the beer. He gave me a brown misshapen coin—not often had I beheld true money.
When the man was gone I put the coin in the pouch in my skirt, and looking up I saw an old humped man, unlike the other, crouching along the street. Deformed, with a great broken hill seeming to rest on his back, his gray hair straggled down like cord. Less gray this hair than silver. And looking up and out, from his face all bones and ridges and age-lines that were like knife-cuts, his eyes. It was him. It was the Enchanter.
Having sought him and found him, now I stood powerless and speechless on the snow. In that narrow crowded space between the walls of rotted houses, he moved up to pass me. He was bent so much his head reached only to my breast, but his eyes laughed at me, cruel black as the lake of drowning, where my image had swum. “Oh, so you stirred yourself to look for me, then?” he said.
But before I could answer, to agree or deny, round the shank of a wall he went. And going after, he was gone. As I had known he must be.
So I went away, back through the village, lugging the heavy sack and the skin with me, not seeking custom, getting none.
I had seen him, and been seen.
• • •
That night in the hovel I made my own magic.
Did I know what I did? Know? I knew nothing at all.
• • •
I threw torn bits of my hair on the fire and splashed my blood on it from a shallow cut I made across my arm. I called his name, on and on. I wept, too. I wept because I was lonely and had nothing beautiful, even if I did not know I was alone, nor did I understand what beauty was.
And I cursed him later, when the moon rose and not a sound in the forest, not a shadow, not a feather.
In the end I lay on my back on the floor and put my hand between my legs, as sometimes I had since childhood, somehow discovering that not all touches there must be painful, obscene, deathly, and meaningless.
The fire came off the hearth, with my blood and hair and tears in it, and burst in my body, and I screamed, and yet his name still was in the screaming.
Then I fell asleep, and in my sleep dreamed the owl had entered the room and stood on me, its claws planted on my breasts like hard bone hands, and with a dead hare in its beak.
When I woke, stiff and sore at sunrise, there was a tiny scratch on my left breast. But perhaps I had made it by accident.
The fire, though, had not gone out. It blazed. There was wood in the middle of it burning. And on the log-table was the hare, headless, bloodless, boned, and peeled of fur, all ready for the pot.
• • •
“Where’s the old cripple with the humped back?”
“Ah, he’s to the out-farm.” This, from some man.
It was his woman who demanded, suspicious and glaring, “Why’d you ask it, white-face girl?”
“I have a pot needs mending,” I replied.
For by then, here in Second Village, and three hours’ walk from the hovel, I had heard tell of the old fellow with gray hair, who could heal the animals of sodden feet and the rash, and also mend household items.
I had come all this way on this occasion without anything to sell or barter.
“White scut!” spat the woman, as I went off.
The out-farm was a holding up a hill, with the skulls of foxes and even three wolves hung on cords, to clack in the wind and scare off others.
The poor sheep huddled by the bare trees, plucking at a bundle of dried grasses left there for them. Their coats were thick, but winter came, was arrived.
Was this the first I ever felt any pity? Even for myself I never had. Only variable hurts had I ever felt, and not known what to do with them.
He was with the sheep, too, the old cripple man that was Hrothgar the Enchanter’s disguise. I saw what he did.
He must have told those in the house not to watch, frightened them with some sorcerous formula. The gods know what.
He was straddling the sheep, and for a moment I thought something else went on, as it does here and there. But
no. Clamping them between his thighs with a strength and control few men, even when young, could call on, he made much of them, stroking and patting them, and singing words whose sounds did not resemble words. Each animal was let go from his clutch, glowing. Then they shone, in the wet white sun, like the palest gold—a metal then I had never seen.
I stood by the fence, and he paid me no attention. Nor did he shout I must go away.
In the end he was done, and all the sad sheep were shining and frisking about. Then he came crouching over to the fence posts.
“Why follow me?” he said.
“To see you.” I was bold with exhaustion, and also amazement, and—gladness. I liked how he had made the sheep better.
“Well. I’m seen.”
“Visit me,” I said, “this night.”
“So forward,” he said. “Not tonight. I have things to steal tonight.”
Now I was really astonished. Why need he steal?
“What?” I said. And stupidly, or maybe not stupidly, “I have things you can steal, too.”
“Oh, you do. But think of this. Hrothgar steals also from himself.”
Then—he did send me away.
I cannot describe how he did it. Did he ask or tell or command me to go? I found myself back among the trees, walking into Second Village.
I felt leaden as if the mud and snow and filth weighed me to the earth. Yet also, how curious it was, alight and clean.
• • •
In the iron tub I washed myself and my hair with water that was chill, for I could only take the edge from its cold with the heated panful from the hearth. A little stream ran behind the hovel, not quite frozen. I had carried off so much I had thought I would drain it dry. In my mother’s time we had used this tub on only a few occasions every year, and then always she first, so I washed myself in water already shallow and thickened from her cleansing.
After the bath I did not want to put on the clothes I had worn. I found the other garment, the long shapeless, colorless dress of coarse wool that had been in our family, so my mother said, since my great-grandmother’s time. It was for the use of any female who must go to the gods-house, to swear hand-lock pledge, or answer for some misdeed, or show a baby to one of the gods. It fit me well enough, but at first I thought I would take it off, for it itched. But then the wool seemed to settle.
I combed my hair by the crackling fire, drinking a little of the beer.
I said to the sparks as they flew up, sizzling at the wet drops that dashed from the comb, “If you won’t come to me I shall curse you properly. I know how to do it.” I did not know. There had been little cunning, or craft of any kind, in my family. Yet at this time I felt a sudden power on me. It was the power of desire, which I recognized but had no name for. Except, it had his name. “Hrothgar,” I said to the fire. “Tonight you will come here. Or I shall break your wings and you’ll die.”
Only the madness in me made me say such things, to threaten an Enchanter of such might. Love drives out fear, they say. Or makes fear only the servant of love, and both fools.
But he did not come. Oh, of course he did not.
• • •
A light woke me.
I could not, waking up, think where it might be from. There was no moon, and clouds were all across the stars.
The fire was out. I had smothered it down to keep the wood for morning.
Usually by night in winter my bed was cold, but I was used to that. Now my bed was warm.
I turned and looked into the source of the light, which was his eyes, the whites of them so clear, and the dark lit within like two black lamps that hold a russet fire.
Did I have the sense to be afraid?
Yes.
But I put out my arms and my hands and took hold of him.
Under the cover of the old wool blanket and the older pelts, he was bare as I.
He laughed. Musical, his laugh. Never had I heard a laugh like music.
“It seems you expected me.”
“I cast a spell to make you visit.”
“So you did. But was it worth, your little spell, more than a shriek or a single tear?”
He was warm, hot as flame, and smooth as metal—yet not like that. The lightest hair ran over his breast—feathers—running to a gradual, denser fur along his belly, thick at his loins, thick as the rich hair on his head.
“How quick you go,” he said, amused.
But I would not stop.
I cared nothing. Perhaps I did not reckon him real at all, but a dream, a phantom come to me in sleep, to give me what life never would.
Unlike the front of him, his back and backside were naked, and hard smooth nearly as marble, though then I did not know what marble was. Yet malleable, too, for muscles moved in his back and chest and all his body, fluent as I have felt in feral animals.
Then I felt the rod of his sex tap against my thigh. I could not help but touch it, clasp it. It was like a separate thing, large and strong, a beast itself that I had interested and that now quested, blindly yet sure, coming to find me out even as I tried to discover him, and he while he lay there on his side, and only looked at me, removed.
I had once or twice seen the things of men, if never wanting to, been shown them. They were ugly, wrong-shaped, foul and senseless. But this of his not like that, and itself coaxing and eager, and I wanted, having put my fingers on it, not to let it alone.
But then gently he slid my hand off him. And I thought I had angered him, and was also myself angered—as how had I ever been angry or dared to be?—but instead he roped me with his arms and drew me in.
I lay held fast against him as his kisses opened my mouth.
What is this pleasure? Pleasure then exists—there is joy in the world—
No it is not pleasure or joy. It is some state that has no name, as none of us have names, even when named. Even he does not have any name.
Nor is this any world I have known, and no one has known it. Or, if ever they have, not as I do.
This, is mine.
Mine, his long back, his hair, his skin, his taste, and the thrust of him that breaks me undone and spills my blood on the straw mattress under us. Mine, the sense of his wings that bear us upward. Mine the little cry of pain, and then the cry of delight, and now mine too the wings—the wings—and I alone am flying upward, straight through my body and his, and through the wreck of the roof, and out into the clouded darkness of the night.
Which is where next I find myself. In the night sky above the forests, flying to the slow drum of wing-beats, and truly they are mine, and truly all things are altered.
• • •
When I lived by the other shore, I was brought gifts. I had a velvet gown, dark blood red, and a necklace of dull gray-green stones that were, I learned, polished emeralds. I had silk shoes, too. And boots with fur for the winter. And a cloak of fur, and a mirror, not of iron but burnished silver, and in that mirror I lost myself, for it was no longer myself I saw there, by whatever name I went. For it seems I had thought of myself one way, and even his descriptions of me had only added themselves to my comprehension of self. But she in the mirror was a stranger. I remember, too, in the mirror her hair turned to darkness, and her red dress to black.
That night, after he took me and tore me and had me and possessed and ruined and remade me, I was changed. And soon I glimpsed the whole width of the black water of the lake, below.
Miles of it there are, whole days and nights of journey and time. It is a sort of sea, though tideless, but then no one had ever told me of sea-tides and I only heard those things mentioned in the place where I later lived, on the farther shore, and most of them from him. That is, the other. I do not mean Hrothgar. Hrothgar taught me nothing, thereby everything.
• • •
Below, on the black mirror of the water of the lake then
, I see my white reflection, and high above I am, close to the misty moon, which has come out of cloud and sheens the sky, the earth, and me.
I see myself reflected there, far down on the lake, just as in the mirror of his black eyes.
A pale water-bird, flying.
For I fly.
• • •
I fly.
I feel the tug and pull of the muscles in my body, the white wings that lift and sink and lift again.
Power.
So strong.
And this—is myself.
Otila—so he called me. Then maybe that is the true name of what now I am as first I fly.
I know my shape, for once long before I have seen one.
Not an owl, a predator of amber and red and flame.
I am white as the snow, as my riven hair that the shock of the shock-struck birch turned ashen.
My long smooth throat stretches.
From sideways eyes, black as the lake, I see two sides of everything, and both sides make one for me, one thing, that finally, at last, I understand.
I am a swan.
A swan.
I am a swan.
2
Waking, I thought I had dreamed it all. And then I saw the reed-bed that stood out on the water. Everything was gray and rose in the sunrise-twilight. The dead and frozen reeds stuck up sharp as long knives, and rattled with the dawn wind.
And I sat on the shore, where trees came down to the water. But this was not the part of the lake I knew. And I did know that area of the shore quite well. It was where I came to catch fish, and where, too, now and then, reluctantly I had seen village men also fishing, or the woodcutters chopping down a tree.
But this though, here, was a secretive place. It had been curved in by an arm of the land, and hooded over by the low-hung trees in their weight of dead snow.
As the light grew more clear, a smudge of constant smoke far along the shore, revealed where must be one at least of the villages familiar to me.
