by Tanith Lee
The leaves were dropping in the woods, and on the yard where I was put out to sit on sunny days, and sew long shapeless garments of the order.
Here too he visited me after some nineteen days.
Signian. I had been told his name as well by then. Prince Signian. Son of a dead lord and the lord’s still-living wife, the Princess Orjana.
When he came into the yard, the priestesses fluttered.
He was thought very handsome. So it was continually announced.
He had long yellow hair, wide shoulders, and a strong stocky frame. His eyes were narrow and light-colored in his broad, sun-browned face.
Perhaps he was handsome. To me he was ugly. He reeked of his sweat and eating, of kennels and closed rooms. Of murder. It had been his shot that pierced my son and smashed him on the earth. And he had eaten of him too.
Now he sat and looked at me, deep in my black eyes, black enough to resist him, as the lake mirrors, but conceals what lies beneath its surface.
The priestesses had heard the tale of my shape-shift. I could discern, despite their faultless belief in their goddess, they did not believe this. The young men had been hunting, when they drank deeply. The shadows had deceived them then, some trick of midday summer light. The priestesses would not quite say this, but they knew it to be so. And they only liked him more, their darling Prince, for his little fallibility. That he had faith in magic meant too he kept his faith in the miracles of the gods. Which could only be virtuous and benign in so noble a master.
He asked me if they were kind to me in the goddess-house.
Naturally I said they were.
He asked me if I yet remembered where I had come from, anything of my past—for already the women had asked that, and I had said I had no memory at all before I woke here. To him I gave the same falsehood over.
Then he put his hand out, and stroked and fingered my hair, that my first lover had compared to the moon.
After this Prince Signian left me.
But the next day I was taken, under guard, to another house, one which belonged to him and was very different.
• • •
As the winter came back, I was growing used to the new phase of my life.
I hated it, it goes without saying. I was in despair.
This may seem very peculiar. I had never had much, and lacked all comforts save the most basic, and those wrested by me from a harsh environment. But I would gladly have taken my old life on, more than gladly if I might have gone back into its last stages, when I had been a bird, and had my children. Had my son, my lover.
Now, in the grand lodge just inside the wall of the Prince’s town, I was given every material thing that might be wanted or wished. Fires burned hot for me, lit and maintained by servants. I had a wooden bed with linen pillows, and pelts of bears and wolves. I had a blue gown, and later another the red of blood. I could wash and bathe myself in warm scented water whenever I chose. There was food, meat and white bread, and wine to drink. After the first thirty days, he gave me a little silver ring to wear on my thumb. He said I should study it, and think how the silver circlet of my quim ringed round his manhood. To begin, I only wore it when he came to see me. Then he grew petulant, and after this I wore it always.
I was a prisoner. I do not exaggerate. I would not take on my other form, for I could not fly the house. And why was this? Something so paltry. I was never let out, always in some kind guarded, indeed watched, women to walk behind me, men to undo doors. Only into a tiny garden might I go, and that always accompanied, among the clipped bushes soon salted with snow. To get beyond the outer doors was not allowed. He had told me straightly. I was too precious, he said, too necessary to him to be risked. I had no memory, was frail. In the spring perhaps, he said. Then he might take me up into the town to see its stupendous sights of lofty buildings and gloomy byways. Even there I should, I knew, be trapped.
Yet, as a swan, I could escape instantly—Ah no. The answer to the riddle has a terrible simplicity. A swan must run and launch itself into the air, its body large and wings so big. Unlike the smaller birds it cannot spring straight up, even from the ledges of the wider windows. Even in the little garden, where there was no space to run at all. I had no room anywhere to begin my flight. It had been the same in the goddess-house.
I dreamed of flight, that was the sum of it. In dreams the roof blew off and the inside walls collapsed. Then I evaded my jailors, dashed through the leveled chambers without impediment, leaped and spread my wings—and was gone.
He had a story he told me, that I had been under a spell, locked into the form of a bird by an evil Enchanter. But his love—that is, Signian’s love for me—had broken the sorcery.
• • •
I do not say he loved me.
I know he lusted for me, or rather perhaps for what he had seen I was. He often remarked on the whiteness of my skin, my uncanny hair.
He did not take me until I had been examined intimately by an old woman, brought in by one of the priestesses. I loathed but was not unprepared for her disgusting investigations. I had had my mother to put up with in the past, after all.
But I knew the examiner would soon find I was not a virgin, and would this put off the Prince? For of course I knew also why I was being examined.
No one, however, said anything to me of my state, until Signian appeared that evening.
He gravely gazed at me then, as we sat before the great dinner that had been laid for him and, I suppose, for me—I barely touched it—amid the blazing forest of candles.
“I’ve been informed, Otila, of your misfortune. I shall not be the first with you.”
Should I seem startled, shocked? Contrite? What use? I had anyway no heart for the game.
I said, “That is true.”
“Sir,” he said softly, kindly. “You must always call me that.”
“Very well.”
He sighed and ate more of the greasy meat, chewing and frowning with thought. At least, the dish was not of roasted swan.
“Otila, I recall your memory has failed you, yet do you have any notion how this came about, that you lost your maidenhead?”
Modestly I kept my eyes on the table’s red shawl, trimmed with beads. “Sir, it is my one dim memory.”
“You were forced?” he asked, hopefully it seemed—but whether from stricture or prurience who could say.
“I was wedded.”
Where this lie had found its origin I stay unsure. It entered my brain, slipped out upon my tongue.
“Wedded?” He had laid down the joint. He must be enraged or perturbed, which was it? I had already seen he had only a limited number of expressions, and one might often have to serve the purpose of two or three moods.
“Yes. My father gave me to a man. The gods witnessed our union. We were together a little while—I forget how long . . . and then—then too, I forget.”
“Sir,” he instructed, absently now. He thought once more. He said, “Your husband—was it he, do you think, who aborted you from being one of the gods’ creatures to a spiritless bird?”
“I can’t say, sir.”
“Yet you were wedded. And you recall no other detail—even his looks—his name?”
I shook my head.
He banged the table with his fist. On their bronze spikes, shaped like the branches of thin trees, the candles trembled warningly.
I said, “Sometimes—I seem to think—he was tall, and dark-haired . . .”
What else, of course, could I summon. The Prince resettled himself.
“I must speak to the priests. Your previous union must be properly dissolved. It’s unlawful I bed another man’s wife. Unless I have killed him in battle.”
Maybe I had trusted I could evade his carnality if I made out I was that, a wife. Really I think I had known he could convince himself, always, of some accepta
ble path whereby he could gratify his needs.
In any case, after he had eaten he drew me to the bed in the corner, pulled my dress both down and up, wadded my flesh and bit at my breast, before cramming his piece inside me. He was a fair size, and would have hurt me if I had not been undone. He demanded little of me but compliance, though now and then instructed, as he had instructed me to call him Sir, to tickle or pinch him here or there. His wants were minimal. Yet he rode some while, a slow and lumbering journey during which he grunted, and at the climax of which he gave a tiny squeal.
He had me only twice, and was quicker the second time, if less vocal.
My distaste was really beyond words, even thought.
I can compare it only to the unpleasantness of certain bodily reactions, a short flux of the bowels, or vomiting. It was vile, but unimportant. Meaningless in the scheme of my severed life.
• • •
After that congress a servant brought me, the following day, the silver mirror, wrapped in silk.
This in some ways was almost worse than his utilizing me. To gape for the first at my own clear image, and know her for a stranger—more a rape even than Signian’s. He had not touched, I thought, my soul.
• • •
Oh, I was a swan, a swan. I had looked at my reflection then and known it for my own. A swan.
• • •
Beyond the lodge, the town climbed ungainly up the hill to a terraced palace. From the highest window of my prison I could see this grandiose and insignificant dwelling, his home, where he lived with his mother, the Princess. The palace was constructed of hefty stones, and banners tipped with metal flailed about its roofs. The town itself was morose and dirty. The sort of pigs that wandered the village streets, ambled here also, through filthy alleys and along the wider lanes—that were less than the width of the lodge’s main chamber, and frequently blocked by refuse.
Outside the walls of this extended jail of a town, the forest had been cut away, for reasons of defense.
Further down the trees began again, around a broader road, up which wagons and carts, and even boats mounted on wheels, sometimes toiled, and men and women trudged.
Last of all, about a mile off, I might see the lake.
Long hours I spent at the window, staring out. My mind spread its wings and spurred me from this alien body I did not recognize, and fanned away, away.
I never thought of the Enchanter Hrothgar, at the window when I watched the lake. Never once, I am prepared to vow before any god, even the unkind measly gods of Signian’s town.
Only in my room, when Signian was gone, after I had washed his slime and reek away from me, only then did I think of Hrothgar. And I cursed him. I wished him in agony and dead, or in some molten pale hell, to which the worst of the wicked are consigned.
But I dreamed of him most awfully after Signian’s visits. As if that thrusting bulb of meat had stirred me up to lasciviousness in turn for my other, occult lover.
I never dreamed of my dead son. Never fantasized as to what our love-making might have been, the rasp of feathers, flare of wings, a land-flight. As a woman, I could not picture—let alone experience—what that could be, only that it must and would have happened, and that then, from him, my lover the swan, my own true progeny would have been born, laid like ghostly opals in our nest, brought by us to life.
Spirits of the air.
• • •
The winter scraped and sharpened its scythes on the four winds, and mowed down the year. In the town, the palace, even in my prison, we must celebrate, now the longest month of the cold season was done.
Seven little house statues had been brought out of Signian’s people’s gods, six of them shapelessly male, and one a version of the shapeless veiled goddess I had been shown in the goddess-house.
They were lined up on the great hearth-lintel, given crowns of gilded straw, and candles lit to them and ribbons hung over them—as if for infants who must be kept amused. Boughs of evergreen, lugged in from the despised wood, were raised along the beams, with painted wooden bees on strings, to ensure plenty.
I was sent the red gown. And when Signian arrived, he delivered to me, in person, in a long box of carved wood, the necklace of polished emeralds.
He often harangued me now with a history of his ancestors, all of which I forgot instantly. He spoke of travels, too, not his own, I believe, and so had taught me something of items and materials, jewels and sea-tides, for these things lingered in my mind—they were not human, therefore perhaps retainable. Now, he told me this:
“These emeralds are a minor treasure of my house. My father gave this necklet to his mistress once. But she died, in childbed—only a daughter. My mother, the Princess, thinks it seemly now I award it to you, even though you’ve borne me no children yet, and the old wisewoman—” He meant the old woman, who now examined me always once a month. “—says you are still not in that condition.”
What could I say to this curious speech? I thanked him, of course. Ill-omened jewels, formerly dragged from the coffer of one dead. And he wished me fecund? I knew in the heart of my womb that it was my shape-shift that would deny always any human child, wanted or not. Just as I had come to be sure I could bear the children of swans. After he had laid me and finished, and gone away, I considered Signian’ s second speech to me that night. I was to be presented to the Princess Orjana. She had said she must judge me fit for my apparently enduring role as her son’s plaything. So I was to go up to the palace. To the stone heap on the hill.
4
Complex preparation preceded my entry to the palace. I was soaked in a bath of honey and curd, laved in scent. I fasted for a day, drank only water. My hair was washed and dressed in six long plaits. I was told I must call the Princess Royalness. They clothed me in the red garment. I was not permitted to walk, as I had not been permitted when brought to the lodge. I traveled in another closed cage, this on wheels, drawn by two small horses thick with hair, in the manes of which bits of gold were wound, just as bits of bronze and silver had been wound in my plaits.
• • •
“I have been hearing tales of you,” she said, the moment she was seated, and the others had withdrawn to the ends of the long, chill room. One there played a stringed instrument, perhaps further to obscure our words. The Princess motioned I might sit on a stool. I did so. “My son supposes you were enchanted under some spell, which his care of you has broken. Can this be true?”
“I don’t know, Royalness.”
“No. They say too you recall nothing of your past—only some hint you were wedded, or think you were. Or is that merely a little fib, to hide an immorality?”
I said nothing. I gazed only at her hands, which lay together in her lap like two discarded yellowish gloves. They had mentioned, to look too often in her eyes would be an impertinence.
She also was an old woman, but old in a manner I had never, until now, ever seen. Hers was a preserved age. Her parchment skin and skull-like face had been rubbed with unguents, and lightened with powder. The thin wither of her lips was touched with soft rose. Her hair, gray where mine was white, had been burnished to a shine and intricately dressed, and she wore a little circlet of gold in it, reminding me of their ghastly faceless goddess.
“Well,” she said, “my son is fond of you, and you please him. For now therefore it seems best you live here with us, in the high house. One day Signian must marry. He will choose two wives. Then it will be necessary for you to go away, perhaps even from the town. But don’t be downcast. Though your heart will break, you will be respected among our people for your service, and will receive, in addition, a small amount of money, to keep you till your death. Any offspring you may produce will likewise be maintained. He may gain a good position either in the Prince’s guard, or the god-houses, wherever it is judged most suitable. A daughter can gain, if diligent and couth, a station among the l
ower ladies here, a nurse to the children or somesuch. You see. We are fair enough.” Still I said nothing. What must I say? Something, apparently: “I trust you’re grateful,” she suggested, “for my care of you?”
“Thank you, Royalness.”
She refolded her thin, flaccid hands.
“Meanwhile, I should like you to tell me how you think it is my son, usually so sturdy in his commonsense, credits he witnessed your change from a white swan into a woman?”
Jolted, I stared after all into her deadly face. Her eyes were narrow and pale like his. But—unlike his—full of a dire, nearly sub-human intelligence.
“Royalness—how can I know? I remember nothing of it—”
“Yet you remember a wedding to another man. The priests here will dismiss any possible prior union this very evening. Do you accept such a thing?”
“Yes, Royalness.”
“Of course. My son must be preferable. You are not quite an imbecile, I think. But now I shall tell you something of my own.” She leaned forward slightly. Was she so eager? I felt I would recoil, but knew I must instead keep motionless, and now was expected to meet her eyes. “My son was told, when a child, stories by his nurse, legends and ancient tales. In you he believes he’s glimpsed something especial. But naturally you are nothing of the kind, only a young woman with strange coloring, and a mysterious, shall I say, past. Be thankful, Otila, if such is your name, at our sophistication. But let me warn you, too. I have heard such myths of transference and shape-shift, when a girl. I do remember one particular old yarn . . . A maid that a prince fancied, who crept every night out of his bed to a burial-mound, and plucked the plants there, and wove them into a dress which, if putting it on, made her become a wild swan. But they discovered her and knew her for a witch, and burned her to death, so not the slightest morsel of her, flesh, hair, nor bone, remained. Do not, Otila, however flighty or forgetful your mind, lead me to imagine you are a witch.”
