by Tanith Lee
I sat, caught in the trancing, lizard-like glare of her eyes.
It transpired I need say nothing now.
“One further matter,” the Princess Orjana added, sitting back. “You will have your hair darkened. And your skin, a little. You are too unusual. Oh, he prefers you pale, but my son always heeds my advice. Certainly you will do so.”
• • •
She sent two of her women. They stained my hair with a stenchful paste which stung my head, and turned my tresses, as the women called them, black.
It was powder I must use on my skin.
They powdered my face and neck, my hands, to show me how I must go on. Now I had a tawny skin.
My mouth they tinted with a red salve, not rose but carmine.
When he came later, and pushed me over on the bed, he decided aloud that I stayed pale below, both flesh and hair. He seemed to like this discrepancy. He took me twice, as only the first time had he, and made louder noises. He told me after I would not mind this changing a little, to delight him and to avoid undue comment in the palace. He said I must own, his mother was wise. An outstanding woman. He hoped one day he might find a wife to help him who was half so clever, but he doubted it. And then he commented that he liked me very well for being only simple, a creature of the senses. But then, I was really a swan, was I not? Only he, like a god—that he did not quite say—had converted me back into a human thing.
• • •
There, in the lodge, I had neither physical space nor mental space to race and spring and shape-shift and be free. I could not even cry out and be left in peace. Someone slept by my door, a woman. Servant, jailor—
But the next day following the interview with the Princess, I was carted off again to the palace, and put into a pair of chambers inside the round flank of a tower.
It was a fortress, the palace. It was thought I needed, here, fewer guardians. The palace women who were meant to serve or contain me, besides, were always slipping away about their own business. The single guard in the place beyond the outer door, liked to drink deep. He often slept. Yet he had the knack too of fully waking always at those times when the Prince arrived.
Outside the window of the room in which my bed was set, I could see only sky, and a long area where a roof extended. It was long enough, perhaps, if I could only step out on it, I might race and transform and fly. The window, however, was a little too thin for me to pass through it, either as woman or bird.
I began to starve myself.
When one of my supposed attendants remarked that I left my food untouched, and out of date the old woman examiner came to poke my openings for signs of pregnancy, I next burned each of my meals on the fire when I was briefly alone, leaving my plate empty enough, as if I had eaten my fill.
But also, alone, I did what I had done before. I tore off pieces of my hair—now black, but with roots like ice, and flung them too on the flames. I used the blunt table knife to release drops of my blood. I called to him, to the other he—to Hrothgar, the Enchanter.
I lay on my back, and stroked my inmost part, but found now it was like a fine instrument dulled. It could yet be musical, but nolonger fully answer.
Even so.
I had summoned him back to me before.
I, even I, who counted for nothing, I had brought him into view like my shadow.
He would not know me, I thought, if he beheld me now, black-haired and swarthy, in my blood-red dress that the silver mirror showed much darker.
I do not know why I had not properly called to him before. Perhaps only I had been sure he would never hear me, or if he did he would refuse me. As if I had not, till now, suffered enough to give my outcry credentials. As if my soul must shrivel and my heart bleed, before any might notice my plight.
Each day, alone, I tried to squeeze out through the narrow window. It was almost possible, that was the worst of it. If it had been less so, doubtless I would not have tried so desperately, so repeatedly.
But I had always been slight, and starving only made me weak, very little thinner.
One night I dreamed the walls melted away from the window-space and enlarged it. I dreamed an owl flew over the sky beyond, which was slate-blue with dusk of dawn.
Waking with actual dawn, I smelled the spring, sheer on the dark stone breath of the palace.
That morning I was restless. Signian had gone off again to hunt, as he did, and might be away several days and nights between. I went out of my rooms and walked about the byways of the palace, those which were allowed to me, the two women padding after me like sulky wolves, who did not want the prey they tracked.
People whispered as they passed me in the alley-enclosures of passageways. They had always done this, but now their mutterings were pronounced more clearly—I was meant to hear, it seemed. I was the Prince’s whore. A foreign woman. I had been a wife, but the priests of the seven pallid gods had absolved me of that, so I could lie with their matchless Prince in lesser sin. What more could I crave than such happiness? Though some of them reckoned I would be damned despite the priests’ efforts, punished after death. Signian, of course, was blameless. I had seduced him. Some said, I was a sorceress . . .
When the dark filled my window that evening, I heard an owl hooting far off in the forest, more than a mile away.
I visualized his eyes, looking at me, black then red-gold, through my fire.
By now I thought I barely remembered his face. Yet it at last occurred to me my falsehood of a wedding, to a dark-haired man, perhaps paraphrased his sexual acts with me and mine with him, which were as unlike the procedures of the Prince as I now was to my former self. I pictured Hrothgar’ s advent here, disguised as an old, hump-backed man, and how I would tell Signian that see—here was my husband—I recollected him now I looked at him—an evil sorcerer—Oh kill him, Sir, destroy him! Save me from his clutches—
In my sickly fasting sleep, unheralded deep pleasure erupted inside my body. I woke dazed, and tried again to force myself through the narrow window. But could not, and now was certain that for every wisp of flesh my fast had shaved from me, a further chunk of stone had added itself to the embrasure. My sulky wolf-women found me lying there. I was ill for many days, during which the foul old woman examined my blood on the linen sheet. She told me I had miscarried the Prince’s seed and was a worthless dunce, but she would not tell him if I would give her a present. So then I got up, staggering and mad, and picking up the silver mirror I flung it at her head. It knocked her over, shrieking, and the wolves ran in and I laughed as they and the guard carried the hag out. I kept saying she must have the mirror, it was silver, and I wanted her to have it as a gift for her kindness to me. I did not know if she had lied, thought she had. I do not know either if she recovered from my present. None spoke of it. She never came in to me again.
After the event anyway all is blind, dumb, deaf, and nothing once more, for a while.
• • •
Hrothgar the Enchanter appeared at the palace in the shortest spring month of eighteen days.
• • •
There was a noise I heard, ringing round and round the shell of the house.
From my clamped rooms I could see nothing, only roof and sky.
In the corridors outside there seemed to be unusual activity, and then this lessened. One of the wolves went to ask the sentry, at the outer door of the apartment, if he knew what went on. When he did not, sat there with his pot of wine, she and the other stole off and left me.
I had no interest in the sounds in that house.
But then, I had not seen the company come up the road from the shore. Some lord rode foremost on a jet-black war horse, and behind him twenty grim faced men, some mounted and some pacing in step. All of these wore dark plates of mail and carried honed weapons, but the lord himself wore heavy silk, and a cloak of the white and black furs of mustelids. A sword was a
t his side even so, sheathed in velvet, leather and gold.
His hair was black and chased, as his sword was, with fine strands of aging silver.
Signian had come back from his hunt by then. He waited in the larger hall to meet with this unlooked-for caller.
Who entered, and stood, lean and silent and tall, of a daunting authority almost appalling in its unspoken, latent power. He must be some mighty lord indeed, this man, or war-leader, doubtless with hordes to follow him. Where then were the rest of them? What did he want of the peaceful and pious town?
“You have a woman here,” the stranger said, in a flat and unimpassioned voice. “She has white hair and dark eyes.”
Signian seemed at a loss. The filled hall fidgeted and murmured.
The stranger said, ungiving as the bone mask of the moon, “She is my wife.”
• • •
I was told these things. They were described to me in some detail, when Signian slammed unannounced into my cell. It was shortly evident he blamed me. I had put on him some allure so he called it, not daring quite to say I had enspelled him, for strong men had now come to claim me, and besides this Prince was not so puny a woman could ever work full magic on him.
He ranted about the war-leader, and his black horse, and his dire guard, who waited there, beak-nosed, their eyes smeary glitterings behind the curious visors of their helms. Feathers were fixed thickly on their helms and cloaks, he told me, all black. They had, these men, a distasteful odor, perhaps of ancient unwiped blood—
From what Signian recited, I thought that it was no other than Hrothgar. Who else would come here for me? Yet I did not entirely believe it. I felt neither relief nor hope.
When the Prince shouted I must remove the red and put on the other, insignificant gown, the bluish one, and that I must also take off the silver ring he had given me, since it might offend my husband, I did what he said at once. His eyes on my body, briefly bare between the garments, held no arousal.
His desire was only to have me gone.
“I have sworn to him, this man, I have kept you here for your own protection, and treated you always with respect.”
I did not reply.
Signian added, abruptly almost as if he fawned on me, “See then, my girl, you won’t want him to hear, will you, how you loved me so. Best say nothing of our meetings. I’ve held my tongue, to protect you. And he seems to accept you are still his wife, in deed as in name.”
I did not ask of Signian what state—spiritual legal—I was truly in, since his priests had rinsed the former marriage off me before their disapproving gods.
Nor did Signian inquire if I was glad my unremembered spouse had come to get me back, nor either if I thought I might after all recognize my spouse. He did instruct me that the Princess, his mother, advised that I should greet the man joyously, as was proper.
With my recent illness, I had lost the savage and bitter fantasy of turning Signian against Hrothgar from spite. In fact, inevitably, given these circumstances, it would have proved both unworkable and immaterial.
I felt, as I say, no hope. Yet deep within myself did happiness begin to force up from the soil of my misery? Must I then disguise it? Or was I afraid? Should I disguise that?
I did not know. All was grayness in me.
As my wolf-women, the pair of them shivering in apprehension of the Prince’s wrath and the threat of the invader in the palace, conducted me to the hall, I could think only of my dead son, the swan, my white darling with his long, strong, slender throat that the arrow pierced, his feathers broken on the shore. And I wept, how quietly.
Signian noted this.
He said, uneasy and approving together, “Yes, tears of delight at seeing him. But be careful he doesn’t think they come from any shame—any abuse I meted out to you.”
• • •
The moment I entered the high and echoing hall, with all the Prince’s arrogant people huddling at its bannered walls, and Hrothgar, of course Hrothgar, standing at the center of the wide stone floor, his minions—they were not human and barely looked it—poised at his back in their black feathers and mail, my tears dried and left my eyes like pits of fire. He spoke to me only a handful, not even that, of words. “Come here to me,” he said. And so I crossed the floor and went to him. It was so ordinary, I might once again have dreamed it all, but it was real.
Then Hrothgar turned to the Prince, and his mother, Orjana. Signian stood like a pole. She sat upright on her gilt chair, not a hair uncombed, only her limp hands now gripping, like claws, the chair-arms. She was quite terrified, I saw. More deathly gray than the places within me.
“You have been generous to My lady,” said Hrothgar. “I would wish to reward you. I’ll send something to you, befitting your acts. Please receive these gifts, though you deserve far more, as the payment of my debt.”
Although he looked unlike himself, and yet exactly as I had known him, in the way such things are known, I recalled instantly on seeing his face, his body. His hair even lined with the silver of faked age, and his face with a fakery of lines, yet . . . I never knew him either. I had never known him. In another past we had met, not he and I—another than he, another than I. He was a stranger also to me. But we went together from the hall, unhindered, his men-who-were-not treading behind us. Outside one lifted me on to Hrothgar’s black horse. It was accurate to say the creature—both guard and horse—had a feral smell—the smell of a large bird that lives on carrion. We rode away from the terraced palace, down the hill, out of the town walls, back into the forests below, toward the edges of the lake.
5
Certain was it he would never, now, possess me.
He did not.
Nor did he speak to me, had not even when I rode with him on the horse. After those first words, Come here to me, his silence.
By the shore he dismounted, and one of the non-men again assisted me, and set me on my feet.
Then Hrothgar whistled very low, and along the lake a sort of raft came drifting. By then it grew dusk. The raft was like a slice of twilight cut free. It slid in to the land, then stopped and waited there. He indicated, by a swift, not ungracious gesture, that I should step on to the raft. I did so. I thought he would leave me there. Set me too adrift. Instead he stepped lightly after me, and at once the wooden thing—or whatever type of thing it was—moved off again, and away, scudding now briskly out on the lake, into the dark.
Behind us, a great clattering of wings.
A thick, fluctuating shadow swirled over, and on into the east, letting fall as it passed countless black feathers. They had been crows, men and horses both. Nothing remained upon the shore but for the trees. And inland, unseen, the town and palace of the Prince and his mother.
Some many miles along the lake, the raft swam back in against the shore.
None had pursued him, nor would they find us now.
I was ashamed. As if I had been truly wed to him, a deliberately joined in sex with another chosen lover.
I could say nothing, and he did not speak to me.
A fire sprang up and burned with a curdled heat. Little lights, like moths, evolved on the trees. Beer smoked in a round iron pot. He dipped in a metal cup, and gave me the drink, without a touch of his skin on mine.
Should I try to explain what had happened? Why had he come to save me from that prison, if he did not know me innocent of blame?
Not once had he looked at me. He stared into the fire he had created. Later he drew a loaf of dark bread from the ashes at the fire’s rim, broke off a piece and handed me it. Gods can do such things, make men from birds and birds from men, call fire out of the ground and baked bread, beer or wine or water from the air. And the gods are always cruel. We are nothing to the gods. Or perhaps they think us cruel to them, we fail them so often, have no magic of our own to enthrall them, disappoint, and finally die. Oh, we die.
• • •
“Let me tell you,” he said, after the full moon rose, “how I came to be a worker of spells, what your kind call an Enchanter. How the ability of shape-shift was mine.”
I gazed at him.
In the naked moonlight all traces of age had vanished from him. And I knew, though the evil mirror was no longer mine, that this was not so for me. I should look the elder now.
So he told me, still not once resting his eyes on me, that he had grown up in a sprawling town, not quite unlike the dungeonous heap of Signian. At thirteen years old, he was sold as a kind of servant, to a man said to be talented in healing and the minor arts of sorcery.
But the man was a cheat. He taught Hrothgar many knacks of spurious magic and quackery, that might seem to do good, but did nothing save deceive.
Hrothgar learned these things, having no choice. The man beat him if he was inept, or even when he was not.
“His brain had rotted,” Hrothgar told me. “At last it did not concern him whether I was able or incompetent, servile or trustless. One night he beat me, on and on, using for the task a great staff he kept, normally, for his pretense of magery. It had the head of an owl.”
He paused. “At length,” said Hrothgar, “I lay on the floor of his house, dying I have no doubt. And he, to rest his tired arm, went pottering and muttering about, cursing and kicking me when he had to step over my body on the ground.”
Hrothgar knew at that hour also that he died.
Of course, by then he did not care, wished only quickly to be gone.
And then—he was.
“Out of myself I lifted, on great red wings.”
The shape-changing had come to him in brutalization and agony, and in death also, very likely. He did not remind me that I, otherwise, had become the swan in the throes of pleasure he had gifted.
