After an imposingly bad meal of beans and stale bread (I never thought I’d find it in my heart to miss our cook), we all lay close to the fire, wrapped in blankets. Out beyond the limits of the firelight, things move in the darkness, never coming near enough to be seen. Sometimes beneath the crack and pop of the burning wood, I can hear a breath, a sigh, the click of teeth.
Faideau and I are closest together; the tether on my ankle is attached to his wrist.
‘How did you get among this lot, Faideau?’ I whisper when I think the others asleep.
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘Because I’m bored and I’m tied up and I don’t think you belong with them. You don’t seem like a cut-throat.’ I take a deep breath. ‘No family?’
‘No. I—no. The Boss brought me up—if you can call it that. There were some other people, but I had to leave them.’ He’s silent for a bit, then, ‘Do you think you can be forgiven, no matter what you did?’
‘Oh, I hope so,’ I reply with a bit more fervour than I intended.
‘Why? What did you do?’
‘I left someone behind. I didn’t mean to and it wasn’t really my fault. And I’ve been trying to make it up for a very long time.’
‘I—what I did, I meant to do. I’m sorry for it, but I meant it.’
‘How old were you?’
‘Nine.’
‘I’m pretty sure kids’ stuff is forgiven, Faideau,’ I tell him, I hope kindly.
‘Sometimes kids do the worst stuff,’ he begins.
‘If you don’t shut up, Jez, I will cut your tongue out. I don’t need it.’ The Robber Bridegroom says it so pleasantly and so calmly that I might almost be tempted to not take him seriously. But I’m not an idiot, so that puts an end to the conversation.
***
A few hours after dawn, we come to a lake, wide and flat, with an island not quite in its middle. A surprisingly steep mountain rises from it. We find a jetty and a rowboat moored there. I see no houses around and assume the boat is the only dry way across. We all five of us pile in—at one point I think about throwing myself overboard, but to what end? We’re going in the same direction.
Faideau looks less than happy about the whole situation, but I note he’s still not questioning the Boss. I feel a despair so deep, one that I’ve felt only once before, in the utter depths of my life, at the end of my life, in fact.
‘Please, Boss. I’m begging you. Don’t do this. Leave it be.’
‘No. Grab her, gents, and keep her close.’
Before they can get me, I tear open my shirt to show the scar, puckered and a bit purplish after all these years. I point to where my heart used to be, where the flesh was parted and the all-important organ torn out. A red birthmark glows on my shoulder. ‘This is how I died.’
They stare.
‘This is how I became a lost thing. I died eighteen years ago.’ I’m so desperate, I trip over words. ‘I found myself here, where all go when they shuffle off. When he tattooed me, the old man thought only to make me into a map. He just wanted my skin. He didn’t want me, I wasn’t special. But he tattooed me and he took my heart. He would have flayed me too had he not been interrupted. But it wasn’t my time. I died too soon so I made a deal: they gave me flesh once more. I found a way out, a way home. I went back to find my son. Time passes differently in there. When I got back, he was a young man, gone from the city and wandering the forest in the company of thieves.
‘There are rules to these places. I’m outside of them for the moment. One day I’ll go back but only when my deal is done. You, on the other hand, don’t belong here at all. The dead you look for will feed off you, pull you down, keep you here. You can’t take them back with you. You’re food to them.’
‘She’s my mother, Jez,’ he says gently, as if speaking to a moron. ‘She’d never hurt me.’
‘The dead have no loyalty.’
The boat grinds aground and we step out onto the small beach. Jones and Hopney take an arm each and frog march me into the undergrowth and onwards to where the mountain begins. The Robber Bridegroom has the light step of the mad. Faideau brings up the rear; I glance over my shoulder at him, try to will him to do something.
The door in the mountain is huge, carved from stone. Conversely, the keyhole is very small, room enough for a slightly bony finger to fit through. The Boss tells me to open it, to let him into the kingdom of the lost things. I refuse and start to scream. I struggle so hard they can’t get me near the door. I break away, manage a few yards before Hopney brings me down and Jones sits on me. The Robber Bridegroom, by now frustrated beyond all measure, places his foot firmly on my hand, then takes his long knife and slices off the finger in question.
He takes the severed thing, holds the bloody end gingerly, and stuffs it in the lock. Things churn and creak inside the mechanism until it opens with a thunk. His henchmen step away from me and my gouting hand. Faideau kneels beside me though, and wraps a none-too-clean hanky around the wound. If I wasn’t so busy swearing, I would thank him.
The Boss stands at the open door, searching inside the darkness for something, someone he recognises and loved perhaps too much. Particles coalesce in the dim light of the cavern, forming and re-forming until a woman stands before him.
She is beautiful, truly beautiful, long golden hair, generous breasts and hips and a tiny waist, a crushed-berry smile, with laughing eyes. If I didn’t know better, I’d think her enchanting and entirely harmless. I grab Faideau’s arm with my uninjured hand, to make him tear his eyes away from the vision that is the Robber Bridegroom’s mother.
‘Don’t think of anyone you’ve lost. Don’t do it or you’re gone,’ I hiss, pinching him so he’ll take me seriously. His eyes slide towards the Boss’s mother and I pinch him again, this time so hard his flesh splits, just a smidgeon. He swears at me, but I’ve got his attention. ‘The Robber Bridegroom has to go. There’s no helping them. I’d prefer you didn’t end up with them. Help me stand.’
He does, although he looks at me suspiciously now, as if I’m something dangerous, no longer vaguely amusing. I limp over to the doorway. Just inside, the Robber Bridegroom and his mother are entwined in a ‘nice to see you again’ embrace that is a bit too friendly for words. Jones and Hopney have wandered past them and are well into the throat of the cave. I see them pause, crane their heads forward to peer into the blackness, then give strangled cries as things, dead things, swarm out of the shadows and engulf them. Many of the lost things are recognisable as women; the Boss’s former brides. There are so many.
His mother looks less delectable now, her face is that of a dried up crone, skin cracked like old parchment, nose eroded by the rot of death. She opens one eye and gives me a slow, wicked wink. Her son moans. I don’t know if he could see her as she really is even if he opened his eyes. Behind them, the darkness has swallowed Jones and Hopney and now it surges forward, towards the light, towards escape.
I put my shoulder to the stone and push, weeping and sobbing and dripping blood on the dirt at my feet. The door closes with a scrape, and I scrabble about at the keyhole, pulling at the tiny bit of flesh to get a hold on it, finally jerking it from the lock. The cogs and wheels turn and creak, sealing the lost things in their home once more. I drop to the ground and cry until snot drips from my nose and I hiccup until I vomit. All in all, an attractive picture. From inside the mountain comes a thin scream.
In the end, Faideau picks me up, wipes me off as best he can and we stagger back down to the beach. He climbs into the rowboat and holds out his hand. I shake my head. ‘I can’t go with you. My deal is done.’
‘There are things you need to tell me,’ he says.
‘I wish I could tell you more. I was a stupid girl, sold myself for food on the streets. I had you.’ I nod.
‘Will you tell me?’
‘No.’
‘Let’s go home.’
‘I can’t go with you,’ I repeat and I throw my finger out into the lake, food for fish.
‘Mother . . .’
‘Don’t call me that—it just sounds somewhat unhealthy at the moment.’ I smile and it feels all wobbly on my face. ‘You have to go, though; this isn’t a good place to be.’
‘I can’t leave you,’
‘Faideau, this was my deal—to save you and I did so. If I leave, they’ll come after me and we don’t want that.’
‘You can’t get back in. You’ve thrown away the key.’
‘There are always other keys, other doors. Don’t come back. Promise me.’
‘Jez . . .’
‘Promise me. Row away and don’t come back. Make a life. Love someone. Give me grandchildren. Promise me.’
‘I promise.’
I hug him for the shortest long time I can, him in the boat, me on the shore. My child. It’s been a lifetime since I held him, since he was a small warm, wet lump of baby-smell and soft flesh. We pull away at almost the same time and he sits down heavily, wiping his eyes and sniffling. I push the boat off the sand and wave.
He drifts for a while then begins at last to row, digging the oars deep into the water. I sit on the beach and watch him go back the way we came.
And then I remember I didn’t ask him what he did, what was his sin. I didn’t remember to ask and so give him some kind of absolution. I watch my boy float away, and think that he looks as broken as my heart feels.
A GOOD HUSBAND
THE WATER here is sweet.
This pool is wide enough and deep enough to give me the space I crave. At the northern end a stream flows in from a larger river many miles distant; at the southern end a tributary retreats far, far away to the ocean. There the taste changes and becomes salty, the colour murky. Fine enough for my cousins with their scaled tails and sharp nails, frilled gills and tiny teeth. Well and good for the Sirens, ever more distant relatives, creatures who cannot decide between elements or even themselves, whether they are fish or fowl. Such a bitter home is not my choice though, oh no.
I love this place. It’s somewhere between a small lake and an overly large pond, a strange in-between thing, to be sure. The important point is this: it’s mine and mine alone. In some spots there are reeds, in others rocks for sitting while I comb my hair, grassy banks, and a thick screen of trees providing cover from the casual onlooker. I get visitors, oh yes, but only the women of Briarton (the town beyond the trees and over one hill, nesting in a gentle valley) come here with any kind of regularity.
It’s mostly the unmarried girls. The Lake of the Mari-Morgan is a place they have claimed for themselves. They come to dance and sing and play. Before a special occasion like a wedding, they will conduct their toilettes here, washing their hair to make it shine and their skin so it glows (the water here is said to have beautifying properties—it’s true, my little kindness to them). With gifts, large and small, they beg my favour, pray, cry, give thanks, rail at fate or me (whichever pops into their heads first), yearn and sometimes get what they want. If I can satisfy a request, I generally do. Sometimes I choose not to, simply so they do not take it for granted; on those occasions they seem to assume their wish was not worthy, or their offering even less so.
I do quite like them, humans, with their funny hearts and minds, their queerer souls. If I am honest, I find them amusing. If I am even more honest, the company they offer is worth the expenditure of magic to give them their heart’s desire. I am a solitary creature but sometimes isolation makes me ache.
Seldom do I show myself nowadays. Not that I am less beautiful or less vain, but I am infinitely more tired. If they see the weariness in my face, then what prospect for them? If an ageless being looks to have lost her spark, then . . . ? I speak only when I choose and it seems to work best as a disembodied voice—perhaps it’s the god-like quality. When I do appear it’s to make a point, a scene, a statement. Sometimes a clever girl will express, in front of her companions, disbelief that I exist. She might stand on my favourite rocky seat, the one a long step from the shore, and declaim her cynicism. What better way to prove her wrong than to be seen, gliding over the lake, all a-glimmer?
Their mothers stop coming after they wed. I have often wondered if their hope dies then, or marriage was simply what they wanted. Having achieved it, they are content to chew on that same meat. But they pass the faith on to their daughters.
This one, this tall thin woman who comes all hesitating through the trees, is different though. This one I am fascinated by, oh yes.
She leans down close to the liquid mirror of the lake. She has visited here since she was a little girl, always bringing a tiny offering of some kind: flowers, sweetmeats, salted fish, embroidered pieces of rag made beautiful with her cunning stitches. She has never asked for anything in return, not ever, not even before her own wedding. The name the other girls call to her is ‘Kitty’; she sews for them. They have attired themselves in marriage and ball gowns of her making after bathing here. I have seen those very dresses wrapped in sheets and draped carefully over bushes and branches until the moment they are required. I’ve watched Kitty sewing them by the water’s edge, smiling gently as her companions laugh and dance around her while she toils on their behalf.
This day, this hour, the scars on her face are still fresh, the reddish-brown of dried, scabbed blood. Two parallel lines run across the bridge of her nose before dropping down her left cheek. She will never be pretty again—and she was pretty, I will tell you that. Large blue eyes, a doll’s pouting mouth and hair that was most glorious—is most glorious still, yet looks like a joke now perched on the mess of her countenance.
When first it happened, she came here to weep. Blood flowed and mixed with her tears to drip into the water. That got my attention: grief and blood. Sacrifices very few ever make, although she did not know it for a sacrifice and there was no one to tell her.
Her friends urged her to wash the injuries in the lake and it did some good, made the healing faster, but in truth the scars will never be gone. There was too much force behind them and too much spite—that’s what makes them so deep, the spite. It bites not merely the flesh, but also the soul.
Kitty stares at her reflection, her features set in a determined way. She peers intently as if she might be able to see me through sheer force of will—she cannot although I lie right beneath her, studying her through the pane of water. The wounded woman opens her mouth and says, ‘Help me.’
Her tears start again and I can taste their salt as they drop down, forming ripples in my home.
‘Help me,’ she repeats. ‘Mari-Morgan, please help me.’
I kick away but make no disturbance in the glassy stillness. Blood and tears she gave me already, all unknowing. For this reason alone I must make answer to her summons. She will ask something great of me, something I may not be able to deliver. I can only throw out an obstacle for her and hope she will give up.
Rising, I become visible, walking across the surface as if it is solid. I know how I must look to her when she’s so ruined. I can see my reflection in her large eyes: silver-green hair, silver-peach skin, eyes like a deep lake that cannot decide between blue or green or black, and a not-quite-stable outline. I ripple, I shimmer, my element is also my essence—in a bright light you might even see through me. I defy the eye to focus properly.
‘What would you have of me?’ I ask in a voice that sounds like a rushing flood. She shakes her head at this hoped-for appearance and I can see that she did not quite believe it would happen. All these years she has brought offerings to a creature she was not sure existed. I am both touched and vaguely annoyed.
‘Make him kind. Make him love me. Make him a good husband. Make my life better.’ Her long hands move to her scarred visage even though she seems not to notice. She doesn’t quite touch the wounds and they must ache still, stretching tight and itching as they dry and knit. Kitty knows how much she asks.
‘What will you give me?’ I demand, as if the dripping blood and flowing grief were not enough. ‘Nothing can be granted withou
t something in return, oh no.’
‘What will you have? Ask anything,’ she says unwisely.
A long time ago when I loved to be seen, when I was younger, less tired, more arrogant, then, for a time, I asked for dresses. I wanted, silly conceited thing, to wear the pretty clothes the human girls did, to adorn myself like the colourful birds that nest in the trees along the banks. And the maidens brought them to me, exquisite things, almost works of art and oftentimes more than the girls could afford—I’m fairly sure some of them dropped their own wedding dresses in. I marvelled over them as they were held above the surface, watched as the sun glinted on buttons and silken bows, crystals and beads and velvet ribbons. They looked so lovely out there in the light when they were dry. Their owners would throw these glorious gowns into my lake and they would grow heavy and sink. I would scoop them up and struggle into the saturated frippery and find the garment, bereft of air and sun, had somehow died. Swimming in wet clothing is difficult to say the least. Shimmering and shimmying, floating and darting through water and lake weeds is neither easy nor pleasant when attired in a sodden drape of fabric. So I stopped asking for this particular kind of gift. I gave up and embraced my watery nakedness, my uncertain outline and the translucent nature of my body.
But now here is a clever, clever girl with brilliant, cunning fingers who sews the way my sea cousins create storms, with the same aplomb and passion.
I make my request and see her heart sink. My unkindness will save her further distress, I tell myself. If she cannot fulfil my price, then both our lives will be easier. One should not ask for what one thinks one wants, it is never the same as it seems when you are not in possession of it; like those dresses, so lovely in the sunshine, so disappointing in my hands.
Sourdough and Other Stories Page 11
