by Mindi Meltz
Flattening himself against the door, he walls himself off from the sound of them; he makes the sound of them like the river in his mind, far away, flowing through the meadow of his home. Through his half-opened eyelashes, far away, he thinks he can see Dragon moving through the outskirts of the mob, where quieter people are standing—mothers and children swaying against each other hopeless, and people who stand alone as if they have always been alone, as if their aloneness is slowly killing them. Behind him, through the crack of the steel door, he thinks he can hear someone breathing.
Kite sinks down, turning his face, pressing his ear to the crack, pushing the noise of the crowd further away. And now he can hear it distinctly: quick, strained intakes of breath, the breathing of someone who cannot imagine that someone is listening to him.
“It’s okay,” murmurs Kite, without thinking. And then, louder, “Can you hear me in there? I don’t want anything.” This is it, he thinks. This is my only chance to know the truth. “I—I want to help,” he says.
Faster than he expected it, like the fire from dry tinder, with the same fierce speed of desperation that sent him flying through a thousand hands from the fallen tree to this door, the door opens a crack more and he is sucked inside.
Delilah wades ashore, only human again, with no magic to keep all her fingers and toes—and then her feet and ankles—from going numb. No pack, no knife, nothing in her hands. She manages to throw off her sweatshirt, which was weighing her down, and keep moving. She is unaware that she’s crawling by the time she hits the rocks, or that she is moving toward the presence of some other before her, someone she can sense more than see.
“Take your clothes off,” says a low, croaking voice, and she realizes she is out of the water, nearly face down on the wet stone. It sounds like the voice of a raven, if ravens had human voices. Maybe they do. Delilah is prepared for anything, and she has also decided that she wants to live.
“Take your clothes off. Now.” Something deeper than fear tells her this makes sense, and so she puts all of her energy into doing it. The icy things seem to wrestle with her for hours. The whole idea of clothing seems impossible to her now—how could she ever have gotten herself into anything so complicated? Panting, she lets the other person, who now appears to be an old woman, wrap an old wool blanket around her. Then she looks up, and then she bows her head.
“Thank you,” she says.
“Hmph,” says the old woman, who trembles now in the cold.
Delilah looks up again. She beholds the elder’s features, uneven, the eyes shiny in the gnarled face. The darkness blows around the two of them, and there is nothing else here but a faint, aching smell of seaweed and salt. Delilah doesn’t know who the woman is. She is quite sure she herself is delirious. But suddenly, what she can feel most clearly is her own mother’s death. It is not a feeling she could name. It is the first feeling she has remembered ever feeling about her own mother, and she does not recognize it. It has no tears. It is just a wide, empty knowing. She has no mother. This is what she knows. This is what is wrong with her, and there is nothing she can do about it; this is what has always been true. It is what makes her sick, what makes her desperate, what makes her utterly, unfixably broken. And yet it helps, suddenly, just to know this.
“Do I know you?” says the old woman, and Delilah can see that she is blind.
“No. I’m Delilah.”
“What do you want, Delilah?”
“I want my sister.” Words she spoke a hundred times over so long ago, with such fury and such passion, but now they sound calm and strangely certain.
“Hmph,” says the old woman again. Then she is silent for a moment, her own head bowed, and Delilah watches her. She reaches down to Delilah’s hands, which are splayed out on the ground on either side of her, as if she knew exactly where Delilah would leave them, and touches them gingerly with her own fingers. Then she pulls herself back up.
“I thought you were that other girl,” she says. “My daughter.”
Delilah knows, then, without her even saying it. She always knew—that the girl Dragon longed for, the girl she found starving and helpless in the forest, was the princess from the tower after all. Of course she wasn’t lying. That girl could not lie.
“My spoiled daughter,” the old woman says, her voice twisting harshly. “So spoiled she names herself ‘Lonely’, as if she is the only lonely person in the world. So selfish she steals the name of the river goddess, ‘Yora’, when she cannot even own up to that—”
“No,” Delilah interrupts, shaking her head hard, surprising herself. “She isn’t like that. You’ve got it wrong.”
The old woman says nothing. She looks down at her own hands, which she cannot see.
Delilah feels angry now, and she hates feeling angry at this person, because it’s all backwards: why are the elders not wise? Why must it seem that she is the elder, after all—the only one who can see things clearly? Yet she cannot put it into words, this sudden pain she feels at this mother’s denial of her daughter. She cannot put into words what Lonely is. “Don’t you know?” she mutters hopelessly. “She’s your own daughter—don’t you know her?”
The old woman shakes her head. “No,” she says. And sighs.
They are silent then, for a long time. Long enough for Delilah almost to forget why she is here. Long enough for her to forget that she is here. It seems to her that she is fourteen years old, climbing in the window—her face unwashed, her hair uncombed, her arms scratched by barbed wire and her fingers burned. Her mother is standing in the doorway of her bedroom, silhouetted by the hallway light. Delilah freezes, one foot touching the floor. It is the only time her mother has ever caught her entering at dawn. But her mother doesn’t say anything. She looks at Delilah for one moment only before she turns away and shuts off the light. Was that sorrow in her eyes, after all? A hopelessly tender question, that she despaired of ever being answered—Who are you? Or was it only the usual condemning coldness, the denial of hope for one who is not worth hoping for? Delilah will never know. But she lay awake all that morning, wondering.
She comes back to attention now, back to the dark wind and the smell of salt, because something is happening to the old woman. She is shaking. She has not moved—her body hunches tight over her hands, unchanged, and her eyes stare emptily—but she is shaking so hard that Delilah stands up quickly and clasps her body between her hands.
“Are you all right?”
The woman stops shaking. She is breathing heavily. “Don’t touch me,” she moans, but she seems to crumble somehow inside Delilah’s hands, and Delilah can feel the tears in there, and for some reason she cannot let go. She crouches next to the woman and holds her. The woman is making sounds that Delilah does not understand, like words in some other language mixed with hisses and hums. But then she begins to shake again, shuddering as if with brutal, soundless sobs, and if Delilah knows anything, she knows to keep holding onto her.
The old woman’s bones shake against Delilah’s heart, her body shuddering down into itself, deeper and deeper into an ancient, wind-wailing sorrow—as if all the world were torn to pieces, and all that is left is this one moment, and this one moment is a tiny, black pebble, bouncing, echoing step by step down an endless flight of stairs into the cavern at the center of the universe.
“Where is she?” the old woman cries finally, softly to herself, her head in her hands, her breath loud. “Oh, Hanum, where is she?”
When she is still again, Delilah releases her and stands up. She takes a good look around for the first time at the windy stone, its damp knife edges lit by starlight. Emptiness circles itself, like the vast territory of the old woman’s loneliness consuming the world. Delilah’s throat clenches.
“Please,” she whispers to the darkness, “tell me Mira isn’t here.” For she feels now that she’d rather search her whole life, and never find her, than know that her sister has sp
ent the last ten years of her life in this place.
But at these words, the old woman raises her head. “Mira,” she says.
Delilah looks at her.
“Mira,” the old woman repeats, staring past Delilah’s shoulder, her eyes wide and milky white behind the dark moons of their pupils. “You come—you come for Mira?”
Delilah falls to her knees and grabs the old woman’s arm, all pity gone from her. The old woman cringes and Delilah knows she must be hurting her, but she doesn’t care. She feels now that she will kill her if she has to. “Where is she?” she demands.
The old woman’s mouth hangs open, and she is trembling again. “Are you—” she begins, and she licks beads of saliva off the edges of her lips. “Are you—the Dark Goddess?”
Startled, Delilah loosens her grip and rears back. “Of course not,” she snaps.
“But then, who are you?”
“I told you,” says Delilah. “I’m her sister. I am the only one who could ever rescue her, I am all that she has, I—” Delilah covers her face in her hands, stopping herself. “Please.” She forces herself to be calm. “If she is here, please tell me where she is.”
“A woman rescuer,” the old woman murmurs, her voice soft and quiet now. “No one has ever come before. No one has ever come for any of them.”
But to the surprise of Delilah, to whom it seemed that the old woman was part of that bony chair and could never uncleave herself from it, she rises now, as if easily. “Come now,” she says firmly and holds out her hand.
In a moment, the two women are walking hand in hand to a flight of dark stairs, there between the stones of the island.
They stop on the top step. Below them, a black hole opens into the center of the earth.
“The people think I guard them,” the old woman says, her voice steady, creaky, and knowing now, like an elder’s ought to be. “But I do not guard them. I do not keep them sleeping. It was Hanum who put them to sleep, and I don’t know how to wake them.”
“What happened to Hanum?” Delilah asks, stalling now despite her desperation, still shivering with cold as she stares down into that blackness. “Was he your lover?”
The woman beside her nods. “I think so.” But she doesn’t answer the other question.
“What happened to him?” Delilah repeats, a fascination creeping over her, though she can’t bring herself to look at the old woman’s face again.
“I killed him.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“Didn’t you?”
“I don’t know.” They are standing there, staring down into this ridiculous black hole—absolute nothingness around them, the universe holding its breath. “I just wanted to be— I wanted her to be free,” whispers the old woman. So fragile, so vulnerable this woman seems beside Delilah, that Delilah wonders how she could possibly have survived here for so long.
“What did you do?” she whispers.
“I put him to sleep. With the same magic he uses to put them to sleep.” She pants the words tightly now, as if each breath is only long enough to contain a few of them. “I used that. Used his own magic. But it killed him. Or they killed him. I don’t know! I don’t know.”
Delilah turns and stares at her now.
“I came from behind him. And I hid there behind him, where he could not see me, when he went down to them. When he made his web of magic, I took it in my hands, and I wrapped it around him, around and around, so that he would sleep with them. And when I came back later—” She stops, panting. “When I came back later, he was dead.”
Then she nods to Delilah, and she seems the raven again—seems, for a moment, the Witch everyone accused her of being, with her eerie smile. “Now we will go down. You and me. See what we find, eh?”
Delilah looks down, feeling the old woman’s hand still in her own, and thinks of Mira, and steps over her own fear. Down. In a moment, she can no longer see anything.
Two more steps. Ten. Delilah closes her eyes and doesn’t see any less, and it is comforting to keep them closed, as if this is only a dream. She tries not to think about anything. Not about the darkness. Not about the fragile, frightening hand that guides her. Not about how terrified she is of finding Mira in this place.
“I gave his body to the sea,” says the voice beside her. “I did not care what happened to him. I do not come down here any more. Not any more…” Delilah thinks she hears fear in that voice now.
They keep stepping down. Delilah forgets how to count. She has no images, no sensations, no smells, no sounds, nothing at all from which to make a reality, except for this steady downward motion and the hand of death in her own.
But when they reach the bottom, there is a light glowing in the distance. It’s a moonish light, hazy, that throws just the barest hints of reality upon the fallen, contorted bodies, large and small, that rise and fall with unconscious breath. Delilah looks to her right and sees the beak of the old woman’s nose, the white of two teeth.
“The Unicorn is the only one awake,” comes her raven’s voice. “When she was gone, we had no light here at all.”
Delilah’s mind, spinning, has no room to wonder about the relationship between the blind woman and light. Forgetting her, she creeps one step at a time, slowly, toward that pale, heaving glow. How she has wanted, always, to move toward it! How she used to stare at it hungrily, inside Mira’s eyes—believing it could never be for her, believing it something shared between her father and her sister that she could never, ever touch. But now she moves toward it. She dares to move toward it because she remembers—she remembers the light arching over her as Dragon’s body trapped hers in the unforgiving desert, and how she knew for the first time that she could stop it, and how Mira the Unicorn saved her.
She doesn’t mean to look at them—she is not even interested—but she has to step around them: the others. These sleeping bodies, heavy from within, twitching and snorting, eyelids fluttering, fists contracting. There is no particular reason why anyone should fear them. There is no reason why she should pause to stare at their soft, bewildered faces, their safely closed eyes, and feel such recurrent shock and recognition. She turns once around, suddenly and without knowing why, and cannot see in the darkness whether or not the old woman is still there. She turns back to the Unicorn, ashamed of her own fear.
“Miri?” she asks.
She thinks she can feel Mira there, maybe, in the nothing, holding her breath in a small, girlish suspense, not knowing if touch will hurt. But Delilah does not see her; only the Unicorn.
“She’s sick,” croaks the old raven voice behind her, closer than Delilah expected. “She’s all come apart.” The voice sounds hideous to Delilah now. She kneels. She touches the Unicorn’s hair.
“Miri, it’s me.”
Only the horn is glowing strong. The Unicorn’s body—a neatly folded, suffering thing of thin, elegant bones—huffs tortured breaths, and is barely white, and does not turn toward her. Its body is so small, smaller than Delilah’s own. In a way, Delilah does not believe at all, any more than she ever did. But what else is there but to try? Why come all this way, if not at least to try? There is nothing stranger about this creature than anything else Mira has ever done.
Delilah lifts the Unicorn’s head in one arm and strokes her hesitantly with the other hand: her shoulders, her back, her long neck. The best she can, she wraps her arms around the Unicorn, and bends her head into that dry, feverish fur.
“Miri,” she whispers. And what she means to say is, I’ve come to take you away from here, or I love you—just tell me what you need, or I’m here now, I’m so sorry I ever left you, but what she says instead is, “Oh Miri, the meadow is gone.”
And she wants to be the strong one; she wants to be wiser, for once, so she doesn’t cry, but all she can do is hold the Unicorn in her arms and rock back and forth, and wh
isper it over and over, until again she cannot remember where she is or how long she has been here. “Gone, Miri, gone.”
Until finally Mira says, “I know.” Delilah looks up fast, but still she sees only the Unicorn in her arms and the darkness around it.
“Mira,” she cries loud, not caring if the old woman hears. “Come back to me. If you love me, come back to me.” That’s what she says. Because what does she have after all—what weapon, what strength, what motivation, what tool with which to rescue—but her own need? It is all she has ever owned.
“But you didn’t keep me safe.”
Delilah turns all around, at the sound of this cruelly eerie voice—a voice like a woman’s twisted into the ghost of a little girl’s, a mockery of the voice that once was Mira’s. But still, there is only the Unicorn. Mira’s voice comes as if from far away, as disembodied as it sounded way out in the desert at the river’s end. But maybe Mira is not talking to Delilah; maybe she is still talking to her own soul. Or her soul is talking to her body. And each one blames the other, for what happened, and each one is afraid to return.
“I will keep you safe, Miri,” says Delilah. But even as she says it she feels Mira’s fear, like the Unicorn’s own sickness—an ugly bile beneath that smooth white—rising up in the back of her throat, because she knows. She doesn’t know how long she has known what happened to Mira and not admitted it to herself, but she does know. She knows the great network of pain within her own body and how it mirrors that same vast network of pain in the Earth itself. She knows the paths men make in the earth, realigning the rivers, changing the very course of the winds. She knows that every time she gave her body to a man without even thinking, she was only letting what happened to Mira happen again. With every heartless, spiritless lover, she was betraying Mira again, because she could not admit to herself that it was happening—and even worse, because in some sick, unconscious, impossible way, she envied Mira for being, in Delilah’s mind, the only daughter who was wanted.
