9 Tales From Elsewhere 7

by 9 Tales From Elsewhere

  He had led hunts, had declared bounty and organised competitions; but in nine whole years the beast had not ceased to plague the towns that bordered the mountain. The queen was right, her harsh words piercing, blackening his thoughts, ringing incessantly—Coward! Coward! Coward!

  He could have killed her—could have ripped out her tongue—could have had her beheaded for that! Even if she feared not death, he had the power to inflict worse torment. Did she not know that? When he returned, the king decided, he would dispense his justice. And he would show no mercy.

  So now the king hunted alone. He would show her. He would wait and watch, like a panther in the underbrush. And when at last he saw the white, winged flight of the beast over the cliffs, pernicious talons ferrying her prey, then it would be her time of reckoning—as he nocked his arrow and shot, right into her vile, black heart.

  He heard her before he saw her. Amid the splash and tinkle of moonlit water she hummed, carelessly, notes scattering like raindrops as she brushed her gleaming black hair with delicate fingers. Every line and curve of bone shone clear beneath her skin, flashing intermittently through gaps in the foliage like pearl-white moths winging through trees.

  He had been nearing the temple, but first he had decided to stop by the river for a quick rinse, to wash the grime off his face and hands before entering his ancestral abode. Now, weary though he was, he felt the familiar stirring in his blood, and was glad he had stopped. There by the river where the wild peony grew, where its thousand-petalled blooms dripped their heavy inflorescences from their arcing branches, there a slender arm lifted languidly and lowered, trickling diamond water; and the shining wet ebony sheet that was her hair rose with it to reveal just the barest sliver of hip, then rose some more to uncover, just for a moment, the perfect, shadowy dent in the small of her back, whispering secrets.

  His heart quickened; his blood sang fire. Desire strained his will, shackles of decency ringing a low note against the burn.

  Water lapped, black and lustrous, against her hip, indistinguishable from her floating hair. Sinuous curves melted into it, pink-tinted, like the colour of snow under an alpenglow of dawn. His foot crunched on the forest bed.

  Startled, she paused, then turned curiously to peer over her shoulder. Dark eyes lifted, uncertain, round shadows cast like clandestine meeting places in an exquisite face that, unveiled of her hair, blossomed out before him like petals of a moonflower, opening one by one.

  For a moment, he saw his own reflection in them. Such a powerful, striking figure he cut, in those deep pools silvered like mirrors. Above them, her eyelashes lightly quivered, like the shadows of flickering candle-flames, shivering though untouched by wind. Then the petals lowered again over her eyes, and her moon-washed hair cascaded back over her shoulders; she had not seen him.

  He snapped. All at once he was an animal—and like an animal he took her, from the back, just out of sight of the temple by the river where the wild peonies still grow.

  She moulded herself meekly to his rough hands, silent and acquiescent as river water shaping itself around the hard, feverish body of a man cutting through it. Forward and speedily he propelled himself, his arms knifing through the waves, crushing with the weight of the world; but the water dispersed around him, and drifted at his touch, so that though he swam through it he could not grasp it a single sliding drop in his hands.

  But the king was pleased—he thought he had conquered. When he was done, he asked for her name.

  She shook her head. Pearl pink silk was tugged on over fine-crafted collarbones. The king liked those collarbones, jutting out under her luminous skin, the colour of sakura. Chiffon sleeves and skirts trailed, as cloudy as her words.

  “I gave it up years ago.”

  The king was bemused, but decided it did not matter. He could give her a name. “Where do you stay?” The king wanted to know, in case he needed her again. He wanted to take her with him. Perhaps it was the hard journey, but he had never felt such need for a woman before.

  “At the temple. The monks took me in before they died. I keep the place, now.”

  The king look alarmed. “What happened?”

  “There is a beast in these mountains,” the girl said, glancing around and huddling absently into herself, as if the slightest gust of wind might blow her away. Desire swept through him again. He felt the sudden urge to protect.

  “I am here to slay it. Know you where it dwells?”

  The girl bit her lip, then nodded. “I can show you to its lair.”

  He thanked her, and they picked their way to the temple then, for him to rest the night. Winding before him through the peony trees, she looked almost a daughter to one of their shimmering blooms. Her pearlescent silhouette attracted the moonbeams, like the wings of a silver moth, enshrouding her.

  Behind his closed eyelids was a world of swirling amber. Against his skin was an ocean of silk. Silken sheets, silken skin, silken hair. They seemed to blend together like a dream, a river on whose balmy currents he wished he could float all his life.

  When the king could not in good conscience put off his necessary task of waking up any longer, he allowed his eyelids to open a slit. Sunlight pierced his delicate cornea, sudden and jarring. He hurriedly squeezed his eyes shut again.

  By the time he finally convinced himself to drag his body out of bed, the sun was high up in the centre of the sky. His movements as he donned once again his hunting attire were heavy and sluggish, as if he were waiting for any reason to stay.

  “Come with me,” he pleaded, his fingers skimming the soft curve of her shoulder. Where he was rough before, now he was exceedingly gentle, as if in apology. “Come with me,” he tried again, more firmly.

  Her head felt warm against his chest. The king had never so beseeched anyone before, so now he marvelled at his words, relishing them as if for the first time. “Come, marry me. I can give you a new home, a new name. It is not good for you, a woman, to be alone.”

  Would she accede? Though close to fifty, the king felt his heart beat like a pup’s.

  White Peony—so he had named her, in his mind—gazed sadly up at him. As she spoke, her voice was helpless. “I cannot.” Her round eyes glimmered, deep wells of night, unfathomable.

  “Why?”

  She sighed. When she spoke, her voice fell like wind-ripped petals. “I was,” she said, “once wife to a powerful man.”

  She told him her story then.

  She had married him when she was fifteen, a girl not even in full bloom. A simple kitchen maid, she had been just one of the many unnoticed women in the house placed there to serve him. So vast was his house that she knew not even what her master looked like; she had only ever seen him from a distance. But even then, how handsome he was! A strapping youth, then only twenty six, but confidently carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. Already he was famed for his skill on horseback, and for shooting down the sun itself with bow and arrow.

  Squatting by the fire as she cooked his broths, her starchy servant’s uniform sticking to her back, she often found her mind drifting like the fragrant smoke before her, to rest upon him whose broad silhouette she came in her mind to know like the back of her hand. Did he like poetry? Music? Did he taste the food he put into his mouth, the precious product her life revolved around? When he lay his head to his silken pillows, each night in a different bed of another wife, did his thoughts ever wander, if only for a little while, to the servant who knelt over the flame for him, daily wiping the sweat from her brow?

  Yet even as she wondered she also created, as youthful girls are wont to do, conjuring details of his mind and body from scattered facts and servants’ gossip till she felt she knew him inside out.

  In time, though, she was able to have a much closer glimpse of him.

  She was playing her zither one autumn night, singing to the full moon in a small patio outside the servants’ quarters. The notes trickled like water fountains from her fingers, and her voice—it was so beautiful then.
Like bright sunlight reflecting off the water’s surface, clear and shimmering. Her father had been a musician; not a very talented one, but he had taught her what he knew. So in her songs, she would pour all her longing; and her heart was wide and vast as the pulsing sea, thrumming to the silent cadence of moon.

  That night, the moon was exceptionally bright. It gazed with yearning at the light of the sun, and it was its voice, spilling through the silver notes of a zither, that caught the ears of her husband’s mother.

  A few times a week, the lady dowager would take leisurely strolls around in the capacious gardens of the house. Whenever he could, the young master of the house would dutifully find time to accompany her; but this time the dowager was alone, with only her entourage of handmaids following. Though usually an austere lady, her face was soft as she drew towards the place whence the pensive notes poured and tumbled through her like dreams over moonlit pebbles.

  But then the notes faltered. Flustered upon seeing her master’s mother standing before her, the girl was about to leap up and curtsey, but the old lady held up a hand and motioned for her to continue. Obediently, she did so. As she played, the lady would intermittently sigh, look up at the dark sky, blinking delicately, and wipe her eyes with an embroidered silk handkerchief. And when the last few diamond drops of music tinkled to a close, fading in a shower of fine silver dust, she was silent for a time, gazing at the moon. At last she gave another quiet, wistful sigh, and told this strange, soulful servant girl to play again for her in her chambers the morrow night.

  She was called to her lady dowager almost every night after that. Perhaps the elderly lady saw in the quiet girl a kindred spirit, or heard in her music a whispered appeal that resonated with her soul. Yet in spite of that they had almost never talked, save for the barest syllable required for the dowager to make her wishes known. On one of those nights, however, servants at her chamber’s entrance had announced the master’s arrival; and he, shining like the sun and robed in swathes of gold, had strode in through the door.

  At that moment, she had charted her own flight to death.

  The sudden silence fell like rocks, dropped into the path of a brimming river. The king awoke as if from a dream. Why had she stopped?

  She was tired, she said, she would continue the story another time.

  “When?” asked the king, “Today you will show me to her lair, and after that, I might not return.”

  Wrapping her arms around herself, she threw a glance out of the window and shivered. “Perhaps not today,” she murmured, “The beast hunts at night. Ere we arrive it will be dark, and we will be without shelter. It will pick us like cherries from the plains.”

  “You have seen the beast?”

  “Glimpses,” she said, casting her eyes down at the sheets and shrinking further back into herself, “A pale shadow, and a stench of blood.” And she would say no more.

  With nothing to do but wait, the king decided to take her on a stroll in the woods. She needed to relax, and the flowering forest around them was the perfect backdrop for romance. Hopefully, she would warm up to him so much so that when he asked for her hand again, she could not refuse.

  The king found that he did not mind so much her refusal to continue her story, for though she uttered not another word about herself, she was intensely interested in him. The king was gratified.

  They tramped through the forest, with the king swatting off flies and lifting up leaves and branches in her way. Like a child she bombarded him with questions, which the king was only too happy to answer. Yes, he lived in a big palace with many servants. Yes, he had many wives; and yes, he loved them all—well, he tried his best. The human heart was magnanimous and capable of infinite expansion, he believed, and each of his wives had a piece of his heart. But definitely the biggest piece belonged to her. It would always be so, because she had taken all that was left, and stolen some from others too. At that he patted her head, and she smiled and blushed, and the king laughed.

  “What about the queen, then?” was her next question, put forth shyly. “How much of your heart does she have?”

  He trod in silence for a moment, hacking at the thorny branches in her way. “Nothing.” His voice was cool. “She deserves to die. She will accompany her paramour in his grave.” Then he turned to her and his face was earnest as he clasped her hands. “When I return, will you be my queen?”

  Surprised, she laughed. “Why, what will you do with her?”

  The king looked grave. “I will dispense justice,” he said, but the stubborn set in his jaw hinted at a passion behind his apparent objectivity. “Infidelity is punishable by death. She will be executed—though no doubt she already wishes she were dead.”

  “You … killed her lover?”

  The king smiles grimly. He had handed her lover’s heart to her on a platter, black and blood-crusted, and had watched with the cold indifference of an executioner as she had screamed and upended the platter back at him.

  “A monster she called me, with a heart blacker than the beast that lives in these woods. Think you so?”

  When she did not answer, but looked quietly back at him, he asked again, more urgently, “Think you so, that I am a monster?”

  Her eyes upon him were knowing and compassionate, gentle as a fawn’s.

  “I am not the monster,” said the king firmly, looking away, “She is. I should have known, ere I married her, that like so many women who came before her she would fall into evil, revealing the selfish nature of her heart once the initial flare of love has dimmed. But," he quickly added, "you need not fear me."

  She had turned the light of her eyes away from him now, looking ahead and around while she stepped lightly through the dappled wood.

  The king looked askance at her.

  The sun’s rays filtered through the trees, bathing her in shifting patterns of light. For a moment they shrouded her eyes with a soft, amber glow, like a shimmering curtain, impenetrable.

  Night fell in gloomy palls of mist, shredded by howling winds. The king and his woman huddled in the temple, snug in the heat of the fireplace and the incandescence of their love.

  “I must go,” he murmured. His breath stroked her hair. “You said the beast emerges from her nest to hunt at night. If I can catch her on her hunt, perhaps when her attention is focused elsewhere …”

  “Please, my king, the beast is strong at night. My king is peerless among mortal men, unrivalled in a hunt, but the beast is no mere mortal; her eyes are keener, her flight quicker, her strength greater. In this fog you would achieve nothing at best, but at worst you might …” Her breath caught. “Catch her when she is asleep, or when she is weary after a night of hunting. Please—" She clutched his sleeve, her voice tremulous and frightened.

  “Hush, hush now, my love. Fear not; I will stay in.”

  But when she was asleep, he quietly got out of bed and donned his hunting gear.

  The door shut behind him with a click. Did it wake her? He crouched behind a window, placing his ear against the latticed paper pane.

  Behind him, the wind, too, was in slumber, breathing gently, sweeping its soft sighs through the trees.

  Satisfied, the king shrugged his bow and arrows over his shoulders and strode into the swirling mist.

  Despite the haze, the boar was caught in a flash, maimed with a firm stroke to the hind leg and let to squeal noisily in an open field high on a cliff. At the fringe of the forest a good distance away, the king crouched under a dense bush with his bow steady in his hands, his arrow strung and waiting. The boar was young, fat and squealing, an irresistible bait. Soon enough, the beast would come. The king settled down to wait.

  Overhead, great planets wheeled, cold and silent. The boar’s cries faded to a whimper. Its blood leaked slowly out, staining dark the moonlit grass.

  The clouds hung oppressively low in the skies, swollen and purple. Once, he thought he saw a great, white shadow flitting through them, its form ethereal, like a ghost. There! Sharply and silentl
y, the king raised his bow.

  But when it came closer he saw that it was only a late-night eagle, circling the crags.

  Stars flickered and died; the king fought to keep his eyes open.

  In his dreams she was there, cooking for him. His arms encircled her from behind, and through the woodsmoke of the brazier she shone her demure smile on him. He smiled back as he bent over her shoulder. Meat sizzled tantalisingly, spicy aromas thrilling. Her honeyed scent enticed him, soft with promise, hovering over the meat like empyreal haloes of light.

  The arrow slipped from his fingers, falling to the grass with a thump. The king shook himself awake. The scent of woodsmoke was still in his nose, and mist danced around him. For a moment he thought he was still by the brazier and peered through the fog, blinking, half-expecting to see her with her bashful smile and chopsticks held out to feed him.

  Yet before him nothing drifted, save fraying skeins of mist, billowing against his eyes.

  The dream lingered in his mind, so real he seemed almost to smell it in the fog. Wood-roast and spice—yes, it had been a pleasant, intoxicating fragrance, laced with flowers, like meat marinaded and smoked in spring. The king sniffed and pinched his nose, slightly numb from the cold.

  Shaking himself a little the king ploughed on. The smell now hovered at the edges of his mind, flitting its silent wings, shadowed and imperceptible. But gradually the scent thickened, the air growing turgid with it. Sweet and cloying it surged against his nostrils, seeming now to have taken on a darker, heavier note—like charred, decaying earth. And though the flower-and-spice fragrance was still there, racy and titillating, yet now it had attained a musty, mineral odour, and sharpened into a familiar iron tang; hot as wine, and bitter as ichor.