I was dressed royally for this second meeting, in blood red silk, as I was when I fled the castle as a girl, and a fine black shawl over my head and shoulders, signifying mourning. I received him alone but for an attendant to guard the door, and she unarmed and out of earshot, besides, and sworn to secrecy; and my hound, whose grandsire was my love’s old hound. His companions came with him as far as the door and they were the son and grandson I knew of old and glad I was to see them. But he came in with just his hound, the very hound that had come to my love and me on our first night in the wild to warn us of our danger; and it knew me again and came up for me to fondle it. Its master told me that he had come to sue for peace on an equal footing. My hound, meanwhile, crept on its belly to fawn on his and was received mildly. This bodes well! said the old man. At that I drew myself up. O man of war! said I. You had a peace and broke it for the sole sake of wreaking vengeance, no matter how base, out of bloodlust for the kill. You live to kill. What peace can such a one as you make that will last? What does it take for such a one to keep his word? He answered that only the future was in our hands. I saw that for pride’s sake he was determined at least to keep his temper. No matter what I said, no stab of remorse or shame would pierce or deflect him or goad him into lashing out. Black obdurate pride was what had brought him to this pass. Eye to eye we sat down then and I told him my terms.
He had come to me, as to my love on that last day, empty-handed, with nothing to offer, but nothing up his sleeve either, for once, no trap to spring or so I thought; nor was he in any mood to goad or gloat over me. Our hounds fell asleep, and maybe that did bode well. Little time was lost in verbal swordplay as we thrashed out our peace. Afterwards I poured us both mead out of the jug – he need have no fear – and we drank to the future. I had thought the game over when he made his move. He got to his feet, waking the hounds, and asked wryly if I would marry him now and seal the pact. So this was what it took. Though unexpected, it hardly came as a surprise. I grasped the necessity. He knew – who better? – that, of all the widows he had made, I was the last he ought to seek to marry; and that marriage to him, of all men, would serve to cast my true love’s blood on my own golden head. Well, so be it, said I.
Why so? He, for the sake of having his broken bread at last and eating it too, a sop to pride, for that kind of man; and of being rid of a thorn in his flesh and the fourfold threat at his back, otherwise, of those four sons of mine; even, for once, for the sake of peace. And I for the sake of seeing those four sons take a high place in his band of brothers as their father’s sons, if they so wished, as was their birthright. I pointed out that they four were a band of brothers unto themselves, and fought as one; and by this he would be getting four, for the price of that one. And, knowing them, they would live up to it or die.
Better with me than against me, he said, and that goes for you no less. But are they prepared to join our brotherhood and keep the oath? he wanted to know. I held my breath for him to go on and say it: that their father betrayed? – but no. No crowing. That is for them to say, I said, and you to ask. Let us send for them and your kinsmen. Or, better – it struck me that all might yet be lost if I sprang this on my sons in front of him without warning – stay the night if you will and let them and your kinsmen take food and drink and their part in our talk of the future. And in the meantime let us break the news of where we stand, each to his own. And so it was.
I who would not leave my first marriage in any other hands but mine, would never not have taken hold of my second when it came.
That night of the boar, my love’s foster father had came from his far valley, wreathed in invisibility, having divined his mortal danger for this third time; but as with the third handful of water, though in his case it was unwittingly, he was too late. Unable in his grief to bear being parted from his foster son, he took up the dead body of my love – so those comrades of his told me, who brought home his mangled weapons and his hound, wailing – and he sped away with it wrapped in gold in the wind, to keep him and call him up from time to time in his stronghold that is his doorway to the otherworld. For my part, I have only my dreams, where I can never call him up, death being the breaker of all bonds, but only wait and hope; and when he is his old self in a dream he comes to bed as ever, burning, flesh to flesh, and other times at a loss, looking straight through me as though I were a stranger, and I awake racked with the pain either way in the deep of night. He is real to me as no living man is or has ever been. I was not fated to lay him out, to wash and anoint him, clothe him in silks and gold and give him a last kiss. And yet what woman would change what I had of him for what his foster father has, who loved him as a son and yet could not bring him back to life? He is where he belongs in the half light, half dark world where his life first took shape. All the same, to my mind what his foster father has of him there in the valley of death is no more alive than a death’s head with a candle burning in it, a flame wavering in the hollows, or the moth to the flame, a dream of another order. But then he is a strange man of subtle mind, if he is a man at all, whose face is as deep as water and as hard to read and whose nature is past my divining.
I had long since eaten my heart out when I came to my second husband. All that was left was a shadow of myself in flesh that might as well have been dead for all I cared. He was satisfied with so little. What had he ever been after but the substance, not the shadow? And so, for all my vaunting, rather than drown myself I made a pact with our mortal enemy and married him and came to warm the bed I had vowed I never should. I gave what wives give. I will break you, he said one drunken night, I will break your will yet. He will not. Love he neither asked nor offered. For my part, I who remain in thrall to love, I hold my peace. In bed, if I dread his hands on me, those murderer’s hands, I am sparing with my angry words and open to him. He is free to take hold of me awake or asleep.
So far so good. The peace has held fast – as fast as do those granite hands of his, scarred and cragged with bone, when he so chooses, and that is seldom, hold out the power of life and death in the formless form of the water of his well. If I lay dying, and he were to bring me water in those hands – would he? – should I drink and prolong my life? How could I, as if no sworn vow, no grief or flitting image, stood in my way? Of all things, this man’s wife though I be, and never having baulked at it, the last thing I could ever do would be to bow my head to those hands and lap like a hound at his bidding. There I draw the line. Thus far, no further.
Once I asked my love if he still wished to spare his leader, our enemy, as best he could. He stared at me. Had our enemy not soaked the land in the blood of thousands of brave warriors, all true to their oaths, to have his vengeance on the one who had not been, only to salve his pride? He has his will wholly bent, my love said, on draining my heart’s blood to the dregs if he can. Why should I spare one who will spare no one at all?
If only I had gone out with him that fatal morning, my place having been at his side day and night in the wild and onward for so long; and encountered the boar with him, given that nothing would turn it or his fate aside; and died with him or stayed with him and meanwhile brought him water for his thirst, for all that no water drunk out of my hands could have saved him – I who once bound him to me for life should have had him in my arms at the death.
There are times in the reaches of the night I am back in the mists and soft rains and shadows of some mossy green place, sheathed in scarlet hand in hand with my love, or on a blanket of skins deep in a river cave beside a fire like a river of red gold, half shadow and half light, sharing a fish I have caught and a honeycomb he has snatched from a rock face or cave wall, defying the bees, and I healing his stings with my herbs; or under a capstone blistered all over with lichen or on the bank of some river or lake wreathed in breath among swans and their ruffles of reflection, the surface of the water popping and looping in the twilight and everything still to be lived through of our life together, the hope and the grief; and times I lie naked under the stars on
a bed of stone as waves on waves flapping like wings break on the shore where no day breaks.
The Blood Red of Her Silks
In the heart of this watery island off the western shores of the mainland lies a lake sunk in a loop of green hills. The air is silvery here and as often as not awash in fine rain, so that the land is steeped in green and shimmers when the sun comes out, from the drops of rain and dew or mist underfoot and the rosaries of raindrops strung under every leaf and twig. This whole island is woodland or bog but for outbreaks of rock here and there, crags and ridges and cliffs, black or red, and rock stacks and the few patches of pastureland cleared by this or that king of the day. From shore to shore trees stand out naked among their shadows or in the green or gold or bronze or red enamel of their leaves, blurring where they overhang the water. Lakes and rivers and bogs glint where they lie, whether still or rippled, sipping and sucking the shore, interlacing. On still days the reflections of the branches, the rushes and reeds and sedge, form in the water, shivering, twitching, broken by a bubble here and there, a splash and spreading rings of ripple around a fish, a gnat, mayflies. This water has eels in its belly and reed beds and waterlily pads haunted by swans in the sheltered coves around the rim. Here land and water alike are full of the presence, the ruffle and whirr of swans, now visible, now not, and their nests, old or new, full or barren, and their eggshells, feathers and bones.
Stories in this land have the texture of dreams, with no happy endings.
Sometimes a frost comes overnight to clamp every surface, even to the spiderwebs, in thin ice. In the depths of the winter every now and then it snows and laceworks of ice form on the rim of the lake, thickening, melting and reforming, some opaque, some clear as glass, and the wooded hills around it chime with icicles. Otherwise it is mild and full of rain. On rainy days in summer, and that is most days, it falls in a scatter at first, drawing a rich breath out of the warm earth, then steadily, solidly down, though, strangely, under the trees for some time it seems barely to be raining at all; and then, once it has stopped and the sun is out, maybe with a rainbow or a fragment of one, it goes on softly raining for a time under the tall trees heavy in leaf. The lake, even as it brims over, seems to flatten itself under the soft grey burden of the clouds. The shallows are clear and warm to the touch, blood warm, and the swans are busy in the rushes and reeds and waterlily pads, their necks hooped. But when a south wind blows in hard, waves break on the lake shore as loud as waves of the sea.
Under the surface there is nothing to be seen. Though clear and fresh and full of life, the water is dense, now murky, now the colour of honey, or greenish, and dark at any depth in any light. It runs cold. In the evening it stills and loops and rings form and fade all over it. Even in high summer under the milky ruffles and oily swathes of mirroring shadow at the foot of each wooded hill it stays cold. On the hottest days a dense green scum blooms in the shallows of the verge, solid-seeming, until a wind frays it away, or a fall of rain, or a current of the river water pouring through. On a still day in autumn once the mist clears the lake is a mirror all day and at sunset, suddenly, a cauldron of fire.
On sunny days a foot, a hand, in the shallows goes pale gold; and on dull days, brown. A swimmer floating at the surface where the water is deep is a mottle of gold all over. Slipping further under, she will go a greenish brown. The deeper she goes the darker, until she has fallen out of sight, silky, invisible, at one with the mud.
There is a story still told far and wide, of the four children of an ill-fated king who once ruled here long ago, when the island was made up of many lesser kingdoms like his under a high king. Their father’s realm was a broad swathe of the island, all green hills, waterfalls and streams, in the heart of which, like a jewel, lay the shining lake. His castle was not far from that of the high king, who held him in high regard and had even given him one of his own foster daughters in marriage after the death of his first wife. She bore him a daughter, then a son, and all was well with them until she died in childbed after giving birth to the last two children, they being twin boys.
The two castles were thrown into commotion and then deep mourning where there had been only celebration. The high king in his grief offered her younger sister in marriage to the widower in the dead queen’s stead, in consolation, and because the children must have a mother. The widower in turn, in his grief at this second bereavement, more out of need than desire, and not wanting to offend the high king, knowing how fond the girl was of her sister and her young nephew and niece, took her to be his third and last wife.
She, being young, thought she had been chosen in her own right and would easily step into her sister’s shoes. Why not? And yet for all her charm and willingness to please, to dance attention on them even, she failed to win the hearts of the husband and children who had been handed down to her. Attendants took charge of the newborn twins and, try as she might, the older two took no more notice of her now than if she were an attendant herself. Even the king her husband took her for granted, having no love left to give her, let alone a child of her own who might love her, though she was as high in rank and no less of a beauty than her sister had been; the very image of her, indeed, so that the sight of her was a doleful reminder of his loss. When he took her in his arms, and that was seldom enough, who was it he made love to in the image of the wife he had loved and lost? So through no fault of her own the new wife was humbled and given no more than a shadow’s part to play in his court and his bed. So pale and withdrawn was she in her decline that she came to seem more like the dead queen’s wraith than her successor and a queen in her own right. While she had her own royal quarters, the children slept with their father in his chamber, where he could look across and dote on them in their sleep. He made a point of taking them for chariot rides to the high king’s castle, where they were spoilt and made much of, while she herself, when she was included, was as good as ignored even there where she had been raised. The stronger and more beautiful the children grew, the more their father loved them and the more they basked in his love; and the more she faded into the background, overlooked. No matter what she did or said, it was they who came first, especially the eldest, the girl, who grew more like her mother every day and was the apple of the king’s eye. To the girl, this aunt, this stepmother who knew nothing of motherhood, was no more than a shell in the shape of her lost mother, like the summer dragonfly shells that she and her brothers found hanging by the claws on the lee side of the rocks, pale husks, their true selves having broken out and flown away.
As to the stepmother’s true self, the girl could not have been more mistaken.
A queen at heart, though so young, the stepmother was not one to languish in silence forever, in barrenness. It was not in her nature, not to be borne. She knew better than to break out in open rebellion. Defiance would get her nowhere. What, then? She began taking to her bed for days on end, now as cold as death, now sweating and shaking, and while she was cared for as was her due by her attendants, in the family she was not missed. For one whole winter she lay in bed and brooded, she who had no brood and no likelihood of one. Was it any wonder her brooding bore fruit at long last? Only what she had conceived was a deadly spite that grew in strength day and night, bathed in an invisible inner fire, until the day came when it was fully ripe and ready to burst open.
This year, as always, autumn in the woods had turned into cold fire by the girl’s birthday. As her father was away from home he had given her his gift beforehand, a lustrous long black mantle with a hood, made of the finest velvet anyone there had seen. And early on the day a little woven bag had come from the high king himself, and inside it was folded a long dress of blood red silk so fine it was translucent and as good as weightless.
The stepmother stared and was dumbstruck, as was everyone, the girl most of all.
In silence she left the room to try it on, and came back in and spun herself slowly, eyes shut and arms out and the long loose sleeves flying, into a patch of sun by the long window.
The onlookers gaped, slitting their eyes at the blaze of fire she made, reverberating on the walls, fanning, incandescent. It was as if some great dragonfly hung burning a gauzy hole in the air, a red whirr over the white of her skin and the charcoal of her long braid of hair as it swung over her back as thick as a swan’s neck and loosening, fanning, shadowy in the flame of her dress. Dizzy at last, and faint, she came to a standstill, gasping, having seen none of this herself, only stroking her silky thighs and seeing that here was a sure sign of her coming of age, even if she seemed to be barely more than a child. And, the day being so hot, a shine came off her and a waft of heat.
Out of the gloom of the background came the stepmother treading, as white as if she were a ghost or had seen one, as indeed she had. Before her eyes had spun her own dead sister. Of those in the room she alone had set eyes on the dress before, though not even she had seen it on. Made for her sister the queen, of rare silk that had been years in the gathering, and never once worn, on her death it had gone into the tomb with her, more precious than gold; or so they had said. But if so, they had not left it there for long, had they? – no, all the while the high king had been hoarding it for his foster granddaughter! Why, when it ought to have passed down to her, the closest in blood, a sister, and a queen herself no less? But she caught the girl’s eye on her and, mastering herself, forced a smile.
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