Oddest of All (12 page)

One thing I know: I should never have let him into our home on a Friday night. It was defiant of me, I think—a way of showing I had nothing to hide. But in truth, I had much to hide—not about my wife, but about my own heart, which was tender and raw, harrowed by the doubts he had already planted there. When Melusine excused herself just before midnight all it took was his raised eyebrow, his amused and scornful grin—not even a grin, just a twitch at the corner of his mouth—to drive me to rash action.

In that moment I decided to break my vow to Melusine and spy on her, both to quiet my brother and to set my burning heart at rest.

 

Near the end of my third day in the forest a light rain—little more than a mist, really—began to fall. I was leaning against a tree to rest when I heard the singing, clear and rippling as water over stone.

I knew at once it must be her.

Following her song, as my grandfather had so many centuries before, I pushed my way through the thickly growing ferns. Rounding a massive tree, I came to a thick wall of fog. I plunged in, certain I had come at last to the place I sought. I stumbled ahead blindly, but after no more than five feet the fog thinned. Soon after that the land dipped, and I found the closest thing I had yet seen to a trail—a little downward twisting path that led between two ever-steepening banks, mostly rocky but dotted with clusters of primrose and eglantine. In the gray light, drops of water stood like jewels on the richly colored petals.

Beneath her singing, enhancing its beauty like a skilled accompanist, was the crystalline music of flowing water.

The rain stopped. The sun, low in the sky, sent shafts of light sideways through the forest, illumining the soft mist from within. The trunks of the trees stood upright within that mist, rising like bars all around me.

The path grew steeper, the banks higher. The light was nearly gone when I tripped, righted myself, and saw her.

 

Extract from the Testimony of
Raymond de Lusignan
(as offered to the abbot of the Monastery
of Saint-Denis in the year of the Lord 953)

______________________________________________________

 

As I have said, every Friday without fail Melusine retreated at midnight to the tower room she had claimed as her own. On that fateful Friday I waited some ten or fifteen minutes after she had climbed the stairs, then ascended to the room myself, my way lit by the torches that always burned in the wall mounts.

Her door was closed. I pressed my ear against it and heard, faintly, two things: the plash of water, and my wife, singing. A new flare of jealousy scalded my heart. Was she singing for someone else?

With the point of my dagger I widened a hole between two of the door's broad planks. It took time, for I had to work silently. I had not forgotten the promise I had made when we married, after all, the promise that I would not ask Melusine what she did on Saturdays, or seek to know it in any way. Nor had I forgotten that she had told me that if I broke this vow all our happiness must end. But in my jealous passion it seemed as if all my happiness had ended anyway. And I kept telling myself that if I could only do this in silence, and if she proved innocent—as some part of me yet believed she would—then she would never know, and all might still be well.

I finished my work and returned my dagger to its sheath. Then I pressed my eye to the hole I had made.

At first I couldn't see anything in the dim light of her chamber. Then my eye adjusted and I spotted her. It was all I could do to keep from crying out in horror. Staggering back, I fled down the stairs as silently as I could.

I did not speak of what I had learned. And when Melusine appeared in her usual form on Sunday she did not act as if she realized I had spied on her. But despite the fact that I now knew she had not betrayed me with any other lover, our happiness was doomed. Oh, my wife had been faithful. But I—I had betrayed her trust completely.

How, then, could love survive?

 

On the far side of the pool, at the water's edge, sat my grandmother.

I had known what to expect, of course. I had read the descriptions in the legends, in my grandfather's testimony.

It was something else entirely to see her.

From the waist up, she was, even after all these centuries, the most beautiful of women, with abundant tresses of thick, red gold hair that tumbled past her shoulders, flowing like a liquid sunrise over her bare breasts. But at her waist came a grotesque change, for there her body shifted to that of an enormous snake. It was hard to guess the length of this abomination, which coiled beneath her; I imagine it was twenty feet at the least.

Rising from her back, looming over her golden head, was a pair of batlike wings. Even folded and at rest they had a demonic look that I found terrifying.

Her song faltered, then stopped. She stared in my direction. A look of puzzlement crossed her face, then she cried in astonishment, “You can see me!”

After all these years, and even knowing what I would find, I felt as if my tongue had turned to stone. A handful of seconds passed, feeling like a century, before I managed to stammer, “Should I not be able to?”

“It has been a long time since anyone could,” she replied. She sounded nervous, uncertain.

“We share the same blood,” I said, by way of explanation.

She slid into the pool—the same pool where my grandfather had first met her, first fallen in love with her. The great tail slithered in behind her. To my surprise, she was able to hold her entire torso, as well as several inches of her serpentine lower quarters, above the water. Arms extended, she glided toward me, propelled only by the powerful muscles of her serpent portion.

I thought of what I carried in my pack and felt a moment of uncertainty. Even in this form my grandmother was the most enchanting woman I had ever seen. Now that we were face-to-face, could I really give her what I had spent so long in search of?

 

· · ·

 

He has my mother's eyes
, thinks Melusine, staring at the young man who has invaded her clearing.

Those eyes disturb her, for they stir memories of her past—of her mother and the curse she had pronounced as punishment for Melusine's rebellion.

Melusine tries to press back the rising memories of what happened after the night Raymond spied on her and the curse came to its fullness. They flood in anyway, carrying with them all the sorrow and loss of that time.

She had known he had done it, of course—had felt a cold chill in her spine the moment his eye fell on her. But she had not spoken of it, loving him anyway, despite his failure. Perhaps loving him even more for the very humanity of it. And desperately, desperately hoping that if his betrayal remained secret, the doom laid on her might not be stirred after all and they could stay together.

 

Extract from the Testimony of
Raymond de Lusignan
(as offered to the abbot of the Monastery
of Saint-Denis in the year of the Lord 953)

______________________________________________________

 

Here is how my faithlessness was revealed.

In the weeks that followed my spying on Melusine I tried to pretend that it had not happened. Yet the tender closeness we had once enjoyed now seemed forced and stiff.

I have thought about this often in the years since I came here to the monastery, where there is so much time to think, and I wonder if in every marriage there are not things that should remain secret. How much of ourselves can we ever share? Is anyone ready to see the all of it, the deep and secret parts that we ourselves sometimes fear to peek at, much less reveal?

Though I do not have the answer, this much I now believe: Regardless of what you know, there are words you should never speak, for once uttered they can never be taken back, and instead will hang in the air like a curtain of venom between you and the one you love.

Thus it was with me and Melusine when we learned of Geoffroi's crime against the monastery.

From the moment I discovered Melusine's secret I had begun to think about the boys, of course. It seemed clear that their strangeness had come from . . . from whatever she was. I loved my sons none the less for that. But now I worried about them all the more. And the whispers that I had shut out for so many years began to pierce my defenses, landing like arrows in my heart: “They are demon seed,” the wagging tongues said. “The blood of Lusignan is tainted forevermore.”

Which is why, I confess, when word came of Geoffroi's atrocity my first, horrified reaction was not sorrow for the lives lost but shame for my own family. In a moment of black rage I turned on Melusine and cried, “Foul serpent! You have contaminated the blood of a noble line!”

Would that someone had cut my living tongue from my mouth before I uttered those loveless, heartless words.

Melusine shrieked and bolted from the room. At first I thought that terrible cry, torn from her heart and echoing still in my ears today, was one of rage. All too soon I realized it came from terror.

She ran for her tower. I sprang up to pursue her, but she was faster than I, as she always had been.

She did not go all the way to her chamber. Halfway up the long, winding stair she sprang to the sill of a window and flung herself out.

“No!” I cried, love rising over my anger.
“No!”

I was but an arm's length behind her. As I clasped the sill to lean out I saw with astonishment that her foot had impressed itself into the solid stone, leaving a deep print. I looked down fearfully, expecting to see her dashed to her death on the rocks below. But a wild cry caught my attention, drawing my eyes upward. What I saw then was worse than my wildest fears could have guessed. My beloved wife, my Melusine, was suspended in midair. Caught between earth and heaven, she writhed and twisted, screaming in agony. Her clothes vanished in a burst of flame. Before my terrified eyes her legs fused into a single thick trunk. It lengthened and lengthened, stretching beneath her in loathsome coils. Blue gray scales slid across its surface, as if she were being sheathed in armor by some invisible smith.

She screamed again. I saw blood spurt from behind her as leathery wings, pointed and demonic looking, ripped their way from her shoulders.

She began to cough. Soon her entire body shook with great spasms, as if she were trying to vomit something forth. At last some small black thing burst from her mouth and fluttered away. Melusine wailed in despair, a sound more heart-wrenching even than her screams of pain, and stretched her arms longingly toward the winged thing. But it quickly flew out of sight.

Only when it was gone did she turn toward me. Her arms were still outstretched, as if she wanted me to take her back, even after what I had done. And her eyes were filled with such anguish that I had my own foot on the sill and was ready to leap into her embrace, heedless of my own life. But before I could make that plunge Melusine was caught as if by an invisible hand and snatched away, vanishing from my sight.

That was the last time I ever saw her. But I heard her again, many times. We all heard her. For she always returned the night before death came to take one of our family. In the midnight darkness she would fly around the castle towers, wailing her warning, until those of us inside were nearly mad with grief.

 

My grandmother's hooded eyes gazed up at me, the strange vertical pupils only making her beauty more exotic. Then her forked tongue flicked from between her shapely lips, and my fascination turned to horror. Why that one thing above all else should have disgusted me I am not certain. Perhaps it was because in other ways her human and serpent parts were clearly distinct. But that slender tongue darting lightning-like from those human lips made shudderingly real the curse that lay upon her.

“Why have you come here?” she asked. “Why now, after all these years?”

“I have a gift for you.”

Eagerness flashed in her strange eyes. But I saw fear as well. As if to hold off the coming moment she turned the conversation, asking softly, “You're Geoffroi's son, aren't you?”

I smiled and nodded, feeling I had reclaimed some pride in my father. “I carry his name, too.” I paused, then added shyly, “I heard you, the night you came to wail your dirge for him around our cottage; the night before he died.”

She closed her eyes, as if the memory pained her. “Geoffroi was the last of my children,” she whispered. “Even so, what I sang was no dirge. It was a cry of desire.”

Relief rippled through me, for these words confirmed that I
was
doing the right thing. After a moment I said, “While he was waiting to die, Father told me the story of our family. All but a small part of it.”

“What part was that?” she asked, her forked tongue darting out again.

“About your mother.”

Melusine looked away, as if gazing into the past, then said softly, “How much do you know? Are you aware that Mother was one of the Earthly Fallen?”

I had learned some about the Earthly Fallen during the years of my quest. Even so, I said nothing, leaving the silence for her to fill, if she was willing.

Pulling herself from the water, Melusine coiled her tail beneath her. Perhaps a foot of her serpent self rose from that coil, its muscular blue gray thickness holding her torso upright, so that her head was actually slightly above mine.