Snow Glass Apples: A Play For Voices (4 page)
QUEEN
Show him in, Jenna.
SFX: A DOOR OPENS. FOOTSTEPS.
QUEEN
My Lord?
LORD OF THE FAIR
Your majesty
QUEEN
You asked to see me
LORD OF THE FAIR
Yes, majesty. (he plucks up his nerve)
I do not come to you as my queen.
QUEEN
No?
LORD OF THE FAIR (CONT’D)
No, majesty. I come to you because you are
wise. When you were a child you found a strayed foal by staring
into a pool of ink; when you were a maiden you found a lost infant
who had wandered far from her mother, by staring into that mirror
of yours. You know secrets and you can seek out things hidden.
Something is taking the forest folk. Next year there will be no
Spring Fair. The travellers from other kingdoms have grown scarce
and few, the folk of the forest are almost gone. Another year like
the last, and we shall all starve.
QUEEN
Jenna, bring me my looking glass. It is in
the chest, in my chamber.
MAIDSERVANT
Yes, Majesty.
QUEEN—INTIMATE
It was a simple thing, a silver-backed glass
disk, which I kept wrapped in a doe-skin, safe in the dark.
MAIDSERVANT
Here, majesty.
LORD OF THE FAIR
Is that the one we bought you?
QUEEN
The same. Sometimes I can see things in
it.
Sometimes it tells me things. Now, quiet.
SFX: MIRROR MUSIC, DISTANT AND STRANGE.
QUEEN—INTIMATE
She was twelve and she was no longer a
little child. Her skin was still pale, her eyes and hair
coal-black, her lips blood-red. She wore the clothes she had worn
when she left the castle for the last time—the blouse, the
skirt—although they were much let-out, much mended.
Over them she wore a leather cloak, and
instead of boots she had leather bags, tied with thongs, over her
tiny feet.
SFX: FOREST NOISES BEGIN—RUSTLING AND NIGHT
BIRDSONG … BUT TREATED, THROUGH THE MIRROR, WITH A LITTLE ECHO AND
FLUX …
QUEEN—INTIMATE
She was standing in the forest, beside a
tree. As I watched, in the eye of my mind, I saw her edge and step
and flitter and pad from tree to tree, like an animal: a bat or a
wolf. She was following someone. He was a monk. He wore sackcloth,
and his feet were bare, and scabbed and hard. His beard and tonsure
were of a length, overgrown, unshaven. She watched him from behind
the trees. Eventually he paused for the night, and began to make a
fire, laying twigs down, breaking up a robin’s nest as kindling. He
had a tinder-box in his robe, and he knocked the flint against the
steel until the sparks caught the tinder and the fire flamed. There
had been two eggs in the nest he had found, and these he ate, raw.
They cannot have been much of a meal for so big a man.
SFX: THE FIRE CRACKLES.
FRIAR
That’s the thing.
He gets comfortable, noisily.
FRIAR (CONT’D)
Who’s there? Is someone there?
SFX: NOTHING. A RUSTLE IN THE BUSHES. THEN
FOOTSTEPS APPROACH, NERVOUSLY.
FRIAR (CONT’D)
Hello… My, you’re a pretty thing. Come on,
pretty thing. Over here.
There is a rustling.
FRIAR (CONT’D)
Oh yes. Such a pretty little thing. Now let’s
see what you’ll do to a man of god for a shiny penny…
QUEEN—INTIMATE
She stood up and walked around the fire, and
waited, an arm’s-length away. He pulled in his robe until he found
a coin—a tiny, copper penny—and tossed it to her. She caught it,
and nodded, and went to him. He pulled at the rope around his
waist, and his robe swung open. His body was as hairy as a bear’s.
She pushed him back onto the moss. One hand crept, spider-like,
through the tangle of hair, until it closed on his manhood; the
other hand traced a circle on his left nipple. He closed his eyes,
and fumbled one huge hand under her skirt. She lowered her mouth to
the nipple she had been teasing, her smooth skin white on the furry
brown body of him.
SFX: IN THE BACKGROUND WE HAVE HEARD THE
FRIAR CHUCKLE AND MUTTER ENDEARMENTS. NOW, FOR A MOMENT, HE
SQUEALS, AND THEN ALL WE CAN HEAR IS A LAPPING NOISE
…
QUEEN—INTIMATE
She sank her teeth deep into his breast. His
eyes opened, then they closed again, and she drank. She straddled
him, and she fed. As she did so a thin blackish liquid began to
dribble from between her legs…
The end of the Mirror sequence: we can hear
the noises of the throne room, crisp and clear.
LORD OF THE FAIR
Majesty? Do you know what is keeping the
travellers from our town? What is happening to the forest
people?
QUEEN
Yes. I know.
LORD OF THE FAIR
Is something killing the travellers?
QUEEN
Yes, something is. Go home, my lord. I will
take it upon myself to make the forest safe once more.
QUEEN—INTIMATE
I had to, although she terrified me. I was
the queen.
A foolish woman would have gone then into
the forest and tried to capture the creature; but I had been
foolish once and had no wish to be so a second time.
I spent time with old books. I spent time
with the gypsy women (who passed through our country across the
mountains to the south, rather than cross the forest to the north
and the west).
I prepared myself, and obtained those things
I would need, and when the first snows began to fall, then I was
ready.
SFX: WE’RE OUTSIDE, AND A FREEZING WIND IS
BLOWING, HOWLING AND SCREAMING ACROSS THE CASTLE WALLS.
QUEEN—INTIMATE
Naked, I was, and alone in the highest tower
of the palace, a place open to the sky. The winds chilled my body;
goose-pimples crept across my arms and thighs and breasts. I
carried a silver basin, and a basket in which I had placed a silver
knife, a silver pin, some tongs, a grey robe and three green
apples. I put them down and stood there, unclothed, on the tower,
humble before the night sky and the wind. Had any man seen me
standing there, I would have had his eyes; but there was no-one to
spy. Clouds scudded across the sky, hiding and uncovering the
waning moon.
QUEEN
(She starts to hum, as if she is
half-humming, half-chanting, magically.)
QUEEN—INTIMATE
I took the silver knife, and slashed my left
arm—once, twice, three times.
QUEEN
(Sharp intake of breath as she gashes her
arm.)
QUEEN—INTIMATE
The blood dripped into the basin, scarlet
seeming black in the moonlight.
I added the powder from the vial that hung
around my neck. It was a brown dust, made of dried herbs and the
skin of a particular toad, and from certain other things. It
thickened the blood, while preventing it from clotting.
I took the three apples, one by one, and
pricked their skins gently with my silver pin. Then I placed the
apples in the silver bowl, and let them sit there while the tiny
flakes of snow fell slowly onto my skin, and onto the apples, and
onto the blood.
SFX: ALL THE WIND HAS GONE.
DAWN CHORUS BIRDSONG.
QUEEN—INTIMATE
When dawn began to brighten the sky I
covered myself with the grey cloak, and took the red apples from
the silver bowl, one by one, lifting each into my basket with
silver tongs, taking care not to touch it.
There was nothing left of my blood or of the
brown powder in the silver bowl, nothing save a black residue, like
a verdigris, on the inside.
I buried the bowl in the earth.
SFX: MAGIC SOUNDS …
QUEEN—INTIMATE
Then I cast a glamour on the apples (as
once, years before, by abridge, I had cast a glamour on myself),
that they were, beyond any doubt, the most wonderful apples in the
world; and the crimson blush of their skins was the warm colour of
fresh blood.
SFX: FOR A MOMENT WE HEAR THE BEAT OF THE
PRINCESS’S HEART …
WHICH FADES INTO THE FOREST …
QUEEN—INTIMATE
I pulled the hood of my cloak low over my
face, and I took ribbons and pretty hair ornaments with me, placed
them above the apples in the reed basket, and I walked alone into
the forest, until I came to her dwelling: a high, sandstone cliff,
laced with deep caves going back a way into the rock wall.
There were trees and boulders around the
cliff-face, and I walked quietly and gently from tree to tree,
without disturbing a twig or a fallen leaf.
Eventually I found my place to hide, and I
waited, and I watched.
SFX: THE SOUNDS OF DWARFS COMING OUT OF THE
CAVE, CURSING AND CLAMBERING. THEY DO NOT SING HI HO HI HO.
QUEEN—INTIMATE
After some hours a clutch of dwarfs crawled
out of the hole in the cave-front -ugly, misshapen, hairy little
men -the old inhabitants of this country. You saw them seldom
now.
They vanished into the wood, and none of
them saw me, though one of them stopped to piss against the rock I
hid behind.
I waited. No more came out.
QUEEN (AS OLD WOMAN)
Hullo? Is anybody there? I’ve got ribbons,
pretty ribbons and combs…
QUEEN—INTIMATE
The scar on my Mound of Venus throbbed and
pulsed as she came towards me, out of the darkness, naked and
alone.
She was thirteen years of age, my
stepdaughter, and nothing marred the perfect whiteness of her skin
save for the livid scar on her left breast, where her heart had
been cut from her long since.
The insides of her thighs were stained with
wet black filth.
QUEEN (AS OLD WOMAN)
Ribbons, goodwife. Pretty ribbons for your
hair..
PRINCESS
(whispering)
Come to me…
QUEEN (AS OLD WOMAN)
(a screech, then)
Keep away from me!
QUEEN—INTIMATE
I dropped my basket, and screeched like the
bloodless old pedlar woman I was pretending to be, and I ran.
My grey cloak was the colour of the forest,
and I was fast; she did not catch me.
I made my way back to the palace.
SFX: THE HEARTBEAT BEGINS IN THE BACKGROUND.
IT GETS LOUDER OVER THIS …
QUEEN—INTIMATE
I did not see it. Let us imagine though, the
girl returning, frustrated and hungry, to her cave, and finding my
fallen basket on the ground.
What did she do?
I like to think she played first with the
ribbons, twined them into her raven hair, looped them around her
pale neck or her tiny waist. And then, curious, she moved the cloth
to see what else was in the basket; and she saw the red, red
apples. They smelled like fresh apples, of course; and they also
smelled of blood. And she was hungry. I imagine her picking up an
apple, pressing it against her cheek, feeling the cold smoothness
of it against her skin.
And she opened her mouth and bit deep into
it…
SFX: AND SILENCE. THE HEARTBEAT STOPS.
QUEEN—INTIMATE
By the time I reached my chambers, the heart
that hung from the roof-beam, with the apples and hams and the
dried sausages, had ceased to beat. It hung there, quietly, without
motion or life, and I felt safe once more.
SFX: WINTER WINDS HOWL. …
QUEEN—INTIMATE