Take No Prisoners (33 page)

"Why are you not loyal to your master?" she says.

"I am being loyal to him. Hold your head stiller. In a few months or years he'd remember how much he loved you and the crime he had forced me to commit. He's in a fury at the moment, but his fury will soon die. Do you think he's been entirely chaste in Italy?"

"Yes," she says without thinking.

The servant makes no reply. He is concentrating on making her look like a slender, small young man. This is clearly the only reason why he makes no reply.

"He and I are supposedly faithful to each other," she says. "So I'll call myself Fidele."

~

That night, as they sat on either side of the fire eating turnips that were acridly black on the outside and almost raw in the middle, the wolf began to talk to her.

"How much can you really remember?" it said.

"Everything of importance. My memory's not so clear as it was, but I am not yet old." She paused. "Yes, I
am
old, but I am not in my dotage. Yet."

The wolf looked at her without expression. She suspected that later, after she had fallen asleep, it would go out into the night, and catch some creatures to eat. Or maybe it would gnaw at her half-sheep. But at the moment, out of pity or some other emotion alien to her, it was making do with these vile turnips which she'd dug up out of the snow with her bare hands from some poor farmer's land.

"I've just lied to you, and I didn't realize I was lying," she said suddenly. "I
can't
rely on my memory. I think sometimes it ... deceives me. I remember the things I did during my life as if they were dreams, and maybe that's all they are. Maybe my life was entirely different. Maybe I've never truly lived at all, but am just a creature that has learned how to dream itself up a past where it was the daughter of a king. I could be an elemental – I could have come from Faerie and lost myself in the fogs of mortal delusion. All the dreams I have could be born out of the fact that I'm in the wrong world. Do you think this could be true, Cymbeline?"

"No."

The wolf spoke the syllable so curtly that it was as if she had been slapped.

"Why are you here?" she said.

"To help you find out what you did and why you did it, so that you can reconcile yourself with yourself."

"What have I done?" She wasn't hungry any more, and threw the rest of her turnip into the fire; there was a chorus of complaint from the flames and then, almost immediately, a reek that had her dragging herself away across the cave-floor until she was out of its direction.

"That was a foolish thing to do," said the wolf.

"I've done many foolish things," she said. "More of them than you can imagine."

"But I want you to
remember
what you've done, not just to dream it."

She put an arm around the wolf's shoulder and at last, after a first reluctance, it rested its heavy head against hers, almost as if they were sweethearts gazing into the fire.

There were castles among the flames, and there were also caves. One of the caves was this one, where now she sat beside a wolf that was irrevocably called by the same name as her father.

The heat lulled her.

~

Fidele wakes to discover a headless corpse at his side, and he shrieks, putting his knuckles into his mouth. For a moment he thinks it is the body of the wolf: no, this is a human, a man. Posthumus. Fidele remembers knitting the jacket this dead thing wears.

Fidele turns away from the dead thing and weeps – not for Posthumus, who wanted Pisanio to stick a dagger into Imogen's heart, but for himself. Fidele sees that there is blood on his soft hands, but only after he has tasted its salt and smeared it across his face.

A man shouldn't weep like this. Fidele's tears are those of a woman.

The remains of his illness gnaw at him, as does his hunger. Through his tears he looks out over the hillside, and memories begin to come back. Living in the cave. Being the servant of Belarius and Guiderius and Arviragus, all the time keeping from them a secret.

A secret.

He has kept it so well that, in his delirium, he has managed to keep it from himself. Only now does he gather the strength to try to discover in his mind the truth of that secret. And at last it comes to him.

His womanhood.

Fidele touches his groin, and remembers at last the time when he was Imogen. Yet his inner sense is telling him that he is a man – though a man still weeping a woman's tears.

~

"Madness took you," said the wolf.

Imogen had been almost asleep, leaning against the mass of the beast. She sat upright, moving slightly away from it, putting her hands to her cheeks and discovering that fresh tears had flowed down her cheeks.

"Yes," she said. "Always there was madness. I was wrong to say that I've done a lot of foolish things. They were
mad
things. And I don't think the madness has left me. I'm sitting in a cave on a Welsh mountainside having a conversation with a wolf. Rational people don't do that."

"A rational person wouldn't have slept with Iachimo."

There it was: out in the open. The flatness of the way the wolf spoke the words made the truth all the more painful.

"I was rational enough to lie about it afterwards," she said, before being engulfed by a further wave of sobbing.

"I don't attach any blame for either act," said the wolf. "You were a woman who had only just discovered the joys of lovemaking, and then your husband was banished. You might never see him again. You were like a furnace that was eager to devour coal. You took Iachimo to your bed not out of any fondness for him but just because you needed someone to be there. And then afterwards you lied so well to Pisanio and all the others that you convinced yourself it had never happened."

Once again Imogen put her arm around the wolf and stared into the flames. The animal seemed to know more about her past than she knew herself.

Iachimo had been suave and attractive, and he had used every weapon in his armory to seduce her. No one else in her father's court would have dared try, because they pitied her situation or because they feared her father's ire. How she had damned their pity! Waking up in a cold and lonely bed each day had been like the plucking out of her eyes, as if the gods had selected her to be cursed. She had wanted Posthumus to be there, to feel him running his fingers through her hair or to listen to his silly jokes.

But Posthumus had been in a faraway land, and would likely never return. So she had allowed a surrogate Posthumus to come to her chamber – not once but many times – so that in the mornings she would feel warm breath against her neck and a hand caressing her stomach and breasts.

For this the price of Iachimo's somewhat hasty and careless intercourse had been one worth paying.

"You might have had his child," said the wolf.

"That, too, would have been a price worth paying," said Imogen. "Because of my father and his accursed stubbornness I was barred almost entirely from the simple pleasure of the touch of another human being."

"Pisanio bathed you."

"That made it worse. Don't you understand? It wasn't until far too late that I realized Pisanio, in his own way, genuinely loved me: at the time I believed he performed all his servantly deeds because he had no alternative. It was only when he disobeyed Posthumus's order to kill me that I began to know the truth. Before then, Pisanio had been part of my furniture, but each day, with his ministrations as I lay in my bath, he unknowingly aroused me."

"I thought it wasn't arousal you were looking for," said the wolf. "I thought it was merely affection."

"I
didn't
want the arousal," replied Imogen sleepily. "It happened despite me. But I would have slept with Pisanio rather than Iachimo had I known his fondness for me."

"Iachimo was not an entirely bad man."

"No," she said. "He did me one great act of kindness."

"And what was that?" said the wolf. It shuffled around until it was lying on its side, its head in her lap.

"He lied."

"About what?"

"When my father insisted he tell the truth about the ring, he lied. He pretended that all he had done was spy on me when I was naked."

"The ring?"

The bet. Her husband, Posthumus, bragging about her virtue and probably drunk, had wagered her chastity against a diamond ring. All this she had discovered too late, long after she had fled her father's house.

He had treated her as if she were a common whore, an object.

And, she told herself, because she wanted affection she had become much like that common whore.

"Was it your fault or Posthumus's?" said the wolf.

"Mine," said Imogen firmly.

"Are you so sure?"

No, she wasn't sure. Her adultery – her various adulteries – had all come about because of that wager. It was strange that men felt they could bet about the bodies of women, even the women whom they had told they loved.

"He made me what I am – what I have been," she said. The wolf fetched more wood for the fire, giving it to her as gently as a parent would have. She threw the branches onto the redness. Some of them were green, and sizzled alarmingly. She smelt the death of their resin.

"So why do you blame yourself for it all?"

"My adulteries were petty crimes. They don't matter. Lucius thought I was a boy when he ordered me to his room, but was just as glad when he found I was a woman: all he wanted was someone who had no choice but to obey his commands. He turned out to be the most tender of all the lovers I ever had. Posthumus was clumsy and Iachimo was efficient in attaining his own pleasure, but Lucius stroked me until the whole of my body sang, and only then would he move into me. I believe he loved me – yes, I
know
he loved me, because he lied as well."

"To you?"

"Never to me."

Imogen reached out a foot as close as she dared to the fire.

"He loved me enough to make sure I was, in one way or another, returned to my husband," she said. "To do that he had to lie – he had to pretend he knew me only as his page, Fidele."

"So many lies," said the wolf.

"My life has been built on lies," said Imogen. "That was why, even in the early days, I was enslaved by the madness. Even now that I'm telling you my memories, Cymbeline, I can't be certain they're the truth. Maybe I'm lying to you without even knowing it."

"Maybe I'm a lie as well."

"I can feel the weight of your head against my thighs, father."

"Are you sure you can?"

"I'm too sleepy. Let's talk again tomorrow."

~

They didn't talk tomorrow, or for the next few days after that. Father Wolf, as she had nicknamed the beast, became skittish and uncertain of her, and wouldn't allow her to come near it, let alone touch it. It seemed to have lost its powers of speech, although at night, as she drifted into an inevitably fitful sleep, she could hear the wolf dragging fuel into the cave for the next day's fire. Sometimes it would bring her food as well: always the neatly bitten-off half of an animal or a bird. It was sharing with her. More often they had no food. The mutton was long gone, and she was too listless to chase for more. The wolf could have caught and killed a sheep, but for some reason it never did.

Hunger and the relentless cold of the days were driving her into a pit of despair that seemed to have no bottom. This was the place where she had been so ill so many years ago that Guiderius and Arviragus had assumed she was dead. Perhaps she
had
died, then, and everything she thought had happened to her since was an illusion.

She left the cave only to piss and shit. Sometimes, when the cold was particularly cutting, she pissed in a corner of the cave, knowing the meatish smell would soon dissipate.

She hoped for death. She wished she had indeed died here decades ago. It would have been better.

Then, one night, the wolf spoke to her again.

"You killed him, didn't you?"

"Killed who?" She was confused, both by the question and by the sudden speech.

"Your husband."

"I ... I don't know. Perhaps I did. He deserved to die. He wagered with my virtue. He tried to have me killed."

She did her best to remember, but all that would come to her mind was the sensation of her lethal little bronze dagger hacking at the throat of her sleeping stepmother. Despite Imogen's pleas for clemency, Cymbeline had executed a dozen men most brutally on the grounds that one of them might have committed the murder; it had never occurred to him that a woman would have used the assassin's knife so adroitly.

The queen. The woman Cymbeline had taken as his second wife and who had wanted to foist her doltish son Cloten on Imogen as her husband, when it was Posthumus who was her husband. The queen had betrayed Imogen and Posthumus to Cymbeline, telling him of their marriage. Yes, she, too, had deserved to die. But Imogen could recall nothing of her husband's death – even though she knew he was long dead.

"Your stepmother," said the wolf. "I hadn't known about that."

"Aren't
any
of my thoughts my own?"

"Any word you speak becomes shared. Why should thoughts be any different?"

The beast moved – still with the old wariness – around the fire and came to settle itself against her as it had done in the early days after she had found it, or it had found her.

"You're right," it said, its breath redolent of the squirrels it had caught for their supper. "She tried to destroy your life with her silly little schemings, so it was justifiable that you destroyed her. It was
not
justifiable that your father had those men killed."

"How was he to know who had murdered her?"

"If he had thought about it – or if he had ordered someone to do his thinking for him – he could have uncovered the truth."

"But he was the king!" Although the wolf was physically very close to her, she felt at the same time that it was far away.

"And they were men. They had the same right to life as he had. As you had." The wolf's voice was very quiet.

"
Would
he have discovered what had really happened?" she said.