White As Snow (Fairy Tale) (27 page)

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Authors: Tanith Lee

BOOK: White As Snow (Fairy Tale)
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I
N THE UNDERWORLD EVENING he returned to visit her. “Are you well at last?” he ardently demanded. Coira felt weak and weightless. She gazed at him. Somehow, it seemed he knew her familiarly. Obviously, he had had time to look at her, to study her while she lay in her stupor, her sham death. To her, he was a stranger.
“Perhaps I’m rather sick, still,” she said, carefully.
“What? Oh, don’t be, my beloved. I want to see you in health at once. We’re meant to be together, you and I. God made us for each other.”
He was alight with concupiscence. When he had been with her before, had this also been so?
She could see, for him, it was a welcomed, rational state, and that he enjoyed it, and was almost impatient with her. She had come back to life. They had revived her and let her out of the coffin. She had had all that night, and all this day, to recuperate, to bathe and use the scented unguents, to make herself ready, to grow hale, enamored
and willing. For it was Hadz who was her prince, and she had been made for him by God.
Coira accepted there was little she could do. Hadz was insane. The whole of Elusion had always said so. Insane and liable to inflict harm. He would not be open to reason or denial. She must give in to whatever he wished with the best show of approval she could summon.
But beyond his ghastly lust, still she felt mostly dead.
She had not properly known what happened. The first awakening, the brief vomiting, and her agonizing first breaths, fading away once more, with her pleading cry left hanging in the void behind her. Before, there had been a sort of dream, but she could not recapture it. After her initial return, there was a murky nothingness, and in it horrible clanging blows came and went, burning the inside of her skull, roaring like church bells, so she thought she lay in St. Belor, under the floor of the church. But that, too, passed. And then she had been pulled out of the coffin, which axes had shattered.
She thought later she had seen Prince Hadz staring down at her, and for a moment she had seemed to recognize his face. There was something in its pale-skinned glamour, its wildness of black hair, that was like—her mother, then like
herself.
But then she thought he was her lover, Hephaestion—but as they lifted her, and carried her away, she knew that he was not. He was taller than any of them. And at the back of his eyes skulked a bright something, half animal, half phantom, which she did not know, but which made her afraid.
Despite all the ministrations of Hadz’s slaves, Coira lay very ill, and leaden with despair. Her return to life was worse, it seemed to her, than the onset of death.
Besides, she could not remember why she had died. It had been a deliberate act, someone said. Who had slain her? Who? Ulvit—no, not now—then who had it been? Was it Proud? Or had Vinka done it in one of her fits?
Yes, it had been Vinka. It had been a woman …
As the awful night and day dragged on, the truth began to play a game with her mind, emerging, running to cover before she could quite see. In the end she did see it, the being of truth. It had the face of an elderly woman, scarred and sewn to its skull.
“Who is she?”
Your mother. Who else?
Coira was so fragile, she lay there weeping, weeping, and weeping. Until she made herself stop. She was in Hell. No one could assist her. By some fluke, and because Prince Hadz itched for her, she had lived.
Better get up then, use the hot bath full of scents which the memory of the apple infused. So, she made herself forget her mother. As every night, she would remember again.
A girl came and washed Coira’s hair.
Cleansed by such things, the Miasma seemed to leave her. Dry-eyed she let his minions tend her.
Coira pulled round her a cover from the bed. They had not brought her any garments.
She knew he would come in. She knew that maybe—doubtless—he had already seen her bare.
Once an old man appeared, went round her, making sure that she was wholesome enough for Hadz. This old man reminded Coira very oddly of a maiden’s nurse—some male crone set to wait on the prince. At last she recollected she had met the old man before, when she had brought the Febrifuga leaves.
The old man spoke to Coira. “You’ve had a stroke of good fortune. Be cheerful. Put this red salve on your lips. This kohl is for your lashes—they should have given you all this before. Yes, that’s better. You must be tempting for him. Don’t dare disappoint. I’ll flog you myself if he regrets you.”
Too ill to rally to her own horror, Coira said nothing.
And then, in the evening, Hadz arrived.
She could no longer pay much attention to his looks. For her,
it was as if she sat in this little chamber with a mountain cat. She could see its talons and the long teeth, tipped by blood. No jot of its prettiness.
But the leopard sat down beside Coira on the couch.
“You’re my lady in Hell,” he said, musingly. “They told you your name? Let me tell you. You are Persapheh.”
Coira knew the name, which belonged to the stolen goddess-daughter when she was the bride of Death.
She made no remonstrance, of course,.
While they sat there, and he drank wine from a gold goblet, some gifts were brought in for her. There was a necklace of glaucous stones, and her own amber bracelet, which he slipped on to her wrist, it and his fingers like the shiver of a worm. But Hephaestion had given her the bracelet. She had been lucky to get it back.
Then they brought in another thing. A monstrous and unbelievable thing. She stared at it, partly losing her breath again, thinking.
What is it
—
what is it?
Knowing.
“She must have this back, my princess in Hell, my Persapheh,” he announced. He seemed amused, but also vaunting—avaricious, lusting again—wanting her body but also this other
entity
—which was nearly a body, too. “They’re afraid of it, those crawling vermin, those dung-fleas. The glass. Witch’s glass. But you are my witch, Persapheh-Hekatis, Lady of Hell. Well, beloved. Get up. Go and put it on.”
Naturally, she did what he said.
She got to her feet and drifted deathly to the nightmare thing.
As she did so, she saw herself, over and over, in fragments. She had fallen to the earth from the sky, and been smashed in bits. But her reflections were not all herself. She had become her mother as well, both old and young. She had become her father, King Draco. She had become Hephaestion. Hadz. And she had become the real Coira, the daughter of Demetra, whose corn-yellow hair hung round her, whose eyes were topaz. There was no means to shut these images away, for now the mirror was broken and had no lid. Instead it had been hung in segments upon this elemental object, tied there
by gold wires, as were the silver and gold leaves and flowers, and strung between, the violet gems and the green emeralds. The tent-like structure which carried all this was itself some stiff velvet, the color of blond. It seemed it might have stood up by itself, so laden and immobile it had been made. Like armor.
Her coffin of glass and metals and jewels was given back to her—as a gown.
They had been putting it together, stitching and maneuvering in fear of his tortures, all this while. The mirror had mended, though it was in pieces; as she had, also in pieces.
A red queen. Hekatis. the witch of the Death Lands.
“Yes, yes. Help her into her robe!”
How insistent he was, the young and handsome prince.
“Gently,” he added, and they quailed, the attendants, removing her bed-cover, passing her naked into the velvet sheathe.
Her coffin. It weighed on her like a robe of sins, the crimes of all her life. Of the lives of sinful others. Too heavy to bear. But Coira bore it, now she was Persapheh. She stood straight in the robe, and they combed her silken hair over it, while Hadz watched, torch-eyed.
When everything was done, he sent the servants out. He came up close. He slipped his hands inside the robe and felt of her, and now only the armor and weight of the coffinrobe kept her standing or alive.
“Do you like my gift? Was I clever? It was too lovely to waste. Now it’s still yours. Ah, your skin, better than the velvet. No need to be modest. I’ve had you already, my beloved, my lovely one. When you were asleep. Twice, thrice. And I felt you breathing—it was light as a smoke. No one else could see. Only I could feel your pure breach against my ear as I rocked your body with my hunger. It was I who woke you, wasn’t it, Persapheh?”
The broken mirror was dead, and did not look.
Coira was dead, as befitted her now. Her eyes, closed.
She allowed the robe to hold her in position as the madman pierced her. She let him thrust inside her. groaning and flaming
upon and in her body, until in orgasm he reared and shouted his own name,
Hadz! Hadz!
He sank down and lay against her feet on the floor. This was the quiescence of victory and power.
She thought, it was nothing. He had done it already, twice, thrice.
And he needed no reaction under or against him. He had raped women, boys of seven, locked in chains; he had copulated with caskets of polished gems. Basically he needed only himself, but he had been there, too, reflected back at himself from her gown of glass.
Even lying on her feet, which were very cold, he saw himself, lazy and smiling. There—and there and there, in the mirror bits at the robe’s edge. He, too, was beautiful. How beautiful.
“My love,” he said, her prince.
I
T WAS WHEN HE STOPPED DREAMING of her every night that he began to think he might have to go back. That is, return to the cavern and make sure. While the dreams came, he could simply tell himself that he missed her somewhat, her sexual company if nothing else. Also that he was only guilty at leaving her. Then, this gap appeared between them. As if she had been sending him letters, although he could not read more than a word or two; messages, then. And suddenly they did not reach him any more. Why not? What had happened? Had anything happened at all? If so, were those vaguely remembered visions of her lying in the earth, drifting in the air, the breaking mirror, pieces of mirror-women moving about, white owls, black ravens, crying doves—were these dream pictures in some way true? Had there been a moment in the dreams when she told him she was dead—worse, buried
alive? Or that she was walking about inside a coffin, unable to get out?
 
 
That day something else was going on in Korchlava. Noises, upheavals.
The city was like all such human heaps, towns, even large villages, Hephaestion thought. There was a hub of better buildings, a well-built house of palace, gardens, a gilded church or this cathedral, which seemed likely never to be finished, but which was towered and faced with marble and goldwork. The appetizing kernal was then surrounded by a debris of houses, markets, shops, and inns, quickly degenerating into slums.
Today some of the citizens were burning effigies of a witch. At first he paid no heed. He only avoided the loud, jolly, foul-mouthed groups where he was able. Then he heard a name they were giving the straw-stuffed sacks. It was Draco’s first queen they were ritually disposing of.
Then, in a lightless wine-shop, he let himself overhear the story. The first queen had always been a sorceress, seeming young and fair but in fact kept young only by her devilish arts. In reality she was an ancient hag. Draco had left her and come away here, and made a new marriage through a special Church dispensation. Then the witch-hag practiced against her only daughter, or some daughter of Draco’s by another. The witch succeeded in murdering the girl at Belgra by the sea. But when the authority there, Draco’s own son, sent for the witch, she vanished into thin air.
Some said she had changed into a serpent and slithered off, or a winged one that flew. Others said she made herself into a woman either so gorgeous or so loathesome that she was unrecognizable. Whatever she had done, she was never found, or Draco would have put her to death. His loyal subjects therefore, at Korchlava, burned her as a doll, sympathetic magic.
Hephaestion sat in his corner, even after the chatterers slobbered off to other things.
Did any of this penetrate to Elusion? Had Coira heard of it, and what had she thought? He recalled how she had said to him, the first time he lay with her,
“She hated me,”
and then, “Do you?” and later, “I only ever loved
her.
But I love
you.”
“Christ, oh, Christ,” he said very softly.
What had happened, what had gone on? Was this idiot’s ugly story here some garbled version of a fact?
I
love you,
she said, inside his ear.
I know. I know it. You were a joy to me, Coira.
You
allowed me to love you. That’s all I asked,
she said.
Christ—why didn’t you ask me for more? Why why didn’t you, Coira? Why didn’t you shriek at me and stick your nails into my arms and make me stay with you?
Astounded at himself, the inner voices fell silent.
But then he saw himself holding her to him, up in the air. She was a child’s height, so they matched.
“I’ll come back for you,” he had said.
That must have been in one of the dreams. How long had gone by? Days, months—the spring was full, it was quite warm today.
“Hey, you, mistake-of-God. do you want work?” Hephaestion looked, and saw a carter hulking near. “Your keep and a copper coin, two days hefting loads for me—donkey’s sick.”
“You’re kind, master,” said the dwarf, doubling down, graceful and inferior. “But I’ve got to get back to my mistress.”
“Work-shy cur. Drinking here when you should be laboring.”
They sent him off with oaths and a flung clod, which struck him in the back. He barely noticed.
Hephaestion turned for the city gate.
What am I doing?
He was on the road above the galloping river, striding unevenly back toward the mines, before he answered himself.
Coira.
 
 
How many days had it taken him to reach the city? Four, five, more. Walking back, up the hills, not pausing often, sleeping only an hour or so, here, there, in the nights. Two days. The days he might have been earning his keep and a copper coin as a donkey.
He needed to earn no money. He had plenty saved from the mine. Besides, it was possible to live as the Christ advocated, accepting what came, relying on fate—or God.
There were flowers all over the hills. The river, when he saw it carving between the rocks and the finely budding trees, was blue as the silk he had bought her, that day before he left.
 
 
“So, it’s you back. Liked it here so well? Or not done so well up above? Your kin were off, don’t expect to find
them.
But it’s all one to you. There are plenty of your sort still here.”
Hephaestion was startled the guard at the hill gate recalled him. As he said, there were so many dwarves who worked the mines. Hephaestion was
not
surprised Proud, Tickle and the rest had also gone away, surprised only at how little the thought of them tugged at him. He had known them most of his adult life. And he had been crazy for Vinka, once. But then he heard himself saying, “Did they go with my mistress?”
“What mistress? You had none. Oh—that girl with the hair—that witch-girl, do you mean? Marusa’s tits, she’s
queen
here now. She’s Hadz’s darling.”
Hephaestion waited humbly, being slow-witted, listening, his bowel churning with dismay, and stormy rage.
The guard was examining the payment Hephaestion had offered him. Now he became off-hand. “Go on, then. Get down, if you want.”
Hephaestion would rather have questioned him, but thought he Could not. Let the man forget again the dwarf had any link to her. The girl with the hair—the times he had told her to hide it—the witch-girl, queen’s daughter, Queen of Hell. He might have
guessed, she would go with some proper man—but not Hadz. She never would, would she?
The guard certainly had said nothing about death, or burial.
 
 
Hephaestion went back along the River of Hate, and all the time he thought of her, now. He thought how she had been with him on Woe Stream. Of how she had drawn him to her in the night. He thought of sex with her and grew hard, he thought of her loving Hadz, and then of dreams of death, and saw his hand begin to shake where it rested on the boat’s side.
You simpleton, you like her so much.
But fear only took hold of him when they came to the cliff under the metallic-starred rock roof, and he saw the insipid icon of the saint, holding up his ineffectual hand to bless.
Hate, yes. He hated this place. He would never have come here again, if not for Coira. He had told her how he was comfortable with mines, but that was a lie. They were asphyxiating pits of danger and death. Like graves. Coffins set with veins of iron, gold and silver, and glimmering gems.
She had not loved anyone else. God knew, he had seen she was not to be moved, when once she had decided. It was not the prince, then, but the king … King Death …
It seemed to take him more days and nights to get up the wending rockery, through the rubble of dwellings, and find the shack on the cliffside which overlooked Prince Hadz’s mansion in the valley.
The powdered lunar roots still hung over the shack Tickle had called a cottage. The torch was alight. A fat woman sat tending a pot on a fire now outside the door, and she was wrapped in an achingly sky blue mantle. It was the silk he had left for Coira.
“I like your gown, Lady,” he said, fawning, joking courteously.
The woman glanced up. She had a face unsightly from the brain behind it.
“Get away, you shit-thing. All this is mine!” And out of the cauldron she shot a ladleful of boiling watery soup. It just missed
his eyes, his cheek. One drop bit scald-cold against his ear.
She was only the world. He was quite used to her. He turned and swagger-strode away, down among the tracks and rubbish, toward the valley.
But a voice sang low in his scalded ear.
She did not take your gift. Cared nothing for you once Hadz wanted her.
And a second voice said below the first,
Or she’s dead.
But he knew voices. In the clefts of workings they would call and whimper. In empty spots they would treacherously sing. At last now he pushed them away. Whatever had happened he was nearly up to it.
On Woe Stream, the same gossipy, one-eyed youth appeared, to pole the raft.
He
did not remember the dwarf at all, or rather remembered him as another dwarf, known as Pack.
“How are you, Pack? Spend your wage already? That’s the silliness with you, Pack, you drink it all away.”
“So I do,” assented Hephaestion. He stood up to the front with the boy. The river crinkled and gleamed, and Hephaestion thought of Coira, standing at his back, burning there like the scald of cold on his ear, fire and ice.
“What’s all this about the Hell Prince?” asked Pack.
“What?”
“Some tale I heard. Some girl he’s got.”
“He’s always got a girl. Or a lad. No, it is a girl, that’s true. She can charm his headaches off. But she got ill. She died, now I think of it, and he had to make a box for her. It was a rare old sight, I heard. Jewels in it and hammered gold and iron. Hadz’s notion.”
“She’s dead.”
“Last I heard.”
Hephaestion knelt down. He threw up in two fast heaves, in the leaden Stream of Woe.
“There, Pack, that’s all your drinking gets you. A belly-quake and a sore head.”
“Yes, you’re right,” said Pack. Hephaestion wiped his mouth. When he could, after a minute, he stood up again.
There was no point in continuing to the prince’s mansion.
Then the boy said, “Wait though. Now I think—she got better, the girl, she got over it. Some old witch poisoned her, jealous of her. But she came to herself. I think she did.”
Hephaestion said, “Stop this. Stop playing with me, or I’ll break your fucking back.”
“Eh?” said the boy.
Hephaestion had spoken too low for any but the stream, the ghosts in the air, to hear him.
“I said, who was it?”
“Oh. Some slut.”
“Yes, some slut. They always are.”
“Praise Marusa for the sluts.”
The raft bumped in against the shore.
When he was clear of the stream, Hephaestion. strode on toward the mansion.
He stumbled twice on the unevenly paved track where he had once helped Coira. Then he reached the untidy roil of the mansion, the facade of trunk-pillars, and the white poplar by Lethe Pool.
Drink the pool and forget.
It would be best. But first, be sure. For if she needed him, he must offer his help. What help he could give. “See to yourself … can’t help you …” Yes, he had said that to her once. In the wagon, when Cirpoz was set to rape her.
She was of the giant and obnoxious race. Nothing to him. Yet, until he knew she was safe and did not wish for him, he would, he would go on.
“What do you want, half-man?”
Hephaestion looked up at the new giant.
Oh God, she was not of this kind at all.
She was of another race, the same race as himself. Not anything to do with Man or dwarves, or with God.
His.
She was his
I own her. And she me.
“Mistress told me to come back, to the prince’s house.”
“Mistress? Whose is it you are?”
“Coira’s.” (Oh, and I am.)
“That one. She’s a queen now. She’s called Persapheh. Get it right.”
“Thanks, sir master.
Persa-pheh.”
She was alive.
He prevented himself. from laughing, since the ruffian would misunderstand it. It was only savage relief and Heaven-sent happiness, breaking him and making him mad.
Hephaestion trudged forward slavishly, and the ruffian kept pace with him.

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