From the Forest (41 page)

Dancing Shoes

Once upon a time he had betrayed her secrets.

One upon a time he had come limping up the long track through the forest, sullen, wounded, homeless and angry. He had tricked her, spied on her, betrayed her and then married her.

She despises him, she always has, from the very beginning. She is right; she knows he is an old lag and not a king at all. So now when he wakes alone in their huge canopied bed, curtained in silk from far away and embroidered, by her, with gold and silver foliage, he feels not shocked but lonely. He feels a huge sad emptiness, which will not be assuaged by the three little princes sleeping in the nursery or by the new child who is swelling her belly now and making her soft and sweet, though not for him, never for him.

He knows she will be with her sisters – that she will have sneaked back to the dormitory, the long bare room where they lived as girls, where they giggled and teased and played and created their own magic worlds into which he had never been invited.

On his best days, when the hunting has been good, when his children have seemed sweet to him, or when he has known that his lands and his people are flourishing under his kingship, he can feel a tender pride in his wife and her sisters and their faithful if high-handed love for each other. He is delighted by their easy affection. Twelve of them, enough for any amusement, and they had grown up not wanting friends, never lonely, never needing to negotiate with the world like he has had to do since his youth.

He had come up the long track through the forest, a laid-off soldier, wounded in someone else’s war, dumped as useless; a man without home, or family, or purpose. Redundant. Hating kings and their power and their riches and their easy, proud complacency. The track had led to the castle and the meagre village at its foot. He had kept company that night with a charming woman whose own son had gone for a soldier and she missed him and was full of ready sympathy and good-humoured comfort. And afterwards, as he was rebuttoning his breeches and picking the leaf mould gently out of her hair as a grateful man should, she had asked him what he would do now and he had laughed and said he hadn’t a clue and didn’t care much, perhaps he should have a go at finding out where the princesses went dancing at night. It was a joke – princesses and their night clubs weren’t part of his world.

‘Those trollops,’ she said, ‘that’s easy. Just don’t drink the wine they offer you and take this wee cloak which will make you invisible.’

He never asked her how she came by it. It was easy come, easy go with her, as he had just learned, and a sensible man never cross-questions a witch who is doing him a favour.

He took it with gratitude and did not check that it worked until she had gone off about her own business. Invisibility was not a thing to be sneered at – he could make an excellent career as a robber if he chose – but she had given it to him for a purpose, and he was old enough and clever enough to know that he had better not treat magic things too lightly, so he presented himself to the King. The gossip was that the old man tried to deter princes now, that he was tired of chopping off the heads of the sons of all his neighbours – it led to ill feeling and would leave the wide country short of leadership in the next generation. They said that he regretted his rash proclamation and was heard to bemoan the fact that a king must keep his word, come what may. But he welcomed the soldier, because there would be little negative feedback from his execution and, after all, the King had eleven other beautiful daughters he could marry off more creditably if by some awkward chance the limping fool were to be successful. So he gave him a decent dinner and saw him settled in the small ante-chamber so he could watch the girls’ night-time antics and see where they went to dance so vigorously that they wore out their pretty little shoes. Then he left him to it. To them.

The twelve princesses were in high spirits. Even as he pretended to sleep he was beguiled by them. They were entirely wonderful in their bitchy humour, their open contempt for him, for their father and for the world. They were so bold, so witty, so unself-conscious and so affectionate with each other. They were like his comrades-in-arms except that they were beautiful and sexy and fearless. They scoffed at him and he adored them for it. A single child, an orphan raised by an uncaring uncle and a much-harassed stepmother, cast out early and sent to the wars, he had never known this easy witty banter, this happy confidence, this tender togetherness, this proud freedom. He followed them down into the secret world of their dreams and wanted to dance and play with them for ever.

And still, on his best days, that is what he wants. He does not want to separate them. He still feels a tender pride in his wife and her sisters and their faithful if high-handed love for each other. He is delighted by their easy loyalty and their deep laughter. He loves their conviction that they are special and may ignore all the reasonable demands of other people if those should inconvenience them in any way. And because they give freely when they give, they give graciously – laughingly, they call it
noblesse oblige
and the people call it royalty and mostly love it when they do not hate it.

Tonight is not one of his best days. He wakes alone in the huge canopied bed and feels a huge sad emptiness. He is lonely and he can never say so; if he tells her how much he has given up for her she will look at him with a haughty blankness – she will never be able to believe that it is more fun in the inn than in the castle, that the burdens of kingship are heavy and that he deserves some of her attention. Her eyes will narrow coldly and he will know she is remembering that he tricked her and betrayed her and got riches and kingship out of it. Briefly he thinks he will go down to the village and visit his witch woman, but that is less fun now he is a king and she gives herself to him with fear and self-interest instead of casual pleasure and laughter.

But the bed is too wide for a man alone and he cannot get back to sleep. He decides he will go, again, and look at the princesses in their private place. He gets up, quietly, anxious not to rouse his servants who need their dreams to make him endurable to them; he lights a candle and goes to the chest he never opens, at the very bottom of which he has hidden his little cloak. He betrayed their secrets but kept his own – none of them to this day know how he tricked them, and although it is a long time since he used it, the cloak remains safely concealed. He feels a dark comfort in his stratagem: they keep themselves hidden from him, and now he will do the same by them.

In the chest there is a heavy velvet and ermine gown of state which he never wears, and underneath it are the jacket and breeches from his soldiering days which he never wears. He lifts them all aside. He reaches in for the cloak which is wrapped in an old rag at the bottom and feels instead something different, something harder and smaller. He knows what it is before he sees it. Slowly, knowing and refusing to know, he brings his hand into the light of the candle and, as he knows he will, he sees that he is holding a little dancing slipper. It is made of soft cream-coloured silk and is embroidered with gold and silver leaves and tiny chips of diamond, but the sole is ragged, worn through and threadbare; it has been danced to pieces.

She has been dancing again.

There is a horror on him and his anger makes him briefly, hotly brave. He looks into the chest more directly, the candle held high, and he sees there are lots of pairs of shoes, all frayed and ruined, all danced to pieces. She has hidden them where she thinks he will not find them.

In his rage he grabs the little cloak and flings it over his shoulders. Now he is invisible even to himself. He snatches up one of the dancing slippers, as evidence; he has always liked evidence, has gathered and used it to persuade himself as much as others. It vanishes into the aura of invisibility which wraps itself around him and, invisible, he storms through the castle, the old wound in his left leg aching at his pace.

He flings open the door of their dormitory, hot with a wrath he believes at this moment to be righteous. She is a wife. She is a mother. She is a queen. She is pregnant, carrying his child – if it is his child. He will cry shame upon her and upon her sisters. He will summon all their husbands and expose their wanton ways. Their hoity-toity attitude and haughty indifference will do them no good. He will burn them on a pyre in the castle courtyard and smile inwardly while the people cheer. His witch woman had called them trollops and he should have listened to her.

But the dormitory is silent, empty. Moonlight streams in the windows, bathing the room in its cold clear light. There is a chaos of cast-off clothing and tossed-about bedding, but it is all held in a silvery stillness. He is arrested at the doorway and stands leaning on its frame, his heart hushed by the beauty and peace of the long room. He is defeated.

After a few moments he sees that where the fourth bed on the left-hand side, her bed, ought to be, there is a blank space. The bed has sunk down, folded away, to allow them access to the secret passage. He comes limping up the long room, slowly, and sits on the third bed and looks into the black pit. He can just see the top two or three steps, but he knows the narrow flight goes on down and down and down, dusty and cold.

He will follow them, he thinks, he will catch them red handed and there will be no excuses, but he just sits there looking into the blackness.

He knows that at the very bottom the stairwell will open out and there will be the forest of silver trees and golden trees and the stands of trees with diamond leaves, all lit by a different moon; and there will be the straight smooth road that leads to the lake and over the lake will be the palace on the island.

He knows they will be all dressed up in silver and gold and diamonds, dancing with their dream princes; laughing and drinking and dancing, doing standing up what is better done lying down, and it will be so beautiful and they will be so beautiful that his heart will melt, as it melted before, and he will lose his anger in a silent enchantment and afterwards they will mock him for his weakness. So he just sits on the bed, sullen, wounded, and looks into the darkness of the pit.

He takes off the little cloak and waits, turning her ruined slipper between his hands. He will, he thinks, wait until they come back. They can see him sitting here as they come up the staircase, footsore and weary, their dresses in rags, their slippers danced to pieces. They will come up the stairs exhausted but satisfied and then they can see him here sitting like a king on his throne and be, however briefly, afraid.

He is the King, he thinks. He is her husband. It is both his right and his duty to bring them into line, to break their haughty spirit, to scatter their pride in the imagination of their hearts. He has earned this right and he has a duty to exercise it. For their own good. For the good of their children. For the good of the State. He practises a fine speech. He thinks it should begin, ‘Ho, Madam,’ which has a royal ring to it. ‘Ho, Madam Wife,’ would be even better, but he knows himself too well. He was never born to that kind of speech. He wants to say something quite different.

‘Trollops. Sluts. Grow up. You aren’t little girls any more – you don’t live in fairy land. What do you know of the real forest, you pampered bitches, of the real world? The trees aren’t made of silver and gold for most of us; the paths aren’t straight and paved. Men aren’t handsome princes free to dance all night; real men go out and they work; they get sweaty and tired and cross because that way they can just about hope to feed their children. Women don’t have fancy frocks to ruin, and hundreds of pairs of dainty silk slippers to dance to pieces; real women stay home and stay faithful because that way they can just about hope to feed their children. It does not always work: rain at haymaking, no rain at sowing-time, a wound in someone else’s war – and the wolf of hunger prowls at the door and the rats of destitution gnaw at the foundations. When real men and women turn to each other for sex and consolation, they don’t dance elegantly; they roll on their backs and get leaf mould in their hair.’

That is the easy bit. He rolls the phrases around his head and is pleased with some of them. He eliminates several cruder and more vulgar insults that spring to mind, feeling that a certain kingly hauteur is called for. The next part is more difficult to gauge. How will he punish them? He will strip off their silken knickers and put each one of them over his knee and whip their naked bottoms. He will sit on his throne to do it. He will invite the whole court, yes, and the village too, to watch him. It gives him a strange dark pleasure to think of their humiliation. He will send them out as kitchen wenches to neighbouring castles – no, to merchants and millers and doctors and priests who will enjoy making royalty suffer. He will lock them up, each in a separate dungeon. He will have them drowned like kittens for the adultery of their hearts. He will have them burned for witches. He . . .

‘Don’t,’ says a voice, ‘don’t do it. Go back to bed now and pretend you never knew.’

He cries out in sudden terror and looks up and sees in the pale light of the moon that what he had taken to be a bundle of bedding on the last bed on the right-hand side is, in fact, the littlest princess. The one who had been once been the most beautiful of all, the one who had always known him and seen through him, whose shy heart was open to his. The one who has never married, the one whose beauty faded first, who is raddled now, whose hair is thin and dull and whose shoulder bones and ribs show through her too-pale skin. The one he loves.

‘Don’t,’ she says. ‘Don’t hate her.’

‘Why are you here?’ he asks. ‘Why aren’t you with the others?’

‘I don’t go any more; it hurts too much. Joy hurts too much when it isn’t real. It isn’t real, you know, that forest, that dancing. It can’t harm you. Go back to bed now and let it be.’

Her eyes are huge in her bony ruined face and they catch a corner of the moonlight. He knows that she is terribly sad and he knows why. He stands up and takes a step towards her.