One Small Step, an anthology of discoveries (36 page)

“
Come on, Torren,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

Only she took a wrong turning. The wrong set of steps, a mistake anyone could make. Instead of reaching the road outside, she found herself in a courtyard, where a bare-branched apple tree stretched bony fingers towards the pale winter sky and impossible red apples lay on the paving stones around its roots.

Meriel’s heart leapt. She caught her breath and dropped to her knees, clutching Torren against her chest, reaching out to take an apple into her gloved hand.

“
It was the best I could do.”

She twisted around at the voice, familiar and not familiar, but knew even as she did that she wouldn’t see him. “Forsythian,” she whispered, remembering.

“
Apples and blood,” he said. “I’ve never made a heart so quickly before. I refuse to be held responsible if you find it loving all the wrong things.” He paused for a long moment. “Though it seems someone has already found their place in it.”

Meriel looked at Torren, small and red-faced and hers. “Yes,” she said quietly. “Thank you, Forsythian.”

“
If you want to leave,” he said, “it’s the other stair you want.”

He didn’t say goodbye. Meriel stayed in the courtyard for a few minutes, waiting, then eventually went back inside and found her way to the right passage, where golden-spined suits of armour stared open-mouthed. She let herself out and stood on the top steps, looking at the road. It led away through the forest to towns and castles and people she had once used to love.

She lifted her foot to step down. Her chest contracted painfully.

She looked up and saw black trailing from a window. It might have been a sleeve, or a wing. It didn’t matter. Cradling her sleeping son in her arms, Meriel turned around and stepped back through the open doors into the house, her home, where her heart was.

And when the soldiers later came in search of the queen and her son, all they could see where the sorcerer’s fortress should have been was an apple tree and a laughing crow.

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T
he
people went out of town on foot, horseback and cart, to where the trees grew scraggy on the dusty hills. The house they sought should have been difficult to find. It lay beyond the hard ground of the rutted road, hidden by grey screens of trees, in as unfriendly a valley as any in that hungry country. No clearer path led to it than the faint tangled traces made by cattle or goats or the feet of a solitary child going to school. But many of the townspeople had been there before, on private errands, and the small crowd found its way unerringly.
 

At the rear of the procession rode the Governor himself. He had known the town when he was a young man gaining experience of the world, but now he returned in all his dignity. He had heard the grumblings and complaints of the dry-spirited people. It had been a long time since rain had fallen. They struggled to live on soil grown thin and shallow creeks run low and rank, while cattle and children sickened and starved. The inhabitants of the house that lay beyond the town had once promised health and cures, but their abilities had been stretched. The merciless drought seemed a punishment for relying on such frail assistance. Each disease, each misfortune, assumed an air of malevolence. The Governor had assured the people that he would see justice done, and his presence lent an undeniable distinction to the proceedings.

The Governor was not surprised when the scrubby wilderness split to reveal the small house neat and grey in its unnaturally green garden. It had been a familiar destination in that youth he had put severely behind him. He was glad to set both memories and rumours to rest at last, like old letters cast into a fire.

Those who had gone ahead had already surrounded the cottage. The doors and shutters were closed.

“
They are all inside, sir,” said the Mayor to the Governor. “They will not come out and beg. They will not admit their wickedness.”

The Governor nodded and then a slight frown troubled his serene brow. “There is a child?” he asked, and the faint hesitation in that hitherto resolute voice troubled the Mayor, for promises of governments had proved hollow before now. The fatherless child was grown undeniably like the women who lived in the cottage, and the Mayor did not think it necessary to trouble needlessly the conscience of one who would not have to live with the consequences of this day’s activities.

“
It goes to the school,” he answered. “Your Honour may recall the teacher said that she would keep the children in. Though,” he added, regretful, “some poison can only be burned out.”

The Governor nodded. Unpleasant thoughts occurred to him of a girl he had known too well and castles he built in the air when he was young and foolish, but he put those images out of his mind and looked sternly at the cottage and the crowd ready and eager to perpetrate justice.

“
You heard the evidence,” said the Mayor.

The Governor inclined his head regally, and replied, “Let justice be done.”

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Planks and timbers fell against the door like the beating of a deep drum. The sisters held each others’ hands and sat on the floor, heads touching. The beams fell like doom against the shutters, and the women closed their eyes.

“
We will die,” said Anne, the eldest, simply. When she said “we”, it sounded so small. Just the four of them: three siblings and the child, so slight and brittle a number.

“
We have died before,” said the youngest sister, Sable. When she spoke, she meant all who had ever lived and died like them: sisters and aunts and brothers and uncles and parents.

“
We are the only ones left to die,” said the middle one, Mary, holding the child on her lap, although Ella had long grown too tall for such a seat. “We are the last of all.”

“
People have hated us too fiercely,” said Anne. “Even those we once thought loved us.”

“
That man has hated us too fiercely,” said Sable. “And I cannot believe I ever thought…” She fell silent and frowned at Ella, for neither Sable’s pride nor her idea of family had ever let it seem necessary to her to tell Ella of the past. “Will you forgive me that folly?”

Anne smiled and shook her head “What is there to forgive, Sable? Youth is always foolish—” here she touched Ella’s hand, “—and yours gave us perhaps more joy than we had a right to. But death has always loved our family too well.”

“
What is it like, death?” asked Ella, still enough of a child to be sure the others knew the answer. Anne and Mary and Sable were silent, and the sounds outside were like the knocking of bones and the scattering of stones on a grave. To them, death had taken on the features of a face once welcome, before it had grown great and regretted them. None of them wished to say that to the child.

“
Dying is like going to sleep after a long day,” said Anne gently, “when you cannot keep your eyes open however much you want to. You can struggle or go quietly, but darkness falls and all your limbs go loose and easy.”

“
Dying is like waking to a bright morning,” said Sable, “when everything is so fresh and new, you are sure no-one has ever seen it before.”

“
Dying is like fire,” said Mary dully. “All flash and flame and at the end there is nothing but ashes and cinders.”

Ella frowned over this, for they had raised her to look for truth in stories. With no more questions to answer or tales to tell, they all fell silent again. It was quieter outside. They heard voices of friends and neighbours, harsh laughter of customers and schoolmates, the distant clatter of bundles of sticks and sheaves of dry grass.

“
I do not wish to die cowering,” said Anne at last.

“
What does it matter?” said Mary. “No-one will know.”

“
We will,” said Sable. “Here and now and for a moment, we will know.”

“
No-one will tell stories of it,” said Mary.

“
Do you think that because we only tell it to ourselves, it will be any less of a story? Whomever else have we ever told them to?” said Anne.

“
To me,” said Ella.

“
There,” said Sable. “You see? We must make a story for her to tell, for we have told our tales and now we must live them through to the end, but Ella has never told a great tale, and that would be a poor way for one of our family to die.”

“
Very well,” said Mary. “We shall not die like cowards, but telling a grand tale.”

“
A night-time tale,” said Anne, “To make the sleeping sweet, and the sleeper wake new-made.”

“
Like caterpillars out of their cases, and embers fanned back to flame,” said Sable. Then she remembered and said brightly, “There are pinecones which only grow into trees after fire.” They stood together, still clasping hands. The house was dark now that the cracks at the edges of shutters and doors were hidden from the sun. Only the light of the hurricane lamp fell golden and bronze on their hair and skin until they seemed creatures of metal and flame. It lit upon the pots and ladles, on the ends of the nails that came through the door, and on the fragments of glass that had fallen from the windows before the shutters were closed upon them.

They put on their finest clothes: Anne’s gown, yellowed and pressed with age; Mary’s go-to-meeting best with buttons at wrist and neck; Sable’s red dress. Ella, who had not yet owned a fine dress, the sisters dressed in the prettiest things they could find. They made her a cloak of the lace veil Sable had sewn before Ella was born (which Sable had never worn and Ella would now never have a chance to wear), and clasped it with a colourful tin brooch.

The sisters put on all the jewellery that had been too good or gaudy, bright or dull to wear every day: their mother’s rings and their grandmothers’ pearls, cheap necklaces bright as beetle-cases wound around their heads like crowns, earrings hooked one to the other. They looped pearls and beads about Ella’s throat and brow and arms. They pinned up their hair. From the vase of flowers (taken from the garden which would soon be crushed and trampled and salted), they took roses and pale jasmine to put behind their ears. Sashes and scarves hung at their shoulders and elbows like wings, and they clipped papery yellow daisies and soft lavender and fluttering ribbons to their shoes. Ella wore Anne’s old dancing shoes, wrapped tight around her small feet with glittering glass beads until the shoes shone like light through windows.

“
We look like princesses,” said Ella.

“
Like queens!” said Anne, and Mary smiled, and Sable held out her arms and spun.

“
Be careful! The lamp!” said Mary, then put her hands over her mouth. Anne laughed in horror, and Sable snatched the lamp
up in one hand and caught Ella to her side with the other, and danced on.

Outside, there was a murmuring, the sound of shouting heard through the thick wood.

“
He can hear us laugh,” whispered Mary. “He is driving them on to bay for our blood.”

“
Let them have it,” said Anne. “They shall not have Ella’s story.” She turned up the light so that it threw
their shadows crazily onto the walls. “Now, this is to be your story, dear-heart,” said Anne to Ella. “So you must begin it”.

“
But let it have no Governors or Mayors or declarations or judgements,” said Mary.

“
How do I begin?” said Ella.

“
Why, the way all tellers of tales begin, little goose!” said Sable.

Mary closed her eyes and, as if remembering something long lost, said, “Once upon a time…”

Ella began. “Once upon a time there was a girl. She was kind—”

“
And good—” said Mary.

“
And clever—” said Anne.

“
And lovely,” sighed Sable.

“
Yes,” said Ella. “All of those. But she was very unfortunate, for a — a…”

“
Not a Governor,” said Sable.

“
An evil prince!” said Ella.

Anne nodded approvingly, and Ella raced on:

“
An evil prince had taken away everything she loved and a great dragon had settled upon the land.”

Sable jumped to her feet. “Let me be the dragon!” she cried. “Look!” And she cast great shadows with her arms so that they looked like jaws.

“
It looks like a dog!” exclaimed Ella, scornful.

“
It’s a wolf-dragon,” said Sable. “Go on!”

Outside, there was a roar of voices, and then a hissing, a whispering.

“
Go on!” said Anne urgently. “A great dragon?”

“
No, three dragons!” revised Ella, suddenly gleeful. “Because the evil prince hated the girl’s aunts … no, her sisters. He hated them because they were good and wise and he was not, and so he changed them into dragons.”

So Anne cast a demure dragon upon the wall, and Mary a reluctant one, and Sable moved her sleeves against the light like beating wings, and outside the whispering was broken by sharp crackling sounds and a faint acrid smell seeped between the boards of the door and shutters.

“
And the girl wanted to rescue her sisters,” said Ella.

“
Of course she did!” said Sable.

“
So she went looking for a brave knight,” said Ella. “But all the knights in the land were afraid of the prince, and could only see dragons when they looked at the three sisters. And no-one else would help her because they were afraid of the dragons too, and of the prince, and they put their hands over their ears and teased her and threw things at her and chased her out of school and out of the town and wouldn’t listen to her when she told them that the dragons weren’t dragons at all, but really her family.”