White As Snow (Fairy Tale) (7 page)

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Authors: Tanith Lee

BOOK: White As Snow (Fairy Tale)
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So then. The nature of Arpazia’s first trance had been inertia, severance. The second trance was composed both of severance and its defense, and of her loathing of self.
Maybe she had only gone mad. That was one other answer to her riddle. She had ceased bothering about death, even when personified as a king. She
had
died, was
dead.
(This would pass, but how could she know it would pass?) The embryo, dividing her from herself on entering, had left her in two pieces. Her childhood had run out with the parturition blood, and become another being: obviously, a child. And the woman remained, crazy, in her hollow fortress.
Like other outlaws who had survived great horrors and no longer knew to fear them, Arpazia grew terrible.
They should have sent her away. Instead they kept her. But kept, too, on her kind side—for she was a queen, and a witch. The witch-queen.
The years continued. As the girl christened Candacis, and called Coira, grew from baby to child, the candle of Arpazia meanwhile burned down, melting the ordinary wax from her and leaving only the flame.
Because of all of this, others had begun to consider the queen. Others watched her. Bright eyes, as if of birds among the vines, of foxes on the hillsides. To her, they were all her enemies. Why should she take special note of any glance? She only talked to the woman she saw in her mirror, who would always answer.
“Her mirror is her tool of sorcery.
”
It was.
She saw things in it, and the mirror, surely, saw things in her.
“She talks to demons.”
Yes, to one: herself.
At twilight, looking in the mirror, conversing with her reflection, the lamp or candle sinking, she beheld a crow which sat above the window, blinking orichalc eyes. Later, a white owl. Or two shadows stood behind her, one of whom held a spindle with white wool on it. Or a tree grew in the corner, laden with rosy fruits, while a serpent twined the trunk.
Had her women too seen such images? Did they ever risk, if she should not be there, opening the mirror and asking some question of their own? Did they get an answer?
She is a witch.
On the terrace of the Oracle: the ancient crone who cuddled lizards in the temple ruin, visited the smoke every dawn. A day came before the rite was due in summer, late in spring of that year when Coira was seven, and Arpazia twenty-two years of age.
Through the half-light, the Crone approached the Oracle and bent to the stone. If any watched, it was only what she always did.
But she too had her questions.
“Holy and holy. Is she ours, that woman in the High House?”
The Oracle smoke might be tampered with, and frequently was. Now, not interfering, the crone gave her gift of oil, and read its pattern, plain to her as language.
Though she reverenced the Christ when she must, in the church, the Smoke Crone knew quite well who He really was, the young god of joy, who must be sacrificed and rise again. There was to the compendium of any god more than one, or two—the usual number being three.
She may be ours,
the smoke had said.
When the rite came, the crone would speak to Draco and send him off to his new capital. She must do it in careful, tactful words, saying the city was missing his attention, like some sickly woman
or hound. But she would see him away, and so leave Belgra free of him, for her people—and for the elder powers which had always been, would always be, when all the rest was gone.
 
 
When the child looked across the hill of terraces, and saw her mother in the white dress stitched by gold, Coira fell deeply, spiritually, asexually yet physically in love. It was the adoration of the priestess for the goddess. Of the body for the vision of its soul. Great love indeed.
And in this selfsame moment, Arpazia, looking in quite a different direction, woke from her second, seven-year-long trance. And also fell into the vortex of love. But it was to her like the smashing of a vessel. As if she had been one of those many items which, through the seven years, she had flung, and which had shattered. Or as if she had been a mirror and, falling, broke into a million sparkling splinters.
What she had seen was not the daughter of her womb. It was a young man of about her own age, standing some way from her, lower down the hillside, under the terraces of Belgra Demitu.
She did not ask
Who is that?
She
thought
nothing. Flown into a million bits, still her mirror gaze was fixed.
And he, too, gazed at her. Through the crowds, across the light, the shadow, he smiled one lightning smile, blinding her.
Arpazia woke from her second trance to the noon sun in her eyes.
T
HAT VERY EVENING, THE CHANGE arrived. As such things often were, it was unlooked for. However, she had wished for it so much, considered it so repeatedly, constantly, that she seized her fate at once.
The day of the Oracle’s rite was arranged oddly. No doubt the
priests had done this, in order to upset the holiday, which was a pagan one.
After the king gave his duty to the smoke, there was a feast, which continued through the afternoon. Then, after sunset came a Mass at St. Belor, and everyone must go to church and sit there for two or three hours, heavy with food and drinking, longing to sleep. Between the banquet and the service, the prudent stole away to rest, or to indulge other desires.
Coira’s nurse had slipped off to a meeting with some lower steward. She had been tipsy, or might not have risked it. Kaya and Julah she admonished.
They
must stay put and care for the child. But Kaya had her own lover, a boy of twelve, a blacksmith’s apprentice. And Julah, peeved to have nobody to abscond with, pretended she had, and also flounced away.
Coira had dozed, then made believe she did. She heard them all go.
When the doors were shut, Coira got up. She had been undressed to her shift for sleep. She herself now accurately donned her white dress and combed her hair.
She went out barefoot on the cool stone floors of the new palace, the colder tiles of the old. The way to the small garden remained in Coira’s mind like a map drawn in fadeless lines. In the corridors she passed few persons. Most of the place was locked away with its secrets, or asleep, or else still junketing in the hall. The occasional scurrying servant or wandering lover paid no attention to a small child in white. She was neither often seen or known.
She found the garden, which was vacant, muffled in late afternoon sun. From the garden a strange old colonnade ran along under the wall of the elder palace. Coira went that way quietly, once or twice touching the glossy leaves of bay trees in pots. She had at this point a curious sensation, the child, as if she were walking down deep underground, which must have been caused by the shade of the high walls.
There were two doors of heavy wood, braced in bronze and with gilded shapes on them of fruit trees. They had a pair of round
handles, like golden oranges, but these were too high up for the child to reach.
Was this the queen’s door? Surely it was.
Coira raised her hand to knock or scratch, then hesitated. It was not, even now, doubt. The child felt her mortal smallness, and thought she would not be heard. She had been frequently ignored.
“Now, my pretty,” said a voice, unknown yet familiar, “all alone? Have they let you get out?”
Coira turned. In a core of darkness under a single pillar, a woman seeming just as old, stood pale, slender and curved like a gibbous moon.
The child looked at her. She said nothing. Through all her peculiar childhood, she had learned this one useful trick.
But the old woman appeared amused. She was not (though she closely resembled her) the Smoke Crone. She said, “I’ve come to call on her majesty. And now here you are, to call on her, as well. You must go first. What better?” And she stepped forward and rapped sharply on the left-hand door. “No one else is there,” said the crone, gossipy. “She’s sent them out.”
A voice called, “Yes, enter.” The queen’s voice? The child did not know.
“Go in,” said the crone, bending even more to the child, “and you’ll see, she’ll be looking for me, up in the air over your head.” And she laughed, the crone, like a goose gaggling softly.
But she turned one golden handle, and when the door opened, the child walked through, alone.
 
 
As the old woman had predicted, the queen was watching above the child’s head for someone of the normal adult giant’s height. Then her eyes glided downward and struck the face of the child with two glittering bright blows.
“Where is she?” said the queen. Always they were asking, this mother and daughter, these elusive enigmatic questions about or of each other.
“She said I should come in first.”
“Were you with her? Are you hers?” asked the queen, apparently surprised.
“No. She was there, by the door.”
“What do you want?”
The witch-queen seemed distracted. She turned away. She had, as always, no attention to spare.
Coira swallowed, her heart drumming and her eyes too large. Now she must make the goddess see her at last. Plainly it had not happened as yet.
“I am Coira,” announced the child bravely.
“Yes?” said the queen, her back to the girl, not hearing her, or only partly. Not knowing the name, perhaps. (They had called her baby Candacis.)
The queen wore the gown she had had on earlier, ivory and gold, but the headdress and veil had been removed from her high-coiled, flawless hair. She paced across the wide room, as Coira had seen her do so many times, pacing across distance and windows. Then she reached what Coira took to be another window. It had an open metal shutter, like a door, but it gave on another room, identical even to the gilded water clock dripping in a corner. And next Coira became aware the queen had materialized in the other room, also, while still remaining in this one. There were two of her. She stood there, facing herself, both ways.
Coira was amazed but enchanted. This was true magic. It was miraculous.
And stealing forward, gazing only upward now to the adult height, as the queen herself had done, Coira missed her own reflection as it entered the scope of the sorcerous mirror. She saw only the witch-queen facing the witch-queen, her wonder doubled.
The child was now too moved even to need to be brave. “You’re so beautiful—more beautiful—the most beautiful in all the whole world.”
The fierce cry penetrated the heart of Arpazia, which today had begun to thaw and crack in pieces. She glanced over her shoulder
and down in astonishment, at the little creature, like a dwarf, on her floor.
“Am I?”
“Yes—so beautiful. More beautiful than anyone. Like the goddess.”
“Hush,” said Arpazia, as she had in the past, but not to this child. Yet Arpazia looked back into the glass. She saw her beauty as if for the only time in her life. Her eyes darkened. “Yes. I am.”
And “Yes,” answered the queen in the mirror, “you are.”
But then she felt something rest against her leg, as a tall dog might do. It was this girl-child again, leaning on her, staring up.
Whose was she?
Oh, she’s mine. Oh. His.
“Where is your nurse?” said the queen. Her face became an egg’s shell. The shell peered at Coira.
Coira knew better than to say where the nurse was. She did not want to discuss the nurse. She wanted her mother to take her hand. Coira reached up and instead took hold of the tips of the queen’s jeweled fingers.
“Let go of me,” said the queen, not loudly, not even cruelly. “Why are you here and not with your nurse? You must go away at once. You said an old woman was outside. Send her in to me.”
Coira’s heart also cracked.
It was not to let love in but to let it out, like venom from the bite of a snake.
When Arpazia looked round again, the dwarvish child had vanished and the crone replaced her in the space of the room.
But the crone, too, was the wrong crone.
The queen tapped her foot.
The crone said, knowing the queen’s mind, still amused,
“She’s
the guardian of the Oracle, she mustn’t leave her spot on the terrace. I’m her kin. She sent me.”
Arpazia said, “I hear from my servants she—you, too, then—are a sort of law in the town. They are your people, not the king’s.”
“Ah, lady,” said the crone slyly. She denied nothing.
“Your people, then,” said Arpazia, “are too bold. You must reprimand
them. I’ve heard talk here of your dancing in the woods. Godless pagans. You make the pious priests angry.” Then Arpazia grinned, saw herself do it in the mirror. But perhaps only the queen in the mirror grinned.
This second crone said, “Will you like to come and dance with us, Queen?”
Years ago … those years came back to the queen, and the engorged face of Draco. She said, “That is a lewd term, to
dance.
”
“Sometimes.”
“One of your young men was insolent to me, at the ceremony this morning. He offended me, and I asked my women, ‘Who is that man, daring to make faces at me?’ They said he was one of your people, you pagans the priests may one day burn for your godlessness.”
“Oh, we’re godly,” said the old woman.
The queen asked, almost shrilly, “Who is that man? Tell me his name. The king—” She faltered, for now she had mentioned the king twice and he was nothing to her, nothing but insane, bad things. Her white cheeks were flushed a moment. (The little girl had flushed in just that way, walking into this chamber, although she had been dull white as a headstone, walking out.) “
Who is that young man?
”
“I’ll tell you a name we give him, lady. We call him Orion.”
Arpazia barked—a crazy laughter—somehow she had heard the name.
“A star!”
“A hunting star, lady.”
“The king”—oh, again—“he shall hear how your
Orion
leered at me—” But the queen was blushing. Years fell from her with the clatter of shed armor. She stood in her expensive lovely gown, naked before the old woman, and hid her young face in her hand.
The old woman bowed her head at this nice outcome. They had hoped
she
might see him—and he was handsome, the young man who had smiled at the queen. And the hand of the old gods was on him. Those gods needed no help. They liked to play, sometimes.
But for the pagan kind, in the days of the Christ, a queen’s favor was worth courting. Perhaps. Always other currents moved, changeable, deep … the gods, liking to play …
Outside, in the corridors, and in the back of her skull, the crone heard the child she had met noiselessly crying, needles of her smashed heart raining from her eyes as she wandered about. Pain and weeping—the lot of human things.
“Three nights from this one, at Full Moon,” said the crone, “we are going up to the wood. King Draco will be gone by then, off to his new city. And half the priests—well, lady, they kneel to the Christ one day and run with us the next. Nothing for you to fear.”
“You presume—”
“To invite you? Yes, yes, fair Queen. Look in your mirror. See your beauty. See your witch’s eyes. What do you say?”
“Will
he
—”
“Oh,
he’ll
be there. Under the trees.”
“Then I shall avoid—”
“A star in the dark. Hunting the deer. Apple grows to be bitten, lady.”
Arpazia’s blood, red as apples, melted to fire.
When she again looked up she was alone, and the evening was closing through amber to ash. A worrisome bell clanged. St. Belor was calling sinners to their unwanted Mass.
 
 
The sultry church, dim with incense and drunken breath. The king’s head sometimes nodded, but soon he had himself in check. He feared God, and God was in this house.
Above the aisle, rising from a moonblast of candles, the frightening figure of the Christ, thin as a bone and bleached as one, hammered with gory rubies to his golden cross. The eyes harrowed down, agonized—yet watchful.
I have suffered this for you,
said these awful eyes, so some might think,
what will you give me in return?
So it seemed tonight to the queen. She had eaten and drunk very little and she was wide, wide awake.
She saw the church of St. Belor, as if for the first time. Its frescoes and goldleaf, the Christ, the statue of the Virgin Marusa, with a silver star on her forehead and the single diamond tear set under her right eye. The saint himself, Belor, waited servantlike behind her.
Clad in Marusa’s blue, Arpazia had been married here.
She had since come here every seventh day, to worship.
It had meant nothing, she was not religious, and less so now. Yet, ironically, she heard tonight what the priest was saying as he stood under the anchor of the enormous Bible.
“Septem Peccata, Septem Peccata.
Against these foul Seven, at all times you must be on guard.”
He was pointing up beyond the altar, near the roof.
Arpazia, like the rest, looked there. She saw the grotesque carvings, devils and monsters, such as she had once been shown in one of her father’s clever books. Had such things made her afraid then? She did not recall. Now she found them contemptible, as she had come to find her younger self. And as for the demanding Savior, there smoldered in her a sort of hatred.
If ever you suffered for me, what good has it done me? Where were you and your God when he had me down in the snow—what return must I give you for that?

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