White As Snow (Fairy Tale) (9 page)

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Authors: Tanith Lee

BOOK: White As Snow (Fairy Tale)
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A
RPAZIA WAS OBSESSED. BY him, after this act together in the dark night wood. Also obsessed by the act itself. She recreated the act, in her mind, even in sleep—and the throes of culmination overcame her. Awake, she touched herself with her fingertips, quick, light, almost as he had done. She thought of his body and his eyes gazing so savagely at her, so mercilessly,
forcing
her into the oblivion of joy.
How many days and nights passed? Three or four. Not a great
many. This was, in some sort, her third trance. But the object of her state, now, was not herself.
She knew his name. Not the pagan night-name she was given for the wood. Near morning the old woman had guided her back again to the palace, or, at any rate,
one
old woman. They all of them looked alike to Arpazia, as, really, every woman had looked alike, and every man, until now.
“Tell me his name,” Arpazia had hissed, on the meadow below the palace. Subterfuge was done with. The sky was pale-sick with dawn.
The crone did not prevaricate, for a wonder.
“As a man, he’s called Klymeno.”
This, too, was the name of a god, but Arpazia did not realize, though she had heard it somewhere, once or twice, in this country by the sea.
“
What
is he?”
“By trade, do you mean? What do you think?”
Arpazia could not think. Part of her, despite her questions, knew he was a being of otherness, and did not exist outside his own world.
“I asked you, and you will answer.”
“Will I? Oh, you’re queen again, are you?”
“I am the queen, yes.”
The crone said, “He hunts, that’s how he makes his living. He kills things in the woods and lugs the dead carcasses to the town.”
Arpazia visualized him, thick with blood. Even this enticed her. That morning in her bed, she dreamed he hunted
her
, and he was naked as he had been in the darkness. His spear brought her down and pinned her to the earth. He ate her alive, tearing off chunks of her flesh as she choked with unbearable fear and ecstasy.
This dream was repeated.
He had not been gentle. What he had perpetrated on her, woken her up to, was more ferocious than any rape.
Arpazia the queen possessed no agenda of the pagan doings of the town and palace. Because of that, she was at a loss. What would happen next? Besides, she could not wait. She had soon used her memory up.
What he had done to her he had only done two times. Then he had kissed her, got up, and left her there. Afterward she did not know if he had taken his own pleasure separately, gaining it voyeuristically from observing hers. He vanished like a phantom through the trees, as did every one of them, these Woods People, but for the escorting crone.
Arpazia found now she needed to know if he too had been pleasured. She had not seen it, and wanted to add this missing ingredient to her dreams.
Or had he been ultimately indifferent to her—unmoved to any pleasure?
How would he be, and look, suffering the pangs she had undergone? Here an image of grunting Draco intervened—she shook it off. This act had no bearing on the acts of Klymeno, performed with her.
Or, had he been indifferent, unaroused?
So the ideas superceded each other.
Somewhere during this time, one of the queen’s women entered her apartments, and brought in another woman that the queen did not remember.
“She’s the child’s nurse, madam.”
Which child? Arpazia stared, blankly.
The nurse of the Princess Candacis curtseyed, groveling.
“Excuse my presence, Lady. I thought you should know. I should ask.”
Know and ask what? What did any of this have to do with the queen?
“What is it?” said Arpazia.
The nurse stumbled on her words, guilty and unsure. “She’s in a fever, Lady. It doesn’t break—you know, well, all mothers know—that is—children take these things—but she doesn’t get well. That day of the feast—I had to go off—only an hour, I assure you, my sister was poorly—and those girls are useless—”
“What are you saying?”
“Will I get the physician, madam?”
Arpazia turned away. She was like her mirror now, which stood closed in a corner. The queen had closed herself.
“If you want.”
“Thank you, Lady—yes, Lady. Oh, thank you.”
Outside again, seething with humiliation, the nurse ranted to herself, “Unnatural mad bitch. She cares nothing for her own child—all left to me—whether it lives or dies.”
That was true enough.
Arpazia had already forgotten. But the entry of others—the nurse—had alerted her to the possibility of sending once more for the crone.
Presently one of the attendants appeared again.
“They can’t find the old woman, madam.”
In a way, Arpazia seemed to have stepped out of a high window; she balanced now on the air, and might at any second crash to the ground far below. So she used no ruse. Anyone could see, she had moved beyond the limit of safe conduct. Yet she was aware of the live currents of secrets here, into which she had barely been admitted. This atmosphere she slightly heeded, and was just a
little
careful.
But with Draco gone, all the palace grew lax, and did much as it wanted. Guards dozed and diced at their posts, or abandoned them. Maids ran off to gossip. Palace washerwomen left baskets of damp clothes unheeded in the yards and passageways. It was already very warm, bees heavy in the tall, untended bushes of blue lavender, the unpruned tamarisks scratching at the walls, lizards indoors and sunning themselves in the rays from windows.
Arpazia said she would sleep. Her women were used to that. And they were always glad when she sent them away, as so often she did.
The queen wiped the cosmetics from her face, let down her hair. She pulled off her royal gown and put on the dress of one of her attendants, indifferent to its scents of skin and perfume not her own. Arpazia covered herself with a plain cloak. Unable to remove her rings, she wound a bit of cloth around them, like a bandage.
Turning then, she glanced into her just-opened mirror.
She giggled like a girl. She looked extremely young.
Who would know her, now she was disguised?
 
 
This was exhilarating, to steal out and be at large, unguarded, unattended, and
unwatched.
(If, inwardly, she guessed that many knew her,
saw
her, she paid no heed. She and they were all caught in the same pretense together.)
The town interested Arpazia fractionally. It was most bizarre, this agglomeration of people, like a swarm, all buzzing busily about each other, making sounds, gesticulating. Poverty and meanness, where she noted them, seemed exotic. The occasional elegance affected her similarly. But she was not very attentive.
Did the hunter Klymeno reside in the town? The jumble of houses and hovels, the square with its booths and animals in pens, were not suitable habitats. There were chapels, but no church, since the great Church of St. Belor stood on the palace terraces. But there were many inns. She avoided their vicinity prudently, although once a man came careering at her from an inn doorway. Her eyes, under her hood, shot such a white look at him, he let her go and only called a foul name after her.
Later on she paused by the shrine of a saint in a side street, a broad, unpaved alley. A tree had been allowed to grow here, and there was a well. Two women sat against it, their bucket and pitchers set by.
“Where is Klymeno’s house?” asked the queen.
It
was
the queen; she sounded royal suddenly, and ill-mannered.
One woman chuckled.
The other said, “Well, high-nose, if it’s the hunter you want, he keeps no place in the town.”
Instantly, despair. Her stricken face, just visible in the cloak, amused the amused woman further. The other seemed to think better of her rebuff. “You might find him at the inn. He may drink there, when he brings the meat.”
“That venison goes up to the king’s house.” added the other.
They were quiet, looking at the queen differently.
“Which inn?” asked Arpazia. Her voice was almost frightened now.
“The inn called
Stag
, where else?”
Crippled by her lack of knowledge and education—no one had ever taught Arpazia good manners, charm, or discretion, only fear, arrogance, and paucity—she said, as if stunned, “One of you must show me the way.”
“Must we?”
They did not move.
The unamused one said, “Better you find it yourself, Lady.”
Arpazia went away.
In another street, soon after, now no longer adventurous, only desperate and uncertain, she could not bring herself to ask directions of the grubby children, the hurrying priest. Then a journeyman came past, tools in a bag on his shoulder. “What do you seek, woman?”
“The inn,” she said. “I must find the inn called
Stag
.”
“I’m for there,” he said. “Come on, I’ll show you.”
Had she noticed him among the trees of the wood, when the full moon hammered on the earth? Perhaps not. But he guided her through the alleys, over the square again, and along a grassy run between bulging walls, to a doorway. There was no sign but for a branch of antlers. Seeing it, her heart struck her so violently she almost dropped down.
“Who is it you want here?” asked the journeyman.
“He is called—Klymeno.”
“The hunter? Yes, I know him. Stay here. I’ll see if he’s to be found.”
So the queen stood at the door of the inn like a drab, waiting for her man, or for custom. Yet no one approached her now to jeer or scare.
She began to cry, surprising herself. Unloved, uncared for, she had never been a protected child suddenly deserted in the adult world. So she did not know why she was crying, or for what comfort.
But when a new light showed in the doorway, the sun catching
the figure of a man as he came out, Arpazia knew the perfect alleviation of the lost child found. And then the alarm of the child which thought it had sinned.
“Yes? What do you want of me?”
Was he as she recalled? No—yes—both of these.
He did not know her. This was the worst blow. Even disguised, he should have known her.
Klymeno, in this daylight: in ordinary woodsman’s clothes of thin leather, bare-armed, brown. His hair, a deeper brown. His lion eyes had kept their amber.
Did he make believe he did not know who she was, or was this true? She had muffled her face in the cloak. She was not herself here, either.
Then he saw her tears.
“What’s the matter? Don’t cry.” He came right up to her and put back the hood. His hand slipped over her hair. “You,” he said, his voice low. “Why are you here?”
She hung her head. Her tears stopped. She said nothing.
It was as if she had gone blind and dumb, deaf too, and time had ended. He did not want her to have come here. Did not at all want her, now.
“Do you know who I am?” he said to her.
She heard him.
But she said nothing.
Arpazia gathered herself, put up her head. Her eyes met his and he saw they had, peculiarly, gone black, pupil and iris all one.
“How I despise you,” she said, her voice lower than his, but sharp as the edge of something broken.
He took hold of her, not roughly.
She said, “Let go, or I will rip you up with my nails.”
“
Now
I know you,” he said. Then he murmured softly, and pulled her in against him, held her without effort, and she could not struggle. “Beautiful Demetra, my darling wife.” His tone was full of love, of desire, of gladness. She turned once more molten in the fire of it.
“That isn’t my name.”
“Yes. By day. When you’re with me.”
“I thought—” she said. She sighed.
They stood by the inn door, he holding her, and she leaning against him. The sun moved slowly over the grassy alley.
 
 
The cart was drawn by a donkey. The animal had white-lined hairy ears, like the donkey which had carried Christ on its back in one of her father’s books.
Klymeno would not let her sit back in the cart. It had been stained by carcasses, and was black from old blood. She rode beside him, behind the white-eared donkey.
They left the town and took a meandering track that ran in and out of olive groves and rocky places, above the sea. The water was the color of the lavender that grew wild by the roadside. Then the track curved up and they went up with it, into the hills. Once, through cypress boughs, she saw the palace, raised on its slope yet already below. It glowed in the sun, quite unfamiliar.

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