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Authors: Tanith Lee

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BOOK: White As Snow (Fairy Tale)
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The pointing priest was indicating a line of misshappen crouching figures. Arpazia stared at them a moment. They were men, but crushed small—dwarves, and with curious animal attributes. One had the paws and claws of a bear, and one a peacock’s tail and lion’s ruff; one a spiked horn sticking up from his forehead.
“The seven mighty sins of the flesh,” cried the priest, raging at the crowded church, these persons redolent of transgression.
“Septem magna peccata carnis!
See, there is Anger in his wrath, Pride in his vainglory, and Lust puffed by his own disgusting hungers—”
Candle-flickered, the stone brutes writhed and cavorted, startling the queen. A stab of fire shot through her. The blood spangled, rose to her face as it had done when the hag stood before her, the weird woman with her chat of the wood.
Arpazia lowered her eyes. Inside her lids, she saw the face of
the young man. And then, that he was naked. Only the shadows of leaves half covered him, his body gleamed like marble.
An elderly singsong creaked in her brain, shutting out the ranting priest.
Black is the wood, black as the night,
Hidden the roses red and white …
And then Arpazia heard a girl’s voice, perhaps Lilca’s, whisper, “I couldn’t make him stop, I loved it so, what he did to me—”
The queen’s eyes were fast shut. She shivered, but only once.
As he raved, the priest spat foam, and here and there a woman fainted from too much wine or remorse.
 
 
“She burns and her pillow’s soaked. That’s the fever-dews.”
Kaya and Julah hovered meekly, as the nurse of Candacis, the king’s legal daughter, gloomed above her charge.
“I didn’t dare leave her,” lied Kaya, glibly, “to try and find you.”
“No, Kaya wouldn’t leave the bedside,” added Julah, squinting at Kaya to make sure her accomplicement was recognized. “But Coira didn’t know us at all, she got so sick. When we patted her, she cried out we weren’t there. She only wanted you.”
The nurse, worn out with her own business, and the church lecture on the Septem Peccata, Pride, Anger, Lust, Envy, Covetousness, Gluttony, and Sloth—longed to lie down herself and slothfully sleep.
“It’s nothing much. They take these fevers at her age. It’ll be gone by morning. There, there, Coira. Sip this water. No? Then you must do without.”
A
ND THE MIRROR GAZED through the night window, and met the slim white face of the three-quarters moon.
I have passed this way before, said the moon to the mirror.
I too, answered the mirror, began in the East.
Already I must go on, said the moon. Farewell, until another night.
But watching, the mirror still saw a moon, a face white as the moon, in a midnight of hair.
“Am I beautiful?” the queen asked the mirror. Someone had taught her such a question but she had forgotten who. “The most beautiful in all King Draco’s rotten lands?”
Yes. Look and see. Only the moon can compare, and the moon has moved out of your mirror now.
“Will—” The queen meant to say,
Will he think me beautiful?
But the words would not come. Draco had found her beautiful, and so made her beauty vile. But that was then. Then she was that other
stupid, wretched one, and now she was a queen, and wide awake—and still young, young as daybreak.
 
 
Three hours after sunset on the third night, someone rapped lightly on the door of the queen’s apartment.
Instead of calling to her maids—for she had sent them away—the queen went herself to undo the door and look out.
No one was in the corridor. Then, they were.
Having pushed off her earlier girl-self, the queen was brand new, nearly innocent again. So she, the witch, for a second took this manifestation for sorcery.
But then she scathingly chided herself. (Her inner tongue, when critical, had remained as harsh for herself as her outer ways were hard on others.)
“Are you playing a game there, old woman? Leave it off. Why are you here?”
“Don’t you know, Queen? Aren’t you waiting for me, fair as the night, and King Draco gone since this morning, and you all alone.”
“I should have them whip you.”
“Oh, you should. But there is another king now. Another king tonight. Come and see, Queen.”
They were in the colonnade. Trees sighed from the palace terraces, and it was dark, half the lamps unlit, yet the summer stars were blisters of white-gold. Arpazia drew the hood of her cloak over her head, to hide from them.
A surprising turning. Had Arpazia never come this way before? They crossed an edge of her private garden, and it looked unknown, like a familiar scene glimpsed suddenly in a mirror. Even the sea was visible on the
other
side, beyond a stand of pines …
The concealed door, which the hag unlocked, apparently without a key, reminded Arpazia of her first escape. She faltered, but then tossed the memory aside.
Descending now a broken ancient stairway, loose small stones
scattering from their feet. Between the oleanders and the olives, goats fed like blanched shadows. Out of a scabrous wall the old woman gripped in her claw a lantern.
Then they went down into the velvet dark, under the terraces, where the tangled gardens had given themselves over to the elder gods of savage things.
Above, behind them, the barely lit palace shone faintly as a ghost on the sequined sky. All of it seemed a ruin now—ancient, and barely substantial.
Tall plants brushed by, and bowed to the queen. What were they? Not garden things, nor quite things of the forest …
“Hemlock,” the old woman muttered. “White nightshade. Moly, known to the enchantress Kirsis …”
Huge old white stones, and then a blurred milky statue which, as they turned from it, Arpazia saw held lightly in one hand, and smiling, its own raised phallus—
“Stop,” said Arpazia. “I won’t go any further with you.”
“Not far now, Queen.”
Above, behind, from this fresh angle of the wild ground, the temple showed. Its pillars grew like plants themselves, petrified in darkness.
And then they were on a walk, pebbled by great uneven round stones. Feather cypress trees, a scholar’s rack of pens, were sentinel on either side, and then both women slipped through a little gate and were on a meadow, waist high in the dry pale summer grass, and poppies inked black, under the stars.
The land ran up into the trees there, just where a dreadful flaming face was now standing, the moon at full, a mask of beaten gold.
The queen herself became the mirror of the moon. It shone right into her.
I have passed this way before,
said the moon to the mirror of the queen.
And you?
“Never,” murmured the queen.
I see you climb to meet me,
said the moon.
I regret, by the time you have gone high enough up the hills, I shall have reached the summit of the sky.
It was the hag, somehow privy to this uncanny conversation, who remarked, “Don’t mind it, moon. Our way lies down into the dark.”
And exactly then the first trees were there, their limbs running deep into the earth, casting the black shade of their cannopy. This church was cool and fragrant.
Arpazia had grown among enormous forests. She hung back once more. To enter here was to return into herself, her childhood, girlhood. Had that time been so occluded?
“Where have you brought me?” she demanded of the hag.
“Where have you brought yourself? Where do you think?”
 
 
The woods were black as ebony. The roots of them hooped and humped like serpents away below ground. In the boughs, unseen presences pattered, whistled, cooed, shook their wings—but these entities were not all birds.
Starlight had dripped through, and now the moonlight flung down blond carpets. A slender waterfall ran from the mossy mouth of a cave, dippered over rocks and dropped into an oval basin. The moon burned in the water, then the two narrow figures crossed against it.
They had reached a natural avenue in the wood. All around, the thick screen of the trees, the sigh and soothe of the leaves. But here the wide path was like a lawn, the grass so closely cut that perhaps it had been scythed, or else sheep were brought by day to graze.
The moon-carpet ran along the avenue, barred like the coat of an animal with shadow-stripes.
No longer delaying, the queen would have walked on. It was the hag who stayed her now. They were still then, standing there, the lantern extinguished.
Out between the trees presently, Arpazia saw beings evolve into the moon glow.
At first she thought them supernatural. Then she knew that they were human, as she was, only made bizarre—as was she?—by the night and the black wood.
Yet again, seen in the mirror of the night, despite her recognition of them, they were changed. Freed. Lawless.
Palace girls and women from the town, even some of those who had been in Draco’s camps, mingled without a glance. Nobles with servants, with slaves also; and there, as the old woman had promised or warned, a priest from the church of the Christ, an old man,
altered
—made, not youthful, but
without
time.
Arpazia began to notice other matters. The unbound hair, the bare feet and legs—and there, and there, the moon in little, glimmering breasts which seemed to look back at her from their nipples—
And Arpazia experienced again, even at this allurement of her own sex, a scorching erotic thrill.
She had never felt anything for women. Nor for men. That is, she had felt only uninterest, distaste, mockery—climaxing in horror and revulsion.
There had been a slight sound as the crowd gathered in out of the wood. Though none of them acknowledged her, many turned and gaped a moment. These movement. little rufflings of garments, hair, rills of muted voices, insectile whispers, all these ended, and then there was silence again, only the rainy sound of the waterfall, the oceanic ebb and flow of the breeze among the boughs.
Like the moon, something was approaching, coming toward them. And they awaited it, Arpazia too.
She understood. Her heart raced already to meet him. For who could it be that was so anticipated—but
he
?
Soon after, there was a difference at the avenue’s end. The moon had shifted further, to light that spot abruptly. Only then could you see that something stood there.
Arpazia was struck to stone in heart-sinking disappointment.
And fear. For it was not anything remotely mortal, there at the apex of the avenue.
It was a beast. Some monster of nightmare, birthed by a demon.
And a glad welcoming cry rose from the people in the wood. The breeze, lifting, called too. Bells tinkled, a thin piping circled, once, twice, three times, before that overlay of silence came again.
The beast moved now, toward them, leisurely, down the avenue.
Arpazia thought,
Are you a fool still? You know you can trust no one, yet here you have let them lead you. You’re lost now in this wood. And they have summoned up this abomination.
But then she thought, what did she care? Was it worse than Draco, that beast in a man’s hairy skin?
She thought:
Let it try me.
Her nails and teeth were sharp, now.
Look, fool, it isn’t all a beast. It has to walk like a man—
Certainly it walked on two legs. Yet it had the head of a stag, crowned round and round with four branching antlers. And its body was a freckled panther’s, yet also partly a bear’s—and it had the shanks of a boar.
But the bristled or hirsute skins shifted as it walked. Now one lean thigh showed an instant, the long, muscled calf of a man. And then he was nearer, quite near, and under the head of the stag, was the strong column of the young male human throat, and the massed dark hair, gilded as a carving, running out there.
A man in a panther’s skin and the hide of a boar and the pelt of a bear, made king by a diadem of antlers—
Still stone, Arpazia was locked now in a panic of shame and pride, anger and desire, alone among the crowd before and about him.
For it
was
he. It was the one who had looked at her, woken her up. And beneath the plethora of the beasts, as in her waking dream, he was naked as the statue among the hemlock.
S
INCE, TONIGHT, SHE HAD BECOME a mirror, did she reflect this elemental creature? Did he see himself in her surface? For now he stood not three feet from her. He was taller than she, as most men were, and both of the influencing men of her life—her father, Draco. But so unlike, this beast walking upright, to those two former men whose souls ran on all fours.
He smelled of the skins he wore, yet also young and clean, and of the wood, its foliage and moss and sap, the secret crushed life of it.
From inside the wooden stag’s head (like the moon, he wore a mask) she caught the dark gleam of his eyes, and it reminded her of the water she had passed, the basin under the waterfall.
No one else was near, finally. They had drawn away. The old woman had drawn away.
Arpazia stayed still as a stone.
She looked up, into the mask, at his eyes. She felt the warmth of his body, mantled only in skins and shadows.
“I know,” he said, “you are the king’s wife in the palace.” He spoke quietly, gently, and without hurry. “But here, Lady, as you’ve come here, the palace means little. Here in the wood, we’re not the selves we are back there, in the places of men. This is the place of the gods. Do you see?”
Her lips parted to speak. She said nothing.
He said, “Don’t be afraid. We won’t hurt you.”
Arpazia’s eyes widened and words came from her lips. “Try. See what you get.”
He laughed. The wooden head tossed up, just like a stag’s head, and the antlers rattled their terrible tines. But on his shoulders of panther’s skin the hair coiled, thick, shining. It was somber now,
but in sunlight, as she had seen on the terraces, it had the rich color of beer. His hands, though now in the gauntlets of a bear’s paws, and clawed, were tanned. His throat was tanned, almost the shade of an olive under the moon. But at his chest the tan faded. He grew whiter, like marble.
A star leapt in her belly.
“Yes, Lady, they say you’re fierce. That’s good. Like a lioness of the goddess. But all I want is to make you my queen here, for tonight.”
“Are you a king, then?”
“One king. There are other kings.”
“Draco,” she said.
“Oh, not Draco,” said the stag’s mask, coolly.
He drew the glove of fur and claws off from his left hand. She saw then the hand she remembered, and as he moved, the skins, parting, nearly down to his middle.
He was hard and spare, muscled from his work, whatever that work was. The finest rivulet of hair described the center of his chest, down to where the cord of woven grass tied in the skins at his waist.
“I’m the Hunter King,” said the mask of the stag. “Those other kings gave and allow me that. The Kings of the Air and the Wood. And the King of the Lands Below. Do you see what I mean? They’re gods.”
“And you?” she said.
“A man. And you, a woman. But tonight, my queen.”
He took her hand straight up, in his bared hand, and at the touch of his flesh, his fingers wrapping her own, she could have sunk into the grass, for she had turned from stone to molten honey.
When they walked back along the avenue, the moon was gone from it, and only shades pressed in on them, people and trees. But someone brushed off the hood of her cloak, and next her hair was loose and heavy about her, moving as if separately alive, and then a garland was on her hair, with the scent of myrtle and poppies.
She thought,
You stupid bitch, do you know what you’re at? Don’t you ever learn?
But the hating inner voice was drummed away by the beating of her heart. And they were playing their music too, hollow reeds, shaken bells.
At the avenue’s end, cobalt-black, a glade was shielded from the moon by massive oak trees. A primeval place it seemed to her. And on the corded trunks she saw the white gorings, the gouges of generations of boar tusks.
They were igniting a hundred little clay lamps. The smallest reddest flames perched on them, forming a crimson mist.
The altar they approached in the glade was ancient as the slab in the temple of Belgra Demitu.
Someone else had taken away her cloak. But she was accustomed to all these servantly dressings and undressings. And her hand was fast in his.
The King and Queen of the Wood were seated on two mossy boulders.
Earthernware cups were brought them. The drink was ale with a malty syrup mixed in, sprinkled by wild mint.
Arpazia saw her feet were bare.
But really she could feel only his nearness and the pressure of his hand, and all the several callouses on it, which fascinated her. And she wanted him to speak to her. His voice was like the sounds of the wood, and like music, but also the voice of a man.
Do you like men so much?
jabbed the inner voice.
You know what they do in the forest and the bed.
When she thought this, her womb spasmed inside her, twisting, like the strings on a harp.
Is this what women felt? But she knew better than to feel it.
In the dim crimson light, these people were dancing, as they might in the formal dances of the court.
Arpazia said, very low, “Do you think you can possess me?”
“Only if you allow it.”
“I won’t.”
All she could see was the face of the stag, the rending horns.
She thought of Rage, the unicorn, and Lust the stinging scorpion.
She thought of Sloth, who had the paws and claws of a bear. But the Hunter King was not slothful. He was lambent with strength.
He had not answered.
She said, “It’s unlawful for me to be here. The king—”
“Draco heeded the Oracle. He’s taken his soldiers, his own people, and left only those who mean little to him. And some of those are here. And one of those is yourself, Lady.”
Arpazia thought of Pride, a lion with a peacock’s tail. Of Envy the snake and Covetousness the fox and Gluttony the boar.
Proud panther-lion, was he gluttonous in his boar’s skin? Would he devour her?
He had turned his head, and his hand twitched on hers. She fell down through the chair of rock, into the wet black depths of the wood, and there she felt his weight on her, hot as the sun by night.
Arpazia tried to get up. But her legs had become very weak.
“Drink the ale-cup, Persapheh.”
“Why do you call me that—?” she stammered childishly.
“That is your name, when you’re queen in the wood.”
“No. That isn’t my name.”
“In the wood it is.”
It was the name of the goddess known at Belgra Demitu, who was three-in-one: Coira when a maiden, Demetra when a mother, Persapheh when, robed in hoar-frost and winter snow, she went below and became Queen Death. But Arpazia, who had heard the myth, did not recall.
She tried to pull away her hand.
But instead she found she had drunk some more of the drink, and now he stood and drew her with him, and they were in the dance, beside the prehistoric altar.
Black stains marked it, as tusk-tears marked the oaks. Things had been sacrificed on it. And so they were still, for now she saw thin little bones like slivers of new quartz, lying in the grass.
“There’s no killing tonight,” he said.
And then he led her away around the altar and through the ebony trees and into the black between them, where the moon surely had never found her way, not once in a hundred years, but the moon besides was gone.
“I won’t go any farther.”
He stopped.
“Why,” she said, “have you brought me here?”
“Why have you come with me?”
“I’ll give you nothing.”
“I’ll give you everything.”
Then he let her go and she almost dropped to the ground. She caught hold of a tree and the tree supported her. She watched him as he drew off the head of the stag.
He came out laughing again, shaking back his brown lion’s hair. His eyes seemed all dark, like a cat’s by night, and they lighted once, as a cat’s would. And then he stripped away before her (as once the rapist had stripped
her
) his garments of skin. He stood there in the faint nocturnal glim, by which, now, she seemed to see as clearly as if at noon, naked from head to foot.
He was like a column of marble, smooth and satin-slippery, yet warm, and at the center of him the warmth became another black wood, and then a great stem of flame, dark and perilous, upright as any castle tower.
“I’ll kill you,” she said.
But in reply he only shook his head, and putting his own bare hand upon the rod, with such grace and delicacy, he stroked it once, and twice, and three times, as a musician might an instrument of music, his eyes half closing at the pleasure, the melody it gave back.
Arpazia put her face into her hands. She slipped down the tree and lay in the feral grass.
He lay down beside her. He leaned across her and, lifting away her hands, he kissed her forehead, her fluttering eyelids. He kissed her mouth.
Then she gripped him, as she had caught hold of the tree, yet still she fell away and away. They spun together, they might have
been flying, and only he could save her from the fall and from the ground.
His mouth was on her breasts, his hands stroked, making the music in her, as he had made it in himself.
“Don’t do this,” she said. “I forbid it.”
“No,” he said. “But perhaps …”
And it was his mouth she felt upon the dark within her thighs, and the tongue tip, also like a flame, but the agile firefly flames on the red lamps, flickering and sipping.
Arpazia lay on her back and saw the sky and stars between the arms of the wood which held them all up.
What was she looking for? An angel—
The angel had been cast out of Heaven, and was here.
The long flame rippled on and on, and she danced to its music, on her back. Then his eyes crested her body, looking at her as the moon had looked, as a beast would look, raising its pitiless and beautiful head from the thing it fed on.
“Sweet as apples,” he said to her, but then he sank again and his hair furled over her belly and a burning wheel rushed through her womb, her spine, so she clutched the earth and danced on, kicking her heels. Presently her own high single cry burst from her, and it, too, flew away, without her, into the night.
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