THIRTY-SIX
IT MUST HAVE BEEN TRUE, WHAT LILAC SAID, FOR LISSAR FOUND nothing but empty road spinning out before her. She was dimly aware of people lining the narrow clear way, dimly aware of the noise of them, but she seemed to move in the little world of silence that had been born in her last words to Lilac, silence undisturbed by the quietness of her bare feet striking the ground, and the dogs’ paws. For they ran swiftly, the last desperate effort before exhaustion; but that last effort was a great one, and so seven dogs and one Moonwoman fled, fleeter than any deer or hare, and the people rolled back before them like waves, parting before the prow of a ship running strongly before the wind.
It was a long way from the crossroads to the last innermost heart of Goldhouse’s city, and the woman and the dogs were already tired, for they had come far in a very short time. Ash ran on one side of Lissar, Ob on the other, and the other five ran as close behind as the afterdeck rides behind the bow. The wind whistled out of their straining lungs, and flecks of foam speckled the dogs’ sides, but there was no faltering; and the people who saw them go would tell the story later that they moved like Moonbeams. Some, even, in later years, would say that they glowed as the full Moon glows, or that mortal eyes saw through them, faintly, as Moonlight may penetrate a fog.
But Lissar knew none of this. What she knew was that she had to get to the throne room before Camilla’s vows were uttered; somehow, that Camilla should merely be bodily rescued was not enough. Those vows would be a stain on her spirit, and a restraint on her freely offering her pledge to some other, worthier husband; that Camilla should have that clean chance of that other husband seemed somehow of overwhelming importance to Lissar; that she was driven by her own memory of fleeing from Ossin on the night of the ball did not occur to her. But having lost her own innocence she knew the value of innocence, and of faith, and trust; and if she could spare another’s loss she would.
What the people she passed saw was a look of such fear and rage and pain on the Moonwoman’s face that they were moved by it, moved in sorrow and in wonder: sorrow for the mortal grief they saw and wonder that they saw it. For they were accustomed to the Moon going tranquilly about her business in the sky while they looked up at her and thought her beautiful and far away. They knew the new tales of the lost children, and the cool bright figure with her hounds who returned them, but the stories shook and shivered in their memories as they looked at her now among them, running the streets of their own city, and with such a look on her face. Their hearts smote them, for they had believed her greater than they. And some of these people fell in behind her and followed her to Goldhouse’s threshold, hurrying as they could, with some sense that even the Moonwoman might like the presence of friends, mere slow mortals that they were.
“Tomorrow,” said Longsword the doorkeeper, standing as if to bar the way. “Today is for the family, and for the private words; tomorrow is the celebration for everyone, and we look forward to seeing you all.” But Longsword was not a strong swordarm only, and he remembered Deerskin, and read her face as had the people who followed her now; and the official words died on his lips, which turned as pale as the Moon. “Deerskin,” he said, in quite a different voice. “What ails—?”
“You must let me pass,” said Lissar, as if Longsword’s duty were not to bar those from the king’s door that the king had decreed should be barred; as if she had the power to direct him. But he stood aside with no further question, and she ran by him, her dogs at her heels, having paused for less time than it takes to draw a breath on the doorstep.
She did not remember the way, but the urgency guided her as clearly as any beckoning finger; as clearly as she had ever known, in the last year, where to find a missing child, or a cabin on a mountaintop. She burst into the receiving-room, where a number of grandly dressed people waited to be the first to congratulate the newly married pair. Their natural impulse was to recoil from so abrupt and outlandish an intrusion as that of a barefoot woman in a rough plain white deerskin dress, her wild hair down her back, accompanied by seven tall dogs. What was Longsword doing? Why had he not called up his guards?
And so Lissar was past them before they had any thought of what to do to stop her; none had looked into her face. And she flung open the doors to the inner sanctum.
The room was big enough to hold two hundred people, and the picture they made, in their richest clothes, against the backdrop of the finest possessions of Goldhouse’s ancestors, was a spectacle to dazzle the eye; no evidence here of a tin-cup, back-yard kingdom, with precious gems and metals wrought into graceful forms and figures shaping the room like a chalice. But the company, as they turned, in horror, toward the crash of the doors striking the walls, were themselves dazzled by the sight of a woman, so tall her head seemed to brush the lintel of the door, blazing like white fire, and guarded by seven dogs as great and fierce as lions.
She was so tall that as she strode into the room, even those farthest from her could see her towering head and shoulders above the crowd, her flame-white hair streaming around her like an aureole.
The group on the dais at the far end of the crowded room turned also to look toward the door. Lissar saw five frightened faces turned toward her: Ossin, Camilla, the king and queen, and the priest, whose hand, which had been upraised, dropping stiffly to his side again, as if released by a string instead of moved by conscious human volition.… The sixth figure remained facing away from the door a moment longer: as if he knew what the sound of the crashing doors meant, that his fate and his doom had arrived.
And so Lissar’s first sight of her father in five and a half years was of his broad back. He stood as tall and proud as he ever had, and he stood too as a strong man stands, his feet planted and his shoulders squared; like a man who feared nothing, like a man who might have brought a leaf from the tree of joy and an apple from the tree of sorrow as a bride-present to his truelove’s father, and thought little of the task. And yet, staring at his back, what she remembered was the look in his eyes, the hot stink of his body, the gauntleted hands hurling her dog into the wall: and that he was also a tall handsome man was like a poor description by someone who was a careless observer. His golden hair was as thick as ever, though there was white in it now, which had not been there five years before.
Lissar glanced once, only once, at Ossin; she could not help herself. And she saw his lips shape the name he knew her by: Deerskin. She did not understand the fear in his face; anger she would have expected, anger for this intrusion, anger after their last meeting, to meet again after what had passed between them, in these circumstances: anger she would have understood and submitted to. She did not like it that Ossin should look at her with fear. But she could not deny her poor heart one more look at his beloved face; and her heart saw something else there, love and longing, stronger than the fear. But this she discarded as soon as noticed, telling her heart it was blind and foolish.
Then she turned back to the task she had come to do, and prepared not to look at Ossin again, ever again. But she let her eyes sweep over the rest of the group before the priest, and saw the fear in their faces too, and wondered at it, and wondered too that in none of their faces was recognition; it was only Ossin who had known who she was.
“Father!” said the blazing woman; and the doors slammed shut again, but as they jarred in their frames they shattered, and through the gaping hole a wind howled, and lifted the tapestries away from the walls, and the great jewelled urns shivered on their pedestals, and the light through the stained glass turned dull and faint and flickering, like a guttering candle, though it was a bright day outside. Several people screamed, and a few fainted.
And the foreign king who was to have married Camilla turned slowly around and faced his daughter.
“You shall not marry this woman, nor any woman, in memory of what you did to me, your own daughter,” said the blazing figure; and the people in the receiving-hall heard the words, borne on a storm-wind, as did the people who had followed the Moonwom
an’s race through the city; as did Lilac, who sat, her head in her hands, on the edge of a water-cistern at a crossroads where not far away seamstresses sat embroidering streamers of gold and felt their fingers falter, and a chill fall on them, for no reason they knew, and they suddenly felt that the streamers so urgently ordered would never be used. But Lilac, her head in her hands, heard no storm-wind; the words Lissar spoke, over a league away, in Goldhouse’s throne room, fell into the silence around her, the silence that had held her since Lissar had left her, and the words were as clear as if Lissar had returned and stood before her.
Lissar knew she was shouting; only those few words made her throat sore and raw, and she felt almost as though they had been ripped out of her, as if it were not her tongue and vocal cords that gave them shape and sound. She held up her hands, fingers spread; but curled them into fists, and shook them at her father, and her sleeves fell backwards, leaving her arms bare. Her father stood, looking at her, motionless, but as he might look at a basilisk or an assassin. Her own flesh seemed to shimmer in her eyes; but the blood was pounding so in her head that it was hard to blink her vision clear of it. Every time she closed her eyes, for however brief a flicker of time, the sight of a small round pink-hung room flashed across her vision and dizzied her.
He knew what she was there for, but he did not see her, his daughter, and his eyes were blank, as unseeing as they had been the night he had come through the garden door and flung Ash against the wall so hard as to break her skull, and then raped his daughter, once, twice, three times, for the nights that she had locked her door against him, for he was her father and the king, and his will was law.
But his daughter had been dead for five years; he had mourned her all that time, and was here now only because his ministers demanded it. He did not care for Camilla or any other woman. He had ordered dresses for his daughter lovelier even than those her mother had worn: one the color of the sky, one brighter than the sun, one more radiant than the Moon. But she had never worn them, she who was more beautiful than all these together. Camilla was dull clay beside her. His daughter! He missed her still. He closed his blind eyes in memory and in pain.
Father! screamed the figure, only half visible through the brilliance of the white light that surrounded it, brighter than sun or Moon or noon sky; but then as its fists opened, everyone saw hands, ordinary human hands, and bare arms beneath them. But there was blood running from the hollows of the cupped hands, as if the fingernails had gouged the flesh in some private agony; but there was too much blood for that, and it ran and ran down the bare white arms, and as the blood coursed down it put out the light around the figure, as water will put out a fire.
The mysterious wind died, and the company, silent with shock, now heard the terrifying soft sound of warm human blood dripping from outstretched arms and striking the floor, a sound as innocent as rainfall. Lilac heard that sound, and she slid off her perch at the edge of the cistern, and sat on the ground, drawing her knees to her chin, laying her face down upon them, and wrapping her arms around her head.
Open your eyes! said the bleeding woman, her voice like a wound itself. Open your eyes and look at me!
The foreign king opened his eyes and looked at her. Lissar staggered as from a blow, and pulled her arms back to herself again, sliding the red palms down her white hair, and then dropping her hands to her sides where her fingers touched Ash and Ob; and she could feel them growling. They gave her strength, that touch of warm dog against her fingertips, the reverberation of their growls; and she let her hands rest on them quietly, reminding herself of her dogs, reminding herself that she was alive, and here for a purpose.
Deerskin, breathed the company. The blazing figure had dwindled as its fire was put out, and they saw her at last. It is our Deerskin. What is she doing here? How can she be the foreign king’s daughter? She is poor and barefoot, as she was when she first came here, a year ago, when our prince was kind to her, and gave her a place in his kennels, because she liked dogs.
But the ministers and the courtiers who had come with the foreign king staggered as Lissar had when her father’s eyes opened. Lissar! they murmured. For the blood was running down the long white hair of this wild woman in her wild deerskin dress, and it darkened and spread like dye through cloth, till her hair took on the astonishing almost-black of her mother’s, Lissla Lissar’s mother’s hair, mahogany-black, red-black, like the last, deepest drop of heart’s blood, brought to light only by violent death. And they recognized the face, for it bore the same expression as it had when their king had declared that he would marry his daughter, eons ago, eons during which they had wrought mightily with their king, to get him to this place that he might honorably marry again at last, and get his country, and his ministers, a proper new heir. And with this thought they grew angry: they all thought Lissar had died. She was supposed to have died! Why must she ruin their plans thus again, this wild woman in her white dress, spoiling the marriage of their king, the marriage they had worked so hard to bring about.
Our Deerskin would not lie, murmured Goldhouse’s court, much troubled. Our prince and his dogs love her. The Moonwoman is here to rescue us, murmured those who had followed her. Rescue us and our princess, as she has rescued our lost children.
It was only a young woman of slightly more than average height, although with astonishing red-black hair, who stood before them now in her blood-spattered white deerskin dress, bright blood also on the floor before her, and in her face a haggard weariness that belonged to someone much older. She dropped her eyes from the figures on the dais, and with her gaze her head dropped also, sagging forward on her neck as if she could keep it upright no longer. So she stood, gazing at the floor, as if at a loss; and she began to look out of place, among the richness of style and dress, furniture and ornament, around her; and the blasted doors behind her were an embarrassment, as if a careless servant had dropped a laden tray, making a mess on the fine carpet, and spraying the dinner guests with gravy and wine-dregs.
Thoughtfully she knelt, and touched her sullied hands to the red shining pool; thoughtfully she raised one finger and drew a red line down her cheek. The room was utterly silent; no rustle of satin nor tap of shod foot nor gasp of indrawn breath. At her back Lissar felt the warmth and presence of her dogs; and Ash’s whiskers brushed the back of her neck. “I remember,” she said, in quite an ordinary voice, “I remember waking up, after you left me, the last night I spent under your roof. I thought I was dead, or dying, and I wanted to be dead.”
She sprang to her feet. “I carried your child—my own father’s child—five months for that night’s work; and I almost died again when that poor dead thing was born of me. I had forgotten how to take care of myself. I had forgotten almost everything but a madness I could not name; I often thought that I would choose to die than risk remembering what drove me to madness, for I believed the shame was mine. For you were king, and your will was law, and I was but a girl, or rather a woman, forced into my womanhood.” She gripped her hands together, and they began to glow, as she had glittered in the eyes of the company when she first strode through the doors. She stared at her glowing hands, and she felt her dogs pressing around her, offering her their courage, offering her their lives in any way she might ask of them.
In a new, hard voice, she said, “I was no child, for you and my mother gave me no childhood; and my maidenhood you tore from me, that I might never become a woman; and a woman I have not become, for I have been too afraid.
“But I return to you now all that you did give me: all the rage and the terror, the pain and the hatred that should have been love. The nightmares, and the waking dreams that are worse than nightmares because they are memories. These I return to you, for I want them no more, and I will bear them not one whit of my time on this earth more.”
But she staggered again, and dropped to one knee, and loosed her hands from each other, and clasped her belly, and curled around it, and the glow curled around her, like a halo, or like the em
bracing arms of a beloved friend. “Ah, no!” she cried, in a voice like the sound of the executioner’s axe; and Lilac huddled down farther by the cistern while hot tears ran from her eyes down her folded legs, digging her knees into her eyesockets as if to stop the tears, but they swelled and overflowed anyway, and ran down the insides of her thighs.
“No!” cried Lissar. “I cannot bear it again. I cannot!” And Ash turned, and sank her teeth into Lissar’s shoulder, but only to bruise and startle; she did not break the skin, or perhaps the deerskin dress did not let her. Lissar’s eyes flew open, and she gave one great cry, and a burst of blood flowed from between her legs, thick, dark blood, not bright blood as from a clean wound as had flowed from her hands. This was the secret female blood, heavy with mystery, and it mixed with the more innocent blood already shed; and the intermingled blood sank into the floor, leaving a pattern of arcs and spirals and long twisting curves that forever after seemed to move if any eye tried too long to trace them. In later years that bit of floor came to be declared an oracle, and persons who wished advice on some great matter came to look at it, and see where the pattern led them, and many came away comforted, or clearer in their minds, and able to make decisions that had seemed too hard for their strength. And the throne room became the oracle room, bare and plain, containing nothing but the glowing pattern on the floor, and the shadows of the stained glass, which moved less enigmatically.
“I give it back to you,” said Lissar, panting, on her knees, marked with her own blood. “All—I give it all back to you.” And suddenly she was again the blazing figure she had been when she stepped across the threshold into the throne room, but she was all the colors of fire now, no longer white but red and golden. She stepped up onto the dais.
But for some of those watching the woman made of flame was two women, and they were identical, except that they were inimical. Some who saw thought of Moonwoman, and how she is both black and white, but they rejected the image, for Moonwoman was still and always herself, and what they saw now was … water and salt, wind and sand, fire and firewood—but which was the water and which the salt? The watchers shivered, and wondered at what they saw, and wondered at themselves. Some of them remembered their own nightmares, and perhaps it was those who had nightmares to remember who saw the second woman: and they watched fearfully.