Metro Winds

  There were so many conversations when I first came here. Everyone wanted to speak with me and hear my voice. But those same eager supplicants would turn from me now, and my face, once praised for its clever beauty, is regarded as the unlucky loveliness of a mask worn by false hope, to deceive fools.

  My son’s loss of words was not a complete and sudden binding of his tongue. At first he lost a word here and there and I put it down to the coarsening carelessness of manhood. But his language continued to diminish and anxiety began to prod at me. I noted how he would pause a little too long when searching his mind for the word he wanted, and then he would give an irritated shake of his head and choose another. It would be a good choice, and perhaps I would not have noticed the hesitation if language and my love of it in all forms had not been the gift I chose to bestow upon him, a gift that had seemed to delight him above all the faerie gifts and enchantments he received. I read books to him and spoke of them and made him speak of them to me. I made him strive for precision when he wanted to tell me things; I demanded beauty, originality, wit. It was not long before he was my master and it was bittersweet to see him clench his teeth at some awkward description of mine, or at a word used in a careless way.

  I decided that the diminishing of my son’s language must be some magical affliction; illnesses and plagues here are strange and unpredictable. Sometimes there are tempests of sorrow, which affect every creature and produce a monsoon of tears. At other times, great fat frogs rain from the sky. Once there was a sleeping sickness and everyone fell where they were and slept for days. How odd it had felt to be walking through a sleeping world suffused with the mysterious reek of red roses. Of course I was immune to the illnesses of my husband’s kind, just as he could not catch cold from me. But our son was a halfling and prey to the illnesses and strife of both worlds.

  The loss of language went on until my son found he could no longer produce alternatives. He soon became frustrated enough to substitute the odd curse or to shrug lumpishly when a phrase eluded him. His brilliance was declining with the loss of his ability to express it. Even his demeanour lost its fineness. The daintiness of manners that had so delighted me degenerated into rough sprawling movements.

  Eventually he came to shout and curse his frustration at me, he who had never raised his voice, for what need had he to do so when his words were soft scalpels that could inflict deadly hurts if he chose to use them as weapons? I longed to help him, but my desperate patience only maddened him by forcing him to acknowledge what he was becoming. When I tried to speak of it he would snarl at me to hold my tongue and lumber away.

  I prayed that his intelligence and emotions were only locked up inside him and not extinguished altogether. I had to believe that, but I was becoming frightened. I set aside my pride and called for my husband, using the fragrant summoning mist he had given me in a cut diamond vaporiser. He did not come at once, and so I sent Cloud-Marie to the Summer Palace with a note for the queen-mother asking her to send my husband to me. She sent back that he was away on a quest but she had used her own magic to communicate with him. He would come as soon as he was able.

  I will never forgive him for that delay. As it transpired, he could have done nothing, but he might have helped me to bear the weight of my terror. While I waited for him, I ransacked the fusty King’s Palace archives, poring over tomes and seeking some clue to my son’s affliction, longing for Yssa to comfort me, but my friend and companion had left the palace before I gave birth. I was desperate as a tigress to find a cure for my son, prepared to slay dragons and tear out the tongues of peacocks.

  I found nothing.

  It may seem strange that I did not discuss my son’s condition with my mother-in-law, but I feared what ailed the boy might be my fault. She had told me her son – my husband – had needed to marry a princess to break an inherited curse. She had foreseen that the right bride would end the curse forever, not just in her son, but in his bloodline. She had acclaimed me as that princess, but what if she had been wrong? Certainly the mark of the beast had been on my husband when we met, and so I know that marrying me did save him, for it vanished thereafter. But what if it was only him who I had cured, and not the curse?

  My mother-in-law’s foreseeing ensured my welcome by her son’s people. I had basked in the adulation and gratitude heaped upon me, glad to believe I was what they said. As a repressed and unloved child, had I not felt that some special and important destiny awaited me? Had I not, as a young woman, felt the yoke of ordinariness about my neck as a dreary weight I was not meant to bear? Once I understood where I had come and what I had done, it seemed to me that I had found my destiny. It did not occur to me that even here there are limits to curses and cures and even to love.

  I was disappointed quite soon by love, but perhaps it is so with all who love for the first time, whether their lover be mortal or faerie. I do not know the nature of the disappointment an immortal suffers, but it is in the nature of mortals to weave and sew a trousseau of dreams with which to clothe a beloved, though his or her form or nature is unknown. And maybe few men or women fit those glorious vestments or wear them long, willingly.

  It was not that my husband ceased to love me, nor I him, but the promises that our heady beginning had seemed to make were not fulfilled. My delirious happiness faded. To begin with, I blamed myself. I was of the mundane world and it must be my fault the glamour of love had dimmed. Hence I did not speak of my disappointment to my husband because he seemed content, and if I complained, might he not learn to despise me? But in my secret heart, I blamed him, too, for if my feet stayed a little too close to the ground, it must be because his love had not wings enough to lift me above myself.

  I became fretful and irritable with him and our lives. He did not reproach me or protest or demand what was the matter with me, he simply began to go more and more upon quests, and when he was in the castle, he was distracted and distant. This hurt, for in the beginning he had been enamoured of conversation with me, attentive to all I said and filled with desire to know my thoughts. I had imagined it would always be so, but now he did not question me and beg me to talk of this or that to him, and his eyes no longer followed me when I was within sight. It was not that he did not desire me, but that he desired only certain limited aspects of me. He knew part of me and felt he knew all. Too often, his caresses confined themselves to those that would bring us most directly to coupling. He rode and arrived too swift at his own destination for me to ride beyond irritation and anger and a growing melancholy to my own more distant pleasure. I would pretend fulfilment out of pride and anger and embarrassment and he would roll away with a pleased grunt to fall swiftly to snoring.

  Staring at his sleeping form in the dark with longing and loathing intermingled so profoundly that I did not know where one began and the other ended, I felt myself transported to my childhood home with two cool, rational, intellectual parents who had taught me that if I would be loved, I must be considerate, modest, self-effacing, quiet. My marriage had taught me that I could be loved, and be vividly the centre of things, but now it seemed that this was only for a time. Now I must be a good girl again, and withdraw most of myself behind the serene façade of queen, suppressing anger and fear and longing.

  Lying back against the pillows, I oft times wrapped myself in my arms and shivered under the slick of mingled sweat and restless desire, pining for him to wake just as fiercely as I had wished him asleep. I told myself I did not know what I wanted; I was perverse and difficult. I wanted tenderness and affection, but when he fell asleep with an arm over me, I would shift to make his arm slide away and then stretch, luxuriantly free of him.

  Perhaps I would have coped better if I had been more independent, but I was a non-magical being in a realm where magic was the means to obtain everything. I had to rely upon my husband for all I needed. At first, no whim of mine had been too small to be fulfilled and even anticipated by my prince. But once we were king and queen, I discovered that many of the courtesies he h
ad paid me were no more than part of that initial seduction. He forgot to conjure tea for me in the mornings unless I reminded him. If he slopped his supper wine, he would not wave a languid hand to spell it from the floor. He never thought to smooth our bed or pick up his underwear. I had been startled at first to find that, although he was king, there was no one to make his bed or wash his dishes or cook for him. Magic served here, but he must exert himself and it began to seem that he would rather use me than his magic.

  There were times when life was impossibly difficult. I would sometimes have to ask my husband several times to banish dust or clean our clothing or conjure a meal or even the makings of a meal so that I could cook. Each time I must ask once, and then ask again. When he showed his boredom at my nagging, savage anger and bitterest resentment would come to scour me. But I did not express my rage, for I had by now resumed the habit of silence concerning my thoughts and feelings, nurtured by my parents. Certainly my husband had shown his dislike of my thoughts when they were negative or implied any criticism of him, and in the beginning I had been afraid to make myself a shrew in his eyes. A queen ought to have better things to think of than soiled underwear and dust mites, I tried to tell myself loftily. There was no shortage of food or wine, after all, if I would attend the faerie festivities every night. I never had to bother buying clothes, for my husband was all too happy to conjure splendid dresses and jewels for me, yet I could not wear those dresses more than once or twice since there was no way to launder such delicate fabrics without damaging them.

  But gradually, perforce, I learned to fend for myself. Sometimes I would smile grimly at my reflection as, clad in my elaborate finery, I would pass a looking glass bearing a bowl of slops from the dishes. I felt powerless and furious at my powerlessness. I made our bed and picked up my husband’s discarded clothes if he had forgotten to banish them, because someone must do it.

  ‘I would have done it,’ he would laugh if he caught me.

  Then why didn’t you? I would think angrily, and outside, thunder would rumble ominously among gathering clouds.

  On days when I did not wish to attend a ball in order to break my fast, I would walk to the garden beyond the farthest wing of the palace, and there I would forage for wild tomatoes and potatoes, mushrooms and berries and quail eggs. I learned to set snares for rabbits and wild pigeons which I then roasted in clay balls on a campfire. When winter came I would bring the clay balls home and bake them in the embers of the fire. I might have gone in a carriage to the peasant farmers dwelling about the palace grounds, or even to the little villages to shop, but I was humiliated by the thought that all Faerie would guess how ill my king cared for me.

  Better to endure in private. The pride I felt in managing was a hard, cold, wounded pride. Once, in a moment of weakness, I asked my husband to conjure rubber gloves to protect my hands when I scrubbed pots, but he laughed at me and asked if he was a tyrant to make his queen undertake such work. He waved a languid finger and conjured my hands smooth, saying lightly that he did not like the coarse feel of them on his silky, milky skin. I wondered incredulously if he was malicious in his refusal to ask how my hands came to be that way, but now I think he lacked all curiosity. His laziness was only faerie self-centredness and a lack of imagination.

  I was not so sanguine then, and there was a blizzard that night above the palace. In the morning my husband gave me a baffled, wary look before going on a journey of some weeks. Despite my anger with him, I was lonely in his absence, and perhaps that was why I made a companion of a woman who came begging for some menial job. Certainly Yssa was comely enough, despite her drab attire, but she had a melancholy, wretched air that made it hard to see how fair her face was. She was not good company at all to begin with, for she seldom looked me in the eye, let alone smiled or sang or laughed. She gave so little companionship, in fact, that I found myself regretting my coldness to my husband and telling myself that it was mad to think that mere selfishness and a lack of imagination lay at the heart of my growing discontent. How could such small faults corrode such a great love story as ours?

  I know now that love is not so sturdy and the fault was not so small.

  Why did I stay? I asked myself as the years passed, as maybe all women do who endure indifference and carelessness or even cruelty from their husbands, and contrarily, the answer was different every time. I loved my husband, or I remembered loving him, or he could not help himself, or I wanted his hands on me again, or all men were like this, no matter what the world.

  But the truth, which I acknowledged to myself only a long time after he left, was that the fading of love was not the fault of either one of us alone. I wanted something more substantial and demanding than I had got in my faerie prince; something harder and more consuming than faerie glamour. I wanted him to want me as a woman and a person, not just as a princess, but it was the princess he had hunted so ardently, who he desired.

  It was Yssa who asked one day if I could not get all of the things I sighed for in my own world. My determined efforts to woo her out of the morbid grip of whatever ill fortune or unhappiness lay in her past had effected a subtle change in her so that she was less downcast and self-effacing than she had been, but it did not take much for her to withdraw into her original grim melancholy. Yet, her suggestion that I look for the things I wanted in my old world shone like a beam of sunlight through the murk of resentment that I had stewed for myself. I hugged her, marvelling that I had not thought of it first. Had I not been told a thousand times that there were a multitude of passages between this world and that which I still thought of as the real world?

  With Yssa’s help, I made a mental list: good brooms and mops and soft cloths and rubber gloves. How I laughed as I made that mundane list and how happy I felt. How strong and purposeful I felt writing the names of toiletries I had not wanted to ask my husband to provide – tampons and roll-on deodorant, mothballs and even a surface spray to keep spiders from my bedchamber went onto the list, though this last proved a waste, for I discovered that human chemicals have no power here where even spiders and dung beetles are magic.

  Yssa helped me to decide what to wear on my adventure, for I had explained to her that women in my world no longer wore full-length sweeping gowns with plunging décolletages. In the end we chose the dullest of my gowns, shortening it to knee length and picking off the lace and frills and beading to make it plainer. Then, just in case, I insisted upon Yssa bundling into my basket a cobweb grey cloak into which had been woven an invisibility spell. Of course I could not shop, invisible, but it would keep me safe if what I was to do proved unexpectedly dangerous.

  I was about to leave when my husband came in, just returned from a quest. As always, Yssa withdrew when he entered the room, knowing he did not approve of the fact that I had invited her to be my companion without seeking his permission. Seeing me cloaked and carrying a magical hold-all basket over my arm, he regarded me with indulgent amusement. ‘What are you doing, my lady love?’ he asked, and some part of me melted at his voice as it always had.

  But I told myself it was glamour, not love, and answered him coolly. ‘I am going to market in my world for food to cook and for new stockings and a winter coat. I will need money.’

  I had not meant to speak of my journey to him, but suddenly I wanted to force him to understand that he had neglected me. I thought my admission that I went to shop for food would shame him, but he had that wondrous blindness some folk have which allows them to ignore hints and allusions and deal only with outright attacks. He merely kissed me and called me a funny child before bidding me enjoy myself. Then he conjured a pouch of precious stones for me to trade for coin. I had already prised some stones out of jewellery he had given me, and for a moment indignation near choked me. He spoke as if I wished to labour in my old world out of nostalgia. It did not occur to him that I might oft times be hungry or cold; that I might lack the most basic necessities because he did not provide them. But though accusations surged against my teeth lik
e frogs and snakes, I kept my mouth closed, and took the pouch.

  ‘Just wait,’ I had vowed silently as I turned away. ‘You will get what you deserve.’ I said things like this many times through gritted teeth, without any clear idea of what I was threatening. My husband did not know that darkling well of bitterness existed in me, but I think it poisoned me a little, so that small matters became larger than they were, and I was sometimes cruel to him. I would turn away when he reached for me, even though I had invited his caress. I wanted to hurt him and I found ways to do it. Women, I have come to believe, are capable of monstrous cruelty if they do not act cleanly. Or cannot.

  I put the pouch of stones into my basket and set off. Outside the grounds of the King’s Palace it was summer and gloriously bright. The walk in the sunshine with Yssa lifted my spirits immeasurably, and as we approached the nearest bridge that would lead me to my old world, I had to suppress a wild desire to burst into song. It was not the thought of going back to my own world that lifted me, but the fact that I had found a way to act.

  I begged Yssa to come with me, but she baulked at the bridge where we were to cross, hanging back and saying that she would come next time. It was ironic that, although there were many ways from this world to my old world, and few in the other direction, faerie folk seldom crossed. Perhaps, like Yssa, they feared it, or feared what might be done to them, or feared mortality might be contagious. Impatient to be gone, I hugged her and promised that I would not be long.

  I noticed immediately how few of the people about me seemed to see me, let alone notice the oddness of my clothes. I wondered uneasily if my time in the other world had thinned my essence in my own world, with its solid truths and heavy certainties. Then it came to me that perhaps I had always been less substantial than others of my kind. Might it not be that all the dreams and longings with which I had filled myself had rendered me less solid than other mortals, and so more able to cross between the worlds?