Redder than Blood

  I was miles away.

  Having decided this, I stood up, shaking myself. I was human enough, nolonger an avian creature. What had happened then? I had told myself a story in which Hrothgar became my lover, I had reached the peak of pleasure . . . then slept, or entered some other stranger state. During which, it seemed I had walked far around the rim of the lake, believing all the while I flew.

  I stared out.

  The water was silkily ruffling, pleating and unpleating. It was now not very dark, only reflecting the filmy pinkness of a lifting sky.

  Not quite meaning to, perhaps, I pictured the swan I had been, as if I had witnessed her arrival here, rather than accomplished it, sailing in on the air, skimming the water with extended feet, settling in a surge on its cool, unstable constant, that held no coldness for any part of me, next swimming with deft swift little kicks, until reaching the shore—

  I had stepped off on the land, and after a moment was a swan no more.

  Yet—and now I noticed insanely for the very first—I was naked. I had left my mattress and walked here, and lain down and slept here, on the bare earth, bare and white as it.

  Why had I not died? Should I die now, of exposure to the deep white cold, since finally I had realized?

  I did not feel cold. The atmosphere, the ice under my soles, they were only cool, like the water.

  I took a step and oh—

  Again everything changed.

  Between a pair of heartbeats I had become the other. Now I walked, still two-legged, but balanced on a different center, and at an altered angle. I blinked and my doubled vision drew together within some miraculous gem in the middle of my brain.

  Like a thrown spear, light and sure, yet heavy and potent with the power of essential velocity, I ran and launched myself skyward.

  How huge, that sky. I did not think of magical, holy spaces, or gods who might dwell there, up behind the layers of the light. I thought only of flying.

  But even so, nothing was lost on me, the wisps of cloud dissolving to the west, the tiny flecks of smaller birds.

  Below now, the water shone a silver mirror. Again I saw from shore to shore. Clusters of life were dotted here and there. Deer were feeding on bark, a savage pig was trotting between the stems of trees. Little ungainly boats unseamed the fringes of the water. Fish glinted, too, deep down, these seen by me in some way I cannot describe. I had no caution or doubt at flight, as I had had none in the darkness. I did not think or feel, or reason or know as a human does. Although some nebulous invisible cord must still have bound me to what I had been, and would be again.

  I made my landing some quarter mile from the area of my mother’s hovel, at the place I had gone formerly to fish.

  Swooping low, alighting on the ripple-floor of the lake, I fished once more. I snapped up the shiny trophy and broke it clean of pain and horror in one faultless snap. Down it fell into my long dense body, under the firm pads of flesh and snow feathers. Bones too I ate. I drank a little of the lake.

  Two men were out along the shore. In my human guise I would have known them, but now did not, they had no interest for me, were like rocks that moved about. To be avoided, discarded. Only after would I recall.

  One pointed to me. They paused, anxious lest I take or disturb anything they might want. But they did not attempt to kill me. There was a law everywhere in these regions against the killing of such birds. Even I had known, only lords might hunt swans, pluck, eat them. The swan did not know, and cared nothing. Men were rocks.

  I turned away, floating among the brown grasses decaying by the water. Dipping my head I saw my reflection, but it meant nothing wondrous or significant. It was the normal state of my life, to see myself, as flying was. I thrust my long neck deep in the shallows, and fished again for a water plant.

  When I stepped this time ashore, I trampled my way up between the pines. And here it came to me I was a woman, and so I became one again. And then, though I felt no harm at all from the cold day, and no one else was about, I fled to the hut, got inside, and slamming the rickety door, let down the bar, and leaned there on the timbers. I wept. I had and have no grasp of why. Or, if now I do, it is redundant.

  And soon anyway I made up the fire and put on some beer in the pan to warm. I had eaten and needed nothing else. Nor was I thirsty, and still not chilled. Yet I required the beer, as I did the clothes I slung on myself, and the comb I pulled through my hair.

  • • •

  It is impossible for me, sensibly and convincingly, to detail how it was for me to change my shape, either from woman to bird, or back again.

  There was nothing tangibly physical in the transference. No muscle or sinew stretched or worked oddly, my breathing did not seem to become alien, nor the beat of my heart quicken. My hair—or feathers on me—did not stir. I experienced, after that second time, no transitional sense of occlusion or perspective. I was one being. Then another. I melted from one condition to the next. It seemed to happen only with a slight overview, something to do with my whereabouts or my consciousness when on land or water, or looking at such external or internal things. I was never, even so, to alter to a woman when on the wing high in the air. Nor half drown as a woman when adrift on the lake. Nor either did I ever change to my form of swan when inside a human habitation.

  I felt no sorcerous impulse, and no coercion. It was not some spell or curse he had put on me. I believed initially, and long after again I believed, it was my own gift that somehow I had found. And even as I sat by my human fire in the hovel thinking of it, less frightened than puzzled, nearly sad, I did not really think we had joined in sexual congress. There was no trace of him left in the hut, and despite the burned mark of blood on the mattress, I guessed I had imagined him. That therefore had been the dream. To shape-shift was the reality, and all my own.

  • • •

  Here then began my life as a swan. Or, should I say, as a woman who might become a swan—at will, presumably, a swan who likewise might re-become a woman. Some will envy me, I know, some fear me and some hate. And many will not credit a word.

  • • •

  Hrothgar I did not see again for the thirty-three days of that long winter month.

  Snow fell thick.

  I became a swan as the mood or reverie took me. Which was quite often. One day I was humanly gathering blackened berries as a condiment from the shrubs up among the birches, and heard ducks calling as they sheered over the water. I let the berries fall and next moment found myself—my other self—running, leaping from the path among the thinner trees, springing upward and gliding free. The bluish tawny ivory of my beak was striped, I think, with the congealed juice of the berries. I had been chewing some. I did not return until the next frozen dawn, and by then little animals, or ice, had consumed the shriveled fruit.

  As a human too I continued impervious to the temperature.

  My hair had thickened, and my skin seemed to be more white. My hands did not chap or split in blains.

  Sometimes I found one of my own blanched feathers lying by the doorway of the hut. Once I found one in my own hair.

  One morning too I saw, near the hut, the tracks of a solitary wolf. It had drawn close, then sped away. I never saw it, but suspected it had seen me fly down, after which the rest had alarmed it.

  Did I rejoice in my talent?

  Of course. My life had been till then walled in.

  Sometimes, when a woman, I sat by the hearth and domestically mended my garments or broke wood for the fire. I thought I must use my genius for flight to take me to those distant shores I had, by now, so often observed from the air. But at this era I never, when a swan, was tempted to do that. For, as a swan, I had slight concern with it. I preferred the nearer verges of the lake, even if I ranged somewhat further afield than ever I had as a girl. The shallows were perfect for feeding, plants still to be reached with my long and supple
neck and selective beak. Even when ice formed like paving at the margins, I did not swim so much out away from shore. And sometimes, as a human, I took the ax and smashed the ice, so that I, the swan, could sail off more easily and briefly.

  Sunrise was pale yellow now, sunset dark red, and the sun looked old.

  Some had said the sun always slowly died in winter, returning as a fresh new orb between the midnight and dawn of a single early day of spring.

  Did all things alter their shape, being, and nature? Aside from birth, old age, and death, of what else were mortals capable?

  And did I miss the presence of the Enchanter who had so curiously enchanted me?

  When a woman I missed him. I thought of him by night, if in the hut, and skillfully conjured for myself the pleasure I had now determined I never received from his body. Should I remember him I yearned after him, burned after him—but in the most inchoate way. I had other concerns. I had other employment.

  When a bird I thought of nothing but what I did. I, the swan, was paramount.

  Is it of interest that, as a woman, I always recollected my swan-life vividly—while as a swan, I more and more forgot my human form?

  For after each excursion I examined what I had seen and done. Always it thrilled and excited me. The peculiar grieving I felt at first was all dispelled. And as it was only in human form that I could humanly relish my swan-times, I was nolonger isolate, or dully sullen during my mortal life.

  • • •

  The owl began to perch, high on the lightning-stricken birch tree.

  I heard it. I heard him.

  The cry now was particularly cruel and heartless, a deviant demonic cry that made the hearth fire crawl down under the wood.

  I did not go to see save once. It had been full moon that night, and the owl a black shadow on the pallid tree, and its own shadow reeling as it raised now one fretted wing or the other, with a single sudden ignition of red eyes.

  Was I ensnared?

  Maybe. I was unsure.

  I knew besides I could not keep the Enchanter out, should he choose to enter the hovel. He had come in through wall or barred door or too-narrow window in the past. It abruptly seemed to me, only now, that I had not dreamed our union. Or, if only a dream was all it was, then what called in the tree was only an owl.

  As a swan, I had never flown where the owl was. Nor did I ever note the owl. Did I not then, at all, recall Hrothgar when I was a swan? I cannot say, even now. How curious, how bitter.

  No more snow descended, but there was an early morning—I had just come into the hut—when the frost that formed was so fearsome it had turned the world white-black, with crusts of tin. Things died everywhere about, or were already dead, and the old dying sun dragged itself out of the east the color of stale bladder-water.

  That was the hour he returned, Hrothgar.

  I had just started the hearth to life. I put on the beer to heat, and saw him entering through the wall.

  Through the wall, as I had suspected he could if he wished, he idled in to the enclosed room. And as he came in, he was changing, owl to man, that very second.

  So I saw, for he showed this to me, what I too, no doubt, resembled and was, in that metamorphosis that seemed to me, once it had happened, only inevitable, almost rational.

  The owl was nolonger quite a creature—but more like a mantle the Enchanter had put on, one that wore threadbare instant by instant, and frayed off from him. At first too it seemed the mantle of the owl was larger than a man, a giant, but as rapidly it vanished, it grew also less. Its body then rivered away through his body, leaving momentarily an impression of itself. So I saw a naked man with feathers on his skin the knotty wood-like bird legs branched down through his own, its claws turning to vapor against the bones and muscles in his thighs. The wings of the owl, its head, went last of all. Then he was, for a single heart-beat, a man masked as a bird, his black eyes looking through its golden ones, the wide wings ranging out behind his back. But after this, he was solely a man. And from his nakedness only a rusty down of its eclipsed feathers drifted to the floor.

  This act took no more than it would be to count to seven or nine. Yet had seemed to last many minutes. Ever after when I thought or think of it, it will seem to last an hour or longer.

  I did nothing. What could I do?

  Except I gazed at him. I had not before seen him clad only in his body, since in the other undream visit, when he deflowered me, we had lain in the dark. I had only felt of him.

  Seeing him I desired him. And I knew we had been lovers. For the desire was greedy, practiced.

  Where I knelt by the fire, his shadow fell.

  I looked away from him, and put out one hand and touched the shadow, at the center of its loins, and watching only the shadow, saw the shadow weapon raise itself at once, engorged and ready. He had been quiescent before. Then I turned and glanced back at him in the flesh, and he had not roused, the blade of his sex lay sleeping.

  “Well, Otila,” he softly said to me, “if you can provoke a shadow by fingering it, don’t you think you will be able to wake me as I am?”

  He played with me, clearly.

  “As you were,” I said, “you were the owl.”

  Then for the moment of a moment, the mask of the owl glared down at me from behind his face, this time its golden eyes inside the black of his own.

  And then—he was clothed. Fully dressed, like one of the richer travelers I had seen, if rarely, in leather and good wool and furs.

  I knew I could never have made garments for myself out of the thin air, even though I might become a swan.

  The beer was heated. I got up, and taking it to the log-table found two cups of earthenware standing ready to receive it.

  When the beer poured it was hot wine, blond in color, and with a scent and taste of spice.

  He drank, and so did I.

  “You never thank me,” he said, “for my gifts. Aren’t they to your liking?”

  I could not answer. It seemed then I must accept my shape-changing came only from him. I knew without he told me. Had always suspected, no doubt, and so hidden it from myself. Lacking him I should be nothing once more. What payment did he demand?

  “I never thought them gifts,” I said. “I thought you pleased yourself. If I am gifted, you make me your debtor.”

  “Why should I do that?”

  “You pray to a god of sorrow and darkness.”

  He smiled. “I pray to nothing. I’d not waste my time on it.”

  “Why,” I said, “are you here with me? Why have you gifted me with—this magic that—makes me—another creature—?”

  “Oh,” he said. “That little deed. Did I do that?”

  And then there was the movement of his dark furs and hair, like a cloud, and I dropped the cup but it never reached the floor to shatter. It must have disappeared. He had hold of me, bent me round in a painless twining, so I let go even of the ground under me.

  We were on the mattress, where I had not-dreamed we were before.

  Now the sere light of winter day poured through the narrow windows, the broken roof, all over us.

  How thoroughly he investigated me at this meeting. He sampled all the country of me. His tongue was like a wolf’s, burning and harsh, then limpid between my legs. This was horrible, then a wonder. His sharp teeth nibbled my flesh and ran along my cheek, and bit away little snippets of my hair. He ate my hair, swallowed it. His face was full of thought as he did this—I saw it plainly in the light. He licked all my skin also, leaving behind a scent of fire and frost. When I slid my hands over him now, sometimes I felt the quills of feathers under his skin as perhaps he could, under mine. Several times he mounted me, and twice turned me and had me that way, from the back. Once he lifted me on to the smooth tower of his blade, and danced me there, I with my head thrown back, crying.

  L
ight dripped on over the room, moving from one end of it to another.

  I had no space to be afraid, barely even to be surprised. I knew that what we did was unholy. The pleasures of it were very great. But at the bursting climaxes of each action my body still did not change. It seemed I did not need to shape-shift here, having learned how during our first congress, and having done so independently since. Our confluence now was simply for itself.

  In the end, the last light had dripped all away.

  We had not spoken ever once our flesh began its dialog, and only I had made true sounds.

  I lay motionless, sore and shining in my inner parts, my breasts scorched where he had suckled at them. My bones had flowed to melted tallow, and did not harden. I could not anymore think of a life where he did not lie here beside or beneath or upon me.

  As darkness, without any warmth of a sunfall however drained, began to soak into the hovel, I spoke his name.

  To my ears tonight it had the noise of the quills of feathers brushing against harsh stone.

  But he had already left my bed. As the blacker shadow came in and in, he clothed himself again in that. From the table he picked up the remaining cup. It still smoked with heat, though poured six hours before. And he drank it dry, as he had drunk my body, and my thoughts.

  I did not believe he could go away. Or if he did, he would return to me.

  Meanwhile of course I knew he would leave me now forever.

  Nor could I say anything, other than his name—Hrothgar . . . Hrothgar . . . feathers, feathers against stone, stone—

  Exactly when he went out of the hut I was unsure. He remained in human form certainly, but out through a wall he must have passed.

  It was another spell on me, as it had been that time when he dismissed and sent me from him in the other village.

  Only many minutes after was I able to realize I might get up.

  Standing in the doorway I glimpsed, in fading dreary dusk, something great and black that winged off across the trees, over the unseen water below.

  As if I had asked, and been answered, I knew very well he had flown to the farther shores of the lake. I knew he was gone. Only the winter would stay with me. I wept by the fire and my falling firelit tears shone red as blood, glamorously bright as gold.