Redder than Blood

  Even in rejection and lament, I knew I should follow him. The swan, I thought, knew that. To follow is a natural thing. Seasons follow each other, and sun and moon, and beasts and birds. And mankind follows each some other also, through birth and life and love and death and silence. It is how we exist, moving always on, even into emptiness, one behind another. There is no choice.

  It is how we exist. And how we perish.

  3

  The place where first I lived, on the lake’s far, other side, was a box of broken stones. It was, I believe, the shrine to an ancient god. No one cared for it now. Nor did I. I made now and then a superstitious sign of respect at the old granite block which, probably, had been an altar. But I sensed no presence. There was nothing left in that space either to be entreated or feared.

  No human beings came there ever. New gods replace old always, and are often jealous.

  It provided me a roof and walls—despite their rents and lapses, stronger and more secure in fact than those of my mother’s hovel.

  Besides, anyway, I never now felt the cold injuriously. I had arrived on that bleak snow-shore at sunfall a swan, and moving up from the water—where I had found in the mud small shelled creatures that I ate—I became a woman, naked as before, and the icy dark fell on me like the softest of soft rains.

  Even so, inside the shrine I discovered some pieces of sacking, and cobbled them together with yarn and a long hooked needle left in a stone cupboard by someone. This then was now my clothing. In the cupboard too was a broken lamp, but I made it burn from a store of sticky black oil left by. While the fire itself I struck with a shard on the altar. These things are not so difficult to accomplish, when one lives as I had.

  My flight over-water to get there was of a different sort.

  It began, as I said, in passionate desperation.

  But, once I had changed, though the abstract motive to follow remained constant, it was charged only with a kind of complacence.

  Which left me, as the white wind came driving from the winter’s core, and struck my wings. Then I must battle as I never had, nor could I have done when human. Many times I was cast down as if by violent fists, to the midst of the lake, far from all land. Below me I could keenly sense the alien depths of black water. Not a single island broke the surface, only thin rifts of ice floated free from shores which, in the beginning, I could no longer make out on either or any side.

  After a score of attempts I rose again and rejoined my war with the wind. Until thrust down again, and again. Night and day passed.

  How long the fight lasted I neither knew nor cared. My strength lessened but did not fail. But I must fly low. At last I sighted the perimeter of the other land, through darkness, as the wind itself began to weaken. I alighted, ate, came ashore, and by then the wind was dead.

  Yet maybe I had need, in the shrine, of my cobbled-together mortal comforts—shelter, garment, lamplight—in no physical way at all. But only for their normalcy.

  • • •

  I was there a long while.

  My life was uneventful, apart from its one iridescent and enormous sorcerous ingredient.

  As does the least of humanity, I lived, just as I had previously. Sometimes humanly I even caught and killed fish from the water, and cooked them on a makeshift hearth I constructed in the shrine. Sometimes I went up into the forest of larch and birch, and found branches and cones for the fire. As I always had.

  I did not try to brew beer. I had here no means to do it. Perhaps I thought, when spring returned, I would gather wild salad among the trees, and later in the year berries and sloes . . .

  People I never much thought of. Never needed.

  People, to one such as I, were unreal, irrelevant, important only in their threats and unkindnesses. Another race, presumably greater and more valued than my own, whatever race mine was or had been. The Enchanter was not human, however, to me. I thought of him. I thought of him so much and with such desire, both of my heart and my sex, but also of such emotions as I possessed, that for me he grew almost present, nearly tangible, there in that box of jagged stones.

  I believed always still I should find him, yet did not anymore seek him. Sometimes I dreamed of him, too. He was at his most actual then, there with me, mine.

  But when I was a swan, then I was one of the winged race, the race of flying spirits. And even if Hrothgar, as an owl, was also too of this divine people, I did not think of him save as some detached, ascendant being, omnipresent, omnipotent, therefore forgettable.

  • • •

  Spring did come back. It has seemed to me it always does. Though one day I may be proven wrong.

  It flooded among the trees. The darker were overtaken by the greener. Flowers opened on forest floors. The reeds sliced from their mummification, they tore wide their dead encasing, each with a green lance.

  When a swan, I grazed on the tough bright grasses that now filled the meadows inland.

  I saw no other of my avian kind. But one afternoon near sunset, I heard the crying of swans away along the shore. I had never heard this in my life, either life. Indeed, before I received my enchantment, I had seen a swan only once, and that far out along the lake.

  What did hearing this crying wake in me? Not so much, though I knew it instantly, and was for a moment alerted, intrigued—partly drawn. As the noise of humanity would conversely have made me, human or swan, seek cover.

  • • •

  There dawned a day of liquid light when I paddled steadily over the lake, feeding in the shallows, but venturing out a little to deeper water after the friskier fish. I traveled quite some distance from the shrine and up the shore-line then, further than I had ever gone in the winter. So I came to a spot where willows, translucent yellow, trailed to the lake. Beyond a thick bank of reeds, glancing sidelong from the tiny snails I feasted on, I saw the nest.

  As with their calling I had, I knew the nest at once. A swan’s making.

  None were there. And what I should have done, had I come on my other kind in that instant, I can never know.

  But I slipped in nearer, dividing the reeds, food forgotten.

  It had all the vacancy, the nest, of neglect, of abandonment. Why, having built it, had they gone away?

  Then I was near enough that, dipping my long neck, I beheld the empty vessel was also filled. Six objects lay within it. In my human mode I might have taken them for smooth stones, even strange large sullied gems of some sort.

  But I was a swan. I lifted myself up into the nest, and stood there, gazing on what remained. Two of the egglings were dead, their faint pulse of sentience ebbed away. Four, lying close together as if for company and consolation, retained their inaudible beating of thin life.

  The nest was spiky with snapped reeds and twigs, on some of which unborn buds had expired, ciphers for the other unborn deaths that came after.

  A swan, I did not ponder. And I cannot, even in this, present my feelings. I was only sureness and decision.

  I placed myself gently, thoroughly, my lower body set down and enfolding, and warming, the egglings. How cool and alive they felt to me now. Gradually, as I sat there, I was conscious their pulses modulated, grew attuned to mine. Now all five of us sang together. It was like a song, like music. There is music. In the voices of birds and animals, of rain and the flicker of leaves, in laughter. Or, in the Enchanter’s laughter there had been, that single earlier time.

  The day went over, a golden wing, a scarlet one, a silver one, one black—as night.

  They and I kept rhythm together. Waking and sleeping.

  At some time during the dark, turning a little, carefully, I tipped the two dead eggs from the nest. They fell into the water and sank, leaden with their necrosis. Heartless, I. Indifferent, rather. I was a swan.

  • • •

  Yet—did I conserve and choose to nurture these beings from some mi
ndless human urge? Had his possession of me made me aware that I might have borne a child—children? Was it, for me, in some deepest recess of my brain—far deeper than any dungeon deeps of the lake—that these creatures would stand for our non-existent progeny, a proof that he had taken me and I him? To me, at this later time, it seems it may be so. But I can never swear to it.

  • • •

  I did not leave them, save for a moment now and then, to dipper up for myself swift food from the lake margins. There was by then an abundance, and as the spring went on and the warmth began, insects swarmed flying even in among the reeds where I sat. I was able to feed myself with ease, snapping glittering jaws-full of them from the air. In the nights moths visited me to die, meat and nectar. I dined on them, while nightingales whirred from their throats of loose pearls.

  My swanlets hatched one by one.

  The first of the two males came out like a warrior, cracking the shell, barely assisted by me. Then the two females, more insistent and busy, more thorough. The second male tapped and tapped like a miniscule hammer on his cell-wall, till in the end I freed him with a light skimming blow of my beak.

  They were speckled and gray as cobwebs, bemused and foolish. They tumbled about. I brought them plants to eat and bullied them into the water, which they were afraid of—until in, when they fell into a deep love with it. They worshipped the lake, staring down at their reflections, which evidently the water had created for them, to make them know themselves and become happy.

  I sipped small flies from the air.

  My children followed me along the line of the shore.

  • • •

  Summer bloomed.

  I had not been human by then for more than three months.

  Did I recall my humanness? Or him?

  I recalled . . . something. Something. What? I do not know.

  But they were bigger now, long-necked already, their dusty, spotted sheaths under-patched by the promise of pure white.

  How I loved them, but it was love by another name and nature.

  The first male was certain and strong. The two females were by turns serious or playful. The last of them, the second male, younger than the others by half a day, was placid, and more slow. If he had been a mortal son, I now believe, I would have thought him due to enter some temple of a mild god, for he was quiet, and clove to me more than did the rest.

  I taught them by example, as a parent always does. They learned and began to fend very much, and ably, for themselves.

  I remember an evening, when I was solitary, and feeding in the long crimson of the afterglow, and stars burned through the sky. I saw my children meandering some way off, a chain of starry whiteness. They were suddenly fledged, all but the finest last residue of their feathery down. They were nearly grown, nolonger mine. I never minded that. But in those moments the last one came back to me over the evening water, calling very softly. He swam about me, butted me in the side. He was now almost my own size, and must grow to be a fraction bigger. He rubbed his long head under mine. The velvety, scratchy perfection of the touch remains curiously with me as a human woman. It was a caress, I think, I know, although at the time I did not notice it as such, then it was only a greeting, an avowal. He would, I do suppose, have become my lover, since I had no mate. They pair for life, so I have been told, swans. Then the moon rose, also swan-white. A swarm of spangled dragonflies cascaded by. We raised our beaks, he and I, and supped, while the final fire smoked out in the lake.

  • • •

  And now a man, this other he, enters my world. This one is very different from Hrothgar—who anyway I cannot state was mortal. His name is Signian, which at first I could not pronounce. But then, during that renewal of my human life, I found great awkwardness with speech for a while, and even with the simple acts of walking, and standing, becoming seated, or lying down. I had been only a swan by that hour for almost five months.

  • • •

  They approached the shore with a stealthy and studied tenseness. They were very loud, thundering through the trees and shrubs, storms of leafage and small branches bursting about them, and flies swirling up, and little birds in a clatter of frenzied wings.

  Then they stood along the border of the water, all facing out toward the wideness of the lake.

  Human—they were human things. I did not recollect what they were, yet I shied from them, and so my children too flinched back. Unrecognizable but steeped in some awfulness: they stank, they were too colorful in their green and brown clothes meant to conceal them, and raucous in their cunning stealth.

  What I did now my children would copy. I stood upright and raced along the lake, flaring my wings, propelling myself skyward in a collision of breaking water and undone light.

  Then they did as I had, my two sons, my two daughters.

  White as secret truth, we seared from lake to sky, our fire of wings spread like sails, our necks stretched. As we rose and fled we were already forgetting the vile things on the shore.

  It was a summer noon. So sheer and shining, faintly tinted with red. The season was ending, the time of falling leaves drew near.

  I heard then the music of humanity. Like sick harps. A twisting strummed note, over and over. A twang.

  In the air all about me, more little birds. How sharp and narrow they were. So slender, their beaks made of flint, and feathered only at the tail—wingless—

  He made no sound. My son. My lover who was to be.

  The arrow from the man’s intelligent bow had pierced his sun-white throat.

  He fell.

  I saw him fall. White leaf out of season.

  Ah, then I was a swan nolonger even in midair, or my mind nolonger was a swan, nor my heart.

  I veered about.

  Past me, reckless and unreckoning, my other three air-borne children rushed, rising on into the light, leaving us behind, celestially gone.

  But he sank downward, fast as a stone.

  There. I saw him meet the land, directly where the human things stood. I saw him smash, shattered, and untrue. A lie. His feathers scattered, like fresh snow.

  No. I was not a swan anymore. Though still I kept the shape of one. For I too dropped toward the men, oblivious of their twanging kill-harps.

  There is this, of course, had I been a woman exactly then, never would I have dared—surely I should have run away. Nevertheless as my feet hit and scalded and broke the reeds and water, already my physical alteration was erupting from me. A swan, I had reached the shore. Next instant I was a woman, naked and white, her hair flying, her arms raised even then like wings, her neck arched, racing toward the hunters and their bows, murderously hissing her rage and grief—

  And they darted away. Some of them were shouting, one screaming. They ran, for they had seen a demon, a bird translated abruptly into woman’s form.

  Only one man stayed. Rooted to the spot either with terror or surprise, I will never know, nor will I ever care.

  For when I reached him, and brought forward my beating wings to shatter in turn his bones, my neck and beak to tear him into bits, a weighty darkness came from him, and covered me up. Was this too sorcery? No, only his long cloak, that he had swept off and over me.

  Could it be that, even at such a moment, he found my public nudity unsuitable? The gods he and his revered were strict and disapproving. Perhaps that then, but mostly I believe now he was afraid, and meant to distract and net me, like the flying thing I had been only a breath before. He credited, too, all that he had seen. Swan to woman. Where his huntsmen would come to say they had been mistaken, or seen nothing odd, this one would always grasp the fact of my transformation. He liked such ideas. In childhood, he had been told stories of them.

  When the cloak smothered me I was lost. I rolled on the earth in its folds—it stank of his kind—retching and shrieking, trying to rip myself free with teeth and nails
, all that was left to me as armament.

  At last my consciousness went out.

  They came and picked me up, for he had called his followers back by then. They picked up the body of my dead son also. But I was spared seeing this, spared knowing quite then that he was taken next to the kitchen of the great royal house, slung down, stripped of his plumage, and cooked for their table. It was surely these beasts, too, who had slain the birth-parents of my other children. Being of the high human class, it was allowed them even by the gods, particularly those pale, prim gods they kneeled to, that they shoot with arrows, pluck, roast, and devour swans.

  For a while I lay like the dead, in a little building devoted to the female god of their pantheon. I was tended there by the veiled faceless women who served this deity.

  No doubt they expected violence of me when I revived, for I had been bound to the hard couch. But I was nolonger passionate or volatile. I had been returned into my former self, cautious and nervous, cringing and placatory. Though I had some trouble in speaking the human tongue for a while, I quickly came to understand it again. This, despite the differing accent and mannerisms of the priestesses, and presently the other humans who appeared. I did therefore exactly as I was bid.

  Each of the priestess-women recalled to me my mother. They were ignorant, sly and spiteful, authoritarian—and cringing, too, as I was once more. And they would regularly beat themselves for penances. Sooner almost than all else, once I had woken, been bathed and clad, they took me to gaze on their goddess. She was an upright, slender, shapeless stone, stood on an altar, and veiled over as they were, but for a fine golden crown set where her head must be. The women were the ones who boastfully educated me in the rich substance of gold. The Prince’s mother, they said, had donated the crown to their goddess-house.

  As I was so obedient and docile, and even acted out praying, once they advised it was best I should pray, they seemed better pleased with me. They asked my name. And when I managed to tell them it, that is the name Hrothgar gave me, the only one I could now recall, they were both pleased and sullen. Apparently they thought the name meant I was, notwithstanding other evidence, of high birth, perhaps even royal myself, though foreign. This was Hrothgar’s joke, of course. To give me such a name. Or had he foreseen I should require it later? Again, I do not know, nor shall I, now. I think it does not count.