Ellen Datlow - The Beastly Bride

Then.

The river appeared.

It was slender and coiling, moonlit now to sparkling white. The other men went on, and Ephran paused, as if to check his line.

“Listen up, Matt,” said Ephran, “you don’t want to worry too much. About her.”

“Why’s that?” said Matt, again light and easy.

“Because there are ways. Do your duty by her. There’ll be no hardship there. Do that, and let her keep her secrets. Then when the time’s right, you can be off. Not leave her, I don’t mean that, Seatons and Proctors have a union, you’ll have to stay wedded. But big place, the Proctor lands. Plenty to do. Just let her be. Don’t — try an’ rule her, or get on her bad side — jus’ do as you want and let her do as her wants. That’s the bestest way.”

Matt said, “So you think it’s true?”

Ephran scowled. “I don’t think no thing at all.”

“She’s a shape-twist.”

“I never said—”

“And her daddy before her.”

Ephran glared in his face. “Don’t you put words in my mouth. You may be the boss’s second-born but I’m freer ’an you. I can go off.”

Matt had the urge to punch Ephran in the mouth. So instead he nodded. “Fair enough. Let’s go fish.”

They fished. And the moon and the fish rose high. They laid the slim silver bodies by for breakfast, and not another word was spoken of the Seaton hand-fast or the Proctor house not ten miles away above, beside the forest.

It was when they had enough catch and were making ready to go back down to the camp.

Matt glanced up, and there across the narrow river, less distance from him than the other men, it stood, pearl in moonlight, and looked at him.

He hadn’t seen one alive. In fact only the drawn one in the book of pictures, when he was schooled.

They haunted the forests and the lower slopes of the mountains. But they were shy of men, only slipping from the shadows of dawn or dusk, once in a while, to kill them. The last occasion one of their kind had killed one of Matt’s had been in his childhood, about the time, he thought, he had seen the book-picture. Puma.

None of the other men seemed to have noticed. They were busy stringing the fish.

For the strange moment then, he and it were alone in utter silence, total stillness, unbroken privacy, eye to eye.

Its eyes were smoky and greenish, like old glass, and they glowed. Its coat was smooth and nacreous, glowing too.

Matt thought it would spring at him, straight over the water for his throat or heart. Yet this didn’t quite matter. He wasn’t afraid.

He could smell the musky, grassy-meaty odor of it.

It opened its red mouth — red even by moonlight — and for a second seemed to laugh — then it sprang about, and the long thick whip of its tail cracked the panes of the night apart like glass as it sped away.

All the men whirled round at that and were staring, shouting. Old Cooper raised his gun. It was Ephran bellowed the gun down.

Like a streak of softest dimmest lightning, the racing shape of the great cat slewed off among the pines, veering, vanishing. Behind it, it left a sort of afterimage, a kind of shine smeared on the dark, but that too swiftly faded.

None of them spoke much to Matt as they trudged down to the pasture. In the camp, each man quickly settled to rigid sleep. Matt lay on his back, staring up at the stars until the moon went all the way over and slid home into the earth like a sheathed knife.

“So I wondered to myself,” said Matt to his brother Chanter in Sure Hold now, “if that was Thena Proctor, I mean, or her daddy, come down to take a look at me.”

Chanter strode to the fire and threw on another log.

“You pay too much mind to the chat of the men. Are you sure you even saw that big cat?”

“Oh, I did. All of us did. Ephran was white as a bone. He stopped Cooper shooting it. Could it even have died though, I wonder?”

Then he left off because he saw Chanter’s face, and it had altered. He had never seen Chanter like this before. Not in a good humor, or in a rage, nor with that serious and uneasy expression he had whenever he had to pick up a book, or the daft, happy smile he gained if he glanced at his wife. No, this was a new Chanter — or maybe a very young one, how Chanter had been perhaps when he was only a child.

“Matt, I don’t know. How can I know? I know our pa meant well by us — both. But I think — I think he never thought enough on this. Probably it’s all crazy talk and damn foolery. Those upland Families — they go back a great way, hundreds of years, deep into the roots of the Old Countries. What you saw — what Joz Proctor is — and she, the girl — I’ve only ever gotten sight of a little sketch someone made of her. Good-looking as summer. But Pa met her. He liked her mightily. Uncommonly fine, he said.”

“The puma,” said Matt on a slow cold sigh, “was beautiful. Silk and whipcord. Pearl and — blood.”

“God, Matty. Thena Proctor’s a human girl. She has to be. She must be. Human.”

Matt smiled. He said, softly, “ Puman .”

A spring wedding.

The valleys and hills were still wet with the broken snows, rivers and creeks thick and tumbling with swelled white water. The scent of the pines breathed so fresh, you felt you had never smelled it before.

In the usual way among the Families, neither bride nor groom had been allowed to look at each other. That was custom. The old, humorous saying had it this was to prevent either, or both, making off if they didn’t care for what they saw. None had the gall to try that in the prayer house. Well, they said, ha-ha, only a couple of times, and those long, long ago.

And Matt? He hadn’t taken to his heels. He had left off asking questions. He simply waited .

No one around him among the Seaton clan acted as if anything abnormal went on. Even Chant didn’t, when he and his Anne came to call. He didn’t even give Matt a single searching glance.

Matt had anyway grasped by then that he was quite alone.

He’d dreamed of it, the mountain cat, two or three times through the winter. Nothing very awful. Just — glimpsing it among trees by night, or up on some high mountain ledge, its eyes— male — female —gleaming.

They drove, trap horses burnished and a-clink with bells, to the prayer house, done up in their smartest, Matt too, bathed and shaved and brushed, the white silk shirt too close on his neck.

What did he feel? Hollow, sort of. Solid and strong enough on the outside, able to nod and curve his mouth, exchange a few words, be polite, not stammering, not stumbling, not in a sweat. His mouth wasn’t dry. He noticed his mother, in her new velvet dress, haughty and glad. And Veniah, like a person from a painting of A Father: The Proud Patriarch.

They are stone-cut crazy . So he thought as they drove between the leafing trees and into the prayer house yard. They don’t know what they’ve done . And along with the hollow feeling, he had too a kind of scorn for them all, which helped, a little.

Inside the building there were early flowers in vases, and all the pewter polished, and the windows letting in the pale clear light. Everyone else, the representatives of the Families, were well dressed as turkeys for a Grace-giving Dinner.

He stood by the altar facing forward, and the minister nodded to him. Then the piano-organ sounded in the upper storey, and all the hairs on Matt’s head and neck rose in bristles. For the music meant that here she was, his bride, coming toward him. He wouldn’t turn and look to see — a mountain cat in human form and wedding gown, on the arm of her father, the other human mountain cat.