Ellen Datlow - The Beastly Bride

As the fields greened with new summer, Thena told Matt she believed the baby might come a little early.

Soon heavy with the child, she hadn’t, from her fourth month, gone off anymore at night. They did not discuss it. It seemed to him only sensible that she didn’t indulge the shape-switch at this time. Though she had done it, he realized at the beginning of her pregnancy, perhaps not yet aware she carried. What effect would such an action have on the growing being inside her? He never asked her that and never himself fretted. He trusted Thena. Again, in the future, he would remember that. And curse himself as blind.

Now and then, on certain nights, he did find her at a window, gazing out toward the forests and mountains. He noticed, when she gazed — he liked to see it — one of her hands always rested protectively on her swelling stomach.

Thena was right. The child was nearly two weeks premature.

He was away the day her labor started. Returning he found the house moving to a kind of ritualistic uproar. The doctor’s trap stood in the yard, women ran up and down the staircase. No one, however, forgot Matt’s comforts. Hot coffee and fresh water stood waiting. The bath had been drawn. His evening meal, he was assured, was in preparation.

When urgently he asked after his wife, they tried to keep him from her. The doctor was there, and two of the Proctor-Fletcher women. Finally he let them see his anger — or his nerves — and they allowed him to go up too.

Thena was in the bed, blue rings round her eyes, but smiling gravely. “Brace up, Matthew,” she told him. “Within the hour I’ll have it done.”

Then they shooed him out again, the women. And twenty minutes after he heard Thena give a loud savage cry, the only violent noise she had made. He dropped the china coffee cup and bounded up the stair, where the doctor caught him. “All’s nicely, Matt. Listen, do you hear?” And Matt heard a baby crying.

“My wife—” he shouted.

But when they let him go in again Thena lay there still, still gravely smiling, now with the child in her arms.

The baby was a girl. He didn’t mind that, nor the fact the fluff of hair on her head was dark, not golden. And he praised the baby, because that was expected, and too, if he didn’t, some of them might think he sulked at not receiving a son. But really he hardly saw it — her, this girl, if he were honest. She was just an object, like a dear little newborn lamb, useful, attractive — unimportant. All he cared about was that Thena had come through the birth, and held out her hand to him.

Fatherly feeling might have found him later. He didn’t seek it. More than all else, as the month went on, he felt a sort of confusion. For now another was with them. He and Thena — and the child. Three of them. Like the silence that had been with them that other time, he and she, and it.

He had a dream one night, and for a while on other nights. Always the same. There was no definite image, only vague shiftings of shade and moonlight in what might be forest. And an unknown voice, not male or female. Which said quietly to him in his sleep, “Thena.” And then, “The puma’s daughter.” And this upset him in the dream, as if he didn’t know, had never heard even a rumor of shape-twisting, let alone seen her change, lain back to back with her in that form, eaten of her kill, loved her better for all of it.

There was a piece of music Thena had sometimes played. Matt couldn’t ever remember the composer; he’d never liked it much. Beginning softly and seeming rather dull to him, so his thoughts wandered, then abruptly it changed tempo, becoming a ragged gallop full of fury and foreboding, ending with two or three clashing chords that could make you jump.

The sun-clock showed the days and nights as they went by. The farm’s work-journal showed the passage of weeks and months. The seasons altered in their ever changing, ever unalterable fashion. As did the moon.

People came and went as well, in their own correct stages of visit, hire, service.

It wasn’t so long, anyhow. Far less than a year. Far more than a century.

In this space they grew apart, the husband and his wife. Like two strong trees, one leaning like a dancer to the breeze, the other bending at a tilt in the earth, backward, sinking.

It was Matt who sank and looked backward. He tried to recapture what they had been before the child came. Or what he believed they’d been. But the child was always there somewhere, needing something. Present — if not in the room, then in the house — and a woman would appear to fetch Thena, who left her cooking or the pianotto, or put down her book, and went away.

But then Thena too began to go away on her own account. There was a nurse at such times, for the child. The notion was that this allowed Matt and Thena a night together. But on those nights she didn’t remain with Matt. It was the forest she went to, like a lover.

For she never said to him now, Come with me . And he never offered her company. She wouldn’t want it, would she? She had company enough, her own.

How thin , he thought, her profound patience must be wearing with her child . She was its slave. He must let her go.

The baby was starting to toddle and was due to be God-blessed soon at the prayer house, and there was to be a big party. Spring was on the land again also, calling up sap, and extra work, and memory.

And a night fell when Matt was exhausted, sleeping as hard as if he were roping cows or tying the sheaves. Yet he woke. Something wakened him.

He lay on his back in their bed and wondered what it was — and then saw the moon burning in the window, full and white as a bonfire of snow.

The room was palest blue with light, and in a moment more he saw Thena was gone from the bed. Putting out his hand, he felt that her side of the mattress was cold.

Nor was this a night for the nurse to watch the baby. It must be lying in the cot in the corner, and would wake and begin it — her — loud lamb’s bleating for Thena — and Thena wasn’t there. So Matt sat up and looked at the cot, and it was empty. Empty as the bed, and as anything meant to hold something else safe, when a theft has happened.

If never before had the child meant anything to him, now suddenly she did.

Her name, at the God-blessing, was to be declared as Amy.

Matt called it aloud, Amy! Amy! and sprang from the covers. He rushed to the small room, where the nurse slept when the cot was moved there — but no one was there now, not the nurse, never Thena and the child. He’d known this would be so.

Matt flung on his clothes, his boots. He dashed down through the house. Nobody was about. Not even out in the stable. He slung the saddle on his horse and galloped away, straight through the young-sown fields, cleaving them.

He knew where she’d gone, Thena, his wife.

His heart was pounding in his brain, which was full too of one terrible picture. He thought of the old religious phrase: And the scales drop’t from mine eyes .

Blind — blind fool. She was a beast , daughter of a beast . A mountain cat — and she had taken his child with her up into the wilderness of pines and rocks under the glare of the bitter, burning moon.

Oh, the picture. It lit his mind with terror as the wicked moon the world. A puma running with its red mouth just ajar on a thing held clamped within its jaws, a small bundle, with a fluff of darkish hair, faintly crying on a lamb’s lost bleat.