Ellen Datlow - The Beastly Bride

Alarm flashed through him; a sheet of spun glass, coppery in color, hung from the ledge. He coaxed the door open the rest of the way, standing several feet back.

Cramped in the glory hole was a naked girl, who now opened her eyes and stared at him with eyes the color of pennies. She pushed herself up on one extraordinarily pale arm.

He knew; knew instantly. He didn’t have to ask who or how and wasted no time in doing so. Her oval face was ruddy on the upper cheeks, where freckles like bits of copper seemed to float. The rest of the skin was fair and so translucent that he could see the blue veins in her neck. A great eagerness seized him. Would she have a tail and legs with pads or be human in appearance? Reaching for her hands, he helped her from the glory hole. She gave off an attractive odor of burned myrrh and cinnamon and proved to be without tail and completely human in limbs. A faint silvery sheen lay in hollows around her collarbone, at her temples, and on her eyelids. Her body was perfectly formed and as smooth as glass. Suffice to say that there were portions of her more beautiful than any seen since Eve walked in the garden, as innocent and bare as the dawn. Xan, a well-built specimen of the male mortal, felt coarse and unfinished next to her.

“Can you speak? Do you have a name?”

She didn’t answer. The gaffer shut his eyes, opened them again. Still there: she wasn’t a dream; he was wide awake. Joy cut through him straight to the heart. He had never imagined a woman so mysterious and lovely, and he could have stared at her for hours had it not occurred to him that nakedness was no longer the natural state of Eve’s children. He jerked the rod from the window and slid the curtain away. She seemed not to know what he meant by this offering, so he began to wind the cloth around her, his hands trembling. Tucked into place, the fabric made a passable sarong.

Taking her hands once more, he stared into her eyes, wondering at the fine crackled lines — bright gold and pumpkin had infiltrated the iris. She didn’t seem to mind his attention and soon leaned against him in a way that suggested trust. He didn’t mean to kiss her, but he did and not just once. She was a quick learner, pressing against him as eagerly as he against her.

“Xan! Xan!”

The voice called, a world away. Slowly he drew back from the girl, yet not so far that — being mesmerized by its sparkle — he couldn’t comb his fingers through the spun threads of her hair.

He turned to see Garland at the screen door.

“I’m sorry—”

“Don’t be! Come in, please.” Xan was glad, because who else in all the known universe could understand what had happened?

The girl looked from his face to Garland in surprise. Perhaps she had thought him the only such being in the world.

“This is my friend,” he told her.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt. Just dropped by to pick up S to T . You’re a bit of a mess, aren’t you?” Garland laughed, surveying him. The farmer held out his hand to the young woman, introducing himself, and she took it between her own and began scrutinizing the green-stained nails and the dark hair at the wrists. Clearly he admired her and had politely failed to notice that her spring attire was somewhat lacking.

“A mess? It’s nothing, just the blood. This is—”

Xan hesitated, unsure how to explain, but the other man simply smiled at the girl’s odd behavior and tweaked her nose, as though she were one of his own daughters. “The salamander.”

“What?” Garland tilted his head.

“I made it. The salamander. Well, I didn’t make — it appeared. Not like this but like a newt. And I punctured its side and blood spurted out, the way the book said. See, look at the marble—”

Garland’s lips had parted, as if to drink in the news.

“I felt terrible knowing it would die. The creature was marvelous — not as beautiful as the girl but a wonderful glass creature — and I was so happy and even a little afraid to see the thing — a miracle of glass — my heart went out to it — I couldn’t bear for it to be lost—”

His voice died away. Was he babbling? Perhaps there was no fit way to tell the shape-shifting strangeness of what had happened.

Putting her arms around his waist, the girl leaned her cheek against his bare chest. Xan wrapped his arms around her, and in that instant knew that he loved her because she was everything otherworldly that he had tried to claim in his art, the visionary beauty that he saw in glimpses of glass or sometimes in the fire heaving with life.

“And so I pinched the wound together and thrust the body into the glory hole and hoped — prayed it would live. While I slept, the salamander changed.”

Garland stared at the girl in a handwoven curtain and the young gaffer.

“You must be careful, Xan. She has no soul—”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t be angry with me — the angels have no souls. And don’t need them. Fairies as well. Demons most of all.”

Xan pulled her close. “She’s no — she’s not any of those things. She’s a woman; I’m sure.”

“I don’t doubt it.” Garland glanced around the studio.

“Have you ever made witch balls? With a web of color? Streaks and loops around an orb?”

“That’s tourist work,” Xan said, shrugging.

“A farmer always knows the date. It’s almost the last of the ramps: it’s the eve of Beltane when witches take their spring tonics and get frisky. On a few country greens, villagers will be setting a peeled tree trunk in the earth, decking it in ribbons and flowers, and asking young women to dance. You see? Like the ash poles set up to Ashtaroth long ago.”

“Why should I make a witch ball because children dance around a maypole?”

“The ball catches the spirits of air! They get lost in the maze, or so it’s said. You could try to protect her.”

“But there’s no such—” The gaffer laughed. What was he saying? He gathered the strands of the girl’s hair in one hand, wondering at its fine glassine texture. She was so precious — he would do anything not to lose her. Hadn’t she come to him as mysteriously as a gift from another world? “Garland, I’d be a fool not to take your advice,” Xan said. “You were the one to tell me about the salamander fire. Help me tote the wood, and I’ll make a gaudy sphere for every door, window, and chimney in the house and studio.”

The girl persisted in trailing after him. He couldn’t make her understand that when he crossed a sill, he hadn’t vanished and would return shortly. She seemed to know little except how to kiss, though she had managed to arrange the curtain so that she could move more freely. The glass on the shelves and in the annealers allured her, and she gestured from him to the vessels in what seemed comprehension.

At last satisfied that out of sight did not mean gone, she perched on a stump as the two men ferried split lengths between woodshed and furnace.

Garland paused to look up, squinting.

“What’s that?”

Xan’s arms were loaded with myrtle and oak. He glanced up to see an enormous sky blue pitcher plummeting from the sky. Astonished, he recognized a copy of the vessel he had made on the first morning of his challenge. When it slammed into the earth near the stump, he let the wood crash to the ground.

The foot sprouted legs; the belly, arms; and with a thlomp! a big ugly head popped from the spout.

“No!” Xan flew toward his salamander girl, Garland pounding at his heels, but the demon grinned, snatched her up, and tossed her into the mouth of the pot. As it bounced across the clearing, she learned how to shriek. Her clamor made the demon roar with glee as he leaped toward the top of the mountain opposite the cabin. He hung in the air, the lip and handle looking like clouds and the body of the pitcher almost invisible, and then plunged to land and vanished.