Amber Sparks - The Unfinished World - And Other Stories

But then one day the rumors reached us: a great and terrible witch was on her way. And the earth seemed to shrivel and wither. And the animals disappeared under the ground and over the hills. And one sad day, I stood in the doorway of our castle and watched the last of the birds winging away, the sky a pale and eerie red as they flew. Even our beloved swans left us.

Many of our people burned in the great fires, sacrifices to the gods that might stop the witch’s coming. I always thought I would end up among them, there in the center of the cypress husks, but my father forbade me go and my mother was too ill to be alone with so many sons to care for. And so I watched my friends dance in the fires, falling one by one to ash as the skies grew gray and the smoke filled the heavens with haze. Of course it didn’t work. She arrived just the same, stepping off the jet in her fur coat and sunglasses, a beautiful, haughty, horrible thing. We watched on TV, the cameras snapping away, her strange made-creatures ringing her like clay golems. When the cameras zoomed in, you could see the thumbprint on their foreheads, the dead, awful eyes, the huge hands. She waved to the curious crowds and smiled like Morgana, and got in her car and headed straight for our kingdom. We stopped dreaming that night for good. We started to fall under her spell, one by one, until only my brothers and I remained untouched.

And then, one horrible afternoon, just three days after we buried my mother, my father married Her. The queen of darkness, la belle de nuit , lady of the last days. She brought his soul through hell and fire and made it hers.

The first thing she asked for was the moon. Then the sky-stained stars. Then the canvas of the sky itself. My brothers rose up in anger at that, left in a pack to hunt and bring back a boar’s head that looked like hers. They left me alone and I was angry, terrified. The eldest said they would be back soon, and smiled, and said not to worry. The youngest looked back at me, and frowned, and warned me to stay out of her sight while they were away. But that same afternoon she put deadly toads in my bath and snakes in my skirt. Only the warnings of the servants saved me. She poisoned my words so they left my lips as bees, stinging my throat and tongue so badly I thought I would die. And she reached out with her mild blue eyes and turned my brothers to seven wild swans, in mockery of the creatures that meant the most to us.

I went to my father, tried to plead with him, but the bees left my lips and my father, horrified, pronounced me a demon. She smiled, and nodded, and summoned her minions, those terrible dark hulking things. They circled me and grabbed me and their hands hurt like ice. They did terrible things to me, and when they had finished, they wiped the blood on their pinstriped trousers and drove my body to the shore. And there they released me, gave me to the waves to claim and keep.

But I was not dead, not quite. My breath rippled the water, my remaining fears flew straight up like a flare, a bright column of stars. I was mute and all alone, underneath the cold moon, on the deserted white road it shone over the sea. The thunder — hers or nature’s, I could not tell — was deafening and I flung myself forward, seeing no land in sight, hearing no sound that could save me. At last, just before the end of my strength had come, I smashed against a tall rock, and I half-clambered, half-floated onto it and collapsed over its welcome solid stern.

Suddenly a single white feather landed beside me. As I gazed up, I saw seven swans winging down, furiously beating against the winds, coming to land neatly in a circle around me. I was surrounded again, but this time by my brothers, my poor, poor brothers, just boys, and how I wept to see them changed so, and how they wept to see me broken so, and how we stayed on that rock for many days, exhausted and alone and utterly devoid of hope or home. They brought me fish and fresh water to build back my strength, and the tears they wept healed my wounds and wore away my scars. And on the seventh day, I woke, healthy and whole, to find my brothers human and solemn and sleeping beside me.

I woke them, unable to speak for the spell on me, but shaking them and humming and grunting with a sort of primitive delight. My eldest brother shouted and smiled, but the youngest frowned and told me this would only last a day. On the last day of each month, he said, the witch had told him they would spend the day as humans once more — not out of kindness, but out of cruelty, so that they would always know the terrible thing that had happened and would remember the human bodies they could never possess again. We wept again this time, and yet again when I shook my head and tried to speak and the bees escaped their prison. We knew I must be parted from my brothers during the day, for they must hunt upon the water and I must live upon the land. And so they brought a cast-off fishing net, and carried me in it to the edge of the water, where I was able to stand and walk and search for a place to live. I found a sort of a cave at the edge, in a little grotto, and in it I made a home, as best I could, and spent the days sleeping and dreaming of music and sunshine and my brothers and I as we were. And at night I lay near the water, to watch over my brother-swans as they nestled their heads in their necks and floated their way to a sad, undreaming sleep.

All the while, the witch was building her city. Her fortress of stone stood at the base of our village, with ten enormous guns to guard it and ten thousand goons to defend it. Our castle became a prison, and the villagers who hadn’t fled one by one started to disappear inside it. The first to go were the fanatics, then the political dissidents, but eventually a problem arose: she needed an army to go east and take back outposts that had been ours in my great-great-grandfather’s time. So the peasants started disappearing, too, but some were able to get messages out and usually they said simply “GONE EAST TO FIGHT.”

And so the villagers began to hide. They built rabbit-like warrens and underground dens; they went south and dug caves there, or went further south to the next kingdom. The artists fled, the musicians fled, the actors fled, the politicians fled, the merchants and craftsmen fled, and our city was finally empty and silent. But she was not content with this. She would have subjects to worship her, an army to command. And so at last she began to build her ghosts. An army of chemically broken once-bodies, she build them of the newly dead, the long-dead, and even the inhuman-dead — snouts and hooves and long hairy tails hooked to human arms and legs and faces. It became not uncommon to see a soldier with the head of a sheep, or a goat, or a bull. The animal eyes rolled in terror and the nostrils snorted in short bursts and the bellows of beastly fear groaned from furry, foam-covered muzzles. But the bespelled human body marched on, and on, and on, off to certain sacrifice in the east. The kings that ruled there were horrified by the black magic advancing on their kingdoms, and they ordered that any animal-man captured alive was to be staked through the heart and decapitated immediately. Then the body and head would be burned in a pit, setting the poor souls at rest once more.

But despite the brutality of these measures, the witch was still winning. She could conjure endless soldiers from the dead, enough to circle the world and back again. By day she sat in her throne room and traced their routes on maps and laughed, bare throat thrown back, barbed wire stretched around her throne for protection. By night she threw lavish, wicked parties for all the humans she had in her power, the ones who had remained fixed by her charms. Her court feasted every night for hours, on course after course, while the rest of the kingdom starved: ground meat in spiced wine sauce; meatballs in aspic; pork pottage; bladders full of eggs, pepper, cloves, currants, dates, and sugar in a rich sauce; roast venison, baby rabbit, stork, crane, buzzard, peacock, partridge, woodcock, egret; a course of martinets baked in quinces; wine, apples, and pears with sugar and syrup fruit compote; cherries and grapes; and finally a cheese course with spiced red wine and wafers. Where she got all of this abundance, no one knew, but by the lean look of her court much of it must have been enchanted.