Amber Sparks - The Unfinished World - And Other Stories

After these feasts, she held elaborate masked balls with champagne fountains, and hired jazz bands to play wild, whirling tunes. Speakers were placed in the courtyard to carry the sound of the revelry far and wide. Handsome men and beautiful women danced until dawn in tails and beads and sequins. In the shadows of the halls and courtyard, bodies tangled in hot, animal passions, sometimes three and four and ten or twenty. Sometimes these orgies went on for days, it was rumored. But, some said, if you removed the participants’ masks, you would see red eyes, haggard faces, sweat-soaked brows and deathly pallor. Help us, they would mouth, cracked, bleeding lips working around the hopeless words.

One of these nights, as I slept on the cold ground near the water, I could hear the music and see their poor faces, these trapped souls. I dreamt of their pleas, and her laughter, and I heard her then, clear as day, whisper the secret of my release into my father’s unhearing ear. She told him he must order all the flax in the kingdom brought and burned, for if I was ever able to weave seven shirts of the stuff — one for each of my brothers — they would return to human form and all her magic would be undone. In the dream, my puppet-father nodded, and I cringed as she kissed his lifeless lips, licking at the bits of soul that still cling there, like strands of honey. She smiled, all red mouth and sharp teeth and white, white face like the coldest moon. And I woke and knew exactly what I must do.

We cannot wait for mercy to fall from heaven, I told my brothers. They flew up to avoid the bees and gave me swanlike, skeptical stares when I described my dream, each syllable stinging my lips like needle pricks. But should we do nothing, I cried, and I think then they knew it was harder for me than it was for them; harder for the human to spend a lifetime waiting than for the immediate needs of the animal creatures to be met. And so when the sun left the sky and the trees drank from the earth, when brimstone pools ringed the cave where I lay, my brothers would gather the flax I needed from the farthest reaches, leaving it for me to find in neat piles when I woke. And so I began to weave, and so we began to hope.

In the beginning, the cave seemed a haunted place, almost an old abandoned drawing room, grown oppressive with damp and rot. I heard laughing. Bats swept unseen overhead like ghosts; cobwebs grew thick over the walls like damask drapery. The air was dark and heavy, full of a strange animal musk I couldn’t place — rather like a long-dead lady’s perfume.

But eventually we grew to understand one another, my cave and I. I grew comfortable, unafraid, trusted to fate and my task. And I went on doing all I could to plait the flax and weave the shirts, my hands a mess of cuts and oozing sores, my hair a tangled, filthy mat. I used the laces of my boots to knot it back, and then eventually I lost my boots, too, and went barefoot in the wild. My feet grew callused and hard, my lips grew swollen and red from the occasional uttered sound and ensuing stings. I must have looked more animal than human to any passersby, though I never saw any other humans in this secluded place. Not until the day the foreign king drove through.

His car was a shiny gray, sleek and modern and so out of place in this wild, ancient wood. It looked like an industrial beast fleeing unthinkable places, the new cowering from the oldest things of the world. And the man who drove it belonged in a very modern magazine; he was all black hair and sharp lines and tan, so tan and healthy it hurt my sick eyes to look for too long. It was like looking at the sun. I wondered, briefly, madly, if I was gazing at some incarnation of Apollo and his chariot, lighting my woods for a moment on their way to somewhere else. But then he stopped his car. He and his companion, a short man with kind eyes, who reminded me of my smallest brother. They got out of the car and ran to where I was frozen in the act of picking the nettles for the shirts. Apollo-who-was-not-Apollo tilted his head to the side and did the thing men do when they decide they are falling in love. And I dropped my flax nettles, horrified, and ran back to the cave in hopes of losing these invaders.

They followed me, of course, and used their artificial light to find their way down the dark. And you know, everyone knows, how the story unfolds when a man decides he is in love. A very stupid man, clearly; who decides to love a wild and probable imbecile, a feral child scraping the ground for plant scraps? But men in the throes of their own passion do odd things. And this, of course, was our neighboring king, more used to following his passions than most. So you can guess, then, that he was the poor sort of king that leaves the running of his kingdom to others and spends his days hunting deer and fox and women with equal aplomb. So you can guess, then, how he took me, against the frowns and sager advice of his friend. You can guess how delighted he was by my refusal to speak, by the acquiescence signaled by the absence of a “no.” You can guess, I’m sure, that after the bath, and the bandages, and the damask silk and pearls, and the fawning court ladies, and the leering court men— You wear those robes like a courtesan —and through it all, my weeping, weeping, weeping over my lost flax shirts, and my chance of saving my poor brothers gone for now if not for good — you can guess how he took me, how he stripped me of those new robes like an unwrapped present and how he hurt me terribly, fiercely, and how in his supreme arrogance he took my tears for gratitude and licked them with his neat pink tongue like a panther. Don’t cry, he said, kindly, I suppose. This happiness will last, he said. And just like that, never mind the society ladies, the royal heirs lined up for the chance at his hand, never mind his father’s wish that he marry a foreign princess — he disappointed court and country alike and married the wild young thing he’d found in the wood.

It was a danger from the start and he never saw it. It made people angry, and angry people are apt to start rumors that other angry people want to believe. It soon got around, even to my sheltered ears, that I was a wood spirit, an evil one, and that I spent half my time in fox shape and half in human shape. It was whispered that I had bewitched His Majesty. It was whispered that I turned him into a boar when he slept. It was whispered that I stole a piece of his soul every time he made love to me. And why not? I supposed it was no odder than the truth; and I was, yes, bewitched. I knew I could never, never let myself try to speak in front of these people, or they would burn me for witchcraft for sure.

I kept trying to get out to the cave, but I was virtually under lock and key. It was a large, modern kingdom, much less rustic than ours, and court life was quite structured. You were never, ever alone. Ladies and servants and hangers-on, and yet you were always lonely. The only person I wasn’t lonely with was the King’s friend, who reminded me so much of my youngest brother. He was very tender with me, and always made time to stop and talk to me in my walks through the gardens, or to take me out for drives because he knew how much I missed my wood. Though he thought I’d been there always, of course. I was glad of these trips, and I even liked the car — I had never ridden in one before and was surprised at how exhilarating the feeling of speed could be. The King never minded these outings — he spent most of his time hunting, and, I suppose, whoring and drinking. One late night when very drunk he forced open my mouth and pulled out my tongue. He told me there was nothing so wrong with me and demanded to know why I couldn’t speak. I shook my head, again and again, and he said he would put my mouth to better use instead then. He wrapped my hair around his fist, around, and around, like a skein, and forced me to my knees, and I thought then of my poor brothers, doomed to fly over the waves for their long or short lives. Would they live as long as men, or as long as swans? How long do swans live? How long would I, with this brutish husband and a court composed of jealousy and lies?