Part II of The White Roe

The curve of her cheek split between panes. She stared past her broken face to the nightworld beyond and its seizure of skeleton trees. They wanted solidity against the black sky and its skirling windhounds who chased anything mad enough to grow beyond the castle and its harbor of stone.

“Majesty.”

The next queen turned from the window.

The straw-legged page held out his hand, palm taut with impatience.

She floated past him. Only the tic of her cane marked the sound of her passage. Otherwise she moved silent as an eel on her way to the king’s chamber. When she finished her wifely duty, she floated back to her window to watch the break of day over the mountains, shrouded in distance and the fog of her breath.

She rode.

Since her injury she needed the morning air and its purifying powers, which she could better access from the height of a horse, at a controlled trot. The apothecary said so with the king’s hand on his shoulder.

The noble ladies rode and she, exalted by birth and by the king’s hand, must ride best. He despised a muddy hem and feared she might lose herself to the wilderwood, vanishing like thistledown in an autumn gust. She had done so before.

For this diversity of reasons she had a horse, a handsome beast with cool temper and spires for legs, to carry her around the prescribed circuit. She enjoyed what the horse enjoyed: the wide paths of the royal park where other courtiers might spy the queen and either envy or desire her as the elements flattered the young woman and appeared to light her from within.

More than the vision she was, the stir she elicited pleased the king. The admiration of others induced his and, while he loved his wife, he found her at once a riddle and a bore, wide-eyed and slippery as a sea creature. She was warm without openness, gentle without fragility, capable without wit, comely without intrigue—like a painting of herself.

He should have been satisfied, as the artist in question. He had fostered her after she ran off, was presumed dead and turned up half-bled in a wolf trap. Only by binding her to a wheelbarrow could the gamekeeper convey her to the doctor. Then she had to be reared again, trained to forget the wilderwood as a blot in her chronicle. Her unlearned state had its virtues; he could have strung up in a cage and invited the kingdom to gawk and throw plums; he could have splinted her leg to the bedpost and kept her for private sport. But the king was a visionary and saw in her a pearl, contemptuous in its seawater slime but sublime once he spat and rubbed her to a finish. He had her fed, mannered and sewn into dresses fit for a muse. He named her Nieve.

In the evenings he reclined on a chaise lounge by the bed, where Nieve was made to relax with her leg over his shoulder so that he could massage the cords of scars around her shin and calf, which sparkled like asps in the firelight. She found the ritual less bothersome when she spent his energy beforehand and when she drank deeply of the spiced wine kept for her. It smelled of nettle and fig and phased her vision with calming reds and golds as she stared into the storm cloud of silks that canopied the bed. She drank herself into a flaming fog as his fingers impressed her with their many rings—hers the white jade above the emerald round.

During the king’s hunt, Nieve enjoyed the unreal quiet of a castle without court.  She drank her wine and watched the jolly hoard of nobles and whores punch holes in the frost. Beside the king slouched an unlike figure, that of the gamekeeper on his red sorrel. Its stout legs put him a head shorter than the rest of the party, but he could ride that beast anywhere in the world. The king might have been embarrassed, except he found humor in the gamekeeper’s seriousness and respected the man’s knowledge of the wilderwood.

Nieve retreated from the window and poured her goblet to the brim, watching the spices toss and settle. She took three swigs and licked her teeth clean, unlacing her stays by the hearth. In her linen shift she laid before the fire.

As the wine mollified her nerves, she became perfectly insensate of the old injury, of the stone under her cheek, and drifted toward glowing imaginations of the family she would mother someday, their thistledown heads gathered around her great oak table. When she remembered herself, heavy with drink instead of life, she felt the failure of her womanhood like an invasion of winter and wept. She had tried for years to conceive, careless for the politics of making an heir, wanting only to be more than she was, to be surrounded by the mewling faces she carried in her head—the secret noise she kept from the king. His gargantuan fingers would not have this part of her.

It was this small defiance that kept her from quickening. If she gave herself in full to her lord and husband, she would have that oak table and its joyful shrieks.

She spent the rest of her wine and settled down. The flames leaped behind the grate, murmuring gentle, disconsolate hunger.

The king’s return sent the kitchen to frenzy. The hunting party had shot several fowl of fair size, but it was of course the king’s catch that stirred the most excitement: a beauty of a boar with ploughs for tusks. He ordered its head to be stuffed and mounted, the eyes set with black amethyst.

Nieve roused herself at the page’s knock and dressed for the banquet. When she took her place by the king’s side, he picked the choicest cut from the haunch of the boar and fed her from his hand. She accepted each bite with a determined swallow, maneuvering like a bird in order to catch the gravy in her mouth. The king chided her ridiculousness and, as she let her chin drip with gravy, he grandly removed the napkin from his lap and dabbed his wife clean. The nobles smiled tightly at the chivalrous display. Nieve drank her wine.

“Don’t you like the meat?” the king asked.

She told him it was delightful.

“Eat your fill,” he said, snapping the strings of her stays and helping her to another handful. His fingers dripped gravy on her bare chest.

“Leave nothing, dearest.”

She licked his fingers clean.

“Good girl,” he said, taking another cut and turning over the other side of his chair, where the hunting dog snapped up the meat and licked the king’s fingers until he slapped her away and she sank, whining, to the floor.

Nieve woke with a premonition. Some tremor or tension had tipped her from her sleep and she felt twisted inside as if she had been running from a vicious fog, one that used to protect her but ran her now into the stone jaws of despair.

She did not realize she was awake until she the winter air pinched her lungs. How had she made past the guards? But they were all at the banquet hall, carousing under the boar’s scooped and stuffed head.

She let her feet take her until the sunrise. Until the fog. Until the mountaintop of her dreams and the ruins of a cottage, in which stood an oak table and chairs. Her nerves twitched and thrummed as she circled the furniture, their wooden patterns confusing her eye. Worn yet lucid, she knew she had slipped past an old boundary into a fugitive state, where dust became sunlight, trees became hands, and chairs sprouted eyes.

She had been here before, in the blotted time. Now, a mannered woman in the trappings of a king’s wife, she looked upon the dwarfish chairs and saw none of their former consolation. Only her shadow, staggered over their cracked seats.

She returned through the orchard to visit the herbalist in the anterior wing of the castle. She floated between the guttering braziers, cane in hand so as to complete the silence of her stride. She found only a pair of boots peeking from an alcove to answer for the prior night’s revelry. Glad of her privacy, she was surprised to find the herbalist occupied.

“Take two pinches, and two only.”

She paused outside while he finished his transaction, recognizing the velvet lilt of one of the new whores.

“I need to get through the night.”

“I understand the sensitivity of your situation—”

“I can’t have fits with a client in bed. The girls already think I’m possessed.”

“Dosing in excess can poison the womb.”

The whore laughed. “Well! That saves me my next request.”

Underneath the bravado, she sounded frightened.

The herbalist heard, too. “His favor won’t last, and then you’ll be sorry you didn’t get a child off him. King’s mistress or not, do you think the rich nobles in good health take their lovers secondhand?”

“Two pinches,” she confirmed.

“Just the two.”

Nieve ducked into the shadows as the woman left. She carried a purple drawstring pouch, redolent of nettle and fig.

Nieve cleaned herself of the woods, scraping the blisters from her feet, and pondered herself in the mirror—the concavity of her belly, the receding red of her eyes.

The king would rather her barren than wild. He kept her docile and confused, unable to slip wholly through the demicolored panes of memory and dream, prisoner to his reality—his court, his fashion, his digging fingers. Was her subjection worth his legacy?

She sloshed her drink through the fire grate. The flames roared to new strength, singing the hairs of her thighs. She threw the goblet in, too, and watched the metal bend over the logs until it was nothing but saliva of the money god.

When she emerged from her chambers dressed and coiffed, the nobles had roused themselves for further debauchery. She followed their clamor to the banquet hall, where the courtesan from the herbalist’s was draped over a table, her corset open and the ravine of her torso lined with cherries. The nobles gathered to eat off her and elbowed each other like suckling hyenas. The king rammed and roared amid the commotion.

It was late afternoon, occasion or even music.

One man refused to partake, a solitary figure at the low table by the kitchen door. He was no less bestial for his reserve. Nieve’s eyes narrowed between the hard shoulder blades of the gamekeeper. He was the stone monster that chased her from the clasp of sleep.

He was the gargoyle she feared since the blotted time.

Trembling, Nieve ran from the hall to the crypt of the kings. With a hiss of her skirts, she leaned over the marble likeness of her father, sleeping with open eyes over the coffin where the king’s true remains sifted to dust in their stone enclosure.

She laid her cheek on his armored chest and, tilting her head aside, stared at the bars of sunlight and motes of dust. The holes in the wall for future bodies, hers among them, might have looked like empty eye sockets. But she couldn’t even conjure that. Her power of hallucination had dried up. She could not make confidantes of empty holes for bodies. Not as she had on the mountaintop, with seven crooked chairs.

So much she had made from so little.

So much, since her trapping, robbed.

There was one man she hated. And one she blamed.

She crouched behind the fallen oak, waiting with the ants. They should have tucked up for winter, yet they roved between her dirt-caked fingers and the fog of her breath.

The screams drew her from hiding.

His leg was caught in the gopher hole she had dug and lined with sticks. His forward momentum, as his foot fell through the concealing leaves, had driven him into the sticks and snapped his shin.

He twisted onto his back to assess the damage. But the compound fracture, at his age, sapped him of sense. He saw a figure of deep, brownish red, like a slow wound or the sun on a black bear hide. He recognized Nieve’s presence, having surveilled her for years, and knew she had come for reparations.

“Majesty,” he said, wincing at the sun through the barren trees.

She touched her cane to his knee, sending branches of agony down the shattered leg.

“You’ve stopped drinking,” he said, spitting with pain.

She jerked. He screamed.

“I meant to protect you. The queen—”

“I am the queen.”

“The one before.”

She lifted her cane.

The gamekeeper sagged. “The nobles convinced her you were a threat. She sent me to kill you.”

“You did nicely,” Nieve said.

He could not tell whether she meant it or not.

“If not she, they would have done it.”

“So you are innocent?”

“I tried to show mercy.”

“You drove me from paradise.” She watched him blanch as he began to fathom her misery.

            “But… I saw you. You were dying.”

            She grabbed his leg. “I was at peace in the woods. Then you served me to him.

You should have let me bleed.”

            “I tried,” he wept. “I left parcels for you and searched every day to see if you were alive. I set the traps so the wolves wouldn’t get you. I killed the queen.”

            “I know,” she hissed, letting go and wiping her wet hand on her skirt. “And for that I will grant you mercy.”

            She left.

            When the wolves came, they did not at once devour him. They licked and tested the gamekeeper’s leg before picking sides and starting.

            He watched the changing sky and the sun crowning the mountains. He found forgiveness and rapture in the knowledge that he would die by the girl he had ruined and was thus absolved by her vengeance.

The crows descended upon the penitent.

            A strange phenomenon stole over the castle. The whores dropped like spiders. The guards barricaded their apartment and waited out the hysteria. They heard through the door the heavy, slumped restlessness of the sick and smelled the pungency of bile, waste and blood. The nobles at first smuggled letters and treats past the guards, but the brief glimpses they got of the creeping women within turned them away. The whores fell from grace, no longer the fair beauties of wives past. The hunting dogs, including the king’s, fell ill as well.

            No one noticed the gamekeeper’s absence.

            And no one noticed the king’s.

            He was out hunting and, on the root-twisted path, turned the wrong oak and impaled himself.

            It was not a boar he might have expected, as it had no body. Not even a pulse. It was the mounted head of the boar he had killed. Its black eyes sparkled as his blood overflowed them. Holding the walnut frame on which it was mounted, the queen watched her husband buckle and fall.

            The blood loss rendered him senseless by the time his companions found him. He might survive, pronounced the doctor, given a transfusion.

            “Who better than me to revive him?” Nieve asked.

            “You are not a man,” the doctor said.

“I am his match. Royal blood for royal blood.”

The doctor bowed, fear and loathing raising his veins. For the king was king through marriage. Born a duke to a foreign country, he was in truth the queen’s blood inferior. She was a princess, and her blood oiled the wheel of kings, men who would put Kasimir to shame. How could the doctor speak out—and defy this king’s supremacy?

             Nieve proffered her arm. The doctor corded it, stuck the needle and prayed. She prayed, too, watching her husband’s life fold. He, like his playthings, fell victim to courtly poison.

            She took the red sorrel and rode by the tolls of his death pronouncement, leaving the castle to its pack of hyenas. She travelled to her late husband’s kingdom, a mournful widow with a noisy gate. For she wore at her belt a chain full of rings that were too big and cold for her fingers. She also had a pair of earrings made from black amethyst rounds.

            She took his old lands and roamed the woods there, feeling the earth on her bare toes. She could love whomever she liked—or no one at all—and in time bore a son whom she taught to love the elements and respect the hunt. Always shoot the roe through the eye, she told him.