The Sandman, page 23
The girl took two steps into the room and halted nervously, brushing the brindled hair from her eyes to glance at the cocoon of wolf pelts huddled by the fire and then away.
“Are you clean?” A woman’s voice, resonant as an oboe, but without emotion.
The girl examined her hands back and front. “Yes,” she said.
“Come, then.” A long, delicate hand extended from the cocoon of furs and beckoned to the girl, who padded obediently to the woman’s side and curled down at her feet.
“I left it at the kitchen door for the cook,” said the girl. “It’s chewed. I was hungry.”
The woman laid her hand on the girl’s hair. The girl leaned into the touch. “What was it, Fida? A rabbit?”
“A deer.”
“Did you gut it?”
The girl Fida stilled, then shook her head vigorously. The woman’s fingers tightened in her hair, gave it a small, sharp tug. “Bad cub,” she said.
“Yes.” Fida’s mouth opened in an embarrassed grin, baring pointed teeth. She began to pant. The woman tweaked her hair again. “I’m hot,” said Fida apologetically.
It was no wonder. The room was at blood heat from the fire and seemed hotter still; for it was red as the inside of a heart. Turkey carpets blanketed the floor, crimson hangings muffled walls and bed. The clock on the cherry wood mantel was made of red porphyry. Its hands stood at half past one—whether morning or afternoon was impossible to tell, the windows being both shuttered and curtained.
“I’m hot,” said Fida again, and shifted, restless and uncomfortable. “I’m going out.”
“You just came in.”
“I’m going out again.”
The woman withdrew her hand into her furs and shivered. “Of course,” she said. “You must do as you please.”
In one swift heave, Fida was on her feet and padding to the door. She paused with her hand on the knob. “Will you watch me go?” she asked.
“The moon’s full,” said the woman. “I’m going to the Mountain,” said Fida.
The figure in the chair went very still. “To the Mountain,” she said, laying down her words like porcelain cups. “I will watch you go.”
Fida grinned, and was gone.
No need to go to the window immediately, thought the woman. Just sit a moment longer by the fire while the girl readies herself. But even as she thought it, she was up, pulling back the curtain, unlatching the heavy wooden shutters, folding one of their panels into the thickness of the stone wall, pushing the casement window open to the night.
It had snowed, snow on deep snow. The clearing between the manor house and the forest was a silver tray polished to brilliance by a full moon riding the Mountain’s shoulder. A beautiful night, all black and crystal white, and very, very cold. The chill flooded the woman’s lungs, stung her cheeks and her eyes, cut through her layers of wool and fur and velvet as though they were thin silk. She clenched her chattering teeth and endured until a lean pale she-wolf trotted out around the side of the manor and toward the wood, pausing halfway across the clearing to look up at the window.
The woman raised one hand in a bloodless salute; the wolf howled.
As she watched the wolf’s shadow lift its pointed chin against the snow, the woman felt time slip. The moonlight fell just as it had a year ago, the night she’d heard a noise outside her bloodred room. An owl, she’d thought at first, or a wolf howling. But when it came again, she thought it was a voice, shouting a word that might have been her name.
She was curious—no one had come near manor or Mountain for more years than she could count—so she had unshuttered the window and looked out. She saw naked trees groping at the edge of a dense wood, snow-draped Mountain brooding beyond, full moon glaring down on the courtyard, and nothing else. But as she shrank back into the room, away from the moon’s cold gaze, a wolf had slid across her vision like a shadow.
Two shadows, really. The wolf’s shadow was darker than the wolf itself, long and black as a shard of night fallen into the courtyard, stretching out from the wolf’s forepaws, shoulders hunched, head tilted curiously, arms splayed just a little too wide for grace: the shadow of a young girl, as human as the wolf was not.
The woman had thrown wide the casement and leaned out into the frigid night.
“Come!”
Her voice rattled the air like a flight of pheasants; the wolf disappeared under the trees before the echo of it faded.
The woman closed the window with stiff, blue fingers and fumbled the shutters and the curtains shut. Then she blew up the fire and crouched beside it to thaw her hands among the darting flames. A young wolf, she thought, still a cub, to judge from the outsize paws and the lean, gangling body. A wolf with a human shadow.
A strange sight. But the woman was a witch, and she had seen strange sights before. A brown man with branching horns and dainty, cloven feet bending gravely above her to offer soup in a silver tureen. A small, sleek woman with apple-seed eyes, who swayed like grass in the wind when she walked. A Lady whose face shone coldly among her dark hair like the moon among clouds, and the Witch’s father weeping at her feet. This wolf with a human shadow was not the strangest of them, nor the most unexpected. Once her father’s Lady had shown it to her, trotting unsubstantially over the face of the moon. “Tinder,” she’d said, and, “A two-edged blade.” Then she’d smiled and gone away.
The Witch had not understood the Lady’s words at the time, being young and passionate and unacquainted with blades and their uses. But she’d had time to consider them over the long, cold years, and she’d decided they meant that such a wolf was a promise of heat, like tinder, and that fire could burn as well as comfort. Now it was come, she was forewarned. All she need do was bring herself to step out under the moonlight, the starlight, the shadow of the Mountain, and she would be warm.
A flame caught her finger, caressed it to rosy life. She closed her long, dark eyes. “I cannot,” she murmured. “I cannot go outside.”
“Then you must stay inside.” The voice was the Witch’s own, and the face to which she raised her eyes. Both voice and face were cast over with a silver brilliance like the moon’s.
“You,” said the Witch. “You,” agreed the other.
“The hour has come.”
“But you can’t seize it.” The fluting voice was both despairing and mocking. “You’re afraid.”
The Witch curled herself into the scarlet cushions of her chair and gathered a black shawl around her shoulders. Her visitor laid one arm along the mantel and gazed down at her, smiling slightly. Meeting her eyes, the Witch thought that she saw the moon in them, dead and leering; she shivered, but did not look away.
“I cannot feel fear,” she said.
“No,” said her visitor. “Nonetheless, you will not go out. Out is too cold, too hard, too bright. You have not been out in years. Besides, it would have pleased your father.”
The Witch reached for a cup of tea—peppermint—fragrant and steaming to warm her hands and her cold, empty belly, and found one ready on the table. “What,” she said when she had taken a careful sip, “could my father’s pleasure have to do with my going out?”
“Very good,” approved her twin. “The tea is a nice touch. Haven’t you noticed that you never do anything you think would have pleased your father?”
“But breaking the spell would not please him. That was the bargain, wasn’t it? That I should live like this forever?”
“That’s what I said.” The other turned to admire her reflection in the overmantel mirror. “Pretty. I like the earrings. But you should do something new with your hair.”
The Witch put her hand to her hair. It poured over her chair like carved and polished wood, deep brown, with a red glint in its depths. “I like it,” she said.
“You’re afraid to change it,” said her visitor. “Your father liked it loose, you know. I remember him saying so.”
“I did not call you,” said the Witch. “I do not need you.
Begone.”
“Ungrateful bitch. I was just trying to help.”
“I do not need your help.”
The other began to laugh, showing small, white teeth that lengthened as she laughed and grew sharp and yellow until they filled all her mouth, and her tongue between them grew long and flat and red, and her laughter slid up into a shuddering howl. And then she was gone, taking the fire with her.
THE NEXT NIGHT the Witch watched for the wolf in the library from a French door that gave onto the courtyard.
The moon had paced across the sky before the wolf finally appeared, silent as smoke and close enough for the Witch to see the wet gleam of its eyes and its vaporous breath rising. Its shadow on the snow was sharp and clear as a black paper silhouette, blocky and awkwardly configured, yet unmistakably human.
The Witch forced herself to push the door ajar, then her nerve failed her. Shivering, she called:
“Come!”
The wolf started at her voice and loped back into the wood, pausing under the first trees and looking back over its brindled shoulder before taking itself and its shadow to the shelter of the wood.
The Witch ran after it, a step and then another crunching over the pathless snow, carrying her out of the shadow of the manor and into the moonlight. It dazzled her, so that she reeled and lifted both hands to her face and staggered backwards with the snow dragging at her feet like quicksand. Tripping over the threshold, she fell hard upon the library’s carpeted floor, where she sat with her fingers pressing hard against her lids until stars appeared in the darkness there, and a milky light like moonrise. Hastily, she opened her eyes. The French doors were closed and shrouded, as they ought to be. But a silver chill was upon her.
In her chamber, she blew up the fire and wrapped herself in the wolf pelt from her bed. Half-expecting the Lady to appear, black-eyed and mocking, she brooded over the fire. The porphyry clock chimed meaningless hours. The flames were scarlet and gold, with coals glowing below them, hot and alive as the sun. One coal was larger than the rest, dull red in the fire’s ice-blue heart, drawing her eye until it filled all her vision: a carbuncle encased in faceted crystal. The logs shifted, and the coal flared into whiteness marked with red, like the red mouth in a woman’s face—her own face, the Lady’s face, salt white, with blind stone eyes turned inward and two lines carved between the brows. The stone eyes twitched and opened on stars in a sky so black that it sucked into itself the soul of anyone gazing upon it. Into its deeps fell the Witch’s soul, flying among adamantine knives that pricked her toward the moon, which looked upon her with loving eyes and stretched its bearded lips to engulf her.
The Witch seized one of the adamantine knives. It was all blade. Her hand scattered rubies from her wounded fingers, but she felt no pain as she sliced the star across and across the moon’s face, only cold.
“That didn’t work the last twenty thousand times you tried it,” the Lady remarked. “Can’t you try something else?”
The Witch gave a strangled mew, sat upright in the cushioned chair, put her hand out for a glass of wine. Her fingers groped in empty air. “Red wine,” she said aloud. “In a golden cup. Set with rubies. Now.”
“You must be mad,” said the Lady cheerfully. “What you really need is meat. You haven’t eaten anything in ages.”
“Red wine,” said the Witch decidedly, and lifted a brimming goblet to her lips. The wine was warm and fragrant with cinnamon and cloves; it burned in her hands and feet and behind her eyes. She drained the goblet, then dressed herself in a crimson velvet riding dress and little heeled boots lined with wolf fur, wrapped herself in pelisse and shawls, veiled her face against the wind and the cold gaze of the moon and stars. She unbolted the front door, opened it, and stepped outside to wait on the snow while the moon rose over the Mountain, bringing with it the she-wolf and her human shadow.
Seeing the woman, the wolf stopped. The Witch took a step forward. The wolf hesitated, lowered her tail, advanced one paw and then another. Step by slow step, wild- eyed and shivering, wolf and Witch left the safety of manor and forest, approaching the exposed and brilliant center of the clearing, approaching each other. They met. The she-wolf sat on her haunches; the Witch knelt before her and put back the veil, trembling like a bride. “You are Fida,” she said. “You are my faithful servant.”
The wolf shuddered all over, quick and hard as a death throe, then rolled onto her back and sprawled her back legs, offering the Witch her soft, pink belly. The Witch laid her gloved hand in the furry hollow, stroked upward to the furry chin, and stood.
“Come,” she said, and this time the she-wolf obeyed, following at her heel like a well-trained dog back across the clearing through the open door, stopping only to mark the threshold with her scent. She looked about her, with ears pricked curiously, until the Witch closed the door and barred it. The cold, clear scents of pine and game and night and her pack drowned in a hot miasma of dusty wool and woodsmoke. The she-wolf sat down on the Turkey red rug and howled.
The Witch grasped her muzzle in both hands. “I don’t like that noise,” she said, shaking her gently. “Bad cub.”
The wolf drooped her ears and whined; but when the Witch released her, she howled again: a long, panicked ululation.
Cold prickled up the Witch’s spine. She needed utter devotion, and here was Fida, scrabbling frantically at the heavy oak door, snuffling at the thread of clean air, telling her that home was on the other side.
Laughter echoed in her ears like a silver bell. “Your father would be very pleased,” it rang, mocking.
The Witch stamped her foot. “Bad cub,” she shouted, to drown the bell. “Stop that at once and come with me.”
The wolf raised her head and fixed her with moonstone eyes. Her nose wrinkled, her lip lifted from her sharp, yellow teeth; she rumbled threateningly. The Witch kicked her sharply in the ribs. She gave one startled yelp; the Witch kicked her again. Whining, the wolf offered her belly as she had in the courtyard. The Witch bent to accept her submission. “Good cub.”
THE RITUAL CHAMBER was in the cellar, as far as possible from the open sky and the stars. The stairs leading down to it were cold and smelled of stale earth, like a long-abandoned den. The she-wolf marked them with her scent, and the chamber door and the high stone table that was its only furnishing. In one corner, she discovered a long, lumpy shape covered by a heavy carpet. Her nose pronounced the carpet dusty and the bones beneath it dry and fleshless and long, long dead. She sneezed, then leaped onto the table and sat, ears flicking back and forth, panting anxiously.
She whined when the Witch swept her front paws from under her and flipped her awkwardly on her back, but made no other objection. She even stretched her neck when the Witch put the knife to her underjaw and began to slit her skin away.
The Witch herself had never performed this ritual, but she had watched her father countless times, skinning the pelts from wolves and deer and bears to create servants to wait on him and her. After he died, she had made no more. She needed no servants; she preferred to do things for herself. If she knew absolutely that there would be wood for her fire and bread for her table, it would be so. That was the way of her magic, to work by absolute knowledge. Now, she knew absolutely that the she-wolf would lie still and trustful under her knife, and it was so. She knew she must cut only so deep and no deeper, must cut surely, without hesitation. A moment’s doubt would kill the wolf and all the Witch’s hopes of warmth. Once she might have doubted. But her father’s bargain with the Lady had neatly excised disgust, compassion, and fear, leaving behind nothing but her absolute knowledge and a steady hand upon the knife.
There was no blood. The edges of the pelt were white and dry in the knife’s wake, the flesh under it pink and whole and hairless. The pain, the Witch knew, would not be great unless by chance she pierced too deep. As the thought brushed her mind, the knife faltered, leaving a slender, scarlet track just over the breastbone. The she-wolf cried out in a voice neither human nor wolf, and the Witch sucked her breath in hard between her teeth. So easy to slip, to let out life and let in death—the ultimate coldness. Somewhere in the back of her mind a memory stirred, of blood hot on her cold hands, peat brown eyes wide with terror, and a thin, high scream like a dying rabbit’s. Annoyed, she began to mutter the ritual aloud, the fluid words drawing the knife with them down the belly to the tail, then sideways between skin and pelt, working the wolf loose from the girl-form beneath.
The ritual took all night, and when the Witch was done, her hands ached with pulling and cutting, her lip bled where she had bitten through it, her eyes and knees twitched and strained. A brindled wolf pelt lay piled at one end of the stone table at the feet of a naked girl.
She wasn’t pretty, not as humans measure beauty, being thin-hipped and shallow-breasted, her torso too long for her legs and arms, her hands and feet broad and stumpy, with horny palms and soles. Her hair was brindle gray like her pelt, and stood out in a wild aureole around her sharply planed face. Her nose was long and blunt, and her lips were very thin. Along her breast-bone was a scar, red and raised like a whip welt.
“Fida,” the Witch called her, and she opened eyes like winter moons. The thin, mobile lips twitched and worked, parted for the long, pink tongue to explore them. She made a tentative huffing noise, sneezed and sat up, eyeing the Witch with her head tilted awkwardly to one side.
“Mistress,” she said, her voice rough and deep. She looked down at herself, lifted her hands one by one, licked between her stubby fingers, twisted to examine her altered body. She even tried to smell her crotch, at which the Witch laughed, cracking open the cut on her lip. The wolf-girl’s head came up at the sound. Seeing the blood dribbling down the Witch’s chin, she licked at it as she would lick the blood from a packmate’s jaws. The Witch drew back from the touch of her tongue, hand to mouth, eyes showing white around the starless pupils.
“Bad cub?” the wolf-girl inquired anxiously.
The Witch shook her head slowly, then reached out to tousle the rough, brindled hair. “No,” she said. “Good cub.”
