Risa, page 35
Flustered, the lady looked down again at her hands. Her fingers twisted tightly together. “It is only … such a place as that must be … no one would seek such a place save for some great and terrible need.” She stood abruptly. “I must see to the ordering of dinner. I will have one of my women bring you your meat.” She put her back to him, and Gawain suddenly felt that she did not want to have to look at him anymore.
“Then let me bid you good-night, my hostess, since I am not to see you again.”
Her shoulders sagged for a moment and then straightened. “God be with you this night, Lord Gawain.”
She was gone, and Gawain was alone with a rushlight and the remains of broth and bread and his own uneasy thoughts. He tried again to stand, but he made it no more than two steps from the bed before his knees began to buckle under him. He could do nothing but lie in his bed and stare at boards and buttresses over his head, and wonder—what did his hostess know, and where did Risa bide, and what did she suffer.
Be brave, be brave my love. God grant me my strength again. Let me find her whole.
There was no way to tell how much time passed before he heard the thudding of boot soles on stone. The door slammed open and Belinus strode up to the bed, a bloody bone in his hand.
Without concern or ceremony, he tossed the object onto the bedcovers. It was a boar’s curling tusk.
“The whole of the beast is in the yard. I did not think my lady would like me to drag it up to the sickroom!” He bellowed with laughter at his own joke. “A poor thing, skinny from winter and not yet fat for summer, but fought like a tiger. I’ve a man who will be showing his scars to his grandchildren.” He folded his arms in great satisfaction. “That is what I have gained today, my lord. And you?”
“Several hours’ fine conversation with my most courteous hostess,” said Gawain promptly. “I will do my best to return them to you, my host, but I may have to beg you mercy on my weakness.”
Belinus laughed heartily at that. “We must get you well soon, my lord, I should dearly love to hear how you spoke to my wife! But although I’ve hunted a boar today, I’ve an appetite like a bear and my meat waits in the hall. Good night, my lord Gawain. We will talk soon, you may be sure of it!”
When he was gone, and the door was closed, Gawain picked up the tusk that had been left to decorate his sickbed. It was warm, as if it had been freshly torn from the new-dead beast. It had an edge that could cut a man’s hand were he not careful. The place where the tusk had lain was spattered with drying blood, reminding Gawain of the blood he had imagined on the edge of his bowl of broth, and the blood he’d smelled in his dream. It seemed to him that the smears and spatters shifted beneath his sight, and he fancied that if he looked long enough, he might read them like old runes.
Gawain rubbed his eyes. What is happening to me? That fever is not so gone as my lady promised.
Setting the tusk carefully on the table so he would not be seen to show disrespect to his host’s token—though in truth he would have tossed the grim thing aside if he could—he laid back on his pillows to wait for supper and then for sleep and to pray for tomorrow and strength and health and after that … and after that …
After that, for life.
That night, Risa dreamed. The door to her cell was diffuse, like mist. The threshold around it sagged unevenly and was made of only rough and broken stones. Risa started forward, only to realize her wrists and ankles were weighted down with chains of iron, so heavy she could barely move. She struggled, against the chains and against the profound weariness that filled her. She had to climb the stairs, she had to. So she walked out into the corridor, which was black and dank and solid. She toiled up the worn stairs, her chains scraping on the stones, a harsh grating noise.
Outside, the courtyard was nothing but a ruin. The memory of marble coated tumbled stones like a silver mist. The tiles were the barest hint of color gleaming thinly across a churned sea of clay and mud. The fountain was a muck-filled bowl in which a little dirty water bubbled up fitfully. The jagged ends of roofbeams lay beneath the moon like a giant’s broken bones. Only one tower stood whole, a thick, inelegant edifice, built for keeping watch against some enemy.
Risa stood there, gaping, at a loss as to what to do next.
Then, she saw a woman trudging toward the broken fountain. In her hand, she carried a sieve made of wood and hair. Her face was sunken with woe and despair. She dipped the sieve into the dirty water and watched, tears running down her face as the water ran out onto the muddy ground. Risa saw then that she had no eyes. She had only pearl-grey spheres where her eyes should have been, spheres to cry and to suffer, but not to see.
Head hanging low, the woman turned and walked one weary step at a time back the way she had come.
Risa stared after her, a lump rising in her throat, her own woes forgotten for that moment.
Then, she saw the others.
In the manner of dreams, she saw them one at a time. As soon as she turned from one, that one was gone, and she was alone with another person, entirely different, but just as blind, just as suffering.
She saw a youth wielding a broom as tall as he was, frantically sweeping at the clay and mud of the courtyard. The broom bristles swished against the ground, sounding so much like the sea Risa thought she might see the foam from the breaking waves.
A man, chained like she was, dragged his shackles up the winding stairs to the southeast tower. Each step was an unspeakable strain. His face, his whole being was slack, devoid of hope or plan beyond the next step. Two demons—red-skinned, black-horned and leather-winged—fluttered around behind him, laughing at his struggle. The man’s strength failed him and he crumpled forward, dashing his chin against the unforgiving marble, his body a helpless weight in its chains, he rolled down the hard and unforgiving steps until he lay still, bruised surely, perhaps broken, at the bottom.
The demons leaned over his still body, sniffing like dogs over a kill.
“Is it dead?” asked one.
“It wishes it was,” replied the other, pawing delicately at the man’s head. “But it will be here again tomorrow.”
Then the other one looked up, and saw Risa.
“What’s this? What’s this?” shrieked one, leaping into the air. “Is it flesh or is it fowl?”
They dove toward her, as the ravens had done. Panic and fury lent Risa strength despite the chains, despite the weariness, and she swung her arms, swatting at the fiends, but they just cackled in delighted laughter, flying out of her reach.
“Again! Again!” cried one in horrible delight. “The others do not give such sport as this! Again!”
Its companion swooped low, and Risa ducked. “How is it she has eyes and they have none?”
“Ah! For it is her body he wants confined, her mind he has other uses for.”
“Him! Him!” screamed the first of the fiends. “Has he fallen yet? Has he?”
They flew away, up into the night sky like leaves caught in the wind, and up at the top of the tower, balanced on the slumping stones of the battlements, she saw Euberacon. Around him in the air there hung a flock of demons, shining with their own eerie light. They were bloated and grotesque. They were pinched and withered with long grasping fingers. They were as beautiful as angels or with red and black faces distorted by fury, they slumped in the air as if as weary as Risa, or they gamboled, displaying their bodies to him, enticing him to reach out, to stretch his arm too far, so that he might lose his careful equilibrium.
They were waiting for him to fall.
“Yes,” she whispered. Fall, fall! Let them take you, let them break you on the stones. “Yes!”
She wondered for a moment if Euberacon saw the demons before him, or was this shape as blind as the others she had seen. But then, he looked down past his shoulder onto his tiny, dark domain and she saw his face clearly. She expected him to smile, to gloat at her bound in chains of nightmare, but he did not. She saw only fear written across his face. Around him the demons flocked, greedy and ready.
Then, it was over and Risa woke. Dawn’s light streamed in through the tiny window and showed her the solid stone walls and the closed door. All was as it had been when she fell asleep. Including, she tightened her fingers and relief rushed through her, the knife she held hidden in her sleeve.
What was that dream, or could it have been another vision?
What does it mean?
The cell offered no answers. The stones around her looked and felt as solid as they had been before. There was no way to make any ablutions or to refresh herself. She smoothed her hair down with her free hand, then, she worried one of the ribbons out of the loosening braid. Clumsily, she bound the knife to her forearm, her heart in her mouth the whole time. What if the invisible servants were here to watch what she did? What if they had alerted Euberacon? Or would they just dart their clawed hands down and seize her only hope?
Were they demons like the ones she had seen in her dream?
She stood and folded her arms, letting her sleeve fall over the knife and its hasty binding. She could feel its edge against her skin. It would cut her if she moved too quickly. Worse, the ribbon would not hold for long. She would have to find her chance or make one quickly.
Remembering how it had gone the previous day, Risa tried the door. It swung open easily. Evidently, the sorcerer desired her presence.
Good, she thought grimly, steeling herself. For I would be near to him.
Risa mounted the stairs to the courtyard. The sun poured down, careless of Risa’s captivity. A table covered in cloth of silver had been set beside the fountain. Euberacon sat there, loaves of bread and bowls of jellied meats before him. A woman bustled to and fro, setting down another bowl, this one of deep red preserves, adjusting linen and setting out another cup and knife. But that was not what caused Risa to stare. She knew this woman. This was the one she had seen the night before in her dream trying to draw water with a sieve.
How is it she has eyes and they have none?
Ah! For it is her body he wants confined, her mind he has other uses for.
The woman curtseyed to the sorcerer, her face serene and alert. Risa could not see her eyes. Euberacon nodded, and the serving woman took her leave.
“You are prompt this morning,” said the sorcerer. “Good. Come here.”
Yes. Risa did as she was told, coming to stand before him, arms folded tightly across her chest.
The sorcerer spread a slice of fresh brown bread with jellied meat and took a bite. Risa was ashamed to find her mouth watering.
“Tell me what you saw last night,” he ordered.
The details of her nightmare sprang instantly into her mind’s eye, but Risa just tightened her hold on her own forearms. She felt the shape of the knife beneath the cloth of her sleeve. The ribbon was already loosening.
Find the chance soon or make it.
“Did you hear me?” the sorcerer’s voice took on a dangerous edge.
“I saw nothing last night,” she said. “I slept in a cell behind a locked door. What could I have seen?”
“You are a liar,” said the sorcerer coolly. “I will allow that once only. What did you see last night?”
What could concern you about my dream? The sorcerer’s eyes were boring into her mind and fear shrank Risa’s heart, but still she said, “I saw nothing last night.”
The sorcerer rose slowly to his feet. Risa looked up and deliberately shrank in on herself, shoving her hands into her sleeves. He stalked around his chair. His shadow fell across her. His eyes drew her close, and she felt her mind slip away from her, all volition draining toward him.
Clamping down hard on the last of her will, Risa drew the knife. Its edge sliced a fiery line across her skin. She swung it out, but she swung too wide, and only grazed his hand.
“Slut!” he shouted. Risa did not give him time to say any more. She darted in, knife raised and ready, aiming for his belly. She stabbed upward. Cloth tore and the blade sank quickly through flesh, until her arm jarred against bone.
Euberacon clouted her hard across the ear, and Risa toppled backward, seeing stars.
Before Risa’s sight cleared, Euberacon was beside her, his hands gripping her arms, twisting and his fingers gouging into her tendons. “What? You think I keep my life where such as you can find it?” He dragged her to her feet, and she saw the knife on the tiles. There was not even any blood on it.
But I felt it, I felt the blow! her mind wailed.
Euberacon twisted her arms harder, forcing them up and behind her. She kicked backwards, but her feet found no purchase.
“You will learn, you whore. You will learn who your master is.”
Euberacon twisted her arms until the pain burned from shoulder to fingertip. He kicked at her knees and calves, driving her forward toward the fountain. She struggled but it did no good. The sight of the clear, sparkling water in its beautiful tiled basin filled her with terror. Euberacon gripped the back of her neck, his fingers digging deep into her flesh. The world swirled red and black before her eyes.
“So you still think you will be saved? Perhaps you think that your knight will have you back and be enchanted again by that pretty face of yours. It has opened so many doors for you, that face. I think it is time you learned I own that face as I own all of you.”
He thrust her downward. Risa cried out, but her scream was muffled by the water. It filled her mouth and stopped her ears, a gout of it dragging painfully down her throat into startled lungs that wretched and gagged and dragged in more water. She thrashed aimlessly, the panicked instinct for survival wiping out all else. But Euberacon’s arm was like an iron bar, pinning her remorselessly down. Drowning, she was drowning. She saw black again and flashes and lines of gold, and her lungs were more filled with water than air, and over the churning of the water she heard distantly a voice chanting, and thought she heard another answer, and then the blackness drew its cloak closer.
Mother Mary, help me!
But this time, the Virgin did not answer. This time, something else happened. She felt it in her bones and in each joint. They twisted, wrapped and crushed themselves together. The muscles of her face dragged themselves out long and painful, snapping and tearing. Her aching eyes screwed in tightly to her skull, shrinking almost to nothingness while her teeth fought to tear themselves from her gums. The pain overrode the terror of drowning and Risa struggled to scream and not to scream and felt herself tear in two for death to enter in.
All at once Euberacon’s arm dragged her up out of the water and dropped her onto the tiles.
For an eternity, all she could do was retch and try to breathe. Her lungs burned. She vomited up clear gouts of water onto the tiles, soaking her hands, sleeves, and skirts. At last she was empty, and her breath rasped in and out, and she blinked her eyes clear of tears and ice-cold water, and she could feel again.
She could feel her eyes, small and round and set too close to a nose suddenly too broad and protruding. Her jaw was heavy as a stone, but her head where she was accustomed to the weight of her hair was featherlight. She pushed herself up on her hands, and stared down at them, her tiny, piggish eyes trying to strain out of her misshapen skull. Her hands were unrecognizable. The skin on them was scaled and scabbed. The fingers were splayed and twisted and the yellow nails curled like the talons of some bird of ill-omen. Her wrists stuck out inches past her sleeve, the filthy, yellowing skin clinging slackly to the bones. The only thing left that was recognizable was the ring on her right hand with the great, square emerald winking mockingly in the brilliant sun.
Risa screamed. She couldn’t stop herself. Terrified at the sight of her own hands, she slapped at them, trying to pull off skin and nail as if they were a pair of gloves. Over her head, she heard Euberacon laugh.
“It is well then you cannot see that face now!” he crowed, and he seized her collar, dragging her again to the fountain, and leaning her over it. And Risa looked at the wavering water, and she could not help but see.
Round black eyes that belonged in the face of an animal blinked and stared. Skin stretched tight over a shelf of a brow but hung slack and hollow against cheeks and a jaw that jutted out beneath a spatulate snout where her nose had been. Her teeth, jagged and speckled with black, protruded over her sagging lip. Already, a stream of spittle ran from the mouth she could not close down to her long and wasp-thin neck.
But her hair, her hair, that her mother had combed and perfumed and braided, her hair that Gawain had called fairer than any crown of gold, her hair was little more than a scattering of black bristles over a scabbed and mottled scalp.
“Now, listen closely to me,” Euberacon said, his voice barely louder than a whisper cutting through the roaring that seemed to have filled her ears. “I am inclined to turn you out into the world as you are to see whether it is men or the wild beasts that hunt you down first. But if you show me your obedience, if you serve me without question, then I will return your beautiful face, and yes, that mane of hair you are so proud of. It is all for you to choose now.”
He released her and stood back. Weakened as she was, Risa nearly fell. She barely caught herself on the edge of the fountain. She looked up at him. His snake’s eyes glittered with their triumph. She looked back at her wavering and distorted reflection in the water. She did not need to see what he had done. The smallest movement screamed with the pain and the wrong of it. Fear, fury, wretched sorrow swarmed and sang through her mind. A thousand thoughts wailed like ghosts, first among them the urge to murder the man who stood before her and then take her own life, dashing herself down from the tower against the tiles so no one could see the monster she had become.
“Well, woman, what is your choice?”
And she remembered what Kerra had said, and she remembered how Gawain had looked at her in love, and she saw again the horror of her own hands and face and looked up into the black and shining eyes of the man who wielded his power without mercy, and she knew she had no choice. Not anymore.
Slowly, painfully, as if she were an old woman racked with rheumatism, Risa knelt. She bowed her head until her forehead touched the sun-warmed tiles at his feet.
