The Hanged Man: Part 8: Lithia
Post # 84: In which choice, cleansing fire, sacred dance ...
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Now the first stars came out in the real night sky. She raised her hands up in the air, the fingers of one clenched around the marbles, holding her arms out as though in welcome, or petition. Did she have a right to pray for anything? What did she want? Was there anyone out there — anywhere — to hear her?
I need help, she thought, and then — it’s wrong to need help.
But when she sat paralyzed and Joe lay dead on the ground, Baba Yaga had come.
Was that help? She shuddered.
She closed her eyes. Her arms were getting tired. She breathed, imagining the smell of stars, how they’d feel on her tongue and bubbling through her blood. Sharp and stinging? Cleansing and stimulating, like peppermint? Or hot, like a spatter of sizzling grease, tasting of iron and warm spice?
Show me what to do now, she thought. Show me, and I’ll do the rest.
Something brushed against her leg. She flinched back, an arm shielding her face, and saw a dog. She lowered her arm, feeling a spurt of shame at her reflexive fear. The dog turned and looked over its shoulder, eyes glowing in the torchlight. She thought, wolf, and realized there was torchlight in fact, somewhere behind her. In five minutes, it would be full dark.
A lean, ageless and sexless figure with short hair stood holding a burning torch. Heks had a strong impression of power. An unfamiliar feeling rose in her, part recognition, part longing. Uncertainly, she took a step forward.
The wolf sat like a dog at the motionless feet of the torch bearer.
“You stand at a crossroad,” said the figure.
Heks considered this. “I don’t know which direction to choose,” she said.
“One choice is to stay here.”
“No,” said Heks, “I don’t belong here.”
“Are you sure?”
Impulsively, Heks stepped forward, keeping an eye on the wolf, who made no move. She reached for the torch. Now she realized the torchbearer was a woman, swathed anonymously in a dark cloak in spite of the summer night. The woman handed the torch to her and Heks took it into the hut. She touched it to the stained mattress, the rickety wooden table, a rag rug on the floor, stiff with dirt. Everything she touched blossomed into flame, as though soaked in flammable liquid. In minutes, fire engulfed the hut, roaring hungrily, sending out waves of choking heat.
They moved back, the torch back in the torchbearer’s hand. The wolf watched the fire through slitted eyes, ears pricked.
“Very well. Out into the world, then. Follow the white light.”
***
A small fire burned, as though in echo of the blaze behind her. The friendly cart, the horse and the two men sitting near it made a welcoming picture, framed by the frogs’ insistent song and the flowing river. She felt an intruder as she stepped out of the night.
“There was a fire. My house has burned down. I need a bed and I thought of…” she gestured with a hand toward the house. She’d learned the safety of silence and invisibility and kept her words colorless and brief.
They were surprised. They grey-haired man who made her think of a wolf, Radulf, uttered a sound of concern and stepped forward, as though to comfort her, but stopped when she stepped back.
“Can anything be saved?” asked the peddler.
“No,” she said.
“Of course, you must use the bed,” said Radulf. “I believe the ladies put clean sheets on it for the new family, but they won’t move in for a few days, yet.”
The entered the quiet, tidy house. There wasn’t room for more than a few pieces of furniture. A pile of cushions sat near the fireplace.
“Shall I light it?” asked Radulf.
Heks shook her head. She’d seen enough fire for the night.
Radulf left her and she lit a lamp and looked around. Here, there’d been life. Someone had moved in these rooms, squatted to light the fire, stretched out with the cushions. Someone had sat in the comfortable chair with a lamp at her elbow. Someone had stood at the kitchen counter, preparing food. Heks opened the back door and the summer night flowed in.
She heard a soft sound of inquiry at her feet. A cat, tattered tail raised in the shape of a question mark, stepped past her into the house. Heks liked cats. She filled a bowl with water and put it on the kitchen floor. The cat drank, wetting its white bib. It was yellow eyed. Its long orange coat needed attention. It had a mat under one ear and bits of leaves and twigs in the feathers on its back legs and probably underneath, as well, Heks thought. It appeared quite at home. Clearly it belonged in the house. Heks wondered why it hadn’t shown itself before. She bent and stroked its head. It arched its back, inviting her caress, and began to purr loudly. When she took the lamp and went into the front room, the cat went with her.
She ran her fingers along the warp and weft of the loom, almost expecting to hear music. A shawl draped the chair in front of the cold hearth, and she sat down and wrapped it around her shoulders. It was a beautiful thing, woven with a slubby texture in glowing creamy white with ripples of color running through it. She ran her fingers over it and caught a fugitive gleam of gold and silver in the pattern.
The cat jumped into her lap, kneaded with brief rapture, and curled up, a solid weight.
For some reason, the house made Heks want to weep. She leaned her head back against the chair, closed her eyes and rested her hands on the cat, her fingers stirring gently through its coat.
Cautiously, she explored her feelings and recognized peace. Her senses were both soothed and fed by the house’s beauty and order. Fed. Funny how that kept popping up. Baba Yaga had told her to eat or die, and she’d eaten. Oh, how she’d eaten, in a kind of ecstatic lust that made her writhe in memory but had been raw triumph and power at the time.
Her aging, unlovely body ached and longed for…what? Rest? Gentleness? Yes, those. But more than those. Pleasure? Oh, yes. Yet pleasure had never been hers to live with and keep. Once or twice she’d known it, brief as a hummingbird’s wing, before life became blunt-edged and hard as a knucklebone, before she withered and dried and her hair and skin thinned and even the thought and dream of pleasure were no longer for her.
She wouldn’t sit and think any more. It had been a long day. She lifted the sleepy weight of the cat carefully and set it on the floor.
The bedroom was no more than a closet, almost entirely filled by the bed. She set the lamp on a shelf next to it. The cat jumped onto the thin summer quilt, a mingling of pink and orange, beautifully stitched together. Methodically, she undressed and unpinned her hair. She smoothed the quilted bedcover. The back of her hand was blotched with brown spots and laced with prominent veins. It looked like an old lady’s hand. The sight of it against the vivid colors of the quilt filled her with grief. She put out the lamp and, in the dark, turned back cover and sheet and slid into the soft bed.
Heks turned on her side and curved around the purring cat. Cool linen sheets began to warm against her skin, smelling of lavender and sun. She couldn’t remember ever sleeping naked before. Certainly, she’d never slept in such luxurious comfort. She laid a hand against the cat’s unkempt coat. She slept.
GINGER
Ginger had been out all morning, unwilling to face the inevitable ritual of choosing yarrow stalks with her sisters. She’d been wandering the castle grounds, needing to be free of the confining walls and roof. It was breezy, and one of her combs had come loose. A lock of dark red hair blew across her face.
She found no solution to her problem on the castle grounds. She had long since stopped searching for one. The relief she sought was the simple freedom of being outside.
Her thoughts circled around and around on the same trampled path that had occupied her most of her life.
I can’t do this anymore.
You must.
Why?
Because you owe it to your mother. You’re the eldest. You must take care of your sisters, and you must guard your spiritual life. You cannot betray them all, and yourself as well. Without the roots of spirit, life is nothing. If you aren’t vigilant, it will all be taken away. You’ll fail everyone in your family.
But if my father knew the truth, perhaps he’d come back to us, unlock the door, love us again. Perhaps he’d allow …
He’ll never allow. You know it. All will be lost because you failed in your trust.
What is a spiritual life soaked in blood and death? Is that what Mother wanted?
You must guard.
I can’t do it anymore.
You must protect.
I hate myself.
You must do your duty to your mother and sisters.
It was time to go inside.
Ginger released her dangling comb and headed back to the castle, where chaos met her. She stood on the threshold of the room she shared with her sisters, took a steadying deep breath, and stepped into a tumult of voices, possessions, clothing, unmade beds and a yapping puppy.
She made her way slowly toward her own bed. Elizabeth and Grace were having a loud altercation about havoc wreaked by the puppy in a carelessly gaping wardrobe, Elizabeth bent on punishing the animal and Grace defending it. “It’s your own fault! You’re so careless!”
Susan had eaten all the raisins meant for a cake and the cook had scolded her bitterly. “I didn’t know they were for a cake, Ginger, honestly! I just wanted a snack!”
Amy had her easel up and was painting, paying no attention to the activity around her. She had a quiet attic room with good light to paint in, but for some reason preferred squashing next to her bed with chair and easel in the middle of the noise. Ginger saw a tube of burnt sienna oozing fatly onto the bedspread.
As she went, she did her best to create order out of chaos, picking several items of clothing off the floor and laying them across beds and chairs. She also collected a stack of books to be returned to the study.
“Gemma, will you collect the shoes?” she called over the noise.
“Yes!” said a round-faced young woman who bounced up from the floor between two beds. She began at once to collect a pair of worn-out shoes from each bedside, excavating among dresses, stockings, books, drawing pads, gloves, scarves and underwear.
Once she’d reached her own bed, tidier than most of those around her, Ginger surveyed her troops and the room for progress. A pile of shoes lay near the door for disposal, a daily reproach.
The row of beds was made, ranging from neat, tight sheets and covers to duvets pulled hastily over wrinkled blankets and squashed pillows. Most of the floor was visible. Clothing was out of sight, if not neatly hung and folded.
It was the best any reasonable person could expect from a room shared by twelve sisters, ages 25 to 40.
She took a jar off her chest of drawers. A handful of dried yarrow stems bristled out of it. As she counted aloud in the now silent room, eleven other voices joined in. “Five, six, seven, eight…” She chose twelve stems at random and evened up the bottoms, throwing a scarf over her hand to conceal all but the tips. Each of her sisters drew out a stem.
This time Ginger held the short one. She sighed.
When she’d been younger and her mother was alive, she’d assumed she’d be married as soon as she came of age, leave her parents and home, make a new family and a new life.
That was more than twenty years ago. The sleeping chamber that once held twelve young women and girls now held twelve full-grown women, trapped in a kind of arrested childhood by their father’s obsession and their mother’s legacy of secrecy.
Ginger looked at the short stalk between her fingers and thought this is all I’ll ever be. There’s no way out of this madness. Every life we take will diminish ours a little more until we’re old women and our own deaths come. Is this what you wanted for your daughters, Mother?
They didn’t kill with their own hands, of course. They killed with smiles and hints, flattery and attention. They killed with a sleeping draught in a goblet of wine, passed so fingers must brush casually together. The young men drank, dreaming of power and seduction, slept, and thus forfeited their lives.
After his interview with the king, each suitor was shown to a room off the princesses’ bed chamber. It was a pleasant sitting room with comfortable chairs. Windows lined one wall and a lemon tree grew in a large pot in the sun flood. The sister who’d drawn the short straw administered the sleeping draught, hidden in a careful dose of charm and a glass of wine.
Ginger readied a tray with wine and elegant bits of food. Why couldn’t everyone have what they needed, instead of working at such hopeless cross purposes? Life had to offer more than this — didn’t it? Her mother had married, had children, had some experience of the world. Then, without warning or explanation, she’d simply gone, leaving Ginger to honor and keep the jail of secrecy they were all chained in.
When the tray was arranged, she carefully added three drops of sleeping draught to the visitor’s goblet, knocked on the door and entered the sitting room at his bidding.
Her first impression was surprise at his age. This was no youth. Iron flecked his thick hair and his face was lined. She couldn’t tell the color of his rather deep-set eyes at first glance. He took the tray from her, thanking her courteously. She distracted him prettily with a taste of this and a taste of that, pouring out wine for both of them. When his goblet was safely in his hand she relaxed slightly. They moved to the window and looked out across the summer landscape.
She took a sip of her wine and prepared to flatter and show an interest in the stranger, feeling rebellious and depressed. What would happen if she took the goblet out of his hands and said “Leave! Leave now or you’ll surely die!”
He touched the outside of his pocket, as though checking to make sure something was there, and said, “You said your name was Ginger. I’m Radulf.”
She looked into his face and realized his eyes were hazel. His short dark beard was greyer than the hair on his head. She groped for something to say.
“Tell me about your life here,” he invited.
She had a strong urge to tell him everything — every single thing she’d learned, felt and thought, right up to her present turmoil.
She didn’t, of course. But she did mention her mother, keeping the loss casual, and her sisters. She made no mention of shoes danced to pieces each morning, and neither did he. They discovered a mutual love of books and explored a shelf of them in the sitting room, finding favorite authors in common.
This was always the part she dreaded most, making conversation while watching the goblet empty, sip by sip. On this evening, light faded from the sky and the goblet emptied without her being aware, she enjoyed the conversation so much. He was interested but not intrusive, expressive, and willing to share — to a point. He had private depths to match hers.
She left him with a book in his hand in a ring of lamp light. He was still awake, but she knew soon he’d sleep. She shut the door to the sitting room softly behind her, set the tray down, and made ready for the evening.
The headboard of one of the canopied beds concealed a locked door. Three of the women moved the bed aside, put out the lights and ducked through it, Gemma, the youngest sister, leading the way. Ginger brought up the rear. She glanced around the room once more, pocketed the key and shut the door quietly behind her.
Stairs, wide and shallow, wound down. Dim light filtered through the air like mist. Holding up their skirts, they descended, one after another, feet quick and agile on the polished stone. Ginger thought they were like birds, light-footed and rustling, escaped from a cage, but wasn’t the freedom an illusion? They merely moved between the cage of their bedchamber and a larger cage. For an uncomfortable moment, she imagined her mother and father behind her, driving her and her sisters before them like geese.
The stairs led them into the lovely avenue of trees, with their leaves of silver, gold and diamond. The trees hummed, those with gold leaves on a deep, rich note, and those with silver leaves with a sound of green fire.
As they emerged from the avenue of trees, the lake lay before them, calm and glassy. Ginger and her sisters found their boats and set sail, a flock of silent swans.
As she skimmed across the living water, Ginger wondered if she’d already found the limits of her life, if nothing remained to learn or discover, and her restlessness and disloyalty were leading her into discontent that would erode the rest of her days and nights into bitter old age.
They reached the other side of the lake and stepped onto the dancing floor. As she went through the familiar preparation and ritual, Ginger, with relief, put away spoken language and quieted her mind. The music began and she gave herself to it gratefully and let it lift her away from her unhappy, dangerous thoughts. Her intellect slept, dreaming, and her body expanded into wild female life, at one with leaf and water drop, crystal and star.
RADULF
Radulf didn’t open the book in his hand but sat listening for a time after Ginger left him. Prudently, he’d emptied the content of his goblet into the pot holding the lemon tree while the woman Ginger was distracted. He could hear faint sounds from the town outside the window. Vague female voices spoke on the other side of the door, no words distinguishable. He heard no raised voices or sounds of distress. Perhaps they were getting ready for bed. Perhaps getting ready to go out?
After a few minutes, he rose and extinguished the lights. He put his ear to the crack of the door. Yes. They were there — or at least some were. He thought he heard several different voices. They were talking, but not sleepily, as though moving toward bed. He heard drawers being pulled open and shoved shut, and the closing of small, light doors, like wardrobes or cupboards. He had an impression of movement and anticipation.
Then the voices fell silent and he heard a heavy muffled scraping, as though something large was dragged across the floor. Carefully, he turned the door handle until he felt the latch release and opened it the merest crack, just enough to put his eye to.
A group of women stood with their backs to him. One of the canopied beds had been pulled away from the wall, not awry but straight out, leaving a narrow gap just wide enough to squeeze through. Radulf thought it possible it might not be noticed from the chamber door, should anyone glance in and check, at least if the light was dim.
A door in the wall opened. He thought one of the women had used a key, but couldn’t see clearly. One by one, they disappeared through the door, skirts rustling, gauzy scarves floating, and glimmer and shine of gold and jewels at necks and wrists. Oddly, they wore their hair down rather than pinned, braided, twisted and tied with adornments. Ginger’s shone like polished wood, perhaps mahogany. The other heads were variations on brown, some lighter and some darker. She was the last one through the door. It shut behind her and he heard a key turn in the lock.
By then he was halfway across the floor of the bedchamber. The key with the red-jeweled haft and shoulders the Firebird had given him was in his hand. He knew, without a single doubt, it would fit in the door. It did. He opened it as carefully as he could and found it swung silently, heavy but perfectly balanced. A flight of shallow marble steps twisted out of sight, reminding him for a second of the marble steps leading into the sea outside his family’s castle. But the sea lay many miles away from here. The sound of the women faded. They were well ahead. He shut the door, relocked it, and descended the steps.
He came out in an avenue of trees. A deep, rich sound of humming filled the air, a vibration he heard with his whole body. The trees gleamed and shone, reflecting light as though they bloomed with stars. When he reached them, he realized with wonder that some had leaves of gold, some leaves of silver and some leaves of diamond.
Only one way lay through the trees. He couldn’t see the women, but, faintly, he heard their voices ahead.
He came out of the trees and in front of him a lake stretched like a sheet of glass, reflecting a thousand points of light. Overhead, stars pricked the dark, or lights of some other kind. The stairs had appeared to take him down, but he didn’t feel he was underground and accepted this was some other dimension, someplace far from the sleeping chamber at the top of the stairs. The cool breath of the lake filled his lungs. Small boats moved across the dark water, silent and graceful as birds. Ginger was in the act of launching hers.
He set out around the lake on foot.
Torchlight sprang out on the far shore, guiding Radulf. He could see figures moving about. Approaching cautiously, keeping to the shadows, he discovered a wide flat floor of polished wood, set around with torches. He stopped well back in the shadows. One of the women moved from torch to torch, hand rising and falling in a graceful but commanding motion, and the torches dimmed until the floor was just lit enough to see. He came a step nearer, watching.
The women spread out on the floor, each somehow remote from the others. They weren’t talking now. They might each be alone. Slowly, coming from nowhere and everywhere, music began to swell. The hair stood up on Radulf’s arms and the back of his neck. Dar’s music had been strange, mocking and insistent or moving and tender, but the silver green voice of the bone flute couldn’t be compared to this slow upwelling. It was like comparing the fluttering pulse of a hummingbird to the slow, inexorable heartbeat of a whale. It contained the hum of the trees he’d walked under; the cool, gleaming voice of the lake; and the whispering of sails from the boats in an unseen and unfelt wind. It sounded primitive and ancient and deeply, deeply female. It held blood and bone and tangled hair.
A squat, heavy figure stepped onto the floor from the shadows. The figure was naked and female. Radulf could see a heavy growth of pubic hair spreading across her groin and onto thick thighs. Her breasts hung, soft and pendulous. She was short, with vast hips. She danced with eerie grace, moving with youthful suppleness. She was hideous. She was beautiful. Radulf couldn’t decide which. He couldn’t look away. He found himself smiling and didn’t know why. She herself smiled, grinning widely, joyously. Curls of thin hair bobbed on her head. She danced barefoot.
She reached into the shadows and lifted two drums onto the floor, held in place by some kind of stand. She laid her hands caressingly on the drums, fondling them, running her fingers across them as though across a lover’s body.
Gradually, she began to play and he heard the drums’ voices weaving with the music filling the night. She beat a steady rhythm, but he could hear variations in the beat as her hands moved across the drums. Her hands danced their own dance within the larger dance, lifting the beat out of the hollow drums, calling it, opening the way, her palms and fingers strong and skilled. She looked as elemental and natural as a mountain, as an old tree, as the desert.
Radulf had been so intent on the old woman he’d lost track of what the others were doing. He tore his gaze away from the squat, bobbing figure stamping and turning and dancing with the drums and found the twelve princesses dancing. They didn’t dance together, at least not obviously. Each appeared to be creating her own dance, but together they expressed something deeper than themselves. It was a dance of doors and steps, trees, shining leaves, water, sails, invisible wind, vaulted night sky. Hair flowed over shoulders and necks. Breasts were bared, jewels shed. Scarves floated, gloves discarded, skirts subsided into formless rustling heaps at the edge of the floor.
Radulf suddenly felt himself a violation. He didn’t belong here. He had no right to look upon this. He thought of the king, sitting in his throne looking at Radulf out of hard eyes, saying, “Women are sly creatures, untrustworthy and silly. I rue the day I took a wife, though at the time I was determined to possess her.” He’d laughed, then, bitterly, his mouth tight. “And she gave me twelve more to deal with! They’re a heavy burden, young man, a heavy burden. Secretive. But I’ll break them. One day I’ll know where they go, who they’re with and what they do. I don’t care what the price is. One day I’ll know the truth!”
Now he understood. No wonder the princesses felt they couldn’t tell their father the truth. The dance belonged to them; was theirs and theirs alone. No doubt the mystery of the queen’s disappearance was also tied to this place. The humming trees, the living lake and the dancing floor hid within the depths he’d sensed in Ginger, but what a price these women paid for their spiritual life! What a tragic price in death for such wild strength and beauty.
He returned to the lake, knowing, soon or late, they must return to the boats. He sat with his back to the dimly lit dancing floor, looking out across the gleaming water and thinking while the night played its music around the drumbeat at the center.