Harrowing the Dragon Patricia A Mckillip

Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, V, 3

There were four bodies. The Prince did not count Tybalt, who had been buried with Juliet, but who, unlike Juliet, had stayed dead. The graveyard seemed frozen after the Prince spoke, in one of those midnight moments when the owls are silent, and the moon itself stops moving. The grass, and the Prince’s chain-mail shirt, and the leaves in the great trees around us caught light the color of bone. The vault yawned fire from the torches; everything else shaped shadows alive and coiled to spring. In the torchlight, the dead seemed to move, gesturing and trying to speak, tell. But I couldn’t hear them. The Prince was still looking at me. An owl spoke, and then so did I, the only thing I could say, “Yes, my lord.”

“There they all were,” I told Beatrice later, next to her in the rumpled sheets. “Dead. So young, all of them. Juliet — a child. With a knife through her heart. And the Prince’s kinsman, Paris, who was to have married her. Blood still wet from the wound in his belly. And Romeo, not a mark on him, but lifeless, with Juliet crumpled on top of him. And Tybalt. At least he was lying there quietly, without any mystery about him except death. And we know how he died. Romeo killed him, and the Prince banished Romeo. He should have been in exile in Mantua, not killing people in a vault in Verona. Especially people already dead.”

“So you think Romeo killed Juliet?” Beatrice asked sleepily. Her eyes, dark as moon-shadow and as mysterious, had that distant, luminous look about them she got when she had us both at both ends of the night: Antonio with the nightingale, and me with the lark. I couldn’t begrudge him: he was her husband. I could only begrudge myself for knowing. He rose with the dawn for the day watch, and left that hair like beaten brass, those eyes you could crawl into and hide, those breasts the color of cream and scented with almonds. He left all that treasure alone, for anyone to plunder. For the likes of me, grimy and red-eyed from the night, to stagger home into her bed. I gave up asking how she could, why both of us, who did she love best — those things. She only ever laughed.

I could tell she wasn’t listening carefully, but I had to speak anyway, to tell, so that the ghosts would rest in my own head, dwindle back into their deaths.

“He must have come back to dishonor the bodies, I said, puzzled because it was most reasonable and most unlikely. ”Maddened by his exile. He stabs Juliet’s body and is discovered by Paris, who has come in sorrow to visit her grave.

“They fight; Romeo slays Paris. And then —” I stopped, because I could not see beyond. “Romeo dies. But how? Why?”

“I would think he would have attacked Tybalt’s body first, since Tybalt was the cause of his exile. ”

“Romeo was young and could be fierce, but he was at heart a gentle man. I spoke with him, once or twice, when he roamed the streets and orchards at night, plagued to the heart by love of some fair Rosaline. I can’t see him stabbing any woman, Capulet or no, dead or alive. But it was his knife.”

“Maybe she tried to kill him, in grief for her cousin Tybalt’s death — ”

“But she was already dead!”

“Apparently,” my mistress said with her charming laugh that was the clink of two gold coins, “not dead enough.”

So it was, with what the Prince said to me, that day turned into night, and night to day. I had to catch sleep where I could, since I could hardly search and seek during my watch. After a too-brief morning in my mistress’s arms, I went out and ate, and then met daylight head-on, bright and painful after such a night. I went to see the friar whose business it had been to bury Juliet and Tybalt in the Capulet’s vault. He might remember a flickered eyelid, a sigh without a cause, that would tell us Juliet had not been entirely dead. She had not been, of course; she had bled when she was stabbed. So they had buried her alive, only for her to wake in that terrible vault to find the death she had eluded coming at her yet again, and this time no escape.

But I could not find the friar. He was not in his cell reading, nor in his chapel shriving, nor in his garden with his weeds and wildflowers he calls medicine. His door was latched; so was his gate. The sacristan I finally found in the chapel knew only that the friar had left for Mantua, the day before, but he did not know where or why.

So I went to the palace of the Capulets.

It was noon by then, and hot as a lion’s breath. I saw my mistress’s husband Antonio, still on watch and scowling like a bear. He caught my arm, but it was not what I thought. “Stephano,” he said. “Come with me — there’s a fight between servants on Weavers Street. ”

What we need, I thought wearily. More dead. “Montague and Capulet? ” I guessed, as we began to run.

“Who else? They claim the very air that they both breathe. They blame one another for last night. The lordlings keep apart, only eyeing one another, waiting to pick their time. This quarrel shows which way the wind blows.” He was panting as we rounded a corner. He was shorter than I, older, rounder, brown, and furry beside my lanky bones and sun-whitened hair. I caught myself imagining him with her, snorting and huffing between her breasts, and I wondered in my own blank fury how she could? How? In my mind, she looked at me over his back and lifted a finger to her lips and smiled.

Antonio gripped my arm again. “There.” Still running, we watched two men chasing a third into an alehouse. Another pair grappled on the ground, their livery, the red of one House, the blue of the other, slick with dust and muck tossed out the windows. Even as we came at them, someone emptied a pot from the second story onto their heads. They sputtered, but never noticed much until we dragged them apart. Others of the day-watch had come to help; a couple, swords drawn, vanished into the alehouse after the rest of the brawlers. Holding my dirty, bleeding catch by hair and arm, I yielded him to Antonio and his men.

“Thanks,” Antonio said. “I’m glad I found you awake.”

“I have to be,” I explained. “I’m the one the Prince’s eye fell on first, last night. Find out who did this, he said. So I’m up at noon, trying to make some sense out of a brawl among the dead in a burial vault.”

He nodded. “I’ll help,” he offered. “These streets will run with blood, soon, if we don’t untangle this. What can I do? ”

I didn’t hesitate. “Come with me. Talk to Lord Capulet, while I question Juliet’s mother and her nurse. Women know things, sometimes, that men never see under their noses.” I caught a whiff of myself then, having picked up the brawlers’ perfume. “After I wash, ” I added ruefully, and we went together into the alehouse.

Both women, I was told at the Capulets’ palace, were prostrate with grief. But I waited, and they roused themselves to speak with me, to shape their horror into words, and to make sure I knew who must be to blame. They came together, the Lady Capulet with her fine face seamed with lines, her hair unbound, a new web of silver glittering over the dark, her eyes red-rimmed, sometimes dry with fury, then spilling sorrow at a memory.

“That Romeo, ” she said between her teeth. “I should have sent poison to him in Mantua. I threatened to, because he killed our Tybalt. Juliet heard me — she said she would mix it for me.” She told me this fiercely, without shame, without thinking. I did the thinking then. Poison might have killed Romeo in the vault and never left a mark on him.

“Did you? ” I asked her, since she brought it up. She stared at me. Her face crumpled then; she turned away, shaking her head.

“I wish I had,” she whispered, weeping. “I wish I had.”

I looked at the nurse, wondering if she, too, had considered poison. She was plump, doughy, pale as tallow; her eyes, fidgety as magpie’s eyes, refused to meet mine. They spent much of their time hidden in a scrap of linen.

“Oh, sir,” she wept. “Our treasure is dead, our precious duckling; all we had is so cruelly gone.”

“Yes,” 1 said, as gently as I could. “But how? How did you manage, as much as you all loved her, to put her in the vault alive?”

“She was dead!” the nurse cried out. “That morning she was to have married Paris—we found her dead in her bed! The pretty thing, with no more breath in her than a stone has, and no more life. So her wedding became her funeral.”

“But she wasn’t dead.”

Her mother, sobbing into her skirts, turned to me again. “He killed her —that fiend Montague.”

“That may be, but for him to kill her, she would have to be buried alive.”

“You keep harping on that,” she exclaimed angrily, while the nurse’s sobs got louder and louder. “How could you think we would have done such a thing?”

“I don’t know what to think,” I answered, bracing myself stolidly in the full force of their gale. “A young woman about to be married dies mysteriously in her bed, and her bridegroom to be meets his death in her tomb.” I could hardly hear my own voice over the nurse’s noise. Something was amiss. “Perhaps she tried to poison herself?” I suggested at random, since the word was in the air around us. “She did not wish to be married?”

“She did!” the nurse cried out.

“She didn’t,” the Lady Capulet said at the same time. They looked at one another. The nurse resumed sobbing. “She didn’t and then she did,” Lady Capulet amended.

“She didn’t at first?”

“I think she fretted — imagined things — the way girls will.”

“The marriage bed,” I guessed. The nurse had soaked her linen and begun on her apron.

“But she came to peace with the idea,” Lady Capulet said.

“So she would not have poisoned herself, that morning, to avoid her marriage. Tried, and failed, I mean. And wakened later in the — ”

They were both crying at me by then. It took me a moment to untangle their words, and then their meanings. “Married” they both said, and “marriage” but it wasn’t until they finally met each other’s eyes again, that we all realized the words they spoke meant wildly different things.

“My poor pet, ” the nurse was sobbing. Lady Capulet groped for a chair. I could have used one, too.

“What are you saying, Nurse.” I half expected Lady Capulet’s voice, rasping harshly through her throat, to flame like a dragon’s.

“She had no fear, my poor, proud duck, of marriage — she was no maid. She was a married lady when she died.”

“Married.” Lady Capulet had to stop to swallow. The nurse had hidden her face, trying to crawl into her apron, away, I sensed, from an impending explosion.

“To whom? ” I asked quickly, before Lady Capulet found her breath again and scorched the nurse to cinders.

“Who else?” the nurse demanded of her apron. “Of course, to Romeo.”

I tried to describe the ensuing chaos to my beloved, the next morning, but I did it badly. It made her laugh: the appalled and furious parents, the distraught nurse, the fury slowly giving way to bewilderment and then fresh tears as they realized what their daughter had done and why.

“She loved him,” I said. “That much. And he loved her. Enough for both to defy their Houses. They had some notion, the nurse said, that the marriage might bring peace between their families.”

She had stopped laughing at the image of the Lord Capulet chasing the nurse around the room, brandishing a silver branch of candles, while Antonio and I stumbled over chairs trying to catch him. She was silent a moment, dropping kisses like soft petals down my chest until I could no longer think, and reached for her, and she lifted her head, and said abruptly, “But it only answers a single question: Romeo did not kill Juliet. How did he die? How did she? Did she kill herself with his knife? Why? He came to her alive — She was still alive — ”

“The nurse kept saying the friar’s name — Friar Laurence, who married them in secret barely hours before Romeo killed Tybalt. But the friar has gone to Mantua.” I stirred, puzzled by an echo. Coincidence.

“Why Mantua?” she asked, hearing the echo.

“I don’t know . . . Romeo had been exiled to Mantua, but . . .”

But what she did then made me forget time and light and duty, until I stood in the streets again, smiling at nothing.

Then time dragged at me, and light roared, and duty called, and I went home to sleep an hour or two before I faced them all again.

I met Antonio at noon, in the tavern where I had my breakfast. He sat with me, and gave me his news, which was little enough, after the previous day.

“I spoke to Lord Montague’s nephew, Benvolio, who was Romeo’s good friend,” he said. “He knew nothing of any marriage. He was stunned by it. He thought Romeo was still brooding over some Rosaline. Walking the fields at night and babbling of love to the moon. It happened fast, his marriage to Juliet.”

“Love does, when you’re young.”

“One advantage of age: It’s a relief to be done with such stuff.”

I looked at him, startled. “Surely you love. Your wife— ”

“If I loved my wife,” he said roundly, “I would be walking in Romeo’s mooncalf paths. Love’s as dangerous when you’re older.”

“Then what would you call it? What you feel —” I stopped to settle a crumb in my throat. “For one another.”

“Use,” he said comfortably. “Habit. Familiarity. She won’t leave me, though she has her faults and I have mine. She’s beautiful, and I let her have what she wants. If she is sometimes restless, that’s as it pleases her. She gives herself to me when I want, and she does so smiling. I don’t ask about other things that catch her eye, and she doesn’t tell. They don’t matter.”

“But—”

“We are content.” He swallowed the last of his ale. “What should I do now?”

He was asking, I realized dimly, about our mystery. I was silent, remembering the open vault, the dead.

“Paris,” I said finally. “It was his page who called the watch. Find the page and ask him what he knows.”

“What will you do?”

“Break the news to Lord Montague,” I said, rising, “of his son’s unexpected marriage. Meet me here before my watch begins.”

Lord Montague’s palace seemed quiet, numbed with grief. He had lost both wife and son within days of one another: Lady Montague had died brokenhearted over Romeo’s exile from Verona. Lord Montague, a tall, imposing man with hair whiter than I remembered, greeted me listlessly. He had been told, he said, of the marriage.

“By whom?” I asked.

His mouth tightened a little, eased. He sighed. “By my great enemies, the Capulets. We are left with very little to be angry about, and very much to grieve over. Our faults, especially. Our children might be alive, if we had — if we hadn’t—” He stopped, his mouth twitching, then added, “I have made offers of peace to Lord Capulet. Our children tried to love. It seems wrong to war over that.”

I bowed my head, relieved. But there were still questions. “Did Romeo go alone to his exile?”

He shook his head. “Balthasar went with him. His man. He was always faithful, very loyal to my son. Why?”

“May I speak to him? He might have been there in the graveyard with Romeo. He might be able to tell us how Romeo died. And why.”

“He died — ” He stopped again. “He died of love.”

So it seemed. I touched my brow, where too little sleep, too many riddles, were beginning to brawl behind my eyes. “I am very sorry, my lord. He was a kind young man, and gentle, unless he was provoked. And then from all accounts brave, and true to his friends.”

“Balthasar knows little,” Lord Montague said, but sent a page for him. He added, while we waited, “My son was as good at killing as at loving. We taught him to do all things well. I suppose he killed Paris out of some kind of jealousy — ”

“It seems unlikely. More likely that Paris attacked him, thinking that Romeo had come to dishonor the dead, in revenge for his exile.”

“What was Paris doing there?”

“I’m not sure, yet. But he was young, in love. That’s when I would meet Romeo, wandering alone at night, sighing over Rosaline.”

“Rosaline.” He snorted faintly, and then sighed himself. Better to have lived with a heart broken by Rosaline, than to have died for true love and Juliet.

Or was it better? I wondered.

Easier to think you love than to love.

Easier to tell yourself lies than truth.

“He took me with him to the graveyard, to help him open the vault, but he would not let me stay,” Balthasar told us when I asked. He seemed a modest young man, neat and well-spoken. Spidery lines ran across his brow; he blinked often, trying not to see, I guessed, not to remember. “He —he threatened me. That if I stayed, he would kill me.” He closed his eyes tightly, as if the light hurt them. “I didn’t believe him. But he wanted so badly for me to leave —How could I not do what he wanted?”

“That’s all you saw? The open vault and Romeo entering? Where was Paris?”

“I don’t know. I was running, by then. I never thought — never for a moment—I only thought he would take some comfort there, with her, and then leave. I thought — he had to see that she was dead, before he could live again.” He ground the heel of his hand into one eye a moment, while we watched. Then he added tonelessly, “He gave me a letter for you, my lord.”

“What?” we both demanded.

“I forgot about it. I think I lost it when I ran.”

“What did it say? In heaven’s name, boy — ”

“I don’t know, my lord,” he answered wearily. “I never learned to read. I didn’t know it might be important. I never use letters. He wrote it just before we left Mantua for Verona.” He lifted his sad, winking eyes, to Lord Montague’s face. “I expected that he would be alive to tell you.”

I went to the friar’s cell again, to see if he had returned, but there was no sign of him, no word, the sacristan said. My steps led me through the graveyard then, back to the vault; I was seized with some vague, nightmarish notion that the dead had wakened again, and I would find the vault gaping open to show fresh horrors, more dead dead again, more mysteries. But it was closed, silent. Trees murmured around me in a hot summer breeze; doves cooed their sad, comforting song. I walked around the vault, searching the long grass, the bushes, looking for something. Anything. What I found was a crowbar one of them had dropped, which only perplexed me more. What had Romeo expected to find if he had brought it to open the vault? A living Juliet? A shiver ran through me, even as I sweated. Was that what they had planned? That she should pretend to die, and he would come into her grave to rescue her? But why did he die, then? Had he not found her alive? She had been alive enough to kill herself at least and fall over his lifeless body.

She had found him dead, then. And killed herself.

But how had he died? And why?

A beggar accosted me as I left the graveyard. A stranger to Verona, I thought; I did not recognize his face. He tried to speak to me, after I tossed him a coin, but I didn’t listen; 1 couldn’t hear him over the clamoring mystery in my brain. I went home again, to sleep a while before my watch. I woke at dusk, thickheaded and unrefreshed, still with nothing answered. I had hoped to shape my dreams into solutions, but all I dreamed was what I had seen: Juliet’s face, lovely as a flower and ghostly pale, her blood seeping into Romeo’s clothing; Paris lying against the wall, trying to coil himself around his wound; Romeo’s staring eyes, his parted lips, as if in the end he had seen Juliet alive and tried to speak; great, waxen trumpets of lilies scattered everywhere.

As I ate my meal at dusk in the tavern, Antonio told me where the lilies had come from.

“Paris brought them, his page said.” I nodded, unsurprised. “He told his page to keep watch, and whistle if he heard anyone coming.”

“Did he bring a crowbar as well as flowers?” I asked.

“No. Why? Was there one? ” He answered himself. “There would have to be.”

“Then Romeo opened the vault himself. So the page is watching, and Paris is—”

“Strewing flowers in front of the vault and weeping — ”

“And what then? Someone comes?”

“Romeo comes. They hide, Paris and his page, and watch Romeo order Balthasar away and open the vault. So Paris — ”

“Paris,” I said, illumined, “thinks Romeo has come to defile the place. Of course. So he leaps to defend Juliet, and they fight.”

“With some reluctance, it seems, on Romeo’s part. The page said he spoke with a frantic courtesy, begging Paris to leave. But of course Paris would not. So he died there.”

“And the page?”

“He left when they began to fight, and ran to get the watch.”

Me. I grunted and chewed a tasteless bite. I felt Antonio’s eyes on me, watching, unblinking. I wondered if he knew where my steps led me, at every dawn after my watch. I met his eyes finally, found them smiling faintly, enigmatic. Amused? I pushed my chair back noisily, finishing my meal as I rose.

“What now?” he asked, intent as ever on the mystery. I shook my head.

“I don’t know. If Friar Laurence does not return soon, I may have to ride to Mantua and look for him. I’ll speak to the Prince tomorrow, tell him what he hasn’t heard by now. But there are still those nagging questions. Did Juliet intend to kill herself on the morning of her marriage to Paris? Did Romeo come to the vault to mourn her death, or did he expect to find her alive? What killed him?”

“Poison, likely. He came to die beside her in the vault.”

“But why was she still alive?”

He shook his head, baffled. “Star-crossed, maybe. They were never meant to live. Only to love.”

He left me with that thought, as if the lovers had been more than human, nothing like us, who, older and growing tawdry with life, could no more have loved again than we could have cut new teeth. He went home to her; I went into the darkening streets.

Another beggar stopped me, just before dawn; I could not see his face. Perhaps it was the same one. I could barely speak by then, with weariness; I only wanted to sleep. He tried to follow me, but I did not want him to see where I was going, and I spoke sharply to him. He faded away with the night. I dropped into my mistress’s arms, which she held out to me as generously as ever. I tried to bury myself in her sweetness as in some warm, gently moving sea, but my thoughts kept tossing me onto a rocky shore.

“Do you love me? ” I asked her once, without meaning to.

“Of course,” she said. “Stephano. Of course.”

The beggar was waiting for me when I left her.

I stopped when I saw him, angry and mystified. Maybe he thought to threaten me by telling Antonio what he had seen; maybe he had some notion that Antonio might care. He had started to speak even before I stopped; busy studying him, I didn’t listen. He was tall and gaunt as some desert saint; his clothes hung loosely on him, where they weren’t holding themselves together by a thread. His hair and brows were shaggy, iron-grey and white. His feet were bare and dusty, cracked, as if he had walked parched roads for some time.

He tried to fill my hand with gold, which is when I began to listen to him.

“He told me to buy food with it, but I found I could not eat his gold. Not with what I gave him. He would not hear ‘no.’ I will pay your poverty, he said, not your will. I didn’t have the will to refuse. Refuse to eat, refuse to live. Until I heard what happened to him. I came to give back his gold. I can’t take back what I gave him, but I will not eat his death.”

I closed my eyes, opened them, to see if he was still there, if his words made any better sense. “Who are you?” I asked, bewildered.

“A poor apothecary, from Mantua. I wept when I heard. He spoke so courteously to me. He was so young, so bright and vibrant with life. I could not believe he would really want to die. A young woman would smile at him, I thought, and he would wonder how he could have ever thought of dying — ”

“Wait.” I held up my hand. “Wait.” My voice shook; I had to swallow what it was he told me. “You’re speaking of Romeo — ”

“I didn’t know his name,” he said. “Until we heard the news in Mantua, about the strange deaths in Verona. Then I knew it must be him.”

“He bought poison from you. To kill himself.”

“Yes.”

“It’s death — ” My voice rose, broke away from me. “It’s death for you to tell me this — If I told them in Mantua what you sold — ”

“I know.” He peered at me, owl-like, from under his tufted brows, fearless, resigned. “I have done what I have done. And now you must.”

I was silent, staring at him, piecing things together. Romeo must have heard of Juliet’s death and bought poison in Mantua to die beside her in that vault. I felt something push into my throat, some word, some noise. My eyes stung suddenly. They came alive for me, again: the two young lovers, wanting only time and room in the world to love. We had no time or room, in lives crowded with our empty passions, to give them.

I leaned back against the stone wall of my mistress’s house, shaking, dry with sorrow, trying to hear some heartbeat in the stones. I heard only the clink of gold that was her laugh.

“You must take it, ” the apothecary said. I opened my eyes, stared down at the gold he had let fall into my hands. I moved finally, pushed myself away from the wall.

“Come with me,” I said.

“What will you do with me?”

“Feed you. What else? And after that you will leave this city, and I will never see your face again. Will I?”

“Why?” he asked me softly, his bird-eyes, weary and unblinking, holding mine.

“Because,” I sighed, “neither you nor I nor the stars themselves could have kept that young man alive without his Juliet.” I gave him back the gold. “Keep it. I would have to explain it otherwise. It is not from Romeo, but from me.”

I walked him to the city gates, after we ate, to make sure that he did not linger. He seemed bewildered but not, on the whole, unhappy to be still alive. I had no desire to bring the issue up with the Prince. That Romeo took poison seemed obvious; he might have stolen it as easily as bought it. Juliet must have taken some herself, on her wedding morning. I had no idea where she had gotten that. Maybe, I thought, as I watched the apothecary become a shimmer of dust in the distance, we would never know.

But when I went to the friar’s cell that morning, his garden gate was open, and so was his door. I walked in. His lean face was harried and wan with grief, but unsurprised, as if he expected me.

“Stephano,” he said, and pulled me down beside him. “I have been — ”

“I know, in Mantua.”

“No,” he said, exasperated. “In Verona. I was leaving for Mantua to tell young Romeo that Juliet would only pretend to die — the letter I wrote him had gone astray. But I wound up quarantined along with my traveling companion, Friar John, who had been visiting the sick. Plague, we were told, but it was only measles. They finally let me out this morning. Only to be stricken with this news ...”

“Friar Laurence, did you give Juliet the poison?”

“It was only to make her pretend to die! So that she would not have to go through that farce of a wedding.” He pulled a dusty boot off and flung it across the room, then sat brooding at it a moment. “A foolish old man,” he breathed. “Who did I think I was, to meddle with love? Blame me for everything. Let me find my sandals. Then take me to the Prince — I’ll tell him — ”

“I think we’re all to blame,” I said softly, and sat on one of his uncomfortable stools. “And maybe it was their destiny to bring Verona peace. Friar, will you shrive me before we go?”

His brows rose in surprise at my oddly timed request. But he only touched the crucifix on his breast and murmured, “Who will forgive me?”

Voyage into the Heart

The virgin they got from the cow barn, the Prince’s daughter being, as she put it, indisposed. She did look pale, the mage thought, her golden skin blanching the color of boiled almonds at the idea. She was to be married within the week; the mage was not without sympathy. Fortunately, the Prince had other things on his mind.

“Just find one,” he said impatiently, assuming either that virgins grew on trees or that the word, spoken, would make itself true. “Anyone will do.”

Any number of virgins appeared at the mage’s summons, all looking quiet, modest, beautifully dressed for the occasion. They became suffused with blushes at the mage’s questions.

Lips trembled, eyes hid themselves, hands rose gracefully, silk shaken back from wrists, to touch quickly beating hearts or slender, blue-veined throats wound with chains of gold thinner than the tremulous veins. They saw themselves waiting at the edge of the forest, listening to the wild hoofbeats, the urgent clamor of horns, the courtiers in their rich leathers and furs riding hard, sweating, shouting, slowly closing around the elusive beast, driving it towards its heart’s desire. For her only would it stop; to her only would it meekly yield its power and its beauty, while all around her men fell silent, watching the single moon-white horn descend, the liquid eye close, the proud head fall to rest across her thighs.

“Yena,” the mage said at one face, startled out of his boredom. “What are you doing here? ”

There was no smile in her sapphire eyes, nothing that had been there for him in the dark, scant hours before. She answered solemnly, “My heart is still virginal, my lord Ur. I have not lost my innocence; I have only gained a certain knowledge.”

What she said was true; he felt it. But he answered grimly, “You stand to lose more than your innocence.” He pitched his voice to be heard, subtly, even by those daydreaming outside the corridor. “The Prince wants that horn to detect poison at his daughter’s wedding feast. Despite treaties, he still fears betrayal from old enemies. The betrothal is devoid of romance and so is this hunt. The animal will run from you. I don’t know what the Prince will do, but he will not thank you.”

He saw her swallow. He heard whisperings through the stone walls, footsteps muffled in supple leather and silk trying to walk on air away from him.

Then he heard rough voices, a woman’s pithy curse. The doorway cleared abruptly at a whiff of barn. A young woman with astonishing eyes, so light and clear they seemed faceted like jewels, hovered in the doorway. A stabler prodded her forward, pushed himself in behind her.

“My daughter, my lord. She doesn’t like men.”

The mage gazed at her, received only annoyance and some fear from her haunting eyes. They made him turn inward, look at his own past to see what she was seeing in him.

“Well,” he wondered, “why should she?”

She didn’t seem to know what they wanted of her, why they insisted on washing her, dressing her in silks, making her sit under a tree, just beyond the forest’s edge. “A what?” she kept saying. “Is that all you want me to do? Just sit? What about that lot? Did you see those eyes? Like bulging eggs in a pan, chestnuts in a fire. I’m warning, if they touch me, I’ll feed their livers to the pigs. ”

“No one,” said the mage’s disembodied voice somewhere up the tree, “will hurt you.”

She cast a glance like white flame up at him. Not even his spell, he felt suddenly, could withstand that vision. But she said, rising, “Where are you? I can’t see you. Can’t I be up there with you? They’ll run me down, they; with their brains in their breeches and scrambled from bouncing in their saddles — ”

“Hush,” the mage breathed, weaving the word into the sound of his voice, so that the leaves hushed around him, and the air. His spell did not touch her—the animal might scent it — but the stillness he had created did. She settled herself again, her arms around her knees. A tangle of horns, trumpets, shouts, preceded the hunt. Her face turned toward the sounds, her hands tightening. But she stayed still, biting her lower lip with nervousness. Her lips were full, the mage noted, though she was scrawny enough. Washed and brushed, her dark hair revealed shades of fire, even gold. The fanfares sounded again, closer now. She looked up fretfully, trying to find him.

“This is all — ”

“It won’t hurt you,” he promised. “I’ll let nothing hurt you. It will come to you as docilely as a cat. A child.”

She snorted, shifting restlessly. “Maybe they come that way to you, cats and barn brats. Then what? Then what after I just sit and let it come?”

“Nothing. You go back.”

“That’s all.”

“All,” he said, and then he saw the animal running through the shadows within the wood.

It made no sound. It saw him in the tree; its night-dark eyes found him, pinned him motionless on the branch. It did not fear him. Transfixed, he realized that it feared nothing, not the dogs at its heels, nor the noise, the arrows flicking futilely in its wake, the bellowing men. Nothing. It was ancient, moon-white, and so wild nothing could ever threaten it; nothing else existed with such fierceness, such power, nothing that could die. It was an element, the mage saw, like air or fire. Stunned, he became visible and did not know it. Below him, the woman sat as motionlessly, no longer fretful, watching it come at her. The mage could not hear her breathe. As it grew close she made a sound, a small sound such as a child might make, too full of wonder to find a word for it.

She lifted her hands. The star burning toward her stopped. Something rippled through it: a scent, a recognition. Its horn spiraled like a shell to a fine and dangerous point. It moved toward her, step by cautious step, as if it felt she might run.

Behind it, almost soundlessly, the hunters ranged themselves along the trees, waiting. Even the dogs were silent.

It dropped its head into her hands. Awkwardly, she stroked its pelt, making that sound again, as impossible or unexpected textures melted through the scars and calluses on her hands. It began to kneel to her. The mage felt his throat burn suddenly, his eyes sting with wonder, as they had not for centuries, over something as simple as this: All the tales of it were true.

It laid its head across her lap. She stroked it one more time. Then she looked up toward the mage, found him, tried to smile at him in excitement and astonishment, while tears glittered down her face, caught between her lips. Her eyes held him, held all his attention. They contained, he realized, the same innocent, burning power he had glimpsed in the great beast that had come to rest beneath her hands. Amazed again, he thought: Like calls to like.

And then a blade severed the horn from the head with a single cut. A second drove into the animal’s heart.

The mage fell out of the tree. He vanished, falling, then reappeared on his feet as the hunters made way for the Prince, and the woman, screaming, stared at the bleeding head on her knees. The mage, groping for words, found nothing, nothing where anything should be, no word for this: It had never happened before. The Prince laid a hand on his shoulder, laughing, and said something. Then the woman screamed again and flung herself catlike off the ground at the mage.

“You saw—” She still wept, though now her teeth were clenched with grief, her face twisted with horror and fury. “You saw—Your face said everything you saw! But you let them — How could you let them? How could you?” She struck him suddenly, and again, fierce, openhanded blows that gave him, for the first time in centuries, the taste of his own blood.

And then she was quiet, lying across the animal, her face against its face, her arm hung across its neck, as if she still grieved, but silently now, so silently that she cast her spell over all the men. They stared down at her, motionless. Finally, one of them cleared his throat and sheathed his bloody sword. The Prince said, “Take the animal; the hooves might be useful. What do you think, Ur? Are there magical properties in the hooves?”

The mage, beginning to tremble, felt the spiraled horn split his brow, root itself in his thoughts.

“Ur?” the Prince said, from very far away. “Should we bother with the hooves? Ur.”

Then there was silence again, as spellbound bone and sinew strained against their familiar shape; the men around the mage grew shadowy, insignificant. Words escaped him, memories, finally even his name. Her eyes opened in his heart to haunt him with their power and innocence and wonder, all he remembered of being human. Seeking her, he fled from the world he knew into the beginning of the tale.

Toad

The first thing that leaps to the eye is that my beloved had no manners. She behaved like a spoiled brat once she had what she wanted. If it had not been for her father, where would I have been? Still hanging around the well, instead of dressed in silks and wearing a crown, and being bowed and scraped to, not to mention diving in and out of the dark, moist cave of our marriage sheets, cresting waves of satin like seals, barking and tossing figs to one another, then diving back down, bearing soft, plump fruit in our mouths. “Old waddler,” she called me at first, with a degree of accuracy missing from subsequent complaints. She never could tell a frog from a toad.

Why, you might wonder, would any self-respecting toad, having been slammed against a wall by a furious brat of a princess, want, upon regaining his own shape, to marry her? Not only was she devious, promising me things and then ignoring her promises when threatened by the cold proximity of toad, she was bad-tempered to boot. The story that has come down doesn’t make a lot of sense here: why are lies and temper rewarded with the handsome prince? She didn’t want to let me into the castle, she didn’t want to feed me, she didn’t want to touch me; above all she didn’t want me in her bed. When I pleaded with her to show mercy, to become again that sweet, weeping, charming child beside the well who promised me everything I asked for, she picked me up as if I were the golden ball that I had rescued for her and bounced me off the stones. If she had missed the wall and I had gone flying out a window, what might have happened? Would I have waddled away, muttering and limping, under the moonlight, to slide back into the well until fate tossed another golden ball my way?

Maybe.

She’ll never know.

Her father comes out well in the stories. A man of honor, harassed by his exasperating daughter, who tries to wheedle and whine her way out of her promises. A king, who would consent to eat with a toad at his table, for no other reason than to make his daughter keep her word. “Papa, please, no, ” she begged, her gray eyes awash with tears, the way I had first seen her, her curly hair, golden as her ball, tumbling out of its pins to her shoulders. “Papa, please don’t make me let it in. Don’t make me share my food with it. Don’t make me touch it. I’ll die if I have to touch a frog. ”

“It’s a toad,” he said at one point, watching me drink wine out of her goblet. She had his gray eyes; he saw a bit more clearly than she, but not enough: only enough to use me as a lesson in his daughter’s life.

“Frog, toad, what’s the difference? Papa, please don’t make me!”

“Toads,” he said accurately, “are generally uglier than frogs. Most have nubby, bumpy skin — ”

“I’ll get warts, Papa!”

“That’s a fairy tale. Look at its squat body, its short legs, made for insignificant hops, or even for walking, like a dog. Observe its drab coloring.” He added, warming to his subject while I finished his daughter’s dessert, “They have quite interesting breeding habits. Some lay eggs on land instead of water. Others give birth to tiny toads, already fully formed. Among midwife toads, the male carries the eggs with him until they hatch, moistening them in — ”

“That’s disgusting!”

“I would like to be taken to bed now,” I said, wiping my mouth with her embroidered linen.

“Papa!”

“You promised,” I reminded her reproachfully. “I can’t get up the stairs; you’ll have to carry me. As your father pointed out, my limbs are short.”

“Papa, please!”

“You promised,” he said coldly: an honorable man. A lesson was to be learned simply at the expense of a stain of well water on her sheets, a certain clamminess in the atmosphere. What harm could possibly come to her?

I have always thought that her instincts were quite sound. For one thing: consider her age. Young, beautiful, barely marriageable, she might have kissed—though contrary to common belief, not me — but she had most certainly never taken anyone to bed with her besides her nurse and her dolls. Who would want an ugly, dank and warty toad in her bed instead of what she must have had vague yearnings for? And after all that talk of breeding habits! Something bloated and insistent, moving formlessly under her sheets while she tried to sleep, something cold, damp, humorless — who could blame her for losing her temper?

Then why did she make those promises?

Because something in her heart, in her marrow, recognized me.

Let’s begin with the child sitting beside the well, beneath the linden tree. She thinks she is alone, though her world, she knows, proceeds in familiar and satisfactory fashion within the elegant castle beyond the trees. The linden is in bloom; its creamy flowers drift down into her hair, drop and float upon the dark water. Breeze strokes her hair, her cheeks. She tosses her favorite plaything, her golden ball, absently toward the sky, enjoying the suppleness and grace of her body, the thin silk blowing against her skin. She wears her favorite dress, green as the heart-shaped linden leaves; it makes her feel like a leaf, blown lightly in the wind. She throws her ball, takes a breath of air made complex and intoxicating by scents from the tree, the gardens, the moist earth at the lip of the well. She catches her ball, throws it again, thinks of nothing. She misses the ball.

It falls with a splash into the middle of the well, and, weighted with its tracery of gold, sinks out of sight. She has no idea how deep the water is, what snakes and silver eels might live in it, what long grasses might reach up to twine around her if she dares leap into it. She does what has always worked in her short life: she weeps.

I appear.

Her grief is genuine and quite moving; she might have dropped a child into the well instead of a ball. She scarcely sees me. I make little impression on her sorrow except as a means to end it. In her experience, help answers when she calls; her desperation transforms the world so that even toads can talk.

All her attention is on the water when she hears my voice. She speaks impatiently, wiping her eyes with her silks, to see better into the rippling shadows. “Oh, it’s a frog. Old waddler, I dropped my ball in the water — I must have it back! I’ll die without it! I’ll give you anything if you get it for me — these pearls, my crown — anything! So will my papa.”

She scarcely listens to herself, or to me. I am nothing but a frog, I while away the time eating flies, swimming in the slime, sitting in the reeds and croaking. Her pearls might resemble the translucent eggs of frogs, but I would have no real interest in them. Yes, of course I can be her playmate, her companion; she has had fantasy friends before. Yes, I can eat out of her plate; they all do. Yes, I can drink from her cup. Yes, I can sleep in her bed—yes, yes, anything! Just stop croaking and fetch my ball for me.

I drop it at her feet. I am no longer visible; I have become a fantasy, a dream. A talking frog? Don’t be silly, frogs don’t talk. Even when I cry out to her as she runs away, laughing and tossing her ball, that’s what she knows: frogs don’t talk. Wait for me! I cry. You promised! But she no longer hears me. All her fantasy friends vanish when she no longer needs them.

So it must have been with a first, faint sense of terror that she heard my watery squelching across the marble floor as she sat eating with her father. They were not alone, but who among her father’s elegantly bored courtiers would have questioned the existence of a talking frog? The court went on with their meal, secretly delighting in the argument at the royal table. I ate silently and listened to their discreet murmurings. Most took the princess’s view and wished me removed with the salmon bones, the fruit peelings, and tossed unceremoniously out the kitchen door. Others thought her father right: I would be a harmless lesson for a spoiled daughter. Most saw a frog. A toad with its poisonous skin touching the princess’s goblet, leaving traces of its spittle on her plate? Unthinkable! Therefore: I was a frog. Others were not so sure. The king recognized me, of course, but, setting aside the fact that I could talk, seemed to believe that for all other purposes, I would behave in predictable toad fashion toward humans, desiring mainly to be ignored and not to be squashed.

But the princess knew: to journey up the stairs with me dangling between her reluctant fingers would be to turn her back to that fair afternoon, the sweet linden blossoms, the golden-haired child tossing her ball, spinning and glinting, toward the sun, then watching it fall down, light cascading over leaves into shadow, until it fell, unerringly, back into her hands. When the ball plummeted into the depths of the well, she wept for her lost self. Faced with the future in the form of a toad, she bargained badly: she exchanged her childhood for me.

Who am I?

Some of the courtiers knew me. Their wealth and finery did not shelter them from air or mud, or from the tales that are breathed into the heart, that cling to boot soles and breed life. They whisper among themselves. Listen.

“Toads mean pain, death. Think of the ugly toadfish that ejects its spines into the hands of the unwary fisher. Think of the poisonous toadstool.”

“If you kill a toad with your hands, the skin of your face and hands will become hardened, lumpy, pimpled. Toads suck the breath of the sleeper, bring death.”

“But consider the midwife toad, both male and female, involved with life.”

“If you spit and hit a toad, you will die.”

“A toad placed on a cut will heal it.”

“If you anger a toad it will inflate itself with a terrible poison and burst, taking you with it as it dies.”

“Toads portend life. Consider the Egyptians, who believe that the toad represents the womb, and its cries are the cries of unborn children.”

“She is life.”

“It is death.”

“She belongs to the moon, she croaks to the crescent moon. Consider the Northerners, who believe she rescues life itself, when it ripens into the shape of a red apple and falls down into the well.”

“She is life.”

“It is death.”

“She is both.”

To the princess, carrying me with loathing up the stairs, a wisp of linen separating the shapeless, lumpy sack of my body from her fingers, I am the source of an enormous and irrational irritation. I rescued her golden ball; why could she not be gracious? I would be gone by morning. But she knew, she knew, deep in her; she heard the croaking of tiny, invisible frogs; she recognized the midwife toad.

If she had been gracious, I would indeed have been gone by morning. But her instincts held fast: I was danger, I was the unknown. I was what she wanted and did not want. She could not rid herself of me fast enough, or violently enough. But because she knew me, and part of her cried Not yet! Not yet! she flung me as far from her as she could without losing sight of me.

Changing shape is easy; I do it all the time.

The moment she saw me on the floor, with my strong young limbs and dazed expression, rubbing my head and wondering groggily if I were still frog-naked, she tossed her heart into my well and dove after it herself. She covered me with a blanket, though not without a startled and curious glance at essentials. She accepted her future with remarkable composure. She stroked my curly hair, whose color, along with the color of my eyes, I had taken from her favorite doll, and listened to my sad tale.

A prince, I told her. A witch I had accidentally offended; they offend so easily, it seems. She had turned me into a toad and said . . .

“You rescued me,” I said gratefully, overlooking her rudeness, as did she. “Those who love me will be overjoyed to see me again. How beautiful you are,” I added. “Is it just because yours is the first kind face I have seen in so long?”

“Yes,” she said breathlessly. “No.” Somehow our hands became entwined before she remembered propriety. “I must take you to meet my father.”

“Perhaps I should dress first.”

“Perhaps you should.”

And so I increase and multiply, trying to keep up with all the voices in the rivers and ponds, bogs and swamps, that cry out to be born. Some tales are simpler than others. This, like pond water, seems at first glance as clear as day. Then, when you scoop water in your hand and look at it, you begin to see all the little mysteries swarming in it, which, if you had drunk the water without looking first, you never would have seen. But now that you have seen, you stand there under the hot sun, thirsty, but not sure what you will be drinking, and wishing, perhaps, that you had not looked so closely, that you had just swallowed me down and gone your way, refreshed.

Some tales are simpler than others. But go ahead and drink: the ending is always the same.

Copyrights and Acknowledgments