Black Pearls (18 page)

I was the first, then, to hear how the queen had driven away her lovely stepchild. Long before wetnurses whispered it to children at bedtime and courtiers banished it, with a wave of their ringed fingers, to the exile of stale gossip, the fairest woman I have ever seen told me her story. It did not surprise me at all to learn that Diamonda was of royal blood—for me, she shone as brightly in our thatched cottage as she does in the palace that is now her home. What
did
astound me, though, was the idea that anyone anywhere could wish her harm.

"How could your mother put a price on your head?" I asked. "How could flesh turn against flesh?"

"She is not my mother, Erin. My father used to tell me he dreamed my mother." The firelight found her frown, kissed it with honey. "When I was little, it made Father sad to speak of her. Each time I asked what she looked like, he would only lean on my arm and make me take him to the huge mirror in my stepmother's bedchamber. He would stand me in front of it and stare over my head into the glass. 'There,' he would say, 'That is what your mother looked like.'"

I cannot remember my own mother, but I know she was not a dwarf. I know because of the wine pitcher that Timias bought at Genfall. As Diamonda spoke, I glanced up to where it rested above the hearth. The comely woman holding grapevines on the handle might have been our mother's twin; all my brothers said so. When I was a child, something stubborn, some unschooled weed of pride, sprouted in me each time they told the story of my birth. Too weak to lift her head or open her eyes, my mother had smiled at them as she held me tight. "This one," she'd said, "is fine as a prince. He's a dear, normal little lad, isn't he, boys? I told your father it would be different this time. I wish he could see what a strapping son I have borne!"

"Ah, yes," my brothers told their dying mother. "Here's a healthy, normal babe for you at last." They had crowded around me, patting my ugly head, kissing my withered limbs.

"Just look at his handsome face," crowed Rowan. "And his body," admired Gwiffert, "how firm and straight it is!" "He will be as tall as an oak," promised Timias, tears blinding his eyes. "As strong as any man for miles," wept Dynll.

Only Ferin and Corwyn, too young to play the game, began to protest that the baby's head was much too large for its body, that its eyes bulged horribly from their sockets. So they were banished from the room and did not see our mother sigh, draw me to her, and whisper in my ear, "The best for last, sweet Erin. I saved the best for last." Dynll says I never cried until they took me from her arms.

The fire was a gray powder, but still I could not let Diamonda go. "There is no reason to run away," I insisted. "This poor place is probably the last spot on earth your stepmother's soldiers would look for you. Why, you could stay safe here forever while that greedy monster tears up the country for miles around."

"I wish it were true, but the smith's wife told me today there's a brigade of royal troops camped near Higman's Crossing." Diamonda poured the last of her tea over the ashes, then bent her head over the empty cup. "I wonder why the money isn't enough, Erin. She has all of Father's fortune. Why does she need my death?"

"Perhaps," I said, stiffening with pleasure as she took the hand I offered, "your stepmother is afraid you will change your mind about renouncing your inheritance. She has only to look at you to know there is no man alive who would not fight to the death to support you."

The more she smiled, the more I wanted to prove my words, to show her I meant what I said. "To the death, I swear it!" I yelled, struggling to my feet, Punch determined to fell giants.

"Many thanks, sweet Erin." She was whispering now; my battle cry already had the others stirring in their sleep overhead. "But your death would hardly please me." She stood then, too, and put her hand on my shoulder, which shook like a thing apart. "What you
can
do for my sake is sleep well tonight and help me tell the others in the morning."

Sleeping well was an art I lost that night. When they learned how close the troops were, my brothers decided to spread the story in the village that our visitor had gone back to her home and family. This precaution, though it proved necessary, forced Diamonda to live like a prisoner in our dark cottage. And I? I lay awake each night, grieving her loss. Who is warmed by a transient sun? What sort of reprieve was it to live with the knowledge she would have to leave us?

As the days wore on, Diamonda was no happier than I. Each morning, as we left for the mines, our royal stowaway seemed more nervous, less patient. She seldom complained, but her eyes were distant and uncertain, her songs turned sad, and she paced when she walked. "I feel as if I am on a draughts board with nowhere to go," she told me one morning. "At least let us steal out after sunset, Erin. We can skate by moonlight and you can tell me all the stars' names, the way you used to." She made it sound as though she were yearning for something that had happened years ago instead of weeks. And she made it impossible for me to say no.

We waited until well after dark, then set out with torches across the snow. When we reached the pond, she ran toward it with a little shriek of delight. She stooped to put on the skates I had carved her from a yew branch, then, like a finch loosed from its cage, sped out onto the ice. "Hurry up, Erin!" Her shadow darted and wove over the shining ground. "Look—I have already learned to skate backwards!"

Though I would have been content to stand and watch her forever, I put on my skates and followed her onto the sheet of moonlight. I have been skating as long as I can remember, and though she learned quickly, I still had a few tricks to teach her. She liked my leaps the best; she held her breath before each jump and clapped like the villagers at a juggling show when I came down. I was skating to the farthest edge of the ice (having decided to leap across a log stranded in the middle of the pond) when I saw the lights.

They were a good distance away, that I could tell. But how fast they were advancing was harder to judge. I raced back to where she stood and grabbed her hand. I pointed to the torches, twinkling like stars on the slopes above the stream. "If they are on horseback, we have no time to get home," I decided, already skating away from the cottage. "We will hide in the mine."

We took off our skates and stumbled through the snow, cutting west toward the far side of the hills down which the lights were filing. "It lies just ahead," I told her, battering my way through drifts that reached my hips. She followed gamely, less encumbered by snow that came only to her knees. But fear had taken her breath, and she sucked in the icy air too deeply as she ran.

When we had reached the entrance to the shaft and worked our way down to a point where our torches were hidden from view, I stopped and made her rest. I climbed back to the surface to drag a branch across our tracks and seal the entrance behind us. "We are safe enough now," I told her when I returned, "unless your stepmother's men can see through stone."

She would not sit but remained pinned to the wall of the shaft, gulping air as if it were water, her body shaking, her eyes closed. When the pounding of hooves echoed in the cave, she ran to me and threw her arms around my neck. Her chest was heaving and I could feel her heart jump against me. As the men aboveground yelled to one another, I put my arms around her, too, and forced her to sit on the ground, soothing her as I would a child. "Shhh. Do not fret. I will not let them harm you."

I knew our mine as well as I did my own house. I was calm and certain of our hiding place. "There is no need to worry," I whispered, my breath spreading smoky fingers in the gloom. Still she shuddered and held me close, breeding in me a kind of madness, a sharp desire to prolong her anguish. For as long as the men remained dismounted and their footsteps crossed and re-crossed the ground above our heads, Diamonda melted into me. As long as they continued to yell and laugh, her sweet breasts were mine to press against, to feel with arms that fell slyly, secretly against her time and time again.

We remained undiscovered, and when the horses had clamored off over the hills, we were free to go home. But not free to risk again such foolish expeditions. Even Diamonda now saw the sense in her confinement and begged no more for moonlight skates. Our caution doubled and our lives rattled like dried pods. My brothers and I became prisoners, too, circling dully between the mine and the cottage, afraid to take trips to town, deal with traders, or let beggars in for food. In the center of our weary pattern, Diamonda grew more and more restless, her only entertainment the quiet talks she and I shared after the rest had gone to bed.

"Do you suppose," she asked me one evening halfway to spring, "that you and I want what is best for us?" She was mending a tear in the vest I had bought from a peddler. I had noticed often how the slow, regular passage of her needle through cloth turned her philosophical. Now something crumbled and gave way inside my chest as she pricked herself, sucked her finger, and sighed. "Do you suppose God has arranged it so that human desires are like seedlings bending toward the light?"

My body was a stream swollen with a sudden thaw, racing toward things it could not see. "What do you mean?" I asked.

"Oh, I know it sounds wicked," she said, eyes once more lowered to her sewing. "I used to have a tutor; he was a priest. He told me that the body desires but the spirit is always satisfied. Do you think that is so, Erin?"

The sound of rushing water filled my ears. I looked at her, helpless with longing. It was a longing of the flesh, yes. But of the mind, too. And of the spirit, surely, since I would gladly have accepted transformation into the mindless, sexless cloth she worked, just to be nearer her. "What do you crave, dear friend?" I asked her, trembling at the thought that it might be something I could give.

She looked up from her mending, her whole face flushed the way it had been when she was ill. "You will laugh at me."

"I could never laugh at you," I protested. "Or deny you any thing you ask for. Only tell me what you want."
Before I explode with need,
I should have added, with the frustration of heaven glimpsed through a keyhole, a distant horizon that calls and calls.

"Perhaps it is wrong to want more than we already have," she said at last, no longer looking at me, staring instead at the smoking hearth. "But my dream is so stubborn, so dear, I cannot give it up. I think I know what love is, Erin, though I have never tasted it." Still she could not bring herself to look at me. The cause, to my mounting joy, was not my appearance or any aversion she had to it. The flush on her cheeks, her downcast eyes, suggested instead that her native modesty struggled against a consuming passion. "How strange, how sad that I am most awake when I sleep, when he whose touch I have never known opens me like a flower."

One of my brothers turned in his sleep above us. The wind outside howled and beat itself against the door. The moon stopped rising and waited, caught in the window. "Who?" I asked. "Who is he?"

"Someone I know," she told me, staring still at the ashes, "as well as I know myself. Someone who has helped me bear sickness and poverty Someone whose face I carry like a dear, familiar secret wherever I go."

What had been a pale shoot of possibility was now a monstrous delight that out-howled the wind and filled me with a vanity and courage I had thought reserved for larger men. "I never guessed," I said, standing and walking to her, "that you were yearning for what is near to hand!"

I bent to her now, a good child rewarded suddenly with his fondest wish, a pious zealot about to collect the answer to his prayers.

"You are right," Diamonda told me. "He is no further than my dreams." She, too, had gained courage and was finally looking me full in the face. "His kindness, his devotion, are as close as my heart. His handsome smile, his tall and graceful form—they wait only for me to close my eyes."

Poor deluded dwarf! Now the current that had buoyed me up closed over my head. A drowning man, I sank down beside her chair, my face in my hands. "'Handsome'?" I repeated. "'Tall'?"

"I knew you would laugh at me." She shook her head, stroking the velvet vest in her lap. "In truth, Erin, I do not blame you. Here I am, a penniless princess dreaming of a man I have never even met!"

Again she shook her head. "Sometimes I think I will manage it, my friend. I think I can be content to stay here with you and your good brothers. And then I go to bed and he is with me again, wooing me away, calling me past any delight I have known."

That night, though I mouthed platitudes and urged Diamonda not to abandon hope, I buried mine. Just before dawn snuffed out the moon, I smashed the wine jar with the beautiful woman on its handle. I threw it with all my might against the hearth and watched it shatter against the stones.

Perhaps Diamonda, too, lost heart. Perhaps she began to fear she would live forever with her diminutive admirers, and never meet her handsome dream. Perhaps that prospect was worse than returning to the trap she had sprung. Why else would she have let in the old beggar woman? Why believe in winter apples, when all around her was ice and chill? Unless, somewhere, in the secret reaches of her dreaming heart, she had chosen to die?

The others found her first. I had taken to waiting behind, watching to make sure no one followed us home. When I walked in, my brothers were standing in a hushed ring around her. She lay as if, overcome by weariness, she had decided to take a nap on the floor. Her cheeks were still flushed, her skin warm. The apple had rolled from her hand and stopped, wine-colored and immense, just short of the ashes in the hearth. Though it looked fresh picked, plump with sun, a horrible stench filled the room. Had she noticed the smell when her first bite broke the skin? Had she welcomed the poison, inhaled it like perfume as she fell?

The foul odor and the purplish skin of the fruit made me certain it had been tainted with belladonna. Of the seven of us, I had learned the most about healing and herbs. But Diamonda was beyond my help. If she had been felled by henbane or hemlock, I would have set to boiling nettles in hopes of reviving her. If her heart had been stopped with mistletoe, I would have asked Dynll to climb Corwyn's broad shoulders and reach me the mandrake roots we had hung to dry from the rafters that fall. But I knew no remedy for the poison that had by now spread its silent tyranny to every part of her.