Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer: Expanded Edition (9 page)

THE GOLDEN ROPE

ONE

In the stone house amid the white wood, the woman sat and brooded on a power that only one might give her. She had wooed him long and diligently, and she had given her life over to learning and study that she might commune with him. But, like an unrequited love, so far she had been ignored.

All around the house the dead trees, a palisade, out-stared the moon. They were a constant reminder of her youth which she had given up, her vitality which had been drained. And yet, tonight, it seemed to her there was a strange stirring in the trees, and in her blood.

When loud knocking came on her gates, she was not amazed, nor quite calm. Very seldom did any seek admittance here. Those who knew of her—and she had not courted fame—understood her scholarship and disliked it. Others guessed her ambition, and feared her. Presently, her servant entered the room, a tall, dark-skinned man from the East, dressed in silken clothes, and tongueless. He bowed low, then indicated to her, in a gesture language she had taught him, and which none but she and he could comprehend, that a city fellow had sought her door. He was of the lowest urban class, a rogue requiring her aid for his wife who, it seemed, was sick to the death.

Her normal practice, in such a case, was to dismiss the petitioner without seeing him. Now she instructed her servant to bring the man in. She gave the order with a curious excitement, and took care to compose herself that nothing of her mood should be detectable.

The man appeared a moment later. By her trained instincts and intelligence the woman told instantly much about him. He was a thief, one of the dregs of the world. That he cared so for his wife’s health that he came seeking a witch implied no love, merely that his wife was some use to him. The woman noted, too, that her visitor was afraid of her. And that, under its filth, his hair was like new gold.

“So,” she said. “What do you want?”

“My wife is with child. The condition does not suit her. I dread she may die.”

The woman nodded coldly. He would never have known how her pulse had quickened.

“I understand. Your wife sells her body and brings you a fair wage from the enterprise. You suppose that when she grows big and cumbersome, her customers will dwindle.”

The man faltered, then smiled at her ingratiatingly.

“I see I was a fool to try hiding anything from you, my lady. As you say. I find it hard to come by honest work. If we starve, it will do none of us any good. But if you could give me some of your clever herbs, so the trouble goes away—”

“And this child is yours, you think, that you will be rid of it so freely.”

“I do not, alas, know.”

“I
know. It is. You are aware,” she said, “I ask a price for any service.”

He grinned and panted like an eager dog.

“When she is well, her first month’s wages shall all be yours.” The woman watched him. He grew uneasy. “We would never cheat you.”

“Tell me, then, what that month’s wage would be.”

He shuffled, and named a sum.

The woman waited, concentrating, until she read from him the aura of thought which showed his wife. Though he had made a whore of her, this girl was beautiful.

The woman nodded again.

“I think you have halved the amount. No arguments, if you please. I shall be generous to you. I myself will double the coins, and you shall be given such a figure every twenty days. Providing your wife carries to term, and bears.”

The cutpurse gaped.

“A wonderful bargain for you,” she said. “You will benefit outrageously by it.”

“But why—”

“Once the child is fit to travel, you will bring it here to me.”

“But—”

“I will then settle upon you one last payment, to compensate your doleful loss.”

“But—”

“Do not dare,” she said, “to question me.”

He balked. Clearly he was unsure if he was in luck, or if she was simply a lunatic who might renege, then harm him.

“Or,” she said, “to doubt me.”

“Ah no,
no,
my lady.”

She rose; he cowered.

“Wait here, and touch nothing. There are safeguards on my property which prove injurious to meddlers. Do you believe me?” His pallor showed he did. “When I return, I will have for you your first payment. Also herbs and powders you must give your wife to strengthen her, so the child is robust.”

She went from the room and along a passageway. She unlocked, in an unusual manner, a black lacquer door, and passed down a long flight of steps to the vast underground chamber that was her study and her insularium. As her fingers busied themselves in the preparation of those medicines she had prescribed, they trembled slightly.

Infallibly, she knew a golden rope had been placed in her hands. She had only, with patience and wisdom, to draw it in.

* * * *

The child was born, and opened its unfocused eyes on dirt and squalor. Then, if it was even properly aware of such things, came an upheaval, a cessation of warmth, the dim wailing of a woman—someone was sorry to see it go after all. The child cried, then slept. Bundled in its covers it was taken to high gates, and given over to a pair of dark lean hands. Money rang inside a leather bag. As thin snow began to fall, a door thudded shut.

“A girl,” said the woman. “That is very well. This wisp of hair is dark now, but will change inside a year. She is whole and will be lovely.”

The world was altered.

* * * *

The earliest memory, the first impression, did not linger, was wiped away. Life was this: A beautiful apartment which opened on a large garden. The walls about the garden were very tall; on three sides the stone piles of the house leaned over it. On the fourth a few dead branches, like a handful of white bones, were all that might be glimpsed of any other place. The ceilings of the beautiful apartment were themselves extremely lofty, but they sank a little closer as the years passed, just as the childish bed and chairs and desk were taken away, and adult furniture replaced them. There came to be an exquisite harpsichord, two guitars of dark and blond wood, with ivory frets. Tapestries and paintings came, and hand-painted books, sweeping pleated dresses of pale lemon silk and cream satin and blanched-almond brocade where there had hung little-girl dresses of similar materials and tints. In a box lined in velvet lay some pieces of priceless flawless jewelry, several of an Eastern cast.

The child, too, had changed, was no longer a child. She was thirteen, the age at which many a damsel of good house might already be contracted if not married. The girl had, however, never seen a man, save in a painting, never heard of one save in a book. She knew they existed, just as lions, wolves, unicorns existed, far beyond the walls, another species in another country. Yet from this same outer wonderland her toys, her furnishings, her books somehow transpired. Everything was delivered as she slept, or taken away as she slept—like magic. Sometimes shocking, and sometimes delightful, yet she was used to it. Magic, as with the apartment, the garden, was an everyday matter.

And beyond the walls of the house and the garden which divided her from the far-off mythology of the earth? The bones of the trees gave evidence of a waste. No other evidence was awarded her.

The woman, whom she did not call “Mother” but “my lady,” was the only live thing the young girl saw, or had ever seen. It was a fact, as the ceilings drew lower, the woman became smaller, until she and the girl were almost of the same height. Otherwise, the woman seemed not to change at all. She wore plain clothes, dark and without ornament. Her face was colorless, expressionless. She offered neither love nor friendship, not even the shelter of another personality. Yet it was this woman who, without passion, without enthusiasm of any kind, taught the girl all she had come to know, and brought in to her, by those mysterious nocturnal means, the literature, the musical instruments, that were the accessories and gilding of knowledge; the elegant garments, and the jewels.

The young girl knew her origins, also. My lady had told her from the first. “You are not the child of my body. You are the child of a man and woman who did not want you. I wanted you, and so you were brought to me. You are named Jaspre, since I sent to your mother powders of jaspre to strengthen her while she carried you. Do not feel any regret or any betrayal. Your natural parents are nothing to you.” And the girl named Jaspre felt nothing. The ideas of parentage, of love, even, were unconvincing, alien to her. In her world, such things did not exist.

Sometimes, Jaspre would wander through the large garden, among its avenues, of which there were many, between its uncannily manicured box hedges, in and out of its grottoes where nymphs of mossy stone played statically with each other but never with her. Occasionally birds flew over the garden. In some naive manner, she understood they represented freedom, but freedom held no particular allure. Jaspre’s world was of the intellect and the spirit. Even her daydreams were contained within the garden. She had never seen a lion or a man or a forest or a mountain. She had never seen beyond the door of her apartment.

Nor, when she looked into her long mirrors, did she realize what looked back at her was the most beautiful thing in the beautiful room.

But the woman realized. She had nurtured Jaspre like a rare plant, its white stem, its bright petals. The woman, who had no lust for human flesh, who lusted only for one thing, had caught her breath, seeing the glowing creature drift toward her from the sunset shade of an ilex tree in the walled garden. The skin like pearl melting in the dress of pearl silk, scarcely any difference observable. The loosely plaited hair like a golden rope…

* * * *

“Do you recall how old you are, Jaspre?”

“Yes, my lady. I am thirteen years of age.”

“You have never,” said the woman, “asked me anything concerning the rest of the house.”

“It is,” said Jaspre, “the house.” To this non-questioning the woman had molded her in subtle, gentle ways. It was not apathy. It was an intelligent disinterest in those things that could have no bearing on one’s existence.

And yet now, “I will show you, today, a door. It has remained hidden, Jaspre, but now we shall use it, you and I.” Jaspre nodded calmly.

“Yes, my lady.”

The door was concealed behind a section of the wall which moved. It gave on a stair. It was the stair to the insularium.

* * * *

To the world of the apartment and the garden then, was added this new continent of marvels. In ranks, the tall stoppered vials, from which a pinch of powder dropped into air might burn, another produce sweet perfume. Slim flattened statues of bronze stood in the shadows, a bronze bull with wings. While on a platform reached by several narrow steps, was a great instrument which, when tilted up at an extravagant angle, pierced some opening in the side of the house, and by means of mirrors and lenses captured the stars and planets in the green evening sky.

Jaspre wandered in the vast room, windowless and lamp-lit, sipping from it, tasting of it. She had been nurtured and lessoned to gain much from the appearances of things, the sensations of their umbras, less from their functions. Hers was an intellect which dreamed and fantasized upon, rather than inquired into. So, she touched the statues, the telescope, gazed on the constellations, inhaled the sweet aroma of powders, and did not ask their natures, nor require to be informed.

Presently, the woman led her to a narrow alcove, and drew aside a curtain of smoky samite, and then another behind it of black velvet. Beyond the curtains was a gate of horn scrolled by black iron, and with a gilded iron lock. This lock the woman negotiated without a key, using strange pressures of her hands. As the gate opened, a third curtain was disclosed, but this of a dull brazen chain mail.

Although she did not know, and had been told nothing of what lay in store, the suspenseful drawings of curtain upon curtain, the unlocking of the gate, the metallic mesh, the unsuspected depth of the alcove itself—all this had worked upon the young girl’s imagination. That some pinnacle of importance was about to be attained, and revealed to her, was apparent.

The woman paused, her hand resting on the drapery of brazen mail.

“That I took you in,” she said, “was for a purpose. I did not, as you have seen, bring you here to serve me. And yet, I did take you, raise you, keep you, in peerlessness and in innocence, that you might serve—another. And now you are fit to learn of him and to look upon his image.”

Jaspre’s heart beat quickly, instinctually, and she waited, her eyes fixed only on the curtain. Which, in another instant, the woman drew aside.

Jaspre had never seen a man before. Inside the alcove stood a man. Then, as the lamplight beat on him, she beheld he was made of stone, a pale stone finely planed, fantastically burnished, colored with all the most convincing nuances of life.

His long and thickly curling hair was black, and lay seemingly loosely against his forehead, cheeks and shoulders. His features were chiseled, of a faintly Eastern cast, singularly handsome even to the point of beauty. His flesh was pale, but not with the dead pallor of the stone, rather a curious dark whiteness flushed through with somber tinctures, as if ichors flowed directly under the skin. In the eyes, which most of all might display lifelessness in a statue, there had been set dark jewels that glimmered, that seemed possessed of actual sight.

The image was represented as garbed in a black outer mantle of the ancient Parsua, diagonally cut and fringed with silver, with a broad belt that flashed with large bloody gems. Gems of blood and ink and blue water also crusted the shoes carved on his feet and stared from his long fingers. One hand lay relaxedly at his side. The left hand was gracefully uplifted in an ambiguous gesture of offering or beckoning.

The statue’s feet rested upon a low plinth, and in the plinth some words had long ago been cut, their letters softened now by time that had, in no other form, impaired the freshness of the work. After a while, as if impelled, Jaspre looked at them and next leaned close.

Deo Arimanio,
they read.
Nox Invictus.

The woman spoke quietly at Jaspre’s side.

“You have deciphered the writing. Do you translate it?”

“He is,” said the girl, “a god, and this is his name. And here it says that night—”

The woman broke in, softly as before:

“Unconquerable Night, is what it says. It is a good wish for his future victory, against the god of fires.”

Jaspre’s eyes fell. Her heart beat so fast now the woman did not miss it.

“But that fight is far off. For now, he dwells in darkness and is at peace in his kingdom.”

“Does he then,” said Jaspre, “truly exist?”

“Yes. He is God. The King of the World, that is him. The Prince of Darkness, eternal adversary to the devil Lucifer, bringer of light and blinding. The Lord of Eternal Night. By some called Bel, and in the Roman tongue Arimanio, as it is carved here. But as you shall worship him now, he is named Angemal. Angel, demon and god.”

“And I am to serve him?”

“For this you were born.”

Slowly, the young girl’s cheeks stained red with blood. The lights in the eyes of the statue blazed and sang, as if he saw and smiled at it.

TWO

Into her world, then, of floral garden, of gracious room, of magical laboratory, a god had entered.

In miniature, a creation myth, Jaspre its feminine principle, her axis now fixed: A man who was also God. Who was also the Serpent. She was thirteen, and everything spread before her, a glittering sea clothed in phantasmal mists, tossed by mystic gradual lights. On this her mind embarked, into the perpetual dawn of knowledge. And now knowledge was enhanced by that best accessory of all—desire.