The Dark Mirror (38 page)

“‘I’m quite comfortable here, thank you,’ he said as politely as he could, though this was far from the truth. But he remembered from the tales of his childhood the perils of obeying a summons
such as this. On the other hand, it was growing very cold and a proper hearth and a roof over his head did sound quite appealing.

“‘Warm fire, warm bed, dreamless sleep for weary head,’ the crone muttered, beginning to shuffle off under the trees. Still Nechtan hesitated; what if he followed her and she led him all the way to the perilous realm beyond the margins? From there, he might never return;
and he had a commission for the king.

“‘Soft hands, sweet embrace,’ came the voice of the old woman. He could hardly see her now as she moved away. ‘Spirit’s solace, resting place.’

“‘Wait!’ Nechtan cried and, snatching up his bundle of possessions, he stumbled after her along a path dimly illuminated by the moon.”

Tuala paused in her tale. Her listeners had been quite silent, Broichan watching
her gravely, Garvan leaning forward, intent. Mara pursed her lips now and said, “He was a fool, then. Doubtless he never came back again to his own time and place.”

The men at arms were looking anywhere but at the storyteller. However, it was clear they were absorbed in the tale; not one of them had stirred since Tuala began it.

“She took him to a small cottage all hedged about with briars,”
she went on. “Inside, it was indeed snug and warm, with soup heating on the fire and a jug of ale ready on a little crooked table, almost as if someone had been expecting him. Seated by the hearth was another cloaked figure. Indeed, this one was swathed and wrapped about with layer on layer of woolen cloth, so Nechtan could not see the shape of the person at all. What he did see was a pair of lovely
white hands, soft and graceful; and the face that was turned toward him was a woman’s, and pleasing in form. Its most remarkable feature was the mouth. This was the prettiest, most beguiling mouth Nechtan had ever seen and, being a stone carver by trade, he’d an eye for beauty. The lips were not too thin and not too full; they were red and sweet as a ripe cherry and curved in what seemed to him
the perfect shape for kissing. Looking at that mouth he almost forgot where he was and what had led him there. But not quite.

“‘The blessings of the Shining One on your hearth,’ he said with only a slight tremor in his voice. ‘The old woman said I might come in to get warm. It is very kind of you.’

“The woman smiled. Her mouth developed a charming dimple at one corner, her eyes grew brighter
and her hands reached for jug and goblet to pour him ale, but she could not quite stretch far enough. The crone, mumbling to herself, came over and did it for her.

“‘I’m sorry,’ the younger woman said. ‘I cannot walk; my friend Anet, who brought you here, must perform many tasks for me. Please sit, drink and warm yourself. Then I have a proposition for you, or a challenge, if you will. You are
a man of judgment, I read that in your eyes. You know, then, what margin you have crossed to visit me tonight.’

“‘Nechtan’s hand halted, the goblet halfway to his lips.

“‘It is safe to drink,’ she said. ‘You are already in our realm, but I will not seek to hold you here against your will, nor will Anet. What choices a man makes in my house are his own choices.’ She sighed, and Nechtan heard
in that sigh an uncanny reflection of his own secret sorrow, the emptiness of the heart he would give much to banish. He lifted the cup to his lips and drank, watching her over the rim.

“‘Nechtan,’ the woman mused, ‘that is your name. A maker of fine things, strong, lovely things. Why has such a man, a man with a craft and a position in life, a man with his own house and the king’s favor, such
sorrow in his eyes?’

“‘I don’t know,’ Nechtan whispered, looking at her and thinking those white hands, that delicious mouth might drive him to a despair still greater, if he was not careful. ‘Tell me, since you seem to know my name already, what is yours, lady?’

“She smiled, but it was a smile whose sadness seemed all too familiar to him. ‘They call me many names,’ she said, ‘such as Crookshanks,
Twistabout, or Half-Maid. It is not for nothing that I go clad thus; nobody may see me as I am beneath my wrappings, save Anet there who tends to me.’

“‘I would give you a new name, if you would allow,’ Nechtan found himself saying. His cheeks grew hot as he realized his temerity; what would the lady think of such boldness?

“‘And what would that be?’ she asked him softly.

“‘Ela,’ said Nechtan.
‘That name is for a swan; and it is of such a creature that you remind me, pale and remote, of a beauty beyond the understanding of human folk. Forgive me; I do not know you, I should not have spoken thus . . .

“‘Ela.’ She echoed it, and the name hung in the air of the little smoky cottage, sweet as a promise. ‘That is . . . acceptable . . .’

“She waited while he drank a bowl of soup and warmed
himself by the fire. Then she gave him her proposition. She had, Ela said, the power to take away his loneliness and to assuage his secret sorrow. If he wanted to stay
with her, to live in her cottage and to share her bed at night, she would grant him dreamless sleep and days that were free, so that he could cross back into his own world and continue to ply his craft. “For I see,’ she said, ‘that
to give up this calling would cause you to wither away before your time. Stay with me a year and a day, and you shall have honest work while the sun is up, and under the moon, nights of such sweet content that there will be no room left in you for sorrow’

“‘But, lady—Ela—’ Nechtan could feel the heat rise to his cheeks, the warring of his body’s desire with his mind’s caution, “you said—forgive
me—you said none but your elderly companion could ever see your form as it truly is. How can you welcome a man to your arms and to your bed if that restriction holds?’

“‘You need not see me unclothed,’ Ela told him gravely, ‘nor hold me against you, flesh to flesh, for this magic to work. Believe me, you would not wish to see what lies beneath these bindings I wear.’

“‘Then how . . . ?’

“‘Trust
me, stone carver, and accept what I offer you. You will sleep the better for it.’

“Nechtan was silent. His mind was full of questions that could not be asked.

“‘You don’t believe me,’ Ela said, her long lashes drooping over her clear, light eyes, her lovely mouth sad. ‘Or you do not trust me. Stay tonight, only tonight, and I will show you this is true.’”

Tuala paused; around the table, the
silence was absolute. “Tell me,” she said. “What would you have Nechtan do?”

Broichan offered nothing. She thought perhaps she had achieved the impossible and rendered him mute with surprise.

“He should never have got himself into that situation,” Mara said bluntly. “A craftsman, a person of substance, he knew what was what; he was a fool to follow the crone, a fool to drink from the woman’s
cup, and he’d be even more of a fool to accept the offer. He should at least ask what the terms are; what she wants of him in return. I think he says no, thanks her politely, and gets on with his journey as quick as he can. There’s no time for secret sorrows and suchlike in a man’s life. He should just do what has to be done and be glad of what he has.”

“Can’t do that, though, can he?” ventured
one of the men at arms.

“That’s right,” said another. “It’s not how the tales go. Take one look at
such as her, and a fellow’s lost forever. He probably gets in her bed, and undoes the wrappings even though she told him not to, and finds she’s a monster waiting to gobble him up.”

There was another silence. Tuala waited.

“As an artist,” Garvan said, “he knows the paths of the gods are never
straight and obvious. As a man who works with stone, he understands that beauty exists with the release of dreams from the forms that restrain them. He has no choice but to agree to what this woman offers him; it seems to him this might be what he has long searched for but never found.” He glanced sideways at Tuala, a question in his eyes.

“That’s good,” Tuala said, surprised that such a man
would offer such a response. “He stayed, and it was exactly as Ela had promised. She shared her bed with him, but it was understood he might not hold her close, nor take off the many swathing garments with which she concealed her body. And she did indeed work magic; her skills and her sweetness awoke a fire in Nechtan that he had never known he possessed, not in all the years of his marriage nor in
his casual encounters with women through the time of his widowhood. Ela’s soft voice, her listening ear, her gentleness and kindness soothed his spirit wondrously; he felt he could tell her anything and she would understand. By day he returned to the mortal world and continued to ply his trade. At night he hastened back to his Ela, his hunger for what she could offer undiminished by familiarity,
for her presence seemed always fresh, always new, a wondrous world with ever more treasures to discover. There were no more nights plagued by shadows and desperation; now it was all sweet fulfillment and the profound sleep that follows it.

“A year and a day passed, and not a night of that time but Nechtan spent it in his new sweetheart’s bed, which proved difficult for his trade at times; a stone
carver needs to be free to travel, to go where his commissions take him. But he had assistants, and he managed, for he could no longer bear to sleep without her.

“Then, when the time she had set him had passed, Ela asked Nechtan what he would do now. ‘For I see,’ she said, ‘that although we are happy together, and you are no longer troubled by loneliness, there is a new sadness in your eyes.
What is it that troubles you, dear one?’”

Tuala glanced around her audience again. “What does he tell her?” she asked them.

“He wants to see what she looks like,” a man at arms offered, eyes averted.
“It bothers him that she still has a secret from him. That’s in many tales; curiosity gets the better of folk, and then everything goes wrong for them.”

“That’s right,” said another. “If one of
the—the Good Folk—sets a rule like that, you dare not go against it. That can only end in sorrow. But in the tales, that’s what people do, every time.”

“He probably unwraps her binding when she’s sleeping and takes a peep,” Mara said, “and after that Ela vanishes, her and the crone and the cozy little house, and he’s left just as he was before, beset by foolish longings for what can never be.”

Tuala waited.

“No,” Garvan said. He seemed to be considering his reply. “No, I don’t think that’s it. Of course he would have liked her to show him her body; if she could not do so, it meant she didn’t yet trust him. But that was not the cause of his unease. He told her that what he wanted above all was to be able to give her the same pleasure she had afforded him so generously, night after night,
without seeking anything in return save his company. He longed to be able to heal her wounds as she had his. He wished she would tell him how he could do this; he wished she would say what she herself needed for true content.” He looked at Tuala, suddenly hesitant. At least, that is the way I would tell it, had I your gift for words.”

“A carefully crafted answer, friend,” Broichan commented with
a twist of the lips.

“It seems an honest answer,” Tuala found herself saying. “Have you a better one, my lord?” Something had made her bold tonight, perhaps the inner voice that had conjured so unlikely a tale from nowhere.

“No,” said Broichan. “I simply wonder how this fellow found the time and the energy to maintain his trade when his head was so full of feelings and anxieties and sensitivities.
I am inclined to concur with Mara, and say he should have left well alone when he had the chance. I suppose the tale works to a conclusion in which we discover this Ela was under some kind of enchantment, and her stone carver found out the secret for undoing it and made her straight and beautiful again. Simple tales for simple folk; the patterns are always the same.”

It seemed to Tuala there
was a challenge in those eyes and in the cynical words. “The Shining One is not predictable,” she said. “Her cycles may be constant, but the tides she awakens in the minds and bodies of her creatures, she governs at her own will. When Ela heard Nechtan’s answer, tears spilled
from her eyes. He longed to take her in his arms and comfort her, but he respected the limits she had set him. Far better,
he had thought from the beginning, to accept this strange shadow of a marriage than to lose altogether the one who had become his best friend, his solace, his heart’s joy. So he only reached his hand to curve it around her cheek, and touched his lips to her face, kissing away the marks of her weeping.

“That night, at dark of the moon, she let him undress her. Whatever it was she revealed to him,
it did not make the house disappear in a puff of smoke, nor Ela and old Anet vanish. It did not drive the stone carver away. Indeed, those who saw Nechtan in the years afterward commented that he was becoming dreamy with contentment. As for the images of his carvings, they grew stranger season by season, bull and boar and goose replaced by curious animals that were neither one thing nor another,
and patterns so intricate they seemed to change even as you looked at them: spirals and mazes without beginning or ending. This story is a bit like those patterns. Nechtan took Ela to see the swans on Maiden Lake. She shared with him her deepest secrets. They had great and lifelong joy, each of the other. That is all I know, or all I choose to tell.”

Silence again. It was broken by the one of
the men at arms protesting, “You mean that’s the end?” In his outrage at the tale’s abrupt conclusion, he seemed to have forgotten to be wary of the teller. “But what was her secret? What did she look like under the wrappings?”

“Maybe fair, maybe foul,” Tuala told him. “That’s not the point.”

“Without that, it’s not properly finished,” Mara said. “Such a tale, a tricky sort of tale, needs a
conclusion. It needs to explain the secret of the thing.”

Tuala did not comment. Probably not a single one of them understood the meaning of the story. It made them uncomfortable that it did not conform to the accepted way of such tales.