Alison's Wonderland (23 page)

You wouldn’t think, to see me crouched here among the rocks in my black rags musty from the damp, the hems heavy with mud, that I am a queen. I have made sure of that. I will not be recognized. My hair is white, my back hunched and my sunken mouth almost toothless—though my limbs are still strong, as I’ve had miles to walk to reach this place in the black heart of the forest. Not that anyone will see me, because I’ve made sure of that, too. Sprinkled with fern seed, I will pass unnoticed unless I draw attention to myself, which at this moment I have no intention of doing. I’ve scrambled up the outside of the hollow limestone outcrop that serves my stepdaughter as a home, squeezed under the roots of a birch clinging to a cleft in the stone and positioned myself so I can look in through one of the window holes.

There she is, asleep. She looks so innocent, doesn’t she? But don’t be fooled; there is no innocence in her. She lies on a bed of bearskins, her head thrown back, one arm crooked over her eyes to ward off any sunlight that might creep into her stone house. Her long hair looks as glossy and black as split charcoal, even against the dark pelts. She’s wearing a dress
of doeskin—very well made, I imagine, considering who she got it from, but laughably rustic.

No real peasant girl would be asleep at this time of day, not with the sun setting and the evening meal not yet prepared.

When I married her father, the girl was already notorious. Beautiful beyond the norm, she’d broken the heart and nerve of every page boy and stable lad and done the rounds of the squires; she was working her way through the grown men, those not wise enough to resist her games. Ungovernable, they called her; a sly and shameless tease. Or more candidly: the royal slut. They wondered why her father the king didn’t put a stop to it, but all he did was execute or exile any man he found to have succumbed to his daughter’s appetites. Nor did he seek to find her a husband and rid himself of the problem.

I tolerated it, more fool me. Newly married, I was not yet come into my full power over her father or the realm. These things grow slowly, like the roots of ivy that cling to a wall and work their way into the cracks, eating the mortar—until those roots are the only thing holding the wall together. I recognized in the girl the signs: the old blood burns hot in those of us who carry it. And I knew that it was not only her bad reputation that kept her in the parental home and not only her rank that protected her from punishment. She had, perhaps without knowing it, worked an enchantment that ensured the king kept her close and safe. So I tolerated her behavior for years, until the day I saw that she had turned her eyes upon her own father, my husband.

That was when I determined to do away with the girl.

Uncomfortable, I shift my withered body against the stone and glance about the clearing. It is tempting to accede to my impatience and take the opportunity now, while she sleeps and is alone. But I’ve learned to be more careful than that. I’ve come across her late in the day and I doubt she will be alone for much longer. She didn’t build this house herself—this
parody of a human dwelling, carved from the living forest rock. And from what I saw in my mirror, her protectors are not to be treated with contempt.

Almost a year ago I picked a soldier with, I thought, the right temperament and told him to take her secretly deep into the forest, into that trackless gloomy labyrinth of needles and moss under the canopy that blocks all sunlight, and there cut out her heart. He failed. To mask his failure he brought me back the heart of a hind, and it was many months before I realized my error and extracted from him the true story.

Shadows are lengthening from the tall firs that hem this lonely clearing. Only the tops of the trees are still touched with light.

When my stepdaughter had realized what he intended, she’d wept and opened her clothes and begged him to let her live and promised him her neat little furrow or her sweet pale rump to plow in exchange for mercy. He’d laughed at that—Do you think I would have chosen a softer-hearted man for such a task?—saying that he could and would take those things just as easily after slipping the knife into her. Then she’d promised him the pleasure of her mouth, pleasure beyond imagining, just for a few moments’ delay. He’d fallen to that trap. I imagine she did keep her side of the bargain, at least for a little while; certainly he’d dropped his guard at some point.

She’d bitten off his ball-sac entire. I made him show me the ruination that she’d made of his manhood. And while he’d screamed and thrashed about on the ground she’d run off into the forest, naked and spitting out his blood and laughing.

I made the soldier hang himself, not for his failure—I am not unreasonable—but for having lied to me.

See her lying there, her lips still crimson as if painted with a man’s blood. But now she stirs and wakes, cocking her head as she rises, and she’s right: there is a noise, a faint sound as if
of slow drums, thrumming through the rock to my fingertips. The girl stands and stirs the fire and lays on more wood, moves the pot of yesterday’s stew to the heat, then looks to the door expectantly. The soft leather of her dress, I note with some corner of my mind, clings to her form in a manner flattering her already obvious loveliness.

And here they come, her protectors. Her saviors. They haul themselves up from deep cracks in the earth, from barely visible fissures in the shadows of boulders, and slink toward the house. Despite my disguise I shiver. Ignorant people call them dwarfs, but that is not what they are. Their name in the old tongue is
svartalfar,
which means
dark elf.
Certainly they are shorter than most men, but no shorter than my stepdaughter. They are creatures of the deep places and of the shadows. They are the gray of snow that has been trampled underfoot, or black as the shadows under the unending firs or sheened with the oily colors of the dead water that collects among the needles in the hollows where trees have fallen. They dress in leathers that are crusted with dirt. Their faces are lean and hard, but their eyes shine with the colors of gems; blue like sapphires or green as emeralds or red as rubies. They are lithe in the body but muscular across the shoulders, almost top-heavy, from digging and from forge work. Because the
svartalfar
are artisans. They make objects of peerless cunning and craft, and they prize beauty above everything else in the world.

There are seven of them in all.

One by one they converge upon the house, upon my stepdaughter. I turn my gaze back through the window hole, to see what happens inside. It seems domestic enough at first. Each of the
svartalfar
goes up to the girl and looks her up and down, without touching or speaking, almost as if inspecting her. She stands demurely, her eyes downcast but glittering
through her long dark lashes and the fall of her fringe. Then they turn aside and go about their tasks. Occasionally one will mutter to another, but they are otherwise almost silent. They light lamps and set them about the center of the room, they clean the tools they have brought home. The wiriest of them stirs the cooking pot, then he chops up and adds ground-elder and a brace of rabbits that have been hanging behind the door. He is the cook; there seems to be no question of the girl doing any chores. When she has been looked over by each of her seven hosts she simply sits again and waits to be fed.

I ignore the insects that whine in my ears as the world darkens at my back. I am all patience. Haven’t I been patient many years? I watch as they eat their stew and lay the bowls aside. Then the girl lifts her eyes to the oldest, broadest and most knotted of the
svartalfar.
He nods, and two of the others hurry to take an iron chest from the shadows and lay it before him. From his belt he brings out a key upon a thong, and unlocks the chest, setting back the lid.

It is full of gold. Not coin, but jewelry of extraordinary delicacy and beauty. The girl stands. See how the tip of her tongue wets her plump berry-colored lips: she is trembling with anticipation. She moves into the center of the room, the circle formed by the
svartalfar
on their stools. Then one of them, his eyes the yellow of topaz, comes forward and unlaces her dress, dropping it to her feet then helping her step out.

Skin as white as snow.
It is very nearly no exaggeration; in the lamplight she seems to glow. I squirm with envy and with trepidation; the blood of the
ljosalfar
must run strong in her, and if the
svartalfar
have given the world wonders then the light elves have bequeathed it witchery. She is absolutely beautiful. Perfect breasts, twin-tipped with pink. Perfectly curved hips. Perfect, flawless thighs. She is as smooth as marble taken from a riverbed, as a polished moonstone, as new-fallen snow. The only colors about her are in the soot-
black hair upon her head, her gleaming dark eyes, her blood-red lips. I hear the
svartalfar
sigh.

They dress her from the treasure box. They come forward all at once, and work with the patient care of true craftsmen, neither getting in each other’s way nor fumbling, their dark hands delicate and sure on her pale skin: a pair of elaborate earrings, filigree greaves that embrace her shins and calves, wristlets that attach to finger rings by a web of golden links, spiraling armlets. They catch up her hair in a crown of gold lace and drape her cheekbones in a mask of finely pointed mail. Then a collar of gold, and chains that hang down from it to rings that go through her nipples, pulling them up. Rings through her labia and her clitoris. She does not flinch; the invisible holes in her flesh must be old, and she well used to the jewelry. Her whole body is hung with arcs of delicate gold chain, pinned to her flanks by fine wires. Filigree wings attach flat to her shoulder blades. A plug is inserted deep between the snowy globes of her bottom and she bends and takes it with equanimity: when it is in place a gold tail stands in a curve like a cat’s behind her, gleaming in the light of the fire.

See how they admire their own handiwork when they are done, standing back to revel in the full effect? They love artifice and they love beauty; she is now the perfect combination of both. Her lips curve with satisfaction under her chain-mail half veil. She runs her hands gently, gently down her own body, plucking at the wires that pierce her flesh, circling her breasts and hefting their orbs to make the pendant beads dance. She rolls her rear to make her tail twitch. She shimmies her hips. She loves her own body, dressed only in gold. She loves what they have made of her: a pagan idol.

To show her gratitude, she begins to dance for them. The
svartalfar
kneel back in their circle, eyes aglow, transfixed by her slender glittering form, and they beat time for her upon
their thighs, the seats of their stools, an upturned bucket. This dance is one she never learned in her father’s ballroom. It is all pride and taunting, pleasure and lasciviousness. It is slow like the ooze of cream, then urgent as the shudder of an arrow striking home. She writhes her hips and rolls her buttocks and shakes her breasts until the dark elves look entranced, half-witless with desire. Even from my spyhole I can see the moist gleam on her inner thighs, the swelling petals of her secret rose peeking out when she bends to tease each of them in turn. They must be able to smell the perfume of her lust.

Finally one of them—it is the cook, the one I think of as the youngest—breaks. He pitches forward, grabbing her legs, planting hot kisses on her bare thighs. He drops his breeches and pumps the swollen member that rises from it frantically in his fist. The girl signals to the leader with a flash of her eyes, and suddenly they are all on their feet again.

There are treasures still waiting in the jewelry box, you see. They prise the youngest of their number from her, and clip more and longer chains to her nipple rings and to the piercings through her sex—and the ends of these chains they keep in their hands, taut. Then they dress her in a harness such as I have never seen before; a device that straps about her thighs and stands proud from her mound: a phallus of gleaming gold, rendered in perfect detail to every fold and vein, horrifyingly oversize and twice as obscene arising from the narrow hips of this pretty girl.

She laughs. Then they bend their young cook on hands and knees and she crouches to impale him up the fundament. And as she rides him—and she is not gentle, she is not kindly, she buggers him like a soldier in a long war rutting his whore—the others hold the chains tight and pluck upon them, stretching her nipples and labia out and sending repeated stabs of sensation to torment them. Her breasts quiver, sweet prisoners of nipples that have turned dark and swollen. She slaps the
muscular rump beneath her hands and squeals. The youngest
svartalfar
holds his own pintle and jerks it, groaning, the muscles standing up on his arm and shoulder—until she comes, shrieking and tearing at his arse cheeks with her nails, and he spurts the thick jets of his seed over the floor.

That is too much for the other six. They release her from the harness, leaving their comrade to collapse with the golden phallus still buried to the hilt in his bowels. They unclip the long chains to make sure she will not become entangled and pull the cat’s tail from her anus. Then they ravish her, each desperate to take possession of their goddess.

They are too impatient to each wait their turn, but take her two or three at a time, impaling her in the arse and the coynte and the mouth or simply humping her exquisite breasts. Their dark bodies knot around her pale one. Watching from my vantage point, I learn a number of things about the
svartalfar;
for example, that their virile members are by human standards very large, very thick and gnarled like tree roots. That their spend is prodigious in quantity. And that unlike men they are not exhausted by their first shot from the bow; each of them takes his pleasure of her three or four times. Even the cook recovers sufficiently to stuff her throat and ram her until she chokes on his cream.

You might think such a slip of a girl could not take such a riving, but she does. She receives the most brutal hammer blows of their thrusting pricks eagerly and her spasms of pleasure are unmistakable though her screams are usually muffled by cock. You’d imagine she has no bones in her body, so swiftly does it accommodate those thick and glistening tools. She spreads herself wide with her hands to ease their entry, and through her tears she searches blindly with her mouth for more.