Sister Emily's Lightship (23 page)

“A trick will not save her,” said Death. “I will have all in the end.” She shook her head. “I do not say this as a boast. Nor as a promise. It simply is what it is.”

“I know,” Haden said.

“What do you know?” asked the king, for he could not see or hear Death.

Haden looked at the king and smiled a bit sadly. “I know she will live and that if you let me, I will take care of her the rest of her life.”

The king did not smile. A peasant's son, even though he is a doctor, even though he is famous throughout the kingdom, does not marry a princess. In a story, perhaps. Not in the real world. Unlike Death, kings do not have to keep bargains. He had Haden thrown into the dungeon.

There Haden spent three miserable days. On the fourth he woke to find Godmother Death sitting at his bedfoot. She was dressed as if for a ball, her hair in three braids that were caught up on the top of her head with a jeweled pin. Her dress, of some white silken stuff, was demurely pleated and there were rosettes at each shoulder. She looked sixteen or sixteen hundred. She looked ageless.

“I see you at my bedfoot,” Haden said. “I suppose that means that today I die.”

She nodded.

“And there is no hope for me?”

“I can be tricked only once,” Death said. “The king will hang you at noon.”

“And the princess?”

“Oh, I am going to her wedding,” Death said, standing and pirouetting gracefully so that Haden could see how pretty the dress was, front and back.

“Then I shall see her in the hereafter,” Haden said. “She did not look well at all. Ah—then I am content to die.”

Death, who was a kind godmother after all, did not tell him that it was not the princess who was to die that day. Nor was the king to die, either. It was just some old auntie for whom the excitement of the wedding would prove fatal. Death would never lie to her godson, but she did not always tell the entire truth. Like her brother Sleep, she liked to say things on the slant. Even Death can be excused just one weakness.

At least, that is what she told me, and I have no reason to doubt the truth of it. She was sitting at my bedfoot, and—sitting there—what need would she have to lie?

Dedicated to the memory of Charles Mikolaycak

I
N THE BEGINNING

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God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form.

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which is not to say entirely formless, but rather still lumpy and without fixed landmarks. And void, or empty, or unpopulated.

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Darkness was over the face of the deep and under it as well. And as the spirit of God hovered over the face of the dark deep, rather like a hovercraft, only without any actual flow systems, the voice of God said, “Let there be Light.”

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Which we take to mean the sun appeared in the sky, though appear may be rather too sudden a word for what obviously…

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And there was light and it was good.

Then God divided the light from the darkness, a rather neat trick, and called the Light Day and the darkness He called Night.

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and there was evening and morning, the first day.

Then God checked his list and said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, a kind of metaphysical dike, dividing them.” And He called the firmament Heaven. Or Lower Atmosphere. There are two schools of thought on this.

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And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.

And God said, “Let the waters under the Heaven be gathered together in one place and let dry lands appear, which are easy to map.”

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And which appear in any child's telescope. And He called the dry land Earth and the gathered waters Seas or Oceans or Mares, there are three schools of thought on this.

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And He bade the Earth put forth grasses and seeds and trees bearing fruit and mushroom and fungi and trailing vines. And God saw that it was good.

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And there was evening and morning and that was the third day.

On the fourth day God put a multitude of lights in the Heaven further dividing day and night and southern hemisphere from northern. And He distinguished the seasons, making one half Earth freeze and one half Earth bake, an interesting approach to world building.

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Which led, as we shall see, to an odd prolificity of life, the hemispheres each with their own distinguishable creatures. And it was evening and morning, the fourth day.

Then God said, “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures.

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And let birds fly in the Heavens.”

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And He created great monsters of the sea which could not live on land and great monsters of the land which could not live in the seas, a great wasting of monsters, whose bones litter both land and sea.

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Then God saw that it was good, and told the creatures to be fruitful and multiply

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though He forgot to tell them how to stop multiplying, a rather more useful skill one would think. And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.

Then God said, “Let Earth bear living creatures, wild animals of every kind,” by which He meant creatures other than the great monsters, who were already overbreeding on the shores and polluting the seas with their monster bones.

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So He brought forth cattle and serpents and herds of horses

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and wombats, snail darters, and the chicken-eating frog.
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And God saw—though we may wonder why—that it was good.

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And then God said, “Fuck it. I'm not going to make man in my image. I have total recall, both forward and back. I know what a mess he will make of my Earth. And just when I've gotten all my firmaments and Mares and snail darters and lights just right.” And He squeezed His fingers together

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which made mush of the piece of clay he had been molding,

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and threw it down in the middle of the central continent where it formed an odd ridge of mountains

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which we today call
God's Pile.

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And He made our lovely planet instead, ninth away from the sun.

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Lights, please.

Now, before I deal with the second part of my lecture, the scientific approach to creation, are there any questions?

—
for Salman Rushdie

H
ER EARLIEST MEMORY
was of rain on a thatched roof, and surely it was a true one, for she had been born in a country cottage two months before time, to her father's sorrow and her mother's death. They had sheltered there, out of the storm, and her father had never forgiven himself nor the child who looked so like her mother.
So
like her, it was said, that portraits of the two as girls might have been exchanged and not even Nanny the wiser.

So great had been her father's grief at the moment of his wife's death, he might even have left the infant there, still bright with birth blood and squalling. Surely the crofters would have been willing, for they were childless themselves. His first thought was to throw the babe away, his wife's Undoing as he called her ever after, though her official name was Allerleirauh. And he might have done so had she not been the child of a queen. A royal child, whatever the crime, is not to be tossed aside so lightly, a feather in the wind.

But he had made two promises to the blanched figure that lay on the rude bed, the woolen blankets rough against her long, fair legs. White and red and black she had been then. White of skin, like the color of milk after the whey is skimmed out. Red as the toweling that carried her blood, the blood they could not staunch, the life leaching out of her. And black, the color of her eyes, the black seas he used to swim in, the black tendrils of her hair.

“Promise me.” Her voice had stumbled between those lips, once red, now white.

He clasped her hands so tightly he feared he might break them, though it was not her bones that were brittle, but his heart. “I promise,” he said. He would have promised her anything, even his own life, to stop the words bleeding out of that white mouth. “I promise.”

“Promise me you will love the child,” she said, for even in her dying she knew his mind, knew his heart, knew his dark soul. “Promise.”

And what could he do but give her that coin, the first of two to close her dead eyes?

“And promise me you will not marry again, lest she be…” and her voice trembled, sighed, died.

“Lest she be as beautiful as thee,” he promised wildly in the high tongue, giving added strength to his vow. “Lest she have thy heart, thy mind, thy breasts, thy eyes…” and his rota continued long past her life. He was speaking to a dead woman many minutes and would not let himself acknowledge it, as if by naming the parts of her he loved, he might keep her alive, the words bleeding out of him as quickly as her lost blood.

“She is gone, my lord,” said the crofter's wife, not even sure of his rank except that he was clearly above her. She touched his shoulder for comfort, a touch she would never have ventured in other circumstances, but tragedy made them kin.

The king's litany continued as if he did not hear, and indeed he did not. For all he heard was the breath of death, that absence made all the louder by his own sobs.

“She is dead, Sire,” the crofter said. He had known the king all along, but had not mentioned it till that one moment. Blunter than his wife, he was less sure of the efficacy of touch. “Dead.”

And this one final word the king heard.

“She is not dead!”
he roared, bringing the back of his hand around to swat the crofter's face as if he were not a giant of a man but an insect. The crofter shuddered and was silent, for majesty does make gnats of such men, even in their own homes. Even there.

The infant, recognizing no authority but hunger and cold, began to cry at her father's voice. On and on she bawled, a high, unmusical strand of sound till the king dropped his dead wife's hand, put his own hands over his ears, and ran from the cottage screaming, “I shall go mad!”

He did not, of course. He ranged from distracted to distraught for days, weeks, months, and then the considerations of kingship recalled him to himself. It was his old self recalled: the distant, cold, considering king he had been before his marriage. For marriage to a young, beautiful, foreign-born queen had changed him. He had been for those short months a better man, but not a better ruler. So the counselors breathed easier, certainly. The barons and nobles breathed easier, surely. And the peasants—well, the peasants knew a hard hand either way, for the dalliance of kings has no effect on the measure of rain nor the seasons in the sun, no matter what the poets write or the minstrels pluck upon their strings.

Only two in the kingdom felt the brunt of his neglect. Allerleirauh, of course, who would have loved to please him; but she scarcely knew him. And her Nanny, who had been her mother's Nanny, and was brought across the seas to a strange land. Where Allerleirauh knew hunger, the nurse knew hate. She blamed the king as he blamed the child for the young queen's death, and she swore in her own dark way to bring sorrow to him and his line.

The king was mindful in his own way of his promises. Kingship demands attention to be paid. He loved his daughter with the kindness of kings, which is to say he ordered her clothed and fed and educated to her station. But he did not love her with his heart. How could he, having seen her first cloaked in his wife's blood? How could he, having named her Undoing?

He had her brought to him but once a year, on the anniversary of his wife's death, that he might remind himself of her crime. That it was also the anniversary of Allerleirauh's birth, he did not remark. She thought he remembered, but he did not.

So the girl grew unremarked and unloved, more at home in the crofter's cottage where she had been born. And remembering each time she sat there in the rain—learning the homey crafts from the crofter's stout wife—that first rain.

The king did not marry again, though his counselors advised it. Memory refines what is real. Gold smelted in the mind's cauldron is the purer. No woman could be as beautiful to him as the dead queen. He built monuments and statues, commissioned poems and songs. The palace walls were hung with portraits that resembled her, all in color—the skin white as snow, the lips red as blood, the hair black as raven's wings. He lived in a mausoleum and did not notice the live beauty for the dead one.

Years went by, and though each spring messengers went through the kingdom seeking a maiden “white and black and red,” the king's own specifications, they came home each summer's end to stare disconsolately at the dead queen's portraits.

“Not one?” the king would ask.

“Not one,” the messengers replied. For the kingdom's maidens had been blonde or brown or redheaded. They had been pale or rosy or tan. And even those sent abroad found not a maid who looked like the statues or spoke like the poems or resembled in the slightest what they had all come to believe the late queen had been.

So the king went through spring and summer and into snow, still unmarried and without a male heir.

In desperation, his advisers planned a great three-day ball, hoping that—dressed in finery—one of the rejected maidens of the kingdom might take on a queenly air. Notice was sent that all were to wear black the first night, red the second, and white the third.