The Best of Electric Velocipede (13 page)

Milk and Apples

Catherynne M. Valente

S
he was not my child—and yet.

From the day I walked beneath the fluttering red flags and bronze-cragged portcullis, frightened as a tree before the axe, this infant was put into my arms, pushed against my breast, her shock of black hair a gleam against my trembling skin. I was so young then—child bride on my child throne, threaded up in violet and gold, gowns meant for another, gowns which, even laced their tightest, could not produce the womanly form of their last owner. I sat, velvet and silk puddling around my hips, sliding off my slim shoulders, with a baby sprawled on my lap, and the hall was empty as a nunnery. I was a wet nurse, married into this Teutonic mausoleum because I had been wicked, yes, because I had borne a dead daughter, I had squeezed a little pale corpse from my body as though I were nothing but a fat coffin, and buried it in the snow-hardened fields.

So, you see, I was wicked, from the beginning. There was a man and a child when there ought to have been nothing but candies and horse-lessons. My dresses had to be let out, and the huntsman was banished from any house of stone or straw. I stood over the purplish, frozen creature—half-fish, half-snail—as a pot-scrubber from the kitchens lowered it into the icy scrabble, into the potato roots and carrot seeds, curled around itself as if to protect its tender skin from worms, its black hair already icicles breaking off under the weight of shoveled soil. Its hands were doubled into fists, a little row of perfect fingernails like pearls in a spoilt oyster-bed. The snow did not melt on my cheeks, and I did not weep.

Alone in all the world, this one king wanted a wife whose breasts were already clotted with milk, whose flesh groaned childward. He looked at my teeth when we met, my pink gums. He ran his hands over the welts still blazing on my back from the whore’s whip. And under my father’s rheumy eye he squeezed a white drop from my left breast, his scorpion-hand hot and dry. He wiped his fingers clean on my penitent skirt.

My family was grateful for the favor. I came with twelve head of cattle, and I, swollen heifer, thirteenth. I was lead out of my home with all those brown-hooved cows, and I did not weep.

On a twisted little throne of willow and wicker they put her into my arms, white as the ground over my gray-navelled daughter, lips too red for infancy. They put her into my arms and drew the curtains. I was alone with her. This was my wedding night—I did not receive the king in my bed, only his child in a drafty, stony hall where no water or bread was brought me.

I did not even have to loosen the golden laces, so ridiculous were those clown-cloaks of my bridal bower. My breasts were hard and shrieking with their weight of milk, their stoppered grief. My body was taut and grasping, straining in its dumb carnality to replace its missing self. She cried, her little reedy cry, and her plump hand fluttered against my face. She turned upward, black eyes narrowly open, like doors to some secret place, searching blindly for the mother-warmth. I had none of it to give. Snow still settled on my face, unyielding. But her plaintive, innocent throat worked noiselessly, swallowing milk that was as dead in the earth as my own piscine girl.

I eased a cold and swollen nipple into her scarlet mouth. Her brow eased and she began to suckle with a swift, greedy thirst. The tug of her swallowing was stronger than I expected. Slowly, I drained out of myself, into her, and the bell-pain in my chest tolled silently, fading into echoes.

I put my hand to her dark, soft head, and wept.

*

She was not my child, and yet, as winters swept by like blackbirds, she looked more and more like me. Did I wish this, somewhere in my sorrow? Did I incant some old rhyme while I slept, alone in my high-postered bed, and will her face into this delicate mirror? I have seen the paintings of her mother—how could I not, when my stone-bricked room is hung with them like boughs of yellow apples—and she was bright and gold as a young lion. Yet the girl grew dark and slight, pale as glass, and her eyes were huge, huge and black.

I became a virgin again—cobwebs strung themselves diamond-wet within me, and the king never came to my room, except to see his daughter fed. And fed she was, into her fifteenth year, for he would not wean her against her will, and the little girl came to me with smiles and kisses and bows in her hair, every day more radiant and flushed, her curls as bright as coal half-turned to diamonds. She fastened up the laces herself when she had finished, for the gowns had long since come to fit. She was always careful not to hurt me with her teeth, and sometimes, when she had done, she would lay her head against my neck, and sleep with her hands twined in my own jet hair. This was all I had of my husband, his lupine grin, his feral eyes clapped on me, on her, as she shut her eyes in bliss.

At night, I could hear them dancing together in the downstairs rooms, to some blaze-noted tarantella, and the fire crackled beneath their laughter.

I do not remember when the mirror arrived. Among the forest of portraits that showed the former queen—on her wedding day, on her favorite horse, gravid and glorying—was suddenly a cool glass, its frame a knotted kind of silver. Once it was there, leaning heavy as a churchbell against the gray wall where the
Sun Queen Regnant
had hung, it seemed as though it had always leaned there, and no canvas emblazoned with the dead woman cloaked in gold had ever caught the morning dust. In the procession of identical women, bright as lamps, was now one dark pillar, with skin that never drank sun, a figure ruined by fifteen years of nursing lashed sagging and chafed into a widow’s witch-black gown.

I touched my face—I thought, perhaps, I had been beautiful. Once, on the day they put my fish-child into the potato field. That day someone might have painted me, and called my sweet face sainted. But this creature, claw-fingered and sallow-throated, flesh kept on bone only by brackish water and bread soaked in pigfat, this creature was a deathshead, all its beauty drawn out as through from a silver well, drawn out by lips too red for a child.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall
, I whispered,
who is the fairest one of all
?

Crowded by the golden ghost in all her faces, the mirror rippled, and showed my own face—as I was, before I was wicked, with a high blush in my cheeks, and endless rivers of crow-wing hair curling at my waist. I watched myself tend a clutch of roosters in a green apron. I watched myself laugh, and sweat prettily in the sun.

Oh
, I whispered,
oh
.

*

It was not hard to call him. A boiled dove, a few drops of my blood, a yellow stone laid in the moon’s path for three nights—and he was there, gray-eared dogs at his side, below my tower. He was older than I liked to see—he drooped in gray like his hounds, and his skin was beaten into bronze by sun and rain. But even so, after all these years, he could hardly look at me.

She might have been ours, I told him. But she is not. She is innocent. She knows only the taste of milk and the smell of my collar. You mustn’t hurt her, I said, only wean her from me so that I can step away from this stair of bone. Take her into the potato field, into the snow, and harden her flesh, lay out her heart in the ice and mud, as you laid out mine when it was knotted up for you like a pretty red present.

Save me, I said. I am in need.

The huntsman nodded, weary as cattle, his head heavy with debt.

But when he returned, he held only a little wooden box with a copper seal.

It was not that she was not beautiful, he said, or that I did not want to obey you. But she wept so, and clutched her dress around her, and lay whimpering like a deer in the whirling snow. She begged me and her eyes were huge, huge and black, and I could not do it. I let her go, and she ran into the green forest, her hair streaming behind her like a coal furnace coughing.

I was stricken; the king would surely throw me from the tower and watch my skull wet the garden bed.

I am sorry, he said. But I did bring her back, I brought her back to you.

And he pressed the wooden box into my hand, disappearing into the fog with his mud-pawed hounds padding behind him.

Inside lay a mound of bones, startlingly white, tiny and delicate as those of a fish.

*

Without her, I still felt her mouth, phantom, silent, hungry. The shade of her pulled at me with lips of air.

The king did not come. He closed himself into a garret of portraits, of women black and gold, and the only sound was his bellows, wheezing through the walls. He did not dash my brains out on the floor, he did not, at long last, sink his grief into me. Without her, I was of less use than any oil-stroked effigy. The tower was empty of all but wind and painted queens. And the mirror, which showed the other me huddled in the crook of a willow, whipped red and bloody by the cold. I tried to reach through the glass, to touch her, but the mirror allows only so much. She is bound there, under the silver.

The stone whistled and coughed, and the damp settled in.

The king did not come.

And the king did not go to the woman in the mirror. Not as she crouched in her tree, not as she stumbled through the wild wood with her arms upraised, scratched and whipped. Not as she starved under green boughs heavy with apples—poor, innocent thing, who did not know how to eat if it was not from my breast. Not as she found a burned-out carcass of a thatched hut, and not as she hid herself there, terror-mad, keening back and forth, clutching her bruised knees, her hair a savage cloak of snarls.

She was my daughter. How could I not go to her?

I crept down the tower stair in my worn gown which looked finally what it had been from the first—a funeral shroud. My bones rattled like beans in a gourd. When the sun touched my skin for the first time since I was a bride, I could feel the light settling into strange new wrinkles and crevices—I was, at last, a hag, bent and broken, a pitcher poured by husband into child. And under a black hood, I fled into the forest, yellow teeth gleaming.

As I went, I pulled apples from the trees, into my dusky apron, and if I used a glamour or two to make them redder, rounder, brighter, it was only to make them beautiful for her, more delicious than the milk she had drunk in delight for years upon years.

*

Mother
, she croaked.
Mother
.

Out of the charcoal hut, blackened and skeletal, she crawled, thin as a leaf of paper, her eyes spilling over with relief, scarlet lips trembling. She put her arms up to me like a babe tired of walking.

Mother
.

I stroked her pollen-clotted hair, combed the gold from the black, and crooned to her, rocked her sweetly, whispered nonsense names and tuneless songs. She scrabbled at my bodice for the laces, ravenous of tooth and throat, and her fingernails, perfect as a line of pearls, cut into my dry and page-brown skin. I pushed her hands away, closed her mouth with a hooked claw. Oh, and the betrayal in her eyes! Huge and black, they blinked in disbelief, suddenly shattered and faithless. She wept, and tried to pull at my waist, and her weeping became sobbing, and her sobbing became screams.

It was then that she saw the apple. Redder even than she, it bulged breast-like in my cloak, and desperate as a caught wolf, she thrust her clumsy fingers at it. I pulled it free, and it shone between us like a tiny sun, its colors twisting and boiling. She lay against me, bathed in red, and I rubbed it slightly against her cheek, as one will rub a knuckle against an infant’s silken jowl, to turn its untried mouth towards the teat. After all, she is a good girl, and her mouth seized the shining skin, blood-bright and warm.

I swelled.

She diminished.

There was no choking, no sputtering, no bulging of those endlessly black eyes. She simply drifted to the ground, falling like mist descending on a sod-packed rooftop. I could say I did not know, that I only tried to feed her, to show her food that was not flesh—but who would believe it? I was wicked from the beginning. My children can only be death and poison, corpses green and gray, coupled together like yoked wagons.

There is no faith left for me.

As I held her, my hair tumbled over hers, and we were lost in a curtain of darkness, enwombed in our hair like twins. But in that shade she closed her eyes, and her last breath smelled of spoiled apples.

*

I stood clothed in jet and ash, face sweet as saints, nose straight and proud. My hair was braided around my head like a crown, but I wore none. My hands were smooth and white as snow, clasped so tightly that the blood had long fled my fingers, clasped tightly enough to keep from shaking. I stood over the purplish, breathless creature—half bird, half hart—as seven pallbearers, stooped and huddled in grief, lowered in a box of glass—almost, it was whispered, as though it had been hewn out of a mirror—into the icy scrabble, into the potato roots and carrot seeds. She was laid out flat as if to offer herself, virgin-tender, to the worms, her black hair already icicles breaking off under their own weight. Her hands were clenched into fists, a little row of perfect fingernails cutting into an oyster bed.