Medusa

“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, roll up, roll up, and step this way! Yes, if you’re interested in the weird and strange, if you crave the bizarre and frightening, you’ve come to the right place! Yes, step inside and see freaks from the darkest corners of the darkest countries in all the wide world! Roll up, pay the toll, step through the curtained gate, and you’re there, my friends, in the presence of the freaks who haunted your childhood dreams, and haunt you still! Forget the pinheads, the mermaids, the wolf-children! Forget the boneless girl and the headless boy. You’ve seen all of those things before! Don’t waste your dime on things that you’ve already seen. Pay here, pay me, and step through the door. Do it now. Don’t miss the show! Roll up, roll up! Extinguish all smoking materials at the door. Forget what you think you know of the world. Roll up! Hurry, hurry, hurry, ladies and gentlemen. Come one, come all, and stand in her presence, if you dare!

You’ve seen the Bearded Lady! Now come see the Serpent Queen, the saddest girl in all the world!”

They kept her in the dark for so long that her eyes grew skin, closed forever, and, dawn-blind, she waits. She presses herself against the dirt floor of the cage, her palms and cheek and breasts and belly and cunt, and she listens, and she waits. They’ll come; they always come, one way or another, are led or sent. They all look the same to her, with their pale smooth skin and their fine, fly-away hair. Her hair lies dull and lifeless, blunt against the dark dirt. She is still, and so are they. The insects that she catches when they skitter across the floor are barely enough to keep her alive. She swallows them whole, and they pull at the stitches in her throat as they squirm the way down into her belly. They throw her cabbage leaves and spoiled fruit, things that stink of earth and rot. Khthon, she whispers. She forgets the exact meaning, but it had something to do with harvests and graves. In the dark, she is her own grave. Her healed over eyes make no tears. Once upon a time, there was ritual sacrifice, and it was babies that they left in the holes in the earth for her to find.

She licks her lips. Her forked tongue tickles the corners of her mouth and tastes the air. She tastes copper and shit and oil fumes. There’s a rat in the cage with her, somewhere, and she gropes for it. When she catches them, she swallows them whole. It reminds her of sex, her head thrown back, the undulation of breasts and throat as she forces it on down, and then the dead sleep that follows.

She misses this one. She sucks at her lips for the taste of the last one. There’s barely anything there.

Outside, the shouting starts again. In the old days, the good bad days when she was Guardian and Protector and Queen, there were prayers. She doesn’t understand the words, but she wonders if the meaning might be the same. Devotion, desire, and one day you’re fucking on somebody’s altar and you’ve signed your own death warrant. Some deaths take longer than others. All these years, she’s been waiting.

Something changes. A cockroach skitters across her face and up over her open-closed eye. It’s just trying to get away from the light. She presses her ear to the floor and listens to the trembling of footsteps in the dirt. She can’t see, but she knows what’s happening. If nothing else, she’s learned how long it takes for things to change. There’ll be a mirror, high on the wall. There’ll be a boy with fine golden hair. In her youth, her hair was golden too. There’ll be no sword. They don’t carry swords anymore.

What one god takes away, another finds a way to give.

Slowly, she sits up, but she keeps the palms of both hands pressed against the floor, the better to feel him with. She lifts her head and feels the whisper of a hundred forked tongues against her cheek. She whispers to them, and tells them to be patient. Obligate, she needs meat to thrive. They come to her like babies, toddling, their eyes unfocused. They see her blindness, and don’t realise how quickly she can move. A bead of venom forces past the rim of one blind eye and trickles warmly down her cheek. She wants him so much that she can taste it.

In the old days, they dug holes like graves and left the babies there for her, with words of ritual. They placated her with blood. They kept her at bay with tender flesh, easier to swallow whole, until their hero could make is way up to her mountain with mirror and sword.

Old story. Unsatisfying.

The sirens, though, were from the earth too, the earth’s daughters, and they taught their sisters how to sing. Khthon, they said, because even beautiful things must eventually come to rot beneath the earth. Gravedirt caked under her fingernails. In the dark, the years and years of dark, she taught herself to sing in harmony with herself, a hundred and one flickering forked tongues. She can’t see, but she knows that he’s watching her in the mirror, and she knows that men can’t resist this song without a mast to bind themselves to. He’ll turn. He has to. He doesn’t have a choice. The shouting outside gets louder, so she doesn’t have much time, before they come in here to find another one made stone, but not before she has his blood to warm her. There’ll be another one through the door any minute, come to see the Serpent Queen, saddest girl in all the world, with her blind eyes and her poison tears.

She stretches out her hands to him, and she sings, and she sways, and she smiles, and she waits.

Isolde (part 1)

There was a face frozen in the ice, a young boy or girl. She couldn’t tell. In Ireland, where she was from, they still told stories about a girl washing bloody shirts, a glimpse of your own death. She hadn’t seen any skinny girls, their knuckles blue from trying to get the stains out of skirts, but she stood and stared at the face in the ice for a long time, the little distorted features, tried to make out if her own fate was spelt out there. She couldn’t tell. It had been a long ride to bring her there, tall on her white horse, the hedges pale with frost, the heavy fur trimmed edge of her cloak dropping almost to the ground. There had been no sound, the world dampened by the snow, a strange funeral hush and she had turned her face into the shadows of her hood and thought of him, conjured him bent low over the neck of his horse and riding hard. When she had heard that they were coming for her, her husband’s men, she’d run through the secret doors to him without her shoes on. He’d caught her in the doorway, and she’d pushed a plan against his parted lips. Ride quickly, she’d told him. Do this thing and that. Do not fail me if you love me. Do not fail. It had been so simple, at the time.

She sealed it with a crumpled kiss.

“Isolde?”

She started; she’d been staring at the face in the ice. The child had fallen, obviously…fallen with nobody to catch her (she’d decided that the long hair straggling recalled a little girl with hair in braids come undone in the icy cold). She could fall here too, yet. She shook herself. Nobody was going to die here. Nobody ever died for loss of love or honour. Dying and the end of living are not quite the same thing in the end.

“Isolde,” said the voice, more insistent this time.

“Yes, yes…I’m coming,” she said, with a royal wave of her hand, shading her eyes to look for him as she stepped down onto the frozen river, into her own future. Or something.

He had come in a ship with dark sails and ended her life, to begin with. She had been almost too old to be married, too beautiful for most men, too carefully guarded a prize and then the Knight had come to claim her for his King. Nobody had asked her what she thought. Bought and sold, she’d stood and watched as the blood flowed on the green, green grass of her home. She had wondered if it would rain, as she watched the clouds scudding across the flat, white sky, as she watched the knight from across the water leaning on his sword on his knee in the mud, head bent. She had prayed for rain then. Let the rain come in hard from the sea and drown him. She didn’t want to look at him. She didn’t have eyes for anything but the wide, hopeless width of the pale sky. Morholt was dead. She had wanted the knight dead as well.

But it hadn’t happened.

Later, he’d stood on the deck on his ship with dark sails while, in white, she waited to kiss her mother goodbye, to bid honour to her father. She wore white for Morholt, the Champion but her uncle too, and squeezed her fist around the shard of iron that they’d taken from his ragged heart; a splinter from the Knight’s sword. It tore her palm and stained her dress, the splinter from the sword that had broken poor Morholt’s loyal heart. Behind her, on his ship, he was waiting for her, leaning on his arms on the rail, his shirt stained green from rolling in the grass with Morholt’s dead weight on top of him. He stood in the sun and she could imagine the smell of him, sweat and leather and his darkly curling hair, grass stains and blood. When she imagined him touching her by accident, his fingers brushing her arm to steady her as she climbed aboard the ship, her stomach heaved uneasily. She was pure, a princess of Ireland in her white gown. They had called her the Fair and she’d waited years for a husband who wasn’t afraid of her. They said that she could heal the sick. They said that she was worth her weight in iron, which is heavier and more use than gold. She’d been sold like so much meat to this curly haired knight who was younger than her. The price he’d paid for her had been blood and violence, which told her all that she needed to know about men, if she hadn’t known already from watching her father and his brothers. She risked a glance back at him. He smiled and winked at her, still leaning on his arms. She turned back to her mother and held out her hands.

She didn’t look at him again.

If her life had ended with Morholt and the sight of the knight standing on the sunny deck, then Hell was the space below the decks, in the dark, where the world pitched and rocked and Brangwain, sweetheart, her childhood friend who she’d grown up with and bought with her when she left, cried and whimpered about the country that they were never going to see again. With Brangwain’s cheek against her thigh, Brangwain’s tears soaking through her white skirts and her fingers combing through Brangwain’s long, pale hair (so like her own), Isolde had closed her eyes and thought of a new world. Around them the ship had creaked and shuddered as though possessed, and Isolde’s entire life narrowed to planks and pitch and the rocking, rolling motion of the sea, to the curls of Brangwain’s hair around her fingers and the bind of white linen across her breasts.

“Shhhh,” she murmured, smoothing her friend’s hot, wet cheeks. She kept herself occupied by imagining each part of her body as separate and then turning them against him, one by one. When she was done, she hummed Irish lullabies and started on Brangwain’s body. She turned each part of them against him. She hardened both of their hearts and told herself that maybe she could learn to love a King but she could never even look at the Knight who killed her without leaving a mark. She entertained fantasies of killing him while he slept. Her Uncles had taught her some things, but her mother had taught her more. She wouldn’t miss her mark, she was sure of it. After Brangwain fell asleep, she kilted up her skirts around her knees and followed the corridor down into the spiralling heart of the tiny ship, hiding from the shouts of the crew men on the deck above. He hadn’t even closed the door of his cabin all of the way.

Through the crack in the door, she watched him shrug out his clothes. She watched as his shoulders tensed as he dragged his shirt up over his head. Underneath the green, he was brown and white. Scars. Too many scars. For a moment, the beauty of the lines across his back made something low in her belly contract for him, but she closed her eyes, pinched a breath out through her nose.

She was hardening her heart.

He’d left his sword lying on a pile of clothes, unsheathed; he’d been examining the notched blade, his sword ruined now, no grace. Isolde thought about the shard of steel in the pocket of her gown, the splinter that had broken Morholt’s heart (hers as well). The Knight lay in a wooden tub, steam rising, his head tipped back against the rim. He looked much younger with his hair slicked back. He looked like he’d barely lost his puppy fat, his face only recently gone lean and handsome. She thought of her youngest brother, lying with his cheek against her thigh, dreaming of bows and arrows. He looked almost fragile lying there, the water beading on his skin, catching against his scars. She picked up the sword and hefted it. He wasn’t a child. She’d seen him with blood on his hands. The sword was heavier than she thought it would be. She imagined being hit with it, propelled by the full weight of his body behind it. He didn’t look like much, but she imagined that it had hurt like hell.

There are different kinds of hell.

She realised that he was looking at her. Somewhere inside her, there was a trembling little girl screaming but Isolde, with her hard heart, lifted her chin to meet his gaze, leaning her weight downwards on the point of his sword.

“I could kill you,” she said. “I should kill you. You…I loved him.”

“I’ve got a name,” he said. She lifted the sword with both hands, walked towards him with it held out in front of her, trembling, until she was close enough to stand over him. With some effort, she guided the point of the sword to rest against his throat. He didn’t stop looking at her.

“I know your name. I know who you are. I loved him and you killed him.”

“I was challenged,” he said. “What else was I supposed to do?”

“Is that all you do? Like a trained dog? Your master says kill so you go kill, and drag the bloody spoils back home? What does your wife say?”

“I haven’t got a wife.”

“That’s sad,” she said, pressing on the sword a little, so she could feel his breath bobbing against it. “If I killed you, right now, who’d remember you? Anybody?”

“The world remembers deeds, Isolde. I’ve done. I’ve done what was required of me. S’not me who’ll be forgotten…s’you and your ladies and your uncle who did nothing but wait.”

Her name. He’d said her name for the first time. She’d assumed that he didn’t care, but he’d looked at her and said it. She dropped the sword. It bounced with a terrible noise when it hit the side of the tub and fell against the floor. Her bare feet made no sound on the wooden boards.

He woke her, fumbling in the dark. She’d lay awake listening to him roaming on the deck, her arm around Brangwain’s waist, holding the other girl’s slim heat against her. In the sudden flare and then the dim spill of the light she saw him, blowing on his burnt fingers. She sat up, Brangwain snoring softly still.

“Isolde,” he said, with a quick nod of his head, turning away from her, back to the door, reading for his own bed.

“I would have killed you, kni-“

“My name’s Tristan.”

“I would have killed you, Tristan.”

He looked at her for a long time, too long, so long a time that it became uncomfortable, and then he nodded.

“Do you want to come and sit with me, Isolde? Have something to drink? It might help you sleep.”

She’d clambered out from beside Brangwain, gathering unbleached linen around her thighs. Later, people would talk of love potions and powder heavy wine. Later, they’d whisper of witchcraft and foul play, trickery and deception, some kind of Irish spell. What Isolde knew was this: when his lips touched hers, she tasted his breath. What she knew was that, when he held out his hand to her, she took it, and one side of her skirt touched the bone of her ankle. They knew each other’s names. She let him bring her out onto the deck. She shivered and he wrapped his arm around her shoulders, pulled back against his solid heat. She let him because it felt better than being alone. It wasn’t anything to be proud of, later. It was just something that had happened. It wasn’t as if she’d planned it that way, lain in the bed beside Brangwain and plotted. She liked to think that she understood a little about men; how some pushed and some pulled and some drifted. He was drifting. She saw it in his face. She didn’t love him, she couldn’t, but she did feel sorry for him, like a blue edge to the heat of her anger. She hated him, but she could no longer hate him out of existence. It was a stutter, when she took his face in her hands. It was a stammer, when she kissed him. He tried to whisper to her but he couldn’t find the words. She rubbed her fingers against his lips. White was for mourning, not purity. Pure something. Want. Need. She wanted him to help her. She needed him to know her. He was the last person who’d seen her, before she changed entirely. She pressed her body tight against his and hoped to leave an impression. She had wanted to hate him, but something else had come instead.

She woke up in pieces, her hands first (one threaded through his curling hair, one smoothing the flat heat of his belly). Her nose then, which brought her the warm, close smell of him, spice and sweat and old blood, soaked into his skin like beer in barrel wood. He smelt like the monks she’d met, Christians, those old men with their incense and their fool’s prayers. His bones were arranged around her like a blessing. His body, notched with scars, reminded her of his sword. She’d wanted to kill him the night before but now she stretched carefully, not wanting to wake him. It would be morning soon anyway, and Kernow would come looming out of the mist, and she’d rise and braid her hair with herbs and water and make herself ready for her husband.

Lonely without him, she kissed his forehead. He opened his eyes. She rubbed his lips with her fingers, don’t speak, not yet, don’t ruin it. He lay silently and watched her as she bent naked over her chest and rummaged for a gown that wasn’t mourning white. In the pitching, rolling light, the indigo linen looked closer to black, closer to the colour of his eyes than hers. He lay on his back on the pallet, one arm pillowed behind his head and watched as she sat taken, soft curves and muffled lines, and combed her fingers through her nearly waist length hair.

“So now you’ll go and be a wife?” he said. “Somebody else’s wife.”

“Yes,” she said. “I suppose so.”

“You could stay. We could…go. This is my ship. We could go anywhere.”

Anywhere there was water, anyway. The sea had always seemed so terrifyingly big from the beach, mirroring the sky. She shook her head without looking at him.

“No, Tristan. Not now.”

“I wish…”

He was so young, wasn’t he?

“If wishes were horses, lover, I’d be the Queen of Ireland, and I’d never have met you, and I’d have a hundred thousand horses.”

She turned her back on him to step into her gown, and didn’t look at him after that.

Mark was handsome though she wondered how much of that was a kind light in his eyes, the nice line of his mouth. Flowers in her hair and shared wine from a golden cup. Brangwain’s hand on her arm when she thought that might fall and she was a wife. Married. She’d almost wanted it to rain, wanted the sky flat and grey and featureless, imagined Tintagel washing away into the sea in a deluge, but it hadn’t and it didn’t and the sun shone all day and the ladies danced and she sat at her husband’s right hand. Her husband.

And all day, Tristan there, not smiling, in the corner of her eye.

Later, in the dim light, always in the dim light, Isolde unbraided Brangwain’s long hair, the comb bone as she separated layers over her maid’s finely trembling shoulders. The could have been sisters, the two girls; known each other for so long that they’d started to look alike, tall and slim with long hair and the bind of white linen across their breasts. They had called her the Fair, Isolde, the Princess of Ireland and there she was, a wife, a ruin and Brangwain was her only hope. In a fire, she’d have kicked a hole in anything to let the smoke out, to let her out. Brangwain was a hole which she smashed with her fist in the sky that was orange and red with setting sun, in the fact that she would soon be expected in her husband’s bed, but not until full dark.

A sunset wouldn’t save her. Not only a sunset.

She stood back and studied Brangwain who stood against the window, her hair and and loose and long, her hands beautiful but trembling. Against the light, she was so much dark space, the shape of her, rather than her actual details. Isolde took her face in her hands and kissed her.

“Will it hurt?” said Brangwain, and Isolde smoothed her hair with the sides of her fingers, remembering Tristan in the pitching, rolling dark and Morholt before him, pain and a little blood, her heard folded away small and offered with an open mouth and taken so gently. Hearts had layers like onions, like carefully packed chests. In the warm light of the setting sun, thinking about hearts and giving and taking, Isolde pressed a kiss to the corner of Brangwain’s mouth, trembling lips to trembling lips.

“A little,” she said, “But not too much.”

“What do I have to do?”

“Go to his bed,” said Isolde, managing a smile. “He’ll show you the way. It’s natural. It’ll be alright.”

Later still, years later, after the ice, in the face of fire, she thought that it was that, sending Brangwain into Mark’s bed in her stead, was probably the first thing that she did that condemned her to burn. Or to dream of burning, and black sails, but she managed to put that out of her mind when she went to him where he was waiting, open arms and the look in his eyes. She was another man’s wife, the wife of his Uncle, the wife of a King but she came to him barefooted like a peasant, like a lover, her long hair brushed out on her shoulders (her body was a mirror). When he bent his head to kiss her, she thought of Brangwain putting out the candle before Mark could turn around and look into her face.

“Will he miss you?”

She shook her head.

“Brangwain went. One woman’s very similar to another in the dark, I suppose. To a man.”

He didn’t have anything to say to that, but she turned in his arms, her gown unravelling in his hands. She wanted to feel like a lover again, not a wife. Wives were women like her mother, who had been beautiful once but had faded, famed now only for her white hands, her light dim and almost gone, like a dead day in winter. Wives were iron, and women were supposed to flow like the wind. She rubbed her fingers against his lips (how easily things became habit).

“Don’t,” she said, unravelling.

Mark leant towards her, a cup of wine in his hand, the long table in the hall loaded with food.

“Tell me, my love,” he said, and she was distracted by a bead of wine the colour of blood clinging to his beard. “Who shall I leave to guard you when I go hunting?”

“Guard me? In my own home?”

“Too precious a jewel to be left in a wide open chest.” He laughed, and she remembered that she didn’t hate him, quite. “Who?”

She couldn’t help it; she looked to where Tristan was sitting beside the fireplace. He laughing loudly at something. He made a lot of noise, a lot of light, and drew the eye.

“Tristan,” she said. She had heard the whispers, of course she had: the Queen and the King’s nephew, Mark’s wife and his loyal servant, tristanandisolde, their names run together by suspicion. She’d heard them and Mark had surely heard them too but in scarlet, with her hair braided with gold, she felt like whispers, mere whispers, could never touch her. She was invincible. She was pushing against the sky.

“Tristan,” she said, again.

“Tristan,” Mark said, and nodded.

She wasn’t entirely sure when it had happened; when Mark had started ploughing Brangwain by candlelight, in daylight, in all lights, her hair dragged back so that he could see her face. It wasn’t her place to ask; her was her husband. Still, it meant that there were certain things that Brangwain knew because she’d been told, because sometimes Mark talked more easily when he was falling asleep. She didn’t blame Brangwain…it was as though she’d pushed her onto the path after turning her three times to confuse her. Isolde couldn’t blame her, that she’d found a way to Mark regardless. And they had been friends for so long.

“Isolde,” she hissed, and Isolde bent her head to listen. “It’s a trap. He’ll kill you.”

Isolde her felt a tilt come to her chin. She was a princess of Ireland, for the love of gods. She was no weak and mortal woman.

“I am not afraid of him, I…”

“He’ll kill Tristan too.”

She hadn’t run to him, then. She’d taken a deep breath, to feel linen tight across her breasts, the weight of the embroidery on her skirts. She hadn’t felt the sky any more, but she was still strong. She hadn’t seen him the whole night and, in the morning, she went to Mark, every inch his queen in her red and gold and told him that Tristan had displeased her, that he always displeased her, and that the cold wet moor could have him, and good luck with the fox or the stag or the sea. But she wasn’t immortal any more. And that was the difference wasn’t it? She could die now, one way or another, but hand or tongue. She could die, but she wouldn’t. She was a Queen of Kernow, and a princess of Ireland, and she was not afraid, but maybe she went to him less.

And still, the whispers came and, more and more, Mark was listening. And he had to do something, to appear still strong. It was vital, beyond important, to appear still strong.

“I have to test you, Isolde,” he said, his hands hurting the sides of her face where he held her. “I have to show everyone that you are my Queen,” he said, but what he meant was so many people can’t be wrong, can they?.

“Test me, then,” she said. “See if I’m lying.”

And there was a face frozen in the ice, a young boy or girl. She couldn’t tell. She bent down and brushed gloved fingers over the surface. A girl, she thought, a raggy whisper of braids in such a cold grave. She saw a glimpse of her own tomb and shuddered in her warm layers.

“Will you cross, Lady?” someone said, and it was all ceremony because she had to cross. Turning back now would be so big a folly. One of her husband’s men was holding out his hand to her.

“I will cross,” she said, stepping out alone.

Crossing the ice, her muscles cramped; her belly, her feet, the long muscles of her thighs which he had smoothed so expertly with his heavy soldier’s hands. She would not slip there though, not yet. She would not give any of her husband’s men a chance to catch her, or see her fall and tell Mark about it. She walked without lifting her feet, her hems stirring the snow on the ice, which creaked like a giant’s bones beneath her feet. The world was made out of giant’s bones. The world was a cage of ribs and the delicate parts of hands. Bear me, she told the river, silently. Bear me safely across. Around her, the pilgrims were also crossing and, ahead, the island and more bones, the bones of a saint, cracked femurs and a holy skull. She searched the corners of her vision for something, anything. His face in shadow. A hem stained green, dark hair against his brow and, when he passed her, the barest whisper of blood. Do this thing, and that. Do not fail me if you love me. Do not fail.

On the shore, carefully, she stumbled.

“The Lady!” she heard, going quicker than she’d meant to, and then his arms, familiar, a whirl softly to the cold, hard ground. Do not fail me if you love me, do not fail. A broken moment, a fluttering beat of her heart. She realised that she’d been doubting him. She shouldn’t have. He was a capable man. His arms were strong. Her husband’s men came running but he was already helping her to her feet, a pilgrim continuing on his way, stained green at the hem of his pilgrim’s brown. He took her heart with him, on his way on up the hill to see the Saint, as she turned to her husband’s men, feet shuffling, thinking against of that face in the ice. He took his heart with him. She could love him more, after that, in all the welter of wanting.

The snow was starting again.

Isolde (part 2)

In the abbey, she wore white. She was pure and her heart was far away and getting further.

“No man has ever touched me; no man held me in his arms since my husband on the day that I wed.”

“No man but your husband and the pilgrim?”

“My husband and the pilgrim.” They put the words into her mouth. She let them. She had put the words into their heads.

She watched them heat the iron, and then she might have said a prayer but not to their God, to her old gods, who pressed against her, butting belly and thighs and breasts with small, damp heads, like she had birthed them from her own body. When the iron touched her, skin blistered but she did not feel it. She held his gaze until it broke, until he looked away. They carried the message home to Mark: his Queen had spoke the truth and God had protected her from scalding iron. His Queen would always now bear the scar of his suspicion. His Queen would never have a heart for him now (and who could blame her?).

Always, always, let them love you more than you love them.

In the weeks that it had taken for the blisters to bubble and break and heal shiny on her arm, they’d carried on as before, more or less. They had no reason not to. They were beyond suspicion. Her faith had saved them. Her faith and her duplicity. That was another mark against her, maybe. Brangwain and the marks on her arm. When they bought him home from hunting carrying him at the height of their shoulders, they told her that he was already dead and her legs wouldn’t hold her (if he died, her heart went with him; she didn’t know where he’d hidden it). Brangwain who was still so loyal (but she had Mark’s bed, what did she have to lose?) came running.

“Don’t give them reason to doubt you, Isolde. Not now.”

“I need my white dress,” was all that she could say, dumbly, nervously, over and over. White dress, white, white. White for mourning and void. She was unpacking the gown of white that she’d been wearing on the first morning that she saw him, shaking out the wrinkles when the curtain had been pushed aside. Blood still stained the spot where her hand had hung.

“Lady, you have to come. The King’s nephew is dying.” Dying was not the same as dead.

“What can I do?”

“They said that you were a healer, lady.”

That had been her, hadn’t it? Ireland was so far away, but they had said that about her, hadn’t they, way back when, in another life?

She’d kicked off her shoes and kilted her skirts to run faster to his side.

She sat with him for a day and halfway through the night before he started to talk The dead have their own language which the dying have started to learn. She held her hair back and bent over him and tried to make out the individual words.

Homegodsinlovehopelovehurtloveisoldeloveisoldeisoldeisolde.

She smoothed the sweaty hair back from his brow, the tips of her fingers bitter with the herbs she’d used to dress his wound.

“Shhhh…You must be tired, Tristan. Sleep now, man. Rest your head, and I’ll tell you a story.”

“Isolde,” he mumbled.

“It’s me, my love,” she said. “I’m going to tell you a story. About a Queen of Ireland who had a heart of glass and a thousand horses and could run faster than all of them and no man could ever catch her.”

And the story was about Maebh of Connaught, but it was about her too. Her life that had arrested when she’d seen him standing over Morholt, stained bright green. The way that she’d been caught and lost her horses and her heart of glass

“Don’t die, my love,” she said. The blood had turned his green shirt brown like rust and she covered it with her hand. “I’ll never find my heart again.”

Mark had come himself to carry her to her bed, wrapped her skirts around her legs like a blanket and lifted her like she was air. Against his shoulder, she had murmured about her lost heart. He had kissed her hair and told her that, always, her heart was in his safe keeping.

Even half asleep, she knew that that wasn’t what she’d meant.

And, two lonely days later, when he came to her, she lifted the sheets and let him lie beside her. He came to her too soon, winces and forced smiles, blood leaking through linen and onto her clean sheets. She knew that it was too early, but she was glad to see him. He wore her heart on his sleeve, on a silver chain around his neck. Was she glad to see him or her heart? It didn’t matter. By then, they were the same thing, more or less.

“I told you to rest,” she said.

“I had to see you.” She felt him speak rather than heard it; felt the words vibrate between her thighs as she slid across him. Whoever said that sex was a language to be spoken?

“You’d have lived,” she said, guiding her hands to her breasts (put it back, put it back, put it back where you found it). He pressed deep inside her, but her heart was nowhere to be seen. She almost forgot that she’d been looking for it. She started to move, distracted, for a second by a scratch of scarlet on the bedlinen, but he moaned and then she did, and then she closed her eyes.

She’d forgotten all about the blood; he’d been so gentle that she’d forgotten that, sometimes, love is like a war. Brangwain had been crying and pulling at her skirts, at Isolde’s skirts, with trembling fingers like a child.

“Oh, Isolde, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”

Isolde had pressed her fingers against Brangwain’s lips.

“How could you have known? Darling. Most loved.” Blood will call to blood, Isolde knew that, and when they asked about her monthly courses, Brangwain had told the truth; that they were a week gone, which left blood on her sheets and blood on his and no way to explain. And it couldn’t be taken back, not by Brangwain’s tears or Tristan running to her after he’d been told. He’d come running and she’d met him in the doorway, blocking his way and when he’d still tried to come in she’d pushed against him, shoved his as hard as she could with both of her hands.

“Don’t you dare,” she’d hissed and he’d looked at her with a wound in his eyes that was somehow worse than the break in the smoothness of his side (because, perhaps, it was beyond her powers to heal).

“Isolde, I…”

“Do you know what they’ll do to us, if they find you here, now? Do you know how bad this could be?”

No worse than it was going to be, but still.

“Run!” She’d screamed at him and pushed him, and he’d stumbled away from her like a little boy, but he had left. Do this for me. Do this thing, and that. Do not fail me if you love me. Do not fail.

After he’d gone, she’d sat down in a straight backed chair, smoothed her hair and her skirts and waited for them. She was a Queen of Kernow. She could not be harried or chased or cornered. When she saw how they averted her eyes, she smiled, but she was cold. It took a very brave man to finally lay a hand to her.

Passive, like a wife sometimes is, she let herself be taken away by her husband’s men.

She let herself be taken, her heart already hidden far away.

Hidden, and safe.

She was a bird trapped by the span of her own wings, then, beating against the walls of her prison. They stripped her to her shift, left her with unbound hair like a virgin girl, but that wasn’t the worst of it. They took away her windows too. She didn’t care particularly for the Cornish hills, but the sea and the sky were the same as the ones which touched her island, her Ireland, and she mourned them. Still, they couldn’t take the memory of Ireland away from her and she dreamt of it often, of Ireland and horses and of running, not away from something but towards it, something bigger and brighter than the sun.

And, yes, she thought of him often too. Mostly, she thought of him in Ireland, her green far-away land, and she smiled and, in the dark, nobody saw her. Perhaps Mark thought that people would forget all about her, and, in turn, the way that she had dishonoured him? In the dark, she laughed and then, still smiling, the palms of her hands scraped bloody by unforgiving, Cornish stone, she pressed her mouth close to the cracks in the walls and insinuated his name deep into the mortar, and hers as well. Let Tintagel itself weep and call for him and her, if Tintagel would be her grave now.

Tristan and Isolde, she told the castle. Isolde and Tristan. Mark my words.

He should have known that people wouldn’t forget her. He should have known the legends outlive their players. He’d meant to burn her, like Arthur had meant to burn Guinevere. He’d meant to blacken her, as she had blackened his name. He’d wanted to make a shooting star out of her, but he’d forgotten how, once before, God had saved her from burning.

She was never quite sure how it happened.

“Do you trust me?”

“Yes and no. With my life, but you lost my heart.”

She remembered nothing but the sudden flare of heat. The heat, and his voice over it. She must have swooned; the fire was cleansing. Out of fire comes new beginnings and fresh starts. He was her beginning. He had burnt her heart to white ash. Later, in the dark, he’d tell her stories of his he’d rescued her, cut the bindings around her hands and lifted her over the flames (scorching, in the process, the hem of her skirt). His horse was dappled grey and brown, his body was warm but did not burn her, and she curled between the horse’s neck and his chest, and she took his stories with a pinch of salt but she believed in heroes anyway.

“Are they following us?”

He shook his head. Like Arthur before him, Mark had been hoping for things to be taken out of his hands, and the burden put on somebody else’s back.

“Will we ever go back?” she murmured, as they rode, as night fell over Tintagel.

“Maybe in another life,” he said, wheeling the horse into the dark forest.

She was lying down already when he drew his sword. He was standing over her. For a split second, still dreaming, she thought that she’d cheated one death to be delivered straight into the arms of another. She put up her hands to protect herself She didn’t beg him not to. If Mark’s hate couldn’t finish her off, then maybe love could? It was all shades of the same death. Death did not arrive. Tristan dropped to his knees and lay his notched sword between them almost reverently between them, wool on top of moss and fern.

“What are you doing?” she said, rubbing one eye with a fist.

He reached out. She thought that he’d touch her, but he didn’t, the tips of his fingers moulding the air over her cheekbone

“Never again, Isolde.” He lay down beside her. She wanted him to touch her, but she lay huddled in her winter layers, frozen on her side of a steel coloured sea.

“Why not?”

“Because sin bought us here,” said Tristan, and turned his back on her. She reached out and fumbled along the straight line of his shoulder, looking for a crack. When she reached his hip, he took her hand in his. So she hadn’t lost him completely, which was, in the dark, a flicker of a light. She didn’t want to lose him at all, by then, and not just because of her heart.

When she fell asleep, she dreamt of Mark and he held out a ring to her in the palm of her hand. The sword still lay between her and Tristan, and, though he clutched at her hand, he didn’t wake.

“I’m not your wife,” she said. “That part of me caught fire and died.”

“And yet you have her face,” he said, still holding out his hand. “I’ve come to make you an offer, woman-who-looks-life-my-wife.”

“You have nothing that I want.”

“And yet I do.” The ring was made of twisted gold. “This is your wedding ring, but it’s funny, Isolde. It’s your ring, but it’s also his life. Isn’t that a thing?” He smiled and she realised that she wasn’t dreaming; she’d never seen his face look that way before. “Did you think that you could run, Isolde? Did you think the gods would love you?”

“I didn’t think, I…”

“Take the ring or I’ll kill him while he’s lying on his sword. I won’t have him killed. I’ll do it myself and I’ll do it in front of you so you’ll never forget that I tried to be merciful. How hard I tried, Isolde.”

She stared at him for a long time. When it fell into her palm, the ring was hot from being held.

“I’ll come back in the morning,” she said, and closed her fingers around the ring.

Forgive me, she says. Ride far, my love, my glory. Remember that queen in Ireland who had a heart of glass? It was ice, really. It melted clean way.

Forgive me, my love, she says.

Forget me.

She was a wife for many years, after that. She lost her youth to it. She grew no less beautiful but she did grow older, and, if she didn’t love Mark then she didn’t hate him either. It wasn’t her fault. There was a Queen of Ireland who’s heart melted clean away. He came to her one night when they’d been married twenty years, and something was troubling him. She could see it in his face.

“What’s wrong?”

“He’s dying.” She stabbed her finger with a needle, and numbly watched red bloom in the skirt that she’d been stitching.

“Who is?”

“Tristan.”

“I…would have thought that you’d have liked that.”

“My sister would never forgive me.”

“What do you want me to do, Mark?”

“You healed him once.”

“I did.”

“You could do it again.”

“You’d let me go to him? You’d release me to him?” She couldn’t look him in the eyes.

“I shouldn’t. He betrayed me.”

“We both betrayed you,” she said, managing to look at him. She slid out of her chair awkward (no longer so young) and onto her knees at his feet. “Let me go to him.” She held out her hand to him, her trembling hand. In her palm rested a twisted gold ring.

He’d given Tristan’s life to her once before.

She was too late, in the end. He died before she could get there. She stood at the side of the grave and the women wept and wailed, the wind whipping at the edge of their white gowns. His funeral was like a dance, and she didn’t quite know the steps. She was older, by then. She hadn’t danced in some time. As they pressed the clay into the grave around him, as they laid his notched sword across his chest, she thought of him in his youth, that boy in his green stained shirt, the sun shining in his hair, his arms folded on the rail of the boat. She thought of him on the deck the first time she kissed him. She thought of him that night in the forest, and how she’d wanted nothing better than to be held. She thought about her lost heart.

If wishes were horses, lover, I’d be the Queen of Ireland and I’d never have met you and I’d have a hundred thousand horses.

She turned away from him, and…

And there was a face in the ice, a young boy or girl. She couldn’t tell. She saw her future written in a language of looped pigtails and didn’t like it. She would not have her future foretold that way. She squinted ahead of her and thought she made out a flash of green under brown.

She was a Queen of Kernow, a Princess of Ireland and her heart was solid ice and far away, anyway.

Hidden, and safe.

Kali

The city is her cradle, is her hunting ground, is the ratta-tatta rhythm of her steadily beating heart. She comes and goes. You may catch a glimpse of her, here and there, too dark to be beautiful, too terrible to be really loved. It’s a toss-up, see? It’s a bargain that you make. She is young and she is also old, rings on her fingers, the music of silver skulls at her belt. She wears her hennaed hair in careful coils…the palms of her slender hands are red like blood. She was sari silk and denim scarred with acid. She is beautiful and terrible and lovely as an electrical storm at sea. She is Kolkotta’s heart, and hearts are bloody too.

The world could turn on a penny, on a copper coin. This moment here; this moment is the entire of history. Stories have a beginning and a middle but it’s the endings which take skill. Not everybody can tell a good story. It takes heart to end something. He is closing. He is ending. He doesn’t know it yet. They never, ever know (he couldn’t tell a story if he tried). When he saw her in the bar, it was like lightening striking, like eclipse – like all of the world went dark, except for the shadow which she threw against a darkened sky, arms raised and dancing, like Love, like God. He was dumbstruck, dazed; the dull copper penny tones of her hair, the smooth slope of dark skinned breasts. Her wrists were heavy with gold jewellery. Her lips reminded him of blood. She was the most beautiful woman that he had ever seen. She was like a loud noise happening in a quiet room. She echoed.

He thinks that he saw her first.

They always think that but what he doesn’t know was that they were her girls, hers only. Each of them was another of her beating hearts. She is a mother spurned and betrayed. He has broken her hearts, thinking that they didn’t matter – if they walked the streets then nobody loved them. If they sold their love then nobody cared. She cares. She has always cared. She has so much love. She used to have so much mercy. Her heart is solid iron to him now. He took away all the words that she had to refer to herself, and left her empty.

This has nothing to do with love now.

The room is nothing special; garish prints and dirty tile, grime around taps, a bag made especially for carrying business suits. The room is not important. They are on the bed together, which is important. They are the centre of the known world. Nude, now, she rises above him, pulling pins from her hair and scattering them on worn sheets like omens, like spells. She bones over him and whispers to him that, when he’s gone, she’ll miss him like bones. His hands are on her hips. Her hands are on her breasts, in her hair. Those girls were soft, their bodies parting and bleeding like delicate flowers, but she is wo-man, and she is better than he is. Every man she’s ever known was desert, built on shifting sand, but she is wet earth, and in her, things will grow when she needs them. She guides him inside her, imagines him pushing against her heart. She bends over him and presses a kiss to the taunt skin of his chest, sharp with sweat, and then she bites.

He screams, at first, but he stays hard inside her too. Mine, she murmurs. Price.

She takes what she is owed in blood. Sometime after the screaming stops, she rises, leaving him low. He will always be low now; this is the price that he paid for mistaking life as something cheap. Life is never cheap, and children’s lives are as gold to mothers. A baby is a prize bought for blood and sweat and tears and years. She is a mother. She was their mother. She will be a mother again (her daughters and sons are legion). She leaves bloody prints on walls and sheet and pale skin gone slack…he had too much skin and too much hate. She leaves her mark in scarlet which will dry brown, be washed away by careful hands, a girl on her knees with her hair carefully wrapped and a gold ring on her finger so thin that it would bend out of shape. She winds her hair with fastidiously collected pins. She dresses last, the storm-breeze from the window drying blood on her skin like tattoos, as telling as wrinkles or scars. She empties his wallet and leaves a wad of dollars in a fold of sheet, present for the girl with the carefully wrapped hair. It’s still night-time when she finds herself back on the street. She soft-shoe shuffles a dance step at alien angles with the clothes she wears, and she blows kisses to the doorway, alleyway, kohl-smeared girls. They’ll sleep sounder now, when they go to sleep. Those ones, and the others, her poor dead beautiful girls. A little rain is starting, as she ducks under archways and goes on her way, his raincoat keeping out the worst of it, belted tight. She is a Goddess but not just a Goddess here. A mother also, here. Kolkotta sees her coming and shelters her.

Kolkotta is her lover, her cradle and her hunting ground, the ratta-tatta rhythm of her rapidly beating heart.

Eurydice

In the end, They pinned the stars to his dark suit, in the shape of his lyre.

And so, goodbye. I am in immense darkness holding out my hands which are, alas, no longer his. One points up, the other down and here I am, forever, waiting. My body is a signpost and my veins make many dead roads. My heart is a folly; outside, beautiful but inside it’s door-less and it holds no heat. I mark the way, here; where he left me, were they kept me, as a warning.

To love is to hurt.

Above, there’s a long white road and it leads up to the sun. We dream of that road and, in our sleep, we walk it. We walk backwards with our eyes tightly closed, against the wind, counting steps. That way, if we ever make it back, we’ll know when to stop walking and be at peace. Even in our sleep, we know the truth; we mustn’t look back. We almost always do, though. It’s human nature to want things most when they’re almost gone. We must do everything in our power, everything we can, not to look back.

But we do it, anyway. We look back and we wake up.

Up or down, though. That is the choice that we always have.

Up then. Up there.

He looked back. That much I understand. He didn’t take them at their word but he was right to. They pulled me back so fast that I left a cloud of dust behind, my post deserted, the road unmarked. Carrying grey dust in my hair, I couldn’t hear him…my singer, and I couldn’t hear. The rushing noise rose and deafened me, but I saw him, and I bloomed life. I couldn’t read his lips but I tried. I would have held my hands out to him but my hands had forgotten any purpose which they had before. When they let me go, I followed him automatically; close my eyes and followed his smell and counted the steps. Don’t look back, don’t look back, don’t look back.

He did, of course.

It’s human nature. We always look back.

The road to Elysium was long and pale. I took it slowly in my bare feet, the dust stirring upwards and into my open hands, all that I had to bring with me. Somewhere something was burning and the smoke was pressing against our sky. One, two, three backwards steps and the city came back into view…a a palace tightly walled, a prison, a present. Hades built it for his stolen Queen…

In the courtyard, three old men sat nodding. Their miscarriages of justice were legendary. Back before them in my raggy wedding gown, faded scarlet, I waited.

“Take the high road.” I took it, backwards and forwards, down and up.

One of them was blowing smoke rings. I tried to catch one, one handed, thought that I might wear it on my cold hand. They were looking at me, leering. I imagined him there with me, and I opened my eyes, repeating one number, over and over, and I was not afraid.

“Tartarus is for whores, murderous mothers, inconstant wives. Elysium waits for heroes.” What did I know about heroes? What had I ever done that was brave? Now I was learning, but too late to change anything at all. I was learning to be brave.

“Such is life, woman. Your tragedy is to burn, if briefly.” I don’t think that those old men had any idea of just how viciously I could burn, just then. My heart was solid stone, like a comet. I could burn with a blue fire and not be consumed. That was what I had left to me. To burn and burn and never eat myself alive.

I got a last glimpse of the palace as I walked away, pale, perfect in it’s symmetry, and it broke my heart. Nothing grew in her garden but the marble was worked with buds always on the edge of bloom. Persephone was waiting for her Spring, always.

I was so thirsty. The numbers stuck in my mouth, against my teeth and repeated. There are two pools beside the gates. Up to my ankles, I stopped but I did not drink. I stood there with the hem of my dress floating and I watched the heartbroken women scrabbling on their hands and knees for mouths full of water. They say that Lethe takes away pain. It’s always that way with women; shared grief, but hidden. I needed my pain to keep my shape, needed the number of steps, the memory of the light. I needed them so that I would know when to stop. I twisted my hair, dropped my flowers and my dancing shoes on the surface of the water and watched them sink. I was so thirsty and so, so cold. That’s all that the dead are. We are cold from the inside out.

In Aspodel, I saw a boy newly arrived in hell. His body clung to the shadow of his armour. A Spartan, maybe, although he could have been from Carthage or Mogadishu or Amiens, too. He wore his hair shaved close against his skull. I asked his name…he couldn’t remember. I asked him where he’d come from. A field. There had been red flowers growing. How had he died? He hadn’t. He was just dreaming of this chilly girl in this chilly hell. Sometime soon, he’d wake. He touched me with both hands and stained my dress red over my heart. And how dare they talk to me about heroes, when I went walking in dim Aspodel and saw the faces of the million dead boys.

There was a clamouring noise, a jazz chatter across the whole of hell. The red hand print bled across my heart and I was going up, up, up.

In my dreams, the dog barks and snarls, warns that I am escaping. I was expecting that, but all that he did was lift his great heads to watch me pass. He knew who I was and barely made a snarl. My body left no warms shapes in the air. There was no mistaking me for anything other than I was.

The banks of the Styx are thick with mud and I left deep, backwards footprints there. On the opposite shore, the shuddering masses pushed and pulled. I had no money to pay the toll but I did have some silver; the ring that he gave me would have melted down into two rough coins.

“Take the oar,” Charon said. If he can find someone to take the oar then he can finally walk away, but nobody was ever that stupid. I folded my arms across my chest and I watched the shore slip away. He talked, but I didn’t hear…I drew my rusty veils around me and I watched and I waited. I don’t think he’ll ever find anyone to take that oar. It’s his hell and nobody else’s.

You don’t have to stay anywhere forever. You don’t have to do anything forever.

I know that it’s an abstract, but the cold. The cold creeps in and freezes you, hardens your cracked and bleeding heart. Beyond flesh and blood by then, I was beginning to thaw. Blinded and shivering, feeling the cold, I felt my way through a forest wooded with suicides. Lips moved against the palms of my hands. Whispers came to me through my pores. (What is the word for a mother of dead children? Why does love begin? Why does it end? Is there such a thing as too much love? Can you die of too little? How many people have died that way? How far would you go? When would you stop? Why does blood taste of metal? How many dreams can you explain away? How many days? Where does the good go, when it goes (and it does)?). He might have gotten a song out of it, my singer, but they would have devoured him as payment for their secrets. They would have eaten his warm heart whole. I didn’t belong there. It wasn’t my fault. I just wanted to be happy. I just ran out of luck.

I wrapped my fingers around the fibres of their prayers and pulled myself on up.

The world fades out at the edges, becomes all kinds of grey. It’s difficult to tell which direction to walk in, which way is up, but we have dreamed of this road and with your eyes closed it all looks the same anyway. One step after the other, one foot behind the other and, eventually, the light.

Sometimes, we even think that we see the sun and the unbroken blue of the sky.

And I grew up there, no distant Thrace for me, so I should have known all about snakes and long grass. It was a sudden, sharp pain; the snake’s teeth, my bare foot. I should have known better. The snake slithered back into the long grass, left beaded blood but no punctures. I danced and it smeared on my skin, blood and poison, and did me no harm, and all of the warmth came rushing back, like an orgasm, like all of the light in the world. And I actually saw the sun.

For a moment, I was frozen but so warm.

On my wedding day, the sun was shining and I stood naked while they brushed out my long hair. The grave-dirt, the particles from that grey sky fell to the round like silver sparks and I was free of it, then. For a moment. For a time, at least. My body was a circle, and I was beginning all over again.

The dress laces on around me…it needs me for structure. Without me, there is no dress, you see. Without me, there is no dress, and without him there is no me, and without us…

There is no world without us, only the grey sky and the long white road.

Eurydice, they’re calling and, ready at last, I lift my arms, pointing only to myself this time. They same my name again, calling me to my wedding: Eurydice, which means ‘width’ and ‘justice’ and if anyone deserves all of the justice in the whole wide world then it is me and him. It is Orpheus and me.

Eurydice (again)

…in other words…

The hell of loving other people is not enough to stop us.

Lilith

I was a star in the earth, and he was soil, and I was soil too, and we fell apart into each other, and a garden…no, not a garden…a world, between us. We fell apart into each other, and we were the world, under God, and he was under me, and I was in him. Yes.

In the beginning we were a garden.

I was a star in the earth, and the entire earth was blooming, and I was blooming with it, arms over my head, swaying in the warm and varied breezes, the ones that came in from the sea, oh, the ones that bought promises and seeds. And I was a star in the earth.

He made me a promise, but he forgot what it was before he had a chance to break it.

Lie down, he said, but all I wanted to do was grow towards the sun. Lie down, he said, but all I wanted to be was above. I had lain in the soil for too long. I was a below-ground thing, learning to be in the light.

Oh, to be in the light.

There were things without names, and I was thing without a name, too, and we all, every one of us, every part of us, learning to be in the light.

The sun never set in those first days.

There was light on the face of the deep, oh, yes. There was light on every face, and all of the faces were upturned, except his.

He was looking at me.

What could I say? I was only reflecting the light given to me. I could make no light of my own. It was not in my design to shine.

Lie down, said Adam.

No, said I.

I was a star in the earth, and I grew in the bark of trees, and the heavy, nodding heads of flowers, and I flew with birds, and drank water with the others, and I raised both hands, and every finger was a no.

No, said I. Because if he could stand, and the trees could stand, and mountain could stand, then I could too, said I. I had been there at the beginning, said I. I’d been a part of everything too. He wanted to be inside me. Little brained, he’d forgotten that I was already inside him too. Adam’s problem was that he lacked imagination, and I was all dream. I was all want. I was more than the sum of my parts, yes. I was more than he wanted me to be.

No.

There are creatures that are born knowing how to run, and, within minutes, they run, keep pace with a herd, keep safe. I didn’t need to run. It seemed to me that the rising sun made a path to walk, goodbye. The world was ever expanding, and there was a world in me, getting bigger all the time, seas and continents. There was so much to be done, yes, and he’d wanted me to lie still, and lie quiet, like the soil, and I was pushing, yes, I was exploding up up up. Up, where there was only the sky to stop me.

Angels and demons, they say. Experience, say I. So I opened my arms and let the entire world come rushing in. I was a mystery to myself. I was learning the purpose of every inch. I was a walking miracle. I was coming to understand, and I gave birth. We are a self perpetuating cycle. We are a light that never goes out.

My children were numerous as the stars in the sky, complicated constellations entirely of my own design.

And I was in the cities by the sea.

They cam after me, the angels, beautiful with their eyes made out of burning love. To love is to burn, be burnt up, consumed. My purpose was to burn for him, for Him. Oh, I was going to burn, one way or another. I was always going to burn, when all I wanted to do was shine.

“Come back,” said the angels, solititious. It was the only choice I ever had; leave, come back…stay or go. I had wanted to shine, not burn. I had wanted to shine so badly, shine and go on shining, without being consumed. If they could do it, why not me?

“Come back,” the angels said. “Or we’ll kill them.”

My babies, my children, numerous as constellations, sprung beating from the soil of me. A story which I told in living blood and bone. A hundred children a day, they said, to be crushed between their long hands, the ugliest hands, hands for doing ugly work, and nobody would remember me then, either way. I would be dirt and no more. I would be soil, to be planted.

“Come back,” they said.

“No,” said I.

Maybe I could have loved Him on my own, if they’d given me the choice. No choice given, and it would never be in my nature to shine, not now. They rubbed the shine off me and left me dark and bitter, a thing for ripping, never to nurture. I was the ground in which weeds would grow, strangle them, and me too. And I could have been a star.

So my children died in their thousands, in their millions, so many. I lost count. Their screams only a mother could hear, and I heard them, and locked them away in my many hearts. I was the eye of a storm, and I raged and I tore at the sky. And I wouldn’t go back then. I would never go back. I changed, adapted and became closer to what they were making me into.

My temperature was dropping. I was becoming a cold blooded creature, a drop in a great sea. She had been born by then, the apple of his eye, and the world had turned further away from me, opened its arms and welcomed her, which made it easier, in the end. I was the eye of a storm. Like a storm, I raged, and like a storm, I blew myself out, clean out.

And I was gone, then. I was utterly and completely gone.

And I was everywhere. I was mirrors and water and windows. I was everything that reflected light, and I was sort of shining, then. I was everywhere, dogged by their lies, lies told by men with beautiful eyes and ugly, horned hands. What lies they told, that I lay with me and demons, that I was the devil’s wife, and the Queen of some Sheba. That I took their children. That I reached through mirrors and took them, took them away. I became every one of their bad night dreams.

The truth: that they lost me when they took my children, and that all things heal, given time and space and air. Not all scars are ugly. A weed is a flower in the wrong place, and not all of us choke the earth in which we grow.

The truth is that they lost me when they fell in love with Eve, when I was free to go, and I was so utterly gone.

Gone into my own darkness.

Gone with my borrowed light.

Gone to shine.

Helen

Beautiful*

___

* Part bird, part god, what was anybody expecting of her, anyway? Born to spark, and burn brightly. Born to grow into her own face. Her eyelashes could dispatch fishing skiffs out onto the deep wine sea, just a fraction of a face that would one day launch fleets, one way or another. And she was doomed before ever she saw him. She was doomed because she was the most beautiful thing in the world. Something to be owned. A prize to be given. To Paris, of all people. Stupid boy. Neither of them stood a chance; pretty and stupid, selfish and carelessly cruel. A peacock lives for twenty years, but a swan? Too sad. Too, too sad. Her husband, the one with the bloody hands, gave chase, but not for her. For pride. For honour. For ownership of the most beautiful thing in the world. The topless towers burned for many things, love and loss of love not withstanding. And who else would launch his ships? Helen’s crime: her mother’s gift. Her curse: beauty is only skin deep. It took fifteen years but, by the end, even in Sparta, they were calling her Helen of Troy. Oh, loss. Oh, broken heart. Menalaus took her back, but she left a part of her behind. At her centre now was a trinket box, gold and silver filigree. She carried it with her back to Sparta, and, by then, all that it contained were wisps of smoke and the screams of the Trojan women, the wives of the city. Cassandra should have burned her while she slept. Men die on their own. Women last longer. Helen outlived all of her squabbling men and came, at least, to Rhodes, her welcome in Sparta well run out. Such is life. Such is history. And Helen had no sons to keep her there. Polxyo welcomed Helen with one arm open, all the time holding her gown shut over the empty room that was her heart. When men died on the beaches of Troy they buried them in great ditch graves and there was only her, only Polyxo to remember her, her husband, T-le-pole-mus like a song. All of those dead husbands, and everyone of them dead for her. For Helen. The end is simple: the Erinyes return rightness to the world, but, rarely, are they kind. Mortal women are crueller still and who knows what Polyxo paid her handmaidens to don wings and cruel knives, and who knows what they will pay for what they did? Mortal women hanging a mortal woman from a tree that bent slightly under her weight, but, in the end, held. Poor Helen. Poor beauty.

Hanging is hell on a face.