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.