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.