“Not really,” she snorted, wiping her eyes. “What is one entrance to the underworld? It’s always the same, the blood and the hooded lady and the cave. You give what you can, you go into the dark. The dark took us. No more needs be said.”
“There is always more. Tell me, like you used to, when I warmed your bark with my belly and you kept your hair so short.”
“You were always tiresome and greedy.” Oubliette sighed, but she was smiling a little. “I went to the lake…”
THE TALE
OF THE
DANCING GIRL’S
DESCENT
TAGLIO KEPT HIS ABSENTIA IN A LITTLE BOX, too, did he tell you that? He showed me once, and he wept over them, shriveled and black, knocking in an or angewood box like the rattle in a snake’s tail. He wanted me to see them because I am a huldra, and so in some roundabout sense he had mutilated himself for me. For my grandmothers, for my celestial aunt. I wrinkled my nose—it is embarrassing to witness another person’s faith laid out like that, reduced to something small and dry and lifeless, a reliquary full of toenail clippings. I think he always liked me better than you. He had never met a real huldra. We were abstract; the story of the Heifer-Star and her brother was real. I was proof of his religion, I was as good as a Star, and I slept against his stomach between the cart handles. He looked at me and told himself he was right, that the dull, phantom ache between his legs was sacred.
I don’t know anything about that. I am only myself. I have always been made of wood and girl and cow, and that is no more a divine revelation to me than a man’s thumbs are to him. You never thought I was proof of the existence of a god. But I felt sorry for our green gazelle—do you remember his little cape?—and I let him tell me I was holy. It seemed the least I could do. We hunted together while the Manticore taught you to pick pockets and sing scales. He was so quick with those teeth, and I became as quick as he. It was so hard to stay by you—I looked at you and shivered as though the hollow walls of the Mint were still all around me. I looked at you and knew I should have taken the burden, I should have lain under the stamp. It was my idea; it was wrong of me to let you do it. I looked at you and remembered everything. With Taglio singing little rhymes to the rabbits until they were close enough to snatch, I forgot.
And I forgot when I danced. When I was Zmeya, I was beautiful, and strong, and immune to all hedgehogs. When I was Zmeya I could not be touched. I did not have to be a tree-girl who had lost a kiss to the miller’s son, or her hair to a unicorn, or seven years to a factory. I was her, and I was green, and I writhed. And as the music became quicker, as you joined in with Taglio and played his little flute, I understood less and less that I was not her. On the hunt he called me holy; in the dance I knew I was divine. If it seems silly now, at least I have the consolation that many others had gone before me in madness for love of her, for love of the snake and the sky. I cannot explain it better. I danced her so often that I felt her in me, I felt her far off in the dark, coiling around herself in the fog. What damage does the telling of a story play upon its teller? I told her story hundreds of times. I could not bear to remain outside of it.
The day after you kissed me—I was not angry, don’t think I was. I never thought of it again. Taglio and I went after supper. We were on the track of a fawn. I lay on my belly in the moss and birch leaves and watched its spots flash in and out of the wood. He lay beside me, and we whispered to each other while our prey chewed twigs.
“You look like a snake lying there. I am sure it is not an accident, and I am sure you are about to leave us,” he hissed accusingly.
“Why would you say that?”
“You are barely here. I can almost see through you. You would speak to no one, and only dance, if you did not like to hunt so well. If you did not like me so well. And I have begun to wonder if you do not like me only because I once saw her.”
I turned my head slowly, so as not to start the deer. “Don’t say that. You are my cart-knight.”
“For now. But you left us days ago—I felt you go. Now there is only this stranger in your place, lying to me and telling me she is you.”
I looked at the mash of old, broken forest beneath me. “You do not want me to stay. That is why you say such awful things.”
With equal slowness, he cupped my head in his hand. “Darling huldra, bull-born and borne to me by a fortunate wind—go. I will not be the one who keeps you, and we will soldier on without your moods and your scowls, much as we love them. Find whatever you are already looking for.”
“I will go,” I mumbled, “to the Isle of the Dead and do what you could not.”
He blinked, as though I had cut into him with my hunting knife. I saw his lip tremble, in anger or grief or hope, and a long while passed when we did not mark the fawn at all, but wrestled in our gazes. Finally, he drew from his vest a little brown box, and drew from it a silver-black leaf.
“Don’t fail us,” he said, and as one, with the leaf clutched in my hand, we sprang out of the brush and took the fawn down in one single red stroke.
How do you find the land of the dead without dying? Everyone has a story of that place. It is gray and lonely, it is a raucous circus, it is a place of judgment where the soul is weighed against a feather, it is nothing at all, I do not care, little girl, go away and don’t steal milk from my cow. You could ask a thousand folk and hear a thousand tales.
Or you could go to an astrologer and by turning your back amaze him into drawing you a map to an almond tree which is almost a legend, but which is in actuality your petrified, mistletoe-infested grandfather, and tell him that if he does not tell you the way, you will cut him right down and not even weep, for he never should have touched your grandmother at all.
You could brandish an ax to make your point. It would have to be a very sharp one. The tree might ask how he would know
the way. You might say that he is neither living nor dead, being mostly Absentia and almonds, and surely able to tell you how to slip into the in-between places. The tree might grumble, but only one or two swings of the ax, only one or two showers of wood chips would probably induce him to shout and wail and holler out just exactly how to find a lake with a woman living near it, at the mouth of a cave.
The tree who is some part of your grandfather might then whip his branches around and try to catch you, slapping at your arms—but it is too awful to think about, and you would get away as quickly as you could, and would certainly never tell anyone about it.
There is a lake here; there is a lake there. It does not seem much like any other lake, save that its beach is littered with thin slivers of glass like raindrops. Over that sharp shore I walked, with my good, solid shoes well bought, and my steps echoed across the water like shouts. So I should not be surprised that she was awake and waiting for me, a black cowl drawn over her face, so that I could only see a long hoopoe’s beak, long and thin and curved, pointing out at me. Her black skirts spread out over the ground in drooping folds, on and on, down the beach and into the black water, and it seemed that there was no difference between the cloth and the lake.
“Let me pass,” I said.
“Pass what?” she said, and her voice seemed hollow in that clacking beak.
“Pass through you, to the land of the dead.”