Deerskin by Robin McKinley
But it was part of the horror that Lissar knew she had not even the strength to kill herself, that the unspeakable might be avoided at the last. That kind of courage required that all the parts of her, body and mind, flesh and spirit, be united enough to take decisive action; and instead she was a handful of dead leaves in a high wind. She could not even sit up, or stop crying.
“Oh, Ash,” she groaned, and cupped her hands under her dog’s silky, whiskery chin. Ash delicately climbed up on the bed and curled up next to her; she rested her long sleek head on her person’s neck, and Lissar clasped her hands around Ash’s shoulders, and so they spent the day.
NINE
LISSAR DRIFTED IN AND OUT OF CONSCIOUSNESS. SHE COULD NOT have said what she dreamed and what she saw with open eyes in the physical world.
At some point, near twilight, she rose, and let Ash out into the garden to relieve herself; and while she was alone, she went to a small drawer in the desk that stood in one cornerless corner of the round room, and from it she took a key. With the key she locked the door that led into the palace, into the chambers for a princess. When Ash returned, she tried to fit the key into the lock of the garden door, but it would not go.
She looked at it, at first in dismay, and then in rising panic; and she had to sit down abruptly, and press her hands to the back of her head. As she sat thus—with Ash’s nose anxiously inquiring over the backs of both hands—she thought, It does not matter. The other garden door, the one to the rest of the out-of-doors, has a hundred years of ivy growing over it; the key to it must no longer exist. From the outside, from the other side, one cannot see that there is a door at all; I only know from this side because of the old path.… I have looked, from the other side. I know the door cannot be found. It does not matter.
She stood up, and brushed herself off, and fed Ash some of the cold cooked eggs from her breakfast, which had never been cleared away; and she drank a little of the water that had been left in the big pitcher, which had been hot twelve hours ago, for her washing, before the summons had come, before her world had ended; and she gave Ash water as well.
She thought she did not sleep that night, although it was hard for her to tell, for her life now felt like sleeping, only a sleeping from which she could not wake. She lay curled upon the bed, feeling her limbs pressing into the mattress, feeling them too heavy to shift; and Ash curled around her. As the dark grew thicker, her eyes seemed to open wider, her body become more torpid. She could not count the passage of time, but she knew that it did pass; and she felt the essence of herself poised, perched, at the edge of some great effort, some bright hard diamond-spark of self burning deep within her slack flesh; but she knew too that this was a dream of respite only, and that she had not the strength to win free. And she lay on her bed, imprisoned by the languor of her own body, and listened to herself breathe, felt the dampness of the air as it returned from its dark passage of her lungs, and watched the night-time with her open eyes.
She knew that midnight had come and gone when a hand was laid upon the latch of the inner door, and the latch lifted. But the lock held. The door was shaken, and she heard anger in the shaking, and felt anger, and something more, seeping through the pores of the ancient wood, a miasma that filled her room as the person on the other side of the door shook it and hammered upon it in his rage and desire.
She buried her face deeper in the hard muscle of Ash’s shoulder and breathed in the warm sweet clean smell of her. And at last the person, having said no word, went away. Lissar could not bear the dark when silence returned, and sat up, and lit a candle that lay on a table near her bed, though it took her many tries to kindle fire, for her hands shook. And she sat up, wrapping the blankets closely around her, for she was numb with cold, and felt the miasma seep away; but it left a stain upon the walls, which were no longer rosy, but dark, like dried blood.
In the morning Lissar rose and let Ash out, and fed her the end of yesterday’s breakfast bread. Then she unlocked the inner door, and ventured through it, that she might relieve herself like a human being instead of a dog; and she met no one on her way. But she found a tray bearing a pitcher of fresh water, a loaf of bread, and butter and cheese and apples, on a small table usually reserved for ladies’ gloves, near the door from the anteroom with the statue, leading into the hallway of the palace; as if the person who left it could not risk coming any farther inside. Lissar did not know why she had come so far through her rooms herself; but when she saw the tray, and picked it up, she thought, Viaka.
She carried it back to her round room with the darkened hangings on the walls, and the ivy creeping around the window, and gave Ash some bread and cheese although she herself drank only water. Her mind was vague and wandering; it had focussed, for a moment, on the memory of Viaka; but there was nowhere to go from that thought, and it fled from the memory of yesterday, and the knowledge of the day after tomorrow.
Lissar sat on the bed, and rocked, and hummed to herself, and thought about nothing, and once or twice when Ash thrust her nose under her person’s arm for attention, Lissar had to make an effort to remember not only who Ash was, but what: a living creature. Another living creature. A living creature known as a dog. This dog: Ash. Her dog. But then her mind wandered away again.
That evening again as twilight fell she arose from the bed where she and Ash had spent a second day, and locked the inner door again; and again she lay wakeful, and her mind cleared a little, for it was waiting for something, and it hovered around the waiting and eluded the knowledge of the thing awaited.
She listened to the soft sound of the dog’s breathing, and of her own, and heard the hours pass, though she did not count them.
And again at some time past midnight she heard a hand upon the latch, and this time when the person beat upon the door that would not open it made a noise louder than thunder, and Ash turned to marble under Lissar’s hands again, as hard and still as marble, except for the reverberant buzz that Lissar could feel though not hear, which was her growl. And this time too the person went away without a word, though the attack upon the door, this second night, had gone on for longer, as if the person could not believe that by mere force of will it could not be made to open.
And in the morning Lissar again arose, and unlocked the inner door, and went out, and this time there was meat as well as bread upon the tray, pears instead of apples, with another pitcher of water, and a bottle of wine, and a deep bowl of green leaves, some sharp and some sweet, in a dressing smelling of sesame. And Lissar built a small fire with the remains of the kindling from two days ago, and heated the rest of the water from yesterday, and washed herself.
Tomorrow was her wedding day.
She would not think of it.
She had seen and spoken to no one but Ash since the king’s pronouncement. What of the ladies to make her dress, and the maid-servants to bring her flowers, flowers for her and for those special friends who would stand behind her in gorgeous dresses of their own, to weave the maiden’s crown? And because she was a princess, the form the flowers were woven into was not basketry, but the finest, lightest, purest golden wire, not easily found at any village market, which had to be ordered from a jeweller familiar with such rare and dainty work. What of the preparations for her wedding?
But perhaps the preparations did proceed; perhaps she only did not remember, as she did not—would not—remember that tomorrow was her wedding day. Her wounded mind flared up a little, and declared that it was no wedding that would occur on the morrow, but a murder; it was not that she feared her wedding, but that she grieved her execution. But her mind could not hold that thought long, either, any more than it could hold any other thought.
And perhaps the preparations were going on. Perhaps the last two days had been full of ladies talking and laughing, full of bolts of cloth so light that when unrolled too quickly they floated, waveringly, in the air, like streamers of sparkling mist; full of laces so fine as to be translucent, that they might shine with the maiden’s own
Perhaps this all had occurred, and she only forgot. Perhaps even now she was not standing alone in her round room with only her dog for company, drying herself from her awkward bath on three-day-old towels, but surrounded by seamstresses adding the last twinkling gem-stars and gay flounces. She could not feel her own body under her hands; her body did not feel the texture of the towel against it; she neither knew where she was, nor why, nor what was happening to her.
She woke, still wrapped in a towel, in a heap in front of the cold hearth. Ash had lain next to her and kept her warm; she sat up and shivered, for the parts of her not next to Ash were bitterly cold. It was almost full dark—she jumped to her feet in alarm, seized the key, and locked the inner door.
She took a fresh shift from her wardrobe, leaving the clothing she had worn for the last two days folded over the chair beside the bowl she had used for her bath water. She put the shift on, and then stood staring into her wardrobe, not knowing what to put over it. It was dark, she could wear a nightgown, go to bed; in which case she should take the shift off again. Or did she mean to escape, put on dark clothing, find some way over the garden wall, two stories high as it was, escape from what was happening tomorrow.
But what was happening tomorrow? She could not remember. Why was she standing, in her shift, in front of her wardrobe? It was too much trouble to take the shift off, to put a nightgown on.… She turned away and went back to bed, curling up on her side, as she had done the last two days and nights; and Ash came and lay down beside her again, and nosed her all over, and finally laid her head down with a sigh, and shut her eyes.
This night Lissar slept, and if she dreamed she did not remenber. But she knew she woke to reality, to eyes and ears, and breathing, and the feel of her shift against her skin, and of the furry angular warmth of Ash, when there was a terrible noise from the garden.
The garden gate was opening.
It creaked, it screamed, it cried to the heavens, and the ivy and late-blooming clematis were pulled away and lay shattered and trampled upon the path; the little tree that lay just inside was broken down as if a giant had stepped upon it. But the ancient key had been found for the ancient lock, and the key remembered its business and the lock remembered its master; and so the gate was ravished open.
Lissar heard the heavy footsteps on the path, and she could not move; and as the possibility of motion fled, so too did reason. A little, fluttering, weak, frightened fragment of reason remained behind, in some kind of helpless loyalty, like the loyalty that left bread and water by the antechamber door, like the loyalty of the relatives who take away what the executioner has left. And this flickering morsel of reason knew that it could not bear what was to happen; and the princess, dimly, observed this, and observed the observing, and observed the sounds of footsteps on the path, and did not, could not, move.
But Lissar remembered herself after all when the door of her small round room was flung violently open, because Ash, in one beautiful, superb, futile movement, launched herself from the bed at the invader in the door.
It was the best of Ash, that she be willing without thought to spend her life in defense of her person; and yet it was the worst of Ash too because it brought the scattered fragments of her person into a single, thinking, self-reflective, self-aware human being again, who saw and recognized what was happening, and her part in it.
As Ash leaped, Lissar sat up and cried, “No!”—for she saw the gigantic hands of the invader reach out for her dog, like a hunter loosing a hawk in the hunt, with that swift, eager, decisive, predatory movement. And she saw the one huge hand seize the forelegs of her dog, and for all the power of that leap, that threw the both of them around by the force of it, the invader kept his arm stiff, keeping that snarling face well away from him, where she could waste her fury only on his armored forearm. And in a blink, as the leap was completed, he seized Ash’s hind legs with his second hand, and as she sank her teeth uselessly into his wrist, with the momentum of her leap, he grasped her legs and hurled her against the wall.
It was an extraordinary feat of strength and timing; almost a superhuman one. But it was not only the wall Ash struck, but the protruding frame of the door, and her head caught a pane of window-glass, and Lissar heard the sickening crack her dog’s body made beneath the shrillness of breaking glass; and she screamed and screamed and screamed, her throat flayed with screaming in the merest few heartbeats of time, till her father stripped off his great gauntlets and left them on the floor beside the broken body of her dog, and strode the few steps to her bedside, and seized her.
She could not stop screaming, although she no longer knew why she screamed, for grief or for terror, for herself or for Ash, or for the searing heat of her father’s hands which burnt into her like brands. Unconsciousness was reaching out for her, that bleak nothingness that she knew and should now welcome. But she had no volition in this or in any other thing, and she went on screaming, till her father hit her, only a little at first, and then harder, and harder still, beating her, knocking her back and forth across the bed, first holding her with one hand as he struck her with the other, first with an open hand, then with a fist, then striking her evenly with both hands, and she flopped between them, driven by the blows, still screaming.
But her voice betrayed her at last, as her body had already done, and while her mouth still opened, no sound emerged; and at that her father was satisfied, and he ripped off her the remaining rags of her shift, and did what he had come to do; and Lissar was already so hurt that she could not differentiate the blood running down her face, her throat, her breasts, her body, from the blood that now ran between her legs.
And then he left her, naked, on her bloody bed, the body of her dog at the foot of the broken window; and he left the chamber door open, and the garden gate as well. The whole had taken no more time as clocks tell it than a quarter hour; and in that time he had spoken no word.
Lissar lay as he had left her, sprawled, her limbs bent awkwardly, her face turned so that one cheek touched the torn bedding; she could feel something curling stickily down her cheek, and the taste of blood was in her mouth. She knew where she was, and who, and what had happened to her, because her eyes could not stop looking at Ash’s motionless body; starlight and Moonlight glanced off the shards of broken glass, as if she lay in state upon a bed of jewels.
Lissar went on breathing as she looked, because she did not know how to stop; but as time passed she felt the cold upon her body, feeling it like a soft inquisitive touch, like the feet of tiny animals. She did not recognize pain as present experience, for such a distinction was too subtle for her now; rather it was that pain was what there was left of her, as screaming had been her existence some little time before. The creeping cold was a change, or a further refinement, upon her existence. But the cold was not content to pat at her skin and then grasp her feet, her hands, her belly and thighs and face. It wormed its way inside her; but she could resist it no more than she had been able to resist her father. Nor, she found, did she now want to, for the cold brought oblivion, the cessation of pain.
And then she saw its face, and it was not an animal at all, but Death, and then she welcomed it. Almost she made her split lips work to give it greeting; but her voice had fled away some time before.
I am dying, she thought, in the guttering of consciousness, I am dying, she thought, in the encroaching cold stillness. I am dying, and I am glad, for Ash is already dead, and it will all be over soon.
PART TWO
TEN
SHE OPENED HER EYES RELUCTANTLY. SHE HAD BEEN CALLED BACK from a very long way away. The coming back had been hard, and she had not wanted to do it; the leaving had been bearable only
It was then that she felt the need to return from the bright, weightless, untroubled place where she found herself; it was then she knew someone was calling her, calling her from the old unhappy place she had just left. She was astonished—and then angry—that there was enough of her still attached to her life to listen: immediately to listen and, worse, to respond. In that bodiless, peaceful place there was that in her that moved in reaction to that call: like the needle floating freely in its bath choosing to acknowledge north. Did any other bits of that needle resist the pull; were there bits that did not understand it, that were themselves bent and shaped as their stronger sisters aligned themselves, pointing strongly, single-mindedly, north?
She remembered where she had learned about joy: she had learned from her dog, Ash. She and Ash had loved each other, played with each other, grown up together, been each other’s dearest companion. It had been Ash only who had not left her, there at the very end of things, at the end of the princess Lissla Lissar.