The Girl With No Hands and Other Tales Page 4

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  Red Skein

  Once upon a time, there was a little girl called Matilda. Her hair was dark, her skin olive, and her eyes as yellow as corn. She lived in a small village with her parents and brothers. Some days she was industrious, working hard to help her mother around the house. Other days she would sit at the window and watch those who passed with the same stare men and dogs use to eye meat and women. No one quite knew what to make of her, but she harmed no one and was loyal and loving to her family, so the villagers tolerated her eccentricity.

  Matilda’s maternal grandmother lived in a small cottage in the woods. She had a reputation as a wise woman, a healer, and—if crossed—as an efficient caster of curses. Matilda loved to spend time with her grand-dam, who taught her herb-lore and told her tales of women who chose to be something other than their outsides might indicate. Matilda’s mother did not like her daughter to spend too much time with the old woman, for her own mother scared her and Beth feared that in time her daughter would grow to be like the old witch. Then God only knew what would happen.

  A good few years after her bloods started, Matilda was still unmarried in a village that paired off its females at a young age. It kept them busy—rearing children and tending a house left little time for questioning. Matilda, though, was different. What had been tolerated as amusing eccentricity in the child, was seen as a streak of danger in a young woman.

  At seventeen, Matilda walked with a swaying gait that mesmerised and bothered those who watched. For a girl as yet unbedded she seemed to know how best to affect the men around her, and even some of the women. Her attraction was effortless, like a scent that floated from her skin and tickled the nostrils of her watchers.

  Village boys her own age would have liked to know what waited under her skirts. They had tried to find out; some had worked up the courage to ask her to walk out with them, but when she turned her yellow eyes on them, their cool depths turned the would-be suitor’s knees to jelly and his heart to lead. Matilda smiled and walked on.

  Her mother noticed the gazes that followed her daughter. Best, she thought, to take advantage of them, of the girl’s beauty, of the desire she roused. Beth approached several families with the offer of Matilda as a wife. While no one was so rude as to laugh out loud, no one accepted. As the tone of her offer became desperate, Matilda’s mother sensed pity in the eyes of those she entreated, shaking their heads and saying no.

  Something about Matilda suggested she would not be easily quelled, would not go quietly to a bed not of her own choosing and, perhaps, children gotten on her and left in her care would turn out as differentas their mother; a yellow hue of strangeness running in their veins.

  Each time a boy faded from her daughter’s side Beth’s hopes shrivelled and shrank. They mingled with her fear and tasted of bitter almonds at the back of her throat.

  One afternoon, she called her daughter to her. Beth’s voice was harsh, with disappointment, with the fear that put a hard edge on her concern for her child. And failure—she could smell the scent of failure on her own skin—in spite of her best efforts the child had turned out too much like her grandmother. When she closed her eyes, Matilda’s mother saw her daughter, living alone and strange in a cottage deep in the woods.

  On this particular afternoon, she handed Matilda a basket of food and told her to take it to her grandmother. The old woman was ill, unable to care for herself, and Matilda was to stay with her as long as she was needed. If the old woman died, then Matilda was to come home and the men would go back and bury the old witch.

  “Don’t you care, Mother?”

  Taken aback, Beth slapped Matilda so hard that blood spurted from the girl’s nose. When the yellow eyes turned on her mother’s furiously pale face, they didn’t even blink.

  Matilda wrapped herself in a red cloak that her grandmother had knitted. The wool was the same shade as the blood trickling from her nose; as she wiped the fluid away it settled into the warp and weft of the fabric as if it belonged there. She plucked the basket from her mother’s hand and turned. Beth’s voice stopped her momentarily.

  “She’s not how she should be. She never was, not a normal mother, not a normal woman. Nor are you.” The yellow eyes flicked to her once more, amused, fluid, fearless.

  “No. Not like you,” Matilda said and with that the last apron string snapped as if severed by sharp, angry teeth. Matilda left, her hips and hair swaying. She did not see the outstretched hand reaching to pull back the words, nor the tears that ran down Beth’s face.

  The way to Granny’s wended through the woods. Stick to the path, was the village wisdom. Don’t leave it or you might be lost―worse still, you might be changed. Change was worse than loss; change meant you no longer fitted into your place, you couldn’t be recognised by your kin, and that was the greatest danger of all.

  A boy followed her. A little younger than she, but almost a man, and desperate to win the admiration of the older boys. The task he had chosen to prove himself was Matilda; his goal was amorphous. ‘Matilda’ encompassed a myriad of things: walking out, kissing, sliding a hand up her skirt, or perhaps something more brutal, something he did not dare name.

  He watched as the red cloak disappeared into the woods, flashing in and out of the trees and undergrowth. He hung back until they were far enough from the village that any protests she made would not be heard.

  She cast a furtive look behind her and left the path, stepped into the undergrowth and tugged on the tie of her red cloak. The warm wool slipped from her shoulders as she disappeared between two enormous tree trunks.

  Swiftly he moved forward then saw, coming from the other direction, an enormous grey wolf. A male, in its prime, almost five feet tall at the shoulder, with grey eyes to match its fur. It stopped, sniffed (the boy was grateful he was downwind), then followed Matilda’s scent.

  The boy had only a small knife. He didn’t like Matilda enough to risk his life for her; then again, her gratitude might be worth something. Hearing nothing more from where the wolf and Matilda surely must be facing off by now, he moved forward.

  The first noise to come to his ears was the growling, low and hard. Next came a whimpering, a moan: deep, but female. He crept through the trees, his boot catching on something soft. Her cloak lay like a spill of blood, still warm from the touch of her skin, intimate against his hand. His eyes came to rest on the remainder of Matilda’s discarded clothes and then on Matilda herself.

  She knelt on all fours, naked and brown, her face against that of the great grey wolf as they licked and sniffed at each other. Then she turned and offered herself to the beast, shaking with excitement, whimpering. The wolf covered her and she howled as he entered her.

  As the boy watched, hard and panicked, he saw fur sprout over her limbs, saw her teeth lengthen and her jaw distend, saw her yellow eyes slit in lupine desire as the great wolf laboured over her. Unable to stop himself, the boy rose. His movement caught Matilda’s attention. She howled in fury and, with an effort, pulled herself from her mate.

  The boy’s eyes widened. He saw sharp teeth in a wet mouth, a white circle set within a red one. Saw the muscles in her forelegs tighten and bunch in the moment before she leapt. There was only sky above for the briefest of moments, then pain and a wet sound, and, finally, nothing more.

  When the boy was still and bloody, she gave him one last shake. At this sign, the male, who had waited patiently, joined her and they ate their fill, as though at a bridal feast.

  Matilda shrugged back into her human skin. She picked up her basket and her cloak and continued on her way. The great grey wolf loped beside her, sometimes pushing his head against her hand.

  Behind them, a woodsman stumbled onto the remains of the boy. His distress was multiplied by the fact that he was the boy’s father. He tracked the wolf’s prints, noticing how they intersected with a set of human ones.

  Matilda and her mate arrived at Granny’s house. The wolf waited patiently, lying across the doorstep l
ike a large dog while Matilda entered.

  “Still alive?” she asked the lump in the bed.

  Laughter answered her as she put the kettle on the fire. Settling herself on the edge of the bed, Matilda held the old woman’s hand and peered into her face. Surrounded by hair that had once been black but was now almost white, the face was strange: thin, the angles more wolfish than human, the pale eyes tilted toward the sides of the head, yet beautiful in the same way as a wild thing. She looked weary but well and Matilda thought she would recover.

  “Still alive, little sweet. What did you bring me? Some of your mother’s broth?” He eyes greedily picked at the basket lying on the table. “Did she send good wishes, too, my daughter?”

  “She fears.” Matilda dropped her eyes, sadness that she had hidden from her mother showed there.

  “She always has,” said Granny. “Beth fears for you more than she can love you. Because you’re different.”

  “Because I’m like you.”

  “Yes. Like me.” She opened her mouth to continue but growling and shouting outside the cottage interrupted them.

  Matilda put her nose to the windowpane in time to see the woodsman raise his axe and cleave her mate in two. She howled in despair. Her grandmother struggled out of bed.

  The woodsman hacked at the body of the wolf, his sobs punctuating the slap of the axe in the wet flesh. The trees rang until the mingled sounds were absorbed into their bark, marking them as surely as age would.

  The man stopped only when he heard the grandmother calling to him.

  “Thank you for saving us,” she croaked. She touched his shoulder and urged him inside. He blinked his eyes to accustom them to the gloom of the cottage. “But we didn’t need saving.”

  “You killed my husband,” said Matilda. She dropped her red cloak to the floor as her real covering made its way from inside to settle on her flesh.

  In the autumn darkness, Matilda’s mother lay straight and stiff in her bed.

  Her husband’s snoring stirred the air with a strange violence and she felt the urge to poke him awake, make him roll over, have him share her sleeplessness. But she had done it before and knew that it would earn her a slap across the ear, a casually bruising blow that would ache in the morning.

  She turned on her side, facing the window, seeing the full face of the moon stare down at her. Beth could feel the pull of it in the tides of her blood and tried to studiously ignore it just as she had her whole life. Denying her mother, denying her blood, denying her difference. Denying her only daughter.

  Matilda had not come home. It was three days since anyone had seen her. The remains of the boy had been found soon enough. When the party of hunters descended on the old woman’s cottage they found the woodsman, Granny’s white nightdress and Matilda’s red cloak, smouldering in the last coals of the fire.

  A wolf had gotten in.

  No, more than one: a pack.

  Had to be a pack to slaughter three adults.

  Matilda and her grandmother had been dragged away. Their bodies were being kept in some lupine larder.

  Beth knew better. Her blood knew better. Somewhere they trod worn forest trails, the soft pads of their paws soundless and strong, eyes bright and all-seeing, coats soft as velvet and warm as wool, tongues long, wet and obscenely red.

  A scratching at the door brought her back to the sleepless bed on which she lay. She slid from the sheets, slipped through the few rooms of the cottage silent as a shadow. In the front garden sat a young wolf. Behind it, outside the gate, sat another, older, its fur almost white. Two gazes, both intent, both cold, held her. Briefly she regretted opening the door but it was a dried leaf of a thought, picked up and blown away as soon as it entered her head.

  The young wolf rose and made its way down the garden path toward her mother. Beth, knees weak, sank down to sit on the stoop. The yellow eyes mesmerised her and the beast stopped in front of her. She lifted her hand, rough and red with years of toil, reached out and fastened onto the fur, buried itself deep into the warmth and texture. She closed her eyes.

  Surely now, she thought, surely now I am dead.

  Then the fur, the warm body, were gone and when she opened her eyes the two beasts were fading into the night, down silent streets until they found the woods. In her lap, Matilda’s mother found a long red skein of wool, damp with saliva and strong with the scent of wolf. She wrapped it around her wrist as tears slid down her face, stinging like nettles.

  * * *

  The Chrysanthemum Bride

  He who tries to express spirit through ornamental beauty will make dead things.

  — From an 11th century Chinese treatise on Art

  “See how the skin glows?”

  “It’s like a pearl.” It is only his second day with Master Wei, and once again the boy congratulates himself on being apprenticed to this man. Li is certain his future is assured. “How did you make it so?”

  “Soon enough for you to learn that, Li.” The old man walks slowly around his pride and joy, nodding to himself and smiling a private smile. His hair is silver, long, no longer pulled back in a tail; he feels himself free of the constraints of appearance.

  “This is a work of art, Master Wei.” Li’s eyes slide over the object in question, covetous, amazed, a little afraid.

  “Yes. Yes, she is very fine.”

  Mei-Ju studies herself in a bronze mirror. The handle, once carved and intricate, has been worn smooth. It had belonged to her grandmother, concubine to a local warlord. When the warlord died, his wife cast Grandmother out with only the clothes on her back, the child in her belly, the engraved metal combs in her hair, the mirror and the jewellery she had sewn into her hems as soon as the warlord began to sicken. Mei-Ju has inherited her things.

  Sometimes, when she regards herself in the highly-polished bronze, she sees a face not quite her own. It is older, more beautiful still; she thinks perhaps the mirror shows who she will become. She does not stop to think that perhaps it holds spirits within. After these occasional visitations, she seems different, subtly changed, lovelier than before.

  Her family is very poor but Mei-Ju is very beautiful and very ambitious. She is sleek but a little plump; any spare food goes to her, to keep her beauty intact, for her family believe this is how she will save them. If she is lovely enough, a rich man will take her as wife or concubine, then, they pray, prosperity will flow to them, that emptiness will become fullness. This is their fervent hope in all the years of lack, all the years when the groans of their stomachs compete for attention, trying to out-do each other: My hunger is greater! No, mine! Oh, be silent. Mei-Ju thinks only of leaving the hovel, not of what her elevation will mean to her family. She believes that when she at last leaves, she will not look back.

  Her skin is flawless, a pale yellow, like gold washed to take the harsh shine out of it. Her eyes are black stones surrounded by long lashes. She brushes her hair, which is ebony, a black waterfall and almost long enough to sit on. Usually, she makes her sister, Chen-Ju, hold the mirror for her, but Chen-Ju is out in the field and their father would not consent to having her play maid to her beautiful sister, not today when they need the harvest so badly.

  Mei-Ju is spared physical labour—not least because her feet were broken and bound when she was very small; even then they could see how wondrous she would become, how her face would change their lives. Her feet had to be made to match. The concubine grandmother was the one to wield the large rock, to break the bones as her own had been and to bind the soft, crushed things tightly. Mei-Ju’s shoes are tiny and plain, but she dreams of one day wearing something precious, something silken and soft on her misshapen limbs. She cannot run, and walking is painful and slow (one reason why she likes to have her sister on hand), but she knows her golden lotus feet will help her totter to a place she longs to be.

  “The robes are very rich, Master,” observes the apprentice. The golden dragons running up and down the fabric glare fiercely at him. Part of him regrets what
some may well see as waste.

  “Of course, Li. This is for the Crown Prince. It can be nothing less than the best. The Empress would not have it otherwise.”

  “Her son was away for a long time,” the boy hazards, aware the knowledge he gains here will help him navigate the treacherous paths of the Imperial Court. He is from a poor family, but Li is intelligent and enterprising.

  “True. For five years the Empress could not do anything, but when her time came, when she finally drove out the usurper, she brought her son and heir back home.” Wei nods sagely, adjusts a sleeve. “Bring me the headdress, Li.”

  Chen-Ju hates her sister. Her own face is flat and plain; they don’t look alike at all. Some days—all days, really—Chen-Ju would like to rake something sharp down Mei-Ju’s face. Not her nails—she has none, for they crack and split and tear to the quick from her arduous hours of manual labour. Something else, then: one of the engraved combs Mei-Ju uses in her hair, perhaps. The combs that belonged to the concubine grandmother. Yes, they would do the damage nicely.

  Chen-Ju used them once, wound her own hair up and twisted it thus and thus. She made her eyes lose focus and her face seemed softer, almost pretty. She reached for a hope of beauty, her soul stretched out its fingers, almost had a grip on something she had never known; then Mei-Ju wandered in. She wasn’t angry—she laughed. She laughed so hard she fell over, tickled beyond words at the idea that her flat-faced sister might try to adorn herself, might try to find something lovely in her rough visage.

  Clenching her fists, Chen-Ju had fought the urge to hit, fought the urge to disfigure. She, too, believed that the cost of a future would be paid in the currency of Mei-Ju’s face. It didn’t mean she hated her sister less, but it stayed her hand.