Snow, Glass, Apples

Copyright (c) 1994 Neil Gaiman

I do not know what manner of thing she is. None of us do. She killed

her mother in the birthing, but that's never enough to account for

it.

They call me wise, but I am far from wise, for all that I foresaw

fragments of it, frozen moments caught in pools of water or in the

cold glass of my mirror. If I were wise I would not have tried to

change what I saw. If I were wise I would have killed myself before

ever I encountered her, before ever I caught him.

Wise, and a witch, or so they said, and I'd seen his face in my

dreams and in reflections for all my life: sixteen years of dreaming

of him before he reined his horse by the bridge that morning, and

asked my name. He helped me onto his high horse and we rode together

to my little cottage, my face buried in the gold of his hair. He

asked for the best of what I had; a king's right, it was.

His beard was red-bronze in the morning light, and I knew him, not

as a king, for I knew nothing of kings then, but as my love. He took

all he wanted from me, the right of kings, but he returned to me on

the following day, and on the night after that: his beard so red,

his hair so gold, his eyes the blue of a summer sky, his skin tanned

the gentle brown of ripe wheat.

His daughter was only a child: no more than five years of age when I

came to the palace. A portrait of her dead mother hung in the

princess's tower room; a tall woman, hair the colour of dark wood,

eyes nut-brown. She was of a different blood to her pale daughter.

The girl would not eat with us.

I do not know where in the palace she ate.

I had my own chambers. My husband the king, he had his own rooms

also. When he wanted me he would send for me, and I would go to him,

and pleasure him, and take my pleasure with him.

One night, several months after I was brought to the palace, she

came to my rooms. She was six. I was embroidering by lamplight,

squinting my eyes against the lamp's smoke and fitful illumination.

When I looked up, she was there.

"Princess?"

She said nothing. Her eyes were black as coal, black as her hair;

her lips were redder than blood. She looked up at me and smiled. Her

teeth seemed sharp, even then, in the lamplight.

"What are you doing away from your room?"

"I'm hungry," she said, like any child.

It was winter, when fresh food is a dream of warmth and sunlight;

but I had strings of whole apples, cored and dried, hanging from the

beams of my chamber, and I pulled an apple down for her.

"Here."

Autumn is the time of drying, of preserving, a time of picking

apples, of rendering the goose fat. Winter is the time of hunger, of

snow, and of death; and it is the time of the midwinter feast, when

we rub the goose-fat into the skin of a whole pig, stuffed with that

autumn's apples, then we roast it or spit it, and we prepare to

feast upon the crackling.

She took the dried apple from me and began to chew it with her sharp

yellow teeth.

"Is it good?"

She nodded. I had always been scared of the little princess, but at

that moment I warmed to her and, with my fingers, gently, I stroked

her cheek. She looked at me and smiled -- she smiled but rarely --

then she sank her teeth into the base of my thumb, the Mound of

Venus, and she drew blood.

I began to shriek, from pain and from surprise; but she looked at me

and I fell silent.

The little Princess fastened her mouth to my hand and licked and

sucked and drank. When she was finished, she left my chamber.

Beneath my gaze the cut that she had made began to close, to scab,

and to heal. The next day it was an old scar: I might have cut my

hand with a pocket-knife in my childhood.

I had been frozen by her, owned and dominated. That scared me, more

than the blood she had fed on. After that night I locked my chamber

door at dusk, barring it with an oaken pole, and I had the smith

forge iron bars, which he placed across my windows.

My husband, my love, my king, sent for me less and less, and when I

came to him he was dizzy, listless, confused. He could no longer

make love as a man makes love; and he would not permit me to

pleasure him with my mouth: the one time I tried, he started,

violently, and began to weep. I pulled my mouth away and held him

tightly, until the sobbing had stopped, and he slept, like a child.

I ran my fingers across his skin as he slept. It was covered in a

multitude of ancient scars. But I could recall no scars from the

days of our courtship, save one, on his side, where a boar had gored

him when he was a youth.

Soon he was a shadow of the man I had met and loved by the bridge.

His bones showed, blue and white, beneath his skin. I was with him

at the last: his hands were cold as stone, his eyes milky-blue, his

hair and beard faded and lustreless and limp. He died unshriven, his

skin nipped and pocked from head to toe with tiny, old scars.

He weighed near to nothing. The ground was frozen hard, and we could

dig no grave for him, so we made a cairn of rocks and stones above

his body, as a memorial only, for there was little enough of him

left to protect from the hunger of the beasts and the birds.

So I was queen.

And I was foolish, and young -- eighteen summers had come and gone

since first I saw daylight -- and I did not do what I would do, now.

If it were today, I would have her heart cut out, true. But then I

would have her head and arms and legs cut off. I would have them

disembowel her. And then I would watch, in the town square, as the

hangman heated the fire to white-heat with bellows, watch unblinking

as he consigned each part of her to the fire. I would have archers

around the square, who would shoot any bird or animal who came close

to the flames, any raven or dog or hawk or rat. And I would not

close my eyes until the princess was ash, and a gentle wind could

scatter her like snow.

I did not do this thing, and we pay for our mistakes.

They say I was fooled; that it was not her heart. That it was the

heart of an animal -- a stag, perhaps, or a boar. They say that, and

they are wrong.

And some say (but it is her lie, not mine) that I was given the

heart, and that I ate it. Lies and half-truths fall like snow,

covering the things that I remember, the things I saw. A landscape,

unrecognisable after a snowfall; that is what she has made of my

life.

There were scars on my love, her father's thighs, and on his

ballock-pouch, and on his male member, when he died.

I did not go with them. They took her in the day, while she slept,

and was at her weakest. They took her to the heart of the forest,

and there they opened her blouse, and they cut out her heart, and

they left her dead, in a gully, for the forest to swallow.

The forest is a dark place, the border to many kingdoms; no-one

would be foolish enough to claim jurisdiction over it. Outlaws live

in the forest. Robbers live in the forest, and so do wolves. You can

ride through the forest for a dozen days and never see a soul; but

there are eyes upon you the entire time.

They brought me her heart. I know it was hers -- no sow's heart or

doe's would have continued to beat and pulse after it had been cut

out, as that one did.

I took it to my chamber.

I did not eat it: I hung it from the beams above my bed, placed it

on a length of twine that I strung with rowan-berries, orange-red as

a robin's breast; and with bulbs of garlic.

Outside, the snow fell, covering the footprints of my huntsmen,

covering her tiny body in the forest where it lay.

I had the smith remove the iron bars from my windows, and I would

spend some time in my room each afternoon through the short winter

days, gazing out over the forest, until darkness fell.

There were, as I have already stated, people in the forest. They

would come out, some of them, for the Spring Fair: a greedy, feral,

dangerous people; some were stunted -- dwarfs and midgets and

hunchbacks; others had the huge teeth and vacant gazes of idiots;

some had fingers like flippers or crab-claws. They would creep out

of the forest each year for the Spring Fair, held when the snows had

melted.

As a young lass I had worked at the Fair, and they had scared me

then, the forest folk. I told fortunes for the Fairgoers, scrying in

a pool of still water; and, later, when I was older, in a disc of

polished glass, its back all silvered -- a gift from a merchant

whose straying horse I had seen in a pool of ink.

The stallholders at the fair were afraid of the forest folk; they

would nail their wares to the bare boards of their stalls -- slabs

of gingerbread or leather belts were nailed with great iron nails to

the wood. If their wares were not nailed, they said, the forest folk

would take them, and run away, chewing on the stolen gingerbread,

flailing about them with the belts.

The forest folk had money, though: a coin here, another there,

sometimes stained green by time or the earth, the face on the coin

unknown to even the oldest of us. Also they had things to trade, and

thus the fair continued, serving the outcasts and the dwarfs,

serving the robbers (if they were circumspect) who preyed on the

rare travellers from lands beyond the forest, or on gypsies, or on

the deer. (This was robbery in the eyes of the law. The deer were

the queen's.)

The years passed by slowly, and my people claimed that I ruled them

with wisdom. The heart still hung above by bed, pulsing gently in

the night. If there were any who mourned the child, I saw no

evidence: she was a thing of terror, back then, and they believed

themselves well rid of her.

Spring Fair followed Spring Fair: five of them, each sadder, poorer,

shoddier than the one before. Fewer of the forest folk came out of

the forest to buy. Those who did seemed subdued and listless. The

stallholders stopped nailing their wares to the boards of their

stalls. And by the fifth year but a handful of folk came from the

forest -- a fearful huddle of little hairy men, and no-one else.

The Lord of the Fair, and his page, came to me when the fair was

done. I had known him slightly, before I was queen.

"I do not come to you as my queen," he said.

I said nothing. I listened.

"I come to you because you are wise," he continued. "When you were a

child you found a strayed foal by staring into a pool of ink; when

you were a maiden you found a lost infant who had wandered far from

her mother, by staring into that mirror of yours. You know secrets

and you can seek out things hidden. My queen," he asked, "what is

taking the forest folk? Next year there will be no Spring Fair. The

travellers from other kingdoms have grown scarce and few, the folk

of the forest are almost gone. Another year like the last, and we

shall all starve."

I commanded my maidservant to bring me my looking-glass. It was a

simple thing, a silver-backed glass disk, which I kept wrapped in a

doe-skin, in a chest, in my chamber.

They brought it to me, then, and I gazed into it:

She was twelve and she was no longer a little child. Her skin was

still pale, her eyes and hair coal-black, her lips as red as blood.

She wore the clothes she had worn when she left the castle for the

last time -- the blouse, the skirt, -- although they were much

let-out, much mended. Over them she wore a leather cloak, and

instead of boots she had leather bags, tied with thongs, over her

tiny feet.

She was standing in the forest, beside a tree.

As I watched, in the eye of my mind, I saw her edge and step and

flitter and pad from tree to tree, like an animal: a bat or a wolf.

She was following someone.

He was a monk. He wore sackcloth, and his feet were bare, and

scabbed and hard. His beard and tonsure were of a length, overgrown,

unshaven.

She watched him from behind the trees. Eventually he paused for the

night, and began to make a fire, laying twigs down, breaking up a

robin's nest as kindling. He had a tinder-box in his robe, and he

knocked the flint against the steel until the sparks caught the

tinder and the fire flamed. There had been two eggs in the nest he

had found, and these he ate, raw. They cannot have been much of a

meal for so big a man.

He sat there in the firelight, and she came out from her hiding

place. She crouched down on the other side of the fire, and stared

at him. He grinned, as if it were a long time since he had seen

another human, and beckoned her over to him.

She stood up and walked around the fire, and waited, an arms-length

away. He pulled in his robe until he found a coin -- a tiny, copper

penny, -- and tossed it to her. She caught it, and nodded, and went

to him. He pulled at the rope around his waist, and his robe swung

open. His body was as hairy as a bear's. She pushed him back onto

the moss. One hand crept, spider-like, through the tangle of hair,

until it closed on his manhood; the other hand traced a circle on

his left nipple. He closed his eyes, and fumbled one huge hand under

her skirt. She lowered her mouth to the nipple she had been teasing,

her smooth skin white on the furry brown body of him.

She sank her teeth deep into his breast. His eyes opened, then they

closed again, and she drank.

She straddled him, and she fed. As she did so a thin blackish liquid

began to dribble from between her legs...

"Do you know what is keeping the travellers from our town? What is

happening to the forest people?" asked the Head of the Fair.

I covered the mirror in doe-skin, and told him that I would

personally take it upon myself to make the forest safe once more.

I had to, although she terrified me. I was the queen.

A foolish woman would have gone then into the forest and tried to

capture the creature; but I had been foolish once and had no wish to

be so a second time.

I spent time with old books, for I could read a little. I spent time

with the gypsy women (who passed through our country across the

mountains to the south, rather than cross the forest to the north

and the west).

I prepared myself, and obtained those things I would need, and when

the first snows began to fall, then I was ready.

Naked, I was, and alone in the highest tower of the palace, a place

open to the sky. The winds chilled my body; goose-pimples crept

across my arms and thighs and breasts. I carried a silver basin, and

a basket in which I had placed a silver knife, a silver pin, some

tongs, a grey robe and three green apples.

I put them down and stood there, unclothed, on the tower, humble

before the night sky and the wind. Had any man seen me standing

there, I would have had his eyes; but there was no-one to spy.

Clouds scudded across the sky, hiding and uncovering the waning moon.

I took the silver knife, and slashed my left arm -- once, twice,

three times. The blood dripped into the basin, scarlet seeming black

in the moonlight.

I added the powder from the vial that hung around my neck. It was a

brown dust, made of dried herbs and the skin of a particular toad,

and from certain other things. It thickened the blood, while

preventing it from clotting.

I took the three apples, one by one, and pricked their skins gently

with my silver pin. Then I placed the apples in the silver bowl, and

let them sit there while the first tiny flakes of snow of the year

fell slowly onto my skin, and onto the apples, and onto the blood.

When dawn began to brighten the sky I covered myself with the grey

cloak, and took the red apples from the silver bowl, one by one,

lifting each into my basket with silver tongs, taking care not to

touch it. There was nothing left of my blood or of the brown powder

in the silver bowl, save nothing save a black residue, like a

verdigris, on the inside.

I buried the bowl in the earth. Then I cast a glamour on the apples

(as once, years before, by a bridge, I had cast a glamour on

myself), that they were, beyond any doubt, the most wonderful apples

in the world; and the crimson blush of their skins was the warm

colour of fresh blood.

I pulled the hood of my cloak low over my face, and I took ribbons

and pretty hair ornaments with me, placed them above the apples in

the reed basket, and I walked alone into the forest, until I came to

her dwelling: a high, sandstone cliff, laced with deep caves going

back a way into the rock wall.

There were trees and boulders around the cliff-face, and I walked

quietly and gently from tree to tree, without disturbing a twig or a

fallen leaf. Eventually I found my place to hide, and I waited, and

I watched.

After some hours a clutch of dwarfs crawled out of the cave-front --

ugly, misshapen, hairy little men, the old inhabitants of this

country. You saw them seldom now.

They vanished into the wood, and none of them spied me, though one

of them stopped to piss against the rock I hid behind.

I waited. No more came out.

I went to the cave entrance and hallooed into it, in a cracked old

voice.

The scar on my Mound of Venus throbbed and pulsed as she came

towards me, out of the darkness, naked and alone.

She was thirteen years of age, my stepdaughter, and nothing marred

the perfect whiteness of her skin save for the livid scar on her

left breast, where her heart had been cut from her long since.

The insides of her thighs were stained with wet black filth.

She peered at me, hidden, as I was, in my cloak. She looked at me

hungrily. "Ribbons, goodwife," I croaked. "Pretty ribbons for your

hair..."

She smiled and beckoned to me. A tug; the scar on my hand was

pulling me towards her. I did what I had planned to do, but I did it

more readily than I had planned: I dropped my basket, and screeched

like the bloodless old pedlar woman I was pretending to be, and I

ran.

My grey cloak was the colour of the forest, and I was fast; she did

not catch me.

I made my way back to the palace.

I did not see it. Let us imagine though, the girl returning,

frustrated and hungry, to her cave, and finding my fallen basket on

the ground.

What did she do?

I like to think she played first with the ribbons, twined them into

her raven hair, looped them around her pale neck or her tiny waist.

And then, curious, she moved the cloth to see what else was in the

basket; and she saw the red, red apples.

They smelled like fresh apples, of course; and they also smelled of

blood. And she was hungry. I imagine her picking up an apple,

pressing it against her cheek, feeling the cold smoothness of it

against her skin.

And she opened her mouth and bit deep into it...

By the time I reached my chambers, the heart that hung from the

roof-beam, with the apples and hams and the dried sausages, had

ceased to beat. It hung there, quietly, without motion or life, and

I felt safe once more.

That winter the snows were high and deep, and were late melting. We

were all hungry come the spring.

The Spring Fair was slightly improved that year. The forest folk

were few, but they were there, and there were travellers from the

lands beyond the forest.

I saw the little hairy men of the forest-cave buying and bargaining

for pieces of glass, and lumps of crystal and of quartz-rock. They

paid for the glass with silver coins -- the spoils of my

stepdaughter's depredations, I had no doubt. When it got about what

they were buying, townsfolk rushed back to their homes, came back

with their lucky crystals, and, in a few cases, with whole sheets of

glass.

I thought, briefly, about having them killed, but I did not. As long

as the heart hung, silent and immobile and cold, from the beam of my

chamber, I was safe, and so were the folk of the forest, and, thus,

eventually, the folk of the town.

My twenty-fifth year came, and my stepdaughter had eaten the

poisoned fruit two winters' back, when the Prince came to my Palace.

He was tall, very tall, with cold green eyes and the swarthy skin of

those from beyond the mountains.

He rode with a small retinue: large enough to defend him, small

enough that another monarch -- myself, for instance -- would not

view him as a potential threat.

I was practical: I thought of the alliance of our lands, thought of

the Kingdom running from the forests all the way south to the sea; I

thought of my golden-haired bearded love, dead these eight years;

and, in the night, I went to the Prince's room.

I am no innocent, although my late husband, who was once my king,

was truly my first lover, no matter what they say.

At first the prince seemed excited. He bade me remove my shift, and

made me stand in front of the opened window, far from the fire,

until my skin was chilled stone-cold. Then he asked me to lie upon

my back, with my hands folded across my breasts, my eyes wide open -

but staring only at the beams above. He told me not to move, and to

breathe as little as possible. He implored me to say nothing. He

spread my legs apart.

It was then that he entered me.

As he began to thrust inside me, I felt my hips raise, felt myself

begin to match him, grind for grind, push for push. I moaned. I

could not help myself.

His manhood slid out of me. I reached out and touched it, a tiny,

slippery thing.

"Please," he said, softly. "You must neither move, nor speak. Just

lie there on the stones, so cold and so fair."

I tried, but he had lost whatever force it was that had made him

virile; and, some short while later, I left the Prince's room, his

curses and tears still resounding in my ears.

He left early the next morning, with all his men, and they rode off

into the forest.

I imagine his loins, now, as he rode, a knot of frustration at the

base of his manhood. I imagine his pale lips pressed so tightly

together. Then I imagine his little troupe riding through the

forest, finally coming upon the glass-and-crystal cairn of my

stepdaughter. So pale. So cold. Naked, beneath the glass, and little

more than a girl, and dead.

In my fancy, I can almost feel the sudden hardness of his manhood

inside his britches, envision the lust that took him then, the

prayers he muttered beneath his breath in thanks for his good

fortune. I imagine him negotiating with the little hairy men -

offering them gold and spices for the lovely corpse under the

crystal mound.

Did they take his gold willingly? Or did they look up to see his men

on their horses, with their sharp swords and their spears, and

realize they had no alternative?

I do not know. I was not there; I was not scrying. I can only

imagine...

Hands, pulling off the lumps of glass and quartz from her cold body.

Hands, gently caressing her cold cheek, moving her cold arm,

rejoicing to find the corpse still fresh and pliable.

Did he take her there, in front of them all? Or did he have her

carried to a secluded nook before he mounted her?

I cannot say.

Did he shake the apple from her throat? Or did her eyes slowly open

as he pounded into her cold body; did her mouth open, those red lips

part, those sharp yellow teeth close on his swarthy neck, as the

blood, which is the life, trickled down her throat, washing down and

away the lump of apple, my own, my poison?

I imagine; I do not know.

This I do know: I was woken in the night by her heart pulsing and

beating once more. Salt blood dripped onto my face from above. I sat

up. My hand burned and pounded as if I had hit the base of my thumb

with a rock.

There was a hammering on the door. I felt afraid, but I am a queen,

and I would not show fear. I opened the door.

First his men walked in to my chamber, and stood around me, with

their sharp swords, and their long spears.

Then he came in; and he spat in my face.

Finally, she walked into my chamber, as she had when I was first a

queen, and she was a child of six. She had not changed. Not really.

She pulled down the twine on which her heart was hanging. She pulled

off the dried rowan berries, one by one; pulled off the garlic bulb

- now a dried thing, after all these years; then she took up her

own, her pumping heart -- a small thing, no larger than that of a

nanny-goat or a she-bear -- as it brimmed and pumped its blood into

her hand.

Her fingernails must have been as sharp as glass: she opened her

breast with them, running them over the purple scar. Her chest

gaped, suddenly, open and bloodless. She licked her heart, once, as

the blood ran over her hands, and she pushed the heart deep into her

breast.

I saw her do it. I saw her close the flesh of her breast once more.

I saw the purple scar begin to fade.

Her prince looked briefly concerned, but he put his arm around her

nonetheless, and they stood, side by side, and they waited.

And she stayed cold, and the bloom of death remained on her lips,

and his lust was not diminished in any way.

They told me they would marry, and the kingdoms would indeed be

joined. They told me that I would be with them on their wedding day.

It is starting to get hot in here.

They have told the people bad things about me; a little truth to add

savour to the dish, but mixed with many lies.

I was bound and kept in a tiny stone cell beneath the palace, and I

remained there through the autumn. Today they fetched me out of the

cell; they stripped the rags from me, and washed the filth from me,

and then they shaved my head and my loins, and they rubbed my skin

with goose grease.

The snow was falling as they carried me -- two men at each hand, two

men at each leg -- utterly exposed, and spread-eagled and cold,

through the midwinter crowds; and brought me to this kiln.

My stepdaughter stood there with her prince. She watched me, in my

indignity, but she said nothing.

As they thrust me inside, jeering and chaffing as they did so, I saw

one snowflake land upon her white cheek, and remain there without

melting.

They closed the kiln-door behind me. It is getting hotter in here,

and outside they are singing and cheering and banging on the sides

of the kiln.

She was not laughing, or jeering, or talking. She did not sneer at

me or turn away. She looked at me, though; and for a moment I saw

myself reflected in her eyes.

I will not scream. I will not give them that satisfaction. They will

have my body, but my soul and my story are my own, and will die with

me.

The goose-grease begins to melt and glisten upon my skin. I shall

make no sound at all. I shall think no more on this.

I shall think instead of the snowflake on her cheek.

I think of her hair as black as coal, her lips as red as blood, her

skin, snow-white.

END

5,000 words