Chapter 15 #2
“If I could be assured that I would have nothing else to remind me of what I have lost, I would prefer getting lost in the animal,” he confessed, “but there is no assurance of that, so I am obliged to find ways to retain my faculties. Early on, though, I realized that clinging to the edifices of humanity — fashion, routine, lifestyle — perpetuated the ridiculousness of my situation.”
“Company, then, reminds you how to be human.”
“I make a poor facsimile of a man now and only then by manipulating people to give me their time.”
“And what happened to the others that stayed with you?”
“They expressed their unhappiness and I sent them home. Anyone who stays with me is a guest bound by contract, not a prisoner bound by chains. You control what happens, every step of the way. You can choose where you go, where I cannot go, how much or how little of me you see, what we discuss, and yes, even when you want to leave. I am a poor servant, but poor or not, my function is to serve,” he repeated the words that had started this conversation, “like a good pet.” He cast his eyes away.
“None ever came back?”
“Beauty told me she would return, but never did.”
“Tell me about Beauty.”
“We tend towards brief mild winters here, but her father stumbled upon the keep during one of our infrequent blizzards, lost, tired, hungry, half-frozen. The fortress tended to his needs. And then he too stole something which he said was for his daughter. In the full bloom of my arrogance, I told him I needed his daughter in exchange.”
“What did he steal? Something worthy I hope.”
He resisted telling her that the man had also taken a rose.
“It was something precious to me. The theft came at great personal cost.”
“And Beauty lived with you too,” she said, “and you loved her.”
Baró shot Rivani a glance with her pronouncement. “Most certainly not. She was kind to me at a time when I least deserved it.” Much lyke thee. “Other than you, she is the only other who has touched me.”
“Did she care about you?”
“She cared about duty. She saw it as her duty to be here and tolerate me on behalf of her father. Beauty permitted me to keep company with her at dinner and I became her pet. I think that was how she managed, viewing me as an intelligent animal who attended to her needs.” He bit his lip, not wanting to ask but needing to know. “Are you going to stay?”
“It looks like it, doesn’t it?” She squeezed his arm.
He trembled in the absence of tears.
“We need to renegotiate some contractual items,” Rivani said.
“You pledged to look after me through magic. I release you from that. You have told me it hurts you when you use it and so we should not. I have put away massive stores of food for the winter and with your hunting, we will not starve or suffer.” Fortunately, Rivani did not require Baró to respond because he could not have, so overcome by her consideration and courtesy.
“We agreed that my amusements and entertainments are my own, but I am now willing to be more than just someone who gives time and space. I take pleasure in most of our joint occupations and diversions. As you are prevented from reading, if any books might be salvaged, I can read them to you.”
“You read?”
“Do you find it surprising that I read because I am Rivani or a woman?” She gave him an unimpressed glare.
“Perhaps both conditions make it seem unlikely,” he admitted, “but so few were literate when I was among others and I have had no literate company since my isolation, I assumed that things had not changed in that regard.”
“That’s fair.” She took his arm again. “I have another amendment I should like to propose. You have likened yourself to a pet, an animal that relies upon the care and attention of its masters. You have served, but you have not received reciprocal attention.”
“If I do not deserve it —”
“I wish to do something different. I give you permission to touch me, Baró. We are both allowed to say no whenever we want. You have never been disrespectful of my person. I will believe that you are worthy of care and affection unless you show me that I cannot trust you to receive either.”
“I apologize,” he said. “I do not understand what you are suggesting. I know you are demonstrating a virtue but...” He spread his hands out wide. “I earned this, all of this. Does that not show you that I cannot be trusted?”
“Whoever did this to you must have been powerful.” She stepped in front of him, reaching out to touch his cheek. “So powerful that they could have erased you from this existence.”
“This was, I believe, supposed to be a punishment worse than death.”
“And perhaps that was the intent,” Rivani agreed.
“But to spare your life also means that there was something worth sparing. Your fate has been doubly cruel because it denied you that which was integral for your improvement — the care of another. And yet, you have had the strength of character to do it anyway.”
Baró found a fallen tree trunk on which to sit, his confusion and emotions getting the better of him and causing him to doubt the security of his legs. Her touch and her suggestions made his stomach knot with impossible hope and he shook with the violence of his relief and gratitude.
“What’s wrong, Baró?”
“I am afraid,” he confessed.
Rivani had said she would not leave, not now, but she would leave eventually.
She would have to. And this beautiful dreamlike episode in a long weary life would be over, not just after a brief taste of kindness and dutiful companionship but after a year of warmth and affection.
He would revert. He would forget her, forget all of it, until someone else came along and reminded him for a time of what he had and lost.
“New things are always terrifying.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “I agree to the changes you have made to our contract.” He cast his eyes down at the next thought. “But I would like something else.”
“For our new bargain?”
“No. Freely given — if given at all.” He hurried on, knowing he would stall if he did not let the words out.
“I will never truly be absolved of my crimes. I know that. I know also that you can speak for no one but yourself. Nonetheless, I ask, nay, beg, that you will give me the opportunity to be a better creature and somehow earn your forgiveness.”
“Be as good as you have been,” she said. She took one of his hands, needing both of hers to clasp one. “Show me that my trust is not misplaced because you have my forgiveness already.”
When he worked up the courage, he retired to his room, strode out upon the balcony and down the stairs to the private enclosed garden.
He confronted the rose bush. The empty beds in the courtyard spoke of former rose bushes that had bloomed and died over the centuries, counting down, always counting down.
The leaves of the surrounding trees and shrubs had changed into their autumn finery with many having already begun shedding their new raiment, doing a timekeeping of their own.
He could not yet feel the chill in the air, but he could smell the change.
Reflexively, he counted the flowers on the remaining bush.
Heedless of the changing season, the blossoms dripped in blousy resplendence, their unfurled petals like in high summer, and they were numerous, enough to fill every decorative vase in the fortress.
More than enough. Too many. The one paltry flower and cutting Rivani had taken had been so insignificant and inconsequential in the face of so many others that served to remind him of how much more suffering he had yet to do.
Yet even with the discouraging quantity, he allowed himself to be happy.
Rivani had not spurned him as she should have.
Instead, she had forgiven him, told him she would stay, and changed their contract so that he might continue to benefit from her.
Even if the roses taunted him, they had unwittingly provided a most wondrous companion.
“Rivani hath agreed to stay,” he said aloud, marveling at the truth of such a pronouncement.
He did not understand, but would not question such a gift.
The bush, of course, remained silent and unmoved at his awe-filled statement.
It never responded when he spoke to it, not that he expected the plant to respond, but he had no other true locus of connection to the Magic that kept his world in stasis.
The bush alone reminded him that his life as a man had not just been a fevered dream.
Without the roses, perhaps the faint remembrances of being human would have nibbled at him like hunger pains during sleep, but they did exist and they did remind.
“She knoweth,” he said, still trying to believe it himself.
“She knoweth and forgiveth and intendeth to stay.” The silence disappointed him.
He did not expect acknowledgment, but he wanted something.
He only had Rivani and the silent bush to turn to for support, for self-disclosure, to express those things that he had no one to tell.
He had nowhere else to turn and proclaim how euphoric Rivani had made him.
“Yf she doth accomplysh the ympossyble and forgyveth me for what Y have done, thanne maybe... Perhaps she could...” He clamped his teeth down on his lip. He could not say it, did not wish to think it and hope for more.
Go on, say it, She said. Love you. It does sound ridiculous, does it not? But foolish hope makes everyone sound that way.
He nodded, chastened for having the words he was too cowardly to say turned upon him. Foolish hope or not, it was hope and that was something new.
Gratitude is also not love, She reminded him. Your relief and joy now that she knows are not a foundation. I do not think you are even capable of love.
“Perhaps not, but Y have at least started,” he said to Her, to the bush, to the nothingness in the garden.
He had given up before he had even tried in the past. Those few visitors would never have given him the opportunity to speak and he in turn had never wanted to tell them.
But this desire to tell Rivani led to a new fear.
If love was the next thing to accomplish, he had no knowledge of what it entailed.
The accounts of it were confusing, some poets writing about how wonderful and beautiful while others about how painful and cruel.
Perhaps She was right. Perhaps he was incapable.
Nonetheless, he wanted to know what it felt like to be loved, just once.
And even if, by some miracle or daftness on her part, there is mutual declaration of love, do you think she would ever willingly bind herself to you in marriage?
The Voice sounded derisive, biting. Could you imagine her giving up her freedom for the sake of any man?
What hope do you have then that she would do anything but laugh at the suit of a monster?
She spoke the truth. His hope, however powerful in the moment, was fleeting.
Rivani could be kind to him, forgive him, befriend him, take care of him, perhaps even develop affectionate feelings for him, but nothing else.
Even if he could identify his feelings for her as love, there would be nothing else.
Her pity and compassion would be comforting and intimate, but that would be all it could ever be.
“Y wyll never be a man agayn.”
The knowledge had been there for years, but he had never confessed to it aloud. He could no longer function or assimilate to the world of men. If the gifts would just cease, he would be content in this shape until death.
When silence reigned over the garden, when his mind cleared and when She no longer whispered in his ear, he trudged back up to the bedroom he seldom used, his brief defiant jubilance consumed by bleak reality.
Ensuring that the door was closed, he removed the cloth covering from the mirror and stared at the reflective surface.
He did not himself look human anymore even with the greatest amount of imagination, but the gazing said that he was self-aware, and there was always a painful twinge at seeing himself.
No matter how accustomed he got to this ever-changing body, it was wrong.
Even if you somehow managed to love her, I would not think it possible for her to love that, She remarked.
That. Well, he was a that now, wasn’t he?
That dig made him smile. The monster in the glass imitated the gesture, their version menacing and ugly, the gums mottled and diseased, the teeth unnaturally large and pointed, the face a twisted deformity from which the creature had not mercifully died at birth.
He poked and prodded and pulled at his face.
He watched in perverse fascination as the monster did the same.
“Y would not believe that she beeth capable either, but Y had thought yt even less posfyble for her to forgyve me.”
He ran his hands over his eyes and down his snout.
He dragged his claws through the short black curls that framed his face and went down around his shoulders.
He wanted to find that it was all an illusion, that this was his dream, that he would wake up and feel whole and complete and not thoroughly ashamed of all that he was.
He wanted to have some other life with some other face with some other past. He wanted the monster in the glass to look like he might inspire anything other than horror.
“Dear gods and angels, thy gyfts hath made of me a travestie.”
Did you forget? She sounded amused.
“Yt hath been some tyme. Tyme doth soften the memory.”
He ran the pad of his finger over one of his horns, over the monster’s horn, tracing the ridges of the bone. Even the reflection of his hands repulsed him, gnarled and massive. The snout, larger than ever, caused him to wince. He ran his claws through the curls again that had gone from hair to fur.
“Woldest that Y could do somethyng with thys.”
Perhaps a horn and hoof polish? She jibed.
He snorted. He covered the mirror again, thereby relieving himself of the dull but insistent ache which nestled itself under his left rib.
You are so unaffected by it now, you let me jest at your expense without protest?
“Thou mockest me for Thy handywerk. After centuries, Thou hast desensytized me to the payn. Thou hast made of me an anymal.” He shrugged. “And lyke an anymal, Y just am.”
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