Green Monkey Dreams Read online

  Maeve told me a woman was either beautiful or ugly, but I have learned to be something else altogether. No doubt it is fearsome in its strangeness, though, for a commonwoman in her pumpkin house peers out at me with a kind of dread, and her man waves his hoe at me and makes the warding sign to keep off evil.

  When I was a princess, they bowed and smiled to see me go by, dazzled by my beauty, relieved to see a man riding with me: my keeper.

  Now, a pedlar glares at me and gives me a wide berth in his wagon. He does not know what to make of a woman alone riding the Worldroad. I am neither commonwoman nor princess, but some strange new hybrid. Worst of all, I am manless.

  ‘What will come of it?’ I hear him mutter. ‘If one rides alone, will not more ride after her?’

  I remember drawing the card of long journeying the year my firstblood came, and the bird of my heart, caged for so long, beat its wings against my breast.

  I knew it could mean either a physical or mental journey, but this was the third time it had come to me. To draw a card three times is a trine, and summons all the meanings of the card. So then, a mental and a physical journey. I did not know how long that journey would be, or that not all of it would take place on the road.

  I had focused my mind and summoned the earth magic that belongs to women, willing it into my hands as I drew again to see what the journey would entail. I remember the spread as if it is before me now.

  Under the significator, I laid the four permitted explanatory cards, face down, and crossed them with a fifth. I kept one ear on the door, not because of Maeve at her chutneys and sauces in the kitchen, singing tunelessly even though she swore she didn’t, but for fear my mother would come and catch me.

  She might well take the cards and fling them out the window, or tear them up. Worse still, she might just give her cold, cawing laugh, and the Seerat would be forever tainted with her sneers and black mocking glances.

  My mother was more silent than not, and bitter-mouthed when she spoke. Sometimes I thought she was insane. I could not imagine how I had come from her, for it seemed to me we were not alike in any way. She was dark, lean and spiky and sombre as a winter tree, and as a child, I was blonde and plump. I decided I must be more like my father. I did not dare ask how he had looked, but I knew that he had blue eyes – mine were blue too – and I extrapolated the rest of him from my own features: shorter than my mother, with smooth creamy skin and pale hair like buttery down.

  He had died fighting in the dragon crusades when I was still in my mother’s womb. I knew this only because Maeve, who had come with my mother to the edge of the world afterwards, had let it slip after drinking fermented berry cordial. I learned that the rare indulgences in this small vice offered the best opportunity to wheedle information from her. That and eavesdropping were the only ways I had of learning anything. I did not know what a crusade was, and she would say nothing more about it other than that it was to do with fighting and was therefore the business of men.

  For Maeve the world was divided into nobles and commoners, men and women. I believed her, but I had no intention of letting any of her categories shape me. I would be my own thing, I thought blithely, never knowing that this would be the hardest thing of all.

  ‘Men’s business? Fools’ business,’ my mother had snarled at her, overhearing us speak of warring. I was glad she did not know how the conversation began. A sort of madness had seemed to come over her the one time I made the mistake of asking about my father. She began calmly enough, telling me he had ridden up to the tower on a white horse and called her to let down her hair so that he could climb up.

  ‘He was fair as a dream with his eyes full of clouds, and his hair slicked down by his mother’s spit. When he looked at me, it was like being swallowed up by the sky, drowning in that endless blue.’

  ‘Was that love then?’ I had asked eagerly, and then wished I had not, for the black glitter in her eyes seemed to stab out at me.

  ‘Love? Who spoke of love to you?’ she hissed.

  Maeve, shivering in her boots, confessed. ‘She had to know,’ she added defiantly. ‘You think bringing her here will keep her from it? Love will come riding on a white horse for her, and she will go, just as you did.’

  My mother gave a crazed howl of laughter that froze my blood and Maeve hustled me out, clucking under her breath.

  ‘Why did she bring us back here?’ I asked, when all was quiet, and Maeve came down at last to give me supper.

  ‘Because of love,’ she said with weary sadness. ‘Without your father, the palace, the dresses of precious watered silk, the sweetest summer wines, were meaningless. You see, love is like the sun. It makes everything golden, but when it sets, all is darkness and shadows. Then there is nothing but a tower of one sort or another.’

  I understood from this that my mother had brought us back to where she was born at the edge of the world, because my father had died. The death of her love had acted upon her like the bitterest winter frost which bites to the very soul of a tree, so that it never grows true again.

  Why else would she choose this draughty lonely tower, from which her prince had rescued her, over the summerwine and watered silk she might still have possessed in his palace, though he was gone?

  I did not know what watered silk was any more than love, but I imagined they must feel the same: the touch of cold water in the stream on the bare secret places of my body mixed with the feel of petals from the wild brambles around the base of the tower.

  I had played at love in the forest after that, in a dress of watered silk, but by the time my firstblood came, I had tired of making believe, and became strangely restless.

  Sometimes I felt as if my head was a great echoing space barely occupied by the few things I knew – the tower, the forest, the Worldroad, the domestic secrets Maeve taught me when she was of a mind – how to iron a seam flat and how to remove a stain from white cloth.

  I longed for my own prince to come and take me adventuring throughout the world with him. I imagined us riding together, but we would not go where the crusades were, and the wars and killing. I did not know why men were drawn to such things, but it seemed fighting and bloodletting sang to them as the Worldroad sang to me. But I would keep that deadly music from his ears and we would make a song of our own and he would be grateful to me for saving him.

  That was what my mother should have done, instead of letting my father go off alone to be killed like that. She should not have listened to the stories that said a woman does not travel. She should have defied the stories for love.

  I did not tell Maeve of my notions, for I knew she would call me a fool and lecture me about the duties of women who must stay in their pumpkins if they were commoners, or in their palaces and towers if they were princesses.

  I would not argue with her, but I knew my prince would not leave me behind. He would understand the hunger in my heart to see the world and know that it must be fed. He would be glad for me to ride with him, for if he loved me, would he not want me with him?

  I pushed my mother’s voice out of my head, and imagined what I wanted to see in the cards I had laid out – the knight of wands coming across the desert bearing the cup in his hands, and perhaps the ace of cups otherwise known as the house of the true heart. And what for the third? The ten of cups, or better still, the lovers.

  A journey with a prince who would offer me true love. Maeve told me once that I was a true princess, though my mother had been a commoner before her marriage. A prince must be a prince by blood, but a woman could be raised from commoner to noble by a prince, if she was beautiful enough to make him love her.

  I turned the first card over.

  Woman in trammels, surrounded by swords. My mother had got into the reading after all, for wasn’t it her that I wanted to escape? Her with her swords and binds.

  What else? The Beast – a friend in unexpected guise who might even seem to be an enemy. I did not know what that might bode. There was no one in my life but my mother and
Maeve. Only a pedlar who came each year when the leaves changed colour.

  Could the pedlar be the Beast?

  Each year I managed to convince myself before he came that he was less smelly and silent and unpleasant than I remembered, and would happily take me with him to see the world for the price of my two silver hair-combs. Then he would come, fetid of breath and foul of tongue, his eyes sly and shifty, and I would change my mind and remember I was a princess and must wait for my prince.

  Yet the Beast card gave me pause, for sometimes the prince did not fetch the princess in Maeve’s stories himself but sent an emissary. I could not think a prince would send someone so ugly to fetch his beauty, but sometimes a prince or, more often, his mother tested a princess. Maybe I was supposed to pierce the superficial ugliness of the pedlar, and see the beauty of his heart underneath. In stories, princesses always saw and felt things more deeply and truly than other people.

  I frowned. The pedlar could not help his looks and it was uncharitable for me to judge him by them. I would be nicer to him when next he came, just in case.

  I turned the next card. The moon with its sickly glamour, and the dogs howling at it – illusions and deceptions. I did not know how that fitted with my journey.

  The final explanatory card was the Fool: innocence and ignorance. I shrugged – representing me, no doubt. Well, I was not ashamed to admit that I knew nothing. Ignorance was lack of knowledge, not stupidity. How could I be anything but a fool when no one had ever told me anything? I had never been anywhere but the woods surrounding our tower, and a little way down the Worldroad (so named, Maeve said, because it leads to everything eventually).

  I turned the last card, crossing the rest.

  It was the bleakly beautiful Veiled Empress – guardian of mysteries, of secrets yet to be revealed, of wisdoms in waiting. A good card but in that position, it represented what lay in the way of what I wanted. It meant I had to find answers to secrets if I would ever journey.

  Later that day I found the egg. I almost left it, because the shell was broken and though I could see the chick in it, I thought it must be dead. Then I saw its tiny thorn of a claw flex fractionally and I stooped to take it up. The poor wee mite, featherless and blue with cold, was already flyblown, but its life beat, feeble as a whisper, under my fingertip.

  I took it inside and peeled away the shell. I washed off the maggots, dripped sugared water into its thin beak and put it in my handkerchief drawer. It grew a ragged down, pecking milk-sodden bread from a saucer, and slept on the pillow by my head when it was too big for the drawer. When it was a full-grown bantam rooster, and Maeve had stopped talking about roast whitemeat and begun to feed him little messes when she thought I was not looking, I decided it was safe enough to name him.

  I invoked the cards and drew the Lion of Courage, which speaks of inner strengths and the ability to endure. I took this as an omen, and with Courage on my knee clucking softly in avian contentment, I gazed out of my high turret window at the Worldroad, dreaming patiently of my prince who must surely come before the spring ended.

  On the festival of Beltane, we lit the sacred fire and sang the ancient songs thanking the goddess for her bounty, and praising the earth mother. That night, Maeve told me another of her seemingly endless store of stories about princesses. This one was about Cinderine, whose prince found her dirty and cleaning a scullery, terrorised and enslaved by her relatives. He had taken her away to his castle and made her a princess. He had loved her greatly, Maeve said, and could not bear for her to grow old and ugly. He sealed her up in a diamond so that she would be young and beautiful forever.

  That night, I dreamed I was trapped inside a diamond, suffocating and silent. I woke screaming, and wondered if Cinderine had allowed her prince to lock her up for the sake of love. I would not have let him shut me up, I thought with a shiver.

  That night, for the first time, I thought about beauty. It was a vital ingredient of the princesses and would-be princesses in Maeve’s stories, fair or dark, tall or tiny, sweet or cool. Beauty even granted social mobility to commoners. My mother had been a commoner but men had swooned at the sight of her. Because of it, the prince had brought her away to his palace and wed her, transforming her into a princess. But then he had gone away to war.

  With the sweat of my nightmare cooling on my skin, it seemed to me suddenly that beauty was a coin with two sides. It was also the reason the women in stories – commoners and princesses alike – were locked up by their fathers and brothers and husbands; as if beauty was a sort of wild thing that men feared might escape and run away, or tear their throats out. No doubt the men who had swooned at my mother’s beauty had not liked her any more for it when they woke with a bump on their heads, feeling foolish.

  I climbed out of my bed and crossed the cold stone floor to stare into the dark mirror over my dressing table. Was I beautiful? I did not know. I had only my mother and Maeve to compare myself with. I did not think Maeve, with her sagging breasts and big feet and hairy eyebrows, was beautiful, and my mother’s beauty had surely died long ago.

  I did not know whether to hope I was or not. Beauty was clearly dangerous to possess, yet one could not be loved without it. And the only alternative, Maeve said, was ugliness.

  If I was ugly, something terrible might happen to me, too. The ugly sisters or stepmothers in stories often fell into terrible fits of jealousy and either tried to murder the beauty, which was ridiculous because beauty cannot be killed, and they would end up getting their heads chopped off; or else in demented attempts to render themselves beautiful, they would hack off a heel or a toe, and bleed to death.

  At the very least, lacking a beautiful sister or cousin to drive me mad, ugly, I was destined to be unsought, unloved, unsung. No one would come to take me journeying on the Worldroad. Without beauty I would be stuck in the tower forever.

  I suddenly remembered a thing my mother had once said.

  Maeve had been scolding me for playing in a mud puddle. ‘Now you are ugly,’ she snapped.

  ‘Would that she were,’ my mother had whispered in a voice that shivered my soul. ‘Men will kill and die for it, but they cannot bear it once it is theirs. It burns them.’ And she had turned her face away from me.

  The pedlar came when the leaves had already fallen and the days had grown short and cold. He stared at me as he had not done in other years, until Courage flew at him and pecked at his ankles. I decided I had made a mistake in trying to be kind to him. My instincts had told me he was ugly right through, and I should have listened to them. He leered and offered to buy Courage for his cooking pot as I backed away.

  I was glad to see him go, but I understood for the first time that there would be others like him on the Worldroad, and I was glad to think of a prince riding with me, to protect me. No wonder women did not travel alone, for who would protect them?

  The first snow flew and then it was too cold to swim in the stream, too cold to dance in watered silk, too cold to drink anything but hot milk. The three of us sat in the tower room as close to the fire as we could, working on a tapestry stretched between us and covering our knees.

  ‘I don’t know why I bother lighting that fire,’ Maeve grumbled, rubbing her swollen fingers. ‘That wind steals the warmth before it does any good.’

  I looked into the flames and thought the illusion was better than nothing at all. I did not look outside, for the ground was white with snow, and the Worldroad had all but vanished. No one travelled in winter. I had set my hopes on spring.

  Courage shifted and resettled himself under my feet.

  Maeve, then, facing the window, was the first to notice the solitary rider.

  ‘Look,’ she croaked, nearly swallowing the pin between her lips.

  I looked and saw the cloaked figure on a horse and understood that my prince had come at long last. My mother rose and crossed to the window. Coming up behind her I saw that she had driven the point of the needle deep into her palm and three drops of red blood fell i
nto a snow drift by the window. The sight of that blood against the purity of the snow made me want to vomit.

  The rider’s name was Peter. He had dark hair, sherry brown eyes and a smile that started in them. He was handsome, but he was not a prince.

  ‘My prince has sent me to bring you to his palace,’ he said, in a voice that was like the first sun after a dark long winter, and something in me thawed and became liquescent.

  ‘A pedlar spoke of a rare beauty in a tower, guarded by a wicked witch.’ He coughed apologetically and Maeve shrugged. She knew stories required poetic licence.

  ‘When my prince heard that you were the fairest maid in all the lands he had travelled, and a princess of the blood as well, he swore he would have no other to wed. I had thought to arrive in the spring, but it is much further to the edge of the world than I’d realised.’

  And he knelt at my feet and paid homage to my beauty. I knew then that I would travel after all, and I smiled down on him in purest joy. He did not swoon, but he did stagger slightly.

  Maeve fussed over him and tut-tutted at his wet cloak, insisting he come and sit by her cooking fire to dry while she dished him up some leftover stew from our lunch. It was not proper for a commoner to go up to the tower where my mother was, she whispered, when I said the fire upstairs was nicer. I blushed, feeling like a bumpkin, and he kindly pretended not to notice.

  If he had come in spring, we would have left almost immediately. But it was winter, and snow fell and fell, flattening the land’s contours so that the trees were nothing more than skeletal shapes etched blackly against all of that whiteness. I chafed at the delay, and when Peter apologised for his lateness, saying that other than the distance, there had been storms and forest fires and even a tornado in his path, I understood that the very forces of nature had conspired against me, and that all was as it should be. Forces were always arrayed to keep the lovers apart in stories – but inevitably the obstacles would be overcome.