How should I begin?  How, in truth, should all tales begin?  With one end comes a beginning, my beginning: and so I shall speak of her, as I see her now.  She comes to me, and I neither know why or how nor from whence she came.  Long soft hair is straggled and wet, colourless and dark in the shadows of the night.  It is raining outside, I think, turning my gaze to the grooved wood on the table, following the lines momentarily – but all lines inevitably run back to her.  Raising my eyes I look upon her again as she takes her seat across from me: I see the pallor of her face, the smooth cheeks drained of hue, of tone, the lips turned blue with cold.  Her clothes are plain, ragged, drenched with rainwater.  I do not recall what colour they are, nor what material they are comprised of.  My mind flits upon her like a butterfly.  I lift the mug of ale to my lips.  It has lost its taste.

            “Well?” she asks, returning my gaze with the candour of cold, azure eyes.

            I am surprised at the sudden oddness of her question. “Miss?”

            “You are staring at me,” she explains, then smiles a wry, cool smile. “How can that be?” she whispers, as though to herself.

            “I did not mean to offend you, miss,” I say to her, wondering if I had truly recognised her or not.  There is something familiar about her.

            “It is of no matter,” she assures me.  The innkeeper passes by; but she does not hail him. “I take it that you are a traveller?” She nods towards the stave, my oldest friend, leaning by the fireside.  I nod.

            “Yes.  I have travelled far throughout these lands, further than any other man has travelled.  I have seen…many things.”  I remember briefly the things I have seen on the road before I came here, and my mind momentarily recoils.  I see mushroom clouds of red mist over cities turned grey; the waste of disease unknown and irreversible; the sight of men overcome by creatures encased in cold steel; the twilight of a world gone dead and devoid of all life but for the crawling beetles on the ground. “I have been to the ends of the world and back,” I end on a breath, wondering why I had begun my journey at all.

            She glances at me with those cold blue eyes once more, appraising me with an expression of marked curiosity before she nods. “You intrigue me.  I should like to have met you,” she says softly.

            “We have just met,” I reply, puzzled.

            “I meant…I should have liked to have met you before.” Her gaze wanders.  She looks about the tavern as though for the first time.  There is a strangeness on her face, as though the place is foreign to her.  Again the feeling that I should know her fills me.  The straight, angular lines of her cheeks and chin, the thin lips…I still cannot mark the colour of her hair.

            “And you?” I ask, “What brings you here?”

            She looks upon me as a dreamer woken from a reverie. “Like yourself, I am only a mere traveller.  Yet this is all…very strange and new to me…” The words come slow, measured.  Again the cool curiosity lights her face. “Tell me, what have you heard or seen upon your travels, sir?”

            “Too many tales for me to tell in one night.” I answer but to avoid her.  For my part, I am more interested in her own past. “But I would be willing to listen to any tales that you would give me, lady.”

            She smiles, but the smile does not touch her eyes.  Yet still – should I say – I love her, for what she has been and what she is not, for crossing my path on this dark and stormy night unbidden.

            “You call me lady,” she notes with some mirth in that plaintive voice of hers.

            “Forgive me.  But there is something in your gaze…”

            “I know,” she answers, nodding again. “We recognise one another, do we not?  Well, perhaps we met one another on the path towards this place.  But so much of the journey here I have forgotten already…Perhaps it was by the river that we met…” She trails off, looking suddenly perplexed.  I do not recall having crossed a river.  After a moment the look passes from her face and she smiles at me again. “You are right – I once was a lady.”

            “And what mishap has befallen you that you are here now in such humble array?”

            Her eyes wander again.  It is as though she finds her surroundings peculiar to her, even as a fish would find land a realm as alien as we would find the depths of the sea.  When she looks at me again her expression is whimsical.

            “It began with my sister,” she began, her tone low, musical, as though the sentence had passed through her mind so many times that it had become akin to a song, or a poem of old. “She was my twin.  And we loved one another, once…”

            So, one twin, and another.  They walk hand in hand through the gardens of great houses together, books in hands, hair loose, shining like torrents of liquid gold down the slender curve of their backs.  I see the sheen of their garments as they brush past, finest silks and satins, diapered with the crests of nobility.  Which one is she?  I do not know.  They are as like as one, even to the very shape of their smiles; having grown up forever in one another’s company, knowing no other, needing no proof that others exist.  She tells me of the meadow that they walked in that day, that morning of watery sunshine on pale grass, of dewdrops and birdsong.  Beyond the dip of the plain there is a forest, and they go there, but she does not tell me why – perhaps it is for the foraging of mushrooms that they go; or for the wildness and the unknown, the feral realms of everyday human life.  The hidden emotions, the desires, the passions buried deep within – all those things that rule us, that bind us, that we spend all time either running from or indulging shamelessly.  And through the forest came riding a young knight at the head of a cavalcade, weapons shining brightly in the dapple sunlight, his golden hair fair and curly framing a handsome, boyish face.  It is Italo, a knight of greatest fame – he comes to their stronghold while passing through their lands, promising such tales of the world outside that they have never heard before.

            But even as he speaks, the lady’s twin is silent, looking upon the man with sudden fervour in her eyes, and he too looks upon her with unrestrained desire; and perhaps it is that in that forest he takes her maidenhood, and first wrenches two sisters apart.  For this lady, my lady, despises and fears him; but she confesses with wistful eyes that she is drawn to him too, just as she is drawn to the forest – yet because she despises him she vows to walk away, she will scorn her sister.

            And now how lonely days seem, how fraught with frustration and empty rage.  Her father the baron cares nothing for her, for her dreams or her values, for her principles.  He sits at his table, counting out his paper money, counting, counting…  This is his world.   Riding the great winged bird to ‘paradise’; the red-dressed courtesan who works under him; metal carriages; talking pictures; ‘thinking’ machines: I saw them all once, on my travels, but they mean little to me, after all the time I have spent on roads and paths: yet I fear them, I do.  They all destroyed one path, her path.  Their significance is the future.  Nevertheless these are her father’s life, and he drools over them like a babe, loves them as he does not love his wife.  Sometimes, she thinks he would die for them, if he had to.

            And she tells me of her mother, caught in a loveless marriage, understanding well her daughter’s pain, yet never seeing, never caring, never wondering at the silence, at the sleepless nights, at the ruddy cheeks at dinner.  They longed for the same thing, mother and daughter, at least on a superficial level, or should I say, a superficial parallel; mother would pace the floor of her chambers, thinking, day in and day out: a man, a man, a man is all, I need a man.  And men would come and men would go, and poor mother, still she would believe she never had any.  What was virtue, what was chasteness to her?

            So my sweet lady, she goes unto the meadow, and the loneliness in her heart is so unbearable she cannot quell it.  She tells me what she wants, and I know it already, even before she opens her mouth.  But she is loath to admit it to herself, she is loath to go into the forest for fear that all those wants, all those needs should jump out and claim her, and never let her go.  But as she walks through the meadow a man comes to her, dark of hair and face, but smiling, welcoming, and fair of disposition.  And he says to her: -

            “If thou art willing to listen, I will give thee the advice ye so crave.”

            And the maiden does not wish to listen to him, for she fears what he might tell her more than that which she knows yet remains unspoken.  But the stranger knows her mind, and says: -

            “Come, my fair lady; all throughout this land knows of the greed of thy father, of the lasciviousness of thy mother, and of the licentious relations of thy sister and the good knight Italo.  They care not for thee, dear lady.  Concern yourself no longer for their hurts and their sorrows.  For once, think of thyself.  I beg thee to hark now my words.”

            And the maiden feels the bitterness towards her parents and her sister swell within her, and she wonders, why should I not look to myself this once, why should I not satisfy my own desires, why should I not be happy?  And so she says to the man, “Sir, if thou canst grant me happiness in the dismal monotony of this worthless life, then I would be full willing to listen to thee.”

            And the man bends forward, and he whispers in her ear: -

            “Tonight thy sister shall meet with Italo in yonder woods, as they have done many a night afore.  But at evening repast thou shalt drop this potion into her goblet, and when she drinks of it she shall sleep until the morrow.  Thereafter when night comes go thyself to the woods and call to Italo and he will come to thee, and he will believe that thou art thy sister.”

            And so saying he presses a small phial in her hand, of a clear and tasteless liquid, and my poor, sweet lady asks of him, “What shall I pay thee, stranger, for thy services?”

            And he smiles and answers softly, “My lady, verily thou hast already paid me the price of this phial and more.” And so he leaves.

            Now does my lady wait until the opportune moment and drops the contents of that phial into her sister’s goblet; and during dinner does her twin swoon, so that all believe her gravely ill, and they take her to her bed.  And feverish does my lady wait for darkness to fall upon the meadow and the forest; and when it has done so she steals forth from the fastness and down towards the woods.  Now Italo hides amongst the brush and the bracken, and sees from afar a pale light moving through the darkness, and knowing it is his lady his breath comes quick as he waits for the call of his name.  The light falters, and for a moment all is silence; then he hears a softer voice than the one he is accustomed to, calling his name but once.  It is the password, but he is uncertain – until he moves forward from the undergrowth and sees his lady there, lamp held aloft, casting the beauty of her face into soft and pallid light.  And recognising her, he goes to her and takes her in his arms, believing her, neither suspecting nor questioning that she is who he believes he is.

            She trembles, at once from lust and from dread; I see it in her face as she drops the lamp, the hesitancy in her blue eyes, the reluctance to commit to what she has, ultimately, long ago committed herself to.  But he stoops to kiss her and upon his lips the betrayal blooms and flowers and she accepts his fierce embrace, the primeval dance, the bittersweet knowledge that one must give as well as take.  With a strange and tender savageness he takes her, and I see the tautness of those pale limbs, the smoothness of her small breasts, the soft lips parted wide to stars.  But I see too, the death of something, the helplessness of one fate being sealed; I have no care for the other – it has been sealed already, long before.

            And when it is over, she admits to me: I should not have done this.

            “Tomorrow,” promises Italo before he leaves her; but there will be no tomorrow.  She is left in the glade, lamp almost burnt out, to pull her raiment over her cold, dull flesh.  Suddenly, she understands, she knows the price she has paid for all this, her empty happiness.  For tomorrow Italo will come here again, and tomorrow her sister will come to meet him – but it will not be her.  And when they both realise the truth, that her happiness was their misery, their hate, their betrayal, only darkness would consume her, the waste of days living in the guilt of lost innocence, lost virtue, and all those things she once so treasured.

            She had paid the stranger with her soul.

            Nothing left, she feels the emptiness inside like a physical thing, and she knows he has taken it from her just as Italo has taken her virginity.  Her body is a husk, a shell.  I wonder fleetingly what she will do, how this tale will end; but then I know, instinctively, how this story comes to pass.  With sorrow I watch her as she stumbles through the forest, dead of all thoughts and yet flooded with them, knowing only the pain and suffering she both owns and bestows, recognising only the ideals, the beliefs and the faith she has lost, not because she has learnt to through bitter experience, but because she has discarded them of her own volition.  She has become the thing she always so hated.

            The forest stops, suddenly; the wildness of the tangling branches, the pull of the crawling undergrowth, the call of the wild beasts – all are shown for the futile things that they are.  She wonders that she had even succumbed to them in the first place.

            But the river tumbles onward, to places she does not know.  It invites her, cold, crisp, irreverent of all her troubles, of all life.  It beckons her with the passing gesture of one who lives in apathy – like a man who beckons to his servants, neither looking at them nor marking them.  Of all things the invitation is most pleasing.  Perhaps she thinks, as she wades out into the water, that this is truly happiness.  The repulsion, the innate repugnance she first feels at this senseless act gives way to exhilaration, to triumph.  She is treading a path despised and unknown; she is walking the territory of hermits and thinkers, of creators and dreamers.  Long, yearning arms reach out to me as she immerses herself, and I remember her now, or seem to remember her, as she looks up at me with those longing, staring eyes of hers – for she is not of my time, yet she is a dash, a dot, a spot upon the life I have led.  The lady, my lady – for truly she is mine now – smiles once as she falls and is drawn in by the depths; she will look for me, she says, she will find me.  God knows what determination, what strength possessed her then, that she sought, and that she found.

Later I see her face upon the river; long soft hair straggled and wet, colourless and dark in the shadows of the night.  I see the pallor of her face, the smooth cheeks drained of hue, of tone, the lips turned blue with death.  Her clothes are plain, ragged, drenched with freshwater.  I do not recall what colour they are, nor what material they are comprised of.  They had dragged her down, when she had gone under.

But my lady, when the seal of her fate had been passed, had risen to the surface once more.

- END -