Black Pearls - Louise Hawes [63]
The foul odor and the purplish skin of the fruit made me certain it had been tainted with belladonna. Of the seven of us, I had learned the most about healing and herbs. But Diamonda was beyond my help. If she had been felled by henbane or hemlock, I would have set to boiling nettles in hopes of reviving her. If her heart had been stopped with mistletoe, I would have asked Dynll to climb Corwyn's broad shoulders and reach me the mandrake roots we had hung to dry from the rafters that fall. But I knew no remedy for the poison that had by now spread its silent tyranny to every part of her.
I placed my thumb on her wrist and my ear to her breast— how many times in the years ahead was I to find my head against that precious pillow, hearing nothing but my own racing heart! My brothers closed around us, expectant, hushed. I told them she was neither dead nor alive, but gripped by a poison that had stolen her faculties and sealed her body like a tomb.
We put her to bed as we had when she first came to us, stretching her across a pallet by the hearth. It was not until she was covered with all the blankets we could find, until she slept like a frozen bird beside the grate, that I heard the strange roar start up among us. When the rest drew back silently and left me standing alone beside her, I realized it was me I'd heard, wailing like a wolf and beating my fists against the hob.
It was Ferin, always best with his hands, who built the crystal cocoon in which we placed her. "What if there is a change?" he had asked. "What if she wakes and needs us? Erin says she isn't dead, and I will not bury her alive." So we felled a maple, and he carved a bed for her. While he fashioned wooden angels and rosebuds, the rest of us contented ourselves with bringing home what gems we could and setting them in a necklace for her to wear. When the bed was done and we had laid her in it, Ferin covered her with a casket all paned in glass so we would be sure to notice if she stirred.
Fearful lest the queen discover our sleeping treasure, we hid her bier in a small shed behind the cottage. There, each of us in turn stood guard beside her, waiting for miracles. But Diamonda never moved. As winter withdrew slowly like a beaten cat, and green buds pushed through the forest floor, she dreamt on, unchanged. When the woods around her sounded with restless mating calls, she lay as beautiful and perfect as a stone saint in church. When spring had spent its promise and summer, too, we kept a fire going and wrapped our hands in wool while Diamonda felt no chill. At last, when ice stretched once more the length of Fairny Pond, only the seven of us were a year older than when we had laid her in her bier.
I kept the juice of the apple in a stoppered vial. I mixed herbs, concocted tinctures to find an antidote for the poison it contained. As the years passed, scores of squirrels and rabbits met their death at my well-intentioned hands. First I would poison the little beasts and then work my latest cure. All to no avail. It gave me hope, though, this foolish doctoring; it convinced me that I worked for her recovery. For as long as I kept meddling with my potions and powders, I told myself, I was surely as anxious as the others for Diamonda's deliverance.
Though, in truth, I had less reason to be. Because so long as she lay still and lifeless, I could be with her the way a man—a real man—was meant to be with a woman. Or very nearly. As nearly as a repulsive dwarf dared. If it has been torture to remember this, then it is damnation to tell.
For whenever it was my time to stand guard at her bed, I lay beside her instead. How could I see her, desirable beyond endurance, and not lift the cover that separated us? How could I stoop to kiss her cheek and not beg her forgiveness by burying my face in her breast?
It was always the same.