• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 275 0

little birds, frost-forms and ice-forms. Part of the tree he hung with buds, tight and bursting, mossy and glistening, rosy and sooty-black. Then he hung blossoms of every kind, apple and cherry, magnolia and catkins, hypericum and chestnut candles. Then he added, radiating among all these, the fruits, oranges and lemons, silver pears and golden apples, rich plums and damsons, ruddy pomegranates and clustered translucent crimson berries and grapes with the bloom on them. Each tiny element was in itself an example of virtuoso glass-making. When he had hung the flowers and the fruit, he perched the birds, a red cardinal, a white dove, a black-capped rosy-breasted bullfinch, a blue Australian wren, an iridescent kingfisher, a blackbird with a gold beak, and in the centre, on the crest of the branches, a bird of paradise with golden eyes in its midnight tail, and a crest of flame. Then he hung winter on the remaining branches, decorating sharp black twigs with filigree leaf skeletons, flounces of snow, and sharp icicles, catching the light and making rainbows in the air. This, he said breathlessly, was his master’s world as it would be if the Princess consented to be his wife, a paradise state with all seasons in one, and the tree of life flowering and fruiting perpetually. There is bleak winter, too, said the Princess, setting an icicle in motion. The envoy looked soulfully at her and said that the essential sap of trees lived through the frost, and so it was with the tree of life, of which this was only an image.

The Princess did not leave the tree for the rest of the day. Look, she said to Hugh, at the rich patterning of the colours, look at the way the light shines in the globes of the fruit, the seeds of the pomegranate, the petals of the flowers. Look at the beetles in the clefts of the trunk, like tiny jewels, look at the feathers in the spun-glass tail of the bird. What kind of a man would have made this?

‘Not a prince, a craftsman,’ said Hugh, a little jealous. ‘A prince merely finds the best man, and pays him. A prince, at most, makes the metaphor, and the craftsman carries it out.’

‘I make my own weaving,’ said the Princess. ‘I design and I weave my own work. It is possible that a prince made the castle, the hive and the tree.’

‘It is possible,’ said Hugh. ‘A prince with a taste for extravagant metaphor.’

‘Would you prefer a necklace of bears’ claws,’ asked the icewoman, ‘if you were a woman? Would you?’

‘A man and his gifts are two things,’ said Hugh. ‘And glass is not ice.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked the Princess. But Hugh would say no more.

The princes arrived, after a month or two, in person. Five had made the journey, Prince Boris, the plump dusky prince who had sent the pearls, the precise, silk-robed prince who had sent the silk robe, the curly, booted and spurred prince who had sent the chess game, and Prince Sasan, who arrived last, having travelled furthest. Prince Boris, the King thought, was a fine figure of a man, strong like an oak-tree, with golden plaits and a golden beard. His pale-blue eyes were icy pools, but there were wrinkles of laughter in their corners. Prince Sasan rode up on a fine-boned, delicate horse, black as soot, and trembling with nerves. He insisted on seeing to its stabling himself, though he was accompanied by a meagre retinue of squires with the same sallow skins and huge brown eyes as the envoys. His own hair was black, like his horse, and hung, fine and dry and very straight, in a dark fringe, and a dark curtain, ending at his shoulders. He was a small man, a little shorter than Fiammarosa, but his shoulders were powerful. His face was narrow and his skin dark gold. His nose was sharp and arched, his brows black lines, his lashes long and dark over dark eyes, deeper-set than the envoys’. Prince Boris had a healthy laugh, but Prince Sasan was cat-like and silent. He made his bows, and spoke his greetings, and then appeared content to watch events as though he were the audience, not the actor. He took Fiammarosa’s hand in his thin hand, when he met her, and lifted it to