EXCERPT
Copyright © 2008 Anne Bishop. Used with permission.
Hesitant to leave the safety of my bedroom, where the windows
were shuttered on the outside and let in nothing except a little
light and the illusion of fresh air, I hovered in the doorway
that opened onto the main chamber of my prison. It was a large,
well-furnished room with comfortable chairs, a sofa, and tables
of various shapes and sizes. The overlapping carpets were thick
enough to challenge the cold that rose from the stone floor.
The center of the room was clear of furniture and provided enough
space to serve as a little dance floor or exercise area.
Not that I was diligent about exercise--or anything else for
that matter. What difference did it make if I was sloppy fat
and smelled or if I was trim and freshly bathed? He wasn’t
going to care.
As I crossed the room, I kept my eyes averted from the one large
window that had shutters on the inside--the one window that looked
out on the land beyond my prison. The shutters were safely closed,
but I still kept my eyes focused on the chair…and the
mirror on the wall that matched the window’s size exactly.
I was forbidden to look at the world directly. My jailer wouldn’t
tell me what the penalty would be if I disobeyed. He simply insisted
that I would be cursed, and the implied threat was that
I would not survive the punishment.
Some days I wondered if not surviving would be such a bad thing.
Would that really be worse than a lifetime of solitary confinement?
No. My confinement was not quite solitary.
I sat in the chair and closed my eyes. A moment later, as some
device registered my weight in the chair, I heard the shutters
pull back from the window. I opened my eyes, focused on the mirror,
and breathed a sigh of relief as I looked upon the world.
I couldn’t figure out if I was on the bottom floor of
this gray tower or the top, but I suspected that, if viewed scientifically,
the mirror shouldn’t be able to reflect what I saw regardless
of the room’s position. Since I was a writer, a storyteller,
and a dreamer, I ignored science and accepted the view.
A piece of the river, flowing clean and clear. Lilies growing
near the bank, their buds swelling as they waited for their turn
to bloom. A bright fuzz of green that indicated new grass. Then
the section of dirt road framed by mirror and window. Beyond
that, there was a scattering of trees and a lane that divided
two fields, but they looked vague and out of focus.
“Fields of barley and rye?” I asked the mirror,
thinking of the old poem.
“Is that what they should be?”
My pulse raced at the sound of his voice. Not because it was him, but
because I was glad to hear anyone’s voice.
Steeling myself for whatever would be lurking in the deep alcove
that hid the entrance to this prison, I turned my head and looked
at the male figure half hidden in the shadows.
The horned god today, bare-chested and barefoot, but wearing
jeans that had the softness of long wear.
Oddly enough, the incongruity of his looks and his choice of
clothing made it less easy to deny that he was what he seemed--one
of the old gods who, for whatever reason, had decided to keep
me as a pet.
“Good morning, Eleanor,” he said with the same quiet,
courteous respect his voice always held when he spoke to me.
When I woke and found myself here and he asked me my name, I
had told him I was Eleanor of Aquitaine, a small act of defiance
and a shot of courage on my part to claim to be an imprisoned
queen who was centuries gone.
He had accepted the name without question, which was when I
began wondering a few things about him.
My keeper. My jailer. My only companion. He never came into
the room. I had never felt the touch of his hand. Sometimes I
wished he would try to touch me, just so I’d know that
he was real and not an illusion created by a broken mind.
“I’m not Eleanor,” I said, fixing my eyes
on the mirror and the world beyond the stone walls.
A silence that asked a question.
“I’m the lily maid.”
A different kind of silence before he said, “Ah. The Lady
of Shalott.”
I struggled not to smile, pleased that he understood the reference
since he understood so few of them. Then I got down to the business
of watching the world reflected in the mirror.
Blue sky and some white, puffy clouds. No sign of rain.
Maybe tonight, I thought. That would make the spring
flowers bloom.
Birds flashed in and out of the mirror. A man on horseback trotted
down the road, heading for the village. Then a young woman on
a bicycle rode by.
After that moment of distraction, I saw Peggy coming down the
lane. Plump and solid, her quick walk covered the distance and
brought her to the spot where the lane met the road. She crossed
the road, looked up, and positioned herself dead center in the
mirror. Then she set down the satchel she was carrying in one
hand and held up the bouquet filling her other hand.
She was smiling, but even at this distance I could see a weight
of sadness in that smile. She knew I was imprisoned in this tower.
That was why she came and stood there every morning on her way
to the village’s school. Maybe, unlike me, she even knew
why I was imprisoned. But regardless of why I was there, Peggy
would support a friend and do whatever she could to help--even
if that meant standing on the edge of the road in all kinds of
weather, waving to someone imprisoned in a tower that was set
on an island in the middle of a river.
Peggy held up one flower at a time so that I could see them
clearly. Daffodils, hyacinths, tulips. Crocus. Wild iris. But…
“They’re all white,” I murmured, trying to
hold on to the pleasure of seeing flowers.
“Shouldn’t they be?” came the question from
the shadows.
I shook my head. “They’re a celebration of spring.
They should be yellow and orange and red and purple and pink.
Even striped. And some,” I conceded, “should be white.
But not all.”
I ignored his thoughtful silence and focused on the scene.
Robert rode up on his bicycle and stopped to chat with Peggy.
He pointed to her satchel. She made a dismissive “it’s
no trouble” wave of her hand that was so typical of Peggy
it made me smile.
Robert pointed again, insistent. After going back and forth
a couple more times, Peggy put the satchel in the empty carry
basket attached to the back of his bicycle. The satchel would
be on her desk at the school when she arrived, but she’ll
have been spared the trouble of lugging…whatever she was
lugging to the school that day to show her students.
Another minute went by. Then Peggy waved to me and headed down
the road to the village.
I spent the morning watching the shadow world reflected in the
mirror. Birds. The sparkle of sunlight on the river. Clouds.
A few people on the road, but anyone who worked in the village
had already reported to their jobs.
Finally tired of staring at fields of grain, I stood up. In
the moment before I closed my eyes and the lack of weight on
the chair triggered the device that closed the shutters, the
mirror reflected something else, something dark.
Something terrible.
