'Oh, Ash,' she groaned, and cupped her hands under her dog's silky, whiskery chin. Ash delicately climbed up on the bed and curled up next to her; she rested her long sleek head on her person's neck, and Lissar clasped her hands around Ash's shoulders, and so they spent the day.
NINE
LISSAR DRIFTED IN AND OUT OF CONSCIOUSNESS. SHE COULD NOT
have said what she dreamed and what she saw with open eyes in the physical world.
At some point, near twilight, she rose, and let Ash out into the garden to relieve herself; and while she was alone, she went to a small drawer in the desk that stood in one cornerless corner of the round room, and from it she took a key. With the key she locked the door that led into the palace, into the chambers for a princess. When Ash returned, she tried to fit the key into the lock of the garden door, but it would not go.
She looked at it, at first in dismay, and then in rising panic; and she had to sit down abruptly, and press her hands to the back of her head. As she sat thus-with Ash's nose anxiously inquiring over the backs of both hands-she thought, It does not matter. The other garden door, the one to the rest of the out-of-doors, has a hundred years of ivy growing over it; the key to it must no longer rxist. From the outside, from the other side, one cannot see that there is a door at all; I only know from this side because of the old path.... I have looked, from the other side. I know the door cannot be found. It does not matter.
She stood up, and brushed herself off, and fed Ash some of the cold cooked eggs from her breakfast, which had never been cleared away; and she drank a little of the water that had been left in the big pitcher, which had been hot twelve hours ago, for her washing, before the summons had come, before her world had wavered; and she gave Ash water as well.
She thought she did not sleep that night, although it was hard for her to tell, for her life now felt like sleeping, only a sleeping from which she could not wake. She lay curled upon the bed, feeling her limbs pressing into the mattress, feeling them too heavy to shift; and Ash curled around her. As the dark grew thicker, her eyes seemed to open wider, her body become more torpid. She could not count the passage of time, but she knew that it did pass; and she felt the essence of herself poised, perched, at the edge of some great effort, some bright hard diamond-spark of self burning deep within her slack flesh; but she knew too that this was a dream of respite only, and that she had not the strength to win free. And she lay on her bed, imprisoned by the languor of her own body, and listened to herself breathe, felt the dampness of the air as it returned from its dark passage of her lungs, and watched the night-time with her open eyes.
She knew that midnight had come and gone when a hand was laid upon the latch of the inner door, and the latch lifted. But the lock held. The door was shaken, and she heard anger in the shaking, and felt anger, and something more, seeping through the pores of the ancient wood, a miasma that filled her room as the person on the other side of the door shook it and hammered upon it in his rage and desire.
She buried her face deeper in the hard muscle of Ash's shoulder and breathed in the warm sweet clean smell of her. And at last the person, having said no word, went away. Lissar could not bear the dark when silence returned, and sat up, and lit a candle that lay on a table near her bed, though it took her many tries to kindle fire, for her hands shook. And she sat up, wrapping the blankets closely around her, for she was numb with cold, and felt the miasma seep away; but it left a stain upon the walls, which were no longer rosy, but dark, like dried blood.
In the morning Lissar rose and let Ash out, and fed her the end of yesterday's breakfast bread. Then she unlocked the inner door, and ventured through it, that she might relieve herself like a human being instead of a dog; and she met no one on her way. But she found a tray bearing a pitcher of fresh water, a loaf of bread, and butter and cheese and apples, on a small table usually reserved for ladies' gloves, near the door from the anteroom with the statue, leading into the hallway of the palace; as if the person who left it could not risk coming any farther inside. Lissar did not know why she had come so far through her rooms herself; but when she saw the tray, and picked it up, she thought, Viaka.
She carried it back to her round room with the darkened hangings on the walls, and the ivy creeping around the window, and gave Ash some bread and cheese although she herself drank only water. Her mind was vague and wandering; it had focussed, for a moment, on the memory of Viaka; but there was nowhere to go from that thought, and it fled from the memory of yesterday, and the knowledge of the day after tomorrow.
Lissar sat on the bed, and rocked, and hummed to herself, and thought about nothing, and once or twice when Ash thrust her nose under her person's arm for attention, Lissar had to make an effort to remember not only who Ash was, but what: a living creature. Another living creature. A living creature known as a dog. This dog: Ash. Her dog. But then her mind wandered away again.
That evening again as twilight fell she arose from the bed where she and Ash had spent a second day, and locked the inner door again; and again she lay wakeful, and her mind cleared a little, for it was waiting for something, and it hovered around the waiting and eluded the knowledge of the thing awaited.
She listened to the soft sound of the dog's breathing, and of her own, and heard the hours pass, though she did not count them. And again at some time past midnight she heard a hand upon the latch, and this time when the person beat upon the door that would not open it made a noise louder than thunder, and Ash turned to marble under Lissar's hands again, as hard and still as marble, except for the reverberant buzz that Lissar could feel though not hear, which was her growl. And this time too the person went away without a word, though the attack upon the door, this second night, had gone on for longer, as if the person could not believe that by mere force of will it could not be made to open.
And in the morning Lissar again arose, and unlocked the inner door, and went out, and this time there was meat as well as bread upon the tray, pears instead of apples, with another pitcher of water, and a bottle of wine, and a deep bowl of green leaves, some sharp and some sweet, in a dressing smelling of sesame. And Lissar built a small fire with the remains of the kindling from two days ago, and heated the rest of the water from yesterday, and washed herself.
Tomorrow was her wedding day. She would not think of it.
She had seen and spoken to no one but Ash since the king's pronouncement.
What of the ladies to make her dress, and the maid-servants to bring her flowers, flowers for her and for those special friends who would stand behind her in gorgeous dresses of their own, to weave the maiden's crown? And because she was a princess, the form the flowers were woven into was not basketry, but the finest, lightest, purest golden wire, not easily found at any village market, which had to be ordered from a jeweller familiar with such rare and dainty work. What of the preparations for her wedding?
But perhaps the preparations did proceed; perhaps she only did not remember, as she did not-would not-
