Egelric struggles with the serpent

Egelric was not accustomed to sneaking about in other people’s houses. When he was up to no good, he was man enough to own up to it and be bad boldly. Sneaking to stay out of trouble was new to him.

Fortunately he found no one in the little sitting room at the top of the stairs, and the candles atop the mantel had been left burning unattended long enough to have disgorged rivers of molten wax that were already crusted over and cooled.

He had arrived safe and unmolested at his destination. At last he would be able to ease himself into a chair and let himself burn unattended, at last close his eyes and see nothing but darkness behind.

Jehanne was still small enough to sleep upon his chest, warming him like embers and warding off evil like a wee angel. He did not care who came to his bed so long as he was not in it. Tonight he would sleep with Lili’s dark-​haired daughter in his arms.

The breeze that followed Egelric through the door reached the far side of the room a few seconds later, shaking the candle flames roughly against the rims of their craters until hot wax spilled out through new clefts. For an instant his grandfather’s instinct for frugality awoke in him, reminding him harshly to put out the lights—not that wax candles had ever burned in the stingy old Scot’s home.

But Egelric walked on, leaving them to spend themselves in an oozing mess upon the tin tray. Such profligate waste and such sordid ruin were all that became the house of Maire.

The candles bobbed their flames again when he opened the inner door, but it was the steadily burning light in the other room that caught his eye.

The frugal Scot in him did not like the waste, but more importantly the father did not tolerate candles being left unattended in his babies’ rooms. He watched it until it trembled before his glare, and then he stepped inside.

But the candle was not unattended.

And its tender was not the nurse.

A flash of light leapt off Maire’s earring as she turned, and a second lit her eyes from the side. Their eerie, glowing gold and her mysterious half-​smile made her seem a cat surprised in the act of sucking his baby’s breath.

Egelric reacted first with the instinct of a father—of any animal with cubs—and he grabbed Maire by the sleeves of her dress and yanked her away from the crib.

He remembered his manhood in time to whisper hoarsely, “What are you doing in here?”

Maire mumbled in seeming shock, “She was crying…”

“Not for you!”

Jehanne squirmed and snuffled in her blankets, whimpering through closed lips. Egelric knew only that he could not allow her to open her eyes and see Maire. He knew only that he could not allow the word “Mama” to enter Maire’s ears.

He swung Maire’s body around his own and shoved her outside.

He tried to push her towards the far door, but Maire twisted away and planted herself in the center of the room. The guttering candles made ugly shadows around her mouth, and Egelric was satisfied he was now seeing the hideous truth behind the half-​smile.

He had taken his babies into her house, but no more. He had left Jehanne in her care, let her frolic in her lap, but no more. She no longer seemed a woman to him now, but an animal—not even Eve, but the Serpent.

“Out of here,” he whispered.

“This is my house!”

Egelric stomped away to close the door to Jehanne’s little room.

“Then I shall leave it,” he growled as he stomped back. “What are you doing in here? You saw me ride in, didn’t you? You were waiting for me, weren’t you?”

“I was not expecting you to return so late,” she sniffed.

“You’re still up!”

Maire slowly straightened her back and smiled. Her eyes and earrings glittered with the same gold.

“Perhaps I was waiting to see whether anyone was coming back after the party.”

“Who?” he grunted. “Finn?”

As soon as the beloved name crossed his lips, Egelric nearly slipped off his steely outrage and sobbed. Would this woman—this slinking animal—seduce his son if she could not get to him? Had she, while he had sulked and slept at Acanweald?

She clucked at him, as she soothed her children. “No no, no no,” she purred.

Egelric gasped in relief and briefly grabbed the edge of the mantel to steady himself. Then his scattered thoughts began to draw together again, like a pack of wolves singling out and closing in on their prey.

“Who?” he demanded. “Your little guests? They still here?”

For reply Maire only lifted her head and gave a tinny laugh.

“Who?” he snapped. “Cearball?”

She attempted another impertinent laugh, but it clanged and faltered, and she watched him nervously out of the corner of her eye.

Egelric lifted his hand for the satisfaction of watching her dodge away from it, but he only laid it flat upon the mantel.

“You slept with him!” he laughed.

Maire’s back was stiff, and the smile on her lips was so ugly as to be utterly unwomanly, utterly unkissable. She said nothing.

Egelric smacked his hand on the mantle and laughed again. “If only he had arrived the day before! He could have spared me the effort of showing you what a slut you are!”

“It wasn’t like that,” she trilled with a gloating smile.

“The devil it wasn’t! Out of one man’s bed and into another’s, without even stopping long enough to get dry between the thighs!”

He stepped away from the mantel and pinched the soft side of her leg, as low as he could reach without stooping.

“Tell me,” he crooned and giggled like a gossipy girl, “did you go to his bed or did he come to yours?”

He laid a hand on her hip to hold her still and stepped around her, dragging her shoulder along the flat of his chest and leering into her eyes.

“It wasn’t like that,” she repeated, unflinching.

“No? How was it?”

He stopped behind her and passed both arms around her waist to pull her hips back against his groin. Her body was not stiff but simply unresponsive, as though she meant to pretend she did not notice him at all.

He slid his expert hands over the bony arches of her pelvis and down into the ticklish hollows that were the same on every woman. With his deep voice and his ticklish beard against her neck, he tried his lifetime’s collection of keys in the locks that were on every woman the same.

“What was he saying to you?” he breathed. “No one will know, Maire… I’m wanting you and you’re wanting me…”

Her only awkwardness was in her arms, curved limply away from her sides to prevent them from lying across the backs of his arms. Moreover, her heavy gown and underskirts were too coarse to let him tickle her properly with his stroking fingers.

He slid his hands downward in a V until his fingertips met in a parody of prudery over the cleft between her legs, and he tried again.

“You’re deserving better than him, Maire, sweet Maire…” he purred, mocking Cearball’s affected Irish trilling of her name, and insulting himself with words Cearball might have said.

Her body stiffened slowly, grinding her shoulders back against his chest in an attempt to lift her hips away from his thighs. He had found something.

“You’re deserving better than that man,” he whispered.

Her squirming hips slid away from his hands until his hands lay over her belly, and the soft, doughy handful reminded him of what she must seem to a nineteen-​year-​old.

“You’re so beautiful, Maire. A beautiful woman…” He slid one hand up to cup her breast. “Not some scrawny girl…”

Maire jerked away from his body as suddenly as a lock springing open. He laughed and let her go.

“What were you thinking?” he taunted in his own gruff Gaelic. “He meant all of that? Stupid slut. We all say the same things, and you all fall for it.”

He gave her behind an indulgent pat.

She whirled around to face him. “I didn’t fall for anything,” she hissed.

“Well, I don’t know what’s worse,” he chuckled. “Being seduced by a nineteen-​year-​old boy, or seducing a nineteen-​year-​old boy by pretending to be.”

“It wasn’t like that! It wasn’t like that!”

At last her stupid female stubbornness exceeded his patience, instantly infuriating him like a spark touching dry tinder.

“How was it then?” he snarled. “For I’ll not believe you’re in love with him, and you’ve gone soft in the head if you’re believing he’s loving you! What were you trying to do, Maire? What were you trying to prove? Were you thinking to make me look a fool?”

She turned daintily on her heel and sauntered away. “I need only let you take care of that!” she tittered. “Just look at you!”

Egelric grabbed her arm and whipped her around. “Aye! Look at me!” He bent her back and pulled her hard against him, leaning over her until his sweaty brow slid wetly over her own. “Look at me!” he growled.

With his eyes he wanted to pour pure hatred out across her quivering face. He wanted to make her see the ugliness of her own reflection in their shine. What he saw of his own was terrifying: bloodshot, bared-​toothed, scarcely human. He wanted her to be terrified.

Her voice was shaking and high-​pitched as a child’s, but she cried defiantly, “Aye, look at him! Look at him, Lili! Scarcely one month after you died!”

Egelric shook her until her head flopped wildly enough to make her cry out in pain. He remembered his manhood only in time to stop himself from dashing her skull against the sharp edge of the mantel like the fragile, hollow head of a wax doll.

“Never say that name again!” he snarled and slavered. “I swear I’ll kill you!”

“Ha!” Her pupils had sprung wide with fright, and her golden irises were stretched tight around them into thin bands. Egelric saw the whites of his own bulging eyes in the blacks of hers, and still she laughed at him defiantly, in a parody of a laugh: “Ha! ha!”

He squeezed her upper arms with all the strength of his brutish hands, crushing the soft flesh between his fingers and her bones until sheaves of tiny, threading veins cracked and popped, disgorging her dark blood into oozing, slowly spreading stains beneath her skin.

“What are you trying to prove, Egelric?” she growled. Her teeth had locked tight together and her throaty voice had gone as deep as a man’s.

“You proved it for me last night, slut!”

“No no, no no,” she panted. “What are you trying to prove? How bad you are?” She smiled at him through her gritted teeth, and then she painfully unclenched her jaw to cry out in a parody of glee, mocking Lili’s German trilling of his name: “Ach, Egelric! you old devil, you!”

Egelric’s body reacted instantly with the gesture he had rehearsed a moment before in his mind: he swung her heedlessly out by the arms, cracking the side of her head against the edge of the mantel.

The breeze they made caused the candle flames to shudder, making it appear that he had struck her hard enough to shake stone.

The flow of time slowed and crusted and cooled, and Egelric held his breath, waiting for a next breath that did not come. He gripped Maire’s arms ever tighter, forcing still more of her blood out into her molten bruises.

She was not a doll; her head had not shattered into concave crumbles. However, she did not react all through the tortuous space between two breaths, and Egelric felt for the fourth time the chilling touch of death sinking deep enough in him to freeze the blood in his veins.

Then Maire threw open her cat eyes and snarled. “Kill me, then! Have you a message you’re wanting me to take her?”

She was alive—she lived, though dead ladies remained dead. He breathed. His blood began to move.

“You’ll never see her,” he whispered.

“Nor you, I’m thinking! For you’ll be a long time in Hell!”

She grinned at him like a hissing cat, baring all her teeth as far as her pink gums. Even her eyes were a cat’s: the candles lit their gold from the side until their shine made the pupils seem no more than dark slits.

Egelric’s blood began a subterranean seething, flooding out to the farthest reaches of his body until even the thinnest threading sheaves of veins were engorged to the point of cracking.

He saw now that even death was too good for her, if it was good enough for Lili. Her snarling ugliness was inhuman. Her tongue dripped with venom. Above all cattle and every beast of the field the Lord had cursed the race of serpents. This was what Egelric wanted to prove.

He flung her across the room onto the couch.

Upon her belly he would make her go, and make her lap the dust. His heel would be upon her head. And he would spend himself in an oozing mess upon her face, for such was all that became the race of Maire.