The Animal Kingdom, Part Eleven
The guests had started arriving for Princess Katerina’s wedding at dusk the day before. Some had to travel more than two hundred miles, including the two dozen members of Torvald’s family and their entourage. Katerina had to greet them all with the proper formalities. Everyone agreed she looked very beautiful though very pale. The headstrong and arrogant girl they were expecting was nowhere in evidence. Just the opposite. This girl was demure and quiet. Everyone was much impressed.
Only the King had any inkling of the utter misery and despair which had quelled her tongue.
She dreamed that night that she was rescued, that she simply disappeared, that everyone went home, baffled, muttering about murdering, witchcraft and miracles. But in the event there was no murder and no witchcraft.
Most of all, there were no miracles.
Katerina walked up the aisle of the chapel as if in a dream, wearing a newly made wedding dress and the emerald earrings her mother had worn on this day twenty-six years before. Somehow Queen Adriana had managed, and with such grace and dignity. But she had loved her husband. And her mind was clear. She didn’t live in the shadows, she was a happy person.
Sometimes this killing sadness seemed to Katerina like wearing heavy winter coats and long underwear in the summer. But she couldn’t take them off. They were another skin, they were part of her. She was meant to sweat and suffocate while everyone else ran through the dappled tree shadows in light cotton and silk, the mild wind kissing their skin. Odd she should think of tree shadows. Even they scared her now, as if they were deep crevasses … or tentacles. She shuddered.
The sound of birds beyond the stained glass was driving her mad, pricking her brain like little needles. The red of the stained glass itself was like blood, the glass was bleeding, she could almost smell the coppery stench of it in her nostrils. She was sure she was going to faint. But someone was talking to her.
It was the priest.
“Do you take this man…”
It was really happening, she was about to say, “I do.” She was about to lay her life down before this brutish oaf from the mountains. And she had no strength to stop it. The Priest was asking if there was anyone who knew some reason why these two could not be wed. Would Anders speak up? That was madness, of course he wouldn’t. They would execute him on the spot. And her father had already made his own position clear.
There was no one else to speak for her; not in this kingdom, at least. She thought of Lochinvar in his stall and Wilf … she had no idea where. She closed her eyes. How strange -- she was more alone than she had ever been at this precise moment, as she performed the sacred ceremony by which she was joining her life forever with another’s.
The bitter irony actually made her smile, and everyone who saw that smile thought she was happy. That was the moment where the old ladies who cried at weddings started crying. Torvald smiled back at her, showing his mouth full of horribly decayed teeth.
Then the droning voice was saying “You may kiss the bride,” and he was kissing her and the horror was complete.
But it wasn’t over; in fact it was just beginning. After the reception, where Torvald got violently drunk and threw her about the dance floor, his hands groping her where she had never been touched before, he took her upstairs and the abomination of her wedding night began. It was far worse than rape since she could not even claim to be the victim. And Torvald was no crude pillaging soldier. He had studied the ways of the bedroom and he took her in every way and in every position he had learned in a decade of debauchery. He forced her to perform acts she had only heard of in the foul whispers of servants gossiping at a turn in the stairs. He forced her to perform acts she had never heard of anywhere, until she was slimy with his sweat, saturated and soiled with the feel and taste and smell of him, until he was under her skin and in her blood and in her brain and she was utterly possessed by him and poisoned by his touch. She had breathed him in like smoke and the thick, stinging vapor was killing her.
In the morning the bed was stained red. The sheets were her favorites, combed cotton she had slept on for years. They would have to be thrown away, now. Trying to clean them was pointless. The amount of bleach it would take to remove her blood would destroy the sheets themselves.
They were ruined, just as she was.
But there was a solution. She saw it clearly. She had always been able to think best early in the morning, before the day settled on her and the accumulating hours weighed her down. It was so simple she couldn’t believe it had never occurred to her before. The bedroom window was forty feet above the flagstones. All she would have to do was open it and jump. In a few seconds this whole harrowing ordeal would be over. Supposedly, committing suicide would condemn her to Hell. She wasn’t sure she believed God could be that cruel. Besides, it was hard to imagine Hell could be much worse than this life she was living. At least it would be a change.
And there was one more fact to consider: nobody, not even the priests, could be absolutely sure about the after life. But Katerina was certain about this life: it was nothing but relentless degradation, and it was only going to get worse. Tomorrow she would be leaving here and she’d never see her home again.
At least with suicide, there was some possibility of improving things.
It seemed the only practical solution.
For Princess Katerina, decision and action were one and the same. Even as she was choosing death she was pulling the covers back and tip-toeing towards the window. Torvald, sated on food and liquor and physical pleasure, was still asleep and snoring. It was difficult to unlatch the window and it creaked on its hinges when she pushed it open. She looked back at Torvald. He hadn’t moved. She leaned over and looked down to the courtyard below. It was a good drop; it would do the job. Using a stone ridge above the top of the window she climbed onto the sill. She had to duck down a little to get her head outside, but soon she was leaning out over the gulf of air. She could feel it pulling at her. She lingered a moment, looking beyond the castle walls to the cluttered roofs of the town and the fields and forest beyond. A thin ground mist was starting to burn off in the first light of dawn. It was beautiful. It was the last thing she was ever going to see and she wanted to memorize the pastel colors and the rainy sunlight so she could take the image with her wherever she was going.
That was her mistake. In the few seconds as she paused, Torvald came awake, saw her at the window and lunged out of bed. She had already let go when he reached the window and he wound up catching her under her arms. His knees were locked against the wall beneath the sill and his feet started to skid backward with the sudden jolt of her weight. For a teetering breathless slice of time he thought he would be pulled out of the window with her. But he got his feet under him again and yanked her back inside. He held her at arm’s length.
”Katerina!,” he shouted.
She didn’t answer. She was dazed. He slapped her hard.
“What are you doing!” he said. She just stared at him. He slapped her again, backhanding her cheek this time, drawing blood from her lip. “Answer me.”
“I want to die,” she said.
And then she fainted.