Heroes and Villains (Penguin Modern Classics) by Carter Angela

Author:Carter, Angela [Carter, Angela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141968377
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2011-02-03T00:00:00+00:00

5

The tribe no longer protected itself against Marianne with signs, for marriage had secularized her. She was still a stranger and hence fearful but now she was specifically Jewel’s responsibility and evidently they trusted him to control her dubious magics, keeping them knotted in a bag, perhaps, under his pillow, for now the children were content to ignore her and she could come and go about the camp as she pleased, creating no ripples about her. When she asked for a pony, they gave her a little, black and white dappled one like a toy horse in a nursery, with a coarse white mane. Sometimes she rode around in the edges of the wood but went no farther. Time passed and Jewel watched her from the corners of his eyes but still she did not load up her pony and ride away for, as soon as she and the young man found out how to annihilate one another, she was unable to think of anything else for long. Courting her own extinction as well as his, she discovered extraordinary powers as soon as the dark removed the dangerous evidence of Jewel’s face. Then their bed became a cold, black, silent world and its sole inhabitants were denied all other senses but those of touch, taste and smell.

But once she woke before him and was surprised to see his face quite reduced to gentleness. His hands had fallen upon her breasts as soft as snow in the abandonment of sleep and then, with fascinated horror, she revived the memory that these same hands which, a few hours previously, had temporarily altered her to a river of fire, also, a few years previously, had irrevocably murdered the flesh of her flesh. Jewel’s face seemed to whirl about in the tense hollow of her shoulder, scatter and come together again in shapes of perfect fear; but he opened his eyes and suddenly she saw herself reflected twice, so quickly she turned her head away, before she could make out the expression she herself wore.

Another time, she woke in the middle of the night because a night-jar, come to perch on the tree in the room, whirred extremely loudly. It was the time of the month when there was no moon. She felt her eyes had been put out and, as she groped for Jewel’s hand to prove she was not there all by herself, she encountered, by accident, his face. She touched a promontory of bone very lightly padded with flesh, which must be his cheekbone. She moved the whorled tips of her fingers lightly across this ridge and found a fringe as of grass, presumably an eye hooded under an eyelid. But she had no sense of real eyes or a real face under her fingers. All seemed a small landscape from which she received only the most abstract information and she soon identified this landscape with the blasted heart of the old city; this puzzled her a little but she refused to think about it for long.

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