The Lovers

By Gwyneth Jones

Then the light went out. The little wind that had snuffed the candle flame grew fierce and strong. It roared in her ears. Suddenly frightened she reached for her lover's warm body. He wasn't there. Her hands clutched on nothing, there was nothingness all around her... Gradually she became aware that she was in a new place, still all alone. She was standing barefoot on some rough rocky surface, shivering in her thin nightgown. The air was cold and dank. Somehow she was aware that this place was buried deep underground.

Then the voice came. She couldn't tell from where, it might be only in her mind. It was a woman's voice, rich and strong and calm: it spoke with stern regret of the consequences of her folly. She had betrayed her lover, she had failed him. She had lost forever the right to be his bride.

Psyche was terrified of the dark. "Oh please," she sobbed, "please, I'll do anything. Only let me have my chance to win him back."

The voice was kind.

"Trust me, Psyche. If you perform the tasks I set you honestly and well, in the end I promise you will be free to return to your lover, completely free."

Something dropped from the darkness.

"Your first task. My son's nightshirt is badly marked with smoky tallow drips, because a silly girl held a candle to his face last night: as if she could not recognise without such crude assistance the wonder and beauty that she held in her arms. Wash my son's shirt, Psyche. You will find water close by."

She groped on the floor, picked up the shirt and began to stumble around in the utter darkness, listening for the sound of water. It was a long time, it might have been hours or weeks or years, before she found her way to the underground stream. The water was numbing cold, when she thrust the shirt into it the linen folds immediately became heavy as lead, and a strong biting current dragged against the frail strength of her arms.

"But how will I know?" she cried.

"Know what, Psyche?"

"It is so dark. I can't see my own hands. How will I know when the shirt is clean?"

The voice was noble and gentle as ever: Psyche felt guilty at her suspicion that somebody was laughing unkindly--

"My son's shirts are very fine linen and need long and careful washing. You must scrub on faithfully, like a good washerwoman, until the whiteness of that shirt illumines the whole cavern. So it will be easy for you to tell when your work is done. You see, I am doing all I can to help you, Psyche. Don't you think you should thank me?"

She wanted to scream that the task was impossible, that this wasn't justice, it was vengeance--but she wanted her lover more. Psyche learned her first lesson. "Thank you Lady," she said quietly; and began to scrub.

How many years? There were no days, no nights, no seasons, there was nothing but the work. Her hands were raw and she hauled the heavy, slimy linen out of the water, slept beside it like the dead: woke and scrubbed again and again until her fingers were covered in weeping sores. She grew old learning how much cold and darkness and pain and back breaking toil she was able to bear; and at last the shirt was white and, blind as a worm, she was released from darkness by its light. Then there was--what was there? The terrible gleaning of the battle fields. The water of youth to be carried out of the desert (and the sun devoured the water out of her cupped hands when she'd taken three steps away from the fountain. How many times did that happen? --before she learned to protect it with her own shadow: walking backwards over the knife sharp burning rocks). And then the rose of knowledge had to be plucked from its savage briars. And then, in an oven fired by the flames of that rose, with the water of youth and the flour ground from death's cold stone, Psyche must bake the Lady's bread, which must be lighter than a feather and sweeter than breath. Over and over the harvest was gathered but the rose's petals fell before it could be kindled: the oven was kindled but the bread was soured with tears and would not rise...

But there came an hour, a day, a season when the tasks were all done, and nothing remained but for Psyche to take the roads behind the sun and before the moon, out of the Other World and back into the light of common day.

And finally she was once more alone in the dark, cold rough stone underfoot. She heard voices. She walked towards them (quite indifferent to darkness now), and in a very short time found herself in a broad well-lit passageway full of shuffling bodies. She slipped through them, not sure whether these brightly clothed figures were real or more of the Lady's phantasms. No one seemed to notice her. She came to the cavern's mouth and stepped out into harsh sunlight.

She held her head, she rubbed her arms, she looked down at her own body in amazement. There were air-conditioned coaches in the car park, and an artistic modern pavilion serving light refreshments: coffee, chai, local cakes stuffed with nuts and honey. Sign boards explained in several different languages that these caves had once been believed to lead down to Hades. There were guided tours through them three times a day, as far as the banks of the Dark River.

No further. Psyche had been much further: but it seemed, miraculously, that she had been allowed to return.

Psyche had always known that the country ruled by her lover's mother was old and mysterious and magical, filled with ancient ruins and the shadows of forgotten mysteries. It was very strange to return to it (after how long?) and find that she had become the ancient one. Standing in that brash modern car park she felt like a whisper from a world of ghosts, a word in a lost language: she felt as if she had been dead for thousands of years. She walked through the blaring of motor horns and the wail of music from the tourists' distant countries, picked her way out to the road; stood with the local people and climbed on the next bus into town. She was going to have to tell the driver she had no money. She hoped he would have pity on her--poor ragged, calloused twisted old crone. She sat on the bus preparing herself to beg (she could do anything now). But when the driver came she looked down and found a purse on her lap, a small shoulder bag at her feet. Shed the purse and gave him money.

Her hands were not the crone's hands. They didn't look so very different from Psyche's hands of long ago.

She looked at herself in shop windows. She was dressed in summer clothes, a little too light for the chill that set in towards sunset. She had scarcely aged at all, except for her hair which was more silver now than fair. Sandals on her feet, money and papers in her purse. It was as if she had gone out to take that tourist excursion on a whim, closed her eyes for a moment and dreamed everything: her love, her loss, her trial and punishment.

She found herself a small hotel in the tourist town, and since it was late in the season she had no trouble booking a modest room. She sat on her small white covered bed, the pillows and coverlet embroidered crustily with the Lady's emblems (as was still the custom in remote places); and tried to grasp the fact of her triumph. She had won the prize and passed the test and paid the penalty. She was free. She was even still young.

All she had to do now was to rejoin her lover. Unless things had changed very much--and it seemed as if nothing at all had changed--she knew where to find him. He would be living as before not at the capital where the mundane government of his people was carried on, but in his mother's palace in the Old City, that was buried deep in these ruin-haunted mountains. It was not even far to travel: a few hours' journey at the most over those hair- raising roads, to the other side of the spectacular, glacier riven peak they called the Glass Mountain. She could be with him before dawn.

At that thought Psyche jumped up and hurried out into the street, wondering why she had delayed at all. She would hire a car. She passed the phone, the only phone the place possessed, in the hotel lobby: glanced at it, remembered 'phonecalls' for the first time but couldn't wait.

She ran around the streets, deserted now in the cold of the evening: into the lobby of a big hotel and ran to the reception desk.

"I need to hire a car--"

"Can I hire a car here? Is the office still"

Two young women and a boy, attractively dressed in a homogenised version of the mountain costume, went on with what they were doing, placidly.

"Excuse me!!" shouted Psyche, in English. She had been speaking the language of the country: perhaps these servants only answered to foreigners. She banged on the desk. The women and the boy didn't even glance up. A sheaf of loose papers under her hand did not stir.

Psyche left the hotel grounds, slowly, frowning. She went to the bus station next, and there failed to buy a ticket. She tried to climb on the night bus without one--and as in a dream, a nightmare, her hand grasped nothing, her foot stepped on nothing. She went back to her hotel and tried to place a call to the Old Palace, using the lobby phone. Her hand went through the handset as if one of the two wasn't there.

In the morning she discovered that there was an airport now, with light planes carrying on a regular service in the season to a small strip outside the Old City. She knew that it would be no good but she had learned to be thorough so she tried anyway. She was a ghost in the airline office too. She could not buy a plane ticket.

She packed her small bag, she paid her bill. With a smiling face and a feeling almost that the world had returned to normal after a brief spell of madness, she set out in her thin clothes and summer sandals to climb the mountain road. The modern town ended. She walked through a stand of pines and beside a row of pretty peasant cottages, their steep roofs weighed down with boulders in the old style. A car engine started up behind her. The engine roared closer. Psyche turned... and the road had become the street where she had found her little hotel, just getting noisy with its morning traffic.

She tried again.

She tried again.

No majestic voice spoke from the sky, or in her mind. But Psyche understood. The trials were not over yet, after all. She was still exiled from the human race though they seemed to be all around her. No human hand had been joined with hers, rubbing and scrubbing in the dark stream long ago. She had been living in another world, and she was trapped there still. No one could follow where she must go--not even now, so near the end. She must scale the glass mountain as she had wrung that shirt: all alone, and still, it seemed, wrapped in a kind of darkness.

Meanwhile, in the Old City, preparations were being made for the marriage of Madame's son. He was to marry the beauty, the singer who was called La Sensuala, who was famous far outside her own country and a scandal within it. But La Sensuala was a licensed scandal, and not half such a rebel or so dangerous as the name they gave her suggested. People wondered if this time, Madame la Presidente might really let the young man take a wife. She had been for so long the only woman who ruled in this man's world, in this ancient country: nobody believed she would tolerate a rival. But apparently La Sensuala had somehow won her approval.

On the icy cliffs of silence Psyche wandered--she who had not even considered this possibility. She thought of her lover waiting, of his years of loneliness. She wanted to smooth his soft rough hair, to hold him in the hollow of her shoulder; kiss and tell him this was the end of their suffering and the beginning of all delight. Her body was sore, her vision shaken by the cold waste's glassy shining. But though her eyes were blinded and her feet were broken she never faltered, and never for a moment dreamed of turning back.

She was sitting on a heap of stones by a hill track, tying up her battered feet again after bathing them in a little stream, when a dirty old truck stopped beside her: and she knew that she had returned again from the world outside time. The driver told her that the President's son was getting married.

"Again?" murmured Psyche, showing no sign of horror.

He laughed heartily. "Not really. There was no proper wedding the other time you see. It was just a little bit of a secret affair. La Sensuala has forgiven him, I'm sure."

"I'm sure you're right," said Psyche. "A woman in love will forgive anything."

She still knew that all she had to do was to reach her lover. This other bride was one of the Lady's cruelties, nothing more. She had kept her side of the bargain. The prize must be hers as long as she never faltered. La Sensuala's house was an inward-turned, old fashioned building, with late roses still blooming in the courtyards inside its blind walls. Psyche asked her way there and persuaded the cook to take her on as a kitchenmaid: they needed extra staff because the bride-to-be was doing a lot of entertaining. She really was dressed in rags now, but nobody minded that. La Sensuala travelled round the world in jet planes but in the back rooms of her house time had been standing still for a thousand years. The new kitchenmaid slept on the scullery floor, and they called her 'little mutton fat' because she couldn't get the smell of the washing up out of her hair. She was safe. Her lover's mother would never expect to find her here, never know her if she did.

Once, when she was carrying a pile of dirty table linen across a courtyard, she saw the President's son. He was older, but not much older. He didn't look at her. She didn't want him to: not until the moment came when the abyss of years healed over and everything was made right. Several times as she went about her business she saw La Sensuala--a tall woman always wrapped in bright coloured shawls, with a sheaf of tawny hair. Psyche wasn't in the least jealous. She didn't give the other woman a second thought, not even to feel sorry for her.

On a chain around her neck she wore, as she had always worn since the night her lover first came to her, a golden key. It was the key, he had told her, to every secret door in the Old Palace. In fact it was a tiny thing, just a love-token: incised all over with little dove; one of the Lady's favourite emblems. But not all Madame's powers, or her vindictive jealousy, had managed to part Psyche from this charm. It had become a symbol to her of the truth of her love and his.

One night when she was helping (behind the scenes) to serve one of the cook's elaborate and wonderful meals, she managed to drop the golden key into what she thought was her lover's dish.

She washed her face, she changed her rags she tried to comb her hair. None of it mattered. The major-domo, a magnificent creature in a portly white waistcoat and scarlet cummberbund, appeared at the back-scullery door.

"Did any person here," he asked, "drop a foreign body into one of cook's dishes?"

"It was me," confessed Psyche.

"La Sensuala wishes to see you," he told her, as if he could hardly believe it.

Psyche went running to meet her lover. She pushed through clouds of silk curtains, stumbled over gorgeous rugs, tripped over cushions: and was ushered, rather brusquely, into a small glowing room. The woman with the tawny hair turned from a curvaceous window that looked inward into one of the rose-garden courts, and held up Psyche's key in one hand: in the other one exactly similar.

"You," she said.

She was a very wise woman. She wasn't confused by the rags or the grease at all. She burst into a storm of passionate tears.

La Sensuala insisted that Psyche must be bathed, dressed, combed, fed. She stayed by her rival all the while: holding her hand, stroking her silver-fair hair, biting her lip and exclaiming over the state of Psyche's worn body and her hard-working hands. It was as if at last someone had seen through the veil of glamour thrown by the Lady between her victim and the rest of humanity: and the weary, calloused old crone was pitied and cradled in loving arms. La Sensuala said: "I know all about you. He never speaks of you, but I know he has never forgotten you. Sometimes I wake in the night and he is not beside me. He is only across the room maybe, or else he comes back in an hour and says he was restless and went for a stroll... But I think of you then, Psyche. And I am afraid he is still searching for you, though he himself believes that he gave up hope long ago."

Of course he is still searching, thought Psyche. And you are merely another of his mother's tricks. But she said nothing, she didn't want to be unkind.

Then, in La Sensuala's little glowing parlour, they bargained like two market women.

"Give me one night," said Psyche.

"Take three--"

"One night, when I will take your place and be smuggled into his private rooms in the Old Palace for a love tryst."

"Does everybody in the kitchen know about that?"

"Of course we do. And so does the Lady, without a doubt. And approves of the arrangement, or at least allows it."

"I can arrange for him to come here. I mean privately, at night, apart from the public times. Meet him in my house, Psyche. It will be safer for you."

"La Sensuala, you are too generous."

Poor golden singer, she thought. I am so much stronger than she is, I have so much more to offer.

La Sensuala wiped her eyes and smiled. "Don't you see? I love him too. I would rather know, even the worst. I want to be sure."

"So it's agreed. One night."

"Three. And here."

"If you insist, three. But in the palace."

"Agreed."

They clasped hands: the silver hair and the sheaves of gold mingled. Outside in the rose court a flight of doves rose clattering and wheeled across the narrow sky. It was only three nights now to the wedding. But for three nights more, Madame ruled alone.

It was dark inside the Old Palace. It had always been dark in here. How cold it was too--and what a dank strange smell the air had, like somewhere underground. Still she groped her way onward, following the light carried by the servant who would lead her to her lover's chamber. How very cold this passage was. Here was the door, however: massive and ancient like all the palace furniture. And her guide had discreetly vanished.

She saw a large dim shape, she hopped, skipped over the icy floor: and dropping La Sensuala's shawls sat down, as she thought, on the bed.

It was not a bed. She sat on cold smooth stone in pitch darkness: and knew she had been tricked.

"Where am I?"

"In my son's bedchamber, child, as you wished to be; where he will surely come to sleep at last."

"I am in a tomb."

"The family vault, no less."

"La Sensuala--!"

"No, she is innocent. What does she know of our world, Psyche? Unless I choose to teach her, that is: but that's no concern of yours. The passages above you have been sealed for many years. They are still sealed now, and will remain so until the next royal funeral. Sleep well, Psyche."

"But I have paid! I did everything you asked!"

"Then you are safe Psyche. In this world no one breaks the law or goes back on a bargain. If you have kept faith with your quest, you will find a way out."

Then there was silence. When she was sure she was alone, Psyche began to laugh. She unfastened the fine chain from her neck and held in her hand the trinket that La Sensuala had returned to her. The key, the key to all his mother's secrets. She passed her hand, holding it, over the surface and sides of the coffin table, and at last there came a tiny chink of metal on metal.

In another moment the stone door was Psyche was running sure footed in the cold darkness down and down a spiral staircase. At the foot of the stair she found a level passage where the air smelled fresh. The passage twisted and turned, it split into two. Psyche stumbled over long smooth staves, and round things that rolled and rattled. But she was not afraid of the dead or the dark or even of being buried alive. Elated by her own calm and coolness she followed the breath of freshness still: and at last came scrambling out from underground. Stange shapes loomed around her: she was in the old cemetery outside the city walls. The sky was grey and dim. Psyche ran like the wind: through the ancient royal gateway, up the wide avenue between rows of time-blurred guardian statues, up to the palace walls: and just as she touched them a pitiless finger of warm light struck her on the shoulder.

And that was one night gone.

La Sensuala had not explained to her bridegroom why she was letting him spend these last bachelor nights alone. But strangely enough, he too was thinking of Psyche. The first night he spent alone, brooding and dreaming. On the second night he left the palace and walked the city streets. He was trying to remember what it had been like to be young, to love so absolutely; to be so helpless. He had learned how to live with his mother now. La Sensuala was safe because she threatened no one. He knew that in time the Lady would give him all the power any man could desire: and this marriage was the first installment. She was not unwilling, she wanted him to have his share of the world she ruled. It was only Psyche who had caused the trouble between them.

"Psyche--"

He spoke her name in the chill silvery dawn, and a woman's figure wrapped in glowing shawls crossed the street ahead of him. She was coming away from the palace, bowed as if under a heavy burden. He cried again "Psyche!" --though it was Sensuala he thought he saw. The woman turned her face.

The Lady's son felt a shock almost like terror. For a moment his first love stood in front of him, absolutely young and pure and beautiful. The light changed, the shadows vanished: an old crone pulled her shawl around her sunken cheeks and scurried away.

And that was two nights gone.

La Sensuala was frightened. "Supposing she tricks you again?" she wailed. "Oh Psyche, promise me one thing. Let me bring you together in daylight, in some ordinary way, if you don't meet tonight. Or else how will I ever know, how will I ever be sure?"

"It would do you no good," Psyche told her. "You can't ever be sure of his love, not the way you long to be. Only of your own."

"But will you promise?"

"No, I will not. Would you want me to come back from the dead, and try and see if I could make your husband follow me to my grave? Don't be scared--I only meant you to understand how dangerous a promise can be if you make it when the Lady is listening. And she is always listening, naturally. I know the rules, you see. I know how the wheels go round. I have felt them, going over me.

"Anyway--" Psyche smiled: it was like a flash of edged steel in the soft, richly coloured room. "There'll be no more tricks. He and I must meet tonight. The sun won't rise before I am in his arms, the stars won't move until that moment comes."

It was dark again. When she heard his step she meant to light a candle, but just for a while she would sit without light and taste for the last time how it felt to be alone in the dark. Here was their bed. Here she sat, and soon her lover would come through the door...

What would she say to him? Would she tell him about washing a shirt in darkness, and how the cold of the water burned? Would she tell him how long and strange and cruel it all was? Would she tell him, lying in his warm arms, how it felt to walk alone on the cliffs of ice...

La Sensuala, thought Psyche, would have wept and created on the bank of the Dark River, and complained she had a hangnail and she was catching cold. And maybe, who knows, the Lady would have been forced to give in. Strength isn't what you need, not always, to win human happiness. Strength is the reward of suffering, not a defence against it.

Slowly, as if spellbound once more, she got to her feet. She had been sitting here for a long time.

She crept through the gloomy old fashioned halls of Madame's palace, wondering where her lover had been delayed. She crept by the kitchens, and heard two young servants talking to each other.

"He came down here looking for a girl, can you imagine?"

"That didn't take long! So where's he off to now?"

"To La Sensuala's. He reckons if it wasn't here it was there he saw the kitchenmaid he fancies!"

The two boys roared with laughter.

Psyche ran.

She ran, and she knew that within the silent houses as she passed life paused between a breath and a breath, the fingers of all the clocks had ceased to move; and above the hunched ancient roofs and towers the dance of the sky was still.

And there they were in La Sensuala's parlour, clinging close in candlelight, the lovers. They were both of them in tears.

Psyche stood in the doorway, transfixed. Her beloved, her dear one turned and stood, and took one step away from La Sensuala.

"I saw your face," he whispered. "Yesterday, in the grey dawn, I saw you. I would never have believed I would know you again unless I had you in my arms. It was only for a moment, wasn't it, and only by candlelight. You vanished--again--but then I knew you were somewhere near, I just had to remember where. Oh Psyche--"

La Sensuala stood up too, but didn't try to get between them.

"Husband," she said, in a sad little voice. "You lost the key to your treasure chest and made yourself a new one. But now the first key is found. Which are you going to keep?"

Psyche's beloved took one more step. He held out his arms. She heard him calling Psyche? Psyche? But what was happening? She could see him there, and yet there was a mist between them. It was the same as in that town at the foot of the glass mountain. She could not touch or be touched, she was wrapped in invisble darkness.

"Lady, you can't do this!" she cried. "The price is paid and he is mine, he is mine. If you break your promise you will stop the stars in their courses. I know you cannot break your promises..."

Psyche felt herself becoming crystal and diamond. In the caverns, in the desert and the wilderness of her longing, she had been washed and burned and scoured into perfection. She tried to run forward, offering her dear one all these riches...but even as she moved, she understood: she saw what the lovers saw.

La Sensuala was sobbing bitterly. Her beloved was being carried off by a monster: a burning, impossible thing of ice and fire...not human at all. Once again the Lady had found a way to destroy the happiness of her son and the woman he loved.

Psyche understood then how devious and invincible the Lady's law could be. And yet she felt sure that the choice was real. Nothing that she had gained on her quest could be carried back into her first world: but to reach her lover she had only to become his bride again. If she could only fall weeping into his arms, there would be no more shining mist and invisible darkness: and La Sensuala would be forgotten. Psyche was free, quite free; just as the Lady had promised.

She sighed.

"Psyche?" she repeated, as if puzzled. La Sensuala was crying, the young man torn between past and present looking bewildered and miserable. "Psyche? No, I don't think so. In fact, I'm sure you must be thinking of someone else--someone who died a long time ago."

Outside in the chilly sky of sunrise the doves rose and rattled across the sky like gunfire.

"Quickly!" cried Psyche. "You'd better go, the two of you. Hurry, she must not catch you here together. She'll come around: but give her time, don't provoke her..."

The lovers fled.

Psyche was left alone.

She blew out the candles and waited. The room grew cold.

She lifted her head, smiling.

"Ah, there you are, my Lady. Welcome back. And what is the next task to be? Something quite impossible I hope. I want work."

Originally published in Tarot Tales, reprinted in Seven Tales and a Fable.

About the Author.

Back to the top of this page.