He embraced me (I bit my lip not to scream when his arm touched the wound) and went away. I had hardly ever before been glad of his going. But I thought too how much kinder he was than Psyche.
I never told Bardia the story of that night at all.
I made one resolve before I slept, which, though it seems a small matter, made much difference to me in the years that followed. Hitherto, like all my countrywomen, I had gone bareface; on those two journeys up the Mountain I had worn a veil because I wished to be secret. I now determined that I would go always veiled. I have kept this rule, within doors and without, ever since. It is a sort of treaty made with my ugliness. There had been a time in childhood when I didn’t yet know I was ugly. Then there was a time (for in this book I must hide none of my shames or follies) when I believed, as girls do—and as Batta was always telling me—that I could make it more tolerable by this or that done to my clothes or my hair. Now, I chose to be veiled. The Fox, that night, was the last man who ever saw my face; and not many women have seen it either.
My arm healed well (and so all wounds have done in my body) and when the King returned, about seven days later, I no longer pretended to be ill. He came home very drunk, for there’d been as much feasting as hunting on that party, and very out of humour, for they had killed only two lions and he’d killed neither and a favourite dog had been ripped up.
A few days later he sent for the Fox and me again to the Pillar Room. As soon as he saw me veiled, he shouted, “Now, girl, what’s this? Hung your curtains up, eh? Were you afraid we’d be dazzled by your beauty? Take off that frippery!”
It was then I first found what that night on the Mountain had done for me. No one who had seen and heard the god could much fear this roaring old King.
“It’s hard if I’m to be scolded both for my face and for hiding it,” said I; putting no hand to the veil.
“Come here,” he said, not at all loud this time. I went up and stood so close to his chair that my knees almost touched his, still as a stone. To see his face while he could not see mine seemed to give me a kind of power. He was working himself into one of those white rages.
“Do you begin to set your wits against mine?” he said almost in a whisper.
“Yes,” said I, no louder than he, but very clearly. I had not known a moment before what I would do or say; that one little word came out of itself.
He stared at me while you could count seven and I half thought he might stab me dead. Then he shrugged, and snarled out, “Oh, you’re like all women. Talk, talk, talk … you’d talk the moon out of the sky if a man’d listen to you. Here, Fox, are those lies you’ve been writing ready for her to copy?”
He never struck me, and I never feared him again. And from that day I never gave back an inch before him. Rather, I pressed on; so well that I told him not long after how impossible it was that I and the Fox should guard Redival if we were to work for him in the Pillar Room. He growled and cursed, yet henceforth he made Batta her jailer. Batta had grown very familiar with him of late and spent many hours in the Bedchamber. Not, I suppose, that he had her to his bed—even in the best of her days she had scarcely been what he called savoury—but she tattled and whispered and flattered him and stirred his possets; for he began to show his years. She was equally thick, for the most part, with Redival; but those were a pair who could be ready to scratch each other’s eyes out one moment, and snuggling up for gossip and bawdy the next.
This, and all other things that were happening in the palace, mattered to me not at all. I was like a condemned man waiting for his executioner, for I believed that some sudden stroke of the gods would fall on me very soon. But as day came after day and nothing happened, I began to see, at first very unwillingly, that I might be doomed to live, and even to live an unchanged life, some while longer.
When I understood this I went to Psyche’s room, alone, and put everything in it as it had been before all our sorrows began. I found some verses in Greek which seemed to be a hymn to the god of the Mountain. These I burned. I did not choose that any of that part of her should remain. Even the clothes that she had worn in the last year I burned also; but those she had worn earlier, and especially what were left of those she wore in childhood, and any jewels she had loved as a child, I hung in their proper places. I wished all to be so ordered that if she could come back she would find all as it had been when she was still happy, and still mine. Then I locked the door and put a seal on it. And, as well as I could, I locked a door in my mind. Unless I were to go mad I must put away all thoughts of her save those that went back to her first, happy years. I never spoke of her. If my women mentioned her name I bade them be silent. If the Fox mentioned it I was silent myself and led him to other things. There was less comfort than of old in being with the Fox.
Yet I questioned him much about what he called the physical parts of philosophy, about the seminal fire, and how soul arises from blood, and the periods of the universe; and also about plants and animals, and the positions, soils, airs, and governments of cities. I wanted hard things now, and to pile up knowledge.
As soon as my wound was well enough I returned very diligently to my fencing lessons with Bardia. I did it even before my left arm could bear a shield, for he said that fighting without shields was also a skill that ought to be learned. He said (and I now know it was true) that I made very good progress.
My aim was to build up more and more that strength, hard and joyless, which had come to me when I heard the god’s sentence; by learning, fighting, and labouring, to drive all the woman out of me. Sometimes at night, if the wind howled or the rain fell, there would leap upon me, like water from a bursting dam, a great and anguished wonder; whether Psyche was alive, and where she was on such a night, and whether hard wives of peasants were turning her, cold and famished, from their door. But then, after an hour or so of weeping and writhing and calling out upon the gods, I would set to and re–build the dam.
Soon Bardia was teaching me to ride on horseback as well as to fence with the sword. He used me, and talked to me, more and more like a man. And this both grieved and pleased me.
So things went on till the Midwinter, which is a great feast in our country. On the day after it the King came home from some revels he had been at in a lord’s house, about three hours after noon, and in mounting the steps that go up into the porch he fell. It was so cold that day that the water the house–boys had used for scouring the steps had frozen on them. He fell with his right leg under him across the edge of a step, and when men ran to help him he roared out with pain and was ready to set his teeth in the hands of anyone who touched him. Next minute he was cursing them for leaving him to lie there and freeze. As soon as I came I nodded to the slaves to lift him up and carry him in, whatever he said or did. We got him to his bed, with great agony, and had the barber to him; who said (as we all guessed) that his thigh was broken. “But I’ve no skill to set it, Lady, even if the King would let my fingers near it.” I sent a messenger over to the house of Ungit to the Second Priest, who had the name of a good surgeon. Before he came the King had filled himself up with enough strong wine to throw a sound man into a fever, and as soon as the Second Priest got his clothes out of the way and began handling the leg, he started screaming like a beast and tried to pluck out his dagger. Then Bardia and I whispered to one another, and we got in six of the guards and held the King down. Between his screams he kept on pointing at me with his eyes (they had his hands fast) and crying out: