Happy Hour in Hell

epilogue: queen of the snows

I WAS THIRSTY. I found a little bottle of bitter lemon in Caz’s refrigerator and brought it back to bed. She was dozing, the sheet pulled up only to her thighs, and I stopped in the bedroom doorway, suddenly unable to breathe. So beautiful. I know I keep saying it, but it’s because I’m not good with words, not about things like that, anyway. She was a small woman, slender, but the curve of her haunch still made weird things happen in the pit of my stomach (and other places). I can’t explain it, but something about that wonderful slope between hip and ribs that you see when a woman’s lying on her side . . . well, it’s a lot like poetry, I guess: If you analyze it too much, you miss the most important part.

And her hair, so long, so straight, so pale, like Caz herself. The longing was already so strong in me that I couldn’t help wondering whether I’d been snared by one of those famous infernal snares. But I hadn’t. It was her, and the things I felt were real. I’d been suckered by Hell more than once. I knew the difference.

She rolled over and peered at me out of one eye. “What are you staring at? Haven’t you ever seen a fallen woman before?”

“Never seen one who fell this far.”

“You mean to San Judas, or to you?”

“Either way.” I sat down on the edge of the bed because I wanted to look at her, and I knew if I got too close I’d get distracted again by all the fascinating novelty of touch and smell and taste.

I know it sounds crazy, but right at the moment I was thinking of a picture I’d once seen of this ’60s actress, Jean Seberg, wearing armor to play Joan of Arc. Unlike Caz, she had her hair cut really short, and, of course, she was wearing a couple of dozen pounds of metal to Caz’s absolutely-nothing-but-half-a-bedsheet. But there was still something compellingly similar—the delicacy of her face, maybe, the fragility of that slender body set against a big, dangerous world. I don’t think that actress had a much better time of things than Joan, so maybe it wasn’t a very healthy comparison.

“You’re still staring.”

Caught, I laughed. “Sorry. You’re . . . I was just thinking about Joan of Arc.”

“Why, are you planning to set me on fire?”

“Only with mah love.”

Caz laughed, which was nice of her. On her back now, she pulled the sheet up to her navel, which didn’t really solve the problem of me staring or being distracted. “I remember when she was executed.”

“Wow. Were you there?”

“Me?” She shook her head. “No, of course not. You’re such an American! I was in what’s now Poland, at least a thousand miles away. But the word of it spread all over Europe. My husband, may his soul never rest, heard about it when he was traveling and couldn’t wait to come home and tell me about it. He thought it was—I don’t know. Fascinating. Exciting.” She was silent again. “When my own time came, I thought of her. Not of her faith, though. I had none of my own left at that point.”

I was about to ask a question, but the look on her face stopped me.

“I thought of her because the horror was not in dying, but in the hatred of the crowd. There must have been at least a few watching in Rouen who thought she was innocent, after all, or at least not worth hating—someone gave her a cross made of sticks, so she wouldn’t have to face the end without God. But I don’t think there was a single person in that crowd in our city square, not even my own children, who didn’t think I deserved to die in agony.”

At that moment, for the first time, I really felt the difference between her and me, or rather, between her memories and mine. I shuddered, imagining the avid, hostile faces of the medieval crowd.

“Don’t,” I said. “It’s over. You’re here—I’m here.”

She turned to me. For a moment I thought she was angry. I’m still not quite sure what the expression on her face meant, but all she said was, “It’s never over, Bobby darling. Hell doesn’t work that way.”

I climbed in next to her and put my arms around her, and she turned until her rear was against my groin. I did my best to ignore the distracting nearness of her, her warmth against me, the feeling of her breasts moving against my forearms as she breathed.

“I can’t get over how pale your hair is,” I said as I kissed the back of her neck. I spent a lot of our night together doing that. “It’s amazing—nearly white. Do you have Vikings in your family history?” I guess it could have been dyed, although it matched the rest of her coloring, but I had learned enough in my years on Earth to know that, “Do you dye your hair?” is only a marginally more acceptable thing to ask a woman than “When are you expecting?”

She shrugged in my arms. “Vikings? Possibly. But my people were a mixture of so many things: Slav, German, Goth, even Mongols.” She slid back against me, pressing firmly, not in a sexual way but like someone seeking comfort. “There’s an old story about where the golden-haired people come from. A Gypsy story.”

“Gypsy? You have Gypsies in your blood, too?”

“No, I don’t think so.” Her voice had slowed a little; I wondered if she was getting sleepy again. “They had only been in the kingdom for a few generations. But we had a Gypsy servant when I was a girl, and she would sometimes tell me stories while she worked.”

I waited. “And the story? About the people with golden hair?”

It took Caz a moment to get started again. “Yes. She said that once upon a time, a tribe of Gypsies had camped at the base of a mountain. They didn’t go up it, because it was always misty and cold, and at night they could hear voices howling in the wind. The only man who was brave enough to climb it at all was a fellow named Korkoro the Lonely, a young man who had no family of his own. But even he wasn’t foolish enough to climb too high, because he would have been trapped there when the sun went down.

“Then one night there was a terrible, terrible storm, with thunder and lightning. The whole top of the mountain was covered in mist, so that the peak was invisible. A woman appeared near the Gypsy camp—a beautiful but very strange young woman with white hair and blue eyes—”

“Like you,” I said.

“Shut up, Wings, I’m telling a story.” She reached back and stroked me with her hand in such a way that I became very distracted. It worked though: I stopped interrupting. Of course, it did make it a little difficult to concentrate on her Gypsy story.

“Anyway, the first person who met her was Korkoro the Lonely, who liked to roam far from the camp, hunting. He brought her back and the people of the camp fed her and gave her wine to drink, but they were still frightened because she looked so strange. All the Gypsy folk were dark, with hair and eyes like night, but she was like something from another world.

“They asked her where she had come from and who her people were, and the pale-haired woman told them the she was the Queen of the Snows, and that she lived atop the cold mountain with her father, the King of Fog, but that she had escaped from his court because she had heard that humans knew how to love and that was what she wished to learn more than anything else.

“She fell in love with Korkoro, who had found her, and he fell in love with her, and at last the tribe of Gypsies came to trust her, although she was always strange to them. She and Korkoro—who was no longer called ‘the Lonely’—had twenty children, and each one had hair the color of light, like the mother. And that is where golden-haired people came from, according to the Gypsies.”

“And is that the end of the story?”

She stiffened a little in my arms. “Not entirely. I mean, not the version I learned.”

“So what happened?”

“I don’t remember. I’m tired, Bobby. Let me sleep for just a little while.”

And I should have. But I wanted every moment we had, and I also wanted to know why she’d left off the end of the story. “Is it one of those where one of the kids grows up to be some hero?”

“No.” She sighed. “No. Her father, the Fog King, was jealous of her living among humans and especially of her being married to one. So he ordered her to come back or he would destroy the Gypsies. A mist surrounded the Gypsy camp, and it was full of the Fog King’s soldiers. Their eyes gleamed like cats’ eyes. Korkoro wanted to fight, but the Queen of the Snows knew that the Gypsies couldn’t defeat the Fog King, so when it was dark she walked away into the mist and disappeared. But she left her children behind, and they all lived to grow up and marry and bear children of their own, and all of their descendants had the same pale hair, and so ever after in Poland there were people with hair like mine.” She curled herself up a little smaller. “Now let’s sleep. Please.”

“But what did Korky do?”

“What?”

“Korky, Korko, Korkodorko, whatever his name was. Her husband. The one who found her and fell in love with her. What did he do when she vanished back to the Fog Kingdom?”

“Nothing. There was nothing he could do. No living man could reach the top of the mountain where the Fog King lived. Korkoro raised his children. He remembered her. That’s the end of the story.”

“That’s stupid,” I said, and rolled onto my back.

For a moment Caz just lay where she was, but then she gave in and rolled over so that she was facing me, or at least facing my side. Me, I was staring up at the ceiling.

“Stupid? It’s just an old story, Bobby.”

“I don’t care. I want stories to make sense. I would never have let you . . . if I was that Korkadoodledoo guy, I would never have just let her go. I would have gone after her.”

“But he couldn’t.” She said it patiently, as though I could see it too if I just tried hard enough. “There was nothing he could do. She was gone. He had to learn to live without her.”

“No way,” I said. “He should have climbed that mountain.”

“He would have been killed.” She stroked my head as though I were a feverish child. “And then the children wouldn’t have had a mother or a father.”

“Doesn’t matter. He should have gone after her.”

She stared at me—I could feel it more than see it from the corner of my eyes. Then she levered herself up a bit and lay her head on my chest. “Sometimes there’s just nothing to be done, Bobby.”

“Bullshit, Caz. There’s always something you can do.”

“It’s a fairy tale. Why are you angry?”

She was right, and I didn’t really know why I was angry. I didn’t then. I do now, of course, and I suspect you do, too.

“All the same, he should never have let her go.” I wrapped my arms around her as though to keep her with me when the fog rolled in. “Never.”

“Sometimes it’s more complicated than that,” she told me.