Snow Glass Apples: A Play For Voices Read Free Page B

slowly, and my people
claimed that I ruled them with wisdom. The heart still hung above
my bed, pulsing gently in the night. If there were any who mourned
the child, I saw no evidence: she was a thing of terror, back then,
and they believed themselves well rid of her.
     
    SFX: MARKET MUSIC, GENTLE IN THE BACKGROUND,
BUT NO MARKET SOUNDS—MAYBE ONE LONE CRIER CALLING HIS WARES. SLOWLY
A LONELY WIND BEGINS.
     
    QUEEN—INTIMATE
    Spring Fair followed Spring Fair: five of
them, each sadder, poorer, shoddier than the one before. Fewer of
the forest folk came out of the forest to buy. Those who did seemed
subdued and listless. The stallholders stopped nailing their wares
to the boards of their stalls. And by the fifth year only a handful
of folk came from the forest—a fearful huddle of little hairy men,
and no-one else.
     
    SFX: THE WIND HOWLS.
     
    SFX: INT… FOOTSTEPS ON A WOODEN FLOOR.
     
    MAIDSERVANT
    Your majesty?
     
    QUEEN
    Hmm..? I’m sorry.
     
    MAIDSERVANT
    The Lord of the Fair is here, your
majesty.
     
    QUEEN
    Show him in, Jenna.
     
    SFX: A DOOR OPENS. FOOTSTEPS.
     

    QUEEN
    My Lord?
     
    LORD OF THE FAIR
    Your majesty
     
    QUEEN
    You asked to see me
     
    LORD OF THE FAIR
    Yes, majesty. (he plucks up his nerve)
    I do not come to you as my queen.
     
    QUEEN
    No?
     
    LORD OF THE FAIR (CONT’D)
    No, majesty. I come to you because you are
wise. When you were a child you found a strayed foal by staring
into a pool of ink; when you were a maiden you found a lost infant
who had wandered far from her mother, by staring into that mirror
of yours. You know secrets and you can seek out things hidden.
Something is taking the forest folk. Next year there will be no
Spring Fair. The travellers from other kingdoms have grown scarce
and few, the folk of the forest are almost gone. Another year like
the last, and we shall all starve.
     
    QUEEN
    Jenna, bring me my looking glass. It is in
the chest, in my chamber.
     
    MAIDSERVANT
    Yes, Majesty.
     
    QUEEN—INTIMATE
    It was a simple thing, a silver-backed glass
disk, which I kept wrapped in a doe-skin, safe in the dark.
     
    MAIDSERVANT
    Here, majesty.
     
    LORD OF THE FAIR
    Is that the one we bought you?
     
    QUEEN
    The same. Sometimes I can see things in
it.
    Sometimes it tells me things. Now, quiet.
     
    SFX: MIRROR MUSIC, DISTANT AND STRANGE.

    QUEEN—INTIMATE
    She was twelve and she was no longer a
little child. Her skin was still pale, her eyes and hair
coal-black, her lips blood-red. She wore the clothes she had worn
when she left the castle for the last time—the blouse, the
skirt—although they were much let-out, much mended.
    Over them she wore a leather cloak, and
instead of boots she had leather bags, tied with thongs, over her
tiny feet.
     
    SFX: FOREST NOISES BEGIN—RUSTLING AND NIGHT
BIRDSONG … BUT TREATED, THROUGH THE MIRROR, WITH A LITTLE ECHO AND
FLUX …

     
    QUEEN—INTIMATE
    She was standing in the forest, beside a
tree. As I watched, in the eye of my mind, I saw her edge and step
and flitter and pad from tree to tree, like an animal: a bat or a
wolf. She was following someone. He was a monk. He wore sackcloth,
and his feet were bare, and scabbed and hard. His beard and tonsure
were of a length, overgrown, unshaven. She watched him from behind
the trees. Eventually he paused for the night, and began to make a
fire, laying twigs down, breaking up a robin’s nest as kindling. He
had a tinder-box in his robe, and he knocked the flint against the
steel until the sparks caught the tinder and the fire flamed. There
had been two eggs in the nest he had found, and these he ate, raw.
They cannot have been much of a meal for so big a man.
     
    SFX: THE FIRE CRACKLES.
     
    FRIAR
    That’s the thing.
     
    He gets comfortable, noisily.
     
    FRIAR (CONT’D)
    Who’s there? Is someone there?
     
    SFX: NOTHING. A RUSTLE IN THE BUSHES. THEN
FOOTSTEPS APPROACH, NERVOUSLY.
     
    FRIAR (CONT’D)
    Hello… My, you’re a pretty thing. Come on,
pretty thing. Over