Life in Shadows

She heaved a weary sigh as she let her heavy eyes droop. The four gray walls and four gray towers that overlooked a space of flowers had held her captive for an eternity. She craved freedom and yet she was terrified of the shadowy world that lay beyond her castle walls and the banks of her river. So she sat in her castle on her river and watched peoples lives unfold before her. Sometimes when she was too tired to watch she closed her eyes and listened instead to the rush and the gurgle of the river all about her. It was then that she would let her imagination run down the castle steps to be carried away by its unending flow. That river would carry her where she could never go herself.

An interminable exhaustion had been draining her for a while now. Once she had been able to wake in time to sing for the reapers reaping early in amongst the bearded barley, but now she slept too late. As the days dragged on, sleep seemed to have settled in her bones, making every movement tiring and every breath an effort. She looked up and gazed upon the world of barley and rye that clothed the world and met the sky; her wonderful world of shadows. Through these fields meandered a lazy road on which the lives she observed would stage their scenes. She loved that road and the people who used it, fact some of them she knew well and had often seen pass her window. The market girls in their gay coloured garments with ribbons in their hair always brought a smile to her lips. She would follow their progress weaving steadily until they were out of sight, and strain to hear snatches of their conversation that drifted across the river to her window.

Sometimes knights would pass her bower. She would hear them long before they came into sight; the clink of their armour just as much of a give away as their crimson clad pages that rode before them. She liked the knights more than the market girls for they provided more of a show. With their plumes, their shining horses and their deep throated laughs they fascinated her. She could relate to the dainty damsels in their gaiety but these rough shod men were alien to her. They would come riding two and two, she had no loyal knight and true and so she knew nothing of their behaviour, other than their love of course banter and songs. The only other men she saw were the field workers, who would stop and gaze furtively over the river at her darkened window, then drop their heads and whisper excitedly to one another. These poorly clad peasants revolted her and she would try to block them out of her consciousness. But every so often the cruel things they murmured behind their calloused hands would wriggle their way into her ears. And once those murmurs were in, there was no getting them out. Like seeds the rumours took root and like weeds they could not be abstracted but instead bred at the rate of knots, mutating and blooming. Soon her head would be full of what they had said, her ears ringing with their accusations. The only way to regain a calm disposition was to delight in the mirrors magic sights and weave those sights into pictures uncorrupted by shadows as their real life counter-parts were.

And so, to ward off her demons, both those who tempted her to leave her bower and those who tempted her to stay, she sat day in, day out and watched her shadows flit before her. The yards of decorated tapestry folded about her. Over the years she had become surrounded by her pictures and now wore them like a cape about her shoulders, similar to the shadows she wore around her heart. She grew lonely there in her chamber. Soon her worlds merged, and the gay pictures she had so lovingly created became tainted by harsh reality. She looked and weaved and weaved and looked and closed her eyes and dreamed. But when dreaming was done all she was left with were her misty fields and the cold truth in her heart. The mist was mist and no amount of sun could ever penetrate it for her. She would never have ribbons in her hair like the market girls and she would never work from dawn till dusk and gossip behind her hard worked hands like the farmers. She was condemned to a life of looking and not participating. She was unknown and unknowable.

Empty, void she withdrew. No longer did a couple of lovers sauntering hand in hand by her window bring a smile to her cracked lips. Their happiness did not even evoke the self pity and loathing it had formerly stirred within her. She was no longer sick of shadows, she was sick with shadows. Slowly they were consuming her and her brightly coloured pictures, sucking her dry and leaving a husk of the person she had been. Soon even on the hottest days the sun did not flood through her window like it once had, it stayed outside just beyond her grasp flitting with the breeze like her shadows; visible but unattainable.

Then out of the corner of her eye she saw it; that distinct red cross on a white background. He rode with such apparent ease, he and the horse could have been one entity moving and thinking together. His smiled dazzled her tired eyes more than the bright sunlight that was being reflected by his armour. His dark hair shone and his whole being pulsed vigour. He was singing as he passed by and although she only caught a few of those deep, lustrous notes they shook her more than a life time of shadows ever had. She felt the ice around her thaw and she began to stand, her legs shaking after so much inactivity. Soon he would pass out of her sight forever and be lost to the far side of the window. Urgency boiled with in her as at last his bridle disappeared down the road. Then it happened. She hadn’t consciously thought about it at the time, it just happened. She wasn’t even sure if it had happened until she’d done it. But suddenly she found herself facing the casement and she knew that her world of shadows was lost forever, now she had the real world before of her eyes. And it was devastating. In a voice that trembled with fear she cried, “The curse has come upon me”.

She left the web, she left the loom, she made three paces through the room, she looked out of her window and saw him riding away from her. The beauty that the mirror had revealed was distorted in life. Her shadows were maimed in truth and the perfections she had feared and loved were illusions. Finally she could bear it no longer; she picked up her mirror and dashed it against the floor cutting her hands on the shards as it cracked from side to side. Then she ran from the room that had held her so long. The room that had not been keeping her prisoner but had been protecting her. Innocence was bliss and now she was soiled by knowledge that was beyond her.

The stairway from the room led her out on to a small landing stage where a boat was moored. Heavy, black clouds were descending over the scene and a light rain was already falling about her as she untied the vessel. She wasn’t sure what she was doing but like some seer in a trance, around about the prow she wrote her name. As soon as she was in the boat the tug of the river carried her swiftly to its centre and away from all she had ever known. Where it was taking her to she would doubtless never find out but she cared not, the joy inside her was uncompressible and just the rush of the wind about her loosely robed figure was ecstasy. But she found it hard to look about her, because to either side all she could see were the shadows of her shadows, or the shadows of themselves until they blended into fact, cold and coloured fact. She could not look. And so instead she closed her eyes and lay quite still in the hull of her boat and let the current toss her where it willed and the rain soak her through and through.

She felt none of this, so wrapped up was she in her reverie. She saw only him, and his dark, intriguing looks. She heard only his sweet song in her ears. She began to chant an ancient hymn to herself. She sang a song so old that the earth had all but forgotten the tune. And as she sang, the years were stripped away from her. How long she had sat at her mirror for no one knew. For who had seen her wave her hand, or at the casement seen her stand, or was she known in all the land? And as the years left, her true features and her rawest emotions were left open to the heavens. She thought of him and she sang with all her heart.

For ere she reached upon the tide the first house on the waterside, singing in her song she died. As she floated through the town, people stopped what they were ding and followed her progress on either side of the river. The boat came to the end of its journey and was run aground by the river that had carried it. Her precession of townsfolk flooded onto the shore and round the prow they read her name. A dark, handsome knight stepped forward; entranced by the woman in the boat. He saw her lying there, straight and still like a doll.

Contemplated her beautiful face and full lips, silent in death as ever they had been in life. Then in a clear voice, more to himself than the crowd around him, he said, “she has a lovely face, God in his mercy lend her grace, The Lady of Shalott.”