“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.