Heroes and Villains by Angela Carter

her in his arms. ‘Sometimes it’s phallic and sometimes it isn’t, depending on his mood.’
    The next thing she knew, she was limping beside him, leaning heavily on his arm and the sun had moved across the sky so the beams came down with a sideways slant. She fixed her eyes above the leaves and the thousand repetitions of green forms around her, and saw the fine meshes that dapple the sky as if they were a kind of wire netting and all underneath in a huge enclosure.
    ‘And if you’ve got to worship something, why not the snake, which sloughs off its skin and turns up all fresh and ready for anything and can also form itself into a perfect circle by putting its tail in its mouth. And lives on air and soil. And carries poison in its mouth all the time, ready to defend itself. I’ve nothing against snakes, mind.’
    ‘I wish I could agree with you.’
    ‘Once bitten, twice shy,’ he said.
    As her nurse said to her in the kitchen when she pulled the cat’s tail and the cat scratched her. Since it was a domestic cat, the scratch did not fester. She touched Jewel’s earring with her finger and made it jangle like a tinny peal of bells. They might have passed a charred circle where the Out People had lit a fire and might have passed a skeleton. Then she saw a woman in dun-coloured clothes gathering fungus. Jewel motioned Marianne to keep quiet and crept up on the woman from behind; she thought he might garotte the woman, whose scream re-echoed in the ragged rooftop of the trees, but Jewel was laughing. Dropping her mushrooms, the woman fell on her knees in front of Jewel, moaning.
    ‘Here, you didn’t think they’d really kill me, did you?’ he snapped at her crossly. ‘Think I’m dead, do you?’
    He opened the woman’s screwed up eyes with his fingers and abruptly stuck his hand into her mouth.
    ‘Taste me. I’m real.’
    The woman sucked his fingers greedily and began to laugh.
    ‘The Doctor is praying for your soul,’ she said. ‘When they came back without you, he said you were dead, like the others.’
    Marianne found the woman’s speech far more clotted and impenetrable than Jewel’s; she seemed to swallow half her words before she spoke them. Jewel put his hands under the woman’s armpits, stood her on her feet and led her to Marianne. The woman wore the skull of a stoat on a plaited thong of leather round her neck and her bare feet had grown a thick, protective shell of horny skin. She wore baggy trousers, a shirt with some kind of feather embroidery on it and a waistcoat of fur; she was brown with dirt. Seeing Marianne, her eyes opened wide with fear.
    ‘This is the daughter of my father’s sister’s daughter,’ said Jewel. The woman’s eyes were open so wide Marianne could see a rim of white all round the irises. She hung back and would perhaps have run away if Jewel had not got such tight hold of her hand. She was ageless with travel and child-bearing.
    ‘This is a girl called Marianne, she’s the daughter of a Professor of History,’ said Jewel. ‘She knows which way time runs and came with me of her own free will. A snake bit her but she didn’t die, she walked on.’
    His face and voice were equally inscrutable. The woman looked from Jewel to Marianne and received no comfort from either of them; Marianne was in too much pain and far too perverse to smile. Then the woman sank down again, shuddering, and made certain gestures of the hand Marianne had first seen when she was six years old and realized were intended to ward off the evil eye. Marianne wanted to tell the woman not to be so silly but was all at once too sick and dizzy.
    ‘Take my hand,’ she said to Jewel. ‘I’m fainting.’
    He obeyed her.
    ‘Please get up,’ she said to the woman. ‘You make me so embarrassed.’
    ‘That’s a word we woodsmen don’t often hear,’ remarked Jewel. ‘Here, Annie, you heard her. Get up.’
    He yawned, as if suddenly excessively bored. His cousin got up but she would not walk