"Curses to Pierce the Clouds" - Richard III fan fiction
Even though I wasn't an official participant, I still sneaked into the the Histories Ficathon this year, which was a delight.
Title: Curses to Pierce the Clouds
Fandom: Richard III
Character/Pairing: Margaret, Richard, hints of others
Summary: No longer queen, Margaret must turn to the use of new powers.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Horrific/violent imagery, snakes, ghosts
A/N: Written for gileonnen who wanted Margaret as a classical prophetess.
The gods do offer some consolation to the conquered.
Margaret lay cold upon the bare earth, for she had eschewed even the small comforts that the tent of her enemies might offer. She was alone - no one dared to approach her, for even a step in her direction called out from her throat a high, screeching, howl, and they drew back, as though she might, doglike, claw them apart. Her mind was trying to follow her son down into the earth. Open-mouthed, she screamed into the dirt, feeling it, rough and grimy, between her teeth. This was the indignity to which she had been condemned - to live, shamed, overcome, under the rule of her child’s murderers. She had known queenship - her body weighted with stately, rich-woven robes, a crown at her brow, the nation before her - and now she would be nothing but an example of the York children’s magnanimity, a graying old woman dozing in a corner over her needlepoint. Such a fate it was that awaited her, beyond the awful grandeur of this present grief.
She did not, then, let the grief even begin to quiet, but screamed until her teeth were black with earth.
It was only then, when she had worn herself out with rage, that the snakes came. They moved towards her silently, smooth bodies passing easily over the earth, so that she did not even notice their presence at first, her eyes closed with exhaustion. When they began to twine their bodies around hers, she felt nothing strange in it. They curled around her bones, spiraling up her arms, her ribs, her shoulders, her neck, until they reached her face. And then, with their dry, scratching tongues, they licked clean her ears and eyelids.
At once, having completed their task, they were gone.
Margaret opened her eyes and it was nearly dawn. There was a strange roar in her ears, like the sound of the sea, but heavier and more growling, as though the ground itself had tides, stone and soil relentlessly surging against the shore of the sky.
Before her eyes, the future swirled, in spirals of black dust.
Beneath her feet, the restless dead who wander the banks of the Styx murmured to her, promising secrets.
She smiled, and stood. Power surged through her. She had arms no longer, but wide black wings, heavy with feathers. Her talons gripped the earth as though it extended a hand to her. She lifted her face up to the gray sky and cried out, the sharp, quick shriek of a bird of prey.
-
Try as they might, the new King Edward and his bright court could not rid themselves of her presence. Banishment, she was charged with, on threat of death, but they could not banish her from a castle where the very stones contrived to give her shelter. Those living there might say that it was pity for her that prevented them from forcibly effecting the King’s command, that in the wildness of her grief they could not bear to turn her out into the night to the uncertain sanctuary of whatever allies might remain to her. But these would have been untruths. No one could turn her out now, not until the work of her haunting was finished and all three sons of York lay cold and dead beneath the ground.
-
It dizzied her at first, to see the future. Fates wreathed the heads of those she encountered, like ever-moving lengths of colored thread. It took time and practice to read them, to fix her eye close upon the jagged edge of an untimely death, to distinguish the gold of true happiness from the sickly yellow of surfeited pleasures. Often, now, in halls and kitchens and courtyards and private chambers, people turned away from Margaret’s piercing gaze with discomfort. She stared too long, her eyes screwed up tight as though reading a messily written letter.
She read fate in other places too, in the darting pathways of falcons, in the messy, reeking entrails slapped down upon cutting boards in the kitchens, in the moonlight upon the surface of a deep well. She read the signs throughout all the castle, and everywhere they read the same - doom to the house of York; anguish and betrayal and ignominy to fall upon their heads. The signs were so clear and so unmistakable that she wondered, sometimes, whether it was her own will, the force of her rage, that had written that fate. Had her fury reached down a ghostly hand into the spinning-chamber of the Moirai and tangled up the life threads of the York brothers into these lines of dreaded misfortune?
-
If to read the fates that surged before her eyes took all of Margaret’s work and concentration, then to speak prophecies was no effort at all. They came up between her teeth like bile, so that she must spit them out or choke. And it was a pleasure to watch ugly sounds twisting up the faces of her usurpers, splattering Elizabeth Woodville’s pretty cheek and soiling the doublets of her foolish brothers. But, when Richard of Gloucester stood before her, the words tripped over themselves in wild anapests trying to escape her mouth, buzzing about him like a cloud of dark flies. And she saw, so clearly that she did not know how she could before have missed it, that it was he who was the source of this impending tragedy. Her anger, though it might be potent as unmixed wine, was not the only force which had roused upon the Erinyes from beneath the earth.
For it is the task of the Erinyes to punish crimes against nature. And whatever else Richard was, he was certainly unnatural.
She stood taller than he, with his contorted leg and twisted spine, and as she looked down upon him she called him names, as vile as she could imagine, each creeping creature that lives upon the earth - spider, adder, dog - and he did nothing but smile back at her with easy calm and place Margaret’s own name within her curses. He knew, Margaret thought suddenly, he knew that she deserved those names at least as much as he did, she who groveled on the ground beside the adders, who howled with the dogs, less now even than the she-wolf she once was, nothing more than forlorn Hekabe in the prow of Ulysses’ ship. When she cursed him he must think that she spoke only the curses that had already befallen herself.
But he thought himself too clever. The Moirai would not avert their hand from him simply because they used him as their own executioner. One day he too would suffer, with the Erinyes howling in his ears and beating their dark wings to black out the sun. They would have him, his blood staining their talons the color of rust. And, on that day, Margaret would rest.
-
On the night before the battle, she laid a bowl of black blood under the stars. “Come,” she called to all who would hear, “come out from the earth and drink your fill.” And Richard’s victims came, desperate, hungering. But when they drew near Margaret covered the bowl with her bony arms, with her thick, dark wings.
“Go to him,” she said, “go to the one who killed you and drink from him. Take his sweat, his terror, his remorse. And, when he is dead, you may have all the blood I can give you.”
The weight of their footsteps made the earth shake beneath her feet.
Title: Curses to Pierce the Clouds
Fandom: Richard III
Character/Pairing: Margaret, Richard, hints of others
Summary: No longer queen, Margaret must turn to the use of new powers.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Horrific/violent imagery, snakes, ghosts
A/N: Written for gileonnen who wanted Margaret as a classical prophetess.
The gods do offer some consolation to the conquered.
Margaret lay cold upon the bare earth, for she had eschewed even the small comforts that the tent of her enemies might offer. She was alone - no one dared to approach her, for even a step in her direction called out from her throat a high, screeching, howl, and they drew back, as though she might, doglike, claw them apart. Her mind was trying to follow her son down into the earth. Open-mouthed, she screamed into the dirt, feeling it, rough and grimy, between her teeth. This was the indignity to which she had been condemned - to live, shamed, overcome, under the rule of her child’s murderers. She had known queenship - her body weighted with stately, rich-woven robes, a crown at her brow, the nation before her - and now she would be nothing but an example of the York children’s magnanimity, a graying old woman dozing in a corner over her needlepoint. Such a fate it was that awaited her, beyond the awful grandeur of this present grief.
She did not, then, let the grief even begin to quiet, but screamed until her teeth were black with earth.
It was only then, when she had worn herself out with rage, that the snakes came. They moved towards her silently, smooth bodies passing easily over the earth, so that she did not even notice their presence at first, her eyes closed with exhaustion. When they began to twine their bodies around hers, she felt nothing strange in it. They curled around her bones, spiraling up her arms, her ribs, her shoulders, her neck, until they reached her face. And then, with their dry, scratching tongues, they licked clean her ears and eyelids.
At once, having completed their task, they were gone.
Margaret opened her eyes and it was nearly dawn. There was a strange roar in her ears, like the sound of the sea, but heavier and more growling, as though the ground itself had tides, stone and soil relentlessly surging against the shore of the sky.
Before her eyes, the future swirled, in spirals of black dust.
Beneath her feet, the restless dead who wander the banks of the Styx murmured to her, promising secrets.
She smiled, and stood. Power surged through her. She had arms no longer, but wide black wings, heavy with feathers. Her talons gripped the earth as though it extended a hand to her. She lifted her face up to the gray sky and cried out, the sharp, quick shriek of a bird of prey.
-
Try as they might, the new King Edward and his bright court could not rid themselves of her presence. Banishment, she was charged with, on threat of death, but they could not banish her from a castle where the very stones contrived to give her shelter. Those living there might say that it was pity for her that prevented them from forcibly effecting the King’s command, that in the wildness of her grief they could not bear to turn her out into the night to the uncertain sanctuary of whatever allies might remain to her. But these would have been untruths. No one could turn her out now, not until the work of her haunting was finished and all three sons of York lay cold and dead beneath the ground.
-
It dizzied her at first, to see the future. Fates wreathed the heads of those she encountered, like ever-moving lengths of colored thread. It took time and practice to read them, to fix her eye close upon the jagged edge of an untimely death, to distinguish the gold of true happiness from the sickly yellow of surfeited pleasures. Often, now, in halls and kitchens and courtyards and private chambers, people turned away from Margaret’s piercing gaze with discomfort. She stared too long, her eyes screwed up tight as though reading a messily written letter.
She read fate in other places too, in the darting pathways of falcons, in the messy, reeking entrails slapped down upon cutting boards in the kitchens, in the moonlight upon the surface of a deep well. She read the signs throughout all the castle, and everywhere they read the same - doom to the house of York; anguish and betrayal and ignominy to fall upon their heads. The signs were so clear and so unmistakable that she wondered, sometimes, whether it was her own will, the force of her rage, that had written that fate. Had her fury reached down a ghostly hand into the spinning-chamber of the Moirai and tangled up the life threads of the York brothers into these lines of dreaded misfortune?
-
If to read the fates that surged before her eyes took all of Margaret’s work and concentration, then to speak prophecies was no effort at all. They came up between her teeth like bile, so that she must spit them out or choke. And it was a pleasure to watch ugly sounds twisting up the faces of her usurpers, splattering Elizabeth Woodville’s pretty cheek and soiling the doublets of her foolish brothers. But, when Richard of Gloucester stood before her, the words tripped over themselves in wild anapests trying to escape her mouth, buzzing about him like a cloud of dark flies. And she saw, so clearly that she did not know how she could before have missed it, that it was he who was the source of this impending tragedy. Her anger, though it might be potent as unmixed wine, was not the only force which had roused upon the Erinyes from beneath the earth.
For it is the task of the Erinyes to punish crimes against nature. And whatever else Richard was, he was certainly unnatural.
She stood taller than he, with his contorted leg and twisted spine, and as she looked down upon him she called him names, as vile as she could imagine, each creeping creature that lives upon the earth - spider, adder, dog - and he did nothing but smile back at her with easy calm and place Margaret’s own name within her curses. He knew, Margaret thought suddenly, he knew that she deserved those names at least as much as he did, she who groveled on the ground beside the adders, who howled with the dogs, less now even than the she-wolf she once was, nothing more than forlorn Hekabe in the prow of Ulysses’ ship. When she cursed him he must think that she spoke only the curses that had already befallen herself.
But he thought himself too clever. The Moirai would not avert their hand from him simply because they used him as their own executioner. One day he too would suffer, with the Erinyes howling in his ears and beating their dark wings to black out the sun. They would have him, his blood staining their talons the color of rust. And, on that day, Margaret would rest.
-
On the night before the battle, she laid a bowl of black blood under the stars. “Come,” she called to all who would hear, “come out from the earth and drink your fill.” And Richard’s victims came, desperate, hungering. But when they drew near Margaret covered the bowl with her bony arms, with her thick, dark wings.
“Go to him,” she said, “go to the one who killed you and drink from him. Take his sweat, his terror, his remorse. And, when he is dead, you may have all the blood I can give you.”
The weight of their footsteps made the earth shake beneath her feet.