Notes: This is a revised version of a story I originally posted in 2005.
Versé, transformed into a flower
Now that she is dead, the woman is beautiful. She lies inside the nightdark wooden boat of her coffin, her hands folded together on her chest. They are mostly lost inside the dropping snow-lace cuffs of the dress she was put inside, but I can make out the kitten-clawed tips of her fingernails. They have been polished (by her mother, or her grandmother) to a palesoft candlelit glow—and I remember that, contrary to the old country stories, they did not continue to grow in the minutes after she died. She doesn't look as though she is only sleeping. She doesn't even look like a person. Her skin is made of glass-smooth doll porcelain.
Her eyes are shut underneath two stained-pink white joibels, a flower that appears instantly in the fields, and the gardens, every spring. It's so common that it isn't even named for some long ago and long dead queen. I think one of the others picked these from the tangled mess at the back of the cemetery.
The woman's hair is spilled loose over her shoulders, and brushed out into artfully wind-tugged curls. Her dress—the one that her grandmother would have chosen—is awatersilk thing the color of a sweetheart rose, or of old menstrual blood. Her feet are hidden underneath the closed theatre curtains of the skirts, but she will be barefoot.
She has to be—I have heard her family is conservative, and that would mean that they follow the old myths. I imagine that the nails are polished clean, but that her heels are black with smoke-bruises and dirt.
I don't know how long I have been standing here, hovering alongside her coffin-boat, watching over her. We are all watching her, hidden in our dark winter cloaks. None of us has once dared to break the glasssmooth air by speaking—I can only hear the faint breeze of the woman breathing next to me, and a slight rustling sound.
I imagine that it comes from the twitch of the dead woman's skirts, but I know that it isn't so, and that it is likely, certainly, the leaves shaking on the trees in the shadow-blurred darkness behind us. I might like to attempt to write poetry, but I've never confused a pretty daydreamed image with reality.
When she was alive, the woman's name was Versé. That is one of the very few things I know about her. I never met her. But then, most of the other women here wouldn't have known her either. We didn't come here for that reason.
The woman to my left has allowed her hood to droop down. She has snarled curly hair heaped up into a lace snood, and her mouth is painted a dirt-dark black. She isn't familiar, and I wonder if she is one of the Queen's handmaidens. She turns towards the shadow of another woman, and her voice is a snake-hissed whisper. The other woman nods in response, and:
When they drift away, back towards the well-tended main path, I know they have to be with the Queen. She may not even know they have left—they couldn't be here if they were on duty—but if she has noticed, she will know not to ask them where they were.
Then: She looks well, one of us says, in a snowsoft voice I have never heard before, and I feel relieved. I knew most of these women once—in another life, in the identity I left behind like an old dress—but I don't remember how to talk with them.
She died in the explosion that was meant to kill Senator Amidala (along with the other handmaiden, the decoy, the one whose name died along with her) but the embalmer on Coruscant made a good job of covering it up, before her body was crated up for the hyperspace journey, and before her parents stood over the opened box. I can only just make out the rotted-brown rose petal bruise smashed on her forehead.
"You could say that. But I think she looks dead," Dané says next to me. She has lowered her hood, and her redrose hair is covered with shadows.
"There isn't much else to say," another woman (Yané, perhaps. Or it could only be my imagination that she left her husband in Keren for this) says.
Of course, there isn't anything else to say. When you become a handmaiden (even the sort of handmaiden Dané and I were, waiting in training for the girl-queen I only knew from her portrait and her frozen little voice) you only listen. When you do speak—and according to Saché and Miré, I was good with this—your voice is only an echo.
Several of the women fade away into the darkness. It only takes a blinked second, and they're gone. When I shake my head, my thoughts flutter about like moon-moths. I'm reminded of the line in a poem I wrote, during my gap year after I left service: Handmaidens never leave. They only vanish inside their cloaks.
Dané nods at me before she follows after them, walking off in the direction of the main public gate. There are only a few of the others left, and I haven't any reason to wait around here until I am alone with what is left of Versé.
The air has turned into a breeze as I walk towards the gates, and it tastes like ice water. The joibels might freeze to dried-stiff paper tonight. When I look up into the sky, I see one of the moons, burning with theatre stage lights, from the sun and the cities on its surface, has floated to the top of the sky. I walk through its light back out to the street.