A Knot in the Grain and Other Stories Page 7

  Two days later the queen walked out of the palace in the early afternoon, alone. She often did; she liked to visit the tomb of her parents on the hill beyond the city by herself; and her waiting women and royal guards, who would rather have made a parade out of it, had grown accustomed to the queen’s small eccentricity, and no longer thought anything of it. But this time she did not return. A great hue and cry went up, in Arn and in Vuek and everywhere that messengers could go, from the mountains east, north, and west, even beyond the desert in the south to the great sea; but she was never seen again by anyone who brought word back to her mourning husband and country.

  The villagers who had been frightened by the reappearance of the great stagman, as they had first seen him twenty years ago, were relieved when he disappeared again; and since news travelled slowly and erratically to them, none noticed that the stagman vanished for the second and final time two days after the Arnish queen walked out of her palace and did not return.

  Touk’s House

  There was a witch who had a garden. It was a vast garden, and very beautiful; and it was all the more beautiful for being set in the heart of an immense forest, heavy with ancient trees and tangled with vines. Around the witch’s garden the forest stretched far in every direction, and the ways through it were few, and no more than narrow footpaths.

  In the garden were plants of all varieties; there were herbs at the witch’s front door and vegetables at her rear door; a hedge, shoulder-high for a tall man, made of many different shrubs lovingly trained and trimmed together, surrounded her entire plot, and there were bright patches of flowers scattered throughout. The witch, whatever else she might be capable of, had green fingers; in her garden many rare things flourished, nor did the lowliest weed raise its head unless she gave it leave.

  There was a woodcutter who came to know the witch’s garden well by sight; and indeed, as it pleased his eyes, he found himself going out of his way to pass it in the morning as he began his long day with his axe over his arm, or in the evening as he made his way homeward. He had been making as many of his ways as he could pass near the garden for some months when he realized that he had worn a trail outside the witch’s hedge wide enough to swing his arms freely and let his feet find their own way without fear of clutching roots or loose stones. It was the widest trail anywhere in the forest.

  The woodcutter had a wife and four daughters. The children were their parents’ greatest delight, and their only delight, for they were very poor. But the children were vigorous and healthy, and the elder two already helped their mother in the bread baking, by which she earned a little more money for the family, and in their small forest-shadowed village everyone bought bread from her. That bread was so good that her friends teased her, and said her husband stole herbs from the witch’s garden, that she might put it in her baking. But the teasing made her unhappy, for she said such jokes would bring bad luck.

  And at last bad luck befell them. The youngest daughter fell sick, and the local leech, who was doctor to so small a village because he was not a good one, could do nothing for her. The fever ate up the little girl till there was no flesh left on her small bones, and when she opened her eyes, she did not recognize the faces of her sisters and mother as they bent over her.

  “Is there nothing to do?” begged the woodcutter, and the doctor shook his head. The parents bowed their heads in despair, and the mother wept.

  A gleam came into the leech’s eyes, and he licked his lips nervously. “There is one thing,” he said, and the man and his wife snapped their heads up to stare at him. “The witch’s garden …”

  “The witch’s garden,” the wife whispered fearfully.

  “Yes?” said the woodcutter.

  “There is an herb that grows there that will break any fever,” said the doctor.

  “How will I know it?” said the woodcutter.

  The doctor picked up a burning twig from the fireplace, stubbed out the sparks, and drew black lines on the clean-swept hearth. “It looks so—” And he drew small three-lobed leaves. “Its color is pale, like the leaves of a weeping willow, and it is a small bushy plant, rising no higher than a man’s knee from the ground.”

  Hope and fear chased themselves over the wife’s face, and she reached out to clasp her husband’s hand. “How will you come by the leaves?” she said to him.

  “I will steal them,” the woodcutter said boldly.

  The doctor stood up, and the woodcutter saw that he trembled. “If you … bring them home, boil two handsful in water, and give the girl as much of it as she will drink.” And he left hastily.

  “Husband—”

  He put his other hand over hers. “I pass the garden often. It will be an easy thing. Do not be anxious.”

  On the next evening he waited later than his usual time for returning, that dusk might have overtaken him when he reached the witch’s garden. That morning he had passed the garden as well, and dawdled by the hedge, that he might mark where the thing he sought stood; but he dared not try his thievery then, for all that he was desperately worried about his youngest daughter.

  He left his axe and his yoke for bearing the cut wood leaning against a tree, and slipped through the hedge. He was surprised that it did not seem to wish to deter his passage, but yielded as any leaves and branches might. He had thought at least a witch’s hedge would be full of thorns and brambles, but he was unscathed. The plant he needed was near at hand, and he was grateful that he need not walk far from the sheltering hedge. He fell to his knees to pluck two handsful of the life-giving leaves, and he nearly sobbed with relief.

  “Why do you invade thus my garden, thief?” said a voice behind him, and the sob turned in his throat to a cry of terror.

  He had never seen the witch. He knew of her existence because all who lived in the village knew that a witch lived in the garden that grew in the forest; and sometimes, when he passed by it, there was smoke drifting up from the chimney of the small house, and thus he knew someone lived there. He looked up, hopelessly, still on his knees, still clutching the precious leaves.

  He saw a woman only a little past youth to look at her, for her hair was black and her face smooth but for lines of sorrow and solitude about the mouth. She wore a white apron over a brown skirt; her feet were bare, her sleeves rolled to the elbows, and her hands were muddy.

  “I asked you, what do you do in my garden?”

  He opened his mouth, but no words came out; and he shuddered till he had to lean his knuckles on the ground so that he would not topple over. She raised her arm, and pushed her damp hair away from her forehead with the back of one hand; but it seemed, as he watched her, that the hand, as it fell through the air again to lie at her side, flickered through some sign that briefly burned in the air; and he found he could talk.

  “My daughter,” he gasped. “My youngest daughter is ill … she will die. I—I stole these”—and he raised his hands pleadingly, still holding the leaves which, crushed between his fingers, gave a sweet minty fragrance to the air between their faces—“that she might live.”

  The witch stood silent for a moment, while he felt his heart beating in the palms of his hands. “There is a gate in the hedge. Why did you not come through it, and knock on my door, and ask for what you need?”

  “Because I was afraid,” he murmured, and silence fell again.

  “What ails the child?” the witch asked at last.

  Hope flooded through him and made him tremble. “It is a wasting fever, and there is almost nothing of her left; often now she does not know us.”

  The witch turned away from him, and walked several steps; and he staggered to his feet, thinking to flee; but his head swam, and when it was clear, the witch stood again before him. She held a dark green frond out to him; its long, sharp leaves nodded over her hand, and the smell of it made his eyes water.

  “Those leaves you wished to steal would avail you and your daughter little. They make a pleasant taste, steeped in hot water, and they give a fresh s
mell to linens long in a cupboard. Take this as my gift to your poor child; steep this in boiling water, and give it to the child to drink. She will not like it, but it will cure her; and you say she will die else.”

  The woodcutter looked in amazement at the harsh-smelling bough; and slowly he opened his fists, and the green leaves fell at his feet, and slowly he reached out for what the witch offered him. She was small of stature, he noticed suddenly, and slender, almost frail. She stooped as lithely as a maiden, and picked up the leaves he had dropped, and held them out to him.

  “These too you shall keep, and boil as you meant to do, for your child will need a refreshing draught after what you must give her for her life’s sake.

  “And you should at least have the benefit they can give you, for you shall pay a heavy toll for your thievery this night. Your wife carries your fifth child; in a little time, when your fourth daughter is well again, she shall tell you of it. In seven months she shall be brought to bed, and the baby will be big and strong. That child is mine; that child is the price you shall forfeit for this night’s lack of courtesy.”

  “Ah, God,” cried the woodcutter, “do you barter the death of one child against the death of another?”

  “No,” she said. “I give a life for a life. For your youngest child shall live; and the baby not yet born I shall raise kindly, for I”—she faltered—”I wish to teach someone my herb lore.

  “Go now. Your daughter needs what you bring her.” And the woodcutter found himself at the threshold of his own front door, his hands full of leaves, and his axe and yoke still deep in the forest; nor did he remember the journey home.

  The axe and yoke were in their accustomed place the next morning; the woodcutter seized them up and strode into the forest by a path he knew would not take him near the witch’s garden.

  All four daughters were well and strong seven months later when their mother was brought to her fifth confinement. The birth was an easy one, and a fifth daughter kicked her way into the world; but the mother turned her face away, and the four sisters wept, especially the youngest. The midwife wrapped the baby up snugly in the birth clothes that had comforted four infants previously. The woodcutter picked up the child and went into the forest in the direction he had avoided for seven months. It had been in his heart since he had found himself on his doorstep with his hands full of leaves and unable to remember how he got there, that this journey was one he would not escape; so he held the child close to him, and went the shortest path he knew to the witch’s garden. For all of its seven months’ neglect, the way was as clear as when he had trodden it often.

  This time he knocked upon the gate, and entered; the witch was standing before her front door. She raised her arms for the child, and the woodcutter laid her in them. The witch did not at first look at the baby, but rather up into the woodcutter’s face. “Go home to your wife, and the four daughters who love you, for they know you. And know this too: that in a year’s time your wife shall be brought to bed once again, and the child shall be a son.”

  Then she bowed her head over the baby, and just before her black hair fell forward to hide her face, the woodcutter saw a look of love and gentleness touch the witch’s sad eyes and mouth. He remembered that look often, for he never again found the witch’s garden, though for many years he searched the woods where he knew it once had been, till he was no longer sure that he had ever seen it, and his family numbered four sons as well as four daughters.

  Maugie named her new baby Erana. Erana was a cheerful baby and a merry child; she loved the garden that was her home; she loved Maugie, and she loved Maugie’s son, Touk. She called Maugie by her name, Maugie, and not Mother, for Maugie had been careful to tell her that she was not her real mother; and when little Erana had asked, “Then why do I live with you, Maugie?” Maugie had answered: “Because I always wanted a daughter.”

  Touk and Erana were best friends. Erana’s earliest memory was of riding on his shoulders and pulling his long pointed ears, and drumming his furry chest with her small heels. Touk visited his mother’s garden every day, bringing her wild roots that would not grow even in her garden, and split wood for her fire. But he lived by the riverbank, or by the pool that an elbow of the river had made. As soon as Erana was old enough to walk more than a few steps by herself, Touk showed her the way to his bit of river, and she often visited him when she could not wait for him to come to the garden. Maugie never went beyond her hedge, and she sighed the first time small Erana went off alone. But Touk was at home in the wild woods, and taught Erana to be at home there too. She lost herself only twice, and both those times when she was very small; and both times Touk found her almost before she had time to realize she was lost. They did not tell Maugie about either of these two incidents, and Erana never lost herself in the forest again.

  Touk often took a nap at noontime, stretched out full length in his pool and floating three-quarters submerged; he looked like an old mossy log, or at least he did till he opened his eyes, which were a vivid shade of turquoise, and went very oddly with his green skin. When Erana first visited him, she was light enough to sit on his chest as he floated, and paddle him about like the log he looked, while he crossed his hands on his breast and watched her with a glint of blue between almost-closed green eyelids. But she soon grew too heavy for this amusement, and he taught her instead to swim, and though she had none of his troll blood to help her, still, she was a pupil to make her master proud.

  One day as she lay, wet and panting, on the shore, she said to him, “Why do you not have a house? You do not spend all your hours in the water, or with us in the garden.”

  He grunted. He sat near her, but on a rough rocky patch that she had avoided in favor of a grassy mound. He drew his knees up to his chin and put his arms around them. There were spurs at his wrists and heels, like a fighting cock’s, and though he kept them closely trimmed, still he had to sit slightly pigeon-toed to avoid slashing the skin of his upper legs with the heel spurs, and he grasped his arms carefully well up near the elbow. The hair that grew on his head was as pale as young leaves, and inclined to be lank; but the tufts that grew on the tops of his shoulders and thickly across his chest, and the crest that grew down his backbone, were much darker, and curly.

  “You think I should have a house, my friend?” he growled, for his voice was always a growl.

  Erana thought about it. “I think you should want to have a house.”

  “I’ll ponder it,” he said, and slid back into the pool and floated out toward the center. A long-necked bird drifted down and landed on his belly, and began plucking at the ragged edge of one short trouser leg.

  “You should learn to mend, too,” Erana called to him. Erana loathed mending. The bird stopped pulling for a moment and glared at her. Then it reached down and raised a thread in its beak and wrenched it free with one great tug. It looked challengingly at Erana and then slowly flapped away, with the mud-colored thread trailing behind it.

  “Then what would the birds build their nests with?” he said, and grinned. There was a gap between his two front teeth, and the eyeteeth curved well down over the lower lip.

  Maugie taught her young protégé to cook and clean, and sew—and mend—and weed. But Erana had little gift for herb lore. She learned the names of things, painstakingly, and the by-rote rules of what mixtures did what and when; but her learning never caught fire, and the green things in the garden did not twine lovingly around her when she paused near them as they seemed to do for Maugie. She learned what she could, to please Maugie, for Erana felt sad that neither her true son nor her adopted daughter could understand the things Maugie might teach; and because she liked to know the ingredients of a poultice to apply to an injured wing, and what herbs, mixed in with chopped-up bugs and earthworms, would make orphaned fledglings thrive.

  For Erana’s fifteenth birthday, Touk presented her with a stick. She looked at it, and then she looked at him. “I thought you might like to lay the first log of my new house,” he sai
d, and she laughed.

  “You have decided then?” she asked.

  “Yes; in fact I began to want a house long since, but I have only lately begun to want to build one,” he said. “And then I thought I would put it off till your birthday, that you might make the beginning, as it was your idea first.”

  She hesitated, turning the little smooth stick in her hand. “It is—is it truly your idea now, Touk? I was a child when I teased you about your house; I would never mean to hold you to a child’s nagging.”

  The blue eyes glinted. “It is my idea now, my dear, and you can prove that you are my dearest friend by coming at once to place your beam where it belongs, so that I may begin.”

  Birthdays required much eating, for all three of them liked to cook, and they were always ready for an excuse for a well-fed celebration; so it was late in the day of Erana’s fifteenth birthday that she and Touk made their way—slowly, for they were very full of food—to his riverbank. “There,” he said, pointing across the pool. Erana looked up at him questioningly, and then made her careful way around the water to the stand of trees he had indicated; he followed on her heels. She stopped, and he said over her shoulder, his breath stirring her hair, “You see nothing? Here—” And he took her hand, and led her up a short steep slope, and there was a little clearing beyond the trees, with a high mossy rock at its back, and the water glinting through the trees before it, and the trees all around, and birds in the trees. There were already one or two bird-houses hanging from suitable branches at the clearing’s edge, and bits of twig sticking out the round doorways to indicate tenants in residence.

  “My house will lie—” And he dropped her hand to pace off its boundaries; when he halted, he stood before her again, his blue eyes anxious for her approval. She bent down to pick up four pebbles; and she went solemnly to the four corners he had marked, and pushed them into the earth. He stood, watching her, at what would be his front door; and last she laid the stick, her birthday present, just before his feet. “It will be a lovely house,” she said.