“How did you get up there?” Giles asked me wonderingly, not waiting for an answer. “I’m not sure we can get out. There’s a guard asleep downstairs in the hall, and another one walking up and down outside in the courtyard. And if she has some kind of captive spirit in that mirror….”
I hadn’t told him what was really in the mirror, but I was quite sure it wasn’t captive.
“We’ll get out,” I said grimly. “As far as the stables, anyhow.”
I had Giles fetch his clothing from his room. I fetched mine out of the press. I put on the boots, held Giles tightly around the waist, with our baggage tied helter skelter and Grumpkin squashed between us, and said, “Boots, take us to the stables.”
And there we were, standing beside the horses, an arrival which startled the horses almost as much as it startled Giles. I told him there was no time to explain, and he subsided unwillingly, full of questions we had no time for. Still, he had his wits about him sufficiently to suggest that we tie some sacks around the horses’ feet, so their hooves wouldn’t make a noise on the cobbles. We waited until the guard moved around the corner, then made a dash for it. Once we were past the courtyard (the gate wasn’t even shut and there was no drawbridge), the road was mostly soft dust. We went down through the dark village, silent as mice, then up the other side. When we got to the top of a long rise, we saw a little campfire, and there was Eskavaria sitting beside it, waiting for us.
“Have you been here all along?” I asked.
“Thought you might not stay very long,” he said. “Thought I’d take you along to spend the night with my brothers and me.”
He wouldn’t have thought of that on his own. Who had told him to stay? Puck? Still running errands for Carabosse? I didn’t ask.
He brought our packhorses out of the shadows, mounted his own, and we went along through the starlight, with him humming a little song and the water making an accompaniment to it. We wove through rocks and trees. Once he got down and moved a log behind us, hiding the way. We came to the top of a long slope and could see below us the bulk of a house with windows faintly outlined in firelight.
Eskavaria looked up at the stars. “Midnight,” he said. “Time we get under cover.”
“What happens at midnight?” Giles asked.
“If she knows you’re gone, she may come looking for you then,” the little man answered, and we trotted down the long slope toward the house beneath the trees. A stable stood next to it, with a door connecting the two. We were beneath the stable roof when we heard the scream from above, a long, shrill cry that was not an owl.
Giles started to go out and look. Eskavaria grabbed his arm and held him. “No,” he said. “Never look up when you hear that cry, or she may see you. Faces show up in the dark more than hair or hats do.” Then he led us through the door.
It was a simple house, though larger than it had looked from outside, with one big room downstairs and a large open loft. The brothers, all six of them, were asleep up there. None of them were any bigger than Eskavaria. I could tell from the size of the beds. If not dwarves, they were not far from it. I thought of the “little men” the Dark One had mentioned, and knew these were they.
“You know where my granddaughter is,” I challenged him.
“I know where someone is. How can I be sure she is your granddaughter?” he challenged me in return.
I couldn’t think of an answer. I was very tired. I hurt all over, and I started to cry. Once started, I couldn’t stop.
Giles shouted angrily, “Now see what you’ve done. Damn it, Esky, she’s tired! She’s come all this way to find her granddaughter, and you say a thing like that!”
This woke up the family, and they all came down, rubbing their eyes and asking what was going on. Among themselves they spoke the other language, Euskara. Evidently other people call them Basques, but they call themselves the Euskaldunak, which gives you a hint as to what the language sounds like. Except for an occasional word that sounded rather Latinish, I couldn’t understand any of it, though the tone of the conversation was decidedly argumentative. There was a great deal of pointing up and making the horn sign and staring at us with a mixture of intense curiosity and obvious distrust.
I don’t think there was ten year’s difference in age from Esky, the youngest, to the oldest. The older ones had beards, the older the longer. Evidently they never trimmed them. The younger three or four were clean shaven. Esky told us all their names, and I promptly forgot them. Couldn’t pronounce them, in any case. Not Sneezy. Not Grumpy. My eyes were falling shut. Next thing I knew, they were spreading some quilts on the floor and I was being invited to lie down and sleep.
I didn’t wait for a second invitation.
When I woke, hours and hours later, it was full daylight and the house was empty. The door was open. I could hear horses champing away in the stables and the buzz of flies. Otherwise, silence.
I sat up and fumbled with my hair. Giles must have heard me, for he came in from outside, bringing me a cup of something warm. Broth, I finally decided. With some kind of very fine grain cooked in it. Almost like grass seed. I leaned back against a nearby bench and drank it. Or chewed it. It needed salt.
Giles suggested, very sweetly, that since we had a few moments to ourselves, I explain to him what was going on. I did so, mostly. I told him my mother was a fairy, without dwelling on what that made me, and I said she’d given me certain fairy gifts. I said an inimical force was sort of following me around. I didn’t mention Jaybee, I couldn’t bear to tell him about Jay-bee. In Giles’s mind, I was Beauty and I was Catherine, both at once, and they were not necessarily the same person. He could accept that Elly had been Edward’s child, and Galantha was somehow my granddaughter, without giving up his belief that his first love, Beauty, still virgin and pure, was asleep at Westfaire. I was her, and I wasn’t her, so to speak. He had no trouble believing Galantha had been wickedly enchanted by a witch. He believed in witches. In those times, everyone believed in witches.
“I’ve been to see her,” Giles said, looking at his feet.
“Her?”
“Your grandchild. Galantha.”
I started to get up. He pushed me back, very gently. “She looks almost like she’s asleep, Beauty. Very pale, but not … you know, not rotted or anything. They’ve put her in a kind of case, so nothing will chew on her. I don’t think she’s dead.”
Giles had never seen Disney. This time I did get up.
“I want to see for myself,” I said, pulling the pins out of my hair and trying to find my comb. Giles found it for me and helped me braid up my white locks. When I had the wimple pinned tightly, my veil on and my kirtle smoothed out, he led the way outside.
We went up a gentle hill, not the one we had come down the night before, and through a bit of forest, down a much used path, and into the gaping entrance of a mine. She was lying well back inside, in an area lit by torches. The case looked more like a reliquary than anything else, bits of rock crystal and faceted gems pieced together with gold to make a domed lid in a design of flowers and leaves. The leaves were emeralds, I thought. Or maybe jade. Through the flatter, clearer bits I could see her, only a child, twelve or thirteen, perhaps. She was very beautiful, rather like the child Elizabeth Taylor, in that horse movie they always showed late at night on TV in the 1990s. She was incorruptible, as saints’ bodies are supposed to be. I thought of Giles and my conversation about mice and shrouds and laughed at myself.
Then I sat down beside the case and let some tears run, not many. After a while, Esky and one of his brothers came in and asked if I’d like the case opened. I said yes, and they unbuckled it at one side and laid the top back. She lay on a satin mattress, with a satin coverlet over her, her hands folded on her breast. She was dressed very simply, in a full white shift with puffy sleeves and a kind of laced bodice over it. Disney had got that part right.
The other brothers came from deeper in the mine, setting their tools down to one side and seating themselves on
chair sized stones, one for each of them. From the wear on those stones, I could tell they had sat there like this time and again for years.
Giles took a deep breath. “She looks just like you,” he said to me. “When I first saw you.”
I looked at the child, considering. She looked something like Elly and something like her father, but a good deal like me. As though I’d passed on my own looks, skipping a generation. Her hair was black, of course, and mine had been gold, but otherwise, we looked much the same.
I nodded. Esky reached out to touch the bones of my cheeks and jaw and nodded. “I see it,” he said.
He could see more than I, then, but his brothers all nodded, telling each other how much the child resembled me. The resemblance, whether fancied or real, seemed to allay their suspicions.
“How?” I asked, motioning at them, her, everything, meaning “How did it happen?”
Esky sighed. “One day we heard this screaming noise, so we went to see what it was. This big huntsman was down on his knees, crying. He said Princess Ilene had told him she’d kill him unless he took this little girl into the woods and murdered her. He couldn’t do it. He said he was going to kill a deer and take its heart back instead. Then he went off and left the child behind. It was getting dark. Wolves was howling. We couldn’t leave her there. We took her along home. She was a sweet, pretty girl. Not much sense, but sweet.” He wiped his face with his hand, sighing.
“Well, some time went by. We got used to having her around. At first she couldn’t do nothing useful. We taught her. Cookery a little. Gardening a little. If I tell the truth, Lady Catherine, all of us lusted after her even though she was just a child. With all of us living here, we agreed we’d behave decent. We may be hermits, so to speak. We may not be very civilized, but our ma raised us to be decent folk. Right then, we should have took her over the mountains into Spain. Or took her back to Lourdes, we could have did that. Truth is, none of us travels much, except me, and I didn’t want her to go. She was so pretty….”
He rose and went out of the cave. The brothers muttered among themselves, in their own language. No one said anything I could understand. After a time, Esky came back, his face wet.
“So one day we came home and seen her lying there on the floor. We picked her up and seen her bodice was laced up tight. It was a new lace.”
One of the brothers interrupted, and Eskavaria nodded to him.
“That’s right, a silk lace, one we hadn’t seen before. So we unlaced her, and she caught her breath, all of a sudden. We asked her what happened. She told us a peddler woman come by. Well, we knew then what happened. The witch knew she was here.”
The little men nodded, agreeing this is the way it had been.
“Gaily wasn’t real quick,” Esky went on. “All of us knew that. Even so, we thought since it happened once, she’d know next time. We told her no more peddler women…”
Another interruption, discussion, nodding of heads.
Eskavaria nodded. “That’s right. No more visitors, no one. We said stay in the house until we come home. We said then we’d walk with her if she wanted to pick flowers or something.
“Well, wasn’t a whole week passed before we come home and there she is again. All limp on the floor. We thought she was dead. We picked her up, and then a comb fell out of her hair, and she woke up. It was another peddler woman. Talked her way around the child, like the first time.
“So we knew we couldn’t trust her alone. Right then we should have took her over the mountains, fast. We didn’t do that. We decided that one of us would stay with her, to protect her. Then that didn’t seem decent, so we said two would stay, to keep an eye on each other along with her. And that went along for quite a long while….”
He turned to his brothers and asked them a question in their own language. They argued for a moment, then responded. “Almost a year,” he went on. “It was almost a year. Then one day Euskaby found a big gem deposit back in the mine with a rock in front of it. Big rock. All of us had to move it. Maybe an hour we left her, but when we got back she was on the floor again. This time was no lace, no comb. We undressed her, took everything off, looked at everything, put everything back. We combed her hair. We cleaned her fingernails and toenails. We looked in her mouth, in her nose and ears. Nothing.”
“The witch said it was an apple,” I said. “I overheard her.” It hadn’t been the witch who had said it, but I wasn’t about to explain about Fenoderee and Puck.
“If it was an apple, it’s inside her belly,” said Esky. “There’s no way to get it out of her with her living.”
And he was perfectly right, of course, in the fifteenth. In the twentieth, it would be minor surgery. But if I took her to the twentieth, I might not be able to get back. Or, if I got back, too much time might have passed, and I might never see Giles again. I sighed and bit my lip and decided not to decide, not just yet.
“We’re still within the borders of Ponte Marvella, right?” I asked.
They talked it over and decided that we probably were right on the border, not really in, not really out.
“Then we need to get her out,” I said. “Once we’re outside Marvella, maybe the witch won’t bother us, and we can decide what to do. I don’t think my granddaughter’s dead. Not really. Perhaps there’s a way to remove the enchantment.” In the story it was a prince’s kiss, wasn’t it? Or was that only my own story? Or was it Disney? I simply couldn’t remember!
More argument. They weren’t sure they believed me. I wasn’t sure it was true. Esky waved his hands and shouted. Eventually they agreed. Two or three of them were crying. One thing they did agree upon. Daytime was the time to move. Nights were dangerous.
So we started out. Galantha’s coffin was bound about with ropes and slung between the two packhorses. Our supplies went on Esky’s horse. All seven of the little men came along, to be sure we got out safely, Esky said, but I think they simply were unwilling to let her go. She had become something more to them than a sleeping little girl. They decided the safest thing to do was to go down the south side of the mountains into Spain, since we were nearest the southern border of Marvella. Also, we had to avoid the toll bridge the baron had told me about. If the Princess wanted to stop our leaving, that bridge would be watched.
The idea was good, but the trails were simply not wide enough for the two horses with the coffin between. This became obvious very quickly, and a shouting match broke out among the little men. Two of them kept pointing to the ropes and screaming at two others. I could read their faces if not their words. “You didn’t tie it right. It’s all your fault.” And the others: “You don’t know a damned thing about knots. What do you mean it wasn’t tied right?” It went on far too long, and Giles stopped it by bellowing at them, dismounting, untying the coffin, opening it, wrapping the girl in the satin coverlet, and taking her up in his arms. She was as stiff as an image carved from wood. In a way that was a relief. I had worried myself over what the little men might have been doing with her in that mine, all those years. They had done nothing, obviously, that they could not have done as well with an image carved from stone.
The little men muttered at Giles’s picking her up, but decided to allow it. Still, they insisted on bringing the coffin along, the bottom and top tied separately onto the backs of two of the horses. It had been made with love, care, and endless hours of labor. The gems and gold alone were worth a fortune, not to speak of the workmanship. It was their gift to their Snowdrop, and they weren’t going to abandon it. I shook my head at Giles, and he subsided with a growl.
After a time, we worked out a processional order that worked fairly well. Esky went first with one of his brothers, leading one packhorse, then Giles, then me, then the horses with the coffin led by two brothers, then the other little men coming along single file. We went up for a time, then abruptly down. Giles asked Esky where we were going.
The little man was breathing hard. “There’s a place we can get across the gorge and onto the road
to Santiago,” he said.
Giles looked at me and shrugged. It looked like we were going to St. James’s shrine whether we wanted to or not. I wondered if we would run into Margery Kempe. After that, I tried not to wonder anything or think anything except about hanging on. Riding a horse uphill is difficult. Riding a horse downhill is exhausting.
Night came. The little men went off in all directions, looking for a camp site, finding one at last under an overhanging ledge of stone where we could not be seen from the sky. I thought perhaps they were being overcareful. We must have come far from Marvella by this time. Then, late in the darkness, I was awakened by the same cry we had heard the night before. Around me I could hear indrawn breaths, silence. The horses stopped munching outside among the trees. After a time the cry came again, far away to the north, echoed by the howling of wolves. The little men began to breathe once more.
“What was it?” I asked Eskavaria.
“Night lammergeier,” he said, not meeting my eyes. The lammergeier are huge vultures of the Pyranees, sometimes called “bone-breakers” because of their habit of dropping large bones from great heights to shatter them and get at the marrow. Ordinarily, I believe, they do not fly at night. I thought it wisest not to pursue the matter.
Midmorning, this morning, we came to the road to Santiago. The road is wide enough that the coffin can be slung between two horses once more. My granddaughter is in it. Eskavaria is leading the packhorse. His brothers have faded back amongst the trees, tears running down their faces. A traveler we met coming up from Spain tells us today is the fifteenth of August. We have time yet to get to Compostela before fall.
ST. HELENA’S DAY, AUGUST,
YEAR OF OUR LORD 1417
We have traveled for several days on the downward road, very slowly because of the coffin, seeing no living things except an occasional herd of ibex, a few skulking foxes, or the ubiquitous marmots. Then, this morning, shortly after we began our journey for the day, we came upon a large party of noble men and women together with their servants, all camped among their wagons beside the road. It appeared they might have spare mounts, and Giles went to see if he could purchase a packhorse to carry the supplies carried by Esky’s mount. Esky had been walking, and it had slowed our progress somewhat.
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