by Olga Grushin
By the time she reached the beekeeper’s place, the sun was already setting, and blue shadows were stretching across the meadow. The beekeeper came out of his cottage, a few bees circling drowsily around his head. He was young and doe-eyed, and when he greeted her, his words carried a soft whiff of some foreign land. He reminded her of someone, but she was too preoccupied to catch the resemblance in time.
“I should ask you for a boon, it’s in the quest handbook,” the beekeeper said, and, lowering his golden-brown gaze, blushed inexplicably. “But I will tell you for free, because you were always kind to me.”
She did not puzzle over his words but pressed her bright blue parasol as payment upon him—no one should have to break the rules on her behalf—then, just as the round yellow moon the texture of ripe cheese rose in the skies, followed his directions to the dressmaker’s shop on the main square of a town across the river, where she spent a week weaving straw roses into bonnets and, in restitution, received an introduction to a gypsy horse thief who was passing through that night and in whose wagon she rode for the better part of the month, learning to cook fiery stews, wear men’s clothes, and shoe horses, until they came to the caravan ruled by the gypsy thief’s great-great-grandmother, who appeared more ancient than the mountains they had just crossed and who—once she had spent the balance of the spring braiding stars into the matriarch’s raven-black hair—gave her a Tarot card with the Queen of Swords and the address of a mighty sorcerer scribbled upon it in rooster blood. She stashed the card inside her shirt, close to her heart.
The gypsy thief put a ring of beaten silver, two hands holding a heart, on her finger, and kissed her in parting. They stood on a wild mountain peak, the sunset blazed crimson all around them, his sinewy arms smelled of smoke and hay, his dry lips tasted of pepper and freedom, and for one fraction of a moment she saw a different story, pure and fierce, unfolding before her. But when he pulled her against him, the Queen of Swords cut into her left breast, so she freed herself from his embrace, thanked him for his kindness, and, hitching up her britches, trudged down the mountainside already aflame with the vivid colors of summer wildflowers.
The sorcerer lived in a small valley on this side of the wind, but only barely. By the time she arrived, it was early autumn. Nights were growing chilly, leaves were turning red, and her cloak felt much too thin. She found the sorcerer in a neat little garden behind a neat little house, tending to a neat row of gigantic purple cabbages. A tiny old man with sad gray eyes in a furrowed gray face the size of another man’s fist, he listened to her with an anxious smile, then asked her to be so good as to speak louder, for he was a bit hard of hearing. She shouted her request, and the tall gray mountains around the little gray valley repeated her words many times over, until all the world boomed with her grievances and her hopes. When she finished and the echoes stopped, the old man shook his head.
“Sadly, my dear,” he whispered, “I am retired.”
“But you can’t be, that’s not how it works!” she cried. “I have come from afar to seek your counsel. I have borne amphibian insults, stabbed my fingers with needles and stars, worn out one pair of slippers embroidered with ladybugs, two pairs of sensible shoes, and three pairs of boots, turned my back on the young beekeeper, who blushed so sweetly, and the gypsy thief, who made wild winds blow through my blood. Has it all been in vain? Is there nothing you can do for me?”
The old man thought. The furrows deepened in his small gray face.
“I could give you a few of my cabbages,” he said at last. “Nice plump babies sometimes turn up in the patch.”
Aghast, she stared at him, then at the cabbages. Autumn was drawing closer to winter now; she saw the first traces of frost on the ground between the orderly rows.
“Thank you, but no, I don’t need a new baby. I fear I have not been the best mother to the two I’ve already had.”
And as she spoke, she suddenly knew this to be true. She had been away from the palace, away from her children, for much too long.
Her hand flew to her heart.
“I must get back at once.”
She turned to go, firmly, and was halfway to the nearest mountain when the old man caught up with her. He had been running.
“There . . . is . . . something,” he gasped. “I’ve . . . just . . . remembered.”
She waited for him to regain his breath.
“I did have a pupil long ago. Not the brightest of the lot, I’m sorry to say, always got his spells mixed up. Still, he may be able to help you—I hear he is a king’s magician now, so perhaps he’s become less muddled over the years. I must be honest with you, though, he lives a bit far. On this side of the wind, yes, but only just.”
Her hope stirred anew, even though she willed it not to.
“Please, where will I find him?”
He drew her a map on a cabbage leaf. She studied it, her spirits sinking. The world scratched into the leaf was broad and strange, bristling with snowcapped ranges, dotted with towns whose names she did not recognize. She thanked the little cabbage farmer, tightened her belt, and set off. As she walked, the eerie blue moon, such as could be seen only at the edge of the world, waxed and waned, winter came and went, hills rose into scraggly peaks and fell into shadowy dales. Her path took her by the gypsy grandmother’s caravan, where she stopped for a shot of whiskey and learned that the gypsy thief had taken up with a beautiful dancer and the two had ridden off into the wind on a stolen black mustang, singing raucous songs; she sighed, but not too deeply, for she had her cabbage leaf now. Again the moon waxed and waned, but now it looked less like a wispy blue boat ready to sail beyond the borders of all known things, and more like a head of ripened cheese; and as she continued to follow the map, the landscapes themselves slowly grew more familiar. At the melting of the snows, she arrived one morning in a town by a brown, stately river where merchants’ wives wore elegant hats decorated with straw roses. She visited a dressmaker’s shop on the main square, to trade her stained britches and crude riding boots for a proper dress and a pair of dainty slippers embroidered with ladybugs (their designs copied, the shop owner informed her proudly, from the clothes worn by a lovely princess who had once stayed there). She paid with the silver ring, two disloyal hands holding a faithless heart, then continued on, her own heart seized with a certain premonition. In the full light of an early spring day, she flew up the hill all abuzz with bees. She would not pause to chat with the young beekeeper who came out of his cottage when she passed by, but she did accept a parasol of faded blue that he begged her to have, and, calling out her thanks over her shoulder, hurried away, leaving him to stand empty-handed and stare after her with a pining golden-brown gaze.
She understood everything now. Her heart in her mouth, she followed the sorcerer’s directions past the pond, where the chorus of frogs begged her to kiss them, and around the mill, and across the park with its civilized maze of raked paths and marble nymphs, until the blue-and-white vanilla cake of a palace rose before her. It was marked on her map by a translucent star of the old man’s fingernails impressing themselves into the leaf’s fleshy pulp with an emphatic crisscross and a scrawl: “Here.”
All out of breath and radiant with anticipation, she burst inside at the hour when teapots were just beginning to serve afternoon tea, and dashed up to the nursery, and there were her darling children, Angelina and Roland the Sixth, sitting straight-backed and quiet in their little chairs, listening to Nanny Nanny bleat a nursery rhyme about a cow that flew over the moon.
She pressed them deeply to her heart, first the girl, then the boy, then both of them together. “I am so sorry to have been gone all this time!” she cried. “I have missed you so much, I love you, I love you!”
They pulled away, all resisting elbows and eyebrows raised in surprise.
“Gone?” they said. “Gone where? We saw you yesterday. You brought us cinnamon cookies in bed.”
; “Bah, Your Highness, but that is ba-a-a-d, ba-a-a-d for their tee-ee-eeth,” chided Nanny Nanny, who likewise did not seem astonished to see her.
Stunned, she turned, looked around her. Everything was exactly as she had left it a year before, and she, too, seemed exactly the same as the day she had set out on her glorious adventure, down to her ladybug slippers and her blue parasol (although she thought it had been of a slightly brighter shade). The children paid her no attention. She lingered in the nursery for another minute, then kissed them on the tops of their heads, one blond, one chestnut, and, frowning, left for the tower where Archibald the Clockmaker lived next to his brother, Arbadac the Bumbler.
The winding stairs were long and narrow, with a great many landings. She leaned the parasol (decidedly, decidedly, of a lighter color now!) against the wall at the bottom and began to climb. By the time she reached the third landing, she had forgotten the boat of the otherworldly moon and the little gray man with his cabbages. The gypsy grandmother with the braids spun from the eternal night vanished on the fifth, the gypsy thief’s peppery kiss faded on the seventh. The beekeeper with his soft burr of an accent and someone else’s face was the last to cling to the edges of her recollections, but at last he, too, slipped into oblivion, and by the time she knocked on Arbadac’s door on the seventeenth landing, she was fully certain—and it was quite plausibly the truth of the matter—that only one hour had passed since she had finished correcting the scrawny orphan’s orthography lesson.
(“Master Archibald’s brother is a magician,” the boy, who was the clockmaker’s assistant, had told her. “He can sure do magic. When he’s in his cups, he likes to set all the cogs of the clock dancing. Master Archibald gets horribly mad.”
And he had giggled.
“Now, why haven’t I thought of him before,” she had said to herself. “I’ll go speak to him after we get done with this lesson.” And, forcing herself to focus: “Write down, please: ‘dressmaker,’ ‘thief,’ ‘cabbage,’ ‘destiny.’ No, dear, ‘cabbage’ has two bees. I mean, two bs. Oh, this is making me sleepy, I’d better lie down for a bit before going up to the tower.”)
After her seventh, rather impatient knock, the door flew open abruptly. From the dimness of the stairwell, she squinted at the tall, lean man who wobbled on the threshold, his wispy hair aflame with the sun setting in the windows behind him. But the light had an odd, fragmented quality to it, and she heard a soft flapping sound, as of hundreds of insect wings beating at once. Just then, sure enough, a stupendous yellow butterfly brushed past her face and sailed majestically out of sight around the curve of the staircase, and another, and three more.
“They’re escaping, they’re escaping!” Arbadac cried, and before she could collect her wits enough to reply, he pulled her inside and slammed the door shut behind them. She blinked. The chamber shone, tinkled, and flittered. Brilliant sunlight filled hundreds of potion bottles, crystal balls, and specimen jars with many-colored radiance, odd spindly-legged instruments clicked and clacked, and a thick swarm of butterflies drifted through the air. Immediately a full dozen were quivering in her sleeves, tickling her neck, stirring in her hair.
“Is this a bad time?” she asked weakly.
“How’s that? Oh. No. No, everything’s fine.” Arbadac’s eyes were the color of fog and had a perennially dreamy look. “It’s only that I’m not entirely sure where these pests came from, you see, so it’s best to keep them all in here. Just in case, yes. Still, no harm done, thank goodness, not like the other month, Archie was most unhappy, he so dislikes untidiness and explosions, and that hole in the ceiling was a hassle to repair . . . Well. What can I do for you, Your Highness? May I offer you some tea? The cups often turn furry, but it tastes perfectly fine, I assure you.”
She refused the offer with hasty courtesy and told him about the prince’s enchantment. While she talked, he drifted about, waving butterflies away, his robes floating and billowing around him, his gaze abstracted; she had a distinct feeling that he was not listening to a word she said. When she finished, she looked at him with scant expectation. She was, in truth, feeling rather forlorn.
“Can you help break the spell, then?”
“The spell?” he said, stopping sharply and turning to her with a surprised look. “Ah, yes. The spell. Of course. Yes. Do you know who placed it?”
She had to confess she did not.
“I suppose it could be anyone,” Arbadac proclaimed in his airy voice. “All royals are like lightning rods for curses. Well, but you don’t really need to know the culprit. What you need is to weave a shirt.”
There was a brief pause filled with the beating of wings.
“A . . . shirt?” she asked, faintly.
“A shirt. Give it to your husband on the anniversary of your wedding day. When he puts it on, the spell will be over.”
He beamed at her.
She spat out a butterfly and looked at him wildly.
“And . . . that’s it?”
“That’s it. Except.” His smile vanished. He pressed his hands to his forehead and stood restlessly rippling his fingers as though trying to summon a melody on the harpsichord of his memory, likely somewhat out of tune. “Ah. Yes. The shirt must be woven out of bluebells. No, that doesn’t sound quite . . . Not bluebells . . . nettles. Yes, a shirt out of nettles.”
“Nettles? Are you quite sure?”
“Yes. And you can’t talk or laugh the entire time you’re weaving it, not until the prince puts it on. Silence is of the essence. If you speak even one word, you must unravel everything and start over.”
“Oh.”
“And you must weave it only by the light of the full moon. Or in the hour before sunrise.” He was gathering momentum now, speaking quickly, his fingers tap-tap-tapping against his forehead, his dreamy eyes gleaming with bursts of inspiration. “And only on Mondays. Though Tuesdays are probably fine, too. Yes. You do need to mind the buttons, of course.”
“Buttons?” Her nerves were so taut with her spirits rising and falling by turn that she felt they might snap. “Oh, please, what buttons?”
“But the buttons are the most important part! When you weave the shirt, you must think about the happy years you and your husband had together. Before he was under the spell, do you see, when he was still himself. Sew on a button for each true year, and he will be restored to his true self when he wears the shirt on his birthday.”
“On our wedding anniversary, you mean.”
“What? Yes, yes, the anniversary, of course . . . You only get one chance at breaking the spell, mind, so you have to get everything right the first time. But as long as you do, I don’t see why it shouldn’t work, really. May I interest you in some tea?”
Hope palpitated in her heart with the hundredfold motion of soaring butterflies, and desperate to keep it alive, she declined, once again, the distinctly furry teacup he was holding out to her, thanked him, and ran out the door and down the winding stairs, yellow wings trembling in her hair, just as he was saying: “You might, of course, consider adding the tincture of . . .”
* * *
• • •
That very evening, she discovered that bunches of nettles were to be had in the kitchens (the head cook favored herbal soups), and she started on the shirt without delay. Her hands were soon covered in blisters, but she did not complain, because she was not in the habit of complaining, and also because she had now ceased to speak altogether, just as instructed. She had wondered how she would explain her precipitous silence, yet no one appeared to notice. Prince Roland never came near her, the old king had grown quite feeble and was napping his days away, Angie was currently answering all her own questions, Ro seemed satisfied with her mere presence in the nursery while he staged epic battles between forks and spoons, servants found her a perfect mistress who smiled and nodded at all their requests, and Brie and Nibbles had recently befriended a family of field
mice and left the palace, possibly for good.
(By now, most of the mice had gone. Heady delights of philosophy had failed to sustain them for long, for they soon discovered that puzzling over the meaning of life seemed inversely related to their enjoyment of it: many of their best minds had grown weak from wrestling with the longer words, not a few had died of existential despair, and one sad morning, the most learned mouse of them all was found flat as a pancake, apparently crushed by the weight of her knowledge. As for the vicarious thrills of the arts, it transpired that there were only so many ways to eat a chunk of cheese shaped like a cat. In a desperate bid to restore the flagging enthusiasm for his work, Gouda the artist abandoned realism and began to add outlandish trunks, horns, tentacles, wings, and warts to his cheese sculptures until his new creations looked so revolting he simply could not bring himself to eat them without retching; and his digestive issues aside, after this infusion of the fantastic and the arbitrary into his themes, the powerful yet simple message behind his early masterpieces—the unequivocal triumph of good over evil—was hopelessly obscured. Eventually even his most devoted fans turned away from him, disappointed, and once the smell of moldy gouda grew unbearable, a youngster named Tuft gathered a few of his adolescent friends, all equally disenchanted with higher pursuits, and led a bloodless raid on Gouda’s studio, where they did away with visual arts once and for all.
After that, intoxicated by their success and meeting no resistance—even Gouda appeared relieved—Tuft and his cheering army abolished education, manners, abstract thinking, cutlery, all other kinds of thinking, and much of the vocabulary. Mice should be mice, they shouted gleefully to anyone willing to listen. Their days were short, and they should not waste them lazing about in sunless holes of stone, frightening each other silly with Unnatural Ideas and oohing and aahing over wantonly ruined cheese. No, they should go back to nature and be what they always had been—happy mindless creatures who smelled flowers and one another’s behinds, ran through the rain, flexed their muscles, squeaked their animal joys to the skies. And the mice liked what they heard, for it spoke to something deep and furry within them, and they abandoned the palace in droves. Only the aging professor of Human Studies worried about leaving the princess, out of some obscure loyalty he himself had trouble explaining—unbeknownst to him, he was the last surviving descendant of Brie the First on his mother’s side and Nibbles the First on his father’s; but after a full day of observing her from under her bed, he concluded that mice were not meant to understand the doings of men and that he, too, should follow the call of the wild and revert to a fierce woodland beast, leaving the incomprehensible woman with a sad face to sit alone in her stuffy room and absurdly persist in stinging her fingers with nettles.)