Sourdough and Other Stories

by Angela Slatter

  ***

  He came one evening as spring danced in on the breeze and I sat at the north window, taking in the velvet of the sky. I saw him ride out of the woods and stop, stunned at the sight of the tower. When he had dismounted and tethered his horse near the briar patch, he approached and found the door unlocked.

  I waited for him to reach the top of the stairs, unsure what to do. Malkin was glued to my ankles like a guardian.

  The torchlight caught in his red-gold hair, and flickered on the gold tassels of his princely attire. He was a good deal taller than I and he smiled as he took in my pale oval face, and the black river of hair that hung straight and glossy down my back.

  ‘This place was once my father’s,’ he said.

  ‘He cheated a wise woman,’ I replied. He scowled.

  ‘A witch.’

  ‘Not a witch. No more than your father was an honest man.’

  He glared but said no more. His eyes roamed the room and I thought how it must seem to him, raised in wealth, and how it seemed to me, born in poverty. That which shone here must be to him tarnished, old, to be thrown aside as worthless; to me it was a treasure, a piece of sunlight caught and held in a solid object, to be kept safe. How must I appear to him? Dress made of twenty different fabrics, hand-stitched carefully, slowly; face and feet bare of any decoration, hands those of a girl who had scrubbed the very stones to claim them, not the hands of a princess. To him I must look like a gypsy playing at lady.

  How did he seem to me? He was golden, royalty and richness incarnate. He was at ease, as if he belonged in my home. The thought made me angry.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘Who are you, maiden in the tower, so fair and fierce, who smells so sweet?’

  ‘Rapunzel,’ I answered reluctantly.

  ‘Little radish,’ he laughed, not meanly. Still, it enraged me, and I threw myself at him, a hissing, spitting mess of hair, teeth and nails.

  It started with rage. At some point it was no longer a battle: it was clothing peeled away, skin sliding on skin, flesh against flesh and then flesh in flesh. Finally it was sighs and screams and sobs and a pleasant ache that demanded it all be done again.

  In the end it was love, or so I thought.

  ***

  He stayed with me a month. I still remember the taste of him then, like the freshest of sap from a stalk of spring grass. I remember the feel of him, and all the things I learnt straddling his lap or writhing beneath him.

  I remember how the silence was no longer desired; as long as there was the sound of his voice, the touch of his skin, the salt of his sweat, the world was perfect. I could not believe that I had sought solitude when there was this sweetness, this honey, to be had in the company of another.

  He told me tales of his family and his travels. I did not hear the utterances of a young man obsessed with himself and his own doings, I did not hear the hint of selfishness in his every word; all I heard were the tones of my love. I thought, stupid girl that I was—stupid, silent girl—that I was important to him. That I was of the same abiding importance to him as he was to me.

  Then, one day, he announced it was time for him to leave. He had tarried long enough in my presence and must go back to his princely duties. He would visit me, of course, when he had both time and inclination. I was to lock the door after him and never let another man near, for I was the property of royalty now.

  He finished dressing, finished speaking, and stood, silhouetted against the sky in my north window. I was naked, angry, sinuous as a snake. I launched myself at him and pushed hard.

  I don’t know if I meant for him to fall, to tip over the windowsill, to tumble down and land in the briar patch. My mind still strays away from looking too closely at that. He broke no bones but his eyes were put out by the thorns. He cried for help but I would not answer.

  I watched him from the window; a fury perched on the sill. His horse came to his aid. He mounted the beast and set off between the trees.

  It took a long time for my tears to fall, but when they came, they came with a vehemence that threatened to unhinge me.

  ***

  Men searched for me.

  I had hidden the tower, and would watch them, my eyes hungry. I thought perhaps he might come himself, but that was a wish made of cobwebs.

  My days were spent in a silence that was no longer a comfort. I would sit at a window, my hand smoothing my growing belly, listening for the second heartbeat that thumped in time with my own, listening to the spaces between my breaths for something I did not understand. Listening for a new noise, a noise that would remind me of him, a noise I sought no matter how much it hurt.

  Malkin was constant even though I was not pleasant-tempered. Now I wished he could talk, would talk, but he remained silent, still as stone. I’d wake in the night, heavy and sweating, my belly aching along with my heart, feeling myself utterly alone, but Malkin was always there, flush against me, not even a breath between his fur and my skin. I remember reaching out and burying my fingers in the softness of his coat, comforted for a brief while.

  It seemed the child would never come and, when he finally began to move, he took three days. The pain was immense and I hoped I would die. Finally, I crawled to the shelf and sent the raven to fetch its mistress.

  She arrived, black and feathered, shaking her head over my swollen, infected form. Sybille fed me brews and possets, applied compresses to my brow and stroked my belly gently to coax the child out. By then there was, I thought, no pain that I had not suffered. I was numb to everything as my body rebelled against me and the child. Sybille tried her best, brought all her skill, invoked all the powers she knew.

  The baby died, caught too long between its mother’s body and the air it needed.

  The old woman took him away without letting me see. She cleaned off the blood and got rid of the cord, wrapped him in soft white wool and placed him in a small crystal chest she’d rummaged from somewhere. Sybille made him ageless; he would not decay and diminish before his mother’s eyes. I would need to see him, she said, when the time came.

  For the first month I could not bear to look. I threw a shawl over the chest and pushed it to the far side of the room. Over the weeks, though, I began to glance to the dark curve of the wall where my child lay. When spring again scented the air, the day came when I wanted to know his face.

  He looked like a doll, my son, a sleeping doll. I thought if I poked him gently he would wake and cry and seek my breast and all would be right. But he did not wake, nor cry, nor feed and nothing was right.

  ***

  Sybille went back to her cottage to check on things, staying away for longer and longer as I grew physically stronger. We would talk sometimes, to alleviate the now-hated silence, to draw the poison out of me. She did not condemn him, my prince, but suggested he was a product of his upbringing. Yes, he had been wrong to think me a toy to be played with and laid aside at whim. Yes, he had been selfish and foolish. But perhaps the loss of his sight had been punishment enough. Perhaps it had taught him things he would not otherwise have known. Perhaps he deserved knowledge of his son.

  People, said Sybille, were not meant to be alone. Men and women, women and women, men and men, all should find each other. Solitude was for those broken beyond repair.

  I looked hard at her.

  ‘I wasn’t always alone, little radish,’ she gentled me. ‘I had a husband for forty years, until three winters ago. Now he’s gone. My sons live nearby and they come to see me often. Did you think me an outcast, an old witch with no love nor need for it?’

  Yes, I had.

  ‘You sought the silence because it was easier than being with someone else. You’re a damaged creature in your own way. So is your prince.’ She reached out. ‘You’re not meant for silence, Rapunzel. Your babe isn’t meant for silence. You should go into the world. Be among life, not sitting here in a living death, with only your frozen child and a stone cat for company. This isn’t living, little radish.’

 
This time, when the tears came, they seemed to wash the poison away. I thought perhaps I might breathe again.

  ***

  With the child’s coffin strapped to my back, I walked until I found the edge of the forest and stepped into a wide field. Far behind me was the tower, left open and plain for all to see.

  I had never been anywhere that was not surrounded by trees. I had never seen such wide open space. I shook and felt sweat break out on my brow. But it was not entirely empty, I told myself. There was corn, green and lush, growing high. There was the path I must take, running alongside it. There were people on the road, walking, riding horses, plodding along in their drays and conveyances, heading toward the open gate in the city walls.

  A woman in a cart smiled down at me and offered a lift. I climbed gratefully up beside her and settled myself, the weight of the child heavy on my back. Her eyes kept flickering to my tapestried patchwork dress, and my face, with its bones washed clean by pain, my eyes dark and endless. She sensed, I think, something awry in me, an emptiness occasioned by hurt, a heart with a layer peeled back, a vacuum searching for something to curl inside it.

  To distract her, I asked about the prince. She smiled, happy to speak of him, although he was a prince no longer, his father having died over a year ago.

  The prince, blind for two years, king for one, had spent his time wisely.

  The wastrel had become a careful, considered young man. Where he had once laughed at the maimed, tormented the poor, spat on the beggars, he now bestowed kind words, placed alms in the bowls of those who asked, and built shelters for those who did not. His own terrible accident had turned his heart and mind toward better things.

  He could not see but employed an army of learned men to read for him and he took in their words, acquiring them by rote. Another cohort he employed to take down his thoughts: his scholarship had become known far and wide.

  ‘How,’ I asked, ‘can I find him?’

  He held an audience every Tuesday morning, tomorrow. My companion invited me to spend the night with her family. It was a great charity, in this city, to offer hospitality to travellers.

  In the late afternoon we rumbled through the main gate. After many turnings on the cobbled streets we stopped outside a tall, crooked building. I helped her unpack the wagon, and she showed me to a small room at the top of her house. When she left I unstrapped my burden and placed it gently on the bed. I pulled away a layer of cloth and stared at my son’s face. The door opened and my Samaritan burst in, a small girl at her skirts, words dying on her lips.

  Her eyes moved from the thing on the coverlet to my face and back again. She saw the cause of my emptiness and anguish, she saw how the hole had been made in me. She muttered an apology and backed out of the room.

  I did not stay there that night. It was easier to huddle in a stable, nestled in the straw, with only the horses to watch as I curled around the chest, crystal panes separating me from the flesh of my child.

  ***

  The audience was held in a great hall in the palace. I stood back, watching the supplicants come before him. Finally, when the hall was empty of all but the King and his short, round chamberlain, I stepped forward.

  The official raised his palms to tell me ‘no’, I was too late.

  The King’s head moved swiftly, his nostrils twitching. His hand reached out and pulled the man away. ‘Who are you, who smells so sweet, little radish?’ Useless eyes moved as if they could see me.

  He ordered the chamberlain to leave us, and the man did so, reluctantly. I had thought I would stay out of range, but the prince stretched forward to find me and caught at my arm. Though I expected pain, his touch was soft.

  ‘I sent men to find you,’ he said. ‘At first, it was to have you punished, later I just wanted you beside me.’

  ‘I’m sorry I hurt you. Forgive me,’ I whispered. His fingers flitted across my face, reached my eyes and gently caressed them, cleverly cupping the unbroken tears in his hands.

  ‘I cannot forgive you,’ he said, ‘when there is nothing to forgive. I did not truly see until my sight was gone, nor had I listened to my heart nor the hearts of others until my own had been wounded.’

  I put the casket in his hands.

  ‘If you can bear more pain,’ I said, ‘then know that this contains our child. He did not live long enough to breathe.’

  He wept and begged me to open it and let him hold our son, just once. I slipped the catch and our tears fell onto the soft still face. The King’s hands scooped the child up, to be held against his chest.

  The air around us moved, swarmed, something shifted, tore, then mended. Between our sobs, I heard something: a catch of breath in once-stilled lungs, a surprised gasp from a baby new to the world. Then a cry and my son began to wiggle and to wail.

  So live the blind king, his wounded wife, and their twice-born son.

  DIBBLESPIN

  INGRID knows the woods better than anyone except me. She recognises every tree, rock, leaf and can easily tell one from another. The thick underbrush parts quite willingly when she walks through, because it recognises her in return.

  ‘Dibblespin,’ she says, ‘things are moving in the forest.’

  ‘Things always move there,’ I reply.

  She shakes her head, silvery hair rippling like water. ‘Dark things. Something is awake. I hear wolves outside my garden at night.’

  ‘Not your mother?’

  Ingrid fears nothing in this place. She has lived there all her life. So did her parents and both sets of grandparents, who Ingrid says she sees sometimes, in new forms: Grandma Finkel is a squirrel; Grandpa Ezza is a bright-eyed bird with blue feathers; Grandma Pandy is the large toad who lives under the water barrel out back of the cottage; Grandpa Sidle is the tabby cat, spending his time by the hearth fire. Father is the dormouse who lives in the walls and her mother, Olwen (free of familial constraints) has become a grey-eyed wolf.

  ‘Never my mother at night.’ She hesitates. ‘They seem to sing, but not with wolf-voices. They sound like children.’

  For the first time, she is afraid. I can smell it on her skin; it seeps through the pores like sickness. She plays with the silver knife that hangs at her belt, its hilt shaped like a wolf’s head.

  I do not know what makes me ask again, but I say, ‘Your mother, Ingrid. Have you seen her?’

  She lowers her green eyes and lies when she answers, ‘No.’

  My sole inheritance from our father are my green eyes and bright red hair. From my mother came my large nose, heavy brow, harsh chin, flappy ears, long fingers, monstrously big feet and hunched shoulders. Needless to say my mother was not Ingrid’s mother. More than reason enough to hide from someone as beautiful as Ingrid, if she was not so kind—and more than reason enough to hide from Olwen.

  ***

  That night I sleep sweetly in the arms of an ancient oak, thick of trunk and sturdy of limb. The trees are so densely branched and close together that I can travel through the tree-tops, stepping lightly from bough to bough, and make a bed of them when I need to.

  I do not spend much time indoors. I do not like it. When my mother turned to stone (branches above broke and fell, letting sunlight pierce down like a lance to catch her on its point), I burned down her hut. I hated its dark corners and sour smells; nothing good ever happened to me there.

  Ingrid’s cottage was once in a clearing, but the years have encouraged the forest to grow back and Ingrid’s father and grandfathers had no inclination to argue. There is a small yard, a tiny garden, hedged in by young trees, not as much girth to them as the old ones, but trying hard to reach higher, grow wider. In the garden are all manner of flowers that bloom year-round to spite winter. The yellow ones keep the space around the cottage bright so the lack of sun doesn’t matter much. At night, they close their lovely faces and go to sleep.

  Ingrid knows eyes watch her from behind bushes and rocks, but it bothers her not at all. I like, sometimes, to simply observe my sister. She is so
beautiful; I do not look at my reflection in the stream or pond. I pretend we share the same face. She doesn’t call me ‘stinky’ or ‘dirty’ or ‘ugly’ or ‘troll’. When she smiles her teeth show straight and white; mine are snarled and yellowy.

  I wonder still what her father saw in my mother. Part witch, part troll-wife, she lived in the deepest part of the woods, where no sun shone at all and no blossoms grew to give light. He did not spend all his time in Ingrid’s cottage. For weeks at a time he would go into the city not far from here, with its great walls and imposing cathedral and neat palace, and live there. Perhaps he wandered on his journey, got lost, found the ramshackle hut the foul thing called home. Perhaps she threw an enchantment over him so he thought her palatable (if I am ugly, my mother was worse still). She let him go only when she knew he’d finally planted a seed. Nine months later I appeared, and Ingrid had a half-sister.

  Her grandparents died, one by one; then our father. I saw him only a few times in my life, never close enough to touch. When chopping wood, he missed the block and took off his foot. No one was around to help stem the flow of blood. Olwen wandered away the very next day, making her way among the trees until she was just a speck of dancing red, and then nothing at all. She came back six months later to drink from the rainwater barrel, but on four legs instead of two, and politely ate pieces of meat from Ingrid’s hand.

  ***

  I am woken by the scuffling and snuffling at the base of my tree. There is a low growl and I can hear claws determinedly trying to reach my perch.