Cat in Glass

by Nancy Etchemendy

  Bot was old, and his hands too gnarled for proper cobbling, so Joth did the fine work while Bot cut leather and cajoled his customers. Jacinth ordered a pair of tall leather boots from him, finished with beeswax to keep out the cold and damp.

  “I’ll be walking a long way,” she said as Bot measured her. “Sometimes through deep mud and sometimes over rocks.”

  She looked up and saw Joth watching her as he worked at his last, one eyebrow raised. Her heart quickened with fear and excitement at the thought of the task she was about to undertake.

  At last the appointed morning arrived. In the chill light of dawn, Jacinth dressed carefully, as she imagined a knight might dress before battle, pale and filled with the need to trust something larger than herself, a set of rules, a ritual made right by centuries of practice. She tugged the new boots over her calves, slipped the dirk through her belt and the quiver over her shoulders. Then she knotted a bag of journey bread at her hip, took up her bow, and started down the road to Aranho, looking neither right nor left.

  By the time she reached the village, a crowd of young men had already gathered in the square, all laughter and nerves in the first copper light of the sun. As she approached, a hush fell over them. The muscles of her stomach tightened as she waited to see what would happen.

  “What are you doing here, one-eye, dressed up as if you were a man?” asked one of them.

  Jacinth fought the old fury and pain as she replied quietly, “I am walking with you to the forest.”

  Several of the young men cried out at once. “But you can’t! … But you’re a woman! … You have no right to join in the lily hunt!”

  Jacinth laid her hand on her dirk. “I have a right to walk wherever I please, whenever I choose. And if any of you think otherwise, then I invite you to stop me, at the expense of your own blood or mine.”

  A low muttering rippled through the crowd, and Jacinth tightened her grip on the dirk.

  At that moment, a clear voice cut across the morning air, as sharp as the cry of a meadowlark. There stood the high elder of Aranho, a man who was old long before Jacinth or the lily hunters had been born. He rested withered hands on thin hips and said, “Who among you ever offered her a lily?”

  Silence fell on the crowd once more as men looked away across the fields or watched their own feet shuffling uneasily in the dust. No one answered.

  “Then none of you has the right to stop her,” he said, standing squarely, like a battle-scarred hound who is well aware of his own strength. After a moment, he squinted at Jacinth and smiled through his wrinkles. She nodded her thanks.

  Without another word, the young men made way for her, and she took her place among them. She stood as straight and tall as she could, resisting the urge to paw the ground like a nervous horse as she waited for the procession to begin. Neither did she turn her head, searching for particular faces in the growing crowd of spectators, as some did. Her cheeks burned, for she knew how she must stand out among the sturdy hunters. She imagined the citizens of Aranho whispering about her, snickering behind their hands, as they had done so many times before.

  Though it seemed to her that hours passed, the sun was still low in the sky when the march began at last. They headed east, toward the sea and the deep forests.

  As they approached the last stone cottage before the village gates, she heard someone call her name. From the grassy verge beside the road, her sister Wynna waved, children clinging to her skirts as Jacinth had clung to her own mother’s skirts long years before. Beside her stood Joth, looking tall and strong in spite of the crutches tucked under his arms. Jacinth slowed her vigorous pace and blinked, for in all the years she had known him, Joth had never gone to watch a lily hunt begin.

  “Good luck!” called Wynna.

  Jacinth raised her hand to return Wynna’s greeting, but her gaze never left Joth’s face. He was smiling, and the smile illuminated him as if the day’s soft yellow sun had risen from the horizon of his own heart. Its light crept into every corner of her, no matter how deep the shadows, and courage came with it.

  “I’ll be back soon,” she cried. “I promise you!”

  Then the tide of marching hunters swept her up, and the journey began in earnest.

  They followed the road toward the east, traveling across grassy plains that ran unbroken for miles and miles. For two nights, Jacinth camped alone, ahead of the others. They would have nothing to do with her once the high elder had been safely left in the distance. On the first day’s march, some of them made a game of throwing pebbles at her so that she was forced to choose between endless small bruises and solitude. In her pride and pain, she took advantage of the fine boots Joth had made for her and strode ahead smiling grimly while the strong young men of Aranho trudged along on tired and blistered feet. A bitter satisfaction filled her, for she had been forced to accept solitude many times over in her life. It was nothing new to her. No matter, she thought, as she lay beside her small fire. She tried to dream only of Joth and the lilies, but the night songs of toads and owls pounded down on her like cold, lonely rain, and she cried in her sleep, her fingers clenched white around the handle of her dirk. For it did matter. It mattered as much as it always had.

  Jacinth knew nothing specific about where the lilies might be found. She suspected that some of the other hunters had received instructions from those who had gone before. But even if that was true, none of them would have shared such manly secrets with a woman—particularly one so proud and hideous. She knew only that lilies favored damp, shady places, loamy ground near bogs or the margins of deep forest ponds. She knew also that the forests lay in the low hills that separated the meadowlands from the eastern sea. When the hunters began their march from Aranho, the wooded coastal hills lay far off in the blue distance. But every day they grew closer, until on the third morning the faint smells of leaf mold and pitch and the vast, wet sea awakened Jacinth from her troubled sleep.

  She sat up at once, sniffing the air. The sun had just risen. Birds twittered sleepily, and somewhere in the shadowy grass a cricket still chirped. She looked into the windless sky, and eagerness surged through her as she realized that before this day was over she might well be holding a lily in her own hands. She scrambled into her boots, picked up her weapons, and started down the road.

  Before noon, the road had become a narrow path among tall, leafy trees. Jacinth sat down to rest a moment. She wondered whether to follow the road until it disappeared entirely or strike out on her own. The thought of leaving the traveled way frightened her, for she had never been in a real forest before. Strange, bright flowers pushed up through the carpet of fallen leaves and needles; shining beetles crept over the rocks. She did not know what animals might lurk among the trees.

  Suddenly, as if fierce bears and wild pigs had leapt from her mind into the woods, she heard the sharp snap of a dry twig.

  She jumped up, drawing her dirk, and found herself staring into the grimy face of a lily hunter. His fair hair stood up in dusty spikes, and the lines of dirt around his mouth flowed into an arrogant grin.

  “You slept too late, one-eye,” he said, hooking his thumbs into his belt. “My friends and I will take all the lilies, and well be on our way back to Aranho before you even know where to look. Then maybe you’ll understand your place in the world.”

  Jacinth’s heart sank like a rock tossed carelessly into an icy stream. The long winters of lonely weaving washed over her, and she thought of the unfinished tapestry, of returning to Joth empty-handed and broken beyond saving.

  The young hunter must have seen the terror in her face, for he leaned back and roared with ugly laughter. “That’s what you get!” he shouted jubilantly. “That’s what you get for trampling the old laws!”

  She stared at the dirk in her hands, its cool blade gleaming in the sunlight. The old laws! a voice inside her screamed. The laws that say there is no place for a one-eyed weaver or a cobbler with one leg! In her fury she grasped the blade and crushed it until she felt the
metal bite through her palm. Blood ran in scarlet rivulets down her wrist.

  Through a haze of pain and passion, Jacinth watched the young hunter turn and swagger off down the path, his shoulders still jumping with laughter.

  “I make my own roads!” she cried. “I make my own roads!”

  But if he heard her at all, he gave no sign of it.

  She sat down on a flat stone and bound her hand as well as she could with a strip she tore from the hem of her shirt. After a time, the anger and trembling left her. A cold, desperate courage replaced it. Let the menfolk of Aranho seek lilies where they always had! The woods were thick and huge and full of places where no human being had ever walked before. She would find her own lilies, or she would die in the attempt. She stood up, straightened her back, and plunged into the forest.

  She followed the contours of the land ever upward, leaving a trail for herself by cutting notches into the tree trunks at regular intervals. The farther she went into the woods, the larger the trees became, and the thicker the undergrowth. Spiral ferns snatched at her arms and legs, and bloated insects stung her face. She tripped over roots and waded through thick, slimy mud. She tried not to notice the eerie cries and thrashings of the unknown creatures around her, tried to ignore the swollen fungi that sprang up in rank profusion on the damp forest floor.

  Late in the afternoon, when dusk had already descended around her, she came to a place where the land sloped down in all directions. She stood at the base of an ancient maple tree and turned slowly. She had arrived at the crest of a hill. Yet the trees were so tall and closely spaced that she could see nothing, so she laid down her bow and set about climbing the maple.

  Its trunk was almost as big around as her father’s largest millstone, and the branches hung far above her head. But the maple had stood in the forest for many long years, and its bark was thick and full of ridges. By stretching and straining and planting her supple boots carefully in these small footholds, she gained the lowest branch. Higher and higher she climbed until at last she stood erect in leafy sunlight far above the other trees. She clung to the branches for a moment, giddy with the view that spread below her. As the sun sank lower and the land cooled, a spicy wind flowed out of the forest toward the sea, which lay like a bolt of blue-gray satin on the eastern horizon. The trees marched down to it, thronging over the hills until they reached the broad, white shore.

  A valley lay at the southeastern foot of her vantage point. The valley cradled just what Jacinth had hoped to find—a small, glassy lake, fringed on one side by a marsh. Loons flew above it in profusion, making ready for the night. Their laughing cries floated up whenever the wind dropped. Jacinth’s blood sang like the strings of a well-tuned harp. The land, the sea, the wind spoke to her like old friends, and she knew deep within her that if she could reach that lake, she would find the key to a new life for herself and Joth; she would finish the tapestry and pluck it from her loom in jubilation at last. She took one last worried glance at the sinking sun, then scurried down the tree and trotted off through the dusky undergrowth toward the southeast.

  She knew full well that she oughtn’t travel at night, but she was loath to camp in the closeness of the forest, which clung to her and made her feel as if she walked through invisible cobwebs. She ached to reach the lake and the wide sky above it. As the light waned, color seeped out of the woods until at last Jacinth saw only gray shapes everywhere, some deeper in shadow than others. Huge dusty moths flew out of the ferns as she passed. Mist hovered near the ground. She stumbled frequently, splashed through hidden puddles, and stirred up ashlike swarms of stinging insects. At first she slapped at them, but there were far too many. Before long, her face was swollen and tender from their venom. Still, she pushed on with as much speed as she darèd, stopping only to cut marker notches in the trees, for there were noises everywhere in the brooding darkness around her. Wherever the forest drew back enough to admit the sky, she saw the first stars twinkling. Sometimes she heard the calls of the loons as they flapped across the violet evening to the safety of the lake. Just a little farther, she thought. And she forced herself onward.

  Though she could not yet see the lake, she could already smell its rank dampness, hear the splash of fish and loons on its wide surface, when she realized that something was tracking her. She stood still and listened. In the underbrush to her right, leaves crackled for an instant, then stopped. Jacinth felt her blood, like hot oil, surging through her knees and wrists, boiling in her throat and in the knife cuts on her hand. She took the bow from her shoulders and nocked an arrow slowly, as if in a long, uncomfortable dream. She squinted into the darkness, straining to discern the creature that must be lurking there. With only one eye, she was not certain that she could hit her target even if she could see it. Images of huge black bears and slavering wolves leapt through her mind. The bow and the ashwood arrow trembled in her hands as if they had nerves of their own. The woods seemed choked with the silence of waiting. Then she heard it again—the crackle of dead leaves under the weight of something large.

  She whirled blindly toward the sound. Almost with surprise, she heard the twang of her bowstring, felt the sting of the wobbly arrow as its shaft and stiff feathers rushed past her left wrist. With a sharp thunk the arrow hit something substantial—either tree trunk or bone. It shivered musically in its unseen mark.

  From the deep shadows came a cry of indrawn breath. And an instant later a quavering voice called, “Don’t! Don’t kill me! I’m alone.”

  Jacinth lowered her bow in astonishment. “Show yourself,” she shouted into the gloom, half relieved and half furious.

  With great crashing and crackling, a man emerged from among the trees. By the light of the stars and the rising moon, she could see that he held his hands out at his sides, palms up and empty. When he stood within a few steps of her, she recognized him as the arrogant lily hunter who had confronted her on the road. He had no arrow in him.

  “I’m … I’m sorry,” he stammered. “I … we’ve found hardly any lilies where the elders told us to look. Only two or three. There’s not enough food. The hunting’s been bad, and today a bear killed the baker’s son. It was my idea to follow you. Because of what you said … that you make your own roads. I thought … I thought you might …”

  His voice trailed off into self-conscious silence. By the faint, cold light of the moon, she saw that he was nearly weeping with fatigue. His face and hands were covered with dark scratches, and mud smeared his clothes.

  Jacinth stared at him dumbfounded. She felt as she had when, as a child, Noa had blindfolded her and forced her to walk across a narrow, bouncing plank. They were playing in the rafters of the mill. Noa told her that the plank stretched high above the grinding stones, and that if Jacinth slipped, she would fall to a grisly death. Jacinth had started across the plank, her knees quaking and fear clawing at her insides like a wild animal. Midway she had fallen, and in the moments after she realized that Noa had lied, that the plank was only a few hands above the floor, she had felt just as she did now—betrayed, foolish, and ashamed of her gullibility.

  All her life she had revered the lily hunt, connecting it with the mystery of that summer dusk when Sten had come for Wynna, attributing to it all the magic of hard-earned passage from a child’s thralldom into the independence of maturity. But now the blindfold was ripped away. So this was the lily hunt! The old men of the village told the young men exactly where the prizes were to be found and what to expect along the way. If it had ever been a true test of courage and resourcefulness, it was no longer. The brave lily hunter who stood before her was just a boy, whining because he’d had an unexpected taste of manhood and didn’t like the flavor. If he found a lily tomorrow, he would think of it as something he deserved, and probably sulk because it hadn’t come more easily. If he ever became a man, what happened in these woods would have precious little to do with it.

  Like a cave dweller who has climbed up through bleak caverns and seen the sun for the first t
ime rising at her door, Jacinth now realized that the thing she sought had been there all along. She had convinced herself that without the flower talisman, she could never be a woman. She had spent her life in bitter longing because her peers had judged her by her eyeless cheek and found her wanting, and so, she thought, withheld from her the thing she desired most. All along, the lily had been inside her. And Joth, dear Joth, who had always known, waited patiently while she found her own road to it.

  In the forest night, Jacinth threw back her head and laughed, more freely and joyously than she ever had before. The lily hunter shuffled his feet and watched her nervously as if she had gone mad, which only made her laugh even more. Her ribs ached, and her voice was hoarse by the time she stopped.

  She smiled at the disheveled young man and shook her head. “All right then. If you’d like, we can share a fire tonight,” she said, wiping the tears of mirth from her eye.

  She looked up into the starry sky. “Do you see those loons?” she asked. “They live on the lake that lies just ahead of us. Stand still a moment and you can hear the water lapping at its banks. It’s the kind of place where lilies are likely to grow. I plan to camp there.”

  Without another word, she turned and started through the dark woods again. The young hunter breathed deeply, dragged the back of his hand across his forehead, and trotted after her.

  Before another hour had passed, the trees suddenly gave way to open meadow. Jacinth stood at the edge of the clearing, silenced by its beauty. The stars and the full moon hung like pearls in the deep sky. The surface of the lake shivered with cool light. Loons laughed softly from the safety of the cattails, and frogs and crickets warmed the night with their songs. But most wonderful of all were the lilies.