The Wilful Eye

by Isobelle Carmody

  That night, she bade her mother let her sit in peace in the garden again, and when dusk ended, the little man appeared. She read her new list out, trying variations of names and even diminutives. But it was no, and no again and again. She was hoarse when the little man vanished after saying he would come back one last night, and if by then she had failed to learn his name, she must live up to her oath and willingly wed the king and bear him a child which must be given over as soon as it was weaned.

  Moth had no heart for hope after that, for her mind was awash with names, all of them said. She wept herself to sleep and when she woke, her pillow was so sodden that she knew she must have wept all night. She bathed her swollen eyes and nose and went out in the misty dawn. She went to see Dougal to ask if he had any new names, and after that, she would go through all the books in the house and get any names she had not said from them. She would ask every beast she met if they knew any human names. She told herself she must not give up hope.

  The day was ending when she was coming home with her final meagre list. Her feet were sore from walking from house to house and her throat was sore from asking names and her heart was sore from trying to pretend she was happy to be marrying the king. Tears trickled down her cheeks as she trudged along, but she brushed them away when she heard her own name called, and turned wearily. The dark-haired traveller came striding up and looked at her with consternation. ‘You have been crying.’

  She gave a soft laugh. ‘Someone once told me that my tears were magic, but they will not save me.’

  ‘I heard you have been seeking more names. I was away yesterday and this morning and I was coming to see you now,’ he said. He held out his arm and she took it.

  ‘Do you have more names for me?’

  ‘Just one,’ he said. ‘But now we must speak swiftly, for it is not long until dusk and then the little man will come to hear what you have found out and this is the last day.’

  ‘How do you know he will come at dusk?’

  ‘The bees told me,’ he said. ‘They told me all that you had whispered to them, and what they did not tell me, I learned from my father. The rest I figured out for myself, since I am a clever fellow.’

  Moth stared at him. ‘You can understand the bees?’

  ‘I can understand all beasts when I am in the shape of a beast.’

  ‘You are a shape-changer?’ asked Moth, distracted from her grief.

  The young man bowed. ‘I am only in human shape in the daytime. I hope that does not shock you. It is common enough in the mountains and even in Oranda, though there, the shape-changers prefer the forms of sea creatures. But it is not hereditary. My father and mother were not shape-changers, though my father’s brother is. Which brings me to the words I began to say when we met. I wanted to thank you for saving my father’s life.’

  Moth stared at him. Her mind leapt like a cat on a beetle. ‘The panther was your father!’

  He nodded. ‘The bats carried him as far as they could, but the further they went from the castle, the heavier his pelt became. Finally the pelt began to move and they realised with a shock that they were carrying a live panther. Luckily by that time they were flying very low, for they dropped him and fluttered away.’

  ‘But . . . he was . . . he said he had been killed and that it was enchantment that bound his spirit to his pelt,’ Moth cried.

  ‘So he believed, but in fact the enchantment was an illusion and when my father was far enough away from the king, the spell weakened and broke, so that he took on his true form.’

  ‘But why would the king create such an illusion?’

  ‘Because his appetite is for pain and my father suffered far more in that form than if he had simply been killed,’ said the young man. ‘He sent a cat to find me, for he had found out that I had come looking for him in the Middle Kingdom. He did not dare return for fear of being ensnared by the spell again. He told me you had saved him and bade me help you to escape the king. He did not trust the little man who had appeared twice to save you. I was coming to the palace when I heard that you had left it, and were going home to your parents. There was much gossip about the news that the king would wed you. It was not until the bees sang your secrets to me that I understood. I went back to consult with my father and then last night I went to the castle after I had transformed and I learned the king’s secret.’

  Moth noticed all at once that the sun had set and the moon was rising. There was a red flash and the little man stood before her, but the dark-haired young man was gone.

  ‘Tell me my name,’ the little man invited.

  Moth swallowed and spoke the names on her last list, one at a time, her mind racing. Then she felt a tickle in her ear and she heard a name whispered. She thought she must have misheard. She said to the little man, ‘Is your name Orabald?’ No. ‘Is your name Hedilbart?’ No. ‘Is your name Baltazar?’ No. The little man’s smile grew broader with each denial.

  Again the voice whispered a name. She shook her head, for it was impossible that this was the name of the little man, but the voice whispered it for a third time.

  Moth took a deep breath and said, ‘Is your name Rumpelstiltskin?’

  The little man uttered a shriek of rage and his cheeks grew red and redder as he danced from one foot to the other in fury. Then, just like that, spectacularly, horribly, he burst.

  ‘How did you know?’ asked Moth as they stared at the small burned patch on the great green meadow beside the village, that had once been the black stone palace of the king. It was day now, and the young man had resumed his human form.

  ‘I suspected the king’s magic was all illusion from the way the spell over my father weakened and then broke when he got away from the palace,’ said the young man. ‘A real spell is not dependent on being close to its maker. The magic for an illusion must be continually worked. ’

  ‘But how did you know about the name?’

  ‘It was the only answer, once I saw the king transform into the little man. If they were one and the same, they must have the same name. Of course the stunted little man was the true form of the king and all else was wrought upon that first illusion that made him tall and handsome. The castle and the halls. The straw that was spun into gold of course. And when you spoke his name, it all exploded.’

  ‘It never occurred to me for a second to say the king’s name,’ Moth said. ‘You saved me.’ She gave him a shy smile. ‘How can I thank you?’

  ‘You owe me nothing, for not only did you save my father, you saved yourself with your kindness to him and by your courage and the steadfastness of your hope,’ said the young man. He gave her a sidelong look out of his dark green eyes. ‘You know the village want you to be their queen now.’

  Moth laughed. ‘What silliness! They have no need of a king or a queen. Besides, I have had enough of palaces and royalty.’

  The young man gave an exaggerated heartfelt sigh. ‘That is a pity, for I was about to tell you that my father is the brother of the Mountain King, which makes me a prince. I meant to ask you to wed me but it seems there is no hope for me.’

  She smothered a smile. ‘Well, perhaps a prince would be bearable if he sometimes can become a butterfly or a bird or a wolf.’

  ‘Indeed you would be the perfect wife for such a prince, since you will always understand him,’ said the prince, and they both laughed, but then their laughter died and they looked at one another gravely. ‘Could you love me, Moth?’ asked the prince. ‘I was half in love with you even before we met and before you saved my father’s life, for the bees and the birds and the horses sang your name and your praises to me. I came to your house that first day to sell hair ornaments purely in the hope of getting a glimpse of you.’

  ‘I will love you,’ she answered simply; ‘I do,’ and stopped his mouth with a kiss.

  Moth and her shape-changing prince left the Middle King- dom that afternoon, with only a note left behind to tell her parents she had fallen in love with an unsuitable man, and was eloping to spare t
hem any shame. She loved them, she wrote, and bade them be happy.

  There were many rumours in the wake of her departure and in the wake of the mysterious destruction of the castle. It was said by some that a wicked sorcerer had slain the king and destroyed the castle before stealing his bride and turning her into a bird in a cage until a prince should rescue her. One popular story claimed a dwarf had helped Moth pass the tests set by the king, in exchange for a promise of her first child unless she could speak his name, for all remembered Moth’s frantic quest for names. In that story, a servant overheard the dwarf singing his name gleefully, though no one could give a sensible reason why he would do that when keeping his name secret was his only hope of winning his prize. Other tales said the king himself had been wicked and the little man a hero who had burned the king and his palace with a spell before turning into a handsome prince who had swept Moth away to his fairy kingdom in the clouds. In some versions of that story, the king turned out to be a merman and Moth was given a tail so she could swim in the sea with him and live happily ever after. In other stories the king had died heroically to vanquish the wicked little man and, heartbroken, Moth crept away in everlasting sorrow to live in a hovel in one of the lands beyond the sea. Some foolish people must have a tragedy, for they cannot believe in happy endings.

  Contrary to the popular notion that fantasy is an escape from reality, every story I write must enable me to explore life questions that interest me. The whole point of writing a story is to allow myself to find out what I think, all the more so when the story I am about to write is to be inspired by a fairytale, for these old tales express themselves and work most strongly through the subconscious. For that reason, I wanted to choose a fairytale that plucked deep chords within me.

  Rumpelstiltskin was among the fairytales that resonated, though it was not first on my list. But the thing about writing is that no matter how good and clear your intentions, how deep and brilliant your aims, a story can live or die in the main character or, more importantly, in the voice of the main character. For me, finding that voice is profoundly important. I set aside one fairytale after another because none of the voices was vivid or visceral or original enough to captivate me, so how would it ever capture a reader? The first person who must be interested in a piece is its creator.

  Finally I came to Rumpelstiltskin. The thing that always struck me about this fairytale was the unfairness of it. I felt this dissatisfaction again when I read the original. Indeed the strength of my irritation told me the story was definitely getting to me.

  I read the story closely.

  The girl who is the main character – the miller’s daughter in more than one version – is surrounded by knaves. Her father lies about her being able to spin gold from straw in order to win himself prestige. He must be a fool as well as a liar to lie to the king. That the mother does not protest means she is weak or foolish or under the thumb of her husband, or that she does not care for her daughter. She is not a character who features in the original, but the weakness of mothers and the effect this has on daughters and their characters is territory I often visit, and doubt I will ever exhaust.

  The fact that the father is a liar and risks his daughter interested me too, because whatever my own father’s failings, he died when I was too young to see him as anything but a hero. So while as a woman grown I recognise his flaws, the little girl in me forgives him everything. The father in the story may be many things but his daughter will go on loving him and her mother both, while fully aware of their weaknesses.

  These thoughts were beginning to form the character of the girl.

  The king in the story is a proud, greedy man who locks the girl in a room full of straw and commands her to spin it into gold as her father boasted she could do, or her head will be chopped off. Caught between the stupidity of her father and the greed of the king, if greed it is, the girl is helpless. She would not be helpless, I reflected, if she denounced her father as a liar, but she would no more consider this than I considered not letting my father in after my mother locked him out when he came home late after a night’s drinking. So the girl in the story is morally superior to her father and the king, because she will not appease one by sacrificing the other. In fact, her moral superiority is the reason she is helpless.

  The third man who appears in the story – Rumpelstiltskin – offers to help the girl spin the straw into gold, but at a price. There is a slyness to the dwarf, for the bargain he strikes is to spin the straw into gold for a trinket worn by the hapless girl. But if Rumpelstiltskin can spin straw into gold, what need has he of a trinket? His true desire is concealed. The fact that the girl does not wonder at the dwarf’s motives might suggest that foolishness runs in the family, but I felt my character was desperate rather than foolish: the alternative to accepting his proposal is, after all, beheading. Naturally the king’s greed is inflamed by the girl’s apparent success, so he commands her to spin a ballroom full of straw into gold.

  At this point I wondered whether the king had believed all along that the miller’s daughter could spin straw into gold. I assumed that he had not believed it to begin with, which meant he had summoned the daughter in order to expose the father’s boast. Perhaps he thought that the father would admit the lie when his daughter’s life was at stake. If so, the king must have been dismayed when the daughter was delivered up like a lamb to the slaughter. If he had less pride and more humanity, he would have denounced the father, or if he had wanted a harsher revenge, he might have held the father accountable for his daughter’s success or failure. Instead, he tells the daughter she will lose her head if she fails to make good her father’s boast.

  Would the king really have chopped off the hapless girl’s head if she had failed? The story does not reveal this, so I had to guess. It would take a dreadful and macabre courage to be so vile, I decided, and this king seemed more venal than deep to me. Besides, he is a snob, which means he cares what people think, ergo he would not have had her beheaded. He might, however, have her consigned to the dungeons and then forget about her. It struck me, too, that the king would have been a good deal more interesting as a character if he had yearned for something more than money, which is surely the dullest of all desires. A person who wants only money has the soul of an accountant. And the accountant king certainly desires wealth and expects it when he proposes the second night of spinning.

  The dwarf appears to the girl again – from where, I wondered, and how, and most of all why? Once again he asks for only a trinket as payment and transforms the ballroom of straw into gold by dawn, whereupon the king proposes a third night of spinning. This time there is an entire barn of straw to transform into gold. The dwarf arrives but the girl has no more jewellery to offer. When the dwarf names her firstborn child as his price for the final task, I was immediately certain that he had always planned to ask for the child, and that if the girl had not run out of trinkets, he would have spurned whatever she offered.

  She agrees to the bargain, thinking that life is sweet and anything might happen before she has to pay such a price. At this point the child in question is an abstraction, and if our heroine refuses to pay the price, she will die. If she agrees to the price, she will live, and where there is life there is hope. My heroine was modest and optimistic but also pragmatic, I decided.

  When the last straw is spun into gold, the king is satisfied and he marries the girl even though she is only a commoner. I took the liberty of doubting his greed would ever really be satisfied. Far more likely that the king marries the girl because, with such an unlikely and spectacular talent, she is a veritable golden goose to be kept close to hand. Why else would he marry her? After all, he was not moved to pity or mercy or even justice when he threatened to behead her, nor did he learn to love her for her courage or cleverness.

  We are not told what the girl feels. She is not asked by her father or the king if she wants to marry. I pondered possible motives. Is she so relieved to be alive that she does not mind marrying a gr
eedy self-centred boor of a man? Or does she, like many foolish young women, think that she can change, or heaven forfend, improve the man? Is she a gold-digger who sees marriage to a king as a leg-up socially? Suddenly I realised that it was pointless looking for reasons, because she has not been given the choice. My character – pragmatic and modest in her desires and hopes, sensible of the limitations of people around her, seldom judging those people – would have accepted that she must wed the king if he had the right to command it; she would do so without making a fuss. After her dealings with the three men in the story, she is unlikely to have many illusions about men. Nor is she already in love: had her lover existed, he would have been yet a fourth worthless man, since he makes no effort to rescue her.

  In time, she bears a child to the king. For me, the birth of my daughter was the discovery that I, who had always felt myself to be rather cool and lacking in passion, had an abyss of love in me. So, it was easy for me to imagine that the young mother in the story, caught in a loveless marriage, would be as profoundly affected as I was. I could picture her with that no-longer-abstract firstborn lying soft and impossibly light in her arms, its pearly blue-blind gaze causing a fist of love to close painfully around her heart. Then there is a flash of ruby light and Rumpelstiltskin is standing on the hearth, demanding his payment. Her baby. She would be devastated and utterly repelled by the idea of handing it over to the dwarf. What would he do with a baby, after all? Make a pet of it? Turn it into a slave? Eat it?

  No wonder she weeps, and lo and behold, so the story goes, the dwarf pities her and offers her one chance to keep her baby. Only she must tell the dwarf his name. Is it pity, though, that moves the dwarf, since he is certain that she will never guess his name? I think not. He was sly to begin with and now there is to be a sadistic little entrée to the main course of pain he means to serve up to this young woman, who is now a mother and a queen.