The Starlit Wood

by Dominik Parisien

  I would feed her and give her water, and sit against her warmth and listen to her wise voice. So much of what she said is gone from me now, for I remember things poorly without nectar, but certain exchanges come back to me again and again.

  Like the first:

  Do I dream you, little glowworm? she said from above, as I cast about the piled earth that had been part of the tunnel roof before she came plunging through.

  Eagerly I held up the lamp. There she was, against the ragged roof-hole aglitter with stars. She peered down, the icy air spiking up the feathers on the crown of her head. She was not frighteningly large. That pointed beak was for pinching insects out of the air, not snatching up mice or Tommelises from the ground.

  You are revived, ma’am! I said, pleased.

  Am I not in Danmark? she said.

  Ma’am, you are in the tunnel that joins the house of Mrs. Markmusen to that of Mr. Muldvarp.

  Ah, Danmark, then. But Markmus? Muldvarper? She shifted position on her earthen perch. I am a flier! And you are no flower of Danmark. You have something of the Türk about you, I think. Yes, definitely you are warmlandish.

  Later I would wonder over those words, but for now I only clambered up the loose earth. The swallow was twice as big as me, but unlike Mrs. Markmusen she was smooth and dapper, her body a single dark sweep out to tail-points in the shadows. She had picked apart the hay and thistledown I’d covered her with, and used it to line this draughty hollow of a nest.

  I poured water into the bowl and laid it before her.

  My name is Svale, she said. Who are you, kindness?

  I am Tommelise.

  She smiled. Ah, I see. Brought here by giants, were you?

  I walked here myself, I said. From the Mother and Father’s house, where I was born.

  She nodded soberly. Of course you did. She dipped her beak into the water, lifted her head to tip it down her throat. You must tell me all about that journey.

  And so I did. I told her everything—we had all winter for the telling, after all. When she left, she took my whole life story with her. And she left hers with me, so wild and bright and far-reaching and thickly patterned, my little dull year-and-a-bit seemed hardly worth recounting beside it.

  Mrs. Markmusen comes to the weaving room to inspect the trousseau. The Edderkops bob and sway as she counts the items, their many eyes gleaming like polished black beads, their limbs fiddling and bunching. They are even more repellent idle than when they work—which must be why the mousewife has put them to weaving. She lets them live in a web-clotted corner of her entryway, pouncing on any insect that dares come near, wrapping and hanging the little corpses in their ghastly bower.

  But however unnerving are the makers, the made things are sumptuously fine. If only I could use them without being imprisoned under the earth! I would delight in the broad, crisp bedsheets if Mr. Muldvarp, six times my size and larger, were not going to join me between them.

  Mrs. Markmusen holds the fine linen nightgown up against me, so much softer than the little drugget shift I presently wear at nights. “How small it is!” she says. “And as delicate as flower petals—as it should be, for such a little flower as yourself!”

  But I hate this garment—it’s the sort the Mother wore that night, the layer she shed before her night-game with the Father.

  “I wish I did not have to wear it,” I hiss.

  The Edderkops skitter back from my outburst and clump in a corner.

  Mrs. Markmusen leans down to me, and her watery eyes grow large. “You know how things stand, Tommelise. There is no discouraging Mr. Muldvarp. We’ve put him off all spring and right through the summer—who’d have thought we’d manage that? But he’ll brook no further delay.”

  “But you know what he’ll want. You know what he’ll do. How can you deliver me up to such a creature?”

  Mrs. Markmusen straightens, taking away her popping eyes and whiskery face. She shrugs up there, pulls out her handkerchief, trumpets into it, twice. Parceling up the nose-blowings in the cloth, she casts a cool eye down on me.

  “I’ve done all I can for you, little one,” she says. “But another winter like the last would kill me. A rich fellow like Muldvarp can easily spare a Tommelise’s worth of food in the cold months. Much as I’ve enjoyed your company, we must be sensible about this.”

  How have you survived so long? said Ms. Svale.

  I have learned to eat grain, I said. I was wonderfully warm, sheltered under her wing. Another storm raged above, and now and again a snowflake floated ghostly down, to melt on the rim of the nest. And nuts too, I went on, from the mousewife’s larder. None of it agrees with me, but it keeps me alive.

  She must be very old and spiritless, said Ms. Svale, to let you make so free with her food.

  Oh no, she is quite strong and fierce, I said. And clever. She has devised this whole matter of the trousseau to put off Mr. Muldvarp.

  Put him off from what? Ms. Svale fluffed up her feathers. I nearly swooned from the warmth.

  From marrying me, I said. But he won’t be put off forever. At the latest we will marry in early spring.

  Ms. Svale bent her head around and regarded me a long time in the dimness.

  What good can ever come of that? she said.

  I know, I said dolefully. Muldvarp’s food is even worse than the mousewife’s. But I dare say I will survive on it, just as I—

  How can you marry a Muldvarp, is what I mean, she said. You are not only from a foreign clime but of a wholly other kind than him. He is beast, like the mousewife. You are blomst.

  Blomst?

  I laughed, for how could I be one of those? Blomst were tiny, brittle creatures, spitting at me from the hedgerows or vanishing into meadow grasses. Or they were tall, gaunt, melancholy ghosts of lilies, stalking about the reed beds.

  But Ms. Svale did not laugh with me. Tut-tut, she said. The foreign smell of you has turned that poor man’s head; that’s all that’s happened. You need to go away from here, to set both animals free.

  Fear choked my laughter off. But where would I go?

  To the warm lands, of course, to marry among your own people.

  I stared at her. My own people?

  She laughed. You didn’t imagine you were the only “Tommelise” in the world?

  I have never met another, I said stiffly.

  She shook her head, fluffed her feathers again. Of course not, poor tiny. But you’ve seen every other creature pairing. Did you think that only you were meant to live alone?

  I sat very still in the feather-warmth. I had never asked myself that question. But now that she had uttered it, my whole life looked to me like a timid Yes! in answer to it. Now I could feel I was blomst, as hope sprang open in my head, splayed out its many petals, reminded me that there was color in the world beyond this black-and-gray winter, that there was light—and why should there not be love as well, blomst-love that would not hurt or revolt me?

  But how can I ever find my kind, I said, in a frozen world, without nectar?

  You must wait as I wait, Ms. Svale said, for the world to warm again. To warm, and to blossom. Then, at the first opportunity, you must begin your search.

  Mr. Muldvarp leans forward intently. One hand strokes his velvet coat as if to say, Note this quality! Could Edderkops ever make such as this? He cannot see me well—he cannot see anything well. But he is as keen to hear me speak as Mrs. Markmusen ever is. “Her voice—so sweet, so small!” he often exclaims, interrupting my description of some mountain or mere I encountered in my travels.

  If I turn my tale skyward, expounding on singular birds or butterflies or clouds I’ve observed, he will silence me with robust laughter. “Winged things—what kind of a life is that, flinging oneself about in the air? I should be afraid of flying apart, shouldn’t you, Mrs. Markmusen, without the good earth on all sides of me? The deeper and darker the better, don’t you think?” And I recall how he kicked—kicked!—Ms. Svale as she lay frozen in the tunnel on the night of t
hat first snowstorm.

  But his sensitive pink nose stays pointed my way, so I continue with my pretty ramblings, which he searches for disagreeable features of the outside world that he can enjoy pouring scorn on.

  When his visit ends, Mrs. Markmusen and I accompany him, as always, through the tunnel to his home. Farewells said, and Muldvarp’s front door closed, the mousewife turns to me with relief. “Well done, Tommelise! Another pleasant evening’s entertainment! What a colorful life you have led. But not too colorful, eh?” And up there in the dimness against the tunnel roof she taps her nose and winks down at me.

  “And should I keep refraining,” I ask her, “from telling him the more distressing tales, even after we are married?”

  “Oh, then you may do as you please,” she says carelessly.

  She turns in a whisk of skirts and has gone several steps before she realizes I am not at her heels. She holds up her lamp. My troublement is written clearly on my face, I can feel. I hurry after her.

  “Tell him the story of the fish,” she suggests more kindly. “Yes, and then pay me a visit and tell me how that one takes him. Together we’ll determine whether it’s wise to go on.”

  Why the fish? Because the tale is quickly told? Because fish are so different from mice and moles and myself? I follow her, flinching at those memories: the bumps beneath the water-lily leaf I was seated on, the slithering turmoil as the fish grouped and tangled, the whitened water, those bubbles that did not burst, the smell that rose in the warm sun—strong, peculiar, wrong.

  I cannot imagine Mr. Muldvarp being anything other than repelled by the story, as I and the mousewife are. If he scorns the sky and all flying things, how much more deserving of disdain will he find these other oddities!

  But Mrs. Muldvarp is right—I should try a small oddity first and see how it moves him. He is so much larger than either of us and so will have larger passions. It’s best to take care.

  Come with me, Tommelise!

  Ms. Svale’s wings thrummed and trembled. I hung on tightly to the green shoot of an emerging snowdrop for safety.

  We were above ground, a little way from the hole in the tunnel roof. All about us winter dripped from shrinking snow patches into the softening earth.

  It’s such a lovely time to fly about, the northern spring, she said. And it doesn’t last long—before you know it we will be off to the warm lands, where your fellow blomsters’ welcome awaits you!

  I cannot leave Mrs. Markmusen, I said miserably. She has been so kind to me.

  A full winter on the mousewife’s provisions had weighed me down, body and spirit. I could not imagine climbing aboard the bird-woman and leaping into the vast, overcast sky.

  Well, you have been kind to me, Tommelise. Ms. Svale cocked her head, fixing me with an eye as beady as any Edderkop’s. And yet I’m not spending the rest of my life with you!

  But you are big and brave, I said. And winged! I am tiny, and confined to the ground, stumbling from one alarm to the next. It is safer for me here in the mousewife’s warm burrow—

  Safer? With that lust-addled Muldvarp hanging about, held off only by an ailing mouse?

  I clung to the snowdrop shoot. She was right. Yet I did not have the courage to make my escape, to step outside what I knew. However glowingly she described my future—and she had done so many times during the snow months—I could not believe it was mine to reach out and grasp.

  She shook her head over me. Don’t decide now, she said. I’ll stay nearby for the next little while—and I’ll be back at summer’s end, on the way to the warm lands. Be above ground at any sunrise when I first stretch my wings, and I will take a turn this way, in case you change your mind.

  How cruel I thought her, for forcing this choice upon me, not just this painful once, but every sunrise! How often must I face my own misery, my own timidity, and watch myself give way before it? I only wished her gone, once and irrecoverably. At the same time, I was in the utmost despair, for with her would fly away all my hope of knowing who I truly was, and of living among my own kind.

  Ms. Svale spread her wings. I pulled the dust cloth from my apron pocket and waved it over my head as she lifted herself from beside me. Farewell, farewell! I cried.

  She flew twice around me, raising a wind that almost tore me from the snowdrop, wrenching my skirts and hair about. Then the wind died and she was a dark flourish shrinking to a fleck on the sky. And here I was, alone on the surface, the bare field around me patched with snow, the sky’s untouchable heights above. No other bird or beast threatened me from any quarter of the still, wintry scene. And yet I ran to the tunnel-hole and dropped into the darkness as quickly as I could, as if all the monsters of spring were after me.

  Mrs. Markmusen has often told me about Mr. Muldvarp’s home, marveling at its size and luxury. One night he invites us both to view it. As he leads us through the many rooms, the mousewife nudges me to remark admiringly on their vastness, though even a creature as large as she must surely find so much space alarming after her own cozy home.

  Some rooms are bare and full of nothing but our host’s ambitious plans; in others, gigantic dark bureaus and sideboards stand about, or candelabra’d dining tables, or suites of couches and armchairs. Generations of Muldvarps have handed these furnishings down through the ages, and my betrothed is very proud of them. Here we will sit, when we are married and immured here together. I will trot out my threadbare tales of sunshine and butterflies, and he will snort in comfortable contempt of all the world above.

  “This carving on the balusters, Tommelise—did you ever see such workmanship?” Mrs. Markmusen exclaims.

  “I did not.” I try to sound respectful, though this mole-craft looks lumpish and crude to my tiny eyes.

  I cannot picture myself as the mistress of this mansion, with all its wearying halls and chambers. We are deeper here, and the air is danker; I am destined to breathe it, day in and day out, for the rest of my life. The thought makes my heart shrivel.

  But worse is when Mr. Muldvarp brings us down to his pantry. Mrs. Markmusen gasps as he flings wide the door, and I think for a moment that she must share my disgust, for the walls and floor are heaving with slow-crawling insects of the soil. All kinds stagger and wriggle and drop from the ceiling, the many-legged and the few, the armor-plated and the softer-shelled, and even an earthworm lashes its length about among the teetering carapaces and the blundering legs.

  “What a feast, Muldvarp!” cries Mrs. Markmusen. “Tommelise, you will never go hungry here!”

  “Forgive me,” I say, my throat tight. “These are not my kind of foodstuffs.”

  “Oh, snik and snak!” she says joyfully. “That’s what you said about grains and nuts when first you came to me, and look how you devour them now!” She reaches into the mass and pulls out something shiny black, with threads of legs whirling below. She thrusts it at me. “Try it!”

  Mr. Muldvarp laughs. “Such a modest sample, Mrs. Markmusen! Give her one of these! They’ve a bit more meat on them.” And he selects a beetle almost as big as one of his paws, all grimy shell and waving feelers.

  He brings it to his mouth and bites away its head and half its body. Its back end spasms and stills. Muldvarp chews, a feeler poking out between his lips.

  “Eat, Tommelise!” Mrs. Markmusen all but cuffs me.

  Dazedly I push the smooth, scrabbling insect into my mouth and bite down. The thing dies with a crunch and its bitter insides fill my mouth. My throat rebels, but I swallow and swallow, keeping my face stiffly blank as the mousewife and the mole smile down on me.

  “See? Delicious!” Mr. Muldvarp says heartily.

  Mrs. Markmusen looks more severe. “You’ll get used to them,” she commands. Then she says more gently, “And they are richer than grains, so you need not eat so very many.”

  And I remember what a burden I was on her last winter. Right now she should be shooing her eighth litter from her door to gather their own store for the winter. She should be storing up food
for herself, not wasting her energies arranging a marriage for a foreign interloper.

  I force the last few shell fragments down my convulsing throat. “I’m sure I will come round to these,” I manage to say. “In time.”

  I suffered every morning after Ms. Svale flew away, taking up my spindle under the cold, dim earth, trying not to think of the bird-woman wheeling and dipping in the sunshine above my head.

  Mr. Muldvarp grew more spirited with the spring, arriving in a new coat one evening and pressing Mrs. Markmusen to set a date when she would release me to marry him.

  “I cannot be precise,” she said. “I’ve looked through her trousseau, and it seems to me that another set of woolens would be advisable, if Tommelise is to winter so deeply underground. Let me consult with the Edderkops.”

  Thus she put him off. And then summer came, and warmed the mouse-house right down to our workroom. The warm lands did not seem so seductive. Warmth made Edderkops weave and stitch faster and demand more thread. Their rustling grew furious, their scuttling sudden and alarming. I missed the cooler days when they were sluggish and predictable.

  Now the grain above us is grown to its full height and gone from green to gold, and no sunlight touches even the mouth of Mrs. Markmusen’s home, or slants in through the hole in the tunnel roof. The days cool and shorten, and I try not to think of the swallow.

  I’ll be back, she said, on the way to the warm lands.

  Come with me, she said, so many times. You must! It is a cruelty to these beasts for you to stay, let alone to your own misplaced self.

  Grimly I stay below, moving straight from bedroom to workroom and spinning there through the dawns. I have eaten nothing but beast-food for many months. I cannot even remember what nectar tastes like. Nectar fueled a different Tommelise entirely; who was that sprite who threw herself from the cottage sill so long ago, the blomst who had the energy to flee, one after another, the monsters that paraded toward her as she skirted lakes and swung herself, stalk to stalk, across meadows? That adventurer, that girl who ran outraged through the world, sure she deserved better, she is gone now, and in her place is this resistless half-person, spinning away her days, a stone at her center.