The Wild Folk

by Sylvia V Linsteadt

  It was an elaborate story of three sisters who stole an apple from the apple tree of a king, and were swallowed into the ground where a dragon with three heads dwelled. Many young men tried to save them, but only one young man with a pair of granite shoes, which could sink deep down into the earth, could actually do it. In the story Tin told, the young man was a shoemaker of magical abilities, who could make a shoe out of anything – out of rain, or poppy flowers, or snake bones, or clouds. Granite was no big deal. The dragon was the bigger challenge, not the making of shoes.

  “I came from the hot mouth of a dragon, you know,” said a rough, deep voice as Tin was just getting to the part where the young man in his granite shoes finds the three sisters underground. Tin started so violently that he cut his finger on the knife’s fine blade, which he’d been brandishing as he spoke. “Very hot down there,” came the voice again. “Yes, oh yes it is, down in the centre of the earth. It’s quite magma-tongued. Long time I spent there, being made. Just so, just so… Though I’m hardly a lady, no indeed.” This was followed by a wry chuckle.

  Tin looked frantically around for that lilting, stone-rasped voice. He looked more closely at the granite rock, then gasped. Sitting there was a man no bigger than Tin’s two hands, dressed in neat trousers and a coat, all so precisely the colour and texture of the granite that the man looked at first like nothing more than an odd rocky extrusion.

  “Oh!” Tin exhaled, amazed. “Are…are you a Wild Folk?”

  The little granite man laughed. It was the sound of stones grinding. “I suppose you could say so, after a fashion, though I have never before had cause to take this form. I haven’t spoken so many words together in the last hundred million years, you know, but it seems that in this shape – well, my tongue flaps like a cricket’s legs! I can’t seem to stop it!”

  Tin managed a shaky smile, his heart beating fast.

  “That was the first story I’ve ever been told,” continued the little man with some excitement, scrambling up to the top of the granite rock. “Very obliging of you! Perhaps you human folk do have some redeeming qualities after all.”

  “I-I can finish the story for you, if you like,” offered Tin. He glanced up at the sun. It was low, the light long in the sky. So far the story of the dragon had taken him two hours to tell. He’d put his whole heart into it. He’d added details about the colours and shapes and small beauties of things he thought Comfrey would like, which he never normally did. Now, though, he regretted how long he had taken, worried about the waning light. There were perhaps three hours of it left in the day.

  “In truth, my lad, I may positively expire from an overload of verbiage,” said the little granite man. “No offence intended, of course, but one must get introduced to so many words slowly, so as not to have a stomach upset. So, no, thank you all the same, much as I enjoyed it. And anyhow conclusions have never much concerned me.” The little man peered at the penknife in Tin’s hands. “What is that thing you hold; that thing you’ve been waving about all these hours as the words poured from your mouth like magma?”

  “It’s, well, a tool, for cutting and carving and undoing and also for making, um, metaphors. That is, in the real world, I mean…” Tin trailed off, clearing his throat, not sure how to explain.

  “May I?” said the little man, reaching out a hand.

  “It’s very precious to me,” said Tin. “Meaning no disrespect, sir, but how can I know you won’t take it into your stone for ever?”

  The little granite man climbed down to a place on the rock where he was eye level with the seated Tin. “It sounded to me, underneath your words, like you wanted a pair of those granite shoes, and rather badly.” The man’s eyes glinted, mica-black. “I’m a respectable fellow, young boy. A stone never lies. I only wish to give a gift in return for that story of yours which pulled this small human form right out of me, one I’ve never inhabited before. Very spry, these legs, these hands!” He gave an experimental jig, grinning. “Now, give me that. I understand a thing or two about making things. I think I may just be able to help.”

  Tin’s eyes pricked with a relief and a joy so sweet he almost wept. Slowly, gingerly, he laid the penknife in the little man’s hands. Open, the knife was half as tall as he, but the weight hardly fazed him. Being made of granite, he was very strong. He began to chip away at his own rock, singing merrily. Tin stared on, wide-eyed. The blade sparked and sang against the granite, but did not break. Bits of stone flew in every direction. Before Tin’s eyes, the little man carved a granite clog with astonishing speed and precision.

  “Voila!” he said at last. “Remarkable blade this, made of equal parts metal and human dream. Try it on!” He held up the shoe, which was as big as his whole body.

  Tin gently lifted the shoe in his hands. It was elegant, tapered at the tip, and quite heavy. It fitted his foot perfectly, rooted him to the earth as heavy as a tree. “Extraordinary,” he whispered. “Extraordinary!”

  “Yes, well,” said the little man with a toothy grin. “Now you must make the other. I’ll show you.”

  As the sunset gathered above them, Tin and the little granite man bowed over the stone. Sparks flew from the hot cutting of that small knife blade. Comfrey stirred once, opening her eyes cautiously in the dusk light. But the sight of Tin glowing by some strange light from within the granite stone, and the little man who watched merrily over Tin’s shoulder, were so strange, her head still so thick with pain, that she moaned and buried herself under her cape once more.

  And thus, as starlight fell, Tin learned how to softly coax a shoe from a stone. He learned how to chip and carve tenderly, holding the thing he wanted to make in his mind light as a bird, letting his hand and the stone dance.

  “Dance, dance!” the little granite man exclaimed again and again.

  Tin cut his fingers several times on the blade. The blood got on the rock, and the little man stared at it, fascinated.

  “You have fire in you too, I see. Magma.” He touched the fallen drops like they were red gems from the heart of the earth, and smiled at Tin in a fatherly way that made the boy’s heart ache.

  When the Baba Ithá returned the next morning on the soft owl legs of her bone hut, she found Comfrey and Tin asleep side by side, curled against the granite rock, their coat and cape tucked round them along with their wool blankets. The ashy remains of a campfire made a ring beside them. Tin cradled two stone shoes in his arms, and a small granite man sat perched on top of the stone, looking down at them with more affection than the Baba Ithá had ever seen a rock muster.

  With a long, solemn nod to the stone man, and a soft word to the bones of their cage, she released the leverets. They leaped out of the hut and made straight for Comfrey and Tin on shaking legs, and burrowed under their coats.

  The children would never know it, but when the Baba Ithá saw them all tucked together, and the stone shoes complete, her face for a brief moment was suffused with the sweet brightness of poppies. She smiled, a warm grandmother’s smile, a smile of relief and admiration. For like a fir tree, the Baba Ithá ate sunlight just as much as she ate the old, decayed lives that rested inside the soil. As guardian of the fir forest, she was as life-giving as she was dangerous. And in that moment, gazing down upon them, she was as gentle as the dawn.

  When Comfrey and Tin woke from a deep and heavy slumber full of dreams of stone shoes and glowing spider threads, they found themselves no longer tucked against the granite rock with the small stone man looking on, but wrapped in blankets of bobcat skin by a hearty wood-stove fire. The smell of some sweet and smoky meat filled their nostrils, frying in an iron pan. Myrtle and Mallow stood over them, stiff-legged, watching the door with wary eyes.

  “Mallow!” cried Tin.

  “Myrtle!” cried Comfrey, at precisely the same moment.

  The leverets permitted their ears to be stroked enthusiastically, and Myrtle even endured a kiss on the top of her head from Comfrey. But when pressed about the two long days and nights they had sp
ent caged in this very house, the young hares refused to speak more than a few words.

  “It is in the past now,” said Myrtle. The solemnness in her voice was the only hint she betrayed of the numb panic she and her brother had endured for those two endless, black days.

  “Hares do not dwell on what has passed,” said Mallow.

  “It is, after all, not unusual to have more than one run-in with death before breakfast, if you’re a hare,” added Myrtle. “This one was just a bit more prolonged than usual.” She busied herself nibbling a bit of grass off Comfrey’s cape, and the girl knew better than to press her.

  “We won’t lose you again,” she whispered, stroking the leveret’s long back.

  The Baba Ithá came through the arched bone door then, pushing aside the deerskin that hung there. Her hands were full of wild onions and small quail’s eggs.

  “I hope we aren’t part of the breakfast feast after all!” muttered Mallow, backing into Tin, his long legs quaking.

  “What do you take me for, young leverets?” crooned the Baba Ithá in her most gentle, rasping tones. “I wouldn’t dream of eating you! Not any longer, that is.” She laughed then, sounding more like her old self. “Not today, anyway, no indeed. Thought I’d see you all off with a hearty breakfast, given that you’ve completed the three tasks to my satisfaction.”

  Comfrey looked at Tin, both of their faces still bleary and lined with that uncannily deep sleep. She thought of the pearls, how together they had gathered every last one. She thought of the terrible reeling pain in her head, how it had turned the whole world to spots of light and dark. How long had she lain useless, battling it? Had she really seen Tin lit by the glowing light of the granite stone, helped by a little stone man? Or were those visions only dreams? She had been so ill. The only thing she remembered with certainty was Tin’s voice, weaving steadily at an elaborate and beautiful tale, which she recalled now only as flashes of silver and gold. She searched the boy’s face. Smiling, he pointed silently to the stone shoes beside the wood stove, speckled black and gold with minerals and smooth as milk. Comfrey gasped with delight and for a long moment they beamed at one another.

  “How did you do it, Tin?” she breathed at last.

  Tin, still smiling, slipped the penknife out to show her. “My Oddness,” he replied, and pride moved through him swift and bright as morning. “Would you like to hold it?” he added, suddenly shy. He looked older, Comfrey thought, his smile sweeter than she had remembered, and she hesitated before replying.

  “A little help, please,” the Baba Ithá interrupted sharply, hiding her amusement. “If you would kindly chop these and quit your grinning, young man, I’d be very grateful.” She handed Tin several wild onions, dirt still clinging to their roots, which he took hastily, trying not to go red. Comfrey almost giggled. “And not with that thing,” the Baba Ithá added, gesturing at Tin’s Oddness. She passed him a knife with an antler handle instead. “And you, my dear,” turning to Comfrey, “be so good as to stir the venison sausages, would you?” She pointed to the meat sizzling on the wood stove, then set another pot full of quail’s eggs and water next to it.

  Soon the whole hut smelled of wild onions. The little eggs were perfectly boiled. Two heaping plates were placed in Tin and Comfrey’s hands, to be eaten by the fire. The Baba Ithá ate nothing, only drank a cup of smoky black tea, same as she offered the children. It was creamy with milk. For the leverets she had strewn fresh-cut oatgrass and willow-tips across the floor. They refused to leave the children’s laps, and had to be fed by hand.

  The bone hut was little more than a round room with a wood stove, one big wooden table, and a pile of skins in the far corner where, the children presumed, the Baba Ithá slept. The ridged bone walls were hung with drying herbs, tied here and there and everywhere to the protruding scapula and spinal cords and vertebrae. Several barn swallows’ nests clung in muddy piles to the ceiling. It felt more like a cave to Comfrey than a house, the way her own cob home had been a house, warm and bright and cosy.

  Despite the rich and delicious flavours of the venison, the wild onions browned in deer fat, the delicate taste of quail’s eggs, and the relief she felt – that the leverets were alive, and that she and Tin would not, after all, be fed to the wood stove or turned into robins – Comfrey couldn’t really enjoy her breakfast. She felt uneasy still. She wanted to be out in the air, in the meadows and firwood and dirt roads, on their way. There was so far to go! And they still had no plan, no idea how they would ever be able to approach the Elk of Milk and Gold and survive.

  “Well, I’m surprised you’ve yet to ask about your rewards. I had thought human people were rather greedier than the two of you!” the Baba Ithá exclaimed, pausing to lick venison oil from her fingers. “It is quite becoming of you.”

  “Our…rewards?” said Comfrey. She had forgotten all about that long-ago mention of blessings in exchange for the tasks.

  “Yes, yes,” said the Baba Ithá. She began to unwind the string of pearls from round her neck. “I always keep my word, like I said, as any tree would. You doubted me?” The old woman narrowed her eyes at Comfrey, who blushed and set her plate down with a clatter, not knowing what to say. Myrtle, despite her own fear, stood up on her hind legs in the girl’s defence, raising her ears as tall as she could manage.

  “Of course she did not doubt you, firwood mother,” said the leveret in noble tones. “Only she is tired and had forgotten, as humans often do.”

  Tin hid a smile at the leveret’s cheekiness.

  “What are you grinning about, boy?” snapped the Baba Ithá. The pearls were coiled like a slim glinting snake around her hand, a dozen loops at least.

  The smile faded from Tin’s face and he too blushed, finding he had no ready retort, which made his cheeks colour further. Mallow, following the example of his sister, began to protest on the boy’s behalf, but the Baba Ithá cut him off before the leveret could do more than grunt.

  “Enough!” she barked. “I am thoroughly unused to the strange etiquette of humans, and those unfortunate leverets who must be in their company.” The old woman’s gentle breakfast countenance had changed to a fiercer shade. “I am used to being straightforward, and I am tiring quite quickly of the role of hostess. Listen – the poppy seeds, the pearls, the stone shoes, they are yours. The tasks are their own gifts.”

  “But the pearls,” stammered Comfrey without thinking. “They were a gift to you, from the Seal-man, a lover’s gift…” She trailed off at the spark in the Baba Ithá’s small bright eyes, not certain if it was amusement or tenderness or rage. That story had touched Comfrey, and now her mother and father rose up in her mind. She wondered if Maxine had a secret strand of agates or carnelians somewhere in a drawer, hidden away so as not to think of Thornton, but nevertheless treasured, so as not to forget him. Comfrey had only ever seen the spoon her father had carved from redwood – The first gift he ever gave me, Maxine had whispered to Comfrey when the girl was six, and she’d asked her mother why she always kissed its handle before she dipped it into the acorn porridge. The hint of a love story in the Baba Ithá’s pearls made Comfrey sad, and she wondered if it was right to take a gift that had been a lover’s token to someone else.

  To the children’s surprise, the Baba Ithá smiled a very gentle, very old smile. It made even Myrtle and Mallow relax.

  “Now that is very thoughtful of you, child. Very sweet indeed. I might have missed them before, but now I am certain you will guard them as well as I. It is a very old love, by now, one hundred years gone. So it’s as much your story as mine. And anyhow, you’ve yet to hear the great usefulness these three gifts will provide you,” she said before pausing, dramatically, “in your journey to retrieve the Elk of Milk and Gold.”

  Tin and Comfrey exchanged an awestruck look, leaning in towards one another and the Baba Ithá, feeling their hearts lift.

  “The oil from the poppy seeds has the power of sleep,” continued the Baba Ithá. She reached into the deep sturdy poc
ket of her brown skirt and pulled out an ancient purple vial. “A little smear under the nose or on the temples, and voila, sleep! Swallow a spoonful and you will get a doubly deep heavy sleep. As for the pearls, they are the milk of the bay, you see. They have the milk of the tidal moon in their hearts. For the Elk of Milk and Gold, whose fur is the very same colour as pearls, whose violet eyes hold that same lustre, and who made the moonlight itself, they are the tastiest delicacy, like perfect berries, like tiny sweet candies. And you will need a very, very precious Offering in order to convince the Elk to trust you at all. I’d say it’s lucky you stumbled upon me, wouldn’t you?” The Baba Ithá chuckled and fed another log to the fire. It was engulfed at once in orange-blue flames.

  Comfrey and Tin could only nod, swallowing, trying to keep their astonishment from bubbling out in a rush of nonsense, which they both wagered wouldn’t impress the Baba Ithá very much at all.

  “What about my granite shoes?” ventured Tin softly, breaking the happy silence. He felt a pride similar to that which he felt for the Fiddleback rising in him. “I mean… that is—” He trailed off, feeling foolish for presuming they might be his own.

  “They are indeed a third gift,” replied the Baba Ithá. Her voice was resonant now. “And without them you will never be able to get anywhere near the Grizzly-witches alive. On your normal human feet they’d be on your trail in a matter of moments. Let alone the Elk of Milk and Gold, for she can feel human footsteps through the ground in her strong golden hoofs, and she will be away the second she senses you near. For what cause has she to trust you, at first, any more than I did? But if you were each to be shod with one foot in stone, she would mistake you for the grumbling of granite underground. The whole tip of the peninsula, Tamal Point, where the Elk and her herd run, is granite, stem to stern.”