“My name is Oubliette,” she whispered, and she whispered it like a blessing, as though her name could hold me close and comfort me. I squeezed her cold fingers.
The numbers spilled out of the Pra-Itas’ mouths like water unwanted, and we were led, child by child, to the center of the room, our little hands placed on smooth bars and handles we could not quite see in the dim light, things which seemed like soft-toothed gears, things which seemed like trays, things which seemed like long tables. Beneath our fingers, we began to understand, lay a machine, and as our eyes softened to the shadows, we saw it whole for the first time.
In the middle of a peeling gray floor stood a peeling gray frame. It hunched like a broken turtle, a high, arcing shell through which nameless things passed, lumpish gray heaps disappearing, passed solemnly as relics between children no older than we, and tipped into the rusting, ash-ridden structure. Smokestacks tottered high into the vaulted ceiling and spat pale fumes into the air in weak, spiraling puffs. Pistons drove into the depths of the machine and emerged again, dark and wet. A terrible crunching, stamping sound filled the room, and at the far end of the shell, the contraption contorted into a twisted, enameled mouth, built in the image of a thing which had once walked, a thing made entirely of teeth.
Out of this mouth ran a long board, and onto it slowly spat coin after coin, dull and yellowish white, clunking dully onto the black wood.
Perhaps once, in the long past of Marrow, when they knew all possible things, the machine, the Mint, had moved of its own accord, but now small hands pressed and pulled and shoved at its every corner, turned its every gear, drew up its every dowel and thrust it down again. Furtive dark eyes gleamed around the shell and init, dozens of children adding their limbs to the apparatus so that it could move, so that it could press out coins at a stuttering, halting pace. Thin hands sat on our shoulders like owls’ feet, and thin fingers curled around our chins, holding our faces fast toward the creaking thing.
“The living work,” came a whisper which seemed to be Vhummim, her breathy, weary sighing—but who could be sure among all those long, stretching throats?
Satisfied that we saw the machine and knew that we would soon be among those dark eyes and pale hands, we were led, all in a line, the newest children of the Mint, to a long narrow room, barely held together by the clawing wind whistling through page-turned rafters. All along the walls lay little beds, turned down neatly, their coverlets thin as a cough and fluttering lightly as the gales rushed by outside. The Pra-Ita urged us all toward them, and like good boys and girls we each filed in, found a bed, and curled away from the door, the machine, the terrible long-necked creatures. On each pillow was a sliver of glassy stuff—I licked it under my blanket, then pushed it eagerly into my mouth. It was candy: something like raspberries, something like black tea, something like sugared bread crusts. I savored it, its juice running down my throat. Then I remembered Vhummim, and her city before it was my city. I spat it out into my hand and stared in the gray half-light. It gleamed and shimmered, scarlet, pink, rose.
They had given us rubies. Shaved and slivered down enough to feed a dozen children. I looked over my shoulder at the Pra-Ita clustered near the door, watching us suckle the gems in our hungry mouths. They moaned quietly, miserably, watching us eat. I was too hungry to refuse to give them what they wanted: I pushed the cherry-colored stone back onto my tongue. It sat there like a scald of light. I shuddered and turned away again until I heard the door shut like hands clasping each other in prayer.
We were alone. In the morning, I was sure, our shifts would begin. When the darkness came wheedling through the shivering ceiling, I crawled out of my bed and found among the dark little heads one which was bristled and shorn: my friend, my Oubliette. She opened the corner of her pitiful blanket to me, and I climbed in beside her. We clutched desperately at each other, each trying to steal the other’s warmth—there was little enough to steal, and finally we simply lay in each other’s arms, trying very hard not to be terrified.
“Did you see what went into the machine?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“Did you see what came out?”
She nodded.
The room was filled with the sleeping and soft weeping of other children, mewling like lost pigeons. I didn’t know what else to say. She didn’t cry, like the others, she just stared, and everywhere she stared seemed to shiver under her gaze.
“What happened to your hair?” I said finally, quiet as a thief with his hand on a coffer.
As if in answer, she took my hand in hers, both of us cold to purpled fingers, and drew it around her waist to rest against her shoulder blades. What I touched was not flesh, not flesh, but bark, and wood, and hard, twining vines with berries like knuckles. She was a child in my arms, yes, the front of her skinny and hard-used but still pretty and certainly a girl—but her back from neck to ankle was a gnarled and hollow tree, half dead, petrified into gray and sallow stone. The only warm and living thing I felt with my arms meeting around her was a thick, long tail, a heifer’s dun tail, ending in a soft tuft of fur. She would not look at me.
“Now you see what I am. I am wicked, and ugly, and that is why the hungry ghosts took me…”
THE
HULDRA’S
TALE
MY MOTHER USED TO SIT ME ON HER LAP AND tell me where we came from—so many times that I can not now forget even a word of the tale.
It is said that once there was a heifer so lovely that her skin was as red and flowing gold, her eyes as polished wood, her swishing, flicking tail brighter than a whip of fire. This cow was not quite a cow, as all beautiful things are both more and less than their bodies. In the folds of bark which enclose us all it is written that once she was a girl, nothing but a girl, with hair so long and shining that it caught the eye of Aukon, the Bull-Star, who put his white-hot hooves to her form and shaped her into his own image so that he could love her as he wished to.
Perhaps this is true, perhaps it is not. But as lovers sometimes do, once he had finished with her he wished to keep her all for his own, and the poor thing was left a heifer lowing at the sky—though she was the loveliest of all heifers who ever ate grass and drank water, it was not much consolation, I am sure.
“Where will I go? What shall I do?” the heifer cried.
And answers came, though not those she would have wished for. For though she knew it not, Aukai, the Heifer-Star, the Milk-Star with her black eyes, had seen what her brother had done, and set upon him. A terrible struggle occurred between the two huge creatures. If you have seen bulls battle over a mate, it was nothing to this. Aukai burned brighter than temple fires in her fury, and finally pinned Aukon against a hillock and chewed from him, with her wide, flat teeth, the flesh which made him a bull, leaving a lonely and broken ox lowing weakly in the night, light leeching from him into the mud churned up by their grappling. In disgust, Aukai spit her brother’s silver-dripping testicles away in a broad field, and thought no more of it. It is said that ever after maddened monks castrated themselves in her honor, doing penance in place of her heavenly brother. Perhaps this is true, perhaps not.
Yet a Star is a strange thing, and its ways are stranger still. In the place where the ruined flesh had fallen, a great almond tree grew, with broad white flowers and green fruits. And it came to pass that the cow who was once a girl wandered by the great tree in the height of its flowering. And the tree, too, being only somewhat less than Aukon himself, looked on her and loved her still. With whipping branches he dragged her, hoarsely braying, into his hollows and his crooks, and there stroked her skin with pale and papery twigs until, after many months, her wide flat teeth, not sharp, but sure, chewed their way free of him.
Perhaps this is true, perhaps it is not. Love rarely waits for permission. She ran far from the howling tree, who reached for her with long, snapping vines and needles—and in her running she gave birth to the first of us who are called huldra, who are girl and cow and tree jumbled together
by some inattentive hand. The heifer looked on her first daughter with horror—how far she had come from the girl she was! But who would love this terrible child if she did not? Already her udder swelled and stretched. The wretched infant clutched at her mother’s stiff golden hair, and the heifer sank to the earth to nurse. As the years went by she dropped children like pinecones from her flesh, and occasionally birthed one in the usual way of cows—poor creature, who bled children everywhere she went, and each one mongreled and mottled as we all are.
“My poor girls, my pitied boys,” she said when we sat around her like a herd, flicking our tails at flies like buzzing sapphires, “I know in my heart that it will be for you as it was for me, and you will be loved always, yet only by those who do not share your shape, and care nothing for your say-so. I have given you nothing but sorrow and a dun tail.”
Perhaps this is true, perhaps it is not. Perversions are often written over with elaborate stories, and who knows what strange nights’ revels ended in the huldra, who are tree and human and cow all together? I would not have liked to have been there.
But the story is not wrong about us.
I once had a golden ball, you see. Am I telling this tale poorly? Would a grown woman tell it better? My mother knew how to tell a tale properly. Perhaps she would have mentioned the ball in the beginning. Perhaps she would not have shown her tail so soon. Perhaps a good child would not admit that she owned such a thing as a golden ball—it has never done a girl any good to have one, in all the history of the world. But I am not a grown woman, and I loved my ball.
My sister was not given one, nor my cousins. What you must understand about a golden ball is that by giving one over into eager hands, parents acknowledge a certain wickedness in their children that must be occupied by something other than flesh or sweets. A mother does not give such a gift to the daughter she bathes in milk and perfumes in asters and daisies. She gives it to the scraggle-haired, mud-kneed child who plays by herself at the side of the old well. It will keep her from young men and candies that glitter like fluttering eyelashes, and if she or it or both together should tip over the side of the well, as has been known to happen from time to time, well, at least no daisy was wasted on her.
I once had a golden ball, you see.
One day, when I was turned barkwise to the sun, the miller’s boy came up to our ash-wood fence. He said the things you might expect a miller’s boy to say: He had never seen a girl with roots in her knee-pits before, I was pretty as a cherry without a pit, and wouldn’t I come just a little closer? I shrugged. I was heifer-strong; there was nothing he could do to me. I came close up to the bars of the fence, and he said my eyes were the darkest he’d seen—then he kissed me quick on the mouth. He stole my first kiss, did just as folk have always done when a huldra is in sight: take her without permission, without a care. It is because of this sort of thing that we were solitary creatures, living in our high-up huts, cradled in oak branches, so that the tree in us may rest, and speak rarely to those who are the same whether their back is turned or no.
I bolted for home, but as I ran I thought of little but the kiss. His lips tasted like flour and honey just scooped from the hive, and I told my mother so when I scrambled up the ladder of rope and found her ladling out grass soup for my supper. The next morning, she gave me the golden ball, and told me to run along and play. I stared at her, stricken. No word passed between us, though she had the grace not to hold my gaze. Her tail swished nervously behind her, dark brown across our branch-lashed floor. I took my ball quietly and went out into the fields, to play.
It was a little sun I kept close to my chest, so that it warmed next to my skin. I wrapped my long black hair around it and unwound it again. I called it little names which seem silly now. I polished it over and over with the tuft of my tail and kept it near me while I slept. It gleamed against my cheek like a slap. And I tossed it into the air by the old, vine-strangled well, smeared with flowers which once were red, sitting among the tall, seed-topped grasses like a huge, embittered toadstool. I could smell water in the old thing, algae-jeweled and wriggling with tadpoles, but I could not see it. Up and down I tossed my ball—it caught the light, burned it, scalded it, and my eyes were filled with tears as I stared into that little round star. I was never alone: It rolled and lay still and sparkled as well as a friend.
The day then came when the summer sun itself was a golden ball, and I lay like a dandelion in the grass, and slept with its hot palms on my face. Did I dream? I don’t remember. But when I woke my ball was gone, and in its place was a little red-eyed creature who came nearly, but not quite, to my knees, staring and stroking my hair. It was a hedgehog, quite respectably large and furry, golden from hunch to nose—his quills jangled and clinked when he moved, a little glistening sound. He wrung his burnished hands and stroked his golden whiskers, and his eyes—were they garnets? Were they not?—glowered under lashes like wedding bands.
“Good afternoon,” I said, after a long while. Perhaps I should have said something prettier. A grown woman might have known what to say.
The hedgehog bowed. I think if he had had a hat, he would have removed it.
“Good afternoon,” he replied, in a high, rough voice like that of a flute scoured with river mud. “I have been watching you sleep. You do it very well.”
I laughed. “My mother always hoped I would show a talent for something. Perhaps I shall become a sleeper by trade.”
The hedgehog did not laugh. “My name is Ciriaco,” he said, as if his name could hold my hand and put me at ease.
“And have you seen my ball, Ciriaco? I am fond of it, and it seems to have rolled away somewhere as I slept.”
The hedgehog looked at the long grass uncomfortably. He wrung his hands even more wretchedly; he made a soft and sorrowful rasping noise in his shimmering throat. Slowly, the animal bent until his nose brushed dirt and his quills ruffled along his back, passing a glimmer of prism between them. And then, with a little hop, and an even littler tuck, he snapped up into the air and landed in a thatch of clover as a round, smooth ball all of gold. Perhaps a grown woman would not have squealed and clapped. But I was not grown.
“How did you come to live inside my ball, friend hedgehog?” I cried.
Ciriaco rolled forward slightly, then back, and unfurled himself again, patting dust and pollen from his golden hands as he rose to his full, though not terribly impressive, height once more.
“Your tail is very soft,” he whispered, blushing to his tiny ears. “It has been a great comfort to me…”
THE TALE
OF THE
GOLDEN BALL
IN THE KINGDOM OF THE HEDGEHOGS, THERE are mountains with mouths. They open and close; they twist and sneer. Out from our hedgerows each pearl-handled morning, boar and sow trundle up the black paths, slick as tongues down the side of the crags. We do not speak to one another—it is not done. In the old days, it seemed as though the earth rose up with the sun to swallow the mountains again, so many little brown bodies made the ascent each day, silent shoulder to silent shoulder. We did not sing work songs, or tell tales of the brave hedgehogs who went before us, caged hummingbirds clasped in fear-tightened paws, into the dark.
The dark took them; the dark will take us. No more needs to be said.
I worked in the upper shafts, where gold ran along the rock walls like calligraphy. The Kingdom of the Hedgehogs possesses miners of all kinds: iron and copper and silver and gold, diamond and sapphire and emerald and tin. When we were born, our parents, rheumy-eyed from days on the mountain and pulverized silver shot into eyelashes, placed plugs of each substance into our tiny, clasping paws. Whichever we gripped tightly and waved about with the first and last glee we ever took in the fruit of the mountain, this we would cut from the earth for the rest of our days. Each family was possessed of a little wooden box full of gleaming slugs—and if a child should choose differently from his parents, it was the last he saw of them, as he ascended or descended among the shafts.
My parents were higher than I—diamond-diggers in the ethereal heights. My brothers and sisters were lower: a few coppers, a few irons, and one sorrowing tin-cutter, my sister who lay in our mother’s arms for a single night before bucketing down to a tin-mother whose pup had gone up to the sapphire shanties. So it goes.
And if a child should not choose, if his paw was weak and clammy, or if he greedily grasped all metals alike, he was given to the mountain, and left to die or eat dirt as the hedgehogs before the mountain had done.
Such was the rhythm of life in the Kingdom of the Hedgehogs. We carried in our little glass-blown lamps; we carried out barrows of ore. We slept, we ate, we dug and chiseled and chipped.
I had a water drill I loved. It fit my palm very well—the years had worn paw-holds into the handles.
You may think we were joyless. Beauty cannot seed in joy. Diamonds are crushed from black rock; beauty is carved out of the dark by hedgehog quills. Our mountain was parceled out slowly to all the courts and all the crowns of the world. Slowly, over centuries, it shrank and shrank. We were satisfied by this: that dark may be chiseled into light, and that a jewel touched by a hundred paws might sit one day on a beautiful girl’s innocent head.
In my day the mountain was still greater than anything else on the blasted plains, and I knew nothing outside of it. One day, we would take the last of the mountain to the last princess, and we would be free. So went the tales before the soldier tumbled onto us like a loose slate slab hidden behind a cord of gold.
The Orphan's Tales Page 48