by Jane Yolen
Only the youngest three children ever returned. They said the others had found their little mountain village stifling. They said the others complained that there were no jobs for them except as tour guides. They said the others wanted to see the world.
The three who came back mentioned that the band had needed roadies.
“You mean toadies,” thundered the ex-mayor. It was the line that would carry him back into politics. Into the winner’s circle.
And into story.
If not into history.
The Unicorn and the Pool
IT WAS EVENING AT the pool, and the animals gathered to drink. It was the only time of day when they did not fight or feed on one another.
This dusk there was a strange oily substance floating on the water. “What is this befouling our pool?” growled Lion. “Monkey, did you put that there?”
“Not I,” said Monkey. He crept closer and touched the water tentatively. The substance moved away from his finger, then slid back, fouling his hand.
“Venom,” Monkey said. He knew this sort of thing. “Monkeys do not have venom.”
“Nor do buffalo,” said Buffalo.
“Or giraffes,” said Giraffe.
Hyena only giggled, but they knew he was not capable of any deceit, being open about his cravenness.
“Snake has done it,” Lion said at last. And the others knew this was true, not because Lion said it, but because Snake had done the same thing many times before.
“We dare not drink now,” Monkey added. And this, too, the animals knew.
Just then, as the last light of the sun sank behind the mountains, Unicorn came stepping across the veldt. Monkey, Buffalo, Giraffe, and Hyena gave way to him. Even Lion bowed his head, though just a little, one king to another.
Unicorn’s eyes were cloudy, his skin was yellow with age. Still he moved with grace. He stopped at the water’s age and stared, then bent his head toward the pond.
At the last moment, Monkey cried out, “O, King of Kings, do not drink or you will die.”
Unicorn hesitated but a moment, then dipped his horn into the pool.
Where the horn touched, the poison turned a bright blue, as if reflecting a pure cloudless sky. Then in a moment, the poison darkened as if night had fallen, and was gone.
“Now you may drink, my children,” the unicorn said. His eyes were cloudier than before. He turned and left the pool slowly, as if his bones ached, and where he stepped, flowers sprang up in his hoofprints.
All the animals thought they would see him again—all that is, but Monkey. Gathering flowers—the red with the gold—Monkey made a crown of them.
Days later, when the flowers had wilted, Monkey wept. He wept not for the crown of flowers, or the unicorn, but for all of them who would soon have no proof against Snake’s poison or their own bitter hearts.
The Golden Balls
NOT ALL PRINCESSES ARE selfish. No. But it is an occupational hazard. Perhaps it is even in the genes, inbred along with fine, thin noses and high arches, along with slender fingers and a swanlike neck.
There was a princess once endowed with all those graces at birth. Her father—a robust sort, given to hunting and sharing bones with his dogs—had married well. That meant his wife came with property and looks, and was gracious enough to expire after producing an heir. The heir was a boy who looked a lot like his father and screamed in similar lusty tones from one wet nurse to another until he found an ample breast that pleased him.
The heir was not the firstborn, however. He came second, after a sister. But primogeniture ruled him first. First at school, first at play, first in the hearts of his countrymen.
His sister turned her attention to golden balls.
She dallied with these golden balls in all manner of places: behind the cookstove, in the palace garden, under privet hedges, and once—just once—on the edge of a well deep in the forest. That was a mistake.
The splash could be heard for no more than a meter, but her cries could be heard for a mile.
No doubt she might have remained hours weeping by the well, unheard, unsung in song or story, had not an ambitious, amphibious hero climbed flipper after flipper to the rim of his world.
He gave her back what she most desired. He took from her what she did not wish to give.
“And will we meet again?” he whispered at last, his voice as slippery as kitchen grease, as bubbly as beer.
“By the wellspring,” she gasped, putting him off, pushing his knobby body from hers.
“In your bed,” he said. It was not a frog’s demand.
To escape him, to keep him, she agreed. Then, raising her skirts to show her slim ankles and high arches, she made a charming moue with her mouth and fled.
He leaped after her but was left behind. By the hop, it was many miles to the palace door. He made it in time for dinner.
By then the princess had changed her dress. The dampness had left a rash on her swanlike neck. The front of the skirt had been spotted with more than tears. She smiled meaningfully at the table, blandly at her brother who was now the king. He recognized the implications of that smile.
“Answer the door,” said the king before there was a knock. He knew it would come, had come, would come again. “Answer the door,” he said to his sister, ignoring the entire servant class.
She went to the door and lifted the latch, but the frog had already slipped in.
Three hops, seven hops, nine hops, thirteen; he was at the table. He dragged one frogleg, but he was on time.
The princess would have fed him tidbits under the table. She would have put her foot against his. She would have touched him where no one could see. But the king leaned down and spoke to the frog. “You are well suited,” he said lifting the creature to her plate.
“Eat,” commanded the king.
It was a royal performance. The frog’s quick tongue darted around the princess’s plate. Occasionally it flicked her hand, between her fingers, under her rings.
“After dinner comes bed,” said the king, laughing at his sister’s white face. He guessed at hidden promises. She had never shared her golden balls with him.
“I am not tired,” she said to her plate. “I have a headache,” she said to her bowl. “Not tonight,” she said to her cup.
The frog led the way up the stairs. It was very slow going.
Her bed was too high for a hop. She lay upon it, trembling, moist as a well.
The frog stood at the foot of the bed. He measured the draperies for flipper-holds. He eyed the bellpull for a rope ladder. He would have been all night on the floor but for the king, who picked him up between thumb and finger and flung him onto the bed.
The bedclothes showed no signs in the morning, but a child grew in her like a wart.
Marriage transformed the frog but not the princess. He became a prince, Prince Grenouille. She became colder than a shower to him. She gave the child her golden balls. And she gave herself to cooks and choirboys, to farriers and foresters, but never again to a frog.
And Prince Grenouille suffers from her love for others. He wanders from his desk down to the wellspring in the forest. He dips his hand into the water and drinks a drop or two. The air is full of moist memories, and his burdens, like an ill-fitting skin, drop from him while he is there.
Frogs lust, but they do not love. Human beings have a choice. And, oh, a princess is a very large and troublesome golden ball indeed.
Sister Death
YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND, it is not the blood. It was never the blood. I swear that on my own child’s heart, though I came at last to bear the taste of it, sweetly salted, as warm as milk from the breast.
The first blood I had was from a young man named Abel, but I did not kill him. His own brother had already done that, striking him down in the middle of a quarrel over sheep and me. The brother preferred the sheep. How like a man.
Then the brother called me a whore. His vocabulary was remarkably basic, though it might have been the shock
of his own brutality. The name itself did not offend me. It was my profession, after all. He threw me down on my face in the bloody dirt and treated me like one of his beloved ewes. I thought it was the dirt I was eating.
It was blood.
Then he beat me on the head and back with the same stick he had used on his brother, till I knew only night. Belilah. Like my name.
How long I lay there, unmoving, I was never to know. But when I came to, the bastard was standing over me with the authorities, descrying my crime, and I was taken as a murderess. The only witnesses to my innocence—though how can one call a whore innocent—were a murderer and a flock of sheep. Was it any wonder I was condemned to die?
Oh how I ranted in that prison. I cursed the name of G-d, saying: “Let the day be darkness wherein I was born and let G-d not inquire about it for little does He care. A woman is nothing in His sight and a man is all, be he a murderer or a thief.” Then I vowed not to die at all but to live to destroy the man who would destroy me. I cried and I vowed and then I called on the demonkin to save me. I remembered the taste of blood in my mouth and offered that up to any who would have me.
One must be careful of such prayers.
The night before I was to be executed, Lord Beelzebub himself entered my prison. How did I know him? He insinuated himself through the keyhole as mist, re-forming at the foot of my pallet. There were two stubby black horns on his forehead. His feet were like pigs’ trotters. He carried around a tail as sinuous as a serpent. His tongue, like an adder’s, was black and forked.
“You do not want a man, Lillake,” he said, using the pretty pet name my mother called me. “A demon can satisfy you in ways even you cannot imagine.”
“I am done with lovemaking,” I answered, wondering that he could think me desirable. After a month in the prison I was covered with sores. “Except for giving one a moment’s pleasure, it brings me nothing but grief.”
The mist shaped itself grandly. “This,” he said pointing, “is more than a moment’s worth. You will be well repaid.”
“You can put that,” I gestured back, “into another keyhole. Mine is locked forever.”
One does not lightly ignore a great lord’s proposal, nor make light of his offerings. It was one of the first things I had learned. But I was already expecting to die in the morning. And horribly. So, where would I spend his coin?
“Lillake, hear me,” Lord Beelzebub said, his voice no longer cozening but black as a burnt cauldron. Shema was the word he used. I had not known that demons could speak the Lord G-d’s holy tongue.
I looked up, then, amazed, and saw through the disguise. This was no demon at all but the Lord G-d Himself testing me, though why He should desire a woman—and a whore at that—I could not guess.
“I know you, Adonai,” I said. “But God or demon, my answer is the same. Women and children are nothing in your sight. You are a bringer of death, a maker of carrion.”
His black aspect melted then, the trotters disappeared, the horns became tendrils of white hair. He looked chastened and sad and held out His hand.
I disdained it, turning over on my straw bed and putting my face to the wall.
“It is no easy thing being at the Beginning and at the End,” He said. “And so you shall see, my daughter. I shall let you live, and forever. You will see the man, Cain, die. Not once but often. It will bring you no pleasure. You will be Death’s sister, chaste till the finish of all time, your mouth filled with the blood of the living.”
So saying, He was gone, fading like the last star of night fading into dawn.
Of course I was still in prison. So much for the promises of G-d.
At length I rose from the mattress. I could not sleep. Believing I had but hours before dying, I did not wish to waste a moment of the time left, though each moment was painful. I walked to the single window, where only a sliver of moon was visible. I put my hands between the bars and clutched at the air as though I could hold it in my hands. And then, as if the air itself had fallen in love with me, it gathered me up through the bars, lifted me through the prison wall, and deposited me onto the bosom of the dawn and I was somehow, inexplicably, free.
Free.
As I have been these five thousand years.
Oh, the years have been kind to me. I have not aged. I have neither gained nor lost weight nor grayed nor felt the pain of advancing years. The blood has been kind to me, the blood I nightly take from the dying children, the true innocents, the Lord G-d’s own. Yet for all the children I have sucked rather than suckled, there has been only one I have taken for mine.
I go to them all, you understand. There is no distinction. I take the ones who breathe haltingly, the ones who are misused, the ones whose bodies are ill shaped in the womb, the ones whom fire or famine or war cut down. I take them and suck them dry and send them, dessicated little souls, to the Lord G-d’s realm. But as clear-eyed as I had been when I cast out Adonai in my prison, so clear-eyed would a child need to be to accept me as I am and thus become my own. So for these five thousand years there has been no one for me in my lonely occupation but my mute companion, the Angel of Death.
If I could still love, he is the one I would desire. His wings are the color of sun and air as mine are fog and fire. Each of the vanes in those wings are hymnals of ivory. He carries the keys to Heaven in his pocket of light. Yet he is neither man nor woman, neither demon nor god. I call the Angel “he” for as I am Sister Death, he is surely my brother.
We travel far on our daily hunt.
We are not always kind.
But the child, my child, I will tell you of her now. It is not a pretty tale.
As always we travel, the Angel and I, wingtips apart over a landscape of doom. War is our backyard, famine our feast. Most fear the wind of our wings and even, in their hurt, pray for life. Only a few, a very few, truly pray for death. But we answer all their prayers with the same coin.
This particular time we were tracking across the landscape of the Pale, where grass grew green and strong right up to the iron railings that bore the boxcars along. In the fields along the way, the peasants swung their silver scythes in rhythm to the trains. They did not hear the counterpoint of cries from the cars or, if they did, they showed their contempt by stopping and waving gaily as the death trains rolled past.
They did not see my brother Death and me riding the screams but inches overhead. But they would see us in their own time.
In the cars below, jammed together like cattle, the people vomited and pissed on themselves, on their neighbors, and prayed. Their prayers were like vomit, too, being raw and stinking and unstoppable.
My companion looked at me, tears in his eyes. I loved him for his pity. Still crying, he plucked the dead to him like faded flowers, looking like a bridegroom waiting at the feast.
And I, no bride, flew through the slats, to suck dry a child held overhead for air. He needed none. A girl crushed by the door. I took her as well. A teenager, his head split open by a soldier’s gun, died unnoticed against a wall. He was on the cusp of change but would never now be a man. His blood was bitter in my mouth but I drank it all.
What are Jews that nations swat them like flies? That the Angel of Death picks their faded blooms? That I drink the blood, now bitter, now sweet, of their children?
The train came at last to a railway yard that was ringed about with barbs. birkenau, read the station sign. It creaked back and forth in the wind. birkenau.
When the train slowed, then stopped, and the doors pushed open from the outside, the living got out. The dead were already gathered up to their G-d.
My companion followed the men and boys, but I—I flew right above the weeping women and their weeping children, as I have done all these years.
There was another Angel of Death that day, standing in the midst of the madness. He hardly moved, only his finger seemed alive, an organism in itself, choosing the dead, choosing the living.
“Please, Herr General,” a boy cried out. “I am stro
ng enough to work.”
But the finger moved, and having writ, moved on. To the right, boy. To the arms of Lilith, Belilah, Lillake.
“Will we get out?” a child whispered to its mother.
“We will get out,” she whispered back.
But I had been here many times before. “You will only get out of here through the chimney,” I said.
Neither mother nor child nor General himself heard.
There were warning signs at the camp. beware, they said. tension wire, they said.
There were other signs, too. Pits filled with charred bones. Prisoners whose faces were imprinted with the bony mask death.
jedem das seine. Each one gets what he deserves.
In the showers, the naked mothers held their naked children to them. They were too tired to scream, too tired to cry. They had no tears left.
Only one child, a seven-year-old, stood alone. Her face was angry. She was not resigned. She raised her fist and looked at the heavens and then, a little lower, at me.
Surprised, I looked back.
The showers began their rain of poison. Coughing, praying, calling on G-d to save them, the women died with their children in their arms.
The child alone did not cough, did not pray, did not call on G-d. She held out her two little hands to me. To me.
“Imma,” she said. “Mother.”
I trembled, flew down, and took her in my arms. Then we flew through the walls as if they were air.
So I beg you, as you love life, as you master Death, let my brother be the sole harvester. I have served my five thousand years; not once did I complain. But give me a mother’s span with my child, and I will serve you again till the end of time. The child alone chose me in all those years. You could not be so cruel a god as to part us now.