It was a summer’s day and there was a fresh run of seatrout in the lake. Dozens of fishing boats had come out from Ballyloch, and the sound of happy children rippled across the water. The ogre sat on the grassy bank of his island and watched them. He thought at first it was the sound of flying swans, their wings singing in the air; but then he saw her, a young woman in a straw hat. It was she who was singing. She was standing up in her boat and hauling in her line. Her boat was close to the island, closer to the shore than they usually came, much closer than all the other boats. How the ogre’s heart soared as he listened. Nothing was ever as sweet as this.
There was a sudden shriek and a splash, and the boat was empty and rocking violently. The straw hat was floating on the water, but of the young woman there was no sign at all. The ogre did not stop even to take off his boots and his jacket. He dived straight into the icy water and swam out towards the boat. He saw her come up once, her hands clutching at the air before she sank again. She came up a second time, gasping for life, and was gone again almost at once. The ogre went down after her, caught her round the waist and brought her to the surface. He swam her back to the island and laid her down in the grass. She lay there, limp and lifeless, not a movement, not a breath. The ogre called and called to her, but she would not wake. He held his head in his hands and wept out loud.
‘Why are you crying?’ She was speaking! The ogre took his hands away. She was sitting up! ‘You’re the Beastman, aren’t you?’ she went on, shrinking from him. She looked around her. ‘I’m on the island, aren’t I? I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be talking to you.’ For a few moments she stared at him and said nothing. ‘It must have been you that saved me. You pulled me out!’ The ogre thought of speaking, but dared not. The sound of his croaking voice would only make him more fearsome, more repellent. The girl was suddenly smiling at him. ‘You did, didn’t you? You saved my life. But why? After all I did to you. When I was a child I used to throw stones at you, do you know that? I used to laugh at you. And now you’ve saved my life.’
The ogre had to speak, had to tell her none of that mattered, had to tell her how beautifully she sang. He tried, but of course all that came out was a crow’s croak. ‘All right,’ she went on. ‘Maybe you can’t speak words, but you can speak. And you can hear me, can’t you? My father – you know my father. He’s the weaver. You thatched our house once when I was little, remember? He always told me you were bad. But you’re not, are you? He said you were mad too, that you gobble up children for your tea. But you’re not like that at all. I know from your eyes you’re not. How can I ever thank you? I have nothing to give you. I am not rich. I know, I know. Shall I teach you how to speak words? Shall I? First I shall teach you my name – Miranda. Miranda. You will say it. You will.’ The ogre took her small hands in his and wept again, but this time for sheer joy. ‘And I’m going to tell everyone what you did, and they won’t ever believe any more all the horrible things they’ve heard about you.’ She shivered suddenly. ‘I’m cold,’ she said.
The ogre carried her into his cabin, set her down close to the fire, and wrapped her in his best blanket. He hung out her clothes to dry and gave her a bowl of piping hot leek and potato soup. Afterwards, warmed through inside and out, Miranda slept for a while; and the ogre sat and watched her, happier than he had been in his whole life.
By the time she woke, her clothes were dry again, and he rowed her back across the lake, towing her own boat behind them. She talked to him all the while, and that was when she told him of the smiling stranger with the pointed teeth who had just come to lodge in the village. ‘No one knows where he comes from, but Father says he’ll make us all rich. That’s what everyone says. He may too, but I don’t think so. There’s something shifty about him. He smiles too much. Father says he’d make me a good husband. I tell you, I’d rather marry a billygoat. Him and his magic Stardust! “What do you most want in all the world?” he says. Well, of course, everyone says the same thing, don’t they? “We want to be rich.”’
The ogre had stopped rowing, leaving the boat drifting towards the quay. ‘Stardust. Stardust.’ The word rang in his head like a warning bell. ‘“All you have to do is sprinkle my Stardust on your cornfields,” says the smiling stranger,’ she went on, ‘“and your corn will grow faster in a week than in a whole year. Sprinkle Stardust on the lake and before the week’s out you’ll be catching fish as big as whales.”All we have to do is buy his silly Stardust.’
At this the ogre became suddenly very agitated, croaking and cawing as if wracked inside by some terrible pain. She tried to understand him. She tried to calm him. She wasn’t to know the terrible story echoing now in his head, how his mother had told him on her deathbed of the smiling stranger with the pointed teeth who had come to their house just before he was born, and asked her exactly the same question: ‘What do you most want in all the world?’ ‘A boy child who will grow big and strong,’ she had said. And she’d paid him all her life savings. ‘Sprinkle this magic Stardust on your supper tonight, and you shall have your wish,’ the smiling stranger had said, and he’d taken the money and ridden away on his fine horse. Only weeks later his mother had given birth to a baby boy, bigger and stronger than any man child ever born, but ugly as sin and as misshapen as it is possible to be, and with a voice that croaked like a crow.
The ogre reached forward and clasped Miranda’s hands, striving all he could to say the words to warn her, but they would not come. ‘Don’t worry,’ she told him. ‘I shall come back. I promised to teach you to speak, didn’t I? And I shall. I will come tomorrow. Tomorrow I shall teach you my name. I promise. I promise.’
As the boat touched the quay she leapt out and ran away. Suddenly she stopped and turned to him, her hand on her head. ‘My straw hat. I think I’ve lost my straw hat. But why am I complaining about a silly hat when I have my life? Thank you, thank you for my life.’ And the ogre watched her go, his heart crying out after her, until he could see her no more in the gathering dusk.
That evening, as the ogre sat alone and wretched in his log cabin, the people of Ballyloch gathered in their hall to hear the smiling stranger with the pointed teeth tell them how everyone of them could be ten, twenty times as rich, a hundred times as rich inside a week. ‘Sprinkle this magic Stardust,’ he declared, ‘and you will harvest gold.’ They all listened in silence, and wondered and believed; but Miranda was not there to hear it.
Nothing ever happened in Ballyloch without the whole world knowing it. She had been seen coming back from the island with the ogre. As soon as she got home her father had sent her to her room and locked her in. Through the door she had tried to tell him how the ogre had rescued her from drowning, how he was kind and gentle and not at all as everyone said he was. She begged him to let her go back to the island the next day so that she could fulfil her promise and teach him how to speak.
‘Never,’ thundered her father. ‘Promise me you will never go back there, or you will stay in your room till you do, d’you hear me?’ But Miranda would promise no such thing.
So she was not there to protest when the villagers bought their sacks of Stardust from the smiling stranger with the pointed teeth. But she was watching from her window the next morning as they sprinkled their Stardust all over their cornfields, and out on to the great dark lake. From his island the ogre saw it too, and hung his head in despair. Somehow he had to warn Miranda when she came. Somehow he had to make her understand. All day he sat and watched and waited for her boat, but no boat came anywhere near his island. By nightfall Miranda had still not come.
All night long he sat there, all the next day, all the next week. Still she did not come and she did not come. On the seventh day, cries of delight echoed across the water as the villagers hauled gigantic fish out of the lake, fish so huge they could scarcely drag them into their boats. And the ogre could see clearly enough from the island that the corn in the fields was already twice the height it had been the week before. On the seventh night the ogre sat by
the lakeside and listened to the sound of revelry wafting over the still dark water. He knew it for certain now. There was no hope. She would never come back to him. Those eyes of hers which had promised so much would, like the smiling stranger’s magic Stardust, bring nothing but pain.
Distant thunder sounded through the mountains, heralding a storm; but still the ogre did not seek the shelter of his cabin. When the lightning crackled and crashed overhead, he did not move. He wished only that it would strike him dead. When the cold rain lashed down on him and the wind howled across the lake and chilled him to the bone, he sat where he was and prayed he would freeze to death so that he would not have to face the morning.
Morning came though, and he found himself numb all over, but still alive. The storm had passed by. The morning sun broke through the mist and warmed him. Beside him the swans slept, heads tucked under their wings. That was when the ogre first heard the wailing from across the water. Everyone in the village was out in the streets and gazing up at their houses. Every roof in the village had been ripped off and the thatch strewn about the streets. Out in the cornfields there was no corn left standing. Everywhere the people stood dazed and weeping. Many of them were down at the water’s edge and looking out over the lake in stunned horror.
Only then did the ogre notice it himself. The lake was no longer dark. It was green, an unnatural green such as he had never seen before. He knelt down by the lakeside and ran his hand through the water. It wasn’t the water that was green. It was covered on the surface by a thick layer of slime. Further out, a moorhen bobbed about in it, green all over. She tried to take off, tried to fly, but could not. An otter ran along the shore, not black and glistening as he usually was, but entirely green from head to tail. And fish lay dead in the water, on the shore, everywhere the ogre looked. And his swans, his beloved swans, were gliding through it, dipping their long and lovely necks. He shouted at them to come back, but it was too late. As they washed and preened themselves, every one of them was turning green. Already some of them were choking. He ran to the end of the island to see if the lake was green all around. It was, as far as the eye could see. A solitary duck quacked from in amongst the reeds. She tried to fly, but her feathers were matted and heavy with slime. The ogre knew she was never going to fly again.
As he watched her struggling in vain to clean herself, the ogre noticed Miranda’s straw hat floating in amongst the reeds, and around it the only clear dark water in the entire lake. He waded out and picked it up. One look underneath the dripping hat and his heart surged with sudden hope. All his years of thatching told him it was possible. Miranda’s hat proved it. But the lake was dying all around him. Soon not a fish would be left alive; and he knew that unless he could save them in time, all his beloved swans would die too.
He rowed out over the green lake, and as he rowed he saw dead fish floating all around him, bloated on the water. A drowned cormorant drifted by and a heron aarked in terror from the shore, flapping his great wings in a frantic effort to rid himself of the cloying green cloak that would not let him fly. For once the people of Ballyloch paid him little attention as the ogre walked amongst them. They were too busy bemoaning their disaster.
‘We brought it on ourselves,’ one was saying. ‘How were we to know?’ said another. ‘The stranger promised we’d be rich, and look what ruin he has brought on us instead.’ ‘We will have no corn to harvest. There will be no fish to catch. We will all starve, all of us.’ ‘What have we done to deserve this? What have we done?’
The ogre left them and hurried straight to the weaver’s house. From her window, Miranda saw him coming and called down to him. ‘I tried to come, I tried, but Father forbad me from ever seeing you again. He made me promise I would never go to the island, and when I refused, he shut me in here. I have not been allowed out of my room for a week. And look what has happened in that week. It was the stranger’s magic Stardust that did this, I know it was.’
The ogre waved her straw hat in the air, and tried all he could to tell her what he had discovered, but she could make no sense of all his frantic cawing and croaking. ‘Just come up and let me out, and then you can tell me. But hurry, hurry, before Father comes back.’ The ogre let himself in at the front door and climbed the stairs to Miranda’s room. Once the door was unlocked, she took him by the hand and they ran out into the weaving shed where they could be alone and unseen. There, with the roof open to the skies, and the thatch strewn all around their feet, the ogre showed her the straw hat and explained to her as best he could what had to be done to save the lake, and the fish, and the swans, and the people of Ballyloch too. When he had finished, she reached up and touched his face tenderly. ‘You are no Beastman,’ she said. ‘You are the Bestman, the best man in Ballyloch, the best man in all the world.’
When the people heard the churchbell ringing out, they gathered in the village, believing it was the mayor who had called them together. But the mayor was as puzzled as everyone else when out of the church came Miranda, her straw hat in her hand, and looming behind her the huge form of the Beastman of Ballyloch. Her father was spluttering in his fury, but before he could find the words to protest, Miranda began:
‘The fish cannot breathe and the birds cannot fly,’ she said. ‘The lake is poisoned. If it cannot be saved, then we, too, will die with it. Like the otters, like the herons, we cannot live without our fish.’
‘Why is the Beastman here?’ cried her father, pushing though the crowd. ‘I told you to keep away from him.’
‘Get him away. We don’t want him near the children,’ said the mayor. ‘Send him back to his island. We don’t need him.’
‘And who will thatch our roofs if he does not?’ Miranda was angry now, angrier than she had ever been, and they heard it in her voice. No one could answer her. No one dared answer her, not even her father. She spoke only softly, but everyone listened. ‘I’m telling you, we need him for more than thatching, too. He has come to save the lake, and he is the only one among us who can. He can’t tell you how, because he can’t speak as we do. So, for now, I shall speak for him.’
She held up her straw hat for everyone to see. ‘Only a few days ago, this man, this ogre, this mad, bad Beastman, saved me from drowning. He didn’t gobble me up, he saved my life. I was wearing this hat when I fell in and I thought it was lost. He found it this morning in the lake, and he saw that all around it the water was clear. Look underneath, and you will see how it soaks up the green slime that is choking the life out of our lake. His idea is that we should weave, all of us together, a huge straw carpet and lay it out on the lake. We shall weave it with flax – Father has enough flax in his weaving sheds to do it. It can be done. It must be done. We have all the straw we need, all the corn broken by the storm, all the thatch lying loose in the streets. Once the carpet is made, we shall tow it out and leave it on the lake to soak up the green slime.’
They stood, mouths agape. No one spoke a word. ‘We must have the carpet on the lake by nightfall,’ Miranda went on. ‘We may be too late already to save all the fish, and all the birds; but we may still save most of them if we hurry. We may even save ourselves.’
No one argued, not even her father. Soon every man, woman and child was out gathering the strewn thatch and the battered corn, and spreading it out to be woven into a great straw carpet. All day they toiled, Miranda and the ogre amongst them. For the very first time in his life the ogre felt the warmth of their smiles. No one stopped for a moment, not for food, not for drink. They worked till their backs ached, till their hands were raw, until the carpet of straw was woven together at last. When they had finished, it stretched along the lakeside from one end of the village to the other. At dusk, towed by twenty fishing boats, they hauled it out on to the lake and left it floating there. Neither the ogre nor Miranda nor anyone could do any more. Now the straw had to be left to work its magic. How the people of Ballyloch prayed that night that the straw magic would be stronger than the Stardust magic of the smiling stranger. How they
prayed that their lake could be saved.
When the ogre rowed home to his island that night, Miranda was with him. Time and again they stopped to scoop half-drowned birds from the slime, so that by the time they reached the island, the bottom of the boat was filled with them, all struggling for life. Once inside his cabin, they cleaned them off as best they could with straw wisps and clean water, and then they set about bringing in all the surviving swans they could find. They, too, had to be cleaned off and washed down, until their feathers were white again and gleaming in the firelight.
All night, as they worked together, Miranda was teaching him. Tired as he was, he was determined to be able to say at least one word by morning. Over and over again he practised ‘Miranda’; and by morning he could say ‘Manda’, which, she said, was as good, if not better, than Miranda anyway. It was a start. There would be many more nights, she said, and many more words.
Both were dreading the coming of dawn, for the glow of love was over them, and like all lovers they wanted time to stand still. But in the back of their minds, too, was the awful fear that the green slime would still be there in the morning, that the straw carpet might have failed them. They fell asleep by the fire, the swans all around them.
They were woken by the sound of cheering, and ran outside. Every boat in the village, it seemed, was heading towards the island. And the lake was dark once more, and dancing with the early morning sun. The straw magic had worked! There were still some patches of green close to the shore, but they were few and far between. There would be enough clear water now for the fish to breathe, for the birds to wash themselves clean. The people of Ballyloch leapt out on to the grassy bank, hoisted the ogre and Miranda on to their shoulders and carried them off in triumph around the island. Above them flew the swans, their wings singing in the air.
From Hereabout Hill Page 10