The girl had her eyes set high. The last apple was gripping stubbornly to the cloudmost branch of her Father’s scraggly tree. He had planted it the year she was born. It had grown to twice her height. The apple hung out of her tallest reach. She blew a lock of mousey hair out of her eyes. She was crowned with dirty leaves, as if the tree had been throwing its only ammunition at her, fighting for its last fruit.

The girl took a stone and threw it at the apple. She overshot. The stone sailed out of the yard and into the close, encroaching forest. Like all little girls, she hadn’t bothered to think of what would happen if she failed. 

“Ow!” came a voice from the forest. The girl’s ears perked at the sound of a horse, not the heavy stamp of a working horse but the light toss of a hoof that can afford to be shod and reshod in silver.

The second the horse’s head peered around a bend in the path, the girl darted into the house. The head was white, bled free of all the muddy browns and blacks that marked the peasant horses she knew.

She slammed the door. Her father grumbled a little from his room, where he lay pillowed on a foul-smelling earthen jug. She bent to a knot hole and spied greedily out.

The man on the horse was stained with expensive purples and skin-deep crimsons. His cloak stretched past his back into a blanket for his mount. It was lined with soft, unsullied white fur. He held a whip with a brushed copper handle. The girl couldn’t make it out at this distance, but she imagined the cord was soft brown skin, just enough to give a gentle prodding to a loyal marching steed or servant.

“Warrit, gel?” muttered her Father. She had heard him coming. Even on an earthen floor, his steps echoed.

“It’s the king, father! I hit him with a stone!”

“You did what?” roared her father, already throwing open the door, letting his face fall. “Your majesty!” The king dismounted, still holding the whip. He reached a ginger-colored hand to his forehead and tested the anger of a bright red bump.

“I demand to know the meaning of this. Speak quickly, or it’s the stocks.”

“My liege!” The girl’s father bowed and scraped at the dry soil beneath his face. “It was my daughter!”

“Your daughter, whom you are responsible for. Where is she?”

The girl’s father pointed back to the house and the king flexes the hand holding his whip. “Tell her to come out this instant.”

The girl came without being called, close enough to hear for herself. “I’m sorry, your majesty,” she murmured.

“Sorry is an excellent way to be, girl.”

The girl stared curiously up at the king. He was only a head taller than she. The strand of his whip was hard, black. His eyes were pale enough to be called white. There was no hint of amusement beneath his mustache.

“Will you curtsey to your king, girl?” She did. “How old are you?”

“If it please your majesty, she is at her sixteenth since being named.”

“You are in no position to question what would please his majesty, even were you sober.” The girl laughed. The king turned back to her and brought a hand up to his nose, across the nostrils. He smelled of horse, rich and huge. “You are an impertinent girl.”

“Majesty. I don’t know that word.”

“I would not expect you to. Tell me, what words do you know?”

“I know how to name each thing in this yard, and in the house. I know words to name you, and your horse. I know myself.”

“You would name my horse for me?” There was no amusement blushing the King’s face, but something similar brushed against his voice. “Do so.”

“He looks a Thruppence to me, your majesty.”

“She cost a good deal more than thruppence, girl. What is your name?”

“Esmerelda,” blurted her Father. He felt lost, hung-over, and he clutched at this tiny contribution as though it could save his life. The king stared down at the back of his head. A corner of his lip rose, pulling away from the grime and lice.

“Where is your mother, Esmerelda?”

The girl shrugged. Her father dared to roll back onto his heels. His eyes were level with his daughter’s tiny breasts. 

“Your majesty. She passed away last year. In winter.”

“I’ve done all her work since then, lord. Plus his, when he’s in his cups and bottles.”

“Esme!”

Now the king laughed.

“A daring girl. You shall lose your right arm for the stone. Your left, though, you will keep, as I trow the burden you are made to carry, here. What is it you do?”

The girl was speechless. How, she wondered, could he put, in a single sentence, the words to wound her straight next to a pleasant question? She opened her dirty mouth to retort.

“She is wool-spinner, lord. But lord!” The king lifted both eyebrows up into his tousled hair.

“Yes?”

“Don’t punish her haughtiness, lord. She is a stubborn girl—” a belch interrupted the plea. The king’s nostrils flared, and the girl’s father fought against the blood threatening to abandon his face.

“Stubborn is a word. Haughty. She thinks herself above her station. I shall have her executed.”

Desperate instinct framed the father’s next words. “She can spin straw into gold, my lord! She is only haughty, as you say, because her talent makes her so.”

“Straw into gold? Is this true, girl?” He fixes his eyes on the girl. She is silent. He slides his gaze down, over her small swelling. There is her Father’s pleading face, peeping around her body like a groundhog testing the air to see if it’s really Spring.

“Of course it is true, my lord. I told her to never tell. Can you imagine what would happen? Why, she would be drowned as a witch.”

“At least.” The king turned away and leaned an arm on his horse. He paused, and both the girl and her father balanced on the pressing of a knife’s edge. The King swung up into his saddle.

“Come, girl. With me. We shall see this magic of yours tonight. Afterward, if I am not pleased, you shall lose not one, but both of your arms. And you—” the king extended a hand to the girl and a glare to the father “—you shall speak nothing of this. Not now, not ever. I shall send men to ensure you are properly stewarding this land tomorrow.”

The king pulled the girl up into the saddle. She felt his manhood grow into the small of her back as they clattered down the path on light, ringing hooves. She didn’t cry.

A pair of eyes watched the forest. They blinked and creased as a grin pressed against them.

#

The castle smelled of piss and poor man’s air. The girl said as much and the king exploded with laughter.

“Perhaps your tongue as well, lass.”

They had left the horse in the stables near the keep. Piles of dung clogged their steps to the double oaken doors. Some of the stench clung to the girl’s shoes. She asked for leave to take a bath. The king responded with a heavy hand on her shoulder and a step closer.

He took her down worn stone steps. She went a pace in front, his hand not so much guiding as adding impetus. She slipped once or twice. His grip followed her down. The first time, he tried to offer his other palm, open in aid, but she brushed it away, knowing as she did that she had invited another chop on the block.

He halted her at the bottom of the steps. She blinked in the gloom. They were beneath the ground, surrounded by dark mouths that must have been doors. She opened her mouth to ask where they were. A sharp squeak halted the words at the tip of her tongue. The king hauled on an old, rusty door. It looked as though the rust was holding it together; given a good cleaning, it would be nothing more than an iron skeleton.

The king stepped aside, brushed the burnt red dust off his hands, and mocked her in a low bow.

“Your chambers, great sorceress.”

She slipped in like a mouse in short hurried steps measured with long pauses. The cell was a cylinder, several stories tall. A single high window shone dirty light and stink in a gray column, picking out the center of the floor and hiding everything else in black contrast. She moved into the light and shivers.

“What am I to do?” She paused long, received no answer. “If I am to spin, give me the wool.”

“Yes,” said the king. “Your wool.” He smirked.

How could her father do this? she thought. If only he had been sober— but no, her father’s sobriety was no different from his drunkenness, merely interrupted by fewer belches and bawdy, repetitive stories.

“The straw, then.” She drew herself just out of the light, letting it fall between her and the king.

“I shall have my steward bring you a small pile. I expect to be pleased by the morning. If I am not, you lose your arms.”

“And perhaps a leg and tongue,” the girl shot back.

“Which would all be a shame, lass. You are quite beautiful, in your woodsy way. No matter. If your magic carries you through the night, however, you can be sure that I shall give you a bath, a few nice clothes and trinkets, and a warmer, fuller bed to sleep in.”

“Yours?”

He crossed the room and slapped her. The weight behind the blow drove her to her knees, scabbed from the forest, now scraped on the cold stone. The king turned and left. The door squealed shut and a bar shot through a lock like a thunderclap.

“God’s wounds!” screamed the girl. She pounded a shuddering fist against the floor. She imagined her curse battering against the walls of her cell like a bat in a cage, finally finding the small window, blistering across the sky and into the Lord’s magnificent eye. 

“Give me strength.” These words dripped out of her mouth and into a cold puddle on the stones.

The steward arrived some hours later with a bemused expression, a small cart of straw, and a spinning wheel. He warned the girl against accidentally pricking herself on the spindle and she glared. The steward gave her an amiable shrug, halted an habitual bow, and slipped out the door.

The girl lifted a piece of straw and twirled it in her fingers. The light was deepening in color, heading toward pure black. She kicked at the spinning wheel. It was old, cracked, and mostly useless. She didn’t think she could even spin wool on such a machine; that is, if she knew how to spin wool.

She cried small tears. They dripped out of her open eyes, off her chin, onto the floor, into the cracks between the flagstones.

“Hsst!”

Startled, the girl looked around. It had sounded like a cat. It was nearly full dark now; the window hung in the sky like a malformed moon. A squat silhouette leapt at the hole and whuffled like an ancient dog.

“I say! Hsst!”

“Who is there?”

“A charming little beggar boy? No! Not such! I am a helper, a creature, a tinker and thinker, and transfigurator — specializing in the plain and the ordinary.” During the speech, the silhouette crawled down the wall of the cell, now speaking into its own chest as it flipped easily over a handhold, now grinning its words up into the girl’s shadowed face. “I heard from the birds and the wind of your plight and would offer my humble services to you, if you would take me.”

“You would help me spin this straw to gold?”

“I would spin this straw to gold, meadow lark. You would sleep. You look as though you need it.”

“But why would you help me?”

She peered at the man. He was squat and nimble, wide-mouthed, deep-chested, and musical in tone. He was a contrast walking, and the girl would not have been surprised if, in daylight, his face was Moorish on one half and Norse on the other.

His head tilted and she hears what must be dry skin creaking as his mouth gapes even further.

“You are beautiful, my woodsy girl. I would help you just for this chance to look on you again. Now take you to that corner and lay down your worries as your pillow. Come morning, I shall be gone, and this straw shall be gold.”

The girl did as she was bidden. As she slid into a dream of white horses and small, wet sounds, she heard the frantic squeaking of the wheel, whirling around its unusual task.

The little man smiled as she slept and let a word fall off his tongue, honey and magic, over and over again. Each time the word found straw it spread, thick and sticky, softening the fibers and staining them gold. The bobbin spun, collecting thick, rich strands that would echo the sun come the morning.

#

The girl was awake before light. Her dreams had been troubled and the floor too cold for a comfortable sleep. She let her eyes slit open, fearful of seeing a pile of straw, and berating herself for having fallen asleep. The little man could have done anything he pleased to her, but it had seemed like the right thing to do at the time, to curl up and forget, to be haunted by strange dreams instead of hideous reality.

The pile of straw was gone. Seven bobbins absolutely full of spun gold stood in a neat row beneath the wheel. The small tendons in her feet started to spasm uncontrollably as  she stood. She picked up one of the bobbins. The thread was almost warm; it at least carried the memory of warmth, as though all gold were descended from sunlight.

She dropped the bobbin and whirled around, certain she had felt eyes on her neck. There was no one else in the room. She looked up; no one was at the window. The little smiling man was gone, and might not ever have been there if it weren’t for the riches flanking the old wooden wheel. She bent down to right the spilled bobbin and tucked a lock of hair behind her ear.

The sun was climbing higher, but the light in the cell was still cold and gray.

The door wailed and the king strode in. His eyes fumbled about in the dimness, came to rest on the seven bobbins. He was surprised, yes, and shocked, but mostly pleased, having gotten to be king by delighting in surprising fortune.

“Well, well, girl! You have been busy, haven’t you?”

The girl bobbed a curtsey, peering past his cape while her eyes were down. The steward stood in the doorway, mouth like a fish’s.

“Stand up, girl. Esmerelda. And tell me: how is it that you were able to do all this?”

The girl bobbed again. She bubbled small words that meant nothing and the king grumbled, reminding her of the previous day.

“Answer me plain, girl. You do not, after all, need your tongue to spin.”

“Please, your majesty, it was so hard,” she begged, hoping to draw some sympathy like a veil across his face. For a moment, there was something in the way his eyes were set, but it tore from ceiling to floor as the sun spiked onto the wheel and the gold shimmered anew with faerie promise.

The king’s mouth opened, stuck between a word and a sound of glory. He swallowed, settled on a word.

“I shall be that much more pleased to see my wealth increased on the morrow, then. Steward: I am satisfied. Tell Rickard that he may go back to the kitchens.” The steward turned and muttered. A pair of heavy boots scraped up the stairs. The girl didn’t see to whom they belonged. 

The king smoothed his mustache. “Bring her bread and water. And another batch of straw. Larger this time.”

The king himself bent and stacked the bobbins in his arms, letting his thick gloves brush against the grime of the floor and trail through the small stagnant puddles. He almost dropped one of the spools. He chuckled to himself, adjusted his armload, and swept out of the cell without another word.

Around mid-day, as the girl judged by the slant of the sun, the steward returned with two cartfuls of straw and a bit of a smirk. 

“My privacy, sir.”

She sat in front of the spindle, enclosed by the dirty yellow piles. Her thoughts blurred across the whole spectrum from fear to outrage. Would the little man return? The empty light started to spill out of the cell. It was getting darker by the second. Her eyes were getting emptier. 

As the last bit of sun faded, she picked up a single spear of straw. She placed it on the wheel and pumped the pedal. The straw just sat there, unwound and untouched. She trawled her dreams, trying to dig up the words the little man had spoken as he spun. They had sounded like: Truth-in-broken-cousin. She let the sounds elbow their own way off her tongue, and got a mush of muddled tongue and meaning. Nothing happened.

She sobbed, just once.

“Hsst!”

The sharp whisper lanced down into her prison and she looked up with a shining, invisible smile.

“You’ve returned!”

A little, echoing laugh made its scampering descent from the window. 

“Never before have I heard such a pretty phrase to greet me. Never before. I am a happy little man, and helper, too. The birds and wind—” he was in front of her, now, and a little closer than she might like. She could smell him; he smelled as though he had never bathed. “—they told me of your second task. Don’t worry, my little woody wench! These things always come in threes. Nearly finished now, nearly done.”

“You will help me again?”

“I may.”

“Oh, but sir—” her words were cracked by his laugh, but she stumbled ahead like a young aristocrat anyway. “—you must help me!”

“Must I? I helped you once, and where’s your gratitude? Naught but a smile for the little tinkering, thinkering man.”

“What could I give you? I have nothing!”

“You have your berry lips, little help-lass. If I could taste of them, then I would feel the strength to spin the whole of the night, every star from its silver light into soft silk. Just a kiss, little gel.”

“Just a kiss?” The girl’s lips peeled back of their own. She pursed them, purposefully. The man stank, but surely a little taste of bad breath would be worth the freedom it would buy her. She nodded. The little man didn’t dance or clap his hands. He just tilted his head up, opened his eyes wide and pushed out his distended lips.

The girl closed her eyes and shuddered down until their lips met. He tasted of wood-smoke and old potatoes; she, the mold of captivity. When she pulled away, she saw a sadness in his eyes, suspended by his bushy arching eyebrows.

“There,” she managed. “Is it to my lord’s pleasure?”

The little man laughed again, transforming his eyes into thin slits of humor.

“Your lord, lass, will never kiss you. Now get you again to sleep, and dream of the future. When you wake, your king’s treasury shall be deeper, and you that much closer to breathing back the open air of your happy forest home.”

She obeyed, gratefully. She chewed on her lips, but couldn’t dislodge the taste of him. Nor could she shake the thought of her happy home, reeking of alcohol, floored in dirt, and sparsely draped in small, wrinkled fruits and last month’s vegetables.

#

Morning came with a fanfare. The door burst open while the girl was still blinking the night away. She had slept in this morning. Already the sun was making brilliant fourteen bobbins full of gold. The king shoulders his way past the heralds as they are lowering their trumpets. There were other men clustered in the hall outside the cell, all robed in finery and identical in their gaping expression.

“Stay out of the way, girl,” his majesty hissed. Then, louder, “See, good men? Pure gold! You may test it if you like. I have been very thorough, of course, but there is no need for me to be fearful of your happening upon a clever trick or jest. The girl is far too bovine, and I am far too blessed!”

The king underhanded one bobbin to the gathered men. They conferred among themselves in voices too low for the girl to make out. Before long, one man cleared his throat.

“We can find no fault in the alchemy, your majesty,” he said. The king beamed.

“Esmerelda—” tossed the King over his shoulder as he loaded his arms with the riches “—if tonight you can turn all the stables’ bedding to gold, you shall have golden bedding of your own. I swear on my family name.”

The door shut. The girl was again alone and cold. She stood still, a rod of cold iron seeming to splint her spine. Hours passed. Daylight waned. She didn’t bother to capture her thoughts and wrap language around them. They washed around her in red waves, chilling her and warming her in their ill-timed turns. Monsters, or ghosts of monsters, or voices of ghosts, or the taste of voices. Nothing made sense. Freedom comes when you don’t have to think— but she halted that thought before it fully formed, narrowing her eyes at the cracking mortar of her cell.

Freedom was the forest and the monolithic stones she used to play were castles before they were quarried, hewn down, made into gravestones and dungeon bricks, the bricks that blocked her sight and smell.

One more night. The moon rose.

The girl stretched her shoulder blades apart, letting the iron holding them straight dissolve. She hunched her back and took a good look around the cell. The steward hadn’t come by during the day with a new load of old straw. Did the king expect her to perform out in the stables, where he could watch her and her deception.

“Hsst!”

No, not yet, thought the girl. She clenched her fists and closed her eyes. She smelled the smoke and sweat of the little man, getting stronger and stronger.

“I heard another rumor, woodsy girl.”

Her teeth were clenched as fists. She pummeled out her words.

“There is naught here for you.”

“Naught and nothing? Oh, but hear how wrong you are!”

The door squeaked and the steward backed into the room. He was tugging on a huge mat, spilling over with dirty straw. His back was straining, and his white hands were covered in dung. He dropped the mat, turned, and glared at the girl, huffing loudly so she would take notice. Gradually his eyes trickled off her cold, unresponsive stare and down to the wide-eyed, grinning face of the little man.

“Who is—”

The little man opened his mouth and spoke one word. It entered the girl’s ears, she was certain, but she couldn’t remember what it sounded like, or how it felt, or tasted. It had had a smell, she knew, but it had only touched the tip of her nose, like a sweet kiss, then giggled away.

The Steward’s eyes rolled up into the high corners, then clicked back down. He scowled, grumbled, “There are eight more matfuls,” and never looked at the little man again.

The girl did. She was met with the widest grin yet, and a shrug.

“What’s your name, my girl?” the little man asked.

“Mother called me Esmerelda.”

The little man hummed her name without opening his mouth, just letting the sounds drift around his tongue and teeth. He swallowed and spoke.

“You have quite a job to do tonight.”

“Me? But I thought—”

“Of course I’ll help you. But this time not for your beauty, and not for your kiss.”

The steward backed into the room, grumbling, hauling another mat. The little man didn’t speak until he had left for the next.

“This will be the largest favor I have done for you. And what have you given me?”

“My beauty. My kiss,” stammered the girl, missing his oddly twisted and musical words.

“Not enough. Not much, and not enough. I need much more from you, tonight, in exchange for this. My fingers will bleed, and my tongue will be bruised and thick in the morning”

“Then what? What do you want for this?”

The little man walked in a small circle, blowing air between his teeth, half-whistling. The tune wriggled through the girl’s ears and made her want to go swimming.

“If the king returns tomorrow and finds you sleeping amid a pile of horseshit and hay, you will lose your fingers, your hands, your arms, your legs, your pretty breasts and nose. He won’t speak to you. He will be cold, silent, but right there in front of you, watching Toothless Rickard at his work. You will plead for a morsel of pity, at least until your tongue comes out. He will take your house as the crown’s and kill your father; a swifter punishment than yours, for certain, but no less hideous. And when you are gone and thrown into the pit, I will swing past, drop my pants, and take a shit on your ungrateful grave.”

“But sir—” a sharp laugh “—please! I haven’t . . . I mean, I don’t even know what you want me to do.” She saw herself underground, covered over with soil, and his hairy arse adding derision to death. She is sure that soft jade grass would cover her everywhere but that one spot, which would be brown, cracked, and fever hot.

He stopped whistling. “Your maidenhead,” he said.

“No!” She backed up. He matched her steps. She flattened herself against the freezing wall. The steward entered, gave her a funny look, dusted off his hands, and left again. “Help!” she cried and he doesn’t care.

The little man stared into her belly. “Give me your maidenhead,” he said. “A child will come of it. The child will be mine, without question or care.”

The girl lost control of her tongue. She babbled, was silent, screamed; it made no difference to the little man. The steward came and went, finally bringing in the last haul of straw. The piles ringed the doorway, blocking it from sight. In a moment of silence, the girl heard the door shut, a delayed echo of her hysteria. The bolt pierced the lock.

A sob— she realized it was hers. She brought herself up straight and focused on the little man. He hadn’t moved an inch or whisker.

“Well?”

“You shall have my firstborn child.”

“And your first time, whore.”

The dark words scrambled up her legs and dug dirty hands into her stomach. “And my maidenhead,” she said.

“Good. Then I can help you! Bring the wheel.”

She tugged the old machine in fits and starts, filling her palms with splinters. The little man wandered among the piles of filthy straw, muttering under his breath and poking at the odd lump of dung.

“Lie here.” He pointed at a pile much cleaner than the rest. Cold, she stretched on the straw. “Lift up your skirts.” She tried to let her eyes anchor on a point on the ceiling, but it was far too dark, the ceiling invisible. Her eyes wandered, loose and frightened by the freedom.

She felt a stab of warmth. She didn’t dare look. It felt like a beetle crawling between her legs with small warm feet. She closed her eyes the first time he groaned, squeezed them tighter the second time, and sobbed the third.

“All done, princess, all done. Now, you must go to sleep and remember what you’ve promised. Golden dreams, my little woodsy girl. Golden dreams.”

She didn’t open her eyes. Her skirts were bunched about her waist. Her sex was held in the palm of the hot, stagnant air. The wheel started to spin, squeaking each revolution, rhythmic, a songbird. She couldn’t think of anything but the in and out, her mind producing dreamlike images of things she hadn’t seen, of his thing, of him bending over her, and he squeaked like a wheel every time he pressed into her. 

The little man watched the girl fall asleep while his tongue and fingers pulled the straw through the dyeing magic. “Don’t forget, child.”

#

He was gone when she woke halfway through the night. The wheel was silent. The straw was gone; even the smell of dung had drifted away, replaced by that summer apples and cut bark. She shivered through a short chain of half-formed thoughts. She fell asleep again, to dreams of giving birth.

Her child bawled into the world. It was a dwarf with a hook nose and long beard. Its teeth were yellow and it wouldn’t stop grinning. The twisted mouth gaped wider and wider, giving its own birth to a mirror lodged in the short stump of a throat. The mirror cracked, and each shard reflected a new ray of light, brighter and brighter and then morning was on her.

“I told you to get on your feet, girl.” The king was standing in front of her. She hadn’t heard the door, his boots, his first order. She pushed herself up off the floor, leaving her head bowed. Even the straw she had slept on had been taken. Turned to gold? She wanted desperately to look around, to make sure the payment the little man had taken had been worth the product. She pulled her curiosity down under the hoods of her eyes and curtseyed.

The king was wearing his soft skin gloves. He stroked her cheek with one and pulled a lock of hair behind her ear.

“Do you know how rich I am?” She shook her head. “Enough that I could start a crusade of my own into the Holy Lands, and may well do just that, if the mood takes me. I can pay off all the debts the realm incurred before my kingship.” He laughed. “I could buy France.” He started to walk around behind her. The king sighed deeply; she could hear the way his cynical smile shaped the sound. “I can not, however, allow this wealth to spread. If every peasant father had even a spoonful of gold for his dirt-grubbing family, then my own treasury would be that much less valuable —not to mention that much poorer.

“So, my girl—” he was in front of her again “—I can’t, you see, allow you to go home. You would bring the news of my wealth to your father, and he would tell it to his ale, and be overheard by every filthy little thing that sweats beside you folk in the fields. You must stay with me.”

“Yes, your majesty.” At least there would be food.

“As simple as that, girl?”

“My father is a bastard, your majesty.”

“That I don’t doubt. Not even coming from you.” The king breathed gold deep into his lungs and exhaled hesitantly. “You will be cleaned up and looked after. I will allow you run of the keep and castle, with this one condition: you may not speak. If I learn that you have opened your mouth even once save to stuff your face, then you will spend the rest of your years here. Right here.” The king’s hand stabbed down to the floor. The girl almost laughed to see how the soft leather wobbled and waved, like a turkey’s wattle, like a little clown gamboling in his motley. “Do you understand me, girl?”

She looked up and nodded.

“Good. I will get you a bath, after you help me carry this to my treasury.”

#

Before long, the girl had learned the ways of the keep. She spent a good deal of her time in the kitchens, because it was warm there and smelled as she always thought summers should smell. Once she was reaching for a pasty and, burning her callused fingertips, let out a yelp of pain. The kitchen maids all craned their necks to stare at this child they had been told was a mute. The girl was mortified. She would be damned by any words of explanation, and silence offered suspicion. Thinking quickly, she made a few sounds like a fool, tongue glued firmly to the top of her mouth. The head cook shook her dimpled head, dislodging flakes of pity. She handed the girl a cooler pasty and shooed her out of the kitchen. 

The girl threw the pasty to a dog. Then she kicked the dog in the ribs. It snarled at her. She kicked it again, then ran.

The king heard about the incident and beat her. It was not seemly for a king’s consort to behave so in the presence of servants. “I told them you were mute, not an imbecile,” he had said.

As the months went on,  became filled and round by the mystery child in her womb. She sat long in her chambers, just down the hall from the king’s, within hollering distance. He had cursed when the maids told him she was expecting. Then he came to her at night and explained the situation to her, and warned her again not to speak. 

The king took her when he liked. The girl wanted him to be sure that her child was his, as much as she detested his loves of gold and iron. If he suspected even the smallest amount that the child, the freak it would certainly be, were not his, he would kill her. That had been an unspoken part of their agreement. So, whenever he came to her, she wouldn’t make a move of protest, much less a sound. The first time, she prayed his strong seed would clean her, clear the field planted by the little man. She only felt dirtier.

And now, her husband gone to France to fight a battle that he excitedly called a war, she fidgeted with her skirts and waited for happy news. To distract herself, she watched the sun crawl across the floor.

#

There was a clearing, far from castle and town, floored with deep moss and roofed with ancient branches woven into each other like lovers only wish they could be.

At its center sat the little man, humming to himself with his eyes closed. He listened to the wind buffeting the leaves, the leaves speaking like cicadas. His legs were crossed and his gnarled fingers danced over them. He smiled as though coming to a decision.

He creaked to his knees and then to his feet. He turned in a slow circle. He spied an old tree, twice struck by lightning and nearly outweighing its own roots. He padded over to it.

Masked behind a mass of thick brush, three men in black watched as the little man stroked the bark of the tree and murmured words they couldn’t hear. One man held a tiny crossbow, its string wound so tight it almost hummed. The other two held daggers, blackened so as not to glint in the filtered sunlight.

The little man took a step back, sucked in a great breath and screamed. His tongue moved as though it were shaping words, but all the assassins could hear was one long wail, the sound of a lone wolf, of a whole pack’s answer, of the moon tearing in half and dripping her pain on the oceans. They covered their ears and squinted shut their eyes.

With their eyes closed, they didn’t see the ancient tree topple, they couldn’t see the trunk suddenly hollow, sprouting a doorway here, a small window frame there. They couldn’t see the tiny bluebird flung from its nest or hear it chattering angrily into the netted branches.

The little man closed his mouth. Through it all, the air never moved beyond a breeze; but now it felt cooler, emptier. The assassins opened their eyes.

They saw the little man rap on the front door, putting his ear against it, testing its resonance. He poked a finger into the window frame, scratching at the smooth wood. He rocked onto his heels and clasped his hands behind his back. He whistled a tune, light and twisting as a curl of wood smoke.

The crossbow bolt stuck into his back. His groan of pain was visible, but silent. He reached one fluttering hand to finger the shaft, curled his fist around it, and yanked. He fell to his knees.

Daggers out, the other two assassins rushed him. The little man held the bolt in his right hand. He muttered a word and the blood vanished from its metal head, from the stained shirt on his back. He turned to face the assassins. His eyes were wild, angry, dark and getting darker.

He opened his mouth. One word slithered out and brought the world to a halt. Something blurred. A head fell into the moss, painting the green with red. The thick ground swallowed it up. Then there was nothing but the peaceful clearing and the twitter of the homeless bluebird as it flew away.

The little man didn’t smile. He heard the thrashing of the third assassin as he fought through the trees, blind with horror. The little man started to run. He dodged branches and melted through underbrush, shaded out of sight and silent. He stopped, breathing steadily. He was ahead of his quarry, the crunching of the assassin coming toward him, now.

The assassin nearly stumbled past the little man, hollow eyes grasping at the path ahead. A small, strong hand whipped out, grabbed him under the ribcage, and pulled. There was a crack and a scream. The assassin fell to the ground and looked up at the little man, who opened his mouth.

There was fire, this time. A soft rain put it out.

#

The girl had never taken up stitching as the king’s other maids and consorts had. They had tried to teach her, at the king’s insistence, but the needles had hurt her fingers, and the other girls had been too jealous of her to keep up the lessons. Not having much for distraction, she sat in front of her highest window and brooded on her plan. She looked down on the rows of apple trees of the king’s orchard. It was near to spring, but the trailing ends of cold and snow still clung to the mud and draped over the trees and fields like the train of a cape. The girl watched snow melt and considered spitting on one of the guards stationed at the foot of the keep.

A bird, desperately beating the air, grabbed her idle attention. It flew the way the king moved when he was drunk, listing mad back and forth, but somehow moving steady to his goal. The bird started to circle, gaining altitude. The girl stepped back from the window, puzzlement claiming the color of her cheeks.

The bird flew to her sill and stopped, folding its wings and shrugging like an old man testing the warmth of his coat.

“My lady? Have I news for you?”

“Have you?”

“You haven’t heard the news?”

“I haven’t heard anything, little bird. Tell me your news.”

“Did I live in the clearing, near to the little man? Did I overhear him singing about the lady and her baby— and did he call the child his own?”

The bird kept leaping back and forth on the sill, its head taking in all the room and world in fast movements, like wet lightning. The girl sat down and cupped her hands around her belly.

“You know where the little man lives. What of my assassins?”

“My lady? They were men dressed all in shadows?”

“Yes. The finest assassins in my lord’s flock.”

“Did you hear the word the little man spoke? Why did he make the men so apart? Did you see the blood?”

“He . . . killed them.”

“Did you see him break my nest? Why did he do that? Why did he sing about my lady’s baby?” The bird hopped a couple times. Its talons were so small as to be invisible, but the girl could hear the small click every time it moved. She hugged her stomach tighter. The little man was still alive. He had killed the finest murderers in the land.

“He spoke a word to do this?”

“Yes, yes, yes.”

The girl closed her eyes, heard the squeak of the spinning wheel, and something softer and more magical beneath.

“Did you hear what he said?” The bird was silent. It dug its beak into its breast. “Speak,” said the girl.

“My lady? If I speak, will it hurt?”

The girl hadn’t considered that. She thought for a moment, then she raised herself and crossed to an expensive writing desk. She had insisted the king teach her to read and write, as an alternative to needlepoint. She had written a letter to her father. The king had come to her while she was writing it. He had thrown it in the fire and was rough to her that night.

She took a sheet of rough paper and placed it in the center of the desk. The inkwell was half-filled. She took it and spilled a small puddle next to the paper. A beckon, and the bird perched on her shoulder.

“Make the sounds, here.”

The bird bobbed between staring into the girl’s ear and at the spreading pool of ink.

“My lady? What does a sound look like?”

She took the bird to her bed and taught it in the voice of a patient wind. Some time later, she watched its forked black feet hop across the page, spelling a word. Then she wrung the bird’s neck.

#

After she had given birth, she held her baby and traced the line of its mouth over and over. She was glad to have it out of her, and glad that it slept beside her in her bed.

But when the king came home, he would know. He would know it wasn’t his, or suspect her magic somehow twisted his firstborn. 

He wouldn’t know. The girl stretched, letting her muscles scream themselves hoarse. The baby pulled a breath into its small, sunken chest and stretched its horrible wide mouth into a yawn.

One of the maids knocked and opened the door.

“My lady. A visitor to see you.” The maid’s eyes were glazed. The new mother sank a shudder under the warmth of her quilts and nodded. The maid backed out and the little man waddled in. He hopped up onto the foot of her bed.

“Well, well, my little woodsy girl. What have we here?”

He tried to peer at the baby, but the girl blocked his view.

“This child is not yours.”

“Now, now, we had an agreement. You have paid for but half the price of your gold. I’m here for my other half.”

“Why not go father your bastard on some peasant girl?”

“That is what I did. Give me the child.”

The girl scooped her baby to her breast. Its head snapped forward and back before she remembered to place her hand beneath its neck. As she died, she bit down on another shudder of revulsion. The little man was crawling towards her, his eyes going black.

“You don’t dare harm me. Not while I hold your child. Reason with me.”

“You are a half-wit, and a girl beneath that. You have seen what I can do.” He grinned, empty. “And you may not have heard, but I took care of those men you sent to bargain with me.”

The girl took a deep breath and clutched the baby tighter, feeling its skull dig into the flesh over her heart.

“I heard. I heard more than you think.”

He paused and leaned back on his haunches, narrowing his eyes. “What?”

“I know the word.”

“What!” he exploded and leapt back. He somersaulted off the bed and out of sight. The girl could hear him, pacing, frantic and muttering.

“It’s true. I know your secret.”

His head flew over the baseboard, framed by two gnarled, angry hands.

“You know nothing. You are less than the cows in the field. You are just the field.”

She opened her mouth and the first syllable crawled off her tongue. It tasted like the searing heat of vomit. Her ears refused to let it into her head. She felt as though she were silent, mute. The little man screamed to cut her off and she covered the baby’s ears.

“No! No, you can not use that word. That word is my name! It is not yours to use.” He gave her names of her own, again and again, never repeating himself. She bit her lip, drawing blood.

He whirled and yelled a word she had never heard. She felt suddenly strange, as though dreaming. Beaten by strangers and left on the roadside. Nursed and raped by a wild boar. Sold into slavery by her brother but she doesn’t have a brother and she isn’t a hard worker.

She looked down and screamed. Her legs were gone. The little man stood where they used to be, smirking.

“I have more words, brazen bitch.”

Her heart stopped and sank to her stomach. She felt it throbbing, empty. She had vomited everything when the contractions started.

She opened her mouth and forgot everything except a fear that burnt her hair black and a plea that brought her heart back to her chest. 

Minutes passed. She looked down at her baby. It wasn’t breathing. She pulled her hand away from its neck. Its head flopped into her blankets.

The little man was gone. There was blood on the walls.

The king stormed in, some time later. He demanded to see his child. The girl’s ears were ringing. She couldn’t hear him. He leaned over her, shook her, slapped her hard across an already red cheek.

The word came to her again, and this time everything went black.

#

She called herself the queen, and, with urging, the extended royal family took it up. She ruled a fearful kingdom. Those who hadn’t seen her had heard. She became barren, would never produce an heir. No one had the manhood to urge her from the throne.

She visited her father twice. The first time, she gave him the corpse of her baby and told him to bury it. A week later, she returned, found him drunk and the baby rotting in a corner. She told her honored guard to plug their ears. She spoke, briefly, and then returned to the castle. It took her two baths in water and one in milk to wash the stench of smoke away.

She chose Wednesdays for court days, presenting herself before her subjects. It wouldn’t do for their queen to be disfigured, though, so she sent for a local artifax. He crafted her a pair of wooden legs, wrapped in soft deer skin. Her maids help her into the throne before any of the courtiers arrive.

She judges harshly. She only knows so much.

When she is bored listening to small complaints of land and marriage, she wriggles the stumps of her legs together, watching the stilts of rumpled skin flap like fool’s motley. They make a sound like a timid grasshopper. The queen laughs to herself. No one else dares understand the joke.

I met Emma when I was nine and she was older. I was in the park playing snakes in the grass while mother was in getting her hair done. I crawled belly-down around trees and over paths while dog-walkers and baby-strollers clicked and rolled around me. I didn’t have any friends to play with — not in our city, where the people kept to themselves and smelled gray, like steel wool. There was nobody at my school I knew who could lie in the grass with me and not play guns.

I slithered around the park until my shirt was soaked clear through and I started to shiver. That’s when Emma said, “What a funny game.” She was sitting cross-legged on top of a picnic table nearby, leaning back on her arms like bridge struts to support herself. I didn’t say anything back. She had green eyes and she used them, always moving, always blinking. I remember her skin was green, too, and I remember that the sun came down through the trees and so everything was green. “I know a good game,” she said. She slipped off the table and landed awkwardly on her feet. She almost lost her balance and grinned. “Follow me,” she said.

I stood up and followed her like any other kid. She led me back into the trees, where all the other people’s sounds turned into antsteps and rain. She pushed deep into a band of bushes, letting the branches snap back into my face, showering me with dew. Then she stopped and faced me. She smiled like a girl and reached her hands above my head. She shook the branches she could reach and drenched me with morning drops. I didn’t complain much — I could have gotten any wetter — but I think I scowled. Emma answered it by withdrawing her hands. Clenched between them was a riot of green leaves, their angles and veins all in tangles and misunderstood shapes. She rolled the leaves in her fingers, making them dance until I almost believed that her fingers were the dead things and the leaves the living. Then se closed both hands as if she were praying, catching all the green behind her skin. She didn’t pray, though. She let her eyes go back and forth all over me. When I was about to chatter my teeth on purpose, she opened her hands like a butterfly’s wings. 

Standing on her palm was a tiny bird, a green sparrow with twigs for legs and the spear of a birch leaf for a beak. It was as perfect and delicate as an origami animal, and, at first, that’s what I thought it was.

“Teach me how to do that,” I said.

Emma blew a kiss over the bird and its feathers ruffled. Its head turned and I turned to stone, as if my next breath would frighten the creature away — of, if not the creature, then the quiet birthday feeling that had filled me up.

The bird picked at its plumage and cocked its head to one side. “Have you ever seen anything like it?” asked Emma. I didn’t answer, still afraid to move. “Well?” she prompted.

“No,” I said.

“Good,” said Emma. She sounded satisfied. She sent a ripple down her arms; when it reached her fingers, the bird took flight, leaving behind a small cloud of downy leaves. I tried to keep it in view, but I lost sight of it in the branches, or maybe it had turned into just leaves again. I didn’t think so, because I could still hear the small desperate flutter of its wings.

My neck went still from staring up. Emma tucked her fingers under my chin and pulled my gaze down into her. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said, and then slipped like a cat between two shrubs. Her passage let a wisp of light into our hiding place.

When mom finished getting her hair done she said I couldn’t take any leaves with me, and I had to drop two pocketfuls on the ground.

#

The next day, I didn’t feel like getting out of bed, but mother made me anyway. She took me to church, where I didn’t talk much to the other kids and she sang way louder than I did on the hymns. I told her a couple of times that I felt like throwing up, so she let me pass the sermon in the bathroom.

On the drive home, I listened to the rain and asked mother what miracles mean. She didn’t understand me, though, and said, “Something wonderful that you can’t explain.” That made me think of maths, which isn’t what she meant. 

I didn’t make it back to the park for almost two weeks. I missed three days of school during that time because I was sick. Mother took me to the doctor on a Friday, and after the checkup she had to go to the drug store, so I asked if I could go to the park while she shopped. “Don’t you want to look at the toys?” she asked. I told her I didn’t want to and she dropped me off next to the monkey bars.

Emma was sitting at the bottom of the little kids’ slide, kicking gravel with her bare feet. I didn’t say, Hi, and she didn’t look up. 

“What took you so long?” she asked.

“I’m supposed to be in school,” I said. She nodded and drew a plus sign with her big toe. “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” I asked. Instead of answering, she patted the slide beside her. I sat down. She smelled a bit like burning insulation, so I asked her if she was feeling all right. 

“I am,” she said. “What are you learning about in school?”

I squinted, trying to remember anything that might be more important than Emma. “We learned about Cortez last week,” I said.

“Tell me about Cortez,” said Emma.

I shrugged. “He killed a lot of people he shouldn’t have. He brought diseases from the old world and he wiped them out without his soldiers.”

“I like that story,” said Emma. “It’s sad.”

“I could tell you others,” I offered.

“I would appreciate that,” said Emma. “You don’t know how much.”

I wanted so badly to ask her how she had made the bird out of leaves, but I was afraid that if I opened my mouth she would disappear, as she had from the bushes. 

She looked up from the equations in the sand toward the sound of a barking dog. I watched her eyes trace shapes around the figures of the dog and his owner, around the old couple reading on a blanket, around everyone else but me — she seemed to be using her stare to cut holes in the world, to section off the people she could see like cookies on a sheet.

Mother came and found me and said, “Come on.” Emma gave me a wave with the tips of her fingers. “Who’s your girlfriend?” mother asked after she closed the car door.

“Mom,” I said, and I rolled my eyes.

#

It was summer the first time I tried to kiss Emma. Mother had told me to stay in bed that night, to save my strength. She said I had mono, the kissing sickness, but I figured if I had a kissing sickness I ought to at least have my first kiss.

Mother was right that I didn’t have much strength, but I had enough to make it to the bus stop before service ended, and the only thing I felt wrong was a vibration in my legs every time I took a step, as though my bones were humming.

Somehow I knew she’d be waiting for me, and she was, waiting at least. She didn’t notice me, even when I coughed — I couldn’t help the coughing. She was standing out from under the canopy of trees, hands loosely at her sides, staring up at whichever stars she could see.

“There aren’t very many,” she said when I turned me head to follow her stare. With something as wide as the sky to focus on, her eyes were just about rolling from their sockets. Mine weren’t; I just locked onto the brightest I could see, called it Mars, and tried to catch it moving. 

“There are plenty,” I said. 

Emma nodded and made a smile I was sure was for me, though it was aimed toward infinity. “Would you like to see them?” she asked.

“They look just like the sun,” I said.

Her hand caught mine, fingers locking into fingers. “Don’t hold your breath,” she said. My bones stopped humming. The weight left my body; my blood seemed to run faster and freer. I looked down. The shadowed park was gaining a shape, like the horizon accepting a curve at the right distance. I could see the slide and the monkey bars and the bike path and they all drew closer together. I couldn’t help asking, “How do you do this?” Her answer was a grin.

We floated up through the grimy air, the buzz of artificial light below us, driving us further away. When we crossed out of the bed of smog it was as if a curtain had been torn away. The sky grew even larger. It was cold inside of me. Stars exploded into view like ants from a crumbling hill. My breathing slowed; it felt as if my lungs were freezing. Emma smiled and pointed with her free hand. Her lips moved, but I don’t remember any of what she said. I could tell that there was heat out there in the universe; I could practically see it, but I couldn’t feel the barest blush of it on my skin.

Emma took me down. I coughed when we re-entered the hanging exhalations of the city. When I could see the park and feel my lungs expanding, I tried to lean over and kiss her. She caught my face in her hand and turned both away. “Please don’t spend your innocence on me,” she said, and we fell the rest of the way.

#

While I was sick in bed I couldn’t visit her, not because mother told me not to, but because I could barely get my legs to hold my body up and balanced.

A new doctor told me new things, and mother said we could afford it, whatever it was. She heard a story on the news about asbestos being blamed for an outbreak of sickness in the area of the park, and she told me I couldn’t play there anymore. To make up for it, she bought me toys and books and video games. It was nice of her to do it, but I ran out of interest in them all. My bed became a swamp of plastic and paper. I wanted Emma to visit me, but she didn’t know where I lived, or even that I missed her. She must think I didn’t want to see her anymore, I thought. I wondered if she cared, or if her eyes just kept on slicing fractions off the world.

Then one day I almost didn’t wake up, mother told me, and I when I finally did it was in the hospital. It smelled of paint and varnish and gave me a headache. I figured I’d be able to go home that night — being so close to so many doctors should have done something to me. After dark, while the nurse turned my arm numb with her needles, mother asked me if I wanted her to stay the night. I told her I didn’t want to stay the night. She promised she’d come back first thing in the morning.

I didn’t sleep at all that night. The nurses clipped back and forth in the hallway, and every couple of hours they returned to put medicine in my IV and cold hands on my face and chest. I tried watching TV. A game show almost put me to sleep —almost, but not quite. I was just beginning to see dreams in the drab colors of the screen when the show went all to static and a shadow fell over my bed.

It was Emma. She padded into the room so silently that I thought she might be floating. She put her finger to her lips and made my smile stay quiet. She sat on the bed next to my shoulder and looked down at me. Even in the dark, I could see that her eyes were still, her pupils at rest on my face. I hoped I looked as strong as mother had taken to telling me I was.

“I’m sorry,” Emma whispered. “I still like the sad stories.”

“What are you doing here?” I whispered.

“I came to apologize,” she said. “Do you remember when I took you to see the stars?” She asked it as though I could forget, as though it had been nothing more than an idle conversation on a drearily normal day. I told her that, of course, I remembered. “I spent my innocence on worlds you can’t believe — neither could I, when I came to them, but I learned to. I learned everything about them. I have to apologize because I’m grateful to you for your open eyes. Your innocence is gone, and now you have no excuse for ignorance, but you have given me surprise. I have hoped for ages that I could find something that would build an unfamiliar expression on my face, a disquieting, perfect sensation in my nerves. I don’t think I ever will.” She was smiling as she said this and there were two tears on her face in symmetry. “But I do not discount the pleasure, and the envy, of seeing that wonderment on another person’s face.”

I opened my mouth to ask her things I didn’t need answers for. I think I mostly just wanted her to hear my voice. She put a warm hand over my mouth and went on. “I’m sorry for what I stole from you.” She withdrew her hand.

“It’s all right,” I said. My head was throbbing from the hospital smell and my gut had gone cold as a fist in winter. Emma smiled at me and got up to leave. I reached out a hand to stop her and, though I only brushed the fabric of her jeans, I succeeded. “Will you kiss me?” I asked, and two more perfect tears spilled over her lashes. She leaned over my body. Her dark hair fell in light waves over my face. She whispered something that I didn’t catch  — it sounded like a name from a history book — and then she touched my lips with hers. She tasted like ozone, hot and important. She smelled like a tree, like the breeze of a bird’s passing. She felt like fire, so hot I can barely write it, and it stayed with me long after she had slipped out of my room. I don’t think I’ll feel anything like that again.

In old Nippon, in the city of Edo, there was a lonely daimyo. He was a minor lord, arbitrator and administrator for a modest section of the city, wherein lived simple artisans and rough tradesmen. His wooden house was only slightly larger than those of his subjects, but it felt to him like a palace, because of how empty it was. He lived there by himself, with only a single servant to aide him besides. In the mornings, as he sat facing the spectacle of the slopes of the great mountain, he could hear the footsteps of his servant echoing out and back against the walls. There was no laughter, no rustle of silk clothing or clinking of tea service to interrupt the hollow noise. The daimyo was lonely, and felt as if the echoes would last forever, and be his only legacy.

He was not a relative of the shogun, but his rank afforded him the occasional visit to the palace. On each of these visits, the daimyo lusted for the shogun’s wives and consorts, not just for their bodies, but also for their grace, the shushing of their slippers on lacquer, the pleasure of their dance. It would have been a sentence of shame to have said anything, so the daimyo pretended to look away from the women, involved himself in minor business whenever they performed for the shogun.

One winter, upon waking in a cold bed, the daimyo felt his loneliness grow to its sharpest, bitterest point, like a sliver that had worked its way to the surface of the skin and then must be plucked out. He fell into a depression, convinced he lacked the tools for the necessary surgery. At a gathering of other minor daimyo, he let slip his jealousy of the emperor and, though his peers made no direct condemnation, he knew, as his servant carried him home, that he would not survive as daimyo for another season, that his time was over.

His depression deepened. Though his professional life had brought him shame, his focus was more than ever on his lack of companionship. His servant, fearful of being tossed to the streets, set out to remedy his master’s problem. He spoke to magicians, who told him there was nothing they could do. He spoke to spirits, who said that love of any kind is impossible to force a spirit into. He spoke with the creatures of the forest, the tanuki, who are practical and wise and the masters of transformation. They told him that the spirit need not be bent to love, but that a vessel for love might be created. They were pleased to have bested the magicians of the servant’s own race. They instructed him to travel to the slopes of the great mountain, there to fetch a cartful of ice, and then to find kimura-gumo, the spinning spiders, and to capture a score of them in mid-dance. The servant would then need to sculpt the ice into the form of a human, and to harvest the silk of the kimura-gumo to create a garment. If this garment were to be laid on the sculpture, the sculpture would come to life, with the purity of new snow and the dance of the spiders.

The servant thanked the tanuki and set out to collect the ingredients. First he hunted the kimura-gumo, and from their silk he fashioned a black kimono. Then he traveled to the slopes of the great mountain and fetched a cartload of new snow and ice. These he brought to his master, and explained what the tanuki had told him. 

The daimyo seized upon the opportunity, but he thought to himself: I am already shamed; I could not bear to risk further scorn by letting it be known that I fashioned a companion for myself. He decided that, instead of using the pure snow to form his consort, he would mix the melted water with dirt from his own garden, so that the creature would be tied to the land, unable to set foot beyond the walls of his house and risk embarrassing him.

With his plan thus crystallized, the daimyo set to crafting his companion. He had his servant do the work, but he watched carefully the shaping of the arms, the legs, the neck, the face, and made suggestions where necessary. There were rumors in the air of the shogun forcing the daimyo to relinquish his post when the sculpture was finally finished. 

With trembling hands, the daimyo draped the kimono around the clay body. Immediately, a light shone from within the creature’s head, and its delicate mouth cracked wide. A thin laugh pealed through the room and the creature seized the daimyo by the arms. Together they circled the room in a clumsy peasant’s dance. The creature stamped heavily on the wooden floors, shaking the walls and stumbling. It wasn’t sure on its feet, but it continued to laugh and, before long, began to sing. 

The daimyo was concerned. This creature of awkward motion possessed nothing of the graceful beauty of the shogun’s wives. As he was spun through the air, a clarity came upon him, and he realized that the creature was no better than an apprentice effort, suitable for nothing but scrap and slip. He ordered the creature to stop, but it would not. It gave a joyous shout and stumbled out of the room, onto the house’s small balcony. The daimyo heard a sound like the tapping of chopsticks and looked down. The creature’s legs were forming web-thin cracks where the clay had dried improperly.

All at once, a peal of answering laughter came from below. The peasants had gathered in the street to watch the daimyo be carried about by his foolish creation. Again, the daimyo ordered the creature to stop, but it gave no indication of having heard him. The daimyo tried to struggle out of the creature’s grip, but could not. As they spun near the railing, the daimyo kicked out with both feet, unbalancing the creature and himself. The creature swept its laughter into one long, thin wail and overbalanced, falling to the street and taking the daimyo with it. As they hit the packed dirt, they upset a charcoal brazier that stood in front of the daimyo’s house. The brazier tipped against the door, and the lacquered wood exploded into flame. 

The creature had been utterly destroyed by the fall, its pieces scattered for yards around. The daimyo struggled to his feet. With the heat of the fire on his backside, he stared at the half-circle of peasants that were staring on. Not one among them could hold back a smile, though several had darted away to fetch buckets of water. 

Without a word, the daimyo turned on his heel and entered his burning home. 

The fire spread quickly, from wooden house to wooden house, and soon the whole street was ablaze, the paths choked with peasants with their carts of possessions and invalid family. The daimyo’s servant had collected such a cart as soon as he saw the fire, and then waited in front of the door to his master’s house. When it became apparent his master was not coming, the servant did as selfish men are wont to do: he gave his past a single glance over the shoulder and pressed forward. He stooped once to the ground to retrieve the kimono, now torn and stuck with clay dust.

#

In 1863, a Basque man came to Tokyo, speaking very little of the language. The children of the street marked him and followed him, giggling to themselves as he entered one boarding house after another, unable to make the simple request for a room. When the day had nearly waned, the Basque found an establishment which was run by a polyglot. As he stood in the receiving hall, waiting for the innkeeper to light the fire in his room, the bravest of the children snuck up behind him and picked his pocket, relieving him of a slightly-tarnished silver watch. The Basque turned, having felt the lift, and tried to snatch at the child, but the child danced back and ran for the door.

Just as the child reached the threshold, the innkeeper slipped out of the shadows and caught him around the neck. The child struggled, but the innkeeper’s grip was firm. “Do you have children?” he asked the Basque in Spanish.

“No,” replied the Basque.

“They are surely the purest of joys.” With that, the innkeeper yanked the child off his feet and retrieved the Basque’s watch. Singing a string of high-pitched syllables, the child regained his balance and ducked away from the innkeeper, sketched a mock bow, and darted out the door. 

“The police will deal with him?” the Basque wondered aloud. 

The innkeeper shook his head and handed the watch back to its owner. “It is not a very good watch,” he said. 

“There is certain sentimental value,” said the Basque. 

The Basque found good company in the innkeeper, and that night they sat together in the common room, drinking sake talking. The Basque was interested in stories of local history, and the innkeeper seemed to have a wealth of such stories that had been building pressure on his tongue as water presses on a dam. Of all the stories, there was one that stole all of the Basque’s attention, so that after hearing of it, he quite missed the rest of what the innkeeper had to say. 

“Tell me again about the mad daimyo and his black kimono,” said the Basque. 

The innkeeper smiled. “Yes, that is one of my favorites, as well.” Then he stood and beckoned. “Come. I have something you would like to see.” The Basque followed the innkeeper back through the kitchen to a basement cellar. The innkeeper fetched a kerosene lamp and led the Basque down. The cellar smelled of mildew and tubers; it was cold enough that the Basque could see the mist of his breath. The earthen walls were lined with sacks of vegetables, pots of honey, and casks of fruits. “Look here,” said the innkeeper, dragging a small wooden chest out from the shadows. It was fastened shut with bamboo pegs, which the innkeeper knocked loose with the sole of his shoe. “Try not to breathe,” he said, and lifted the lid. 

The stench of rotten sulfur billowed out into the room. The Basque coughed and gagged while the innkeeper, his face passive and smiling, leaned into the chest and withdrew a sheet of linen, covered in the sulfur dust. “The moths do not eat through the sulfur,” he explained. He set the linen on the ground and reached into the chest again. This time, he came out holding a thin garment of black silk, barely a whisper of a shadow. “My honored ancestor once served the mad daimyo,” he said. “And we, his children, have kept this as a mark of our modest origin.”

The Basque let his hand drop away from his nose and gaped. “Does it work?” he stammered. 

The innkeeper shook it out. Large triangles of fabric hung loose from the body, like flaps of dead skin, but yards of whole cloth remained undamaged. “I have never tried to use it,” he said. “I have no need for companionship, and lack the skills to craft a suitable figure, besides. It is an heirloom, nothing more.”

The Basque took a step forward. “I will buy it from you,” he said. There was a catch in his voice, a force that suggested he could not have made the offer any quicker, or said the words more hopefully.

The innkeeper smiled faintly and turned what was left of the kimono into the light, to better appraise it. “What message do you take from the story of the mad daimyo?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” said the Basque. He hadn’t let his eyes wander from the silk.

“I believe that the story is a warning against selfishness, and against mistaking such an impulse for love. The daimyo was not destroyed by the creation of the surrogate lover. He had aimed himself toward doom long before that, when he allowed that his jealousy of the shogun’s wives might be deflected to another vessel rather than purged from his thoughts. My ancestor’s role in the story was as catalyst, as it is with we who serve unselfishly.” The innkeeper glanced over to see if the Basque had caught the slight witticism, but received no response in word or gesture. “It would be most expensive,” the innkeeper concluded. “I could not part with it for anything less than a minor fortune, you understand.”

“I have little of value,” said the Basque, now breaking his stare and shifting his gaze to his feet. “My home was destroyed by rioters, and my possessions were taken by looters. The money I had in the banca I’m sure would not begin to pay for such a prize.”

“Your watch, then,” said the innkeeper.

“It is but silver,” he said. “A wedding gift from my wife.”

“She would be upset to learn you had traded it for a bundle of tatters, would she?” asked the innkeeper. 

The Basque held the watch in the palm of his hand, spidery shadows from his fingers masking the reflections from the lantern. “No,” he said. “She is dead.” The innkeeper stood in respectful silence as a decision worked its way to the fore of the other man’s tongue. “I shall make the trade,” said the Basque, extending the hand that held the watch. 

The innkeeper first pressed the fabric into the Basque’s hand, then retrieved the watch. There was an inscription on the back in flowery Spanish, which, out of respect, the innkeeper did not try to read. The Basque rubbed the silk between his fingers, his attention absorbed in consideration of its strength, color, and texture. “Thank you,” he said. 

The innkeeper shrugged it off and mounted the stairs. “What value has a story?” he asked. “None, if the audience gives it none.”

The Basque left Tokyo the following day, riding for Kyoto, whence he could hire passage back to Spain. Throughout the long journey, he kept the silk close at hand. When he had the privacy, he engaged in the sewing necessary to fashion a proper garment from the remainder. Having little skill and only an old fishing hook as a needle, his work was necessarily crude, but functional. When his feet hit the familiar dust of the paths that surrounded his home, he had a woman’s shawl in black silk tucked under his arm.

The village was no longer his, though he had grown up there. Rioters had swept through like a plague of locusts. The Basque was still unsure of the motivation — whether it was religious, political, or something less defensible — but he had experienced the effect first-hand. In the night, the rioters had come upon his modest house while he worked late at his job assisting the village lawyer. Perhaps as premonition, the Basque had been discomfited throughout the whole day and requested at last that he might be able to return home to take a tonic and calm his mind. He had arrived at his house as the last of the rioters whooped and crowed over the flames they had built to consume it. With a thought for his wife, the Basque had leapt toward the flames, giving the rioters a wide birth. As he ducked into the house, he glanced over his shoulder and recognized the face of one of the rioters. It was his son, a young man who had never known his father. In that instant, with the flames searing his left side and a wash of shame boiling his right, the Basque felt as if he had lost everything. 

He had gone straight to the bedroom he shared with his wife, covering his nose and mouth with his sleeve. He found her unconscious in bed. He carried her out the back door, unwilling to face the young men again. He tried in vain to awaken his wife as the house and all his possessions burned behind him. All were hot coals and ash by the time he finally gave up and wept over her body. They had grown distant in the recent months, because of her desire for a child, and his unwillingness to give her one. As he thought about all the things he ought to have said to her, the air went cold and the last of the fire was smothered in a shroud of light rain.

That had been nearly a year previous; the Basque had spent the intervening time wandering the world in search of distraction, an explorer of low means.

He didn’t know who now ruled in the village, so he waited until nightfall and then crept with his package to the church yard. He found his wife’s marker, already decaying as though it were made of soapstone. Working with no light but for the half moon, the Basque dug with sticks and hands until he heard them strike pine. He had prepared a paste of sulfur, which he applied under his nose before opening the coffin. 

His wife’s body was dark, like wet clay. Her burial shroud had been eaten back from her body, exposing crossed, desiccated arms and a nakedness that held no secrets. The Basque lifted her gently, as though she were a cake about the crumble, and set her against her gravestone. 

He knew that there was a disappointment lurking just under his skin, and that it was seconds away from bursting through. He bent down to his wife’s body and said: “You must be cold.” Then he wrapped the black silk shawl around her shoulders.

Immediately, her body began to shake as though taken by a heavy fever. The Basque took her shoulders and stared into the pits of her eyes. “My love,” he said. “There is something I should have told you years ago.”

A dry hiss came from deep within her lungs and the smell of her rotten air nearly overwhelmed him, even through the sulfur. She struggled against his hands, shaking this way and that, and he realized that she was trying to stand.

“No, listen,” he said. “I have wandered far in search of the means to forget my contributions to the failure between us, but I have not been able to do so. I wasn’t meant to forget, so let me speak.” Her hips bucked under him and the hiss became a stuttering laugh which sounded, by necessity, cruel. The Basque tried to continue. “Years ago, when we were first married, I did not love you. You were cold and distant, a young girl from her father’s house and not the wife of mine. I found comfort in another woman, the wife of a merchant. I got her with child, though we were careful to avoid the possibility. For both our sakes, we never saw each other again, though I did see her from time to time around the market, walking with her son.

“I watched the son. He grew up mean and naughty, chasing girls, drowning frogs, and seeming to resist all urges to grow out of the mood. My lover, she was not a rough person, nor was her husband. I had thought that neither was I, but seeing my son, the child of my brutish seed, forced me to look inward to my soul.

“If my offspring could overcome the fairer nature of its mother and instead turn to the animalistic, a side I did not even know I had, then there was no hope between you and me of having children, for I could not bear to chain you to such an unfulfilling life. As we grew closer together, you and I, our balance shifted. I became colder and more distant, because I could not provide you with that which you most wanted.”

The dead body could not take the waiting any longer. The Basque finally let it go, and it struggled to its feet, unbalanced as a newborn fawn. It began a slow twirl, and the dry wheezes that must have been laughter began again in earnest. The Basque felt tears prick the corners of his eyes and cold trails slicked his cheeks. 

Suddenly, a pair of rotten hands grabbed him by arms and, though they had no strength, helped him to his feet. His dead wife spun him round and round, her head thrown back, bones clacking, laughing like a snake. The wind dried the Basque’s tears and stung his eyes and, when he could not bear the dreadful dance any longer, he reached up to the body’s neck and cast away the shawl. 

At once, the body went inert. Its momentum carried it over the edge of the exhumed grave and back into the coffin, where its joints popped and broke. The Basque, on hands and knees, peered down into the dark, but from six feet he could not make out her ruined face, and his memory refused to supply one for him. He leaned against the tombstone and wept because he had nothing left of his wife.

#

The Mckinleys had emigrated from a coal-mining village in Scotland just south of Glasgow, and ended up in almost the same coal-mining village in Colorado. The miners were mostly Scottish immigrants, the schoolmarm taught Gaelic alongside arithmetic, and even the working hours were the same.  

In 1945, Mrs Mckinley had a daughter while her husband was underground. She named the child Asha, which means “hope.” Asha grew up going to the one-room schoolhouse three days of the week, and helping her mother with housework on the other four, except during the heavy Colorado winters, during which the school was closed and all the children spent hours trying to escape their chores to go dig tunnels in the snow with their friends. 

One summer, when Asha was twelve, Mr Mckinley was killed in a mining accident, and the two women were forced to make ends meet by serving as tailors for the whole village. Asha stopped going to school so she could keep up with the stitching that had drifted on their kitchen table. She attracted a new nickname: Asha Shutup, because she always had too much work to come outside and play. 

The Christmas after Mr Mckinley’s accident, Mrs Mckinley’s brother came to visit. He had done well for himself in the coal prospecting business, and had spent the better part of the year touring Europe. When he arrived at their doorstep, he was wearing a black pea-coat so thick he seemed to be a globe; his boots were buckled with silver and brass, and a black top-hat perched like a snide joke on his head. Asha had never seen him before, so she was cautiously polite, but after only a few moments of his booming voice and welcome, warm breath, she was giggling like mad at his jokes and even returning a few of her own. 

Mrs Mckinley was not so pleased, and referred to her brother as “His Highness” all throughout the evening, complaining that they wouldn’t get any work done that night. Asha was grateful for the respite, and His Highness could tell. He suggested that the women needn’t do any more work that night, that he would gladly treat them to a Christmas turkey, with as many trimmings as could be mustered in the isolated village. Mrs Mckinley reluctantly agreed. The dinner was magnificent; the oven labored for so long that the whole house took on a rosy glow. After dinner, His Highness told stories of his adventures in restored Berlin, in Moscow, in Madrid while Asha listened in rapt attention, her eyes steady on her uncle, her imagination far away and getting further by the second.

Asha slept fitfully that night. Two things kept waking her up: the spark of wanderlust that His Highness had instilled, and the rustling of her mother as she fussed with the work that had been ignored. In the morning, it was clear to Asha that her mother hadn’t slept a wink. She was about to apologize when His Highness announced himself with a tremendous yawn and a morning wink for his niece. 

“There’s coffee on the stove,” said Asha’s mother.

“You needn’t have done that, sister,” said His Highness. “I brought a packet of the most exquisite French roast.”

“We got what we got,” said Asha’s mother.

“Well, at least let me give you some,” said His Highness. “It can’t be easy to get coffee way up here.”

“Don’t mind it,” said Asha’s mother. “We do all right.”

His Highness gave Asha an exaggerated shrug and collapsed at the table. “What is on the agenda for this fine day, my dears?” he asked. “Shall we go for a stroll on the green? How about an auction. Are there any going on today?”

Asha’s mother gave no answer but a snort that lacked the force of humor. “I’d like to go to school,” said Asha.

“Absolutely not,” said her mother. “Do you see how much we have to do today?”

Asha knew better than to answer the rhetorical, so she sat back in her chair. His Highness broke the silence. “Do you mean to imply that this dull effort has been preventing my niece from attending to her schooling?”

“Things are rough,” said Asha’s mother, winding a bobbin. 

“Outrageous!” said His Highness. “Things could never be so rough as to distract a young mind from education. They mustn’t be. If it weren’t for simple knowledge, we would be no better than the peasants of the Dark Ages, picking at burlap with bone needles and tearing coal from the mountain with forks of wood.”

“Please, mother,” Asha interjected.

The whir and click of the sewing machine stood as an answer. Asha sighed and leaned forward to retrieve her thimble, but His Highness slapped his hand over it before she could. He stood and beckoned her to her feet with a wag of his eyebrows. “We are going out,” he announced. 

Asha’s mother sighed and bent tighter over her sewing. “This house is not yours to govern, brother,” she said. 

“Nor is this life yours, dear sister.” His Highness fetched Asha her coat and, as she fumbled into her mittens, he plopped his old silk hat on her head and adjusted its angle. He stepped back and appraised her with a finger aside his nose. “It doesn’t match your coat,” he decreed. Despite herself, Asha giggled.

Her mother glanced up once more to say: “You look ridiculous.”

“And you’re nearsighted,” said His Highness. “I will bring her home straight after the lesson,” he added.

“I expect so.”

The temperature was kissing right up to freezing, so the snow was wet and sticky: perfect for snowballs. His Highness delighted in their creation almost as much as he did in their qualities as weapons. He coaxed Asha into playing one-ups with him, where the victor gets to name the next target. Neither of them could hit the steeple. 

His Highness sat in the back of the classroom as Asha sat in her lessons. The bit of chalk and lap-slate felt good in her hands again, and the teacher was kind enough to ignore, just this once, the whispered conversations that the girls passed around. 

After lessons were over, His Highness walked Asha home. “I would rather stay with my friends,” said Asha. Behind them, in the town’s single street, the boys had taken note of the snow’s exceptional qualities, as well, and had declared a war on the fairer sex. Asha felt as though she were caught between abandonments: on the one side were her friends and gender, on the other her work and mother. In the space between, she felt cold, and realized she would much rather flee and help bring ruin to the boys than huddle near the stove, darning other people’s socks. She said as much to His Highness.

“Have we encroached enough upon you r mother’s good graces, do you think?” he asked. Asha didn’t answer. She trudged forward with guilt taking over as motivation. “I’ll tell you what,” said His Highness. “I’ll stand lookout, if you will promise to peg that brat who was sniffling all through lessons.” 

Asha grinned and beat her arms as if she were a bird cut loose from a trap. She made to remove the top hat, but His Highness stopped her. “It’s an old, and seen worse than a bit of wet weather, if you believe the stories. Do you like it?”

“Very much so, uncle,” said Asha, fluttering her eyelashes just to test out the effect. It made His Highness smile.

“Picked it up in the south of France,” he said. “Some curiosity shop, where the owner babbled on about vivre, life. Consider it a gift for my darling niece.”

“Oh, thank you!” said Asha, throwing her arms around his thick frame. Then, she slid headlong down the path to the main street, where she caught one of the boys in the ear with a handful of slush. His Highness leaned up against the side of the church, every so often aiming a snowball at the steeple.

The air filled with childish screams and giggles. The Carver boys hunted Asha through the thin alleys with double-handfuls of snow. They got her separated from the other girls and cornered her by the grocer’s. She kicked at them and screamed for help, but was cut off mid-laugh by the sound of her own name being hollered by her mother. She straightened up and turned in the direction of their house. Her mother was standing by the church, arms folded, trying to divide her icy stare between her brother and her daughter. His Highness seemed relaxed, his hands in his pockets, but Asha felt her spine tense up. Just then, the Carver boys yanked open the back of her coat, dumped their snow down, and ran away crowing like soldiers. The action had focused her mother’s gaze, but standing there in a growing puddle, Asha felt unreachable, as if the game had widened now to include both His Highness and her mother, and there was no way His Highness was on the boys’ team. 

“I’m already cold!” Asha yelled at her mother, then ducked behind a building to plan a counter strike on the Carver boys. 

From time to time, as the games wore on, Asha glanced up toward the church. The first time, she saw her mother and His Highness engaged in an animated argument, their arms stabbing at God, the ground, the mountains. The second time, they were turned away from each other, and each had their arms folded tightly. The third time, both had disappeared; and the last time, His Highness had reappeared, holding his suitcase in one hand. 

“Are you leaving, uncle?” Asha called out as he drew nearer. He didn’t answer until he was close enough to put a warm hand on her shoulder.

“I’m afraid so, my dear. Consider this yet another brief stop on my whirlwind passage across the globe. Why, I barely stayed this long in London, and there are loads more pretty girls, there, to coax me to stay.”

“Mother is making you leave,” said Asha.

His Highness sighed and sank one knee into the snow, the better to catch his niece’s eye. “Your mother wears a lot of pride on her back. What pride does, my dear, is kill you from the moment it enters your life. Now, dignity, that’s different, because the world gives you that, and respect, well, that’s a gift from outside, too. You can accept those. But watch out for pride.” His Highness winked. “Because once you have it, you can’t drop it or your whole life will shatter.”

“I don’t understand,” said Asha.

“Nor do I expect you to,” said His Highness. “But I fully intend to be a specter in your memory, and I shall be disappointed if my hauntings do not cause you to understand, some day. In the meantime, I urge you to take your best stab at it.” He grinned and stood, dusting snow off his trousers. He opened wide his arms and enveloped Asha wholly in his coat. As he released her, she felt something pressed into her hand. “Keep it out of sight,” said His Highness, and, with that, he was gone, waving at the children on his way to the train station.

Asha looked at her hand. Wadded in her fist was a bundle of bills that her scant knowledge of arithmetic couldn’t sum. She slid the money into the pocket of her coat and buttoned it down.

The snowball fight had slid into truce; all the children were sitting on the front steps of the school. Asha could almost feel the weight of chores undone, and added her own. The children sat, warming their hands in their armpits, and listened to the sound of snow melting. “I’m bored,” said one of the Carver boys. 

“So do something,” said Asha.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,” said Asha. That wouldn’t do, the specter of His Highness admonished. “Let’s build a snowman,” she said. The Carver boys thought it was a great idea, and leapt into action. In order to make a snowman, large snowballs have to be created, and large snowballs have to begin life as small snowballs. Despite the minor fights that broke out, the dozen kids managed to roll three icy boulders from the main street, leaving criss-crossed dirt paths like worm trails behind them. They struggled to raise the man, and were streaked with freezing sweat by the time he stood upright.

While the girls relaxed on the steps, thinking about what to name their new friend, the boys fetched coal and sticks to form his eyes and arms. Together, they admired their creation. One small boy said: “Tell us a story!”

“He’s not quite finished,” said Asha. She took her uncle’s hat from her head and stretched on her tiptoes to set it on the snowman’s head. Before her heels had returned to the ground, a wild electric taste filled her mouth, and a wide, thunderous laughter boomed from somewhere deep in the snowman’s chest.

A mouth melted open beneath the eyes, which now were burning orange and releasing lazy curves of smoke. “Dance with me!” called the snowman. Its stick-arms came up and hooked into the folds of Asha’s coat. One of the girls screamed, but the snowman laughed all the louder. He began to bob and bounce as though on the water and then he leapt into a simple dance of circles. 

Asha’s tongue had frozen stiff but, as she was spun by the magical man, she felt a freedom overcome her fear; the sound of rushing air beat back everything but exhilaration. She spun with the man until she was so dizzy she couldn’t keep the world under her feet. By that time, the Carver boys had joined in and expanded the circle, and Asha’s girlfriends were close behind. One of the Carver boys helped her to her feet, and someone else put a hand under her arm to keep her upright, and the dance went on. 

Somewhere, beneath the snowman’s laughter, Asha could hear her mother yelling: “Come in from there! You look ridiculous!” The other children heard their parents, too, but none of them paid any mind. They danced until the hidden grass burned from the friction; they danced until the mountains with their hidden coal nearly tumbled down around their ears.