I frowned. “We own this mountain, but we do not dredge up ore for you or your wars.”
Widow laughed softly, full of regret as a pail of rainwater. She snatched up one of the other hedgehogs quicker than a cave-in, dredged him in his wheelbarrow of gold flake like a piece of meat through flour, flipped her shield over in her lap, and rolled him around the edge, into the shape of a ball. From a spigot in the barrel she drew a few greenish white drops and smeared them into his fur, and kept up her steady rolling around the hard, bronze edge.
Onto the stones of the upper shaft she rolled a perfect golden ball, and then she reached for me.
THE
HULDRA’S TALE,
CONTINUED
CIRIACO STOPPED, HIS LITTLE GOLDEN MOUTH snapping shut like a treasure house door. I sat in the now-long shadows near the well, my mouth dry, my hands clasped in my lap.
“She rolled us all, in the Five-League Fog and in our barrows—she was so much bigger than we, and so much stronger than she seemed. For all I know she wanders still in the passes. Now our skins are hard as hers, and we were used as hard as she. She sent us down the mountain to the valleys, and we served a King we had never heard of. His name was to us as milk to a cattleless land.” The hedgehog glowered and picked at his quills. “Did you know there was a war here, in this very place, a long time ago?”
“Don’t be silly.”
“There was. I was here; I fought. We were pressed into service as cannonballs. We learned new words, too. I was shot into the side of a bull elephant, and his blood swallowed me up. And after, when the fields were full of violets and blood-spattered balls, mothers began to take us home and give us to girls who were not sweet as cream and honey, but clever as bees. There was a war; I am a veteran. Does that make me sound brave to you? Does it make you like me?”
Perhaps a grown woman would have been more circumspect. “You are a golden hedgehog all my own! How could I like you better than I do?”
His red eyes flared and dimmed in the late afternoon light. The grass seeds and dandelion dust had settled around him in a floating halo of white. “That is fortunate, for I am going to marry you. That is what I am owed, after all my loyal service—even ordnance should come home to wife and biscuits. I have been your toy. I like you; your hands have always made me blush. I have waited as long as I can, until you were grown enough to smile on me. After all the amusement I have given you, do you not think some recompense is due? This is what I demand, and this is what shall occur.”
I laughed from my belly. I laughed as only children without fear may. “I like you, Ciriaco, but I am not going to marry you! Even if you were not a hedgehog and I were not a girl, I am only a child and very far off from fitting a wedding dress.”
“I am the mountain,” he growled. “I am owed. I have not forgotten who I was before the war—I must be fitted to a princess, an innocent girl whose fingers have yet known no rings. It is the way of things, and I will not be denied just because I am not a pretty ruby crown or a bracelet of silver and sapphires.”
“Hedgehog, I am not a princess. My parents are grain merchants. We eat well and dress well, but it is a pretty poor kind of royalty, even among the huldra. Princess of bread and beer!”
“That is princess enough.”
“I’m sorry, poor beast. I will not marry you.”
I had hardly spoken when they came: gold and copper and silver and tin, ball after ball rolling through the grass, iron pitted and pocked, quartz streaked in grime. They opened up into hedgehogs, their red eyes slitted and sharp, glaring at me from beneath furrowed and shining brows. I stepped backward, as though a pail of water had been overturned at my feet.
“There are few enough of us who are left,” rumbled Ciriaco in his yellow throat, “but enough to keep you safe and still. Your parents will not miss you—they gave you a golden ball, after all. Most probably they expected you to go missing long ago and are even now wondering why you do not get on with it.”
I clenched my fists. “I am not wicked,” I insisted.
“Then why have they left you all alone to amuse yourself with abandoned war relics? Why does no one call you in to dinner? Why does no one cry, ‘Oh! Where has my pretty daughter gone?’”
I twisted my tail in my hands. “I am not a favorite—that doesn’t mean I am wicked, and it certainly doesn’t mean I shall do whatever my talking toy tells me to.”
Ciriaco growled, a sound like clock hands scraping together. At this the two hedgehogs nearest me, a cast-iron fellow and a sow of copper, leapt forward, drawing a handful of quills from their backs like young men drawing their swords. They each seized in cold, stubby hands the long ropes of my hair and with a little roll and a little flip, pinned my curls to the earth, driving their quills in like tent stakes. I tugged and wept but could not pull free. Ciriaco raised his eyes to me, moist and scarlet.
“If I say I love you, will you soften?”
“No, my own golden ball, I am only a child. I will not be a wife.”
The other hedgehogs, smooth and ordered as a little army, began to tear into the earth as I struggled, pinned by their quills. They tore up strips of wet brown sod with bits of grass and yellow flowers still clinging to it, and began to build.
“I shall build us a house, Oubliette, a house for living and loving and cooking and dying, and you will live in it whether you like it or no,” cried Ciriaco, and he danced with a terrible joy while his family worked, their backs shimmering in the last of the sun. His golden feet tamped the soil, and the sod bricks grew around me. “I shall be no one’s ball again!” he sang.
Indeed, through the night they built up the house, and closed me into it like a rafter. By dawn only my eyes and mouth were left naked—and out of the cracks between the soft bricks flowed my trapped hair, with more quills than I could count wrapped up in the dark strands and plunged deep into the field, each lovingly contributed by the hedgehog architects. From a distance, all anyone might see was a humble sod house, with bits of old tree bark showing through the walls. The sheaves of hair stretched from the house like an awning, and Ciriaco reclined in their shade.
The other hedgehogs shrugged and rolled once more into gleaming balls. In the swelling morning, they trundled off through the now-bare field.
“I love you, Oubliette,” said my golden ball. “Put your hand to my head again and I will put a quill ring on it, and we will be happy in the house I have made for you.”
I cried quietly, my tears running muddily through the bricks. “Please, please. Let me go home.”
“You are home—you are the very substance of home.”
So it went. He asked to bend his quills into a ring every day, and every day I felt mud climbing my nose and refused. He was right, you know. No one came crying: “Oh, where has my pretty daughter gone?” No one looked for me. Perhaps a golden ball is nothing but a ball of yarn to lead difficult cats skipping away from their mothers. Perhaps I am wicked in some way I cannot guess, some way which a hedgehog or a miller’s boy can see, but a girl may not.
Finally, Ciriaco left me during the evenings, satisfied at last that I could not pull my hair free, nor escape his house. He rolled away and out of sight, burrowing into leaves and blossoms for warmth, leaving me to frost and hardening sod. I felt as though I too were bounded in blisters like diamonds, clapped up in a cold mountain. My tears froze on the fringes of grass sprouting from the walls when winter came—and when winter came, and the house was dusted with snow, like a new grandmother’s hair, my rescue came shambling into the field where I stood, my knees bent and burning.
THE TALE
OF THE
TWELVE COINS,
CONTINUED
HER BREATH HAD MADE THE SMALL SPACE BETWEEN us warm.
“I don’t think you’re wicked,” I said quietly, my voice filling the space as surely as a limb.
“If I were not, someone would have come for me, in all that time,” she reasoned. “If I were not, I would not have been given a gold
en ball and told to go off and play. I would have been kept close to the trunk of my mother’s body, and wrapped in her tail, the way I wrapped my ball.” She turned her head away from me.
“If I were not, the ghosts would not have taken me.”
“But you’ve done nothing wrong. Your mother left you to the mercy of a ball—mine left me to the mercy of the Stars. But I did nothing wrong. We are not wicked, we’re not!” I curled my fingers into my palms. Oubliette only shook her head.
“How did you escape, finally?”
But she sealed up her mouth like a letter. Light sifted flour-thin through the shredded walls, and long gray fingers curled around her neck, around my waist. They pried us from our beds, plied us into clothes of paper threaded with dirty string, pleaded silently with us to eat what they had brought: handfuls of aventurine and garnet. We sucked them down—they were hard and chewy all at once. Our teeth split their skin, and they tasted like licorice, licorice and beets. The same grasping fingers pulled us from our meager food and pushed us down that long corridor which led to the machine, which led to the Mint.
The workday had begun.
I tried to keep close to her, but it was impossible in the press of so many children. I could not see where she went, the one head floating shorn and strange among the others. Little voices rose and fell, paper trousers rustled—it was a little like school, save that we were all so afraid, so afraid. The Pra-Ita did not speak to us, but placed our hands where they wanted them, pushed our fingers as they meant us to move.
I was stationed at the edge of the great, arching thing. Already it hummed with moving bodies, lurched and swayed as though it were itself alive. It was Vhummim herself, to my surprise, who cradled my arms in hers. Her blue-white hair brushed my face as together we reached for shroud-covered baskets. Her diamond belly pressed against my back as we drew back the shrouds, and her wheat-stalk arms caught me as I fell away from the thing that she meant me to haul up out of the straw—for under the colorless gauze were the tangled limbs of children, glass-pupiled and sightless, gaping at nothing.
“It was better for you,” she wheezed, wretched and worrying, “I told you it was. To work, and not to be minted.”
“You make money? Out of us?” I felt as though I might vomit, but kept the hard, chewy gems down.
Vhummim’s eyes creased with embarrassment. “We didn’t notice,” she whispered, “when we wasted to nothing. We didn’t notice, for a long time. Our markets were so busy—we could not cease trade because of a few ruined districts. Or even more than a few. Our economy kept our heads to the ground. And even after, we kept up our markets, oblivious. We only truly saw what had happened when gold and silver no longer shone for us, no longer warmed the fingers with their very touch.” She cringed away from me—as though I stood in a place to judge her! “It meant nothing to us. Our jewels had no taste, our coin no weight. What does a ghost treasure? That which lives, that which is hot and hard. There is nothing more valuable than bodies, and we trade now in bone, we trade in it and mine it from the unwanted, we mine it and mint it and it goes to the new Asaad, where you first entered the city, and it buys pale shadows of what we used to love: apple cores and broken stone and skin with no meat, glistening and thick. It is called dhheiba, this new money, and we prize it as we once prized silver, as we once prized the taste of topaz. I am sorry, but all things flow to the Asaad, and so must you. The living work.”
I stared at the child whose arm flopped out of the basket, white and cold. It was a boy, with yellow hair and green eyes. His neck was bruised, as though he had been seized by long, inexorable fingers which squeezed and squeezed.
“See?” said Vhummim. “We spare you this task, at least.”
I considered struggling and running from her, but she was surely stronger than I, and faster. She moved her arms along mine again, sinuous and silken, and gently lifted them to grip the boy by the torso, provided the strength, this first time, to heave him onto the machine, where other children, longer employed than I, dully dragged him along to shining blades which quartered him, eighthed him, and further, and further. The meat was cleaned from the precious bone somewhere in the belly of the Mint, and far down the machine, round coins emerged, stamped with the spider sigil, clean and white.
I worked for hours with Vhummim guiding my every gesture like some grotesque pantomime. I stopped looking at them, all those boys and girls—I just closed my eyes and reached into the baskets, closed my hands automatically. I could not look, I could not. Finally, a horn sounded from somewhere far off, and we were ushered away from the great hall and toward a trough brimming with sapphires. I shoveled them into my mouth as I once had brown beans. They tasted like pastry and milky tea. The diet of jewels had begun to disturb my stomach, truth be told, and I wished, fervently, for bread. The Pra-Ita watched us eat, as they had before, and stroked their necks obscenely. They led us without sound back to the barrack beds, and I understood, as my arms ached under the thin blanket, that this day was now every day of my life. I wept into the pillow, trying not to feel the heft of thin arms and legs still in my hands.
Oubliette climbed in beside me, shaking, her eyes wide as a wolf’s, her teeth chattering. I held her so close to me I thought I might break her—but she clutched me with as much desperate strength, as much hopeless terror. We spoke in quick-fire shots, like arrows loosed one after the other, breaking each shaft before it in mid-flight:
“Did you see?”
“Yes—did you have to—”
“Yes—did you do it?”
“I had to! Did you—”
“Yes—did you throw up?”
“No, but I wanted to. Did they tell you—”
“No!”
I told her all Vhummim had told me, and her tears were hot as boiled water on my hands. We shuddered together in the dark. Neither of us spoke for long moments, stretching out like wool around a spindle. At last, because I could think of nothing else to comfort either of us, I murmured against her bristly scalp:
“Tell me the rest?”
She began to talk to me, her voice dim and hushed as rain against a broken fence…
THE
HULDRA’S TALE,
CONTINUED
IT SIDLED, DID MY RESCUE. IT APPEARED UNDER the hoofprint moon, washed in white, the distant grass brushing its knees. My rescue approached hesitantly—it sniffed the air, stuck out its tongue once or twice to taste it. It took a few steps, then stopped to watch me, then a few steps more. The moon was very high by the time it was near enough for our eyes to connect like copper key and copper lock. My frozen tears shattered as I smiled.
It was a unicorn.
I have heard that unicorns are pale and perfect, all white and silver like a bride’s veil—those are silly tales, told by sillier uncles and grandfathers. They are dark, dark as race-horses, brown and jet, with the tails of lions, and a boar’s cloven hooves. They have little black beards that hang from their chins like unchewed grass, and their horns are not pearl and gold, but twisted bone, the stuff of antlers, twisted round in yellow and red and black. Those horns are thick as my own arm, and sharp as shears—but the horn of this unicorn was severed a little above the base, and the stump had bled, scabbed over, bled again. It was a mass of hardened, blackened blood, and only hints of horn gleamed through.
The mutilated beast sidled closer to me and though she drew back, much as a wild horse fearing that the hand that holds the apple has a mate which conceals a bridle, she nuzzled my cheek with her nose, soft as a mule’s.
“I smelled you,” she said. A unicorn’s voice is a low, liquid thing, like pomegranate wine.
“I wonder you could smell anything buried in sod.” I laughed. A unicorn is fearful to see, but it is not a hedgehog, and my heart was lighter for that.
“I smelled your innocence, like baking bread. It called me over the wood and the field.”
“I am wicked, not innocent.”
“Do not tell me my business. Innocence is a tec
hnical thing—I do not care what menial vices you think you have committed. I misjudged purity once, so you ought to believe I am careful enough these days.”
“Can nothing be done?” I asked shyly, trying not to look at her ruined forehead.
“Like innocence, a horn once squandered cannot be regained.”
I tried to shift my weight inside the house of sod, for my legs were stiff and heavy. Often in those days I wondered if I would grow in this hunched position and become a bent-back long before I became the kind of crone who ought to have one. The unicorn moved her dark eyes over me.
“You are in pain,” she said distractedly.
“Yes. I’m afraid you cannot lay your head in my lap.”
Her nose wrinkled. “I do not want to! Why should I want to lay my head in a child’s lap? I am too old for such games!” Her eyes slitted in anger and could I have run, I would have, for her snorting and pawing were awful to see.
“I’m sorry. I ought not to believe dusty old tales—enough are told about my kind that I ought to know better.”
She calmed somewhat, and moved nearer to me again. I looked up at her through my pinioned hair. “But I am in pain, unicorn, and should you help free me, if perhaps your head were to fall—in sleepiness, no more!—into my lap, who should blame either of us?”
She gnashed her yellow teeth a little. “If I free you, you will only run away and I will have to chase you, and then I will be sleepy indeed.”
“I will not run.”
“You will! You do not like me; you only want to use my teeth and my horn and such for your own ends—that is how all of you are. I am nothing but a shop to you, where you may reach onto the shelf and take anything you like.”