A Wild Swan (6 page)

You are driven slightly insane—you try to talk yourself down, it works some nights better than others—by the fact that for so much of the population, children simply … appear. Bing bang boom. A single act of love and, nine months later, this flowering, as mindless and senseless as a crocus bursting out of a bulb.

It's one thing to envy wealth and beauty and other gifts that seem to have been granted to others, but not you, by obscure but inarguable givers. It's another thing entirely to yearn for what's so readily available to any drunk and barmaid who link up for three minutes in one of the darker corners of any dank and scrofulous pub.

*   *   *

You listen carefully, then, when you hear the rumor. Some impoverished miller, a man whose business is going under (the small mill-owners, the ones who grind by hand, are vanishing—their flour and meal cost twice what the corporations can churn out, and the big-brand product is free of the gritty bits that find their way into a sack of flour no matter how careful you are); a man who hasn't got health insurance or investments, who hasn't been putting money into a pension (he's needed every cent just to keep the mill open).

That man has told the king his daughter can spin straw into gold.

The miller must have felt driven to it. He must have thought he needed a claim that outrageous if he was going to attract the attention of the king at all.

You suppose (as an aspiring parent yourself, you prefer to think of other parents as un-deranged) he hopes that if he can get his daughter into the palace, if he can figure out a way for her to meet the king, the king will be so smitten (doesn't every father believe his daughter to be irresistible?) that he'll forget about the absurd straw-into-gold story, after he's seen the pale grace of the girl's neck; after she's aimed that smile at him; after he's heard the sweet clarinet tone of her soft but surprisingly sonorous voice.

The miller apparently was unable to imagine all the pale-necked, shyly smiling girls the king has met already. Like most fathers, it's inconceivable to him that his daughter may not be singular; that she may be lovely and funny and smart, but not so much more so as to obliterate all the other contending girls.

The miller, poor foolish doting father that he is, never expected his daughter to get locked into a room full of straw, and commanded to spin it all into gold by morning, any more than most fathers expect their daughters to be un-sought-after by boys, or rejected by colleges, or abused by the men they eventually marry. Such notions don't appear on the spectrum of paternal possibility.

It gets worse.

The king, who really hates being fooled, announces, from the doorway of the cellar room filled with straw, that if the girl hasn't spun it all into gold by morning, he'll have her executed.

What? Wait a minute …

The miller starts to confess, to beg forgiveness. He was joking; no, he was sinfully proud, he wanted his daughter to meet the king, he was worried about her future; I mean, your majesty, you can't be thinking of
killing
her …

The king looks glacially at the miller, has a guard escort him away, and withdraws, locking the door behind him.

Here's where you come in.

You're descended from a long line of minor wizards. Your people have, for generations, been able to summon rain, exorcise poltergeists, find lost wedding rings.

No one in the family, not over the last few centuries at any rate, has thought of making a living at it. It's not … respectable. It smells of desperation. And—as is the way with spells and conjurings—it's not one hundred percent reliable. It's an art, not a science. Who wants to refund a farmer's money as he stands destitute in his still-parched fields? Who wants to say,
I'm sorry, it works most of the time
, to the elderly couple who still hear cackles of laughter coming from under their mattress, whose cutlery still jumps up from the dinner table and flies around the room?

When you hear the story about the girl who can supposedly spin straw into gold (it's the talk of the kingdom), you don't immediately think,
This might be a way for me to get a child.
That would be too many steps down the line for most people, and you, though you have a potent heart and ferocity of intention, are not a particularly serious thinker. You work more from instinct. It's instinct, then, that tells you,
Help this girl, good might come of it.
Maybe simply because you, and you alone, have something to offer her. You who've never before had much to offer any of the girls who passed by, laughing with their boyfriends, leaving traces of perfume in their wake; perfume and powder and a quickening of the air they so recently occupied.

Spinning straw into gold is beyond your current capabilities, but not necessarily impossible to learn. There are ancient texts. There's your Aunt Farfalee, older than some of the texts but still alive, as far as you know; the only truly gifted member of your ragtag cohort, who are more generally prone to making rats speak in Flemish, or summoning beetles out of other people's Christmas pies.

*   *   *

Castles are easy to penetrate. Most people don't know that; most people think of them as fortified, impregnable. Castles, however, have been remodeled and revised, over and over again, by countless generations. There was the child-king who insisted on secret passageways, with peepholes that opened through the eyes of the ancestral portraits. There was the paranoid king who had escape tunnels dug, miles of them, opening out into woods, country lanes, and graveyards.

The girl, however, is surprised and impressed when you materialize in the chamber full of straw. It has nothing to do with magic. Already, though, you've got credibility.

At first glance you see why the miller thought his gamble might work. She's a true beauty, slightly unorthodox, in the way of most great beauties. Her skin is smooth and poreless as pale pink china, her nose ever so slightly longer than it should be, her brown-black eyes wide-set, sable-lashed, all but quivering with curiosity, with depths.

She stares at you. She doesn't speak. Her life, starting this morning, has become so strange to her (she who yesterday was sewing grain sacks and sweeping stray corn kernels from the floor) that the sudden appearance of a twisted and stub-footed man, just under four feet tall, with a chin as long as a turnip, seems like merely another in the new string of impossibilities.

You tell her you're there to help. She nods her thanks. You get to work.

It doesn't go well, at first. The straw, run through the spinning wheel, comes out simply as straw, shredded and bent.

You refuse to panic, though. You repeat, silently, the spell taught to you by Aunt Farfalee (who is by now no bigger than a badger, with blank white eyes and fingers thin and stiff as icicles). You concentrate—belief is crucial. One of the reasons ordinary people are incapable of magic is simple dearth of conviction.

And, eventually … yes. The first few stalks are only touched with gold, like eroded relics, but the next are more gold than straw, and soon enough the wheel is spitting them out, strand upon strand of pure golden straw, deep in color, not the hard yellow of some gold but a yellow suffused with pink, ever so slightly incandescent in the torchlit room.

You both—you and the girl—watch, enraptured, as the piles of straw dwindle and masses of golden strands skitter onto the limestone floor. It's the closest you've come, yet, to love, to lovemaking—you at the spinning wheel with the girl behind you (she forgetfully puts her hand, gently, on your shoulder), watching in shared astonishment as the straw is spun into gold.

When it's all finished, she says, “My lord.”

You're not sure whether she's referring to you or to God.

“Glad to be of service,” you answer. “I should go, now.”

“Let me give you something.”

“No need.”

But still, she takes a strand of beads from her neck, and holds them out to you. They're garnets, cheap, probably dyed, though in this room, at this moment, with all that golden straw emanating its faint light, they're as potently red-black as heart's blood.

She says, “My father gave me these for my eighteenth birthday.”

She drapes the necklace over your head. An awkward moment occurs, when the beads catch on your chin, but the girl lifts them off, and her fingertips brush against your face. The strand of beads falls onto your chest. Onto the declivity where, were you a normal man, your chest would be.

“Thank you,” she says.

You bow and depart. She sees you slipping away through the secret door, devoid of hinges or knob, one of the many commanded by the long-dead paranoid king.

“That's not magic,” she laughs.

“No,” you answer. “But magic is sometimes all about knowing where the secret door is, and how to open it.”

With that, you're gone.

*   *   *

You hear about it the next day, as you walk along the edges of town, wearing the strand of garnets under your stained woolen shirt.

The girl pulled it off. She spun the straw into gold.

The king's response? Do it again tonight, in a bigger room, with twice as much straw.

He's joking. Right?

He's not joking. This, after all, is the king who passed the law about putting trousers on cats and dogs, who made too-loud laughter a punishable crime. According to rumor, he was abused by his father, the last king. But that's the story people always tell, isn't it, when they want to explain inexplicable behavior?

*   *   *

You do it again that night. The spinning is effortless by now. As you spin, you perform little comic flourishes for the girl. You spin for a while one-handed. You spin with your back to the wheel. You spin with your eyes closed.

She laughs and claps her hands. Her laughter is low and sonorous, like the sound of a clarinet.

This time, when you've finished, she gives you a ring. It, too, is cheap—silver, with a speck of diamond sunk into it.

She says, “This was my mother's.”

She slips it onto your pinkie. It fits, just barely. You stand for a moment, staring at your own hand, which is not by any standards a pretty sight, with its knobbed knuckles and thick, yellowed nails. But here it is, your hand, with her ring on one of its fingers.

You slip away without speaking. You're afraid that anything you might say would be embarrassingly earnest.

*   *   *

The next day …

Right. One last roomful of straw, twice the size again. The king promises that this is the last, but insists on this third and final act of alchemy. He believes, it seems, that value resides in threes, which would explain the three garish and unnecessary towers he's had plunked onto the castle walls, the three advisers to whom he never listens, the three annual parades in commemoration of nothing in particular beyond the celebration of the king himself.

And …

If the girl pulls it off one more time, the king has announced he'll marry her, make her his queen.

That's the reward? Marriage to a man who'd have had you decapitated if you'd failed to produce not just one but three miracles?

Surely the girl will refuse.

You go to the castle one more time and do it again. It seems that it should be routine by now, the sight of the golden straw piling up, the fiery gleam of it, but somehow repetition hasn't rendered it commonplace. It is (or so you imagine) a little like being in love; like wondering anew, every morning, over the outwardly unremarkable fact that your lover is there, in bed beside you, about to open her eyes, and that, every morning, your face will be the first thing she sees.

When you've finished, she says, “I'm afraid I have nothing more to give you.”

You pause. You're shocked to realize that you want something more from her. You've told yourself, the past two nights, that the necklace and the ring are marvels, but extraneous acts of gratitude; that you'd have done what you've done for nothing more than the sight of her thankful face.

It's surprising, then, that on this final night, you don't want to leave unrewarded. That you desire, with upsetting urgency, another token, a talisman, a further piece of evidence. Maybe it's because you know you won't see her again.

You say, “You aren't going to marry him, are you?”

She looks down at the floor, which is littered with stray strands of golden straw.

She says, “I'd be queen.”

“But you'd be married to him. That would be the man who was going to kill you if you didn't produce the goods.”

She lifts her head and looks at you.

“My father could live in the palace with me.”

“And yet. You can't marry a monster.”

“My father would live in the castle. The king's physicians would attend to him. He's ill, grain dust gets into your lungs.”

You're as surprised as she is when you hear yourself say, “Promise me your firstborn child, then.”