Zel (10 page)

Then one day, on the fifth week, the smith remembers another, final detail. “She loves lettuce.”

“Lettuce?” Konrad at this point is willing to follow any lead. But lettuce? “How do you know?”

“Her mother said so.”

Konrad pulls on his fingers, rubs at the back of his neck. “What exactly did her mother say?”

“She said, ‘Let’s go buy that lettuce you love.’” He holds out his hand. “Lettuce, sire.”

Konrad puts a coin in the smith’s hand. Lettuce isn’t much to go on. Almost every farmer hereabouts grows lettuce and sells it in the market. But if the girl lives in the country, surely she grows lettuce in her own garden. So it has to be that the lettuce she loves is somehow special. And the mother said “that lettuce,” so it isn’t just any old lettuce. All right, Konrad will go to every lettuce vendor
in the market until he finds the one with the special lettuce that Zel and her mother bought.

Amazingly, a man with only a few lettuce bundles and even fewer teeth claims to remember Zel. “A gentle girl with a winning way. I yank on her braids and she laughs.” He gives an almost toothless grin. “Stupid girls are afraid of me, but not her.” He shakes his head. “She comes to me every summer and buys this.” He holds out a bunch of small, round lettuce leaves. “You can buy it. And pay once again over for the information.”

Konrad looks at the plain, flat leaves. Why would Zel think these leaves are special? The farmer is probably making it up so he can have the money. “What makes you remember her so well?”

“Her smile. She never came without it.”

Konrad remembers Zel’s smile and its effect on him.

“And her eyes.”

Zel’s penetrating eyes, which appear in Konrad’s dreams. “How do you remember that it was precisely this type of lettuce?”

“Ah, that’s easy. Two ways.” The farmer leans toward Konrad. “First, she asks for this lettuce in early July, but it grows best in the spring. I’m the only one around who grows it all summer.” He looks proud of himself, as though he’s waiting for Konrad to praise his wisdom in business matters.

Konrad’s patience is tested. “The second reason?”

“The girl’s name and the lettuce’s name are the same.”

Konrad rubs at his lower lip. “Her name is Zel.”

“Her name is Rapunzel.” The farmer shakes the bunch of leaves before Konrad’s face. “I grow the best rapunzel around. Where’s your money?”

Konrad pushes the lettuce away from his face with indignation. “I am Count Konrad.”

“So you can afford it, then.” The farmer smiles.

Konrad laughs in spite of himself. He wonders for a moment if this farmer and the boy at the goose farm who treated him so rudely are related. He drops a coin in the well-pleased farmer’s hand.

That night he eats rapunzel with oil and vinegar. The next night he eats rapunzel with onions and tomatoes. He has rapunzel with boiled potatoes and rapunzel with strong cheese. Rapunzel with pork and rapunzel with perch. And rapunzel plain. Every day Konrad searches for Rapunzel. And every night Konrad feasts on rapunzel. The farmer comes to expect him in the market early. He saves his biggest, best bunches of rapunzel for Konrad.

But knowing her full name doesn’t help any more than knowing her nickname. For no one Konrad asks knows any more about a Rapunzel than they know about a Zel.

Rapunzel, Rapunzel, where have you gone?

Chapter 12
Zel

el leans out the south window. The stone is cold, but the sun has melted off the frost. She has just used the slop bucket and pushed it to the north side so she can escape the odor. The top of a lone spruce moves in the distance; a rogue bear scratches its back against the trunk. Perhaps he will pass this way. If Zel is lucky.

Zel has lived in this tower exactly one hundred days. Mother carried up the hay for her mattress and covered it with a single sheet embroidered in vine leaves.

Zel insisted on hay for her mattress, not straw, because hay smells sweet. And hay is what horses eat. Zel remembers the horse at the smithy, the smooth coat on the mare’s back and the dark splotches on her thin, fine legs. She remembers the youth, how he looked at her. In her sleep she sees him eating the bread she gave him. Sometimes she is overcome with the urge to touch his dimple, just lightly, with one fingertip.

Her nights on that mattress are never peaceful. She misses being lulled to sleep by the fiddle. She misses
Mother’s cool kiss and the rabbits’ thick fur and the goats’ nipping and butting. She misses climbing high until her throat aches in the cool, dry air and stepping barefoot from slippery rock to slippery rock in icy streams. She misses dirt, leaves, rain in her upturned face. Oh, she misses so much.

Zel pushes up her left sleeve. She holds her arm out and tilts it until her fine gold hairs catch the weak sunlight. She counts the hairs from wristbone to elbow. Sometimes she sits back on her heels and rocks as she counts.

She knows many numbers. The number of stones that make up the floor of this tower room: forty-four. Large and smooth. The number of days in this tower. One hundred days are many.

Zel stands in her birthday dress. Mother has explained that she chose green for hope. Zel is hopeful. Mother will conquer the threat outside. Or Zel will conquer it herself. She makes a fist. Zel is a fighter. But she’d rather not fight alone.

Mother will be here at noon.

If only Zel could tell time from the sky. But the sky changes with the seasons and the wind. Right there, for instance, just moments ago that cloud was flat on the bottom and lacy on top. But now the cloud has formed into lumps, and Zel predicts that a breeze will soon scatter the lumps. What reward can she give herself if she’s
right? Oh, she can get Mother to massage her neck. Her neck hurts these days from the weight of her hair, which grows unnaturally quickly. Every day she can see how much longer it is; she can feel how much heavier it is. She has asked Mother to cut it, but Mother says her hair will come in handy. When Zel asks what for, Mother doesn’t answer.

Zel lies down on the hay mattress to rest her tired neck. She folds her hands on her chest. Now she can see nothing but her tower room, and that is the worst pain of all. She looks at her folded hands. She smiles. Her hands make drawings and paintings that confound her. Zel feels mystery enter her body, as though she harbors secrets even she cannot be allowed to know. Her bones grow heavy; they would merge with the stone of the tower if she stayed still too long. These thoughts alarm her; she does not recognize the girl who thinks them. She sits up suddenly, her back straight as a pine.

Most mornings Zel paints. When it was still summer, she painted the orange poppies, the yellow ranunculus, the blue gentian. She propped her paintings up along the bottom of the walls, as if they grew there.

Now, in early fall, she paints the greens and blues of the spruce, the browns of the occasional passing bear, the spotted yellows of the leaves that clutter the ground.

Mother gave her these paints. Generous Mother. Zel rises and takes a sheet of paper from the stack. She lays it
on the window ledge. “What would you like painted on you today?”

A squirrel chatters from the walnut tree. Zel laughs. He flicks his tail, bushy thick for the approaching winter. “Don’t go away. Please.” Zel goes to her mattress and grabs the roll from her breakfast package. She rushes back to the window.

Zel pinches the inner part from the roll. She shapes it in the form of a walnut. “A delicious nut just for you.” She tosses the dough pellet. It hits the tree below the squirrel. The squirrel darts upward, then stops, paws extended, skin stretched out in two arcs on each side. He chatters shrilly. The creature is angry at her. Ha! Zel takes another pinchful, squeezes it into a berry shape this time. “Look. A mulberry.” She tosses, and it hits the squirrel on the back. The animal races around to the other side of the tree.

“Rascal.” Zel laughs. She jerks her chin forward and cocks her head, just like the squirrel did. “You are better than the racing marmots and the stiff-bristled boars and the nervous hares. When I call to them, no matter how sweetly, they scurry into the underbrush. You are much, much better.” Zel whistles.

The squirrel peeks out.

“And you are better than blackbirds and larks. They ignore my whistles—or, at most, glide for a wingbeat or two.” Zel whistles and whistles and whistles.

The squirrel comes around to the close side of the trunk.

Zel puts her elbows on the ledge and leans forward. Her feet dangle under her. “Rascal,” she sings out. Her voice is clear as mountain water. “Talk to me.”

The squirrel darts around to the rear of the trunk again.

“Rascal,” sings Zel. “Rascal, Rascal, Rascal.”

And still the squirrel is absent.

Zel is alone. For one moment she had company. Now she is alone again. Alone and alone and alone.

“Coward!” Zel realizes she has shouted. Her pulse beats in her neck. She has shouted many times, shouted until she lost her voice—and never without fear. For her enemy could do terrible things if he found her.

Zel has gone over every moment she’s ever spent with people other than Mother. Every moment of her life that she remembers. Oh, she lured a straying cow onto their alm once, just so she could talk with the herd boy. But he wasn’t angry. He even told her stories. And she once stole a piece of wood the handyman’s son had been whittling on. But after he gave her the cave rock, she managed to slip the wood back into the handyman’s cart. He never even knew she stole it or he wouldn’t have given her the cave rock.

No one anywhere should harbor ill will toward Zel. No one anywhere has Zel harmed.

So who is this terrible enemy?

Zel shouts again: “Come into view, coward enemy!” A bush at the base of a pine rustles. “I’m ready for you!” Zel points at the bush.

The wind rises. The bush moves, as do all the other bushes, as do the trees.

A flash of black and a birdcall. It is musical, not the harsh caw of a crow. It sounds like the chough, the highest flier of the Alps. What would that sublime bird be doing so low? In her wanderings above the tree line Zel has watched choughs ride the wind upward, then suddenly tumble and twist and somersault for the pure joy of it. The call of the rare bird now feels like a beckoning.

The urge to run grips her. “I am a mountain girl. I need the open.” She makes the Jauchzer, the modulated yell common to the people of her mountains. She learned by mimicking the herd boys.

Zel hears no responding Jauchzer. Incipient panic burns her eyes. She needs responses.

She looks at the shrunken walnut branches. If they would only stretch out to her, she could coax the squirrel into her room the next time it comes around. But Zel cannot make the walnut grow like Mother can. Mother has a way with plants, an amazing, powerful way.

And Mother says that Zel will have a way with animals when she is ready. She says Zel will be able to talk with animals. Zel longs for that.

She dips her brush and paints the squirrel nibbling furiously at a dough pellet. The tail is poised for flight. Zel paints an ear, each hair separate, coming to a single sharp point.