A Tale Dark and Grimm (14 page)

She had lived with parents and without. In homes and in the wild. Nothing was good.

Oh, yes. And Hansel was dead.

She laid her little golden head beside the pewter mug on the worn tavern table. The table was sticky from spilled drinks. Gretel didn't care. She closed her eyes.

 

There was a bang, and the door of the inn swung open. Gretel raised her head. A man stood in the doorway. “It's back!” he cried, his voice cracking with fear. “It's back ...”

The people of the tavern all rose to their feet at once.

“Kindheitburg is gone!” the man wailed.

Cries rose up from all around. A few people pushed past the man out the tavern door and onto the slushy road, and began to run.

“What do you mean, gone?” someone demanded.

“It's all gone,” the man in the doorway said. “The houses, Meister Beck's, the bakery, Frau Hopper's ...”

“The people?”

“I don't know. But there were bodies.” He shook his head. “Many bodies.”

The room seemed to groan all together. Some people sat down. Others covered their faces.

“I was out on the hill above town,” the man said. “I saw it circling, circling over the village. I would have run back to warn them, but there wasn't time. Besides, I had to stay with this one.” From behind the man's leg, a tiny girl peeked out. She was hiding her face in her hands, but you could tell that her cheeks were stained with dirt and the lines of dried tears.

The man went on. “It circled three or four times. I could hear people shouting. Then it banked and began to descend. It swept in on Frau Hopper's house—the big stone one. Tore half the building off. I saw somebody—maybe Frau Hopper—fly through the air about a hundred yards. And then crash to the ground.” The man shuddered.

“And after that?” someone asked.

The man shuddered again but said no more. An elderly man nearby guided him to a seat and brought him a drink. He put his head in his hands. A large, heavyset woman came from behind the bar and lifted the little girl up and cradled her and took her up some stairs in the back.

When the door was closed behind the woman with the little girl, the somber tavern suddenly erupted with anxious voices. Gretel tried to make sense of it, but they spoke all together, and too loudly. What were they talking about? What had done this thing? Then, gradually, she was able to pick up one word that was being repeated over and over in the din: dragon.

Gretel was standing near three people—two men, a tall one and a bearded one, and a woman whose back was toward Gretel.

“They say it's human,” said the bearded man.

“Half-human,” replied the tall one. “And half-dragon, of ” course.

“My priest said it was once a man, but now he's possessed by a dragon-spirit,” said the woman.

“It would have to be a devil-man, to be possessed by a dragon.”

“No,” the woman replied. “The priest said no. He said a sad soul. A desperate soul. That's what he said.”

“Yes, I heard that, too,” the bearded man agreed.

The tall one rubbed his stubbly chin. “They killed that man over in Walden. They thought he was the dragon.”

“Guess he wasn't, then.”

“Guess not. He had children, too.”

“They killed six brothers over in Hamelstatt,” said the woman.

“No, that's a rumor.”

“It isn't. My cousin saw it happen.”

“Terrible,” said the man with the beard.

“Terrible,” said the tall man.

“Terrible,” said the woman.

“Excuse me,” said Gretel. She was standing at the woman's elbow. The woman didn't seem to hear her. Gretel tugged at the woman's sleeve. “Excuse me,” she said again. The woman turned around. Her face was pale, her hair hung loose and limp, and her light eyes were circled with black.

“What is it?” the woman said.

“What kingdom is this?” Gretel asked.

“Grimm,” the woman said. “The Kingdom of Grimm.”

“Or it was,” the bearded man said ruefully. “Now it's the ruins of Grimm.”

“Where are you looking for?” said the tall man.

Gretel's throat felt thick. “Do the king and queen have any children?” she asked quietly.

The woman looked at the men, and then back at her. “Did once. Twins. A boy and a girl. But they were lost, poor darlings. Disappeared in the night.”

“Just before the dragon came,” the man with the beard added.

“That's right. Just before,” agreed the tall one. “But where are you trying to get to?”

Gretel hesitated. “I ... I'm not sure,” she replied. She thanked the group and walked to the door of the inn. Two men were standing beside it, arguing about the dragon. She stood behind them, half waiting, half thinking. At length, one noticed her, nudged the other, and they both turned to her.

“Can I help you, dearie?”

She bit her bottom lip. After a moment, she asked, “Which way is the castle?” She said it as if she wasn't sure she wanted to know.

The men pointed with blunt workmen's fingers.

Gretel nodded silently and stepped out the door of the tavern onto the road. She looked in the direction they had pointed.

Even the road looked rough, painful.

She looked the other way.

 

Hansel traveled down the wet, icy roads, a solitary boy with charcoal eyes and curly black hair laden with flakes of snow. Behind him followed two obedient oxen, pulling two positively enormous carts.

The first cart was filled with golden apples—a thousand of them—round and firm and cool. Golden as in made of gold, of course. Not Golden Delicious. Golden Expensive. The second cart was filled with barrels of wine—barrels stacked so high that they tottered and creaked with every turning in the road. There was enough wine in those barrels to keep a whole village in drink for a whole year.

The apples and the wine and the carts and the oxen were all gifts from the two villages, of course. You see, after burying Johannes and making a little headstone for him—
Faitful
was all it said—Hansel had gone on to the village of the golden apples, where he told them of the mouse gnawing at the roots of their tree. They killed it, and the apples began to grow immediately, and so they gave him as a gift the thousand golden apples and the cart and the quiet, obedient, incredibly large ox. Next he had gone to the village of the wine, where he told them of the frog stopping up their fountain. Once they had killed it, the wine began to flow again, and they gave Hansel as a gift the barrels of wine, the cart, and another quiet, obedient, incredibly large ox.

He named the oxen Ivy and Betty—which is strange, because oxen are boys.

 

 

So Hansel, having bested the Devil, and saved the two villages, and now leading a fortune in wine and gold, set out for the Kingdom of Grimm. It wasn't hard to get directions, either. Everyone could point you toward a kingdom where a dragon was.

But Hansel's progress was slow. For he stopped at every village, every hamlet, every house and hovel he passed along the way, to ask if they had seen or heard anything of his sister, Gretel. But no one had.

“You mean Gretel, the old woman?”

“No, my sister.”

“Gretel, my sister's baby?”

“No,
my
sister. And she's not a baby.”

“I have a goat named Gretel.”

“No!”

He may have had a fortune in gold and wine behind him, and two obedient oxen to follow him wherever he went, but Hansel's heart was as black and heavy as it had ever been, and his feet dragged in the mud and the ice. Without his sister, he did not want to go home. Or face a dragon. Or face his parents.

 

Gretel stood at the door of the tavern, staring down the road. Coming toward her were two enormous oxcarts, each capped, like miniature mountains, with snow. Walking out in front of them was someone with dark hair—a small, dejected someone, whose feet dragged as he walked. There was something about the someone that made Gretel want to wait for him.

As the carts drew nearer, her heart caught in her throat. With her fine, ocean-blue eyes, Gretel could now make out the someone's face.

She cried aloud and tore off for him down the road.

 

As Hansel drew closer to the kingdom, he seemed to see Gretel everywhere. In bakeries. In upstairs windows. Going into outhouses (which resulted in some pretty embarrassing moments, as you can imagine). Just up ahead, there was a girl standing at the doorway of a tavern, and, had he not known he was just seeing things, he would have sworn that that girl was Gretel, too.

Then the girl was no longer standing at the door of the tavern. She was sprinting toward him, her long blond hair flying out behind her. Hansel blinked. He stopped dragging his feet. He ran.

 

Hansel and Gretel came together like two magnets meeting, like meteors that have been screaming through space toward this one moment of collision. They met in the middle with a bang, and instantly their feet went out from under them on the slick roadway. They landed, hard, in a puddle of icy mud.

They stared at each other, sitting in the puddle.

Lost and then found.

Dead and then alive.

Covered in mud.

Sitting on their behinds in three inches of filthy water.

And they began to laugh. They threw their arms around each other and laughed until tears streamed down their faces. They sat, freezing, muddy, in a puddle in the middle of the road, with the gray sky overhead, and their parents' castle waiting just a few miles away. They sat there and held each other until their arms ached.

“Where have you been?” Hansel asked as they pulled themselves out of the puddle.

“How are you alive?” Gretel asked at just the same moment.

So they climbed up on an oxcart and told each other about every single thing that had happened since the day of the hunt in the Lebenwald—and some things twice.

And as they talked and laughed and gasped and talked some more, Ivy and Betty drew them closer and closer to home.

 

 

 

 

Soon Hansel and Gretel found themselves in the heart of the Kingdom of Grimm, driving through towns that still lived in their earliest memories. As they looked around, their stomachs began to twist into knots.

Some of the towns looked just as they remembered them, as if memories of home could be modeled in wood and brick. But other towns—other memories of home—had been razed to the ground. Houses were torn apart, with their roofs and walls scattered and broken. Shops were burned, eviscerated, empty. Dead animals lay in the street, their bloated bellies stiffening as flies walked carefully across the surface of their eyeballs.

“The dragon,” Gretel murmured.

Hansel nodded and stared.

As they passed through one gutted town, the door on the wreckage of a house began to move. Its hinges groaned angrily. Hansel leaned close to Gretel. She took his hand. Then, from the darkness, a head emerged.

It was a child. He was very small—the size of the child Gretel had seen in the tavern. He was followed by an older child, a girl, and then a still-older girl.

“Come out,” the eldest said. “Look.”

From behind them emerged their parents. The whole family was dirty, emaciated, with ragged clothes and frightened eyes.

Gretel said, “This is not good.”

“No,” Hansel said. “It isn't.”

Suddenly, Gretel jumped down from the cart and ran around to the back. “I'm going to give them an apple,” she shouted to Hansel.

The family heard this, and the father and mother and three children all came out to the cart. “You have apples?” the father said.