Tales of Wonder (16 page)

“Between one breath and the next, she was gone,” said the priest.

Gently Karl folded her hands on her breast and, although she was beyond the sound of his song, he whispered something in her ear and turned to leave.

“Where are you going?” called out the priest, his words heavy with concern.

“I am going to find Death and bring my mother back,” cried Karl, his jagged voice now dulled with grief. He turned at the door and faced the priest who knelt by his mother's bed. “Surely Death will accept an exchange. What is one old tired woman to Death who has known so many?”

“And will you recognize Death, my son, when you meet him?”

“That I do not know,” said Karl.

The priest nodded and rose heavily from his knees. “Then listen well, my son. Death is an aging but still handsome prince. His eyes are dark and empty, for he has seen much suffering in the world. If you find such a one, he is Death.”

“I will know him,” said Karl.

“And what can you give Death in exchange that he has not already had many times over?” asked the priest.

Karl touched his pockets and sighed. “I have nothing here to give,” he said. “But I hope that he may listen to my songs. They tell me in the village that there is a gift of magic in my voice. Any gift I have I would surely give to get my mother back. I will sing for Death, and perhaps that great prince will take time to listen.”

“Death does not take time,” said the old priest, raising his hand to bless the boy, “for time is Death's own greatest possession.”

“I can but try,” said Karl, tears in his eyes. He knelt a moment for the blessing, stood up, and went out the door. He did not look back.

Karl walked for many days and came at last to a city that lay like a blemish on three hills. He listened quietly but well, as only a singer can, and when he heard weeping, he followed the sound and found a funeral procession bearing the coffin of a child. The procession turned into a graveyard where stones leaned upon stones like cards in a neglected deck.

“Has Death been here already?” asked Karl of a weeping woman.

“Death has been here many times,” she answered. “But today she has taken my child.”

“She?”
asked Karl. “But surely Death is a man.”

“Death is a woman,” she answered him at once. “Her hair is long and thick and dark, like the roots of trees. Her body is huge and brown, but she is barren. The only way she can bear a child is to bear it away.”

Karl felt her anger and sorrow then, for they matched his own, so he joined the line of mourners to the grave. And when the child's tiny box had been laid in the ground, he sang it down with the others. But his voice lifted above theirs, a small bird soaring with ease over larger ones. The townsfolk stopped singing in amazement and listened to him.

Karl sang not of death but of his village in the valley, of the seasons that sometime stumble one into another, and of the small pleasures of the hearth. He sang tune after tune the whole of that day, and just at nightfall he stopped. They threw dirt on the baby's coffin and brought Karl to their home.

“Your songs eased my little one's passage,” said the woman. “Stay with us this night. We owe you that,”

“I wish that I had been here before,” said Karl. “I might have saved your baby with a song.”

“I fear Death would not be cheated so easily of her chosen child,” said the woman. She set the table but did not eat.

Karl left in the morning. And as he walked, he thought about Death, how it was a hollow-eyed prince to the priest but a jealous mother to the woman. If Death could change shapes with such ease, how would he know Death when they finally met? He walked and walked, his mind in a puzzle, until he came at last to a plain that lay like a great open wound between mountains.

The plain was filled with an army of fighting men. There were men with bows and men with swords and men with wooden staves. Some men fought on horseback, and some fought from their knees. Karl could not tell one band of men from another, could not match friend with friend, foe with foe, for their clothes were colored by dirt and by blood and every man looked the same. And the screams and shouts and the crying of horns were a horrible symphony in Karl's ears.

Yet there was one figure Karl
could
distinguish. A woman, quite young, dressed in a long white gown. Her dark braids were caught up in ribbons of white and looped like a crown on her head. She threaded her way through the ranks of men like a shuttle through a loom, and there seemed to be a pattern in her going. She paused now and then to put a hand to the head or the breast of one man and then another. Each man she touched stopped fighting and, with an expression of surprise, left his body and followed the girl, so that soon there was a great wavering line of gray men trailing behind her.

Then Karl knew that he had found Death.

He ran down the mountainside and around the flank of the great plain, for he wanted to come upon Death face to face. He called out as he ran, hoping to slow her progress, “Wait, oh, wait, Lady Death; please wait for me.”

Lady Death heard his call above the battle noise, and she looked up from her work. A weariness sat between her eyes, but she did not stop. She continued her way from man to man, a hand to the brow or over the heart. And at her touch, each man left his life to follow the young girl named Death.

When Karl saw that she would not stop at his calling, he stepped into her path. But she walked through him as if through air and went on her way, threading the line of dead gray men behind her.

So Karl began to sing. It was all he knew to do.

He sang not of death but of growing and bearing, for they were things she knew nothing of. He sang of small birds on the apple spray and bees with their honeyed burden. He sang of the first green blades piercing the warmed earth. He sang of winter fields where moles and mice sleep quietly under the snow. Each tune swelled into the next.

And Lady Death stopped to listen.

As she stopped, the ribbon of soldiers that was woven behind her stopped, too, and from their dead eyes tears fell with each memory. The battlefield was still, frozen by the songs. And the only sound and the only movement and the only breath was Karl's voice.

When he had finished at last, a tiny brown bird flew out of a dead tree, took up the last melody, and went on.

“I have made you stop, Lady Death,” cried Karl. “And you have listened to my tunes. Will you now pay for that pleasure?”

Lady Death smiled, a slow, weary smile, and Karl wondered that someone so young should have to carry such a burden. And his pity hovered between them in the quiet air.

“I will pay, Karel,” she said.

He did not wonder that she knew his true name, for Lady Death would, in the end, know every human's name.

“Then I ask for my mother in exchange,” said Karl.

Lady Death looked at him softly then. She took up his pity and gave it back. “That I cannot do. Who follows me once, follows forever. But is it not payment enough to know that you have stayed my hand for this hour? No man has ever done that before.”

“But you promised to pay,” said Karl. His voice held both anger and disappointment, a man and a child's voice in one.

Ending I

“And what I promise,” she said, looking at him from under darkened lids, “I do.”

Lady Death put her hand in front of her, as if reaching into a cupboard, and a gray form that was strangely transparent took shape under her fingers. It became a harp, with smoke-colored strings the color of Lady Death's eyes.

“A useless gift,” said Karl. “I cannot play.”

But Lady Death reached over and set the harp in his hand, careful not to touch him with her own.

And as the harp molded itself under his fingers, Karl felt music surge through his bones. He put his thumb and forefinger on the strings and began to play.

At the first note, the battle began anew. Men fought, men bled, men suffered, men fell. But Karl passed through the armies untouched, playing a sweet tune that rose upward, in bursts, as the lark and its song spring toward the sun. He walked through the armies, through the battle, through the plain, playing his harp, and he never looked back again.

Ending 2

“And what I promise,” Death said, looking at him from under darkened lids, “I do.”

She turned and pointed to the field, and Karl's eyes followed her fingers.

“There in that field are six men whose heads and hearts I will not touch this day. Look carefully, Karel.”

He looked. “They are my brothers,” he said.

“Them, I will spare.” And Lady Death turned and stared into Karl's face with her smoky eyes. “But I would have you sing for me again each night in the small hours when I rest, for I have never had such comfort before. Will you come?” She held out her hand.

Karl hesitated a moment, remembering his farm, remembering the fields, the valleys, the warm spring rains. Then he looked again at Lady Death, whose smile seemed a little less weary. He nodded and reached for her hand, and it was small and soft and cool in his. He raised her hand once to his lips, then set it, palm open, over his heart. He never felt the cold.

Then, hand in hand, Karl and Lady Death walked through the battlefield. Their passing made not even the slightest breeze on the cheeks of the wounded, nor an extra breath for the dying. Only the dead who traveled behind saw them pass under the shadows of the farthest hills. But long after they had gone, the little bird sang Karl's last song over and over and over again into the darkening air.

The Lady and the Merman

Once in a house overlooking the cold northern sea a baby was born. She was so plain, her father, a sea captain, remarked on it.

“She shall be a burden,” he said. “She shall be on our hands forever.” Then, without another glance at the child, he sailed off on his great ship.

His wife, who had longed to please him, was so hurt by his complaint that she soon died of it. Between one voyage and the next, she was gone.

When the captain came home and found this out, he was so enraged, he never spoke of his wife again. In this way he convinced himself that her loss was nothing.

But the girl lived and grew, as if to spite her father. She looked little like her dead mother but instead had the captain's face, set 'round with mouse-brown curls. Yet as plain as her face was, her heart was not. She loved her father, but was not loved in return.

And still the captain remarked on her looks. He said at every meeting, “God must have wanted me cursed to give me such a child. No one will have her. She shall never be wed. She shall be with me forever.” So he called her Borne, for she was his burden.

Borne grew into a lady, and only once gave a sign of this hurt.

“Father,” she said one day when he was newly returned from the sea, “what can I do to heal this wound between us?”

He looked away from her, for he could not bear to see his own face mocked in hers, and spoke to the cold stone floor. “There is nothing between us, Daughter,” he said. “But if there were, I would say,
Salt for such wounds
.”

“Salt?” Borne asked, surprised, for she knew the sting of it.

“A sailor's balm,” he said. “The salt of tears or the salt of sweat or the final salt of the sea.” Then he turned from her and was gone next day to the farthest port he knew of, and in this way he cleansed his heart.

After this, Borne never spoke again of the hurt. Instead, she carried it silently like a dagger inside. For the salt of tears did not salve her, so she turned instead to work. She baked bread in her ovens for the poor, she nursed the sick, she held the hands of the sea widows. But always, late in the evening, she walked on the shore looking and longing for a sight of her father's sail. Only, less and less often did he return from the sea.

One evening, tired from the work of the day, Borne felt faint as she walked on the strand. Finding a rock half in and half out of the water, she climbed upon it to rest. She spread her skirts about her, and in the dusk they lay like great gray waves.

How long she sat there, still as the rock, she did not know. But a strange, pale moon came up. And as it rose, so too rose the little creatures of the deep. They leaped free for a moment of the pull of the tide. And last of all, up from the depths, came the merman.

He rose out of the crest of the wave, sea-foam crowning his green-black hair. His hands were raised high above him, and the webbings of his fingers were as colorless as air. In the moonlight he seemed to stand upon his tail. Then, with a flick of it, he was gone, gone back to the deeps. He thought no one had remarked his dive.

But Borne had. So silent and still, she saw it all, his beauty and his power. She saw him and loved him, though she loved the fish half of him more. It was all she could dare.

She could not tell what she felt to a soul, for she had no one who cared about her feelings. Instead she forsook her work and walked by the sea both morning and night. Yet, strange to say, she never once looked for her father's sail.

That is why her father returned one day without her knowing it. He watched her through slotted eyes as she paced the shore, for he would not look straight upon her. At last he went to her and said, “Be done with it. Whatever ails you, give it over.” For even he could see
this
wound.

Borne looked up at him, her eyes shimmering with small seas. Grateful even for this attention, she answered, “Yes, Father, you are right. I must be done with it.”

The captain turned and left her then, for his food was growing cold. But Borne went directly to the place where the waves were creeping onto the shore. She called out in a low voice, “Come up. Come up and be my love.”

There was no answer except the shrieking laughter of the birds as they dove into the sea.

So she took a stick and wrote the same words upon the sand for the merman to see should he ever return. Only, as she watched, the creeping tide erased her words one by one by one. Soon there was nothing left of her cry on that shining strand.