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Out of this mouth ran a long board, and onto it slowly spat coin after coin, dull and yellowish white, clunking dully onto the black wood.
Perhaps once, in the long past of Marrow, when they knew all possible things, the machine, the Mint, had moved of its own accord, but now small hands pressed and pulled and shoved at its every corner, turned its every gear, drew up its every dowel and thrust it down again. Furtive dark eyes gleamed around the shell and init, dozens of children adding their limbs to the apparatus so that it could move, so that it could press out coins at a stuttering, halting pace. Thin hands sat on our shoulders like owls’ feet, and thin fingers curled around our chins, holding our faces fast toward the creaking thing.
“The living work,” came a whisper which seemed to be Vhummim, her breathy, weary sighing—but who could be sure among all those long, stretching throats?
Satisfied that we saw the machine and knew that we would soon be among those dark eyes and pale hands, we were led, all in a line, the newest children of the Mint, to a long narrow room, barely held together by the clawing wind whistling through page-turned rafters. All along the walls lay little beds, turned down neatly, their coverlets thin as a cough and fluttering lightly as the gales rushed by outside. The Pra-Ita urged us all toward them, and like good boys and girls we each filed in, found a bed, and curled away from the door, the machine, the terrible long-necked creatures. On each pillow was a sliver of glassy stuff—I licked it under my blanket, then pushed it eagerly into my mouth. It was candy: something like raspberries, something like black tea, something like sugared bread crusts. I savored it, its juice running down my throat. Then I remembered Vhummim, and her city before it was my city. I spat it out into my hand and stared in the gray half-light. It gleamed and shimmered, scarlet, pink, rose.
They had given us rubies. Shaved and slivered down enough to feed a dozen children. I looked over my shoulder at the Pra-Ita clustered near the door, watching us suckle the gems in our hungry mouths. They moaned quietly, miserably, watching us eat. I was too hungry to refuse to give them what they wanted: I pushed the cherry-colored stone back onto my tongue. It sat there like a scald of light. I shuddered and turned away again until I heard the door shut like hands clasping each other in prayer.
We were alone. In the morning, I was sure, our shifts would begin. When the darkness came wheedling through the shivering ceiling, I crawled out of my bed and found among the dark little heads one which was bristled and shorn: my friend, my Oubliette. She opened the corner of her pitiful blanket to me, and I climbed in beside her. We clutched desperately at each other, each trying to steal the other’s warmth—there was little enough to steal, and finally we simply lay in each other’s arms, trying very hard not to be terrified.
“Did you see what went into the machine?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“Did you see what came out?”
She nodded.
The room was filled with the sleeping and soft weeping of other children, mewling like lost pigeons. I didn’t know what else to say. She didn’t cry, like the others, she just stared, and everywhere she stared seemed to shiver under her gaze.
“What happened to your hair?” I said finally, quiet as a thief with his hand on a coffer.
As if in answer, she took my hand in hers, both of us cold to purpled fingers, and drew it around her waist to rest against her shoulder blades. What I touched was not flesh, not flesh, but bark, and wood, and hard, twining vines with berries like knuckles. She was a child in my arms, yes, the front of her skinny and hard-used but still pretty and certainly a girl—but her back from neck to ankle was a gnarled and hollow tree, half dead, petrified into gray and sallow stone. The only warm and living thing I felt with my arms meeting around her was a thick, long tail, a heifer’s dun tail, ending in a soft tuft of fur. She would not look at me.
“Now you see what I am. I am wicked, and ugly, and that is why the hungry ghosts took me…”
THE
HULDRA’S
TALE
MY MOTHER USED TO SIT ME ON HER LAP AND tell me where we came from—so many times that I can not now forget even a word of the tale.
It is said that once there was a heifer so lovely that her skin was as red and flowing gold, her eyes as polished wood, her swishing, flicking tail brighter than a whip of fire. This cow was not quite a cow, as all beautiful things are both more and less than their bodies. In the folds of bark which enclose us all it is written that once she was a girl, nothing but a girl, with hair so long and shining that it caught the eye of Aukon, the Bull-Star, who put his white-hot hooves to her form and shaped her into his own image so that he could love her as he wished to.
Perhaps this is true, perhaps it is not. But as lovers sometimes do, once he had finished with her he wished to keep her all for his own, and the poor thing was left a heifer lowing at the sky—though she was the loveliest of all heifers who ever ate grass and drank water, it was not much consolation, I am sure.
“Where will I go? What shall I do?” the heifer cried.
And answers came, though not those she would have wished for. For though she knew it not, Aukai, the Heifer-Star, the Milk-Star with her black eyes, had seen what her brother had done, and set upon him. A terrible struggle occurred between the two huge creatures. If you have seen bulls battle over a mate, it was nothing to this. Aukai burned brighter than temple fires in her fury, and finally pinned Aukon against a hillock and chewed from him, with her wide, flat teeth, the flesh which made him a bull, leaving a lonely and broken ox lowing weakly in the night, light leeching from him into the mud churned up by their grappling. In disgust, Aukai spit her brother’s silver-dripping testicles away in a broad field, and thought no more of it. It is said that ever after maddened monks castrated themselves in her honor, doing penance in place of her heavenly brother. Perhaps this is true, perhaps not.
Yet a Star is a strange thing, and its ways are stranger still. In the place where the ruined flesh had fallen, a great almond tree grew, with broad white flowers and green fruits. And it came to pass that the cow who was once a girl wandered by the great tree in the height of its flowering. And the tree, too, being only somewhat less than Aukon himself, looked on her and loved her still. With whipping branches he dragged her, hoarsely braying, into his hollows and his crooks, and there stroked her skin with pale and papery twigs until, after many months, her wide flat teeth, not sharp, but sure, chewed their way free of him.
Perhaps this is true, perhaps it is not. Love rarely waits for permission. She ran far from the howling tree, who reached for her with long, snapping vines and needles—and in her running she gave birth to the first of us who are called huldra, who are girl and cow and tree jumbled together
by some inattentive hand. The heifer looked on her first daughter with horror—how far she had come from the girl she was! But who would love this terrible child if she did not? Already her udder swelled and stretched. The wretched infant clutched at her mother’s stiff golden hair, and the heifer sank to the earth to nurse. As the years went by she dropped children like pinecones from her flesh, and occasionally birthed one in the usual way of cows—poor creature, who bled children everywhere she went, and each one mongreled and mottled as we all are.
“My poor girls, my pitied boys,” she said when we sat around her like a herd, flicking our tails at flies like buzzing sapphires, “I know in my heart that it will be for you as it was for me, and you will be loved always, yet only by those who do not share your shape, and care nothing for your say-so. I have given you nothing but sorrow and a dun tail.”
Perhaps this is true, perhaps it is not. Perversions are often written over with elaborate stories, and who knows what strange nights’ revels ended in the huldra, who are tree and human and cow all together? I would not have liked to have been there.
But the story is not wrong about us.
I once had a golden ball, you see. Am I telling this tale poorly? Would a grown woman tell it better? My mother knew how to tell a tale properly. Perhaps she would have mentioned the ball in the beginning. Perhaps she would not have shown her tail so soon. Perhaps a good child would not admit that she owned such a thing as a golden ball—it has never done a girl any good to have one, in all the history of the world. But I am not a grown woman, and I loved my ball.
My sister was not given one, nor my cousins. What you must understand about a golden ball is that by giving one over into eager hands, parents acknowledge a certain wickedness in their children that must be occupied by something other than flesh or sweets. A mother does not give such a gift to the daughter she bathes in milk and perfumes in asters and daisies. She gives it to the scraggle-haired, mud-kneed child who plays by herself at the side of the old well. It will keep her from young men and candies that glitter like fluttering eyelashes, and if she or it or both together should tip over the side of the well, as has been known to happen from time to time, well, at least no daisy was wasted on her.
