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I once had a golden ball, you see.
One day, when I was turned barkwise to the sun, the miller’s boy came up to our ash-wood fence. He said the things you might expect a miller’s boy to say: He had never seen a girl with roots in her knee-pits before, I was pretty as a cherry without a pit, and wouldn’t I come just a little closer? I shrugged. I was heifer-strong; there was nothing he could do to me. I came close up to the bars of the fence, and he said my eyes were the darkest he’d seen—then he kissed me quick on the mouth. He stole my first kiss, did just as folk have always done when a huldra is in sight: take her without permission, without a care. It is because of this sort of thing that we were solitary creatures, living in our high-up huts, cradled in oak branches, so that the tree in us may rest, and speak rarely to those who are the same whether their back is turned or no.
I bolted for home, but as I ran I thought of little but the kiss. His lips tasted like flour and honey just scooped from the hive, and I told my mother so when I scrambled up the ladder of rope and found her ladling out grass soup for my supper. The next morning, she gave me the golden ball, and told me to run along and play. I stared at her, stricken. No word passed between us, though she had the grace not to hold my gaze. Her tail swished nervously behind her, dark brown across our branch-lashed floor. I took my ball quietly and went out into the fields, to play.
It was a little sun I kept close to my chest, so that it warmed next to my skin. I wrapped my long black hair around it and unwound it again. I called it little names which seem silly now. I polished it over and over with the tuft of my tail and kept it near me while I slept. It gleamed against my cheek like a slap. And I tossed it into the air by the old, vine-strangled well, smeared with flowers which once were red, sitting among the tall, seed-topped grasses like a huge, embittered toadstool. I could smell water in the old thing, algae-jeweled and wriggling with tadpoles, but I could not see it. Up and down I tossed my ball—it caught the light, burned it, scalded it, and my eyes were filled with tears as I stared into that little round star. I was never alone: It rolled and lay still and sparkled as well as a friend.
The day then came when the summer sun itself was a golden ball, and I lay like a dandelion in the grass, and slept with its hot palms on my face. Did I dream? I don’t remember. But when I woke my ball was gone, and in its place was a little red-eyed creature who came nearly, but not quite, to my knees, staring and stroking my hair. It was a hedgehog, quite respectably large and furry, golden from hunch to nose—his quills jangled and clinked when he moved, a little glistening sound. He wrung his burnished hands and stroked his golden whiskers, and his eyes—were they garnets? Were they not?—glowered under lashes like wedding bands.
“Good afternoon,” I said, after a long while. Perhaps I should have said something prettier. A grown woman might have known what to say.
The hedgehog bowed. I think if he had had a hat, he would have removed it.
“Good afternoon,” he replied, in a high, rough voice like that of a flute scoured with river mud. “I have been watching you sleep. You do it very well.”
I laughed. “My mother always hoped I would show a talent for something. Perhaps I shall become a sleeper by trade.”
The hedgehog did not laugh. “My name is Ciriaco,” he said, as if his name could hold my hand and put me at ease.
“And have you seen my ball, Ciriaco? I am fond of it, and it seems to have rolled away somewhere as I slept.”
The hedgehog looked at the long grass uncomfortably. He wrung his hands even more wretchedly; he made a soft and sorrowful rasping noise in his shimmering throat. Slowly, the animal bent until his nose brushed dirt and his quills ruffled along his back, passing a glimmer of prism between them. And then, with a little hop, and an even littler tuck, he snapped up into the air and landed in a thatch of clover as a round, smooth ball all of gold. Perhaps a grown woman would not have squealed and clapped. But I was not grown.
“How did you come to live inside my ball, friend hedgehog?” I cried.
Ciriaco rolled forward slightly, then back, and unfurled himself again, patting dust and pollen from his golden hands as he rose to his full, though not terribly impressive, height once more.
“Your tail is very soft,” he whispered, blushing to his tiny ears. “It has been a great comfort to me…”
THE TALE
OF THE
GOLDEN BALL
IN THE KINGDOM OF THE HEDGEHOGS, THERE are mountains with mouths. They open and close; they twist and sneer. Out from our hedgerows each pearl-handled morning, boar and sow trundle up the black paths, slick as tongues down the side of the crags. We do not speak to one another—it is not done. In the old days, it seemed as though the earth rose up with the sun to swallow the mountains again, so many little brown bodies made the ascent each day, silent shoulder to silent shoulder. We did not sing work songs, or tell tales of the brave hedgehogs who went before us, caged hummingbirds clasped in fear-tightened paws, into the dark.
The dark took them; the dark will take us. No more needs to be said.
I worked in the upper shafts, where gold ran along the rock walls like calligraphy. The Kingdom of the Hedgehogs possesses miners of all kinds: iron and copper and silver and gold, diamond and sapphire and emerald and tin. When we were born, our parents, rheumy-eyed from days on the mountain and pulverized silver shot into eyelashes, placed plugs of each substance into our tiny, clasping paws. Whichever we gripped tightly and waved about with the first and last glee we ever took in the fruit of the mountain, this we would cut from the earth for the rest of our days. Each family was possessed of a little wooden box full of gleaming slugs—and if a child should choose differently from his parents, it was the last he saw of them, as he ascended or descended among the shafts.
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My parents were higher than I—diamond-diggers in the ethereal heights. My brothers and sisters were lower: a few coppers, a few irons, and one sorrowing tin-cutter, my sister who lay in our mother’s arms for a single night before bucketing down to a tin-mother whose pup had gone up to the sapphire shanties. So it goes.
And if a child should not choose, if his paw was weak and clammy, or if he greedily grasped all metals alike, he was given to the mountain, and left to die or eat dirt as the hedgehogs before the mountain had done.
Such was the rhythm of life in the Kingdom of the Hedgehogs. We carried in our little glass-blown lamps; we carried out barrows of ore. We slept, we ate, we dug and chiseled and chipped.
I had a water drill I loved. It fit my palm very well—the years had worn paw-holds into the handles.
You may think we were joyless. Beauty cannot seed in joy. Diamonds are crushed from black rock; beauty is carved out of the dark by hedgehog quills. Our mountain was parceled out slowly to all the courts and all the crowns of the world. Slowly, over centuries, it shrank and shrank. We were satisfied by this: that dark may be chiseled into light, and that a jewel touched by a hundred paws might sit one day on a beautiful girl’s innocent head.
In my day the mountain was still greater than anything else on the blasted plains, and I knew nothing outside of it. One day, we would take the last of the mountain to the last princess, and we would be free. So went the tales before the soldier tumbled onto us like a loose slate slab hidden behind a cord of gold.
It was in the upper shafts, my rose-throated hummingbird buzzing softly by my side, scraping her green wings against the twig cage, that we found her.
She had short hair, brown as fur, and an iron cap-helmet dragged down over it until it covered her brow. Behind her was a massive barrel, and she leaned against it, sleeping. She had no armor, no plates or chains or any of the other sorts of things that can be made out of the mountain-molten we bring down. She had a spear and a wide, round shield. And the circles under her eyes were like caverns without water, and in her ragged leather uniform her body floated thinner than lime dust. Her face was a mass of blisters and scars, stretching over her bones like a star map spread over a broken table. We did not confer with each other on her strangeness—it is not done. In my memory, I seem to think I prodded her foot with mine. She started awake, clutching her spear.
