The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror(19)
When three years had passed, she had completed three and a half of her brothers’ shirts. (She had spoiled the first one with her clumsy work, and lost several days to weeping and gnashing her teeth in silent fury.) She was working one afternoon in solitude, her red hands flying about her, when she heard the sound of a huntsman’s horn. It had been a long time since she had heard a sound made by anyone but herself, and it filled her with as much dread as if she had been a roe deer. Quick as she could, she gathered up the nettles in her apron and stuffed her brothers’ shirts into her girdle. She slipped out through the back door and found a tall tree, which she climbed to the top, and seated herself among the branches, and made herself as small as possible. There she sat and spun while below her the winding of the hunting horn and the cries of the staghounds drifted ever closer. She waited for the sounds to pass, and when she looked down again, she saw a man looking back at her. He smiled. She closed her eyes.
“What is your name, sweet child?” the man asked. She said nothing. “You must not fear to speak to me—I am the king of this country, and no harm will come to you as long as you are in it.”
She closed her eyes even tighter and then opened them again. He had begun scaling the tree. She stuffed the rest of the nettles into her apron pocket before he could see them, and waited.
“How did you get up here?” he asked, casting down his hat to the men waiting below. He ascended to her seat, swung himself up beside her, and took her hand from her lap. “Never have I seen anyone so beautiful,” he told her. Her hand felt dead where he pressed it. The man tore off his cloak and swept it around her shoulders. “You are too beautiful to remain here in these woods all alone,” he declared, as if annexing her. “You will return with me, and I will see to it that you are dressed and honored as befits your station, because as surely as I am a king, you are a king’s daughter.”
Being beautiful had never prevented her from remaining in the woods alone before, but there was nothing she could do about it. Beauty was what gave him the right to talk to her as if they had been introduced, and take her hand, and make her wear his cloak, and take her from her tree and to his home. She could not help herself from crying, just a little bit, at the ridiculousness of it all. “Believe me, maiden,” he told her, “the day will come when you will thank me as your deliverer, and if you are as obedient and good as you are beautiful, I will make you my queen.” It was remarkable, the things he was willing to give her, although she had not asked for them. And if his men thought his behavior odd, they kept their thoughts to themselves.
The king seated her on his horse, just behind himself, and together they rode away. When next she opened her eyes, she saw in the sky a wedge of swans following them at a distance, and she smiled in her heart. One of the king’s archers rose in his seat to take aim at them, but she grew so distressed, and her eyes so full of tears, that the king ordered him to leave off. She was so relieved, she fell asleep right there in the saddle.
She awoke to find herself riding through the gates of a great city, greater than the city her father had ruled, with great buildings, and golden cupolas, and fountains, and gardens with walls thirty ells high. The sun swept low and red over all of it.
They dismounted at the gates of a great marble building, the floors of which were covered in carpets richer and more sumptuous to the touch than her bruised feet could ever have hoped for. The walls too were hung with tapestries dazzling to the eye, but she did not see them for her tears. She could not understand how she was here, when she had never said yes to being brought anywhere. She could not remember speaking to him, much less agreeing. She was beginning to learn the danger of silence, and that someone who wishes to hear a yes will not go out of his way to listen for a no.
The king clapped his hands, and women rushed to attend her, to bathe her red, raw limbs in milk and wine and water, to dress her hair and massage sweet oils into her temples, to take from her the clothes she wore and dress her in courtly robes. At this she flew into a fright, and would not allow them to come near, until they left her apron and girdle folded on the floor before her. She swept them up in her arms and held them gently against her. The king laughed. “My silent tyrant,” he said to his men. “She will have her own way. It is lucky she looks so pretty when she does.” When she had finished dressing, the entire court bowed low in admiration of her beauty. “Do you see?” she heard the king exclaim to a tall man nearby, whom he was evidently proud of besting. “I will marry no one other.”
“Majesty,” said the man carefully, “she is beautiful, I cannot argue that—”
“If you did, I’d call you a fool and worse,” the king said.
“But we know nothing of her. All she has done is cry. What kind of a king’s wife will she be?”
“All women cry,” the king said. “Another woman would not look so beautiful doing it, and trouble me all the more by adding speech to it.” And before the man—blessed enemy that he was, she hoped he would compile a list of infamies against her—could say another word about it, the king called for music and dancing.
So it was that they were married, and as it turned out, getting married required as little speech from her as had leaving her home. Afterward the king led her through marble halls and fragrant gardens, though she neither spoke nor smiled but wondered how he could love such a silent, sad companion. The king opened the door of a little green chamber, on the floor of which he had placed her spinning things and a bundle of nettles. “Since nothing else seems to give you pleasure here,” said the king, “in spite of all I do for you, here you may dream you are back in your old treehouse, and perhaps it will amuse you now, if all my kingdom does not.”