I’d have been better off had Nan not been so bookish.
But because she ran offt and married the wandering book-seller and not settled in the village as the wife of the cobbler’s son, the life I lead is . . . well, Nan calls it interesting.
I call it a bother.
Then Nan says the bother – that’s all my fault.
“You’re much too stupid,” she said in the gentle goading way she had when she wanted me to do something I in no way wanted to do. “If you went on an adventure, hah! Come crying back to your Nan in a day, if you were lucky! But as you’re luckless, you’d be gone and done, et by a troll or a dragon or a wolf. You don’t have the guts to go past the garden gate.”
She cackled, and my stepsisters with her.
And I was stupid. Too stupid to see the goading for what it was. And too stupid not to sit still by the fire and listen to Nan’s tales night after night, while the more sensible members of the household slept or sneaked out once the moon set, or earlier if the wind blew.
What Nan didn’t know – or I thought she didn’t know – is that from inside the garden gate which, curse it, for a time I was too scared to pass unless it was holding tight onto Nan’s hand as she did her visits round about the neighboring farms, I could see the white tops of the distant mountains.
They frightened me too.
But they called their promises to me, over the wind and when the moon was tall and shining:
Come. The air is clear.
Come. The trees are green.
Come. Where your stepsisters are not.
But then the wind blew, and in the wind I felt Nan.
Nan’s hearing was never all that good, and she had one eye clouded and milky, so when the wind blew or the light dimmed, she had trouble counting those around the fire. My step-sisters thought they could sneak off, one by one, to find their horrible beaus in the woodshed, or the hay loft, or underneath the hawthorns that surrounded our farm. Still Nan knew. She knew when they slept or when they sneaked off, and always had a sharp word for them come morning.
Yet I’m the one she named Hubris. Explain me that.
Oh, but the tales. The tales Nan told. Stories of adventurers seeking their fortunes, seeking lost loves, seeking revenge. Revenge! Those were my favorites. Because once the adventurers found their fortunes, well, they had to cart it all home, didn’t they? The tellers of tales never told the returns, filled with highwaymen and lavish nights at the inns and adventurers and heroes slinking back home in rags without a penny in their pockets. But those who sought revenge! White-hot at the moment they found it, glorious and streaked with blood and making thrones of the skulls of their enemies! Those are the tales that kept me ‘round the fire and often caused the nightmares that made me roll into the fire once I did finally fall asleep.
And Nan always cackled as she stomped on me to beat out the flames.
“Stupid boy,” she’d say. “Last one I’d take on an adventure. You’d be the one to fall down the hole where the goblins live or get lost in the enchanted forest or be imprisoned by the Dark Lord and we’d all have to risk life and limb to find you, wretch. Maybe we’d leave you there. And you’d deserve it.”
And yet.
Often during the telling of a tale, I could see the tops of the white mountains far away.
“Don’t listen to the daft old woman,” they said. “Come to us and we’ll show you your bravery! You’re no whelp, you’re a warrior!”
And I was. Because when no one looked I practiced my swordsmanship with the bit of iron I beat out cold on the anvil at the far side of the barn. It didn’t have much of an edge to it, but I could do enough damage to a bit of sacking stuffed with straw that I felt confident, in a pinch, it might save my life.
And Nan saw me practicing one day and cackled. “It takes more than a bit of pointy metal to make a warrior,” she said. “There’s creatures just the other side of the fence know more about defense and battle than you do. Best stay home, milk the goats, boy. You wouldn’t last an hour out there.”
And yet.
When she learned a new tale – and you could tell when it was fresh, for the milky eye would glow and you swear you could see the tiniest of black pupils at its center as it roamed independent of the other – she made sure mother shaved my head and that I’d had a good ducking in the river before she told it, so afterwards when I rolled into the fire gripped in a nightmare my clothes would only smolder a bit and I’d only lose my eyebrows. Eyebrows grew back quickly, Nan said. “Don’t care if the rest hears it,” she’d say. “But you. You need this one.”
And she’d put on her pointy boots to do the kicking.
Father – as in many of the tales Nan told – was dead. Died right after I was born. Dead of disappointment, Nan said, for up until then he’d had only daughters and wot not to do with a son. And Mum worked hard washing laundry and taking in sewing and worked us hard in the garden and in the woods looking for berries and stealing firewood, often complaining of the hard life she led because of being the offspring of a bookish woman such as Nan.
“Books have done me a lot of good,” Nan said.
“Saved you from a life of prosperity as the wife of a cobbler, no doubt,” Mum retorted. Indeed, when knew nan’s former beau had made his fortune and moved to the city and had stables of cobblers making shoes for the lards and ladies there. Her own husband, the book-seller, died in a binding accident when Mum was only six days old.
“I’m happier with books,” Nan said. “Who needs money?”
“Money buys food!” Mum screamed.
“I’d like to see you wipe your bottom with money!”
That’s usually when they began throwing things at each other. Not that we had much to throw. But Mum and Nan collected rocks and rotten turnips for such occasions and hid them round the house.
This is when I usually left.
I was not afraid to pass the garden gate. It held no mysteries for me. For when I stepped out into the yard, I saw nothing but the distant mountains, and tried my best to run to them.
Usually. Because most of the time if I showed so much as a burnt eyebrow outside the hut, my sisters, they got unpleasant with me.
‘Baby! Oh Baby!”
Meridy typically started it, as Meridy was the one who also rarely ventured past the garden gate. Said she was tending the potatoes. Probably eating half the crop, raw, fat as she is. She’d been the youngest until I came along and resented my accident of birth.
“Nan says it’s always the youngest in the family who finds her fortune, reaps her rewards, finds her prince! You came and mucked it up. Though you’d probably like a prince, wouldn’t you, Baby?”
That was her standard speech. And Baby is what they all called me, sneering. And as she was too fat to leave her spot in the garden, that’s typically as far as she got into it before I was out of the house and running down the lane, singing one of Nan’s filthy songs to drown out Meridy’s voice.
I liked her the best of my sisters. Her weapons were words, and Nan’s tales always said that words could do no harm unless the victim were a complete and utter clod and dullard who bothered to think about what was being said by an enemy who used only words as weapons.
So her words fell on my back as if she were pelting me with daisies. I’d laugh and run and see the mountains coming and –
Hagg always tripped me near the briar patch, near a fresh pile of horse dung, or near the poison ivy. One could say I could avoid such obstacles, but Hagg cultivated both briar and ivy, and collected fresh dung by the bucketsful and always varied the location of her traps.
I had bruises on my shins from the ash branches she used to foul my legs.
“Stupid Baby, you smell like a horse!” And she’d croak out a laugh.
I never saw Hagg. Only heard the voice, like a frog tired of eating flies.
I’d have hugged her out of revenge, (Oh, revenge!) but it never paid to linger where Hagg set her snares. Just when you thought you were past them, bang! Another bucket of dung.
And Nan never let me back into the house smelling of horse. I had to go duck in the creek first. That awful creek full of leeches and ice water.
After such a ducking, as I stood shivering on the threshold – Nan didn’t cotton to water dripping all over her clean dirt floor – why I tried to run.
I pulled a leech from my left ear, flicked it into the grass, and waved my arms expansively. “You see all this, Nan? It’s the same. Every day. Every day mother leaves to collect the washing. Every day I try to leave and the sisters get me. I’m bored of it. Bored.”
“Ah. Boredom. My old friend,” she said. “Ought to be happy with boredom. It’s predicatable. Always know where you stand when you’re bored. Now, interesting. When things get interesting, come back and talk with me. After you’ve patted out interesting’s flames and maybe pulled her teeth out of your hide. Boring is safe.”
Her milky eye, always her betrayer, spun as she looked at me.
“You’re having me on,” I said.
“Huh,” Nan snorted. “So maybe you need a change? Need life more interesting?”
Never liked it when Nan spoke of change. Change usually involved Jaundice.
She never spoke at all – frighteningly quiet, our Jaundice. I never knew why she hated me so, though I suspect she didn’t really need a reason.
Meridy was easy to pass. And Hagg too, once I learned her habits and learned to salt her patches of ivy and briar.
But Jaundice. Jaundice was tougher to pass.
“Why do you do it, boy?” Nan would ask, helping me pick the briar thorns out of my skin, or smearing her skunk-smell poison ivy salve on my rashes. “I’ve set so many traps around the farm, you’ll never get out. Yet you keep trying. Why?”
All I had to do was look at the white tops of the distant mountains, and she knew.
And to goad me, those nights when the thorns were especially stubborn or the rash exceptionally itchy, she’d tell us new tales of hapless boys who left their farms to fight dragons in the mountains. And as she told her tales, her blind milky eye seemed to stare directly at me, no matter where I sat near the fire, and the firelight danced on it and I vowed to try again.
Where Hagg was mostly passive in her aggression, Jaundice was overt, always had her hair in a severe bun and her fists balled up, and almost always waited until I’d nearly picked all the briars out of my face or brushed off the worst of the manure before she leaped out of her hiding place and began beating my kidneys. And where Nan’s fire-kickings were generally enjoyable because the dogs joined and soon enough were tugging on opposite sides of Nan’s shawl and she was batting at them and I could dart away, laughing, Jaundice aimed to end the fight quickly with blows that would fell a troll.
And if I hollered, in anger or pain, she hit harder. So I learned to be quiet, kept my thoughts on the tops of those mountains, where the air must be clear of firewood smoke, and one could see the lights of the farms and the villages as if they were fireflies lit in the dark valley.
And oh, the sunrises one must see up there! When the sun pops over the horizon and lights the tops of the mountains first – islands of light when all around them is dark!
Nan always knew when I was thinking such thoughts.
“Go there, you’ll get et, plain and simple,” she said many times, her milky eye strangely aglow. “There be dragons.”
“There be dragons here too,” I muttered.
“Aye,” she said. “But they’ll never kill you. Just keep you in your place. Only place a dragon’ll keep you is her belly.”
“Maybe I could give her gas.”
Nan chuckled, then slapped me upside the head.
“An imp like you, not likely to cause even a single burp.”
Dragons, she said.
Oh, she told tales of dragons and how they et princesses and townsfolk and virgins and warriors sent to free the virgins from them.
“I could take my sword,” I told her.
“Nice of you. Dragon could use it to pick her teeth.”
Still, the mountaintops called.
I felt it most the days I passed Hagg and her traps.
Then Jaundice. Never felt brave enough to pass Jaundice. Of course, if she used your kidneys and punching-bags like she did mine, you’d not walk near her often.
But if I could resist the blows. Or dodge them, maybe for thirty seconds. She loved to punch – but did she like to run?
I began running. First, short bursts of speed between the house and barn, startling the chickens.
Faster, faster, pushing each day. Soon the trip between the house and barn took ten seconds, rather than the laggardly twenty-two I started with.
Maybe I was ready.
Run past Meridy. Easy enough. Her weapons were words and if I ran fast enough, she’d only get half a sentence out of her fat face before I was out of earshot.
Hagg. Hagg would be trickier. There, I’d have to combine speed with luck.
Twelve tries. Then on lucky thirteen, I got past her and her traps without much injury. Pulling the thorns out could wait if I could only get past Jaundice.
There, twenty tries. And a year and a half of running, because while Meridy and Hagg didn’t like to run, it was clear Jaundice would. And when she caught me, the blows were even more severe.
On the twentieth, I crawled home, with Hagg and Meridy laughing at me, kicking at me as I crossed the threshold.
“Stop that, you two,” she snapped. “Don’t know a good thing when you see it, do you?” Nan looked at me. “I know what you’re planning. And it’s daft. Almost as daft as marrying a book-seller.”
Then she turned to Hagg and Meridy. “He’ll leave us one day, sure enough. Probably go straight to the mountains, straight to the dragons’ gullets,” she said.
“But he might do. He might do.”
“Do what?” Meridy sniffed.
“Treat him poorly enough, he’ll flee,” Nan said. “But dragons don’t like bruised meat. He passes you, he passes you. And if he passes Jaundice – little chance of that, no matter how fast he’s getting – he’ll flee.”
“So?”
Nan rolled her milky eye. “And then he’ll come back, bringing a fortune back to us all on his return, one of these days.” And the family believed her. Because that’s how it always was, in the tales she told.
So one day, when I was about fourteen or fifteen – both good ages to run away from the unpleasantness to seek one’s fortune, Nan always reminded me – I did run off.
And my life got a lot worse.
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