Golden

by Cameron Dokey

  She found a place to stable the horse and cart, and we set off for the stalls.

  “Stay close to me, Rapunzel,” Melisande said. “The town is a big place. It would be easy for you to lose yourself.”

  “I won’t get lost,” I replied. Which, as I’m sure you’ve already noticed for yourself, was not quite the same as giving a promise.

  For a while, though, the point was moot. I was content to stay at the sorceress’s side. Wonderful and exotic goods filled the market stalls, or so it seemed to me at the time. Only the fruit and vegetable stalls failed to tempt me. They didn’t hold a candle to what we grew at home. Eventually, however, Melisande fell to haggling over the price of needles, and I grew bored. I took one step from her side, and then another. By the time I had taken half a dozen, I had broken the invisible tether that tied me to her and been swallowed up by the crowd.

  Even then, I had no fear of getting lost. I knew right where I was going: to that patch of green at the very center. I wanted to see what the heart of a town truly looked like. I can’t say quite what I was expecting, though I can say it wasn’t what I found. On the lush green grass in the center of the square, a group of town children were playing a game that involved running and kicking a ball. It was just a blown-up pig’s bladder, no more special than balls I had played with myself, but it was tied with a strip of cloth more blue than any sky.

  At this sight, my heart gave a great leap. I was a fast runner and knew well how to kick a ball. I had dreamed many dreams in my small warm bed at night, and wished upon many a star. The wish I had breathed most often had been for playmates. So when the ball tied with that bright cloth abruptly sailed my way, I did not hesitate, but kicked it straight to the player my eyes had gone to first and lingered on the longest: a tall lad several years older than I. Right on the cusp of being a young man. If it hadn’t been a market day, he probably wouldn’t have been playing at such games at all.

  Instantly, my action caused a great hue and cry; of joy on the part of the lad and his team, and outrage on the part of his opponents. For, until the moment I had intervened, the ball had been in their possession, and they’d looked fair to win the day.

  “Oh, well done!” the lad cried. “Now let’s show ‘em! Come on!”

  I joined the game, running for all I was worth, which turned out to be a great deal, for all that I was small. Like a minnow in a stream, I slipped in and out of places larger fish could not go. The catastrophe occurred in just this way, as I attempted to dive with the ball through the legs of the captain of the opposing team. He pulled his legs together, trapping me between them, then reached down to capture the ball.

  This, he missed, for I managed to give it a great push and send it flying. His fingers found my kerchief instead. With one hard yank, he pulled it off. The fact that I had tied the knots so carefully and tightly that morning made not one bit of difference.

  My head was exposed.

  The boy gave a great yelp and leaped back. Instantly the game stopped. So profound a silence fell over each and every child that the adults in the closest stalls noticed, stopped their work, and came to see what had caused the lack of commotion. Before I could so much as reach for my kerchief, I found myself completely surrounded by curious, hostile eyes.

  Eight years had changed some things about the top of my head. It was no longer white, but brown, from spending time in the sun. Its most significant feature, however, hadn’t changed a bit: It was still completely smooth, and I completely bald.

  I could feel a horrible flush spread up my neck and over my face, one that had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I’d just been running hard. I sat as still as I possibly could, praying that the earth would miraculously open up and swallow me whole.

  It didn’t, as I hardly need tell you. Instead, somebody stepped forward: the lad who had first encouraged me to join the game. He didn’t look so enthusiastic now. His eyes, which I suddenly noticed were the same color blue as the cloth around the ball, had gone wide. The expression on his face was flat and blank, as if he was trying to give away nothing of what he might be feeling, particularly if that thing was fear. This I instantly understood, for I knew that to show fear was to give your opponent an advantage you frequently could not afford.

  “Why do you look that way?” he asked. “What did you do wrong?”

  “Nothing,” I answered swiftly, responding to the second question and ignoring the first entirely.

  “You must have done something,” he countered at once. “You must have. You don’t look right.”

  “No one knows that better than I do,” I answered tartly. “I’m bald, not stupid or blind.”

  “Perhaps she is a changeling,” another voice suddenly spoke up, a grown-up’s this time. At these words, the entire crowd sucked in a single breath, after which many voices began to cry out, all at once.

  “Stay away from her!”

  “Don’t touch her!”

  “Pick her up and throw her in the well! That’ll show us what she’s made of. That’s the test for witches.”

  “Enough!”

  At the sound of this final voice, all others fell silent. I saw the crowd ripple, the way the rows of corn in our garden do when the wind strikes them. Then the crowd parted and through it stepped Melisande.

  The expression on her face was one I’d never seen before: grief and fury and regret so mixed together it was almost impossible to tell them apart. Without a word, she walked to my side and helped me to my feet. Then she stooped and retrieved my kerchief from the ground.

  “It seems those knots weren’t quite as tight as we supposed,” she said, for my ears alone, as she worked them free and wrapped the kerchief around my head once more. Her face was set as she tied a new set of knots herself, but her fingers were as gentle as always.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean for it to happen.”

  “Of course you didn’t,” she replied. “There’s no need for you to be sorry. You’re not the one who should apologize.”

  At this, she turned back to face the crowd.

  It’s hard to describe precisely what happened then. Later I realized that I had been given my first real glimpse of sorcery. As Melisande gazed upon them, many in the crowd cried out. Some fell to their knees and covered their faces with their hands, while others stood perfectly still, as if they had been turned to stone. In the end, though, they were all the same in one thing: Each and every one of them looked down. No person there assembled could hold the sorceress’s eyes with their own.

  Then she glanced down at me, and it seemed to me as if my heart would rise straight up out of my chest. All my fears were laid bare, and my hopes also. A voice in the back of my mind instructed me to look away or I would have no secrets left, but I did not. What had I to conceal? This was not some stranger, who saw only my own strangeness. This was the woman who had raised me since my birth. The only one I knew and trusted. This was Melisande.

  And so I held her eyes and did not look away. After a moment, she smiled. I smiled back, and at this, my heart resumed its proper place and all was right once more.

  “I thought so,” she said, as she turned back to the crowd. “This girl has more courage than any of you. Have no fear. We will not come amongst you again. But I think there will be many of you who will now come to seek me out.”

  Then she reached down for my hand, I reached up to place mine within hers, and, together, we made our way back through the crowd. It wasn’t until we were almost through it that anyone made a sound at all. And even then, it was just a single word muttered under the breath.

  “Sorceress.”

  I stumbled, my feet abruptly growing clumsy, but Melisande’s footsteps never faltered at all, though she did stop walking.

  “Fearmonger,” she replied. “Coward, I see what is in your heart. Be careful what you sow there, for it may prove to be your only harvest, and a bitter one at that.”

  She did not speak again until we reached our own doo
r. But, though I stayed as silent as she, that single word, sorceress, rang in my head all the way home.

  Three

  In the years that followed, some things changed.

  Others did not.

  The hair on Melisande’s head got a little longer and began to turn gray. I turned first nine, then ten, and finally, in their proper times and places, eleven, twelve, and thirteen, and all the while the top of my head stayed as bald as any egg I could find in our henhouse.

  I did blister it badly with sunburn the year I was ten, having refused to wear a kerchief or hat in a fit of pique over something I cannot now recall. But aside from that, it didn’t change a bit. Mine remained a head upon which no hair would grow.

  My eyes, however, functioned just fine, and I began to keep them peeled for additional signs of sorcery, watching Melisande when I was sure she didn’t notice (though of course she did—not because she was a sorceress but because she was a grown-up).

  She kept her eye on me; I wasn’t quite sure why. But I finally figured out that she undoubtedly saw me watching her, because I began to notice that she was watching me. Her face would take on a sort of considering expression from time to time, as if she were weighing the image of me her eyes presented with one she was holding in her mind. Each and every time, at the precise moment I decided she had finally made up her mind to speak of whatever was in it, she looked away and said nothing at all.

  But the biggest change of all, I suppose, was that after that day in the town, we were no longer quite as alone as we had been before.

  Melisande had been quite right when she predicted that the fact that people knew there was a sorceress in their general vicinity would draw them to her, even if they were not always quite convinced that it was altogether safe for them to come. Word of her presence and her power spread, and, as it did, more and more visitors began to appear at our door.

  At our back door, to be precise, which always made me smile. It made no difference that a perfectly good road came right up to our front gate. Every single person who traveled to see us for the purposes of sorcery preferred to present themselves at the back door. Some knocked loudly, boldly demanding entry. Others merely scratched, as if, even as they asked for admittance, they were second-guessing themselves and wishing they were on their way back home.

  How does sorcery work, where you come from?

  For I have learned, since that day in the village green when I first discovered its presence in the world at all, that the workings of sorcery are not universal. They have to do with the individual who performs them. Sometimes her powers exist to fill a great need in the land in which she lives. Other times they exist to fill a need within the sorceress herself. More often than not, of course, it’s likely to be both. For sorcery is no simple thing, though simpletons often think it so.

  The gift of sorcery that Melisande possessed was this: to see into the hearts of others even when they themselves could not, and to show them what she saw.

  That was what she had done that day on the village green, what had caused every single person present to drop his or her eyes. She had looked into their hearts and seen their fear of me, of what I looked like, and their desire to cast me out because of it. And she had done more. For she had both seen and revealed the villagers’ deepest, most secret fear of all: that my presence among them might prove infectious, bringing down upon their own heads the fate they wished for me, regardless of whether the heads in question had hair on them or not.

  Some were horrified to discover their hearts could hold such feelings and fears. Others knew they were there full well and were horrified at having been found out. In the end, though, it made no difference: Not one was able to meet the message of her or his heart as seen within the sorceress’s gaze. Each and every person dropped their eyes.

  After such an inauspicious beginning, you might think no one would want to come to see us. But this was far from true. There were many, or so it seemed, who were willing to brave the sorceress’s gaze to catch a glimpse of the innermost workings of their own hearts, never mind that it might be said they should have been figuring out a way to do this for them-selves.

  “Why do they come?” I finally asked one day, after a particularly disastrous departure.

  A young woman, one of the loveliest I had ever seen, her beautiful features streaked with tears, had come barreling out the back door just as I had been on the point of coming in with a basket of apples from the orchard. I stepped back quickly to avoid her and lost my footing, which sent me to the ground and the basket and its contents flying.

  Well I guess I’ll be making applesauce instead of pies tonight, I thought.

  “What did you show her, the end of her beauty?” I asked crossly as Melisande appeared in the doorway. Together we watched the young woman hurry away, the sound of her sobs drifting back over her shoulder. “I recognize that look. It’s disappointed hopes. A few more years of that and no one will remember she was beautiful in the first place. What on earth do they expect you to do for them, anyhow?”

  “That is a very good question, my Rapunzel,” answered Melisande. She knelt beside me and began to help me retrieve the apples, the bruises already showing on their skins. “And one I wish these fools would ask themselves before they come.”

  Her words startled me, I must admit. She rarely spoke of those who sought her help, never passed judgement on them. I stayed quiet, gathering up the apples. I’d asked more questions than usual, but I knew that, sooner or later, she would answer them all, and answer them honestly. That was the way things worked around our house.

  “They come,” the sorceress said at last, “because they confuse seeing a thing with understanding it, and they believe that my true power lies in the bestowing of this shortcut.”

  “Then they are idiots, as well as lazy,” I snorted. “For the first lies within your power, it is true, but the second may or may not. And either way, it makes no difference. A shortcut may be fine if you’re walking through a field, but it hardly seems in order when you’re dealing with the heart.”

  “Well spoken on all counts,” Melisande said, and at this she smiled. “I had not thought to have you follow in my footsteps, but perhaps I should reconsider. With thinking like that, you have all the makings of a first-class sorceress.”

  “No, thank you,” I said. “I think I’m odd enough.” A quick silence fell. Oh, excellent, Rapunzel, I thought. That was nicely done. “Not that I think you’re odd,” I added.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Melisande said. “Of course I am. I’m a sorceress, aren’t I?”

  “I have heard that,” I said. “Though I haven’t felt the need to test it for myself.”

  I saw the considering expression come into her face then. Aha! I thought. Perhaps now I will know.

  But the sorceress simply picked up the basket, got to her feet, and said: “I’ll peel the apples. The peelings will make a nice treat for the pigs. Perhaps there will be enough for pies tomorrow.”

  And so I learned no more on that day, and the very next, Mr. Jones came into our lives.

  I have told you that I learned many things from Melisande, the exception being sorcery itself. But here I must confess one failure. No matter how hard or how often Melisande tried to teach me, I could never learn to tell one plant in the garden from another, let alone what they were called.

  I was not entirely hopeless, of course. I could do the large and obvious things. I could tell an apple from a raspberry; cauliflower from corn. But when it came to knowing things by the shapes of their leaves, by what they smelled like when you plucked them and rubbed them between your palms, even whether a plant was a weed or whether it was not, these things I simply could not keep straight in my mind.

  On the day that Mr. Jones came into our lives, I was working among the rows of vegetables where, insteading of ridding the carrots of weeds as I should have, I rid the weeds of carrots by pulling up every single seedling, carefully and methodically, one by one. When I realized
my mistake, I sat back on my heels with a sharp cry of dismay, which caused Melisande to appear at the back door. It was open, for the day was warm and fine.

  “What is it?” she called. She didn’t actually say, “this time,” but then she didn’t need to. I could hear it in her voice like the chime of a bell.

  “Carrots,” I admitted, and saw her wince, for car-rots were a highly useful vegetable, good in summer, autumn, and winter alike.

  “All of them?” she inquired.

  “All of them,” I nodded.

  Even at the distance from the garden to the back door, I heard her sigh. She came over to hunker down beside me, surveying the damage.

  “Perhaps it is to be expected,” she murmured after a while. More to herself than to me, really. I think this may have been what finally broke open a place inside me. A place I had always suspected, but been not quite certain I wished to acknowledge, for it was a place of anger and confusion.

  “You mean because I’m named for a plant in the garden?” I asked tartly. “In that case, why didn’t you encourage my mother to name me for something inanimate and impossible to kill, like a cutting board or a set of fireplace tongs?”

  “You’d only have dropped them on your foot, or had some other accident,” Melisande replied. Her voice sounded calm, but I could see the surprise flicker across her face. “And it was not your mother who named you Rapunzel,” she continued. “It was I.”

  Just for a moment, I felt the world tilt. This is what happens when something truly takes you by surprise. Not that I hadn’t been asking about my parents, because of course, I had been. The sorceress and I had carefully avoided the topic until now, which was as much my doing as hers. For, if I asked, I knew that she would answer, and answer honestly. This fact of life had made me very careful about what I asked, and what I did not.