by Margi Preus
“Nary a word to me,” he says.
“Nor to me,” say I.
He nods, pleased, and gives Snowflake a satisfied smack.
“Well?” I persist. “What about her?”
“She’ll be having twins, I shouldn’t doubt.”
“The girl?”
“No, Snowflake!” he says.
“I’m asking of the girl,” I remind him.
“Found her when she was just a babe, crawling about on all fours out in the wild, all alone. Seems her people just threw her away. Thought she was a changeling, most like,” he says.
Changeling! A sudden chill passes through my sweater and makes me shiver.
“Left for the trolls to take, I shouldn’t wonder. But it seems even the trolls didn’t want her!” He laughs at this, and then goes on. “So I took her. Turned out she wasn’t much of a worker. Too slow to be much good at anything. But once she found spinning, well! When it comes to spinning, there’s not her like to be found.”
“Is she happy at that work, then?” I ask.
“Why, if she isn’t, she ought to be!” is his answer. “She’s got it better than she should.”
Snowflake bleats and cries. She tries to lie down, then stands, then tries to lie down again. Oh, but Svaalberd is all gentleness, speaking kindnesses to her like he never has to me.
“Good girl,” he says, as she begins to bear down, pushing and bleating by turns. She seems to be having a time of it, but after a bit something starts to appear.
“There’s a leg,” I say.
The goatman turns to me and says, “Why do you stand there, useless? Build up the fire some!”
I throw more wood on the fire, while peppering him with questions about the spinning girl. He says that the girl never uttered a sound, on account of her mother getting too close to an elder tree before she was born, he reckons.
“Why do you keep her locked up like that?” I ask.
“For her own safety, that’s why. She might wander off and get lost! She could get hurt.”
The baby goat lands with a plop on the straw, and Svaalberd says, proud as a papa, “There’s the kid! A doe.”
Snowflake turns around and starts in cleaning up the tiny creature, sweet as can be, with its floppy ears too big for the rest of it.
“Anyway, she’s got strange powers, that one,” the goatman says.
“Snowflake?” I ask, over her cries. She’s bleating and pushing again.
“No, the girl,” says the goatman. “You don’t want her too near the does’ shed, or they may stop giving milk. And you don’t see me shaving, do you? No, you don’t. For should the girl get hold of my whiskers, she could make a potion with them and cast a spell to weaken and sicken me.”
I look at his scraggly beard and think, I would not want to touch those whiskers, even if I could make a potion out of them.
“Do you really believe that?” I say. “The parson says we’re not to hold to such things—superstitions and the like. And when it comes to matters of health, we should put our faith in the doctor.”
“Doctor!” Svaalberd scoffs. “When have you ever seen one of those in these parts?” Just as he says this, out comes another kid, plop! onto the straw.
“Twins, it is,” Svaalberd exclaims, then, “Ohhh …” His tone changes, and I look up from my bellows work, for the fire seems all smoke and nothing else today.
He tsks and clucks and shakes his shaggy head. “Take this one out, and put it in the snow.”
I study the second kid, small as a kitten and unsteady. He rocks on his little pegs trying to stand, and his funny ears flop from side to side. “He isn’t dead,” I say. “And look: Snowflake is cleaning him up, too. She’s not rejected him.”
“He’ll never grow up right,” Svaalberd says. “So there’s no point in feeding him.”
“It’s only his leg is a little funny,” I suggest.
“Nay,” the goatman says. “Best to get it over now.”
“But—” I start.
“Maybe you’d like to go fetch the doctor!” he snaps and shows me the back of his hand. “Now take him out.”
“Do it yourself,” I tell him, turning back to poke at the fire. “I don’t care if you slap me. I won’t do it.”
When I look over my shoulder, there is just the one kid, and Snowflake staring at the door. If I didn’t like old Goatbeard before, now where he is concerned, my heart has hardened into black coal.
The Ash Lad
o our life goes on. Snowflake and her kid in the house with Svaalberd, and me in the storehouse with Spinning Girl. Luckily there’s a stove in there. So I’ve got both stove and fireplace for which to chop kindling, to carry wood, to stoke and to tend.
At first, I keep my eye on the girl, wondering if she’s human or what. Could she be a hulder-maid—one of the invisibles, as Svaalberd said? Her work seems to go from dusk until dawn, as they say the huldrefolks’ does.
“Who are you?” I ask her, and “From whence do you come?” and even “Are you a human girl, or what?”
What is it, I wonder, that makes us human?
“Turn around one time,” I tell her, and she does. There’s no tail poking out from under her skirt. She’s not hollowed out from behind, either, as they say huldre-maids are.
“Sometimes I feel like a hulder-maid myself,” I say, “for there are times when I feel as hollow as a lightning-struck tree trunk.” There are times, too, when I feel as invisible as air.
Human or no, Spinning Girl and I get used to each other. She soon comes after my hair as if it’s a pile of dirty wool, picking the sticks, twigs, dirt, and thistles out of it, then braiding it or twisting it into fancy plaits.
That’s in the eventide. Workdays, I go through my chores, trying to stop wishing I could get away. Because running away is impossible now that winter is here. The snow stays and winter stays, and I stay.
Some people think it’s a romantic job to tend the goats, for they picture the goat girl up in the mountain seter when it’s summer and the sun is in the sky all the time. The grass is thick and green and the sun warm on your face, and nothing to do all day but braid wildflowers into wreaths and gather cloudberries. Those people forget about winter.
Then it’s wake up in the dark, eat breakfast in the dark, haul feed in the dark, gather forage in the dark, cut fir boughs in the dark, haul water in the dark. Oh, and shovel the snow and chop the wood and haul the wood and clean out the ashes and start the fire and rake the coals and cook the porridge and make the candles and knead the bread. All in the dark, dark, dark.
The sun, if there is any at all, never gets above the trees, so you only imagine it. The best you can hope for is to see its pale, cold light winking between the branches. All the while your hands are frozen, red, and cracked. You have to blow on them to get your fingers to bend. And your shoes are always full of snow because your master is too mean to buy you a pair of boots.
The days and weeks go by, and by, and by. The snow is melting; the sun is getting higher in the sky; the goats drop their kids, and they’re all let out to find some grass. Still, I barely notice any of it, since all I know is milking goats, making cheese, hauling buckets, all accompanied by a kick or a slap or a tug on my braids.
Yank. “Girl, why haven’t you covered the milk?” The goatman points to the buckets lined up next to me.
“I’m still milking.”
“Keep your tongue in your mouth,” he says.
I shrug. Slap to the back of the head. “You cover them pails,” he says. “Keep the dirt out.”
I turn slowly to stare at him. This is the man who hasn’t bathed since King Olaf challenged the gods of Dale-Gudbrand.
“You don’t bathe,” I say. “Your house isn’t fit for pigs to live in. The barn was full of goat dung until I came and cleaned it up. You haven’t let me wash my hair the whole time I’ve been here. And you’re worried that a dust mote might alight on the cream?”
I feel a hand yank my arm and lif
t me up, then my heels dragging in the dirt. I can see the hand coming at my face, and although I turn away at the last minute, the blow lands on my cheek. A sharp sting followed by an ache that will blossom into a purple bruise, I’m sure. A few more of those, and I lose count. I run my tongue along my teeth to see if they’re all still there, but my lips are already puffy and swollen, my mouth full of something I suppose is blood.
I’m tossed down into the yard, which is a mud hole from the spring thaw. So first I feel cold muck seeping through my dress, and next I feel something wet slosh over me. At first I think—hope—I’m under the pump and he’s pumping cold water over me, but this liquid comes at me from a bucket. It’s warm and sticky and stinks like Odin’s underdrawers.
“And by the way, that is your job—emptying the chamber pot,” the goatman says. “And since you didn’t, that’s what you deserve, you filthy-mouthed little wench.” Off he stomps to the house, muttering.
Mud-caked, bloody, and stinking, I stand up and am about to scrape some of the filth off me when something catches my eye. Something different, something that doesn’t belong.
It couldn’t be a person. Not a single person has come by in all the long months I’ve been here—including, I think bitterly, any of my relatives. And sadly, Greta, who I know would have come had she been allowed to travel by herself. But of course she is only eight years old and too young for that.
Is it an animal? A tree suddenly burst into leaves? Or a hulder caught out in broad daylight? No, it’s a human being, with a corona of light around his head, so it could only be a saint or maybe the crown prince. Oh, sure, the crown prince would come visiting when I’m in worse condition than a pig.
When he steps forward, I see that it isn’t the crown prince, just a boy, not so much older than me, with a pack upon his back. He stands under a birch tree that has come out in catkins all lit up from the sun behind them—as is the boy’s yellow hair. That is what makes the halo. A swarm of spring midges enhances the effect.
I must be gaping, for he says so, adding, “Your master, miss?”
I’m sure I’ve never heard a more honeyed voice, and I open my mouth to reply, but my mouth being swollen—a tooth or two broken, likely—only garble comes out.
“Poor soul,” the boy mutters and begins to make his way toward the house, giving me a wide berth.
The goatman comes out and calls to me. “Mus!” he says. “Catch Snowflake and put her back in the pen. Then finish that milking you didn’t get done.”
Sure enough, Snowflake is out nibbling at the lower branches of the firs. I go after her while trying to keep my eye on the boy and my master. Svaalberd points off into the distance as if he’s giving directions, while the boy nods and shields his eyes against the sun to look. So he’s lost, which explains how he got here. The two of them go inside the house. What else are they talking about? I wonder. As soon as I get Snowflake in the shed, I run to the house and stand in the doorway, listening.
“… thought she was a changeling, you know,” the goatman’s saying as he wraps up a hunk of cheese. “Her kin tried all kinds of remedies: They flogged her three Thursdays in a row, threatened to put her in the fire, and finally threw her out. I found her crawling about the forest on all fours, took pity on her, and brought her here. Her own people wanted naught to do with her.”
At first I think he’s talking about Spinning Girl, but then he says, “Covers herself in dung every day. Try as I might, she won’t keep herself clean—” and I realize he’s talking about me.
This makes me so mad, I fly into the house with my nails toward Svaalberd’s eyeballs. Of course, he subdues me and nods his head in a pitying way. He hands the parcel of cheese and bread to the boy, and the boy gives him a coin. (And though it’s the bread and cheese I made, am I likely to ever see that coin? No.)
“Done my best to raise her up Christian, but as you can see, she’s little but a wild bear herself. You see how she injures herself,” he says, clucking his tongue and touching—a little too hard—my tender bruises. “She runs into things, falls. Who knows how these things happen?”
“For the love of God!” I cry. “What a liar you are!” But my lips are so swollen it comes out sounding like my mouth is full of porridge.
“Never learned to talk properly, either, poor girl.”
I kick him in the shins, and he winces. For a moment I think his temper will win and he’ll smack me, which he surely would do if the boy weren’t here.
For the boy, old Goatbeard manages the kind of smile the devil might use if he were trying to impersonate the baby Jesus in the manger. It makes me want to vomit. Or perhaps that’s from all the blood I’ve swallowed, and suddenly I have to run outside and empty my stomach over the fence.
Naturally, that’s when the handsome fellow steps out of the house. Mr. Goat follows, shaking his head as if with concern for my immortal soul.
“Many thanks for setting me back on the proper course,” the boy says. “I’ll be on my way …” My heart sinks. Even one night might give my injuries enough time to heal so I could speak to him. “Off to America,” he finishes.
I look up. America? A thousand questions crowd my mind. How are you getting there? Which direction is it? How much money do you need for a venture like that? Do you know my father?
Instead of any of those, I manage, with great care, to form a nearly coherent sentence: “I want to go with you.”
The boy turns to me, looking at me as if for the first time.
“Aye.” Mr. Goat nods, his eyes shifting uneasily. “From time to time she comes out with something that sounds as if it makes perfect sense, poor thing.”
I resist with all my might throwing a clod of dirt at him. I’ll pay enough as it is. And he’ll only twist my actions to make me seem more dull-witted.
“Our ship will be sailing within a fortnight. I’m to be meeting my kin there, so I’d best be off,” the boy says, shouldering his pack, already moving away. Already just a bright spot moving among the dark pines.
When the boy is just about to disappear over the rise, I make my move, bolting for the edge of the farmyard. I can hear the goatman chasing me, breathing hard, and then, oh! his paws clutching. He claps his hand over my mouth, and while I twist and struggle, he kicks open the door to the storehouse. With a shove I am inside, the door slams shut, and the lock turns with a hard metallic clank that seems to ring inside me.
I won’t sink down right here and weep. Oh, no. I won’t give him the satisfaction. Instead, I dash right up the steps to the loft and stand at the window that faces out over the valley, where I can watch the blond head flickering like sunshine among the birches.
The sun is ahead of him now; he is walking west. West. That is the direction I will have to go to get to America.
Spinning Girl presses a damp rag to my face and wipes the blood and filth from my limbs. When I’m as clean as I’m going to get, she goes back to her work. As she spins her yarn, I spin a golden dream out of dust motes. A dream of going to America.
To the Seter
he next morning, the goatman shouts from outside the storehouse. “Up, you worthless girl. It’s time to take the goats up the mountain to the seter.”
He stands outside with a jacket over his arm and a walking staff in his hand.
“It looks to me as if you’re taking them yourself,” I say.
“Just showing you how to get there,” he answers.
“If you point in the general direction,” I tell him, “I’ll find it.”
“Wouldn’t it be fine if it were so simple as that?” he says.
“What about the spinning girl?” I ask. “What is she going to do?”
“That’s no concern of yours,” he says, striking off with such a stride that I have to run to keep up.
Then I remember something. “You told the boy I was a changeling. That’s the same story you told me about the girl in the loft.”
“Maybe it was you; maybe it was her,” he says. “It was
one of you—who’s to know which one?”
“What do you mean by that?” I ask him.
He stops for a moment, turns back to me, and eyes me up and down. “By looks, I’d say it was her. But by temperament, I’d say it was you.”
Before I can ask any more about that, he charges up and over a hill.
Through a grove of stunted birches we go, then through tall timber, their trunks twisted by the wind. Here and there a little patch of snow. After a while I start to wonder just where we are going. Our way seems to lead more down than up.
The goatman prattles on about jobs for me to do once I’m at the seter, while pointing out the plants and herbs growing along the way. “You must get up on the roof and pull out the saplings that have started to grow in the sod. While you’re up there, clean out the chimney. Here’s yarrow, good to stanch bleeding. You’ve also got to oil the leather hinges and grease the latches.”
I think of the ship that’s leaving in less than a fortnight. If I can get away from the goatman and find my way back to Greta, maybe we could get to the ship in time. But what will we do for money? I don’t suppose they’ll let us on the ship for nothing! And then there’s the issue of just where we are now compared with where that ship is.
We come out of the trees into an open meadow, bright with new spring grass, and I forget about all these troubles. Glittering mountain peaks surround us, from which silvery waterfalls tumble down. Streams are moving again and chatter along over stones. The smell of the new grass, of growing things, of warm earth and running water—all of it smells of possibility. This is what America smells like, I think.
Why, it makes me want to sing!
“‘This king, I must tell, was out of his head,’” I sing. “‘His child by trolls had been taken. And troll king and princess soon would be wed—’”
“You shouldn’t be singing of trolls,” Svaalberd barks. “Not here.”
“Why?”
“’Tis said they live hereabouts,” he says.
“Do you really believe in all that?” I ask him. “You, a Christian man and all?”
