by John Gardner
When Chimorra awakened the following morning, the whole world was as dark as a pit, and all the people were moaning and sighing, horribly depressed.
Chimorra said to the boardinghouse lady, “Excuse me, ma’am. Why is everybody moaning?”
“For grief, wretch,” said the boardinghouse lady. “Shut up and eat your doughnuts.”
Then Chimorra did a foolish thing. She said, “If the people are moaning because the light’s all gone, then I am just the person to cheer them up. I have a piece of it right here in my locket.”
“What?” shrieked the boardinghouse lady. “Show me! Show me!” and she grabbed a stick and began to swing it around in the darkness, trying to hit poor Chimorra on the head and steal her locket and get that piece of light.
“Stop!” cried Chimorra. “I’m working for the North Star, and if you hit me I must report you.” But the cruel woman went right on trying to hit her with the stick, banging away in all directions—if one can speak of directions in a world gone dark—and so Chimorra leapt out the window and fled to the forest.
In the forest it was even darker than in the rest of the world, so dark, in fact, that Chimorra could not see so much as an inch in front of her nose. She groped sadly along past trees and tarns and wild animals’ lairs and at last, quite lost and half-frozen from the cold, she crawled into a little cave and cried herself to sleep. When she woke up in the middle of the night (or so she imagined, for one could no longer tell night from day) she recalled, between sobs, that there was some sort of poem she was supposed to say when she felt very depressed, but try as she might she could not recall what it was. “Something stupid,” she thought. “I remember it failed to rhyme.” Then she said, “Well, stiff upper lip, I always say.”
To her great surprise, a voice said, “That’s a very brave thing to say. It’s very moving.”
“Who are you?” said Chimorra. “I’m working for the Lady of the North Star.” But the voice said nothing, apparently no more impressed than the boardinghouse lady had been, which shows you exactly how terrible things were, so Chimorra said more timidly, “Who are you?”
“No one,” said the voice. It came closer now, but she was not alarmed, for the voice seemed kindly. “That is to say, I’m no one any more. I used to be a prince, and I came out here hunting, but now in all this darkness I’ve lost my dogs and horses and things, and I don’t know the way to the castle, so I’m no one.”
“Unhappy man!” said Chimorra.
“It’s kind of you to say so,” said the voice. He began to sob.
Chimorra felt her way to where the prince was and patted his shoulder. “Buck up,” she said. “I’ve worked inside chimneys all my life, and I’m not as bothered by the dark as most people. I’ll guide you about. Perhaps sooner or later we’ll discover the castle.”
“You’re very kind,” the prince said, and he fell in love with her on the spot. When morning came they found it was still as dark as pitch, and the wind was colder than before.
Meanwhile, back in the village, the boardinghouse lady went on beating the walls of the kitchen with a stick, trying to hit Chimorra on the head, until finally the neighbors came over to find out what was wrong. The woman was by now so furious that they couldn’t get a word of sense from her, and it was worth a man’s life to get within sixteen feet of where she raged. A crowd gathered, hundreds of people. At last the king himself appeared, and he said, “What’s all this commotion? This is your King speaking.”
Presently the woman left off swinging her stick and collected her wits and curtsied, impressed at being visited by the king.
“Your Majesty,” the boardinghouse lady said, “it’s about my tenant Chimorra. I’ve learned that she’s working for the North Star, and she’s gotten hold of the last piece of light. I hoped to persuade her to give it to me, since I knew Your Majesty could find some use for it, what with all this dark.”
“Hmm,” said the king. “Very suggestive. A piece of light would be worth all the gold in the kingdom right now.” He called for his guards and told them to hurry and make a search and bring him the girl. In no time at all the guards found the open window and knew she had fled to the woods.
But they were not the only ones who knew! For who should be standing at the king’s left elbow, unseen in all that darkness, but the withered old man with one glass eye, and at his elbow his one and only friend, the wicked old mizer of Utrecht. The man with one eye wanted to find the girl to steal back his light so she couldn’t foil his plot. And the mizer of Utrecht wanted to find her so he could trade off the piece of light for all the gold in the kingdom.
“Hssst!” said the one-eyed man, “we must get to her first.”
“Yes indeed,” hissed the mizer of Utrecht, not mentioning his reasons.
The one-eyed man said, “Quick, I have a plan.”
“You would,” said the mizer.
They felt their way back to the one-eyed man’s house and there the one-eyed man disguised himself as the Lady of the North Star. (It was dark and he didn’t really need a disguise, but the one-eyed man was stupid.) “This ought to get her,” the one-eyed man said. “Ha ha ha,” laughed the mizer grimly, and loaded his revolver.
How dark it was, there in the heart of the woods! The owls who normally lorded the night on wings as silent as drifting snow were forced to walk on cold, hard ground for fear they might bump into oak trees and break their necks. And how cold it was! The bears went into hibernation, though it was summer, theoretically, and one couldn’t walk six feet without snapping a snake that had turned to an icicle there on the path.
But the prince and Chimorra groped on through the darkness, farther and farther into the forest, foolishly imagining again and again that at the next turn they would come to the king’s palace. Welaway! They were mistaken. They were coming to a terrible icy cliff that dropped away to the Atlantic Ocean, which was darker even than the heart of the forest, so that no one would see them if they floated there a hundred years, not even an eagle or a whale.
But four feet from the edge of the cliff, Chimorra stopped suddenly, listening, for she believed she’d heard a voice. And she had.
“Chimorra,” the voice called softly and sweetly. “Come back! Don’t you remember me, dear?”
“I can’t say I do, really,” said Chimorra. However, she did have a kind of suspicion. No one had ever called her “dear” but the Lady of the North Star.
And so Chimorra was half-inclined to believe the voice when it said a moment later, “Why this is your old friend the Lady of the North Star.” Right after the words came a noise like wind or like a snake laughing, and Chimorra felt uneasy in her heart.
“I’ll go with you,” said the prince.
But Chimorra said, “No. Stay here. I’ll go, and if I don’t come back—remember me!” With that she kissed the prince on the cheek and pressed something cold into his hand—it was her precious locket—and she groped away into darkness toward the voice. The prince waited, listening with all his ears, but no sound came to him for hours. Then his father the king found him—he and a large group of cheerful politicians—and they all, by pure luck, found their way back home to the castle.
They lived on in the dark castle for many years, growing colder and weaker from hunger every hour. But cold and hunger were the least of it. The terrible part was the spiritual gloom. The king and queen wept all day and all night, and the guards wept in the courtyard. The politicians didn’t weep, but they spent all the time arguing. As for the commoners, the bankers wept in their iron cages, and street sweepers leaned on their brooms and wept, and the laundrywomen howled as they hung out their clothes. Only the prince kept anything of his normal good spirits, for he remembered Chimorra’s saying “We have nothing to fear but fear itself’ (or something), and it gave him pluck.
Chimorra, meanwhile, had a sad life. For the voice was not that of the Lady of the North Star but the voice of the one-eyed man. He and the wicked mizer of Utrecht had seized her and had mad
e their way back, by pure luck, to the one-eyed man’s house, and since they couldn’t find the locket, had made her their cook and cleaning woman, and year after year they worked her and tormented her and allowed her no comforts, not even so much as a pet.
But one night—the coldest night in the world—the mizer said crossly to the one-eyed man, “I’ll tell you the truth. I’m sick to death of this cold and dark. A man can’t count properly in this confounded gloom.”
With the word gloom a light flashed on in Chimorra’s mind, and she said to herself—
Gloom is here, gloom is there,
But I am the North Star’s friend.
Instantly, she felt much, much better, and the mizer of Utrecht, in the very act of aiming his revolver at the one-eyed man’s voice, began to squint and cover his face with his hands, and so did the one-eyed man, for something amazing had happened. The Lady of the North Star, who all this time had been chewing her lip and thinking, “Think, you little idiot!” was freed at last by those magic words and was able to act—and not a second too soon. Quicker than lightning she went to the prince and whispered crossly into his ear, “Open up the locket, stupid. What do you think she gave it to you for?” The prince opened the locket, feeling sheepish, and out burst the last piece of light in the world. It glanced off the mirror, growing larger there, and bounced off the jewels in the prince’s crown, growing larger and larger, and it filled the chandelier and splayed over the waters of the castle moat and then all the village, and the people were saying, “Why look! Look!” And the world hummed with light like the noise of a billion cellos.
“Chimorra!” cried the prince, for she was standing in the window directly opposite the castle (his eyes had gone across to her straight as two arrows), and she looked exactly as he’d known she would.
“Your Highness!” cried Chimorra, but the prince couldn’t hear her because of the singing and dancing in the street.
The prince hurriedly washed and put on his best clothes, whistling like a sparrow on a barn door, and soon he stood knocking at the door of the one-eyed man’s house, and Chimorra let him in. The singing and dancing had stopped by now, because the people had gotten used to the light, and the village was not as pretty as they’d remembered it.
“It’s so good of you to visit,” said Chimorra, blushing wildly, when they were seated.
“How could I forget you, dear friend?” said the prince.
They both laughed merrily, then fell silent, then cleared their throats.
The one-eyed man and the mizer, standing behind the door, shook their heads, disgusted.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1975 by Boskydell Artists Ltd.
cover design by ORIM
ISBN: 978-1-4532-0310-1
This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media
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