by Layla Lawlor
"But why are you here?" I demanded, chafing her hands between mine. "Foolish girl, you—" I broke off. I had been able to understand her perfectly. And she, it seemed, could understand me just as well.
"Liss?" I said cautiously. "Where are we?"
"I don't know, lady." She spoke in a dreamy, dragging voice, every word perfectly intelligible and without a trace of an accent. I might have been talking to a girl from my own village. "I was supposed to come here, I think. So I came."
"Have you been here before?"
"No—yes—" She shook her head. "I ... I dreamed of it. I think."
I looked around at the dark, wind-tossed bushes, the tortured shapes of the low gnarled trees. We were terribly exposed out here on the moonlit table—no, not a table. It was an altar, of course.
I fell to my knees and brushed away lichen. Old patterns had been pecked into the stone, worn smooth by time: whorls and curves, trailing away toward the sides. They ran seamlessly across the crack in the middle, made before it had broken. The ones that concerned me most were a set of deep grooves, tilted toward the edges of the stone.
My mentor in my folklore studies at the University had maintained that my village's annual burning of the wooden men was a degraded remnant of a true sacrifice. In long-ago times, he said, the men and women who were burned, their ashes feeding the soil to ensure a proper harvest, had not been made of wood. Similar customs of fake sacrifice were common all throughout the mountainland—straw men and wooden men, corn and apple dollies, even one valley where they built an enormous straw goat and threw it flaming into their river at the end of the harvest season.
In my village, when we began the fall butchering, we cut the throat of the first goat or sheep and scattered its blood in four directions, the last into the hissing cookfire. "One for the rain," we said, "one for the field, one for the hearth, and one for the mountain."
One for the mountain, I thought, a little giddily. One for the hearth, and the fire that burned there. "Liss, we must leave this place quickly. Can you walk?"
"I don't know," she said, but she placed her hand in mine, docile as a child. I began to scramble off the altar, with the intention of helping her down.
Movement behind her caught my eye, in a different cadence than the thrashing of the wind-tormented brush.
It was Su who strolled from the edge of the wood—the small trees should not have been thick enough to hide him, but they'd hidden him anyway. "Story lady," he said. "I wasn't sure if we'd see each other again. I am glad."
"I can't say the same," I said grimly. I stood up on the altar, putting Liss behind me. Maybe the altar was not a safe place to be, but it let me look down at him, at least. He didn't seem to have any weapons. I'd dropped my improvised cudgel when I climbed onto the altar. Maybe I could kick him in the face, and give Liss a chance to run. "What do you want with her?"
It was a foolish question; I knew that as soon as the words left my mouth. But he answered me anyway.
"She is my bride."
Foolish. Foolish. "She is a child."
"She's old enough to answer the call."
Liss stirred behind me, as if to go to him. I pushed her back. "How did you get her here? You're not even from here."
"Oh sweet one," he said gently, and though he was not a big man, he seemed larger, somehow. "On this night, I am everywhere."
I laughed. I couldn't help it. This was too strange and too ridiculous. I was a collector of stories, not at all the kind of person to find myself caught up in one. "You may not have this girl," I told him.
"Really?" he said. "You think you can say yes or no to me?" He did not sound angry at all, just slightly amused, as always.
I glanced at Liss to see how she was taking this. She hardly seemed aware of her surroundings, her eyes distant and unfocused. "What did you do to her?"
"Nothing that will cause her harm."
"No harm? She's up here with no coat in the middle of the night. She's already been harmed. She might have died." I knew I was being foolish—I didn't want to find out what happened when a mountain got angry—but the sheer gall of him. "Don't you already have a wife? What about her? Or was that a lie too?"
"I have many wives," he corrected me with a gentle sort of patience. "I thought you would like my Silfy, so I arranged for the two of you to meet."
The least she could have done was warn me. But then I wondered if that kind, pleasant-faced woman in the herder's hut knew what her husband really was.
"And now," he said, stepping forward and holding out his hand, "give me my bride, if you will."
The long, ludicrous tassels on our girdles snapped in the wind. By my own village's standards, we were both dressed as brides. Perhaps in some long-ago time, the apron that looked like my village's bridal girdles had been more than a festival costume here, too. Perhaps it had been worn by young women as they went to their new husbands. Or perhaps it had only been worn by the Mountain's bride, in those long-ago times when the ancient stone altar under my feet ran red with blood.
"Think," I implored myself. "Think!" Stories were my stock in trade; stories were what I knew. And there were many stories of people who bargained with supernatural beings and tricked them. Often as not, the tricks tended to blow back onto their wielder, but there was often a way out, if one could only find it.
I had no apple dolly tucked into my girdle to make an offering, as Goat Woman had done in the local version of the story. I had nothing at all except myself.
"Would you take me in her stead?" My voice cracked on the words. It was a stupid offer, but I still think a part of me could not quite convince myself that the being before me—wild-haired and handsome and old, old, old—was really a danger to me.
"You?" he said. His laugh was soft. "Oh, sweet miss, it could never be you. Don't you know why?"
"I'm not good enough to marry you?" I challenged him, but the words tangled up in my throat.
"Not at all. It was your mother who came to me, long ago. And though I could have called upon you by blood, I did not; I will not. That was the one thing your mother asked of me, and so, on my honor, it is the one thing I may never do."
I swallowed, my dry throat aching, and pushed away that knowledge, deep down to lock it in a corner of my mind where I could deal with it later. It was too huge. I could not think of it now. Instead I forced myself to think around the edges of it, to consider the implications according to the old tales.
"There are rules," I said. "There are always rules. And you have to follow them."
"Have to?" he echoed me, his voice gently mocking. "In stories, perhaps. This is not a story, dearest one."
"No, but the old stories are remnants of something even older, aren't they? Something true. They're how people remember things, when there are no books and no writing."
"And what of me?" He spread his arms wide. "I am no storybook tale."
"Maybe not, but there are rules. Why aren't you in the village tonight?" I wasn't sure if his brief hesitation was only my imagination, but I pressed on. "You couldn't stay, could you? Because the Shaking Out really works. They really did chase everything out of the village, including you."
"No person commands me," he said, cool and calm.
"No person, maybe, but there are still rules; didn't you say so yourself? And as long as we keep our end of the bargain, as long as we make the bonfires and sing the songs and throw our handfuls of blood to the soil, then you are bound to keep your end as well."
Now the laughter was completely gone from his eyes; they were deep and glittering and very, very old. "All of this is mere talk. You cannot stop me from taking that girl. I grant you the respect of asking, by the blood we share, but if you continue defying me, I will simply take her."
"But not on this night," I pressed. "You said it yourself: this is a night for women. This is the one night of the year when they can walk about freely, without having to worry about creatures like you. That's the rule."
"She came to me will
ingly." His voice rumbled like two great rocks rubbed together.
"No, she came because you whispered in her ear for many days, until she couldn't sleep and couldn't work for thinking of you. She is here not because she wants to be here, not because she loves you, but because you left her no choice. You could not take her because her mother kept her inside, so on this night, when she should have been safe, you broke the rules and called her away!"
My voice had risen nearly to a scream on the last words. As the echoes died, I gripped Liss's cold, limp hand in mine and waited, my breath caught in my chest, to find out how my defiance would be received.
He gazed at me in silence, and he was both small and huge; he was man-sized and he was large enough to fill the world and blot out the stars. Then he laughed—and it was Su's laugh, ever so slightly mocking, as if there was always the danger that the butt of the joke would turn out to be you. "Clever child," he said. "Brave child. You're not entirely correct, you know. But I do appreciate a good joke, even when it's on me. Go now, but here's another joke for you, or maybe it's a rule—don't look back. Not you, not her. Not until you are back within the village. Not even once."
Oh, I know how this story goes. I've written it in my book many times, in many variants, but every last story of this sort ends a single way.
Keeping my eyes fixed on Su, I took off Liss's headscarf and knotted it around her eyes. Then I helped her down from the altar. Hand in hand, we crossed the clearing. Su did not move to block our path; he simply stood where he was, so we had to go around him to leave.
I stopped when we reached him, surprised to find that, like the man I'd once thought him to be, he was no taller than me. "You won't bother her again," I said.
Su smiled, his eyes mocking. "If you can bring her back to the village, she will be safe for the rest of her days—from me, at least."
I didn't want to risk pushing our luck too far, but there was something else I had to ask, something I needed to know. "My mother. Is she—was she—"
His face softened a little. There was some true warmth in those glittering eyes after all. "Your mother came to me on her own. And left, then, for a while. But she came back."
"Is she ..." I could barely speak; my ribs felt too tight. "Is she still alive?"
"No," he said.
I couldn't ask any more. I wanted no more answers, especially not from this creature that had traveled with me and lied to me, claimed to be my friend, claimed to be my father.
I started forward as if to walk through him, and unexpectedly, he stood aside. The place where he'd kissed my forehead felt so warm it was hard to believe it did not light our way, like a glowing coal between my brows.
Liss and I entered the woods. Though old and overgrown, the way had been easy to find during my climb, easily recognizable as the road it had once been. Now it was hardly distinguishable from the rest of the mountainside. The cairns that had stood out so clearly were tumbledown heaps of rock; the well-worn road was nothing more than a goat path that kept meandering into thickets and stranding us there. Casting about to try to reclaim the trail, I began to understand the nature of Su's final trick on us. We could not backtrack; I did not even dare look back up the mountainside to see where we'd been. In the darkness it was hard to stay oriented. I just had to keep going downhill and trust I wasn't getting so turned around I'd end up looking back by mistake.
But I kept firm hold of Liss's hand, and she came willingly, content to follow wherever I led. We fought our way through tangled brush, splashed across the stream, stumbled down hills of loose scree that slid under our feet. I knew I was leaving scraps of Meham's girdle in the brush, a trail of loose red and blue threads to mark our passing. There was nothing I could do about it.
We came upon the woodcarving place from the other side of the stream, having lost the path so thoroughly I'd feared we'd never find it again. Until I saw and recognized the gleaming carpet of wood shavings, I had been afraid Su had done something to the mountain itself, so that it stretched on forever and we'd always be walking and walking, always hoping our goal was just through the next thicket. I think he could have done it. But he was playing fair, in his way—playing by the rules. We splashed through the stream. Above us, the sentinel stones were outlined against a brighter sky. Dawn was coming. It should have been a relief, but something told me being caught on the hillside by the rising sun would be worse than not having tried to escape at all. The village was our finish line, and the night paced us there.
I'd managed the most difficult part of the journey without looking back, but somehow that last stretch, scrambling down the logging road and trying to beat the sun, was the part where I had the hardest time keeping my eyes forward. Maybe there really was something close behind us, so near I could almost hear the grind of rock on rock, the creak of a wooden idol taking its first steps on stiff legs and turning its blank eyes to find us.
Maybe it is only human nature to fancy it so, like the way that having your hands full is the best way to make your nose itch.
But I didn't look back, and Liss kept pace with me, and we stumbled between the first houses of the village just as the sun crested the mountain and glared in my eyes. Liss gave a sleepy little gasp and pulled her hand out of mine. I looked back at her before I could stop myself—then froze in dismay, but nothing bad happened. She was pulling her knotted scarf from around her eyes; it kept snagging on the twigs tangled in her hair. She looked as weary as I felt, but there was no longer that vague emptiness in her eyes. She gazed at the scarf in her hands, then discovered she was wearing my coat. "Oh," she said, followed by something puzzled-sounding in her own language. I could no longer understand her.
Around us, women and girls straggled into the village in twos and threes and groups. Our disheveled appearance caused no concern; most of them were just as badly mussed, some holding hands. Liss found some of her friends and they went off together. She'd forgotten to give back my coat, and now that the crisis was past, I was starting to feel not only the night's chill but also my own aching exhaustion.
I wandered toward the part of the village where Meham's family lived. Groups of women greeted me wearily but cheerfully; I returned the greeting with what little of their language I could scrape out of my exhausted brain. The same mystic alchemy had been at work on the village that I remembered from the Morning Afters of my youth: the festival decorations turned shabby, the houses looking small and drab by daylight.
I found Meham leaning over her garden gate. Her husband was on the inside and the two of them showed every evidence of flirting like teenagers, even down to blushing and breaking apart when I came up. I unwound the girdle and gave it back with profuse apologies.
"No, no; it is good," Meham said philosophically. She grinned at me, a little of the girlish exuberance clinging to her yet. "Your first Shaking Out, yes? You liked it? It is fun?"
"Fun" was not the first word I'd choose for the night I'd had; still, the village had made me welcome, and I really had been enjoying myself before I'd run off to rescue Meham's eldest daughter from a mountain god. "Yes," I said. "It was fun, thank you."
Before I left the village a few days later, I went back up the mountain one more time. I waited until I could slip away unseen, knowing I would be warned away—knowing, too, the villagers had good reason for that taboo, even if the particulars had been lost in the mists of time.
It was a glorious, mild autumn day. I climbed with my scarf pushed back on my shoulders and my coat unbuttoned.
There was still a shadow of foreboding lingering about the sentinel stones, but it was no more than a ghostly vestige of the overwhelming fear I'd felt the other day. Perhaps confronting Su in his mountain-god guise had drained away my ability to feel the ordinary sort of mild superstitious fear. Or perhaps it was that, after I participated in my first Shaking Out, the idols around the village now accepted me as they did the other village women; they didn't bother me as they used to, and I hardly noticed them now, avoiding them politely
without thinking about it. I didn't leave a food offering for the stones, though it still seemed a bit rude to me not to, but I gave them each a bow before I descended to the water's edge.
The wood-carving clearing seemed much smaller and less impressive by daylight, just a typical woodcutter's landing with little piles of shavings everywhere. And I could not find the road up the mountain at all. I remembered the little path beside the stream very clearly, the way it became a stair climbing alongside a leaping waterfall, but all the paths I followed doubled back on themselves and turned out to be only deer or goat trails after all. Surely I should at least be able to find the bits of thread and fabric Liss and I had left behind in our scramble through the brush, but like the old story of the lost maiden and her trail of bird-attracting bread crumbs, I could find none of it.
The fourth time I got turned around and found myself confronted by the line of idols surrounding the clearing, I gave up. Either I'd been unusually sharp-eyed the other night, or a door had been open to me that was now closed. Whichever the case, I thought it best not to push too hard. If the door did open, I might not like what was on the other side.
Liss was not around when I said my goodbyes to her family. She had not precisely been avoiding me, but did not seem to enjoy my company very much these days; but then, she was a girl entering the first flush of womanhood, busy with her own concerns. She was still dreamy, but seemed less tired, less drawn. I had not woken once to find her gazing out the window in the night.
To my surprise, Meham presented me with a parting gift: the girdle, still trailing loose threads and missing half its tassels, but washed and neatly rolled up. They were not passed down from year to year, she explained in our halting mix of common languages; they were made anew each autumn, then picked out to have the thread reused in other projects.
I gave her my good ivory comb in return, and we parted as friends, though she would never know what I had done for her.
