“A crocodile! Señor José! I have always dreamed of making friends with a crocodile. . . . Oh, he’s soft as a kitten! But what’s wrong with him? It sounds like he can’t breathe.”
She pulled a knife from the pocket of her dress. The fishermen held their breath as she sliced through the ropes binding the baby reptile’s snout. Fernando winced and looked away as she pried apart his jaws.
“Hold his mouth open,” she ordered José. Oblivious to the rows of sharp, pointy teeth, she peered down the crocodile’s throat, then plunged her arm into his gullet. Old José held firm as the creature gagged and strained to snap his jaws.
Tica fished carefully inside the crocodile’s throat until her fingers closed around something flat and hard and she began, very gently, to pull it out. Everybody crowded around to stare. The object Tica held was made of gold. Once she had wiped off the crocodile spit and slime, they saw that it was ornately engraved, with a scrap of tattered red ribbon tied through a loop at one end, and a clasp at the other.
“What is it?” asked Pepe.
Cautiously, Tica pressed the clasp. The object opened up like a seashell.
“It’s a mirror!”
“Seems small for a mirror,” said Fernando. “What’s the use of that? And how’d it get inside a crocodile?”
“Someone must have dropped it in the water.” Tica frowned at her reflection. She did not approve of people dropping things in the water, precisely because so often they ended up being eaten by animals. Still, it wasn’t the mirror’s fault. She rubbed it on her skirt. It was pretty. Polished, and with a fresh ribbon, it would be even prettier. She slid it into her pocket next to her knife.
“I’ll keep it,” she said. “And I’ll keep the crocodile too.” She dropped a kiss on the creature’s nose. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? To live here with us, and be my friend?”
The crocodile dropped its snout in her lap and blinked adoring yellow eyes.
“The gods will thank us,” said Old José. “You’ll see.”
The fishermen still weren’t convinced.
“I wouldn’t have rescued it if I’d known she was going to keep it,” grumbled Fernando as they returned to their nets. “It’s one thing stopping an animal suffering, but having it live with us!”
“What about our children?” asked his wife, Maia, washing clothes in the river while her young son kept watch for other, larger crocodiles. “He’ll attack them, for sure.”
“He’ll eat our cows and pigs too!” said Lilia, Pepe’s wife.
“We must tell the chief we don’t want the creature,” the villagers decided. “He’s a sensible man. He must order Tica to let the crocodile go.”
So they went to the chief, and he wholeheartedly agreed. He was a sensible man, and he had no desire to live with a crocodile, however soft and pretty.
“Crocodiles belong in the river,” he informed his daughter. “They are not like hummingbirds. They cannot be tamed.”
“And think of what crocodiles do!” Tica’s mother cried. “The danger to the children! The pigs and cattle!”
But Tica was stubborn, and perhaps a tiny bit spoiled. She was used to getting her way.
“If you don’t let me keep him,” she replied, “I will swim away with him, and though I know that he would never eat me, another crocodile probably would, and then you’ll be sorry.”
She glared at them. So did the crocodile. And who knows where the conversation would have ended, with angry villagers on one side and a fierce child on the other, and a chief torn between the two, if the cry hadn’t gone up from the river at that very moment?
“My baby, oh, my baby!”
Everyone ran to the jetty, to see Pepe and Lilia’s two-year-old daughter, Jacinta, swept away by the current, around the river bend, vanishing from sight.
The fishermen put out in their boats at once, but without hope. No matter how fast they paddled, or how well they rode the current, they were no match for the river, and a small child even less so. Jacinta would drown, and her body would be eaten by wild animals. It was what happened when you lived by the water. If it wasn’t the current, it was snakes or crocodiles, and there was nothing to be done about it. The children wailed in this terrible knowledge. Their parents pulled them closer. Lilia rocked backward and forward on the sand. And then . . .
“They’ve found her!”
Lilia began to sob, then laugh, as a canoe reappeared, rowing upstream in the quiet channel on the far side of the river, Pepe seated at the back with his daughter in his arms, dripping and sniffing but also waving and shouting, “Mama! Mama!”
The villagers cheered—then, one by one, fell silent.
“Well, will you look at that?” whispered Maia.
The little crocodile stood on the end of the jetty, his slim young body quivering as he stretched his snout low over the water, for all the world as if he were singing to it.
“The gods have blessed us,” murmured Old José.
And the little crocodile stayed.
Tica named him Choro, after the people who once worshipped crocodiles as gods, and from the very first day they were devoted to each other. Choro went everywhere with Tica, and it was wonderful how quickly the villagers grew used to the sight of him scurrying after her on his stubby legs on land, and to the sound of her singing to him as he swam beside her when she explored the river and its backwaters in her canoe. He slept in her bedroom, and he was as much a part of the chief’s daughter as her crown of hummingbirds and the monkey on her shoulder. The villagers grew bolder with him themselves. Children threw balls in the river for him to fetch, and visitors to the chief’s house grew used to stepping over him as he sunned himself on the warm stone doorstep. And when sometimes they saw him with his snout stretched low over the river as he had done on the day Jacinta was saved, they were careful to speak in whispers and to walk on tiptoe so as not to disturb him.
A year to the day after Old José had rescued Choro, and Choro had sung to the river to rescue Jacinta, a grandmother who, like José, knew of the old ways, brought her baby granddaughter to the crocodile for blessing. She walked up to where he lay basking and placed Teresita, dressed all in white lace, before him. The villagers held their breath as Choro opened his yellow eyes and gently breathed a crocodile kiss over her.
From then on, every baby born in the village was brought before him.
They called Choro el milagro—the miracle—because once he came to the village, there was not another crocodile attack or even a crocodile sighting, and not one child drowned.
The villagers were blessed, and they rejoiced.
In time, though, they forgot that blessings work both ways and that neglected gods become vengeful.
Babies grow, human and crocodile. When the fishermen first brought Choro to Tica, when he was two and she was seven, they could lie side by side with the tip of his tail level with her feet, and the end of his snout at her shoulder. But by the time Tica was twelve, Choro was twice her size. The limbs that had seemed so dainty to Old José were thick, his kitten-soft scales were rough and gnarled, his light, graceful body was heavy. He grew too long to sleep alongside Tica’s bed, too wide for people to step over on the sunny doorstep.
“Drat that blundering lizard!” exclaimed Lilia, as she tripped over his tail.
“Lumbering nuisance!” grumbled Teresita’s father, when Choro upset his woodpile.
“Ugly brute, isn’t he?” commented visitors who had previously wished for a holy crocodile of their own.
Choro still followed Tica where he could, but a twelve-year-old girl is not as free as a seven-year-old, especially when she is a chief’s daughter. Tica had to spend more time with her mother now, learning how to cook and sew, how to tend a garden and to mix plants for medicine. She never had time to scratch Choro’s head just where he liked it, or lie against his flank to sunbathe, or go out with him swimming by her canoe. Now, every day, he swam alone. Without Tica’s songs to keep him at the surface, he dived dee
per and deeper. Weightless and powerful, down where fish darted and eels snaked through the green, swaying weeds, he forgot the human world. Sometimes he felt the flow of the river shift and he sensed his own kind were near. Every day he searched for them, farther and farther, until one morning he reached the place where the river roared into the sea. Here, where the world was flooded with light, where soft water turned to salt and mud turned to sand on a hot bright triangle of land, he came across a dozen creatures just like him and he knew that he was home.
And yet he still loved Tica. And so, as day fell and the sand cooled, he slid away from that place to swim back to her. But something in him had changed. On the edge of the village, when a shadow fell over the water, he surged toward it. The shadow put up a fight, but it was no match for the crocodile. It was gone faster than a heartbeat. In a blossom of blood.
The gods need looking after if you want to keep them on your side.
Choro dragged the calf to a backwater island, because he was hungry and that is what crocodiles do. After he had eaten, he slept, half-hidden in the reeds, through what was left of the day and through the night and again through most of the following day. When he woke, guided by habit and still by love, he swam home, and because he was a pet as well as a wild animal, he did not look out for danger where he had always been safe. He didn’t notice the nets the villagers had set to catch him, or the men lining the bank with spears to kill him, or the poles they had readied to carry him back from the water, or the fire on which they planned to burn him as an offering to some new god. And when he did swim into their trap, he didn’t understand and, just as when they found him as a baby, fought and struggled to breathe.
“Now we’ve got him!” the fishermen cried. “Now we’ve got the devil!”
Deep in Choro’s reptile heart he knew that something sweet was missing, something like birdsong or the warmth of the sun. But he was drowning now, and he could not remember. Shadows were coming closer, many shadows brandishing sticks, and he knew that they were coming for him and that he was going to die.
Choro’s great body shook with his final sigh. Two round tears fell from his yellow eyes as he closed them and then he was going, he was gone except . . .
“If you don’t release him this minute,” said a clear strong voice, “I will swim far away in the river and another crocodile will probably eat me and then you’ll be sorry.”
The voice was not as soft as once it was, but he knew it, and though he did not understand the words, he understood their meaning.
He opened his eyes. Tica stood beside him in the water, and in her hand she held the same knife she had once used to unmuzzle him all those years ago when they were both much smaller. When she had cut through the last of the nets that strangled him, she dropped a kiss on his snout as she had done on that very first day, and then she was crying, and pushing him away, and he sank deep, deep, deep into the dark green water, and left her.
The villagers went back to fearing crocodiles, and the crocodiles went back to attacking them, because that is the way, on the river.
But for many years they told stories of a time long ago, when one of the great beasts lived among them and was their friend. And some day, if you are very lucky, you might see an old woman paddling her canoe, and beside her in the water will be a giant crocodile, and she will be singing to him.
THE
STORY
PRINCESS
Once upon a time, on a misty, rain-swept island, there was a castle.
It was splendid, with turrets and towers, moats and battlements, gardens and ballrooms, and the princes and princesses who lived there were equally splendid. Each had a particular talent. Prince Ruaríg was a champion swimmer who had once rescued the king’s favorite dog from drowning; Princess Fionnula’s singing made her famous all over the country; Princess Aoife was a fearless horse rider; Prince Pádraig’s dancing was exquisite; and, at the age of ten, Prince Connor could shoot an arrow straight and true.
Only Princess Saoirse was different.
Saoirse sang like a frog, danced like a goat, had never learned to swim, and was afraid of animals. The one time she had tried to shoot an arrow, everyone had laughed because she almost killed the cat, and she had sulked for days.
“Why am I so strange?” she asked her mother one day.
“You’re not strange, darling!” the queen protested. “You’re different.”
“I am strange,” Saoirse retorted. “Everybody says so. Yesterday, one of your ladies called me an ‘odd little thing,’ and another one said, ‘yes, what a shame, when the others are so marvelous.’ I heard them. I was hiding in the hedge when they were walking in the garden. I hate it when they compare me to the others!”
“You shouldn’t eavesdrop,” said the queen. “And what were you hiding from?”
“Everything,” said Saoirse.
The queen’s heart bled for her daughter. Hiding in hedges! she wrote to her own mother. She is a bit odd . . . but, Mama, I think she is also lonely. Please will you come to visit, and try to talk to her? You are so wise, I am sure you will know exactly what to say.
The old queen was indeed wise. So wise, in fact, that when she came she did not try to talk to her granddaughter at all. Instead, she gave her a book.
“Why?” asked Saoirse.
“If you prefer,” her grandmother replied, “we can watch Connor practice his archery.”
Saoirse opened the book.
THE PRINCESS IN THE MIRROR
As the hare runs fleet and the hawk flies true
I will find my way to you
Before the strike of twelve
Before the closing of the gate
I will bring you home
Rose came into this world on a crisp spring morning, as farmhands drove cattle back to the fields from milking and the school bell in the village started to ring. After the birth, the midwife turned her back on mother and baby for less than a minute and went to the window. The ground lurched as she pushed it open, and for a moment the world was thick with mist. The midwife wondered confusedly if there might be an earthquake. But when she looked out of the window she saw only order and loveliness. A robin sang from a branch of the old oak tree in the garden, a ring of tiny white cyclamen grew at its foot. From the lane, she heard children laughing on their way to school, and she smiled at the thought that, one day, the new baby would walk that same path.
All this the midwife noticed, yet it did not strike her as strange that, though the day was still, the leaves of the oak tree shook as if a storm was blowing. She did not hear the scurrying footsteps, the thud as something small and round slipped through a gap in the floorboards. And when she turned back to the white-green baby in the cot, she forgot that the baby she had laid there only moments before had been plump and pink.
Even the mother forgot.
It was as if a spell had been cast.
Francis and Eileen, the parents, loved the child with all their hearts. They were honest farmers who went to the local market every week and to the town fair twice a year. Otherwise they lived quietly in their old farmhouse on the edge of the village. Which was just as well, because after Rose arrived, their neighbors kept away.
“Strange . . . ” whispered the ironmonger’s wife, when she saw the white-green baby.
“Creepy,” said the baker. “I’ll not be letting my children near her.”
“In the old days,” said the mayor’s housekeeper, “they would say she was not of this world. They would have left her in the forest to fend for herself . . . ”
A child left in the forest meant a child eaten by wolves. Everyone knew that.
No one said, “Thank goodness those days are over.”
The years passed and the neighbors’ disapproval grew.
“Her clothes!” they whispered, whenever Rose passed. “Dear me, her clothes!”
It wasn’t that Rose’s clothes were different. Eileen dressed her in exactly the same plain, hard-wearing dresses as all the village
girls. Yet as soon as Rose put them on, the itchy pinafores and stiff aprons that hung so heavy on others became airy as silk, swirling and billowing like something alive. Her parents thought this was beautiful, but the neighbors knew it wasn’t right, just as Rose’s silver eyes weren’t right, or her wild black hair that no ribbon could hold. As for the way she behaved! Who could forget Rose’s first morning at school, when instead of playing with the other children, she had climbed right to the top of the rowan tree by the gate? She had stayed there all day. When asked why, she said she was keeping company with a robin.
A robin! And how had a child so small even gotten into the tree, let alone to the top?
There were always so many questions about Rose, and always so few answers. . . .
Her classmates made up a song about her, and no wonder, the neighbors muttered. It wasn’t a nice song—but then, they muttered, Rose wasn’t a nice child.
A few days before Rose’s twelfth birthday, their disapproval reached new heights. A crowd had gathered to gossip in the square, where Rose in rippling tweed lay on the wall of the mayor’s paddock, ignoring them and singing to his horse with her hair full of straw.
“I heard she is sleeping outside,” the mayor’s housekeeper whispered. “In a haystack! Like a rat!”
“But whatever for?” cried the ironmonger’s wife.
“She has”—the mayor’s housekeeper lowered her voice even further—“dreams!”
“Dreams?”
“Bad dreams, Eileen says, if she sleeps in a bed. Scary dreams. I ask you! Eileen should send the girl away.”
“Oh, yes,” said the ironmonger’s wife and the baker and several others, smug because their daughters did not flaunt their clothes, or sing to animals, or sleep in haystacks, or dream. “Eileen should send her away.”
Eight Princesses and a Magic Mirror Page 5
