In the Suicide Mountains (2 page)

Nevertheless, he put his left foot down, and then his right foot, and soon he was in the mountains. The trees were so thick with birds that their music filled the road like fallen yellow apples and he could barely pass. But he remembered his purpose and continued to put his left foot down and then his right foot, and after a time he became aware that on the road ahead of him, walking all alone, there was a woman. She was tall and slender and had hair like yellow straw, and every now and then she would pause for a moment and lean against a tree to sigh. “How curious,” thought the dwarf. Once, in a fit of what seemed sudden fury, the woman struck the tree with the sides of both fists, and the blows had such force that the treetrunk broke, exactly where she'd hit it, and the top sagged over, withering. “Stranger and stranger,” thought the dwarf to himself. He hurried closer, studying the woman to see if he'd be wise to overtake her.

Chapter Two

W
hen Chudu the Goat's Son came even with the woman who'd been walking ahead of him, he found that she was young and beautiful, each feature more beautiful than the last. But what struck him most forcibly was the contradiction between what he'd seen with his own eyes, when she'd broken a beech tree with her two bare hands, and her appearance now—her complete transformation to flimsy elegance. She appeared to be a princess. Her wrists, though not small, seemed barely to hold the weight of her hands; her throat—blue-white and encircled not by jewels, as one might have expected, but instead by a simple peasant's chain—seemed barely to sustain the weight of her head; and her waist, as dainty in relation to the rest as the waist of an hourglass, seemed a structure too delicate by far to support her bosom and broad, sloping shoulders.

Despite this general feebleness, or limpness, or, to put it in a kinder light, airy grace, the young woman walked with long, quick strides, so that the dwarf, to keep up with her, had to trot and even, occasionally, break into a run. She was, like everyone else, much taller than he, and like everyone else she disliked him, or gave him that impression. She never turned her face or acknowledged his existence by word or glance, but strode on, chin lifted, lips pouting, her hair streaming behind her like a golden flag.

She was not in the least alarmed by him, it seemed, and Chudu the Goat's Son was puzzled by this. His appearance, he knew by experience, struck fear into the heart of the boldest desperado, yet this wisp of a maiden was as indifferent to his ugliness as an ostrich would be to an oyster. This made the dwarf so curious he began to forget his natural timidity—his hatred of getting his feelings hurt. He began, indeed, to forget himself entirely. He pursed his lips and beat his fists together and fell into such a serious fit of concentration that his head tipped sideways of its own volition and little by little his eyes crossed. Then, suddenly having reached his decision, the dwarf churned his crooked legs faster than before, moving out in front of her, where she'd find it more difficult to pretend not to see him, and abruptly stopped short, whirled himself around, grandly swept his hat off and bowed from the waist, so low that his forehead bumped the roadway. As he brought himself erect again, he saw the most puzzling thing of all—just barely glimpsed it from the corner of his eye as she came barging past: though she was gliding like the wind, on strides as powerful as an antelope's, she tipped him a timid little feminine smile, whispered some inaudible, timid little greeting, and took a limp, quick swipe past her nose with an invisible fan.
So pleased to meet you
, her lips seemed to mouth. But her eyes—and this greatly startled him—her eyes were furious with hostility, and tears sprayed out of the corners like drops of winter rain.

The dwarf stood stock-still, still with his hat off, watching her hurry up the mountain, around the sharp bend, and out of sight, and then he went and sat on a stump and got his pipe out and stoked it. He pondered and pondered, puffing smoke into the trees, trying to unscramble the riddle of the hurrying maiden: but not even the comforting tobacco could help him, and so at last, with great dignity shaking his head and brushing the ashes from his long black beard, he stood up, absently put the pipe in his vest, turned himself into a sparrow, and hurried to catch up with her.

When he caught sight of her, the maiden was standing by an ancient, towering oak, with her left foot drawn back and the muscles of both legs bunched, preparing to deliver the tree such a kick as would tear it from its footing. In his disguise as a sparrow, the dwarf flew down to her, screeching as if in terror in his piping voice, “Oh yes, destroy our home! Do whatever you please with us! What are poor hapless little sparrows to you—you who have the powers of a dragon? We look forward, at best, to but a year or so of life, but you, you live a thousand, unless I miss my guess, so you can easily afford to hold life cheap!”

At this, to his astonishment, the maiden put her left foot on the ground beside her right and began to weep and cry more heart-brokenly than before, like a poor spanked schoolgirl.

“Little do you know,” the maiden brought out at last, “how far I am from holding life cheap! You must forgive me for threatening to harm your home. I only meant to vent my rage at the cruelty of my fate.” And now again she was sobbing.

“It must be a terrible fate indeed,” said the sparrow, ruffling up his neck feathers, still pretending to be angry, “—it must be a terrible fate indeed that you should feel yourself justified in taking it out on harmless bystanders! But tell us your story, for many's the grief for which God is relief, and there's one or two for which I am.”

“Very well, I'll tell you,” said the maiden, “but take my word for it, there's no relief in sight, and I tell you my troubles only because I owe you, I suppose, an explanation.” With these words, her blue eyes both weeping and flashing, the maiden sat down on the green, mossy bank beside the road, and the dwarf disguised as a sparrow settled comfortably on a branch.

Chapter Three

T
he girl was a blacksmith's daughter by the name of Armida. Her childhood had been happy, for her mother was a great, fierce, chortling woman who might have been a blacksmith herself if matters had gone otherwise and she'd been born a boy. But she took her misfortune in good spirit, as she always took everything in life, and pleased herself mostly with woman's work, cooking and sewing and tending to the cow, which she sometimes carried to the field, for pure sport, on her shoulder. Armida's father was a gentle, simple-hearted man who never cared a tittle for what people thought, as long as he got his dinner and his wife was good to him. He paid no attention—in those days anyway—if neighbors scoffed at the lack of decorum and convention in his house, for what was it to him? Their horses still needed shoeing, didn't they, whether or not his wife, for pure pleasure, chopped down timber? They still needed chains made, and plowshares shaped, though his wife in her spare time carved tombstones. His household got increasingly out of hand, at least from his neighbors' point of view, but the father grinned placidly, sipped hot, flat ale from his dented tin cup, and continued to let things slide. Thus it befell that when Armida was a baby, she got the habit of puttering in the glow of the forge, shoveling in coal or fashioning door-bolts or bending heavy iron in the company of her father, instead of helping her mother in the kitchen where she might have learned woman's work.

“You're a fool, Otto Ott,” the neighbors said, upbraiding her father. “That daughter of yours will grow up headstrong and powerful as an ox in May, and not a man in this world will ever hazard his life by marrying her.”

“God's will be done,” said her father with a grin, for Armida was just nine, and it seemed to him no problem.

“Perhaps the neighbors are right, Otto,” her mother sometimes said, for though she was a merry, boisterous person, she had a deep, uncommon mind, and understood things as nobody else did.

But Armida's father, who always enjoyed it when her mother opposed him, however casually, would guffaw and feint and get the drop on Armida's mother and would pin her arm tight-as-a-clam behind her back, and the two of them would wrestle, laughing and puffing and kicking up dirt by the wheelbarrow-load, until her mother sucked in breath and broke her father's hold and slammed him against the barn's oak wall and knocked the last gasp of wind out of him. Then they'd laugh and laugh.

One night when Armida and her father came in from bending iron bars, they found her mother's two feet sticking straight up like stumps under the wellhouse roof, and her head under the water, and to their horror and terrible sorrow she was dead. The neighbors, though perhaps they meant no harm, could not help feeling that the fault was Armida's father's. Had Armida been working in the kitchen, as she should have been, the tragedy, they said, would not have happened.

Her father's heart was broken, and his self-confidence as well, and so, after he'd buried Armida's mother—in a grave he'd dug out of solid rock and covered with a foot-thick iron door—he gave in, to the last detail, to his neighbors' whims. He married a widow who had distant relatives at the king's palace, and into her hands he put the training and grooming of Armida.

Alas that Armida had not died in that well with her mother!

The step-mother, who had a daughter of her own who happened to be exactly Armida's age (and whose name was Clarella), was wonderfully gentle and kind to Armida when her father was near; but whenever his back was turned, she was mean as a snake. “Hopeless,
hopeless!
” she would hiss, with a look of spiteful glee, for Armida could do nothing right. She made her read books to see what heroines are like and told her to study her step-sister. She showed her paintings and read her poems and gave her exercises.

In one of the exercises which the step-mother used, trying to make Armida “an aristocrat,” she said, “instead of a staggering, rolling-eyed horse,” it was necessary to carry a book on one's head. Armida, though pretty as a picture, heaven knows, was so strong that the weight of a book was like the weight of a feather in her hair, so that for the life of her she couldn't tell where the book was and thus couldn't balance it. Strange to say, out of love for her father—and because she shared, deep down, his remorseful feeling that the family had gone wrong, and that the neighbors were right—Armida was eager to please the step-mother, cruel as she might be, and learn, like a dutiful student, all her step-mother had to teach. Though she had liked her old life and loved her true mother, she couldn't help feeling that what the step-mother said was true: Armida ought to be, like Clarella and the heroines in poems and stories—to say nothing of the ladies at tournaments and fairs, or at railroad stations—flimsy and graceful, helpless and fluttery when gentlemen were near, and whenever conversation turned serious, silly as a duck.

For this reason Armida worked night and day, part of the time reading, part of the time trying to balance books on her head and make her posture aristocratic—all to no avail. But Armida, like her mother before her, was gifted with an uncommonly good mind, and so she thought at last of a stratagem: when everyone was asleep she unfastened the stovepipe from the wall and put the stove on her head, and in this way she learned to walk head-erect, with the grace and light-footedness of a kitten. She learned, soon after, how to hide the fact that she had bones in her arms, and after that—by imitation of her step-sister, and by long hours of diligence—she learned to talk stupidly, as if nothing, even simple addition, could penetrate her skull.

In hardly more time than it takes to tell, Armida became—to her step-mother's horror, to say nothing of the horror of her jealous stepsister—the most sought-after eligible young lady in the Suicide Mountains. Her father was neither pleased nor displeased, so far as one could tell; he merely drank his ale, fondling his dented tin cup as if it were his one last possession, and the more Armida watched him—furtively peeking out past the flowered chintz curtains on the kitchen window while she scrubbed the pots and pans—the more fearful she became in her heart. Then one night, by accident or not, her father fell into the forge which he'd fanned with his bellows to its hottest, and all that was left in the morning was the soles of his shoes.

Poor Armida! If her life had been terrible before, it was now ten times more terrible. When suitors came to visit, her cruel step-mother and cruel step-sister would listen critically at the door, and whenever she made some mistake, they would cackle like two witches. Nevertheless, the suitors kept coming until the whole house reeked with their flowers and was piled like a granary with their greeting cards and favors.

“Disgusting!” said her step-mother, picking up a love locket, newly delivered, between her long, pale, lumpy fingers.

“Well hello! It's the walking honey pot,” said her step-sister, and gave a quick jerk to Armida's yellow hair.

Poor Armida could well understand their scorn, for however she might hide it, her intelligence grew keener every day. She was a living lie, that was the heart of it. It was that, she could see, that lured those admirers to her door like ants: the aura of mystery that, in spite of her best intentions, she gave off like a scent of sachet. Little did they dream, those innumerable admirers, how simple, how unspeakably vulgar, was that mystery at the core: behind her elegant, filagreed facade, her studied femininity, those shoddily stolen little tactics of her step-sister's—the fluttering lashes, the shy gazelle eyes—she was manlike, firm of flank as a farmer. They wrote her sonnets and graceful, silly sestets, gave her thimbles and real-silver sealing-wax sets, invited her to ride in their canoes by the summer's moonlight. What would they have thought if she were suddenly to reveal that beneath the pink ribbons of her lacy dress she had the muscles of a drafthorse, and under her burst of yellow hair the acumen of a banker? Yet it was so.