Black Pearls (15 page)

That was when she stood and faced me, holding up one hand as the horse trainers do at Tinley Faire. "Play," she ordered, and lowered her hand again.

I tried to run from the feeling that rose in me as she uttered her command. I found, however, that I was frozen into a crouch, my folded legs held fast by the longer strings of the fiendish harp. So there was no escaping the rush of song that filled my chest and wanted to force itself from my throat. I had seen wrens and doves trembling in the throes of their songs, their tiny bodies convulsed in the effort to set them free. And now here was I, equally in thrall to a melody I must release or die.

My mouth opened and the song poured out. My golden arms rose, without my willing it, to pluck the strings attached to my own breast. The pain and the joy I felt as the music echoed in my chest made me remember the smile on Our Crucified Savior in the church at Warwick's Ford. I marveled at the exquisite torture I was inflicting on myself, and would not have stopped it for all the world.

As I plucked and sang the very tune she had been unable to make me play a few hours before, my aunt stared at me in horror. Her mouth open, her eyes wide, she listened, as still as a statue, to "The Turtle Dove's Lament." When the last note had ceased shaking my poor bones, she woke as if from a trance.

"It is a beautiful tune," she said, staring into my unblinking eyes. "But I would rather die than hear it again!" Poor Aunt sank to her knees before me then, begging a forgiveness my frozen lips could never speak. "This is not what I intended," she cried, rending her dress and pulling her hair out in great fistfuls. "This is not what I meant at all!"

It was only a week before my aunt succumbed to the shock my transformation had caused her already tender constitution. Unable to help, I watched in horror as she grew ever weaker and finally, whimpering like a starving animal, let death put an end to her suffering. Nor could I call out to those who buried her and sold all her possessions to the scrap dealer. Except for the harp, the great golden harp in the shape of a kneeling girl.

None of the greedy folk who bought me (each paid a handsome sum, and then recouped it by selling me for even more to someone else) could make me play the way my aunt had done. It was only a monster, a murderer and thief, who was able at last to put the magic to work. I suppose he was accustomed to giving orders, to treating others like dogs, for once he had stolen me from my owner and climbed the mountain to his palace, he did not sit beside me and try to pluck my strings as the others had. Instead, he pointed his terrible finger at me and thundered, "Play!"

That was the first concert I sang for the giant, but hardly the last. Just as all the tales say, he loved to listen to his magic harp. In fact, it became a ritual for him each evening after supper. No sooner had the dishes, with their mess of gnawed bones and rejected bits of gristle, been cleared from the table than the huge fellow would count the money he had made off with that day, call for his magic pullet to lay a golden egg, and at last demand of his wife, "Where is my golden harp?"

I often wondered if the little russet hen were under an enchantment, too. Perhaps she was a young girl like me, or even a good dame who had offended some magician or spell-weaver. Perhaps it cost her the same pain and gave her the same throbbing joy to lay her eggs as I experienced when I sang my songs? Often, when the giant lifted the bird from her nest and commanded, "Lay!" I felt the same loosening in my throat, the same heat in my veins that accompanied my songs as they rushed, like air from a bellows, out of my chest.

The giant never went to church, and I doubt that he was acquainted with the Bible or with Our Sweet Lord. But I think he knew something of beauty and of holy sorrow. For when I sang for him, his dreadful face became composed, his eyes closed, and he acquired the devoted, worshipful expression of the parishioners back home. He never needed to tell me which songs to play, for as a result of my enchantment, I knew without words what melody he wanted to hear.

The giant loved most the plaints of waifs and wanderers. Perhaps because he was an outcast himself, feared and scorned by the folk he terrorized, he wept each time I sang of loneliness. "Ay, ay," he would say, nodding his frightful head. "That is the way of the world, is it not? The sorry way of our sorry world." Then, a tear as big as a pillow on his mighty cheek, he would close his eyes and soon be snoring.

You may be surprised when I tell you my life with the giant was not a bad one. It is true I could not move or speak, except to sing, and that at someone else's bidding. Yet though my songs were not my own, the way they sounded first in my chest and then in my master's heart made them almost like hymns. It was as if I had been born to bring this savage creature peace, to soothe that massive furrowed brow, and to put all to sleep in that perilous place, where our castle clung to the rocky cliffs above a patchwork of little towns.

In between songs, I suffered not at all, feeling neither hunger

nor thirst. Sometimes I watched the giant's wife mend her husband's endless leggings or listened to the pair chat over their supper. But most days I slept away the time, waking only to sing and then slip back into dreams of dancing and talking and running just as I had before my enchantment. Some wise men say our time on earth is but a dream; if so, my life had changed little. I woke from sleep to serenade my master, to settle his heart and his house, then slipped back into the past, where I could still speak my mind and my own two feet still took me where I wished to go.

I cannot say exactly when the boy first came to us, when he sneaked in to change the regular rhythm of our days. I know only that even after we discovered he had stolen some of the giant's gold, no one was much disturbed. The giant's wife blamed herself. The young man had looked so lean and meatless, she explained: no good for one of her husband's hearty stews, no good for much except fattening up. So she had fed him and hidden him, hoping to surprise the old man with a treat one day. But the boy had betrayed her kindness and run off before he could be cooked, run off with a bag of yellow coins.

"Do not trouble yourself, Wife," the giant told her. "The littie gnat took nothing of value, nothing I cannot get back twofold from his village below."

And it was true. So long as the hen was untouched and I played for him each night, the giant was content and life went on as it had before the stealthy boy's visit. The great man would stumble home each afternoon with more gold, more jewels and trinkets. His wife and he would place them in bags in a store-room, where they remained untouched. There was, after all, nothing for them to spend the coins on; the giant had long ago frightened away all the merchants and tradesmen in his domain. On rare evenings he would ask for a bag and run his fingers through the shining coins, but the pleasure he got from that was nothing beside the way his spirits lifted when the hen ruffled and squawked and lay, like a miracle, a perfect golden egg.

But when the boy stole the hen, everything changed. The giant's wife must have guessed how angry her mate would be, for at first she lied. She told him the hen had wandered away and must have fallen off the cliff beyond the castle walls. But her husband, whose large nose was more sensitive than ten smaller ones put together, knew the boy had returned. "I smell him," he bellowed. "I smell that pesky troublemaker. Where be he, wife?" He began to stomp around the rooms downstairs, the stones jumping in their places with his every footfall. He tore the tapestries from the walls, peered under the tables and benches, and opened the chests and drawers. "Be he live or dead, I'll grind his bones to make my bread."

It was then that his wife, fearing for her home, pointed a shaking finger at me. "Play!" she commanded, and though she had never craved a song from me before, it was clear she needed one now. I felt it pour from my throat just as my fingers rose to find its notes. "
There will never come her like again,
" the ballad began. "
She was doughty and clever and true to the end.
"

It was a song of mourning for a dead lover, but the giant knew it was meant for his stout little hen. He stopped, sat in his great chair, and clasped his head in his hands. He wept as I had never heard him, openly, like a great, tree-size child.

When the boy came back for me, I must have been dreaming of dancing a jig or chasing the cat from the pantry. It was only after he'd hoisted me onto his shoulders and was carrying me out the door that I found my voice. In all the years since I'd been spelled, I had never been able to speak. But feeling him struggle under my weight, sliding to one side of his back and nearly tumbling from his clumsy grip, was shock enough to spill the words from my throat. "Help, Master!" I half crooned, half moaned. "Someone is stealing me away!"

You have heard what happened next; all the stories tell how the sad tragedy played itself out. How the giant woke from the slumber into which my tune had lulled him; how he thundered, "Stop, thief!" and then gave chase. How the boy tightened his grip on me and ran as fast and as far as his short legs would take him. How my master followed after, old as he was, taking one lumbering stride for every ten of the thief's. And how, as my master tired, the boy was able to gain a few precious paces and lower himself down a vine that clung to the crags where the giant's castle perched. How he reached the ground and chopped the stem of the plant in two, sending the giant, his huge hands reaching for a hold in the sunlit air, crashing to his death at the bottom of the cliffs.

When my master fell to earth, the whole world trembled.
The boy who held me was knocked off his feet as the ground shook, and since he grasped me fast, the two of us tumbled and rolled together until we came to a stop at last, pinned under one of the giant's boots. The bells in the town were ringing nones by the time the young man's family and some villagers were able to bring a timber and pry the boot's toe high enough to set us free.

The boy and his mother had themselves a fine manor, though nowhere as big as my former master's castle. It lay at the end of a long road that snaked its way through green farmland and the humble cottages of their servants, field workers, and stable boys. Thanks to the money they had stolen from the giant, there was always a pleasant fire burning in the hearth of the great house. Nor was there any end to sweetmeats and pies and other delicacies, since the magic hen continued to lay her precious eggs at the lad's command. Settled in a place of honor by the hearth, she was fed as much corn as she liked and frequently pecked at the boy's mother if the woman raised her voice to him. Clearly, the bird felt her lot had improved, and she seemed not to miss the hilltop castle we two had left behind. As for me, I was glad enough to see my old friend, though her bright, unblinking eye betrayed no memory of the years we had spent under the same roof. I began to doubt she'd been enchanted at all.

I slept much of the day, just as I had in the giant's home, but when I woke there was no one to play for. My new owner was so busy showing off his costly clothes in church and at market, so eager to attend dances and to court every young maid in town, he seldom fancied music at home. Even if he had, he learned early that he might not have his way with me as easily as he did with the hen. The first time he'd brought me into the house and set me proudly before his mother, he had pointed his finger just as he had seen my master do. "Play!" he'd commanded me, but I could find no tune in him. "Play!" he repeated, anxious to show what a fine treasure he had stolen. But while the giant and his wife had nursed slow, shy songs in their hearts, this boy seemed to need no music at all. My head stayed bent over the strings, my golden arms rigid at my sides.

"Perhaps there is another trick to it, lad?" the boy's mother guessed. "Mayhap you missed some magic word that makes it sing?"

"No!" The boy pushed me from him so roughly that my strings shuddered and I felt a cruel tug in my chest. "I watched that great ogre careful as careful," he insisted. "'Play' is all he said, and point is all he did." Once more, he aimed his finger at me as if it were a musket. "Play!" he roared.

"Still, 'tis a lovely thing, my sweet," his mother said, study ing me as I sat, silent, where her son had placed me. "Tune or no tune, 'tis made of gold, I'll warrant. Mind how it shines and all." I sensed a timid ditty, the beginnings of a song, as she looked at me. But as she dared not command me, I fell back to sleep.

So they stood me next to the hen, then, and were pleased to have visitors praise their new harp, the very size and shape of a lovely girl. "The filthy monster placed a spell on that instrument," the young man would tell them whenever they asked if I might be played. He would pluck one of my strings, then let it fall back, soundless. "It may never be played by the pure of heart." That was enough, of course, to keep strangers from trying to coax a song from me, and the boy always boasted most of the hen, whose eggs he could be sure of calling forth. "Now look ye here, for a true wonder," he would say, lifting a glistening egg from under the uncomplaining pullet.