Straw into Gold Read online

  At dawn came the Prince, full of plans and promises, and he noticed nothing wrong, not even when the birds gathered around him, swooping and calling.

  “Rack! Rack! Rack!” cried the blackbird, while the robin stood in his path.

  “By your leave,” said the Prince, stepping round him, polite and unheeding, and he came to the tower and called.

  “Rapunzel, Rapunzel! Dear Rapunzel! Lovely Rapunzel, let down your hair!”

  So down for the last time came the rope of golden hair, and the Prince climbed swiftly to the window . . . and he was expected.

  “Ha!” said the witch. “Ha! Now I have you!”

  “Where is she?” demanded the Prince, as soon as he understood. “Rapunzel! What have you done with her? Tell me, old witch!”

  “I’ll tell you,” said the witch, the knife in her hand. “I’ll tell you! She’s gone. Gone, and I’ll never see her again! Gone, and you’ll never see her again! Gone, and she won’t come back, and she was mine, mine, mine!”

  “No!” cried the Prince, rushing to the window. And he leaned out from it and called, “Rapunzel! Rapunzel!”

  “No use you crying,” said the witch. “You took her! You lost her, and what’ll I live for? Now fly after her if you can!”

  She flung her weight against him, her whole dark weight of misery and evil and viciousness and hate, and out of the window hurtled the Prince, and from the whole height of the tower he plunged, headfirst. There were thornbushes growing where he fell, and their branches broke his fall, and so he was not killed. But their thorns pierced his eyes.

  The pain was like red fire.

  Blinded, the Prince crawled, low along the ground, until he summoned the strength to drag himself to his feet. Then his horse, Seren, came to meet him and waited while he mounted.

  “My good Seren; my brave Seren,” murmured the Prince.

  Seren had been just in time. They had hardly moved a few yards into the trees when they heard the witch scream, and, before the scream had ended, another sound and worse.

  Flesh and bones, breaking against stone, and then a great groaning rumble that shook the whole forest.

  And afterward, silence.

  The Prince guessed then that the witch had jumped to her death, and he shuddered until he felt his own bones would break as well, and he could not move, and neither could his white horse. It was not until a robin sang from the trees in front of them that they found they could step forward.

  One step, and then another, very slowly at first.

  Now for the Prince, with his pierced eyes, the world was all darkness, but it was not so for Seren. Nor for the robin. All that day, the robin led the way through the forest, and the white horse followed. When night came they rested, and at dawn they traveled again.

  This was the pattern for many days and nights, until at last there came a morning when the Prince heard the sudden flutter of the robin’s wings as it flew by his face, and a lovely voice calling, “Robin! Robin!”

  “Rapunzel!” cried the Prince, and then she saw him.

  That was how the Prince and Rapunzel came together again, and they clung to each other and laughed and wept and asked, “Is it you? Is it you, at last? I thought I should never see you again!”

  For, astonishingly, the Prince found that when their tears were brushed away, he could see once more.

  He could see! The blue sky, the white horse, the robin on the green grass, and Rapunzel, smiling in his arms.

  So the Prince and Rapunzel went back to his home, and they were married, and they had children.

  Twins: Jess and Leo.

  Jess and Leo knew nothing of how their parents had met. They only knew they were as free as birds to wander the countryside and the marketplace and the small shabby palace that was home. The village school taught them to read, their father taught them to ride and climb, and their mother taught them to sing. One day they brought home a yellow-and-green bird in a woven cage, and opened the door and waited.

  But it was a long time before the bird looked out.

  Longer still until he left the cage, and even then he didn’t go far, nor for long. Every few minutes he was back inside again.

  “He wants to be a prisoner,” said Leo.

  “He doesn’t,” said Jess, and took the cage away. That didn’t help either. The little bird hopped back to where it had stood. He put himself into an invisible cage, until they gave him the real one again.

  “I don’t understand,” said Leo.

  And Jess said, “Neither do I.”

  But their mother looked at the little bird, and she understood. She too had been a prisoner, and she too was free. And now she was the Prince’s wife, and the mother of two children; but still she was also Rapunzel.

  Rapunzel in the tower.

  The tower, the tower, the round bare room. The darkness of the forest at night, and the moonlight on the walls. The chill and the wind and the scudding clouds outside. The cold iron smell of wet stone. The sheets of rain that splattered on the floor. The bliss of sunlight. The huge silences before a storm. Her lost prison. Her lost world. There were moments when she ached for it so much she would have gone back in a heartbeat, just to be home again. It was as if the tower were still holding her. She saw it in her dreams, an ink-black shape blotted against the sky.

  “It’s gone,” said the Prince. “Dear Rapunzel, it’s gone. It fell when the witch fell. I felt the earth shake with the weight of the stone.”

  “I know,” said Rapunzel.

  “Try to believe it.”

  “Try to believe it,” Rapunzel told the little bird one bright morning. It was out of its cage, just then, perched on the top and preening. As she watched, it suddenly struck Rapunzel that this was good. It was no longer hunched and quiet. It looked at her and chirped.

  Then Rapunzel remembered something from a long time ago. The small, silly song of a yellowhammer, and the first skill she had learned from the birds.

  “Mother!” exclaimed Leo, coming in with Jess. “I didn’t know you could whistle like that!”

  “Do it again!” begged Jess.

  Rapunzel laughed, and whistled again, and the bird on the cage cocked his head, winked at her with a bright, dark eye, and stretched a wing consideringly. Then suddenly, with no fuss at all, it rose from the top of the cage, circled the room, and flew out of the open window.

  “Oh! Oh!” cried Jess and Leo.

  “Listen!” said their mother.

  From the top of a birch tree a song came winging back to them. It was the small, silly song of a yellowhammer, swinging in the sunlight.

  Rapunzel ran to the garden and gazed and gazed.

  And at last there was nothing but sky above her, and sunlight and birdsong and small white clouds against the blue.

  And there was no cage and no tower and no shadow anywhere to blot out the light.

  And so then they all lived happily.

  Ever after.

  Straw into Gold

  or

  Rumpelstiltskin

  There was a salt marsh under an enormous sky. It was a bare, wild place of creeks and mud flats, sea lavender and reedbeds. It was the home of wading birds and seals and gulls. For years, a small creature had lived there too. Root dark, reed thin, perhaps half the height of a man, perhaps less. Not an imp, nor a boggart, nor an elf. Something of that kind, but without their charm or mystery. Without their easy magic too. He was a hob. A plain, scuttling hob, with a husky, piping voice.

  Before the hob came to the marsh, he had lived inland, where there were barley fields and windmills and fat meadow sheep. Among the meadows was a village, with cottages and farms and apple orchards. In one of those orchards had been a low brick building where, long before, a farmer had kept turkeys. The old turkey house, overgrown to the roof with a thorny, pale pink rose, made a home for the hob.

  The hob had no name; or if he had, he had never heard it told. The village people had no name for him either. They called him “Eh up!” “Yon fe
lla,” “Now then!” and “Li’l chap.” He worked for them, and they paid him in barley loaves, bowls of milk, fallen apples, hot broth in wintertime, a three-legged stool and a woolen patchwork blanket. In return he picked stones from the fields, cleaned the stables and sheds, swept the yards, sat up at night beside sick beasts, brewed cures from herbs, and spun the wool from the fleeces of the fat sheep into great, smooth hanks of yarn.

  The hob was good at spinning. He had a little wooden spinning wheel, cut down to suit his size. When he wasn’t at his farmwork, he sat in the doorway of the old turkey house with his wheel, and he sang sometimes; thin, reedy songs of his own thoughts:

  Fair days such fair days never seen such fair days

  With light on the barley

  When the wind blows.

  One day the hob was singing a song such as this, when a woman went past with a child. The hob watched them. He always watched children, especially very small ones. They seemed less remote to him than grown people did. This child, a girl in a blue dress, was of the age when children learn to speak. She was pointing to things and naming them.

  When the hob realized this, he put his hand on the wheel to stop the spinning and listened.

  “Sky,” said the child, gazing upward.

  And the woman said, “Yes. Sky.”

  “Stick,” said the child, stooping to pick up a fallen birch twig, and again the woman agreed.

  “ ’Onkey!” The child pointed in glee at a nodding gray head at a gate.

  “Donkey,” said the woman, smiling.

  “Donkey, donkey!” said the child, nodding so much like the donkey that the hob’s beechnut pointy face twisted into a smile. The girl saw the smile and laughed back and spoke again.

  A name.

  The hob’s eyes grew wide. His mouth fell open. His heart pounded so hard he felt faint and fearful. He was fearful in case the child was mistaken. He fixed his eyes on the woman. She nodded tranquilly to the child and added, “Spinning! Straw into gold!”

  That was a saying they had in those parts: “Straw into gold,” a sort of joke. A sort of impossible wish or hope.

  The woman and the little girl passed on, but just as they turned the corner out of sight, the girl looked back over her shoulder, straight into the face of the hob, and she said his name again.

  Now the hob’s days were different. He had a name. In the night he murmured it, and hugged it to himself like a great treasure. In the day his steps were bolder. When his work was done he walked up and down the village street looking about himself.

  This was all because of knowing his name.

  The hob’s spinning now became supreme. He worked with a new, wild energy. There came a day when he turned his wheel so fast that there was no combed fleece left in the village to be spun. Yet the hob still burned with his bold new eagerness. What could he spin? He looked around his little turkey-house home. Then he remembered, for the first time since he had heard them, the words of the woman with the child.

  Straw into gold.

  The hob turned to his bed and gathered a bunch of barley straw.

  Then in secret, and with great difficulty and some pain in his hands, the hob spun a new thread. He spun the barley straw into a thick solid thread of pure bright gold. When it was finished he wound the new thread into a shining acorn-sized ball and held it in his hand. It glowed like a miniature sun on the hob’s dark palm.

  Gold was no part of the hob’s life. He had his milk and his barley bread, his blanket and his rose. He had his name to murmur at night. He had no use for this little piece of gold, and yet he knew it was a wonder. So he took it into the village and walked up and down the street with it until he stumbled over a cart-rut in front of the village inn. He dropped the gold then, and it rolled away, and he crawled in the gutter, searching for it.

  It was not often that people spoke to the hob, but now and then they did. As he scrabbled, a kindly voice asked, “What you doing, li’l chap?”

  “I dropped my gold,” said the hob.

  “Your gold?”

  “My piece of gold,” said the hob.

  “Ha!” called the man to the group in front of the inn. “They’re paying the hob in gold now! What about that?”

  Laughter broke over the hob and buffeted him.

  “What you been up to in that orchard, then,” someone called to him, “to be worth so much?”

  “Spinnin’,” said the hob.

  “That must have been rare fleece!”

  “Barley straw,” said the hob.

  “You been spinning barley straw?”

  “Spun it into gold,” said the hob proudly.

  This time the laughter was a gale, and the men slapped their knees, and those that had heard called to those that had not, “Come, listen to this!” and they said to the hob, “Tell it again!”

  “Spun straw to gold,” repeated the hob, looking from one huge laughing face to another. “Barley straw.”

  The landlord was among them now, with a great jug of barley beer and a fistful of mugs. “That’s a joke well worth a drink!” he said, squatting down to speak to the hob. “There you go, li’l fella!”

  The hob took his mug in two hands, and it was like a barrel to him and smelled like all the good things he had ever smelled, earth and barley and honey and new bread, all of them in one. It tasted like them too, and he drank it down, gulp by gulp, and wagged his head with the strong, good, dizzy feel of it, and wiped the foam on his fingers.

  “And what would you have bought with your barley-straw gold?” asked a grinning face. “What was it to be, my fine spinner?”

  The hob shook his swimming head.

  “Barley beer?” they asked him. “A fine new hat? A riding mare? What do you lack, fella? What’s your desire? What would you buy?”

  The hob looked from one to the other. More questions than he had ever been asked in his life. His head buzzing with barley beer. What did he lack? A companion. A soul to work for. A voice to say his name.

  “One thing?” asked a man, laughing.

  “A child,” said the baffled, beer-swarmed, lonely hob.

  “A child?” said the man, and all the laughter stopped.

  The world stopped.

  “A child?” they repeated. And they asked each other, “What would a creature like a hob want with a child? What have we kept among us?”

  That was the end of the hob’s days in the village, and the turkey house and the rose, and the barley bread and the bowls of milk. The hob’s world was pulled apart by great men’s hands, the rose torn up, the stool smashed, the walls demolished and the roof destroyed, and the hob himself sent running, scurrying, hobbling from the village, with hard words and stones following after him, and his spinning wheel strapped to his back.

  He was outcast, and he had not the smallest understanding of why.

  It was dark now all the time in the hob’s world. Daylight made no difference to his darkness. He groped blindly forward into an empty nothingness. He felt no hunger, nor thirst, nor tiredness. He felt nothing but the road beneath his feet, until he came to the wall.

  The wall barred his way. He could not pass it and so he dropped against it. For a long time he lay crumpled there, neither awake nor asleep.

  Rain fell on him . . .

  The hob did not die, and so he had to go on living.

  He opened his eyes, and the sky was still there. Towering above him was a great, creaking windmill, red brick and white sails and long green grass at the foot. The spinning wheel lay tangled among the grasses.

  Since the hob had to live, he had to eat. To eat, he had to work. Very slowly, with the wall to help him, he pulled himself to his feet, staggered round to the dark open door of the mill, found a broom, and began to sweep the floor.

  The miller’s daughter was named Petal, and it suited her. She was a round, soft blossom of a girl, golden-haired, pink-skinned, and as lazy as she was pretty. Petal drifted through her days, dreamily combing her long, smooth curls, smilin
g when the sunlight moved round to her chair, sleepily humming on the garden swing. She had a nice singing voice, but she never did anything useful except, now and then, a little spinning.

  “You can spin sitting down,” said Petal.

  The miller said, “I never knew anyone do so little for so long!”

  “Well, now you do,” said Petal.

  “Big lass like you should be busy with all sorts!” said the miller. “What’s going to happen when you marry, my fine lady? Then who will keep the house?”

  “Housemaids!” said Petal.

  “And cook the food?”

  “Kitchen maids!” said Petal.

  “And mind the babies?”

  “Nursemaids!” said Petal. “Of course!”

  “Then mind you marry a very rich man, our Petal!”

  “I’ll marry the King,” said Petal. “He’s rich enough!”

  “Marry the King!” scoffed the miller. “I’d like to see the King marry a girl like you!”

  “Watch, then,” said Petal, “and you will.”

  The miller grunted with temper. He always lost his arguments with Petal; he had done all her life.

  “There’s a hob about,” he told her, changing the subject.

  “Fancy,” said Petal, yawning.

  “I’ve not seen it, but it’s there. Sweeps the mill and does the stable. Brews cures from herbs. Cured the bay horse. I been leaving it porridge, and a coin now and then.”

  “When the King comes,” said Petal, who had been smiling into her little looking glass and not listening to a word, “tell him I’m here.”

  “The King!” growled the miller. “That’ll be the day, when the King leaves his great palace in the middle of town to come out here by the marsh and knock on the mill-house door! You do have some ideas!”

  “I do,” said Petal.

  “You’ll wait forever and a day!”

  “A day will be enough,” said Petal. And as usual she was right and the miller was wrong, and the next day the King left his great palace in the town and came knocking on the mill-house door, his carriage having lost a wheel in the road outside, and he himself not wanting to stand around in the rain till it was mended.