The Tower: Part 7: Beltane
Post #68: In which a sister's love ...
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PART 7: BELTANE
Sexual energy and power; balance; interconnection; interdependence
The Card: Justice
Balance; equality; courage; Nature’s power
CHAPTER 23
HEKS
“My name is Johan,” said the stranger. “The Norns sent me -- us.” He glanced sideways at Mirmir. “They sent me to take Ginger back to Yggdrasil.”
“Why? And why didn’t they send you with us when we came through?” Heks demanded from Mirmir.
He looked back at her expressionlessly.
“You know what I think?” Heks asked him shrewdly. “I think the Norns sent Johan and you came with him because you were tired of staying at home and hearing everything second hand.”
Mirmir shook his head back and forth in emphatic denial. The winged man chuckled.
“I’ll tell you about it,” he said to Heks, “but first could we go outside? I’m not used to being underground and I feel half stifled.”
“It may not be safe tonight on the flanks of the volcano,” Rumpelstiltskin warned.
“We can always come back to the cave if we need to,” said Ginger. “I want a long drink of water and something to eat. Let’s get comfortable, and then we can talk.”
Mirmir slid across the cavern floor and poked his head outside. He paused for so long, blocking the cleft, that Heks thumped him with her bony fist. “Go!” she said. “You’re in the way!”
He went, moving with slow dignity. It seemed to take five minutes for his entire length to exit the cavern.
“Finally,” Heks muttered when his tail slid from sight, and followed.
It was late. The smaller, more distant moon, Noola, had set. Cion filled the western sky like a partially-bared silver breast, casting a cool silvery light on Webbd.
The air felt soft and warm as new milk. Rumpelstiltskin handed around cold meat and the native bread and fruit, along with water. The company settled on a flat grassy patch roughly encircled by boulders where Rumpelstiltskin had been camping.
Heks glanced up at the summit of the volcano, but the night was quiet and she saw no sign of Poseidon and Pele. She wondered if they were playing marbles.
As they ate and drank, Johan revealed himself to be a pleasant man, not long past youth. His hair was light in the moonlight, but the feathers on his wing were dark as the night sky. He was cheerful, agreeable, and treated Mirmir like an old friend. He and the serpent were both captivated by the view and marveled at the empty sea bed below and the thrusting volcano above.
Heks noticed Ginger ate and drank heartily and stayed close to Mirmir and Johan, listening and watching. She wondered why the Norns had sent the winged man through the portal to the Red Dancer.
Refreshed, they sat together in an expectant circle. Johan looked from one to the other. “Do you want the long version or the short version?”
“Tell the story,” said Ginger. “We love stories.”
He smiled at her.
“I’m the eldest of eleven brothers and one sister,” he began.
Ginger gasped.
Johan broke off. “What is it?”
“Nothing. Never mind. Go on.”
“I’m the eldest of eleven brothers and one sister. Our father was a king, and ruled a fertile and prosperous land surrounded on three sides by the sea. Our mother died when my youngest sibling, my sister Elsa, was born. We were raised by nannies and nursemaids, and in time my father married again. His new queen was an ambitious woman, rather hard-looking and no longer in youth’s first flush, though handsome. People said she practiced witchcraft, and she was not interested in the men in her town, who could offer nothing but a simple life and a comfortable living. She wanted more.
My father was naturally busy and paid little attention to the relationship between his new queen and his children, but she was jealous of us and our place in our father’s affections, especially as time passed and she did not bear a child. She turned my sister into a drudge and otherwise ignored her, but she worked unceasingly to drive my brothers and me from the castle.
It was an unequal battle, as we were a close family and stuck together, doing our best to protect Elsa and each other. I suppose our united strength drove her to turn to the black arts to be rid of us.
She wove a spell and one day, as we played in the castle gardens and helped Elsa hang the laundry to dry, she changed my brothers and I, one by one, into white swans.
Elsa begged her to stop, sobbing, but in moments eleven dazed swans stumbled around and through the garden beds as Elsa keened.
My stepmother released the castle hounds, who barked and savaged our wings, and set upon us herself. Feathers flew as she tore handfuls from our bodies and the dogs growled and bit, shaking us fit to break our necks.
Unused to our new bodies, we were clumsy and inept in defending ourselves and could scarcely gather our wits enough to realize we had the ability to fly, if not the knowledge of how to do it.
I could not watch my younger brothers mauled and perhaps killed, so, in desperation, I launched myself into the air, flapping my bleeding wings and crying aloud to my brothers to follow … follow!
We managed to get over the garden wall, and then the taller wall enclosing the castle and its grounds, and I led them to a lake some way off where we could rest and consider what to do.
We’d made such a commotion we attracted the attention of several crows, and they followed us, cawing and croaking hoarsely, as we fled to the lake and collapsed onto the water.
In spite of the buffeting we’d received from my stepmother and the dogs, none of us was badly injured, but we were shocked, bruised, bitten and had lost feathers. There was blood on our beaks.
My younger brothers trembled and sobbed with grief and rage to find themselves so transformed. I comforted them as best as I could, and distracted them by insisting we practice swimming, feeding and flying in our new forms. We preened our remaining feathers into order, rinsed our beaks in the water and enjoyed the pleasure of gliding effortlessly across the lake and plunging our heads and necks under the cool water to feed.
Gradually we felt calmer, and the crows, who had been watching from trees around the lake, called us back to shore. We had often fed the crows who came to forage in the midden pile outside the castle kitchen and knew we had nothing to fear from them.
The crows hopped and jostled around us, commiserating, shouting advice and deploring the dark spell binding us. They examined our wounds and bald patches and we were astonished when they pulled out their own feathers and wove them in with ours; they said we could not fly effectively without them and it would take time for our own to grow back in. They were smaller and lighter and could do without a few feathers more easily than we could.
Of course, having black feathers among the white gave us a strange piebald appearance, but after our first molt our new feathers grew in black and our beaks retained their reddish color, as though permanently stained by the blood spilled on that day of betrayal and treachery.
I plucked one of my white feathers and gave it to a crow, asking him to fly to the castle, find Elsa and give it to her as a token we were safe and would not desert her.
We spent some weeks at the lake, getting accustomed to our new shapes and learning to live as swans. As our hurts healed, we practiced flying together, and often circled above the castle, calling Elsa. If she was able, she came out and waved to us, tears running down her face. She looked thinner and more ragged than ever before, and my heart burned to think we were no longer there to shield her and love her.
One day, during an hour when I judged Elsa was most likely to be able to creep away for a few minutes and not be missed, I sent a crow with another white feather to find her. The crow attracted her attention, alighted on her shoulder to give her the feather, and coaxed her to follow it to a tree-sheltered grove outside the castle wall where my brothers and I waited for her.
She fell on her knees and gathered us into her arms. When she had kissed and embraced each one of us and wetted our feathers with her tears, she told us our stepmother had revealed the only way to break the spell she’d placed upon us. Elsa must weave each of us a nettle shirt, nettles she gathered and spun herself with no gloves. While engaged in this work, she must not speak a word to another soul. In order to change us back into men, a nettle shirt must be thrown over each one of us.
Elsa was determined to undertake this task, and had only been waiting for a way to tell us of her intention before she stopped speaking. We did not know how long my father would be gone, and she didn’t want to wait even a day before beginning to work for our release.
My brave sister! We were overcome by the strength of her love and promised to stay nearby and watch over her as best we could. We arranged a certain time every week to meet. She spoke her last words to us before undertaking the terrible task that would one day set us free from our swan shapes, and left the grove with her tongue sealed and determination in every step.
Thus, Elsa began her long task, and we began the equally long task of living as swans. When spring came, we were compelled to migrate with the other swans, much to our dismay. We didn’t want to leave Elsa, whose circumstances grew worse all the time. She had spent the summer gathering nettles and spinning them, and her poor hands were swollen, blistered and red. When our father, the king, returned and found his sons gone, he questioned Elsa, but she refused to speak. Seeing this, our stepmother feigned concern and fear and spoke about witchcraft and pacts with the devil, endeavoring to destroy the bond between father and daughter.
Elsa refused to do any more work about the castle and spent all her time making our shirts. She lived in the stable with a straw bed and just enough food to keep her alive. Our father could not quite bring himself to drive her from the castle, but his wife succeeded in causing him to mistrust Elsa, and he was preoccupied with grief over the sudden loss of his sons. His new wife continued barren, much to his disappointment and her fury.
In spite of all this, the migration instinct proved too strong for us, and we joined our new brethren and flew north for the summer, where we found mates and raised young. We believed one day Elsa would free us from the spell, but in the meantime we were young, and alive, and there were the sky and waterways to explore, plants to nibble and cygnets to raise.
When we saw Elsa again, the young sister we remembered was quite gone. She was a woman now, thin and careworn, her hands callused and blotched. Her hair still shone like gilt in the sun and her blue eyes filled with glad tears when she saw us, but it broke my heart to see her wearing old rags, so lonely and so stoic.
One by one, she completed the nettle shirts and set them carefully aside. Our lives became divided into winters with Elsa and summers with swans in a northern land of cold water and tundra.
One autumn we returned and Elsa was not there.
The crows, who remained faithful friends and allies, told us a young prince had visited the castle over the summer on business and glimpsed Elsa sitting quietly in the stable yard in a patch of sun sewing a nettle shirt. He spoke to her, and though she rose and curtseyed, gave him her hand and smiled, she did not, of course, speak to him.
After that, the crows said, he came several times, always seeking her out, and sometimes sitting with her and watching her scarred, thickened hands as she worked.
One day, when he left, he took Elsa with him, along with a small bundle of nettle shirts. The crows followed, and guided my brothers and me to the prince’s castle.
We settled on a nearby river, and a crow took a white feather to Elsa. Two days later, she met us on the riverbank, led by the crows.
We were relieved to find her in better health. She had gained weight and her clothes were clean and decent, like those of a favored servant. She could not tell us about her new life, but she was as affectionate and loving as ever, gathering us into her arms and pressing kisses on our heads and beaks. In sign language, she told us all but two shirts were completed.
Our stepmother refrained from speaking badly about Elsa to the prince, hopeful from the beginning he would rid her of the last of the king’s children. However, she whispered far and wide about the dead queen’s brats, the sons’ disappearance and the daughter’s sudden mutism and sinister behavior. It made good gossip for the markets and village streets, and word inevitably reached the prince’s ears.
Elsa puzzled the prince. He recognized her fine breeding and beauty and thought it was a shame to treat even a lowly servant as she had been treated. Her father the king, when questioned, was not forthcoming and only grudgingly admitted Elsa was his daughter. No one could explain why Elsa spent all her time making shirts from nettles.
As Elsa would not or could not defend herself and nothing distracted her from her strange task, the prince offered her a place in his own castle, where she could have a room, a spinning wheel, a loom and whatever else she needed. She clasped his hand gratefully and without further ado he had taken her with him that very day.
Fed, sheltered, and no longer actively persecuted, Elsa was reaching the end of her long task. She was racing to finish the last shirt before our next spring migration.
During our last summer as swans, however, a freak storm leveled crops and severely damaged orchards just before first harvest. At the same time, some kind of disease ran through the pigs and they died by the hundreds. Fear of famine during the coming winter swept through the farms and villages. The isolated rumors about Elsa and her supposed witchcraft provided both an explanation for these calamities and a scapegoat.
One evening an army of people, each carrying a wooden faggot, went to the castle with torches, pitchforks and sickles and demanded Elsa.
The prince did his best to calm the mob, encouraging order and reason and promising to do what he could to help them through the winter, but they were beyond listening. They demanded Elsa come before them, along with her uncanny nettle shirts, and explain herself. In hopes she would find her tongue to save her own life, the prince had her brought out with an armed guard.
She was still working on the last shirt. As she stood before the people she continued sewing while scanning the angry crowd, which surged forward, shouting questions and cursing her evil eye.
She spoke no word.
The mob overcame the prince and his men, tied Elsa to a stake, and heaped wood around her feet. She didn’t struggle, but refused to give up the shirt in her hands, finished but for one sleeve.
Meanwhile, the crows had alerted my brothers and me, and we flew through the color-stained evening sky and circled above the mob, crying down to Elsa. She heard us and looked up as someone thrust a torch onto the pile of wood.
We flew down like dark thunder, beating the crowd with our strong wings and screaming with rage. The people drew back, cowering away from our flailing wings, and we grouped ourselves between Elsa and her attackers, but we were unable to put out the fire. One of my younger brothers spied the bundle of nettle shirts and pulled it out of the fire with his beak. Swiftly, he flung the shirts over his brothers. I moved behind Elsa and honked urgently, and she dropped the final unfinished shirt onto me.
The crowd moaned and the fire, gaining hold, leapt. Elsa screamed. I fumbled at the rope binding her with clumsy fingers. It had been so long since I’d used them!
By the time we’d laid Elsa on the grass and fully realized the spell was broken, the crowd was melting away into the growing darkness. The fire blazed high, nothing but a harmless bonfire now. The prince and his people stood amazed, watching our reunion. Elsa sobbed and I gathered her into my arms, realizing only then I retained a black swan’s wing on one side, because Elsa had not finished the last nettle shirt.”