Black Pearls (17 page)

A servant lay a brocaded pillow before him, then set the hen upon it. She was now as plump and proud as any fowl I have ever seen, and when Jack shouted,"Lay!" she raised her head and chuck-led serenely before stepping away from a glistening golden egg.

As always, all the onlookers gasped and begged to touch the marvelous orb. As it was passed from hand to hand, Jack kept his eye on this latest treasure. All the while, he smiled and stroked the careless, preening hen.

Too soon, however, he tired of this familiar triumph and called out as the giant always had. "Where is my golden harp?" he thundered, though all could see the servant had fetched me and was placing me upon a tassled rug at his side. When all was still, Jack made a great show of rolling up his sleeves. He pointed a ring-bedecked finger at me and stared imperiously from under his brows. "Play!" he commanded.

You have surely guessed what happened next, for the lad still had no song for me to play, no melody I could draw from his heart. After my silence came the usual curses, and the tantrums. Jack tried and tried but could not make me sing.

Finally, just as before, I was carried to the door. In front of all his gaudy guests, my master proclaimed that a harp which didn't play was not worth keeping. The door was thrown wide and the entire company drew back from the night. It seemed to me Jack struck a pose, holding me on his shoulders, like Atlas with the world. Time seemed to stop, several ladies tittered nervously, and someone gasped. At last, though, he mustered all his strength and hurled me with such venomous fury that the strings were torn from my chest and I lay, as if dying, under the eaves of his coachman's shed.

***

Spells are supposed to be broken with good deeds. Or with the answer to a riddle. Or with true love's first kiss. But that is not the way the enchantment that bound me was at last undone. I doubt the bandylegged giant-killer who hurled me from his house cared where I landed—but had he used only a little less arm or a bit more gentleness, the magic might not have been throttled out of me. And had his good mother rushed to retrieve me instead of giggling nervously and calling for more savories, I might not have fallen into that healing sleep.

When it was over, it was as if a dream had ended or a fever broken. I woke to the whickers and warm breath of a handsome bay, leaning from his stall to nibble my hair. I felt a tingling in my arms and legs, a ringing in my ears and skull, and the heady, dimly remembered rush of blood through my veins. Without knowing what I did, I raised myself onto one elbow and opened my eyes to the sight of my own two legs, my long-lost knees and shins. There was pain, yes. But nothing I could not endure, would not have suffered doubly, for the sake of what came next. I stood, sweet heaven, I rose up and walked.

Surely nobody noticed the poor girl who struggled to her feet by the stables. Who stood for a moment, eye to eye with the bay, then turned toward the open fields behind the great house. There were no words, only a rhythm in my head that moved my feet, that called my name, that drew me to the forest where the moon was setting.

When I passed the door through which I had been tossed—was it moments or days before?—I heard no voices and all was still and dark. Yet as I left behind that sullen house, there came again the shadow song I had felt in someone's dream—was it days or years before? The two figures in the dream were clearer now, and I could hear Jack's father laughing, see him hoist his small son to his shoulders. He sang a tune to the little boy, a tune I could have played, music I might have sung. For the time it takes a candle to smoke and then go out, I lingered to listen. The pull to soothe my master, to find at last the song that would bring him rest, held me. But then I heard again the pounding in my ears, the rush of my own blood.

My song.
Though I had been so long bewitched that I barely remembered what it was to have a will of my own, I heard a new tune now. No one had pointed at me. No one had shouted, "Play!" Yet clear as a stone dropped in a still pond, loud as the call of geese across the sky, I heard the music of my own heart. It played a stream burbling in the shade of apple trees, and the warm, solid thrum of waking bees. I had no words for my song yet, but the scent of fruited boughs and the rush of wind against my chest were as real to me as my own two feet.

Those feet, no longer made of gold, climbed the pasture gate and set out for the woods beyond. I raced forward, trampling damp grass until I came to the top of a rise. I stopped for a moment to look back at the great house below. Inside its sleeping windows were old songs, music that was dead to me, other people's dreams. I tossed my head, like a mare slipping its bridle, and flew into the morning, running as if I would never stop.

When I first saw her, the name caught like a prayer bead in my throat: Diamonda. I have never called her that out loud, of course. While she was in hiding with us, she used a simple maidservant's name, and now the troubadours have christened her Snow White. But those gossips were not there when we found her, arms and wrists smeared with blood, lips the color of crushed violets. She was not white as snow then, but I have spent my whole life prying gems from a mountain's belly. I don't need to see their faces cut and polished to know how they will shine.

Her tap on our door might have been the wind, or a branch in its fall, so soft was the sound she made. When at length I opened the door that night, she fell across the threshold, one arm landing so that her fingers nearly reached the fire in the hearth. Clotted with mud and covered with blood, she might have been old or young, man or maid. But then I found a cloth, stooped to wipe the dirt from her eyes, and saw what she was.

As I freed her face from the filth that hid it, my brothers' sighs were like the moans of souls raised suddenly from damnation to paradise. For the seven of us, grown to manhood without the scent or touch of a woman, she seemed a goddess, some glory streaming sprite who'd taken a wrong turn and stumbled into the real world, where goddesses could cut themselves on thorns, wander lost for days, take sick and shake with chills. How I wanted to rush outside and tear the dead roses up by their roots. How I yearned to bathe her in the pond at Fairny, to hold her until the water caught her fever and she lay sleeping in my arms.

Instead, I made a pallet beside the hearth and we stretched her along it as best we could. She lay, her head against our bundled cloaks, and stared at the ring of twisted faces, tiny bodies above her. Sometimes I wake in the night, as if an old wound is itching, and see again the horror that widened her eyes.

It was only seconds before her breeding asserted itself and the look of revulsion faded. "I am afraid I have lost my way." She wrapped the vestige of a skirt around her poor bruised legs. "I must ask your pardon and your charity." We all drew closer, our forgiveness palpable. She glanced at Corwyn and then at me.

"I am Erin," I told her. I stood posturing grandly while Dynll, more sensible in his adoration, grabbed the cloth from me, dipping it in the bucket of water we kept by the fire. "These are my brothers, and though we have dwarf bodies, our minds are as sharp, our hearts as stout, as any man's." Dynll pressed the cloth to her head, and I added a deep flourish.

But as I bent to her, I was consumed with a sudden, shameful jealousy and wanted nothing more than to wrest the cloth back from my brother's hand. I stood there twisting my belt like a simpleton, lusting to feel her hair against my hand, to wipe sweat from the glistening hollow above her lips. "My lady," I managed at last, "we are at your service for as long as you wish."

"You are kind," she said. "And I am blessed to have found such gentle hosts in this accursed wood." Her cheeks flushed and her dark fawn's eyes rested on me. Had she known then how many years she would stay with us, how long she would shine in the midst of our deformity, she might have chosen to brave the snow and forest again, instead.

Her fever lasted three days. On the last morning, I was fixing a loose ax handle for Ferin and so let him take her the broth. (I'd risen before dawn to spend two hours nursing potatoes and a few old carrots into what I hoped would pass for soup. When Rowan had fallen ill that autumn, I could not remember where we had stored the tormentil. But now, like a falcon with God's eye, I found the last of the herb under a hearthstone and boiled it all with the stock.) So it was Ferin she thanked for the thin soup and, though he insisted he did not deserve it, I believe to this day she credits him with her recovery.

When we came back from the mine that night, Diamonda's fever had broken and she met us at the door. If she had seemed a broken flower beside our hearth, she towered above us now, no longer a touchable goddess, but bright and inaccessible as truth.

"Bless you all," she said, her hair freshly combed and braided down her back. She turned to Ferin with a smile that twisted the innards of every man in the room and struck poor Ferin dumb. As she talked, he could no longer look the sun in its face and instead stared trancelike at his boots. "The soup you brought me this morning has worked wonders, Little Physician. For, as you can see, I'm quite recovered." She lifted the hem of her skirt as if it were a ball gown and spun around the room.

Her dance and the slice of thigh it revealed left us dizzy; no one could think of a response more clever than to moan and sigh as if we ourselves had fallen sick. "I wanted to fix you a feast to repay your kindness, but I am afraid all I could find was potatoes and cornmeal."

She chattered happily as she led us to the table. She had only covered it with a cloth, but somehow it looked different—more precise, more to be reckoned with than it had ever seemed before. There were eight places set, and she escorted each of us to a seat as if we were noblemen attending a banquet. "Here's your place, Good Doctor Ferin. And this chair's for you, Rowan. Now, Sir Dynll, if you will be so kind. And Corwyn. And Gwiffert. Here, Lord Timias. And you here, Fair Erin."

Dynll was the first to come to his senses. "How," he asked, "did you remember all our names?" His forehead, broad and corded with veins, wrinkled like a beggar's belly. His eyes misted with admiration.

She laughed. "How do you think I could ever forget them? Night and day while I was sick, I said them over like a cate-chism."

I sank into the chair she had pulled back for me. "Fair Erin," she had called me. I was torn between hope and humiliation.
Was she singling me out for a joke? I looked at my brothers, their swollen heads bobbing and gleaming in the lamplight. Was I, last born of seven freaks, the most freakish? Of the distorted carnival masks turned like dark flowers toward her brightness, was mine the most hideous of all?

Warily, I studied my Diamonda as she filled each plate with the pebbly pancakes she had coaxed from our potatoes and meal. Her eyes shone with pride and good intentions; there was no hint of the disgust that had flashed across them when we met. And her lips? They were parted in a smile, full as a child's and as impossible not to return. They exonerated her completely.

She had spoken without malice. But did that mean, I wondered late into the night while the others slept, that I was actually not hard for her to look at? I had seen the children at Genfall Fair whisper and draw back, tiny rosebuds closing all along my way. I myself had stirred my reflection in a stream, frothing the water until the shards of face under my hand could have been anyone's, even a normal man's. I knew better than to hope that she found me handsome or fine-featured. But still, alone with the sort of timid dream that springs to life only near sleep, I thought perhaps Diamonda might have found me a well-turned dwarf!

It was weeks before she trusted us with her secret, weeks that seem now the gentlest of preludes, idle days free from whispers and bolted doors. It was then that I took Diamonda ice fishing in the pond that lies past Fairny Caves. While the wind of envy rattled and moaned, closing its fingers around her hiding place, the two of us spent whole mornings in the blue shadow of the mountain beyond our forest. Careening down ice-covered bluffs on a makeshift sled, we traveled toward the dearest friendship I have ever known.

I remember how she would kiss me for luck, her lips burning my cheek before our descents. How she would throw back the cape from her face and laugh when one of our croppers landed us, splay-legged rag dolls, in the snow. How afterward, she would sip my chamomile tea, weaving our damp adventures into stories for my brothers. And how she would stay up with me long into the night, talking about such foolish, inconsequential things that I will never love anyone so much.

Not that she wasn't fond of us all. Not that she didn't take pains to memorize each of our likes and dislikes, our moods, just as she had our names. But—and I know my dwarfish dreams do not deceive me here—there was a special look, a way of smiling, a tone of voice, she saved for me. The others noticed it, too. Sometimes they teased, but more often they acknowledged the distinction, the primacy that Diamonda's silent preference bestowed. "What should I shoot for dinner?" Rowan would ask me, the huge quiver slung over his shoulder. "Does she like squirrel?" Or, after we had eaten and she was turning the spindle by the fire, Corywn would steal to my side. "How can I tell her without hurting her pride?" he'd whisper, his hands hidden in the dangling, overoptimistic sleeves of a jacket she had made for him. "You know how to put things to her."

It became a nightly ritual, the others climbing to the loft for bed while Diamonda and I stayed by the hearth to talk. And so, if she had something hard to tell, it was only natural that I was the one she chose to share it with first. But I would rather any of my brothers had taken my place that night, had sat beside her sipping tea, and heard her speak of leaving.

"I didn't tell you before," she said, watching the orange village at the bottom of the fire tumble into ruin, "because I couldn't bear to worry you." The light from the fire caught a swelling, a shine at the edges of her eyes. "But surely you see now that I endanger you all by staying. We must say goodbye, dear friend."