Porcelain Princess (11 page)

Now books were
expensive, particularly the original books illustrated by the
Illuminator. Even so, Kilita’s parents loved her dearly, and wanted
the best for her that they could afford. Naturally, they couldn’t
afford a book by the Illuminator, but slightly less expensive
copies were available.

Kilita’s eyes
opened wide with wonder when her parents presented her with the
book. They widened even farther as she opened the book and took in
the beautiful illustrations.

The Princess was
far more beautiful than Kilita had ever imagined. The palace, too,
was far taller, much whiter, and sparkled with more light than she
would have guessed.

She touched one
of the pictures of the Princess, having heard in many tales that if
you touched the illustrations, the people portrayed seem to move,
even to come alive, beneath your fingers. In some rare cases you
could find yourself somehow transported to the kingdom
itself.

Nothing
happened.

She could have
been disappointed, but she wasn’t.

She realised
that the book must have cost her parents a ridiculous amount of
money.

‘
It’s
the most amazing thing I’ve ever owned,’ she said, before telling
them how much she loved them.

‘
Now
I know what it looks like, I’ve even more chance of finding her
kingdom,’ she added proudly.

‘
Finding
her kingdom?’ her mother repeated in
disbelief.

‘
Oh,
I know it won’t be easy,’ the girl replied, having misunderstood
her mother’s bewilderment. ‘I’ve been trying to work out where it
might be for so long now, but it’s difficult because there are so
many stories; and I’m not sure which are true and which have just
been made up.’

‘
Kilita,’ her father said suddenly, seeing this as an
opportunity, ‘have you ever thought that it doesn’t seem
quite
believable, does it, that a princess made of porcelain
could be alive?’

‘
But
father, I’ve often heard you saying that porcelain is the most
magical substance in the world!’

Her parents
sighed resignedly. They had indeed said this, and many many times
too.

Being potters,
they had been seeking the secret of making porcelain for years.
They experimented almost daily with exotic chemical mixtures, the
addition of strange ingredients, the changing of oven temperatures.
Yet still the secret eluded them.

‘
If
she still won’t grow out of this strange belief,’ Kilita’s mother
said to her father later, ‘then perhaps we should combine our own
obsession with hers to help take her mind of it; because by giving
her her own piece of magic, perhaps we can shake her out of this
nonsense once and for all!’

Now they
practised finding the secret of porcelain every spare moment of the
day, because their love for their daughter was now involved. At
last, they achieved their goal, their first creation from this
magical substance being a delicate face, a fine pair of hands and
arms, the lower legs of a child. The rest they created from
material stuffed with rags, hiding it all behind a dress made from
the best lace they could afford.

As soon as she
saw the porcelain doll, Kilita loved it more than anything else in
the world, apart from her parents. Straight away, she refused to be
ever parted from her doll, whom she called Tiko.

Tiko would sit
up alongside Kilita in bed as they listened to the bedtime stories,
wide eyed in amazement at what she was hearing, never daring to
interrupt. She would go to sleep as soon as Kilita fell asleep, but
would already be awake when Kilita woke up. Sitting at the table
for meals, Tiko would never eat, as she was impatient for Kilita to
finish, so they could begin playing together once more.

When they went
out together, no one thought it unusual. After all, there was
nothing strange about a girl of Kilita’s age having a doll; it was
just her belief that certain fairy tales were true that people
found odd.

For once, her
parents weren’t worried about her. For when she realises her doll
can never, ever come to life, they told themselves – despite it
being made of the magical porcelain, and despite all the love that
had being poured into it during its creation – then, finally,
Kilita would come to realise that tales of the Porcelain Princess
couldn’t possibly be true.

Now when she was
out with her friends, Kilita would tell them tales of Tiko. Of
course, such tales should have been immediately taken by her
listeners as nothing more than made up stories, yet Kilita told
them all with such incredible detail, and without changing them in
any way each and every time, that some people began to wonder if
there wasn’t
some
truth in them after all. More amazingly
still, Tiko would sit alongside with a knowing smile on her face,
as if proudly listening to the retelling of her adventures. The
younger children especially would giggle and chuckle, and gawp in
wonder or horror depending on which point the stories had
reached.

Every child had
already decided on which was his or her favourite story.

Many preferred
the stories where Tiko was a little mischievous, a little
uncontrollable, such as the time she accidently let a nearby
farmer’s pig loose from their sty (an event that everyone knew had
actually happened). She tried to round them up, running after them
across the fields, only to finish up in such a filthy state that
she had to have three very hot baths before she gleamed like a
princess once more.

Others always
wanted to hear how both Kilita and Tiko had once fallen asleep by a
small pool, not realising that it was inhabited by water sprites.
Those who knew of the water sprites quite rightly feared them, for
they would kidnap unwary children and make them forget all about
their parents and friends, their past lives, by taking them down
into the watery depths, where they would eventually become water
sprites themselves.

And so, as if
sleep walking in a powerful dream, Kilita rose to her feet and
started walking towards the pool, unknowingly entranced by the
evilly giggling water sprites. But, of course, the water sprites
weren’t to know that Tiko was also alive, thinking she was nothing
more than a rather pretty but useless doll. Realising the danger
Kilita was in, Tiko chased after her, tugging hard on her dress to
pull her back from the water’s edge.

But Kilita kept
on walking, firmly under the control of the water sprites, and
stepped into the pool. Tiko next tried climbing up Kilita’s dress,
sitting on her shoulders and shouting as loudly as she could in her
ears to try and wake her; but it was all no use. Kilita was now up
to her knees in the water. At last, the triumphant water sprites
rose up from the waters, surrounding poor Kilita as they prepared
to drag her down with them back towards the very bottom of the
pool.

‘
Stop, you can’t take her,’ Tiko cried. ‘I feel it’s only
right that I should warn you that she will be of no use to you, and
will bring you only bad luck!’

‘
No
use to us?’ The water sprites stopped what they were doing, looking
up at Tiko in surprise, for they had never seen anything like her
before. ‘Bring us only bad luck? How do you know this? Who or what
are you?’

‘
Don’t you really know?’ replied Tiko, sounding as amazed as
she could possibly manage. ‘Why, look at me; can’t you tell that I
am really this poor girl’s soul, preparing to depart her? Do you
think any girl would be foolish enough to just simply fall
asleep
by your pool? No, I’m warning you, it brings only bad
luck to take the soulless into your home. So I think you would be
best returning her to land.’

The water
sprites looked at each other as they considered this. Then they
looked up at Tiko once more.

‘
We
thank you for your warning,’ they said. ‘But please, can you stay
with her a moment longer to ensure she doesn’t fall into our pool
by accident? A soulless child can never become one of
us!’

‘
Of
course,’ Tiko said graciously, glad to see that Kilita had already
been released from her charm and was waking up. ‘See,’ she added,
‘I’m taking control of her once more, so that I can lead her back
to where she had lain down for her perpetual rest.’

Kilita was still
a little dazed, but she could now hear what Tiko was saying. She
could also feel the cold of the water she was standing in, and she
could see the sprites gathered around her. She slowly turned around
in the water, unhurriedly heading back to the land as if still
under a spell.

With a series of
plops and gurgles, the sprites vanished into the water. And Kilita
made her way home, thankful that Tiko her guardian angel had saved
her from becoming just one more mischievous water
sprite.

‘
And
many of us know that there really is such a pool,’ Kilita would
warn at the end of her story, ‘the deep and dark pool past the
windmill that no child must go near.’

Even those who
didn’t believe the story – and, of course, only the very youngest
did – accepted that it made children stay away from what could be a
dangerous pool. Another popular story similarly told them that they
should be kind to smaller creatures.

A boy from
another village took a strange delight in capturing butterflies,
pinning them to a board so that he could admire them at his
leisure. He thought they looked far more beautiful mounted on his
walls than flying around wherever they pleased, sharing their
beauty with everyone lucky enough to see them.

When Kilita and
Tiko had come across him adding to his collection in the corn
fields, Tiko had been briefly left speechless by his
cruelty.

‘
Stop
that!’ she managed to shout at last.

‘
Oh,
and how are
you
going to stop me?’ the boy sneered at
Kilita, thinking she had been the one who had shouted at
him.

‘
We’ll pin
you
to a board if we have to!’

The boy gawped
in surprise and horror when he realised that it was the doll who
was angrily yelling at him. Dropping everything, he ran back across
the fields, heading back to his own village as quickly as he
could.

Quickly, Kilita
and Tiko released the butterflies he had been collecting in a
stoppered pot, watching entranced as the gloriously coloured
creatures gratefully fluttered around the girls before flying off.
But the boy had also left behind a large bag, and in this bag they
found a number of butterflies that the boy had already pinned to a
wooden board.

Kilita looked at
the butterflies fixed to the board, wishing there was something
they could do for them. Tiko began to slowly blow on the wings of
the butterflies, making them flutter as if they were all preparing
to take off. As she blew a little harder, the wings fluttered
harder too, as if the butterflies were now eager to fly
away.

Tiko began to
carefully remove each pin, pulling it free of the board, then even
more carefully withdrawing it completely from the body of the
butterfly. The butterfly wings continued to flutter and beat
silently at the air; and as Tiko removed each pin, the butterfly
would gratefully soar into the air.

Each and every
butterfly released by Tiko that day wanted the world to know what
she had done for them.

So some changed
their patterns to feature Tiko’s eyes. Of course, not every
butterfly agreed on the shape or colour of Tiko’s eyes. But this is
only natural, because each one saw her from a different angle, or
in a slightly different light, or when she was staring at them in
wonderment, or happiness, or when she was full of pity for how they
had been so cruelly treated.

Other
butterflies included the curls of her hair in their patterns, or
the curves of her mouth, even the upturn of her pretty little nose.
Still others took on the redness of her lips, the greens and blues
of her eyes, the gold of her hair.

And so even
today, you can look at a butterfly and see something in its pattern
that recalls the time Tiko had rescued them.

As Kilita said
the final lines of one of her tales, the listening children would
look towards each other, trying to gauge from the expressions of
their friends just how much of the story they had believed. They
wanted
to believe in the magic of the tales, of course, but
they didn’t want to look too silly either by believing
everything
they had just heard.

No matter how
much of the stories the children took to be true, they would still
gather around Kilita to hear other tales, or to hear their
favourites told once more. It allowed their parents time to get on
with their work around the village, and they showed their
appreciation by slipping a coin into Kilita’s hand every now and
again, or offering her some of their wares or produce.

Kilita’s own
parents, however, were not at all happy with her storytelling. She
was gradually coming to an age where they would have to start
looking for a suitable husband for her. But who would accept a girl
who seemed to forever have her head in the clouds? Who would marry
a girl so obviously unprepared for the arduous life that anyone
born into the village had to eventually accept as their
lot?