The Dollmage

Chapter 6

Hard work makes you lose your beauty if you are bitter, but Annakey did not become bitter. It was tucked away too far behind her heart, and had she not promised her mother she would be happy? All of us watched as Annakey grew more fair and true, careful in her speech, and faithful in keeping the promises to which she was born. She could not play as the other village youth did, but she took satisfaction in working hard. It was not only for her living. After all, Manal brought her meats and fowls and she was not starved. No, she needed to work to assuage the need in her heart to create in miniature. This I know now. How her fingers wished to make the world she saw.This, she would say with her fingers, this is how my eyes see, this is how the world is real.

Not long after her mother died, she smiled. I began to think she had no feeling, and I treated her so. One night she drove me too far.

It was on a summer evening, when the sun had gone behind the mountain but still filled the sky with light. I see it even now by the power of the storymaker. It had been so hot that summer that the waterslicks, usually wet with glacier water, were as dry as tracks.The old people sat on their stoops for relief and even the babies stayed up late, cooling their bottoms in the clover. The older boys were playing at chance-bones, gambling away their fathers’ land by the foot for some day when it would be theirs alone. Manal sat apart, not gambling. Renoa had found it too hot to hike on the mountain so she stayed in the village with her friends. She and the girls approached the boys.

“Come play bat-the-barrel with us,” Renoa said to the boys, her friends gathered behind her.

“There! I win. The east bush of your barley field is mine,” Areth said to Dantu.

“Miller must first give me the marsh bottom at the end of his cow meadow,” Dantu said.

Miller laughed. “You will first have to play or fight my brothers for it.They are so much older than I, they will have divided the land between their own sons by the time I am grown to claim it.”

No one was looking at Renoa until she said, “By the time the land is divided between all of you, there will not be enough for you to have a wife, never mind sons of your own.”

They all laughed but Manal, and his silence sobered them quickly. “Why do you laugh?” Manal said.

“What else can be done?” Areth said.

“When it comes to pass that there is not enough food, no one will laugh. Something could be done if a new valley was found.”

“Dollmage says there are no new valleys,’ Renoa said, but Dollmage has not walked to the top of Mount Crownander and has not seen what I have seen, the world stretching away without end....”

“Mountains,” Areth said.

“But where there are mountains, there needs to be a valley,” Manal said evenly.

All the eyes gazed toward the mountaintops with longing and fear. “Someday we will have to go,” Manal said.

“That is a long time away,” Areth said lightly.

“Yes. So come play bat-the-barrel with us,” Renoa said, “and we promise we will eat very little when we are your wives.”

Areth stood chuckling, but the other boys looked at Manal and did not move, waiting to see what he would do.

“Will you play, Manal?” Areth said.

Manal looked at something through the heat haze and the smoke of the common fire. “If Annakey can play,” he said.

The smile remained on Renoa’s lips but drained out of her eyes. “She is always too busy,” she said.

“She will play,” Areth said. “I will fetch her.”

He brought her, almost dragging her by the hand to where the village youth were waiting. The boys stood when she came, and said hello and joked with her.

Renoa, in a loud voice, began outlining the farthest limits where one could hide, and how high the seeker had to count.

“Annakey, you can be the first seeker,” Renoa said.

“You go first, Renoa,” Manal said. “You are the one who wanted the game.”

“I will,” she said, with her doll’s smile, and she began counting.

They played and hid and laughed in the deepening twilight, and on beneath the blurred stars. Each of the boys took turns having Annakey hide with them in their best spots, crouching close with her until they were found and had to race for the barrel. Manal seemed always close by, wherever she was hiding. Annakey forgot to be careful of Renoa and laughed outright, and for the first time that evening Manal laughed too.

Finally, it was Areth’s turn to show Annakey his favorite hiding place, which was in the upper boughs of a tree. While they were hiding, Areth asked for a kiss.

Annakey shook her head and pointed to Tawm who was seeker, and coming close to them.

“Yes,” Areth said.

“Shh,” she said. “Here comes Tawm.”

“Yes,” Areth said again.

Annakey moved from the upper boughs to the lower boughs, her eyes on Tawm, ready to run and reach the barrel first if he spotted them.

“I will have a kiss,” Areth said, coming close to her.

Annakey drew away. “A kiss is a kind of promise,” she said, “to the one you will marry.”

Areth grabbed her arm and held it tight. “Then promise to marry me.”

Annakey laughed low, uncomfortably, thinking to make light of it. “We are not children,” she said. Areth did not smile.

Annakey stopped pretending it was nothing. “No,” she said, trying to pull her arm away.

Areth put his mouth close to her ear. “Your mother and father are dead. There is no one to protect you.”

“You speak like a robber boy,” Annakey said angrily.

“Seen! Seen!” Tawm called. Annakey was on the ground and running almost before he cried out. Areth was quick after her, but then Manal seemed to appear from nowhere. Annakey hit the barrel, gasping for air. She saw Manal exchange a word with Areth. Areth turned and went in the direction of home, and that is when he began to let winter live in his heart.

When everyone else had. gathered around the barrel, Manal said, “It is too dark to play anymore. We must be up early for the fields.”

“Once more,” Renoa said.

“Yes, once more,” the other girls said, except for Annakey, who had not learned how to follow Renoa.

The boys drifted away. “Good night, Annakey” some of them said, ignoring Renoa.

Renoa stared after them a moment. “We girls will play once more, then,” she said at last. “Annakey, now you will be seeker.”

The girls vanished into the shadows. Annakey counted and then began seeking. She was joyous. For the first time in a very long time, she had laid aside the burdens of an adult and played like a child. She looked behind the trees and in the bushes. She looked near the river, behind the boulders, among the village ovens still smelling of bread, and under the drying trays heavy with shriveled fruit. She looked in all the favorite hiding spots until the moon had ridden some of her slow arc across the stars.

She found no one.

Finally she called out: “I give up! Renoa! Hasty! Willa!”

There was no answer. Annakey waited, and then looked some more. She stood by the barrel until the common fire was no more than glowing ash. Finally, she heard a rustle in the grasses.

“Renoa?” Annakey said, smiling into the dark.

“It is me, Manal. I heard you calling.”

“Manal, I cannot find any of them. Come, help me. . . .”

“They are not hiding,” Manal said. “I saw them at Dollmage’s house. All of them.”

Manal said nothing while Annakey realized that they had played a trick on her.

In the meantime, I had been treating Renoa and her friends to a hot barley drink on my stoop. At first I thought their laughter was high spirits, until I listened to their talk. I went to fetch Annakey myself. My heart could be kind toward her when I knew she was sad and frowning, but when I opened the door, I saw her walking home with Manal. He was saying such things as to make her smile despite her hanging head and drooping shoulders.

My pity drained away. Everything that made her sad found a way to lead to smiling, smiling, smiling.

Annakey was shoveling manure in my chicken coop the next day.

“If your mother had not died,you would not have to work this way,” Renoa said to her. “But then, she brought it on herself.”

Annakey ignored Renoa and attended to her shoveling. She had learned over the years that it made her unhappier to fight back than it did to endure Renoa.

“Do you like to work for Oda the egg-woman?”

“She is very thrift,” Annakey said after a moment.

“Dollmage says she will give me a toffee doll today when I have learned a few things,” Renoa replied.

I called, “Come in, Renoa. It is time to work.”

“Now, Dollmage Hobblefoot? It is such a beautiful day.”

“Time is running short. I am old. If I died tomorrow, what would you do?”

“You won’t die tomorrow, Grandmother. You are young and strong. Please, let me be with my friends just an hour longer and then we will begin.” She was smiling at Annakey, and it made her voice sweet.

“Very well,” I said. “You may have one more hour.”

Renoa had learned already about armature, which is the frame or body core of a doll, made of metal or wire or wood. Later that day, when she had played a little, we would spend some time on pigments. I would teach her to bind it with egg white, and perhaps I would teach her how to make gall ink. Tomorrow I would teach her to make a peddler doll, with an apron full of pockets into which would go pins and buttons and small things. With a peddler doll, these important things would never get lost. Even if you mislaid them and forgot to put them back in the peddler doll’s pockets, they would reappear there. It was one of my favorite tricks of the trade.

Still later, Renoa would make a pauper doll, of rags and odds and ends, to remind her to be generous to the poor. After the pauper doll, I would teach her to make nesting dolls to give to a child who was not growing well. She could make a moss doll to give to a hunter so he would not get lost.

In my dreaming I did not hear what was going on in my own backyard until it was too late. Looking out I saw Renoa and several of her friends standing around the chicken coop, watching Annakey work. They were laughing at her.

Annakey took her shovelful of manure and dropped it on Renoa’s feet. Then the girls were laughing at Renoa instead, and her face was blank with rage. Before I could poke my head out the window again, Renoa stepped forward and pushed Annakey into the muck. She pushed her so hard her whole body was covered. Even her hair dripped with chicken manure.

Annakey was not smiling. For a moment she sat, stunned, in the manure. She moved her hand and seemed to pick something filthy out of the manure. She looked at it, brushed it off a little. The girls watching her shrieked and groaned and made make-sick sounds. Annakey stood up and walked away.

She walked to the end of the village. People laughed as she went by, thinking it had been an accident. She did not notice, for her mind was fast upon the thing she had found in the chicken offal. She walked past Oda Weedbridge’s house. She walked to the end of the valley to where the mountains begin to bunch up their toes, and into, the pathless forest. She walked until she reached the place where the river comes down from the mountain, until she came to her secret place.

When she was there she washed the thing she had found in the manure and put it into her sheep’s meadow.

It was the same little man she had swept up in my house years ago, the one I had thrown into the yard. She studied the man doll, and studied it more, until she knew.

How many times had Annakey desired to fill her meadow with sheep or cows or goats, and then remembered that she must not disobey me. Now she would not keep her promise, for she knew the man doll was her father, and she would make a valley for him and a story for herself.

Annakey bathed in the cold river until she was clean. For a long time she sat by the river in the sun, until the pain in her chest eased. She touched her promise doll on the thong around her neck and stared at the little man doll standing beside her sheep. Comparing the two, she could see that the sheep was the work of a child, accurate, but withholding something. She took more clay from the river. She made another sheep.

This time she felt different. As her hand caressed the slippery clay, she felt a wisdom in her eye, a love in her fingers, a cunning in her wrists and thumbs. This time she thought less about accurate imitation. Now she thought about a sheep, how it was to be a Sheep, to know all the little grasses blade by blade, and to be able to pick them one at a time with your teeth. She knew the smell of field and wood, earth and leaf. She was a sheep, smelling the earth, tasting it. She felt her dainty hoof treading among the gilly mushrooms, the tickle of a ladybug in her ear, and the pain of hoofrot. She knew the taste of bluebells, saw the dew that gathered in the dimples of the earth—wine, sweet wine. She felt the warm, musky comfort of her fellows all round, ever-round day and night, safe, safe.

Then she felt a desire to walk away to that dandelion, or that clover. She knew that she was fashioning Follownot, Oda’s sheep, who was fed in winter on chopped straw and dried peas, and who had such a taste for flowers she would wander away from the herd.

She did not know she was feeling power. She could only feel her joy that when she was done it was a fine thing, and that she could see into the little things eyes and know its name. “Follownot,” she said. She had begun to make a valley doll, and she knew how.

When Annakey put the man doll in the little meadow, she began to make her own story.You must understand this if you are to understand how it happened that the next day Manal and Areth brought to my house black feathers that they had found. Within hours the whole village knew that the robber people had found our valley. There was weeping and wailing while everyone searched their houses and fields to see if the robber people had stolen anything. The only thing that came up missing was Oda Weedbridge’s sheep, Follownot.