Ursula Pflug - Seeds and Other Stories

“Animals aren’t slaves,” Sonia said. “They’re working for us for a while. They can quit anytime they want. We have to pay them for their work, like we pay anyone.”

“You don’t seem to have the same respect for people,” I grumbled, but Sonia rolled her black eyes at me, said, “You pay animals by listening. Pay attention to what they say.”

“I wanted it over, all this listening. I’m frightened of madness.”

“You’ll hear the voices all your life; they’ll never be gone. Don’t throw away gifts; very few can hear animals, plants, stones.”

“It’s not insanity?”

“Can be,” she said, weighing me with her eyes. “Doesn’t have to be. A choice.” Her eyes weighed and weighed. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to show you.” She gave me a hand mirror she’d made herself, framed in silver. “Look at your eyes, and tell me if you still fear me, your horse.”

I took the mirror and looked, already knowing what I would see. Black. Shiny. Irisless. That was the moment I knew I’d forever be among those who know too much.

I took the horse and bags full of goods for trading. For my two years of indentured semi-slavery Sonia gave me a present she’d made in secret: a set of silver cutlery with stars on the handles for my house in town. She was as good a silversmith as a fisher woman. Stars, in memory of Polaris.

Sonia told me my horse was called Slipstream. “What’s it mean?” I asked.

“A little joke about time. Remember what happened to your grandfather? Be nice to Slipstream or he will, and then where will you be?”

“Rather, when?”

“Good question. Be nice to him if you want your friends still alive when you get home,” she laughed. “It’s not only your grandfather’s stone who knows how to play cat’s cradle with time.”

With this warning, bursting saddlebags, and food for the trip I was ready. Sonia said she’d take me part way down the valley and as we passed through the village proper people came out to watch us. They bowed and called me Mr. Salmon Woman, but I saw them snicker behind their cloaks. I’d earned a new name for my stay but not much more in the way of their respect. At least they didn’t drool at me, their eyes brimming with violence any more, wanting to take me home and beat the magic out of me. Perhaps they thought they’d made a mistake about me. I’d never spoken to one of them.

Strange how the leaves fell in that village, red and yellow, piles of them. It was nearing the end of the dry season; we’d planned our trip to avoid the coming rains. The old men came out, wearing hoods against the damp, to rake the leaves into piles where they were burned. In the market we bought a donkey to carry some of Slipstream’s load. Sonia had asked me to return, after the rains were over, with goods from my seaside village, said she’d pay me in silver, in secrets. The coastal villages had never traded with the mountain people before. Sonia said it was time to begin, and I thought perhaps she’d learned something from me after all.

Children ran under our feet, through the little yards that faced the square. Under those red trees Sonia and I were married. I have never felt sadder than at that moment. “Alia was your heart,” Sonia said by way of marriage vows, “but I am your mind.”

Before we left the village we saw a little girl, drawing designs with chalk in the cracking pavement near the bonfire. She seemed different than all the others, playing with an ardent freedom I’d sensed in no one else. She didn’t seem tight and narrow, closed against strangeness, against hope. Like Sonia, she too brimmed with secret knowledge but it was innocent; she hadn’t been hurt by it and their was no concomitant cruelty in it yet. I left Sonia’s side to go and speak with her, but without warning, one of the hooded old men seized her and threw her into the bonfire. I ran forward to pull the child from the flames but it was already too late. She’d burnt quickly, and silently, making no cries, not struggling, and not smelling of burnt flesh either. I cried but hid my tears in the hood that I too now wore. The men stared, and began to encircle us, their brooms and rakes, cluttered with red and yellow leaves, raised menacingly. Sonia drew me towards her, throwing half her cloak around my shoulders to show I had her protection. It wasn’t enough, however, and it was only when my wife made that trick with her eyes and threatened to breathe them all in, only to exhale them forever changed, that they let us pass, whispering and rustling like leaves as we left them behind. I half imagined they said they wanted to come with us after all, see the outside. We walked very slowly out of the square, and onto the one road that led out, to safety. Bears, wild pigs, what could frighten me now?

We began the slow trek down the mountain to a town I no longer believed existed. The pig pens had burned away the memory of my white house, of that sea wind blowing through. So much for my wife being the restorer of memory, but perhaps it was only certain forgotten moments she could bring back, and not the forgettings she’d occasioned herself. We are all fallible.

We camped together above a waterfall that night, just as you and I had, listening while Slipstream and the donkey ate. Sonia had brought along the remaining bottle of last year’s fruit wine, a sweet mango. We finished it after our fish, as our little fire burned down.

“We have to make sure it’s out before we sleep,” she said. “Too dry this time of year, before the rains come.”

“Sonia, who was the child?”

“Spirit child, witch child. They hate them almost as much as they hate outsiders.”

“But she was so good. I could feel it in her, good in a way they know nothing about.”

“Good in a way they’re afraid of, because it threatens everything they believe in, their whole way of life.”

“She was like you, a bit. Only not so hard.”

“Hard is what life among them has done to me. I never wanted to be this way.” Sonia reached out and laid her hand on my knee, and as always, I didn’t know whether to recoil or embrace her. She had that effect on me. “I’m the only witch they’ve ever allowed to grow to adulthood.”

“Why?”

“They thought they needed one witch to protect them from the eyes of outsiders.”

“You were a spirit child then too, like that one? What are they, spirit children? She didn’t smell like burning flesh.”

“We only harden as we age. If I was to burn now I’m afraid I’d smell just like bacon,” she said ironically. Then added,“If I answer all your questions now you’ll never come back next year, and I need you to. It’s the only way to stop the burnings.”

“We don’t have witches,” I said.

“I know, but you are one now, and you’re returning. I’m sorry, husband. I hadn’t intended for you to see a thing like that; it’s why I kept you hidden.”

When I woke in the morning Sonia was gone, as she’d said she’d go. I went home down the hills without my wife, wondering what lay ahead of me, and whether, by having married her, I’d given up my right to you forever. But my night’s dream came to me as I walked the leafy trail, saw at last the sea, the town. A seemingly prophetic dream that filled me with exhilaration and dread. You’d be back, Alia, and I’d marry you as I’d hoped, keeping my other marriage secret. I’d never go back to the mountains to my first bride, never begin the trading that she and I had hoped for so fervently. But you and I would have a child, and it would be a spirit child, the first one ever born by the sea. Sonia’s legacy after all, having changed me so irrevocably. Which would be better? To give you up, Alia, my one true love, or to father a child that might be destroyed by a fear, by a hate that had never existed in our town before, that its birth might elicit? Sonia had awakened me to my own witchery, both terrifying and promising. The full saddlebags had been a cover. It was my new fearsome eyes, the child I’d father, that were my real trading goods. But what would I have to bring back to her mountain village to end the cycle, allow people to see the gift and not just the difference, the gentleness as well as the fearsome power?