Nora of the Mountain
I
The day was dark; the sun an hour or so behind Nora’s rising.
Crumbs of fire nestling among the cinders burst into life as she threw a handful of kindling on them. A log or two of seasoned hickory wood followed. She slipped the kettle onto its hook with practiced ease. Tucking her skirts into her belt, and throwing a fleece about her shoulders, she thrust her feet into her boots, and taking the pail from the nail by the door lifted the latch to winter.
Stillness and then a crunching step, she let the latch click back into place. Little clouds of her breath hung in the air, baby brothers to the setting moon’s entourage. They crystallized and fell, tiny snowstorms at her feet. Crunch, puff, crunch, tinkle, crunch, puff, crunch, tinkle, she made her way to the goat shed.
They heard her coming, bleating softly to one another in anticipation. Another latch lifted let her back into the musty autumn of sheep and goat and hay and nut brown horns and leaf brown fleece. She pushed against their warm bodies, petted their black up-turned faces, and threw down some hay, making her way to the back of the shed where Berli would have bedded down with her kid.
Berli rose in greeting still chewing her cud, her kid drowsing at her feet. Nora offered her a dried apple from her pocket which was politely mouthed and then gleefully crunched and swallowed. Positioning the pail and resting her head against Berli’s flank, Nora patted Berli in thanks as the first streams of milk tinged against the bottom of the pail.
Berli drowsed, her kid drowsed, and Nora drowsed to the ting and bleat and munch of morning milking in the goatshed, while there in the straw, a winking eye peeped shyly up at her, first one, then two, and then a third. Nora blinked herself, stopped her milking, and rubbed her eyes in disbelief. “Oh, my!” she whispered and reached out her hand.
II
They lay in her hand, the three sleeping forms, roan red, leaf green, moon white. Weighty stone, warm as embers, they nestled in her hand and seemed to breath a sigh of relief.
She would set them beside her mug and, much as when she was a child on her mother’s knee, tell tales with them. Snug in her deep pocket, they accompanied her to the spring for water, to the shed for milking and shearing, to the woods in search of chestnuts and tea bark and the abandoned honeycombs of last summer’s bees. They vied for her attention, slipping neatly into her palm, first one then another and she sang them the old rhymes to pass the time. Nora sang to the goats, to herself, and to the stones as the long winter passed, drifting down the mountain to the valley below.
III
Spring rushed warmly up the mountain. The stream below her hut, tired of its headlong rush and tumult down the mountainside had settled in its bed and let the goats climb up and Nora climb down to the village in the valley below. She thrust her knife in her belt – the smithy could give it a new edge – and tied a gaily patterned kerchief around her neck. In one pocket she placed three coins knotted tightly in a square of wooly worsted, in the other, the three breathing stones. She took with her Berli’s kid. Old enough now to leave her mother, Nora would sell her at market, a promising milchgoat worth her weight in spices and ironwork.
The path was carved anew each spring by the melting snow, twisting unexpectedly aside from last year’s well-known way. Now the path swept closer to a thicket Nora knew had once concealed a she-wolf’s den, and not wishing to lose Berli’s kid to her, Nora held her hand ready on the hilt of her knife.
The path slid down an embankment, crossed a snow swollen rivulet and rounded a clump of birch. There Nora found a tiny shepherd boy crying quietly over a wolf slain kid. Beside him knelt his mother, consoling him with tiny pats and wordless croonings. Nora paused, cocked her head, and hummed along, a tiny husky buzzing that startled the woman upright and made her reach for the shepherd’s cudgel that had saved them, but failed the kid.
The mother rose tiredly. “He so wanted a kid of his own. A goat to raise and milk. A goat to start a herd, a tiny herd of his own. She is dead, and I cannot afford another.” The mother looked pityingly at the tiny lad as he patted the dead kid over and over again, calling its name softly under his breath punctuated by hiccupped sighs.
Nora nodded, remembering other kids, other wolves. Lost in thought, Nora hardly noticed Berli’s rambling kid until she butted against Nora’s skirt and nearly toppled her into the woman’s arms. Whirling about, Nora laughed, a loud and rosy sound, and gathering Berli’s kid into her arms before she could skip away, tucked her under one arm, and knelt beside the boy.
Nora gently cupped the little boy’s chin in a calloused hand, lifted his face to hers, and winking brightly at him, wiped his bloodied hands on her kerchief and placed them round the neck of Berli’s kid. The lad stared at Nora in wonder and then buried his face in the kid’s bristly coat while the kid wriggled and bleated and licked his hair into furious swirls that matched its own. Nora settled the two younglings on a bit of moss, and turning back to the woman, shooed her over to them, two of a kind, already deeply attached to one another.
Nora knelt beside the dead kid and admired it’s brindle coat, and after gutting it, deftly tied it by it’s heels in a small sapling, out of reach of marauders and out of sight of the boy, until the mother could return that evening to claim it. She washed her kerchief in the stream, hung it on a branch to dry, and with a nod to the woman, she went her way. Behind her rose the woman’s shining thanks and the child’s delighted exclamations, like birdsong on the morning air.
IV
The walk to the village was long, lined with and occasionally barred by tangles of newly exposed roots and hoary boulders shouldering aside mantles of moss and lichen. Nora named them for the gnomes that were fabled to live just below the summit of the mountain – Nipingr, Hornbori, Finnr, Eitri, Brökk – and began to form the rudiments of a song, a walking tune, a roundelay of the gnomes, to pass the time. So engrossed was she in trying to find a way to rhyme the names of a one eyed thane and his fearsome son, that Nora nearly collided with a mournful roan cow whose near hind foot was caught between a knobby beech root and a burly warrior of stone. The cow lowed piteously, fixed a liquid eye on Nora, and struggled vainly against her captors.
“Hi! Hi! cow. Quit now!” chided Nora, and started in with the buzzing hum she used when she wanted to get her feisty but woolly-brained charges to attend to her. Once the cow had calmed a bit, Nora gave her an absent-minded pat and resting her head on the cow’s flank examined the trapped hoof. Cradling the hoof with both hands, Nora shoved against the cow’s flank with her head, and levered the hoof gingerly out from among the roots. In an explosion of flailing limbs, tossing horns, and swaying udder, the cow knocked Nora flat and floundered through the tangles until she had regained the path. Tossing her head and twisting her tail like a frolicsome calf, she bolted.
Nora sat a moment catching her breath and wondering how a roan cow should come to be wearing her kerchief tied about one horn, the kerchief she’d left to dry on a bush a twisty half mile up the path.
V
Halfway down the mountain, the path entered a woodland meadow, nodding with buttercups, which the cows won’t eat, and bluebells, which they will. There was the roan cow, quite contentedly and daintily plucking and chewing her way through them, one by one. Nora placed her hands on her hips and with a quick exhalation,”Ha!”, caught the attention of the capricious cow. Nora bemusedly shook her head as the cow obediently came to her and rubbed her poll against Nora’s outstretched hand. There was the kerchief, neatly tied about her horn, and there was no mistake, it most certainly was Nora’s.
Nora untied the kerchief, folded it neatly, and placed it in her pocket where her hand encountered the breathing stones. But what was this! Two, not three! Falling to her knees, she hurriedly emptied her pocket onto the meadow grass and found leaf green and moon white, but no roan red. She rested back upon her heels and closed her eyes, retracing her steps down the mountainside – the boy and the wolf-slain kid, the cow, the mossy gnomes and tangled roots – but nowhere with her mind’s eye could she find the missing stone. The roan cow’s sweet breath played with the wisps of hair beside her ear, and Nora absent-mindedly brushed her away. With a jolt, her eyes flew open. Turning on her heels, Nora looked up into the liquid eyes of the breathing roan red stone.
VI
The path below the meadow is less steep, the brook less leap and tumult, more eddy and swirl. Here Nora and the cow could walk companionably side by side, Nora’s quick hands braiding a buttercup wreath for the cow to match her own. They had nearly reached the place where the path divides, one branch continuing along the stream bank to the farmsteads surrounding the village, the other over a clattering wooden bridge leading to the village gate, when Nora heard voices whispering earnestly to one another. There at the fork stood a young man and a milkmaid, her hands clasped fervently in his, her pail resting precariously at their feet.
“Your father must listen! You don’t need a dowry. What a silly, pointless tradition! I don’t care about a dowry.”
“But your father does. Yes, he’s fond of me, but with no dowry … well. And besides, my father has some little pride. I’m no charity case that he needs to beg someone to take me. Perhaps when this year’s calves are grown -”
“Bah! Every year it’s the same, ‘When this year’s calves are grown.’ But there’s never a calf to spare! Let’s leave together, tonight. We can travel, find a place of our own -”
The milkmaid laughed sadly and bent to retrieve her pail, “We’ve not been raised to the gypsy life. In a month’s time – no, less – we’d be home, hungry and a laughingstock. Or worse, disowned. No, we must find another way.”
Nora cleared her throat. “I have a cow.”
The lad and lass whirled about and blinked at her.
Nora took a step forward. “I have a cow.”
The lad and lass stood rooted to the spot, mouths agape, milk sloshing onto the ground.
Perplexed by the Medusa-like effect of her appearance, Nora turned back to the cow, and clasping her arms around its neck spoke softly into its ear. “Though I was of a mind to sell you in the village, you were really never mine to keep. So if you will, those two would be better for your company.” She nodded her head towards the silently staring pair and delicately rearranged the cow’s buttercup wreath while she waited for the roan cow’s reply. After a moment’s rumination, the cow rubbed her head against Nora’s skirt in farewell, tickled the milkmaid’s ear with her nose in greeting, and gave the young man a determined shove with her head to start him down the path towards home.
Nora laughed at the roan cow’s insistence, disentangled her buttercup wreath from her hair, and gingerly held it out to the milkmaid who beamed at her. Taking the wreath, she dropped Nora a dainty, self-conscious curtsey, and placed it on her own head. With another smile, the milkmaid kissed Nora lightly on the cheek in thanks, and skipped and danced down the path after her husband-to-be and the cow.
“Thank you, thank you!” called the young man as he turned and waved heartily to Nora. The roan cow gave him another gentle shove, and they passed from sight around a bend.
Nora touched her cheek in surprise, still feeling the milkmaid’s gentle lips, and coming to her senses, noticed the pail of milk standing abandoned in the middle of the path.
“Oh! You’ve forgotten the milk.” As she bent to catch up the pail’s handle, something slipped from her pocket and landed with a plop into the froth below. In an instant, her hand flew to her pocket and encountered a single stone; in another, it plunged into the pail to retrieve the other. But there was no stone.
Instead, she withdrew a frog, green as moss after spring rains, golden eyed, a tiny frog no bigger than her thumb, and dripping with milk.
“What a fine frog you are! A noble frog. I’ve never seen one of finer color or brighter eyes.”
She deftly wiped the milk from his eyes with her kerchief, and he settled comfortably in the palm of her hand under her gentle ministrations and the soothing croon of her voice. Thinking that while a milkbath might be fine for a noblewoman’s complexion, it might be somewhat less healthful for a frog’s, and with apologies to him for the ensuing indignity, she tied him gently in her kerchief and headed for the brook.
VII
The deeper pools, in which a frog might find refuge from the herons and kingfishers that ruled these watery reaches, lie under the bridge, shadowed by willows. The bank is steepest here. Nora tied up her skirts with her belt and began to make her way down the bank’s makeshift steps of roots and stones, steadying herself against the trunks of saplings, and holding her kerchief in her teeth by the knot that secured the frog.
At the bottom, Nora found herself on a wide ledge of rock anchored on one side by the stone embankment of the bridge arching overhead and on the other by the gnarled roots of a willow of prodigious age and size. Weeping beside the willow was a maiden. Her hair was tangled about her, her dress was a faded glory, and what would have been a surpassingly lovely face was marred by boo-hooing and the tracks of tears. Nora took her kerchief from her mouth and was about to offer it to the maiden to dry her eyes when she thought better of it, and instead stood silently on the bank and chewed her lip. A creature of this sort was seldom seen on this path. Nora waited until the weeping subsided and the maid glanced up, startled to see a goat girl with apple cheeks gazing patiently at her.
“Are you lost?”
“No, I am … alone.” The maiden looked away and stifled a fresh bout of weeping.
“Why are you alone?”
The maiden sighed and gazed fixedly at her hands in her lap. “My father is a nobleman, horse master to the king. For his valiant service both on the battlefield and off, the prince and I were betrothed when we were mere infants. But the fortunes of kings are fickle, and he determined that the prince should marry another in order to affirm an alliance with a neighboring kingdom. I do not begrudge the new princess her spouse; the prince and I have grown up together and have always felt more brother and sister to one another than betrothed. But she is jealous and willful and thought me a rival for her husband’s affections, and so had me banished. And now I have neither husband, nor friend, nor home.” She sighed again, distractedly plucking at a loose bit of brocade, as tear after silent tear coursed down her cheek and joined their brothers on the water-marred silk of the skirt below.
Nora knelt down beside her and patted the maiden’s hand. “Well, I am here, and we are not alone. Look!”
Nora gently untied the knot as the frog struggled inside his kerchief prison. Remembering a certain cow’s rash response to unexpected freedom, Nora cupped her hands about the frog lest he leap away, and shyly offered the maiden a look at her latest companion. She peeped into the tiny cave of Nora’s hands, and two golden eyes peeped back.
As the maiden showed no fear or distress, but rather a mild curiosity at Nora’s jewel bright charge, Nora gently placed the tiny frog in the upturned palm of the delicate hand that lay in the maiden’s lap saying,
“There are tales … of princes …”.
The maiden’s eyes grew wide in wonder.
Rising quickly, Nora bobbed her head to the maiden and scrambled back up the bank as the maiden raised the frog to her lips.
At the top of the bank, Nora checked her pocket – no moon white stone. She looked about her feet for the missing stone and found nothing but weathered granite and black river rock as far as she could see. She checked for swans in the willow-shrouded pool, for if roan cows came from red stones and frogs from green, then swans might spring up from white. But no swan, no winterwolf, no snowy owl from the North, and Nora laughed aloud at herself, for thinking that some shining white creature should have found its way to her. She crossed the clattering bridge, hearing silver laughter from the rock ledge below, and made her way toward the village gate.
VIII
Spring’s first market day is given over to all things young and new. Tender greens, their leaves tightly whorled, tiny berries, spring peas, and fresh herbs crowded together with newly turned birchwood spoons and burlwood bowls and woolens and willow baskets woven in the slumbering months of snow. Lambs and calves and colts, trailing their shepherd lads and lasses behind them, bleated and bolted and frisked their way to market. Winter’s gossip fresh sprung from hidden depths, drunk in by the women, flowed like the ale drunk in by the men, and the news and the fragrance of spices from the wider world swirled through the air.
Clang-iron-to-anvil, clang-iron-to-anvil, Nora made her way to the smithy where clouds of steam and embers like flights of swallows rose into the air and wreathed the shiny summit of the man mountain’s head. Returning Nora’s nod with a smile, he motioned to his apprentice, a lad hanging all his slender weight against the bellows, to see to Nora.
Nora left her knife and one coin with the blacksmith, and, returning to the market square, bought fewer spices than she might have, had Berli’s kid or the roan cow been there. She smiled to think of the tiny goatherd and cowherd couple and was contented. She watched a puppet play, bought an orange from distant lands and a handful of figs which she shared with the village children, and satisfied with the new edge on her knife, made her way home.
Homeward journeys seem shorter but take longer, especially on the mountain, where down is swifter than up. Morning blue had given way to dusky gold, larksong had given way to the doves’ evening lament as Nora entered the deeper piney wood that sheltered the path below her home. Ferns and the pine needles of countless years blanketed the forest floor between the ancient, lichen covered trunks. The hushed swish of her skirt and her muffled steps startled none of her fellow mountain dwellers who merely glanced up at her passing and went their way. That is, all except one. There in the shadow of the wood beside her, paralleling her course, were whispering steps and a flash of white like moonlight on snow.
IX
Their paths converged at the place where the stream leapt into the light through a fern shrouded cleft in the rock. A lad of six dressed in whitest wool, his boots embroidered with dancing hare and reindeer, stood gently stroking the tightly furled fiddlenecks.
“Are you the whortleberry child? Have you a home?”
He gave her no answer but a wide smile and took her hand and led her up the mountain. She hummed the ancient lays and he sighed the words with her under their breath, until they stood before her door and she led him inside.
He walked about the room, trailing his small hand along each surface, his finger running around the rim of each mug, chuckling to himself as he traced the carving on the mantel, reindeer bulls in mid battle, while Nora coaxed the fire to life and kneaded together flour and butter and caraway in the white bowl painted with blue cows that her father had given her mother on their wedding day. He accompanied her to milking without a word, lifting the latch for her, carrying the pail. He accepted the affection of the crowding goats and hugged and spoke quite seriously to each one in a small singsong voice too low for Nora to hear clearly over the milk tinging in the pail.
He drank a cup of milk and ate a seed cake warm from the hearth, kicking his heels under his chair and picking up crumbs and caraway seeds from the table with a finger dampened with his tongue. Wordlessly, he rinsed his mug and gently returned it to its place, and, settling by the hearth at Nora’s feet. He stared into the flames and drew in the ash with the glowing embered end of a twig while she wound a ball of yarn and sang the gnome song she had made. He fell asleep with his head resting against her knee, the now cold twig slipping lightly from his fingers as Nora lifted him gently in her arms. His drawings danced in the flickering flame, telling the story of Nora down the mountain: the goat, the cow, the frog, and the lad. They bowed and curtsied and cavorted with one another and a troop of fine hare sprung up from the ash. They wove their way through an embered ring of reindeer, who with their antlers snared the falling ember stars and crowned them all, as they danced together under the golden moon of the kindly firelight.
That evening, moonlight streaming, the lad gently breathing beneath a fleece on her bed, Nora drowsed by the dying fire. The mountain spoke. Or some venerable bell had spoken in the mountain’s stead. Rippling voices in an airy tongue, the breath of gentian and corydalis and glacial ice, were followed by a gentle knock, twice repeated. Nora stirred and then paused a moment, savoring the scent of some unknown, cherished, alpine meadow that had filled her lungs. She gently rose and let her hand rest lightly on the latch as her senses returned to the mountain’s familiar night.
Opening the door, Nora bumped noses with a white reindeer, who waggled his antlers at her and chuffed with reindeer mirth. His harness of currant red and the night’s cobalt sky, was chased in gold. About his neck hung a bell, it’s voice both mountain root deep and star light, tolling more clearly than the ether sky, and on his back a white lady, crowned with moonlight, her grey eyes, the boy’s eyes, her brow, his brow. Nora felt the lad behind her skirts brush past her and reach up his arms to the lady who gathered him up and folded him into her cloak. The lad leaned down and brushed his lips against Nora’s cheek; cool as moonlight was his kiss, a burning brand against her heart.
And in the next heartbeat, Nora stood alone in the darkling air.
X
Nora was old. Berli was gone, replaced by Berli’s daughters and her daughters’ daughters. The brief, shimmering summer had fled and the still briefer autumn was fleeting, its glinting hoarfrost a sibyl to winter’s snow.
With the evening’s milking done and a seed cake warming on the hearth, Nora sat by the fire, her thoughts like tiny bright fishes flashing through the sunlit currents of wakefulness and the deep pools of dreams. She first heard them in the inbetween of sleep and waking, soft voices and reindeer bells, deep, high, and clear. The scent of that far away meadow filled her lungs and drew her from her chair, and before the knock had come, she had lifted the latch and thrown open the door.
The singing stars whirled above, the full moon rode low upon the mountain crest, and before her stood the lad now grown, wearing boots with dancing hare and reindeer, and a silver filet on his brow. She smiled at him and he at her, old friends who had met but once. Bowing lightly, he took her hand, kissed it gently, and she was gone. There within his palm lay a stone, warm as ember, white as snow.
End
© Magdalen Jago 2008, All rights reserved.
© Magdalen Jago 2008 All rights reserved.
