1. 

When the messenger returned to the village late that evening, sleep, it seemed, had overtaken the people. The last candlelights in the windows and along the narrow  stone streets had just flickered out, their smoke rising from the wicks in long, winding threads. The slow clop of his horse echoed off the stone house-fronts; though, if anyone heard him pass, no one came to the windows – and he saw no one, not one person, until he arrived at the meetinghouse.

Hitching his horse to a wooden support beam, he took up a feebly burning torch, hanging from a column on the inside wall of the building, and stepped down the damp stairs to the lower level, where Anna was being held, somewhere.

The place was deserted. Ominously deserted. Not even a guard was around, awake or asleep.

“Psst!” he whistled, softly. “Anna, where are you?”

A few feet away, he heard a dull groan. Turning, and shining the torchlight into the cell behind him, he saw Anna, just raising her head, and blinking her eyes like a mole against the light. Looking around the dripping passageway, spattered here and there with tiny piles of rat droppings, he found a keychain, dropped or abandoned, not ten feet from the cell. He opened the door with a creak, took Anna out, and led her up to the entrance where, in the moonshine and starlight, he put away his torch.

Because Anna’s two children were staying with their grandmother, the man decided to bring her to his own house that night. As for himself, after all that he’d seen up at the castle that afternoon, he intended to leave the village just before first light – forever.

But, for one very simple reason, this would not happen. He would spend the rest of his life within that very valley, as his children would, and their children. For, until he had come up out of the meetinghouse toward his horse, he’d failed to notice that Anna was taller than he was. It might have been a trick of the light, he thought, or the elevation of the street, which varied at certain points – there were long ditches in the road, where centuries of pedestrians had trodden the stone down – but then he saw, as he guided her steps, arm-in-arm, that he was walking on a higher level than she was. She stepped into his hands, and he gave her a quick boost onto his horse.

Still, just before he gave her the boost, and she was very close to him, he had to look up into her face. No, it was undeniable: she was considerably taller than he was. Why had he not noticed this before? But, he reassured himself, he had never known her husband well, and had seen her only on market days, and then very briefly. As he led her on horseback, down the main street and through some of the narrow side-lanes to his own dwelling, he tightened and re-tightened his trouser-belt several times.  

But the reality of the situation didn’t strike him until he had come to the door of his own house.  The door-handle was almost level with his eyes – but then he looked back at Anna, dressed in her filthy clothes, half-asleep. He looked back, and up, at Anna’s chin, which was now a few inches higher than his own two eyes. Suddenly the door opened, and there was his own dear wife, rubbing her eyes and peering sleepily out into the night.

“Who is it?” she called, half fearfully.

“I’m here,” her husband answered. She looked down, and then across, at Anna, and staggered back a few steps.

“The woman,” she cried, as though woken from a nightmare. “Why is she here?”

“No questions,” he told her, wearily. “Let me in – and her also. Why is no one in the streets?”

His wife dazedly unbarred the door, and the man – who, they say, was a master goldsmith – brought Anna inside, and set her at the table. She fell asleep immediately.

“I intend to leave, this moment,” he whispered to his wife. “There’s no time to waste. Look outside – see how the streets are deserted. The criers are gone, and the night watchmen have disappeared. So pack our things, and ready the horse. We leave this moment.”

“I don’t understand,” his wife stammered. It was her husband who occupied most of her attention – her husband, who had lost a couple more inches since he’d come inside the house. She towered over him already. But he didn’t pay attention to this – not yet, anyway.

“My dove,” he said. “Don’t worry, you will. I have a strange story to tell you, but we must hurry.”

His wife backed up against the stairs, collided into a few pans, and slipped on the first step.

The goldsmith’s wife lay till morning stretched on the steps where she fell, snoring, head on hand, one slipper fallen off. She was the only woman who observed, firsthand, the effects of the quick-working enchantment that surrounded the village, that night. The man himself soon collapsed in exhaustion, as he ran across the room to his loving wife. The next morning she found him, four inches tall, sleeping precariously in the hammock formed by her apron, and suspended by her knees over the top of her shoe.

The rest of the town slept soundly through the night, and when the early rays of sunlight first broke through their windows, the women woke to find their husbands or lovers beside them, shrunken each to several inches in height. And there was a great alarm that morning among the people, and one could hear the women shouting from house to house all through the village, and all round the outskirts, in the huts and hovels in the fields, and all along the hilllsides.  

But it was also, at first dawn, that Anna, now clearheaded and inspired, stepped outdoors into the central square of the village, stood on the pedestal where the woman knight had harangued the men the day before, and began to speak. Every woman (each with her man) rushed to the windows overlooking the street, and listened to what she said (and what she had to say, added the old woman, you all know, after closely studying your catechisms and listening to your teachers).

All the women were afraid. And a very small number, four or five, maliciously argued, without reason or proof, that Anna herself had enchanted the town. This small number, they say, rode up the mountainside to the castle that very morning, on behalf of their husbands, their tiny husbands and lovers whom they pocketed inside their shirts. But neither these women, nor their husbands, were ever seen in the valley again.

But the great majority, as they listened, as they remembered the black knight from the day before, and as they thought of their new freedom, and all the opportunities suddenly opened to them in their new lives, hour by hour, day by day, yielded to Anna’s views, and looked back at their husbands – some of them sitting, gripped or held protectively or possessively in the wives’ hands, at the window, and others perched on the pillow of their bed – with a new and more affectionate love and concern.

Anna, now wearing her green cloak again, explained how the old society was inferior to the new, where men would become shrunken helpmates or slaves, (as the case may be,) to the women. She explained how peace can only be attained in a society where the man is forever second to the woman. How all men are destined to belong to the girl who selects them from an early age, and how each is assigned from birth, according to his tendencies or aptitudes, for his individual and special task. Some, when they come of age at sixteen, take part in the sacrificial ceremony of marriage, while others are set aside to one girl when the time comes, and trained in all the particular arts that contribute to a successful and loving partnership. A man’s talents add to his mistress’s honor, and distinguish her from her fellow-women. He is an adornment to her person and home, like a fine hat or a silken shoe. These were some of the things she said. And the lady in green, on her seasonal trips down to the valley, was pleased with the novel and original ways in which these ideas were applied in the day-to-day lives of the women. 

Then there was a gasp from a woman seated among the crowd, and the women stretched their bodies a little farther out of the windows, to see. Anna dandled her young husband between her fingers. She had plucked the little man from one of the inner pockets of her green gown. The story goes, that the lady in green, (who looks after all women), on the stormy night she fulfilled the peasants’ request, came down to the village and learned that a woman had been imprisoned on her own account – a woman whom the townspeople had mistaken for herself, and who therefore suffered in her place. Feeling pity and anger, she promised immediate action against the people, and justice for Anna when daylight came again. And this was why she came to the square, the next day, disguised as a knight. This was why, above all, she became interested in the lives of the townspeople. 

As for the young man’s debts and failings, these (thought the lady) were paid back sufficiently by the terrible sufferings of his own wife. She forgave him and, the night in which everyone was in bed, while Anna was still half-asleep and dazed at the goldsmith’s table, she finally restored him to her. 


2.

Before carrying on to the conclusion of this story, there are a couple observations to be made. First, that marriage, in ancient times, was invariably arranged and loveless. The husband selected his wife, who was assigned to him because of her family, wealth, position, beauty, and so forth. And the women of the village, without exception, consented to be married to such and such a man on account of her family, wealth, and position. Only by sheer chance – as in the case of the goldsmith messenger and his wife – did love enter into and take hold of the two partners, enlivening and enriching, by a measureless extent, the pleasure and happiness they enjoyed together. So, after the new rites and laws were instituted – among which laws the most revolutionary was that by which a woman could choose whomever she wished for a husband, and marry him, and live with him for as long as she liked – the joy and happiness in the valley increased and spread from year to year, woman to woman, couple to couple, and house to house.

At the meetinghouse that very month, there was a general renewal of vows. Anna carried down from the castle eight noblemen and knights, who were married to the eight wives of the town elders, according to the new ceremonies.

After a few years, the village had settled down into its new life. The women were happy, and the fields produced enough bread and corn, the livestock enough milk and meat for everyone. One morning, the lady in green got up from her seat in the castle, and was never seen in the valley again. For a few years, Anna, her designated minister, presided over the village from the castle. But it was abandoned after her death, cracks formed in the walls, towers collapsed, and eventually, as the centuries passed, the building itself crumbled to the ground. If one takes a daytrip up the hillside from the wooden manor house, she’ll find little evidence of its ruins. A few stones from the ground-work, and large cavities in the earth that used to be wine cellars, or ice-rooms, richly stocked with meat. 


3.

But now there is only one story left to tell, a story that answers the question some still ask about the final stage of our marriage ceremony.

Anna, ever since her two-day trial in the jail, on behalf of the goddess, refused to put on any clothes, other than the plain calico dress she’d worn on that occasion. The story goes that one morning, before dawn, she was preparing breakfast for herself, and had inadvertently dropped her good and faithful companion into her bowl of plain, unsalted oats. They say that she dropped him into her food inadvertently, though tradition does hold that this act had been long preordained, since the beginning of our own era, so that one final rite be added to the rest once the time was good and ripe. 
 
After the first bite, Anna realized what she'd done, and spit his mangled body into her hand. Seeing him like that distressed her. She meditated for a moment, while he lay on her palm, his tiny body shuddering in pain. It was then that she received the illumination we all know today. With great happiness, she told her husband that she had just received a wonderful new vision. She would chew and swallow his body: by showing mercy on him in this way, his death would come to symbolize how man’s deceit and trickery were overcome, and peace restored to the people. Some say that he understood her words, and acquiesced, while others that she chewed and swallowed him forcibly, under protest (the second is more difficult to believe, because of his weakened state). 

In any case, it became traditional, in later times, to swallow one man in effigy during each ceremony. But at a later period, as consuming the man’s image failed to convince certain hardline, zealous women that the ceremony itself had any measurable effect on their lives, it was decided that a living man should take the place of the effigy. And this, of course, is how we conduct the ceremony today. 

Evil, oppression, and suffering are consumed, just as the innocent girl consumes the man. And by observing these solemn ceremonies, all the women in the valley live and will continue to live in freedom, peace, and contentment until the end of time. In this way, the old woman said, we have created the most civilized of societies out of the most barbarous of beginnings.

Here she ended her story.