1. 

The sun rose up over the mountains, shone down on a quiet valley between the hills, and wakened to consciousness the inhabitants of a small village, nestled in the heart of that valley. On one of the hillsides in this village there was a level stretch of ground, sun-drenched, well-watered, and ringed about with an apple orchard, the branches of whose trees still retained some of their first spring blossoms. There was a large, grand, sturdy house of wood and stone near the orchard, and out of this house people began to appear and make their way into the main road leading down to the village. Some, with brushes and buckets in their hands, led out horses and carts; cows trotted out of the barns to the water-troughs along the road, and drank. Old women and young children talked and laughed as they walked together along the winding and rutted dirt path, some leading spirited young colts, others racing and darting out ahead of the group, and others, little boys with sullen, miserable faces, tugging on the sleeves of the older women, hesitantly. 

In the air one could hear the ringing, melodious sound of church-bells. It seemed to come from nowhere in particular, from all the hills around the valley, from all the church-towers in all the valleys, including this one, where a long procession of women and boys stretched down and ended in the heart of the town, at an unfinished, ever-expanding church-building.

They had traveled halfway down the road, when a milkmaid ran after them, leading a tall youth, strapping and handsome, by a noose around his neck. She had not spared any efforts that spring morning in order that he too might look as fine, well-dressed and presentable as the rest of the boys in the village. The time and extraordinary labor she had expended in this task, by the mirror, in the wardrobe, the bedroom – all this extra work had made her late. By the time she’d caught up with the rest of the group, she was out of breath, and stood puffing and coughing in the dusty road, one hand on her knee. Her boy stood behind, his eyes red, and his cheeks burning with embarrassment. The company of women laughed, welcomed her, and set out again toward the town, at the bottom of the hill. 

The closer they came to the church doors, and the more loudly and merrily came the sound of the church-bells, the more people attached themselves to their procession, some waiting by the side of the road, shepherd-girls hurrying with prayer-books and psalters in their hands from the nearby hills, throwing on their clothes as they ran, shopkeepers peering out of windows and doors, holding tabs and ledgers under the arms, and young women, shiny faces fresh from sleep, hair unkempt and clothes unpressed, running downstairs from their rooms into the song-filled streets. 

Next door to the church there was a large tavern. Drinks were set out and ready for the people, huge tankards of dark beer, foaming over the rims. There were pastries and cakes still warm from the oven, arranged in rows on large clay platters, and covered with white icing. Here the young girls threw wreaths of flowers over the heads of the young men, and dipped their fingers into a sticky, sugary substance, like molasses, which they licked,  smeared, dabbed and dotted carefully – like face-painters tickling the cheeks and nose with a smooth, fine-haired brush – in predecided patterns and designs, over the faces of the young men. Then all the girls together drank down the beer set out for them, swallowed the cakes, and brought their men next door.

As girls, boys in tow, marched up the main aisle of the chapel to their seats, flower petals fell from their shoulders and hair, floated over the heads of the women parishioners on one side, and then on the other side, over the young men, pensively waiting in their pews. Somewhere in the back of the church, a baby began to squall, and its voice echoed and flew higher and higher over the low hum of women chattering and laughing – in the same way, the sound of a screeching gull can be heard over the continuous drone of waves on the beach.

At last there was total silence, and two groups of three women emerged from both wings of the church, near the altarpiece. When they had gathered toward the center, they knelt down, facing the people, amid the suppressed buzz of the parishioners. Then from a door to the right of the altar, three more women appeared, these more richly and colorfully attired than the others. Lastly, from the other side of the altar, the last woman appeared, in a plain, calico servant woman’s gown. She raised her hands, palms upward, and the congregation rose to its feet as one. While the tenth priestess remained standing, she extended her arms, palms downward, and the other nine took their seats in front of the altar. Immediately after, the parishioners, with a swish and stir of clothes, followed course.

Obeying an unseen, unspoken signal, the young girls in the first row then stood up together, turned to the row of young boys opposite them, approached them, and led them out through the left wing, two by two. In the same way, the second rows of girls and boys exited through the right wing. Two minutes passed, and then the girls came back alone, smiling, with new, fresh-smelling flowers entwined in each other’s hair, straightening their clothes, or wobbling about from side to side in their tight, black shoes.

As the third and fourth rows prepared to follow the first and second, there was one boy who pulled back on his noose and tried to resist. He made it as far as the fifth row before the crowd of women rushed on him, and pulled him back by the string around his neck. In their ceremonial dresses, it seemed as if the sun, moon, stars, and all the hills surrounding that quiet, narrow valley had fallen on him together and at once. They brought him back, against his will, to the girl, who waited for him in the wings with a bright red, burning face. She pulled him rather roughly off to the side, harshly whispering to him. This was the only disruption of the proceedings. For the rest of that bright, April morning, there was no further interruption, and all the girls, and their boys, passed off into the wings and back until all the pews but one were cleared on the left side of the church.

Now only ten boys were left. With pale faces, they waited for an usher to lead them out into the aisle, and up to the front of the church. There, heads crowned with flower wreaths, they knelt in a devotional attitude, keeping their eyes bent on the stone floor.  Before the collective eye of the congregation, nine of these boys met their fates, one after the other. 

The first three priestesses embraced the first three boys, took them each by the hand, and muttered a few words. Pulling back the hems at the necks of their blouses, three separate lights flashed, as though reflected from some hidden jewel. In an instant, each of the first three in the group had dwindled to four inches, without a change in gears or a gradation of any sort. The three women picked them up off the stone floor of the church, and their small bodies disappeared into the fold of their hands; the priestesses then bundled them up somewhere inside the labyrinth of their long garments, and sat back down. 

The next three boys came forward (one looking back at the congregation, utter terror in his eyes, no hope of escape), and underwent the same process. These shrank to three inches, each, and disappeared, and were lost forever, somewhere in the back-folds of the infinite robes.

Finally, the last three stepped forward, each one of them trembling violently with fear, as they looked up into the kind, serene eyes of – their fates. These last women took off their black, silk shoes, shrank each of the young men all the way down to two inches in size, picked them up – and caged them deep under their toes. One of the young men cried out, his voice promptly swallowed up under the cruel foot of his captress.  

There was still one young man who remained. When the other priestesses had withdrawn and taken their way, with a swishing of robes and a clacking of shoes, off to the sides, the last woman came forward – the one dressed in the servant woman’s attire – and offered the young man her tiny hand. She led him forward to the altar, and made ready the ceremonial silver platter, which had been sitting there, gathering dust, for the last five years. She blew off the white coat of dust – and so much dust was there that, in the morning sunbeams that pierced many-colored through the stained windows, depicting traditional scenes of village life, the motes fell around the pair of them like snow, and landed on the young man’s shoulders and hair like ashes. Now he was ready.

As the people watched, fascinated, the last woman put her hands on the last man’s dust-covered shoulders, and, after another jewel-like flash, he himself was reduced to three inches in size. Following ritual procedure, the barefooted girl in the plain, calico dress picked him up, carried him over to the platter, and dropped him, stunned and helpless, into the center of it. She lifted up the dish, and brought it before the people. After a few words, her face then becoming terrible and serious, she picked up the chosen youth, gently, between her thumb and forefinger. With growing horror, he watched as she opened wide her mouth, and extended her pink, immense tongue past her already wet lips. She was salivating copiously, and long strands hung and gleamed like ropes from the roof of her mouth to her lower teeth – so that when she dropped the man inside, closing her soft lips around his torso, only by an extreme effort was he able to force his head above the upwelling pool of her saliva. 

Finally, once and for all, her teeth clamped down. The first thing he heard, even before the soft chewing sound of his (thankfully) short-lived pain, was the clapping and shouting of the congregation. As her teeth tore and ripped through his torso, he heard a song behind him, rising through her lips to his failing ears. Some of the young girls, and the women, were singing along. Then, a few moments before she swallowed him, he lost consciousness. 

The young woman in the gray dress gave a prayer of thanks in song, and closed the service. The people retired to their separate homes.

2.

The women walked slowly, taking their time on their way back up the hillside to admire the fields of oats and flax, the meadows red and pink with budding flowers, and to enjoy the pleasure of conversation. The April sun was higher in the sky now, and some of the girls stopped to wipe their damp brows, or to sip from a flask of cool water they’d replenished in the town, after the service. At the large, wood and stone house, kitchen maids were active preparing for the noonday meal. They bustled about through the rooms of the house, milking the cows, taking the laundry off the lines, setting the tables and stoking the ovens.

As the women waited outside, their conversation slowed down, as it often does when talking on an empty stomach, and one’s thoughts, distracted by the smell or the memory of food, turn elsewhere—although here the stream didn’t dry up completely, and the last hour passed pleasantly enough. Sometime after midday, one of the maidservants ran up to the door to tell them it was time to eat, and everyone gathered inside.

At last, when everyone was seated, a rich, flavorful soup was carried out as the first dish, and the smell of it revived everyone’s spirits. While sipping and blowing on the hot broth, carefully ladling it with their spoons, they were about to turn to a serious topic of discussion, when a very young girl interrupted them.

She raised her hand, and asked an old and hooded woman, seated at the head of the table, for permission to speak.

“What’s your question, child?”

“Grandmother,” she started off, nervously. “Why do we sing?”

The grandmother was an insignificant-looking, little old woman who wore modest, gray plainclothes, though she was highly respected in the village, and her opinions and advice were sought on almost every important question. She looked up from her plate and smiled.

“My dear girl,” she answered, “can’t you tell me why?”

“Because that’s how the message was first heard.”

“Who first heard the message?”

Another woman to the right of the old lady spoke up. “With deference and respect, grandmother, I’ve heard several conflicting accounts of the origin of our practices. In my own opinion, our tradition is divided on the matter. I know that I don’t speak for myself alone when I say that your own views on this subject would be most welcome.”

She shook her head. “Sister, I don’t want to pester you with a long story. Not before the main course.”

Other voices protested, and seconded the request for a story.

“It seems I have no choice then,” said the old woman, smiling wryly. “But you must give me time to collect my thoughts. Let’s eat, first, and then sit outside on the grass. I want all initiates, and especially the youngest men and women, to come and listen.”

Everyone quickly agreed to this arrangement and, after dinner was finished, they assembled behind the house and sat down under a large, gnarled, blossoming apple tree. The old woman presided on a thick, projecting root, and steadied herself with a cane.

Meanwhile, all the women took off their hose, woolen socks, and shoes, or reached into their trouser pockets, and brought their little men into the light. Some held them in their hands, like dolls, others dangled them or flicked them playfully with their fingers, others rolled them back and forth under their tired soles and heels, others popped them in their mouths, others stuck and tied them down in their thick, dark hair among the ribbons or flowers, or others, stretching themselves out on the cool spring grass, set them down atop their knees, and stroked their heads until they were still.

When everyone was ready, she began to speak.

1.

Six hundred years ago, at the very spot the women were sitting, there was a castle. In those days, all the people who lived in the valley worked as serfs, with no legal rights of their own. They were required to pay tithes and ground-rent to the master of that castle, a great lord whom time, in an act of historical justice, has now forgotten even to his very name. Because castles, back then, changed ownership frequently, no sound rapport or mutual sympathy could ever be established between a lord and his people. Oppression was common – suffering even more common.

But this lord was famed to have been crueler than most, and one day he conceived the idea of building a second castle, larger than the first, on the very highest peak of the mountain range above the village. Why did he want to build this new castle? It’s disputed. Perhaps because he was a lord, and they were serfs. Just the same he did want it, and the peasants in the valley below – being his liege subjects and tied to the castle with their lives – were given the orders to build it. A delegation from among the peasants approached their lord, and explained to him that because it was then spring, or sowing time, the people were busy working in the fields and providing for their families, beginning the labor of the year. Winter, they pleaded, would be a better time. Let us build your great castle then, they argued.

The cruel overlord of the valley, however, was indifferent to the seasons of the year, or to the needs of his subjects. He repeated his demand, now in stronger language, that the second castle be laid out and built from the ground up that very month, as soon and as quickly as possible. Work, he roared, must go on uninterrupted until the castle was completed, the last door springs screwed into the wall, and the last stone mortared onto the high parapets. Not only did he redouble his demands, but he absolutely insisted that the usual tithing and rent payments carry on as before. If money was short, then crops and livestock, wine and butter must be sent instead.

So the peasants, sorrowful, crestfallen, marched back down the mountain to their village. They reasoned how best how to break the bad news to their wives and mothers, sons and daughters. There was nothing to be done.

The next week, spurred by the crack of the whip, by the sword, by the needs of the village, and by fear, the peasants worked at a quick pace. Spring changed to summer, and the castle rose above the trees, hills, and valleys, a gleaming, imposing structure. Whoever lived in that castle would be the first to see the sun in that valley or all the other valleys – and they would be the last to see the sun, sailing over the burning sky and sinking again into the west.

Taking their ploughs again, the peasants went back to work. The mothers were rawboned, the wives and children were leaner, and some of their youngest, along with a handful of the sheep and livestock, had died from lack of nutrition and care. But scarcely had they touched the iron of their ploughs, and begun rutting the rows in the fields, when the lord of the castle summoned them back, once more.

It was summertime now, he explained. At the new castle on the top of the mountain, he wanted a spacious, pleasant orchard and garden to shade him and his guests. He didn’t want the oaks that grew in the forest, however, but thick and gnarled apple trees that grew over the next mountain, in the next valley. The peasants presented their argument. The soil would be thinner in winter, the roots could be excavated and pried out of the earth the more easily, and the branches of the trees would be bare, with no foliage to hinder their work.

It was no use. The stubborn and cruel lord of the castle turned a deaf ear to whatever they said, and the peasants once again trudged down the mountain, back to the valley, and broke the bad news to their wives, who wept.


2.

Midway down the hillside, one of the young men in the delegation stopped by a spring for refreshment. He was alone, because he told the rest of the group to continue without him. He would catch up. As he sat there, drinking the water and stripping himself to bathe, a flash of color and shadowy movement behind one of the trees caught his eye. 

“Who’s there! Hello!” he bellowed, with full lungs. A twig cracked, and then a hooded figure stepped out from behind a tree.

“A wanderer,” the voice answered. Two fine hands pulled back the hood, and revealed a young woman, strikingly beautiful, with dark hair and flashing eyes. She wore a dark green, flowing robe, with crimson underneath. Stitched into the cloak was an intricate, patterned threadwork of suns, moons, and stars.

The young man colored, shyly, and apologized, searching the rocks for his clothes.

She laughed. “Don’t put yourself out on my account,” she said. “Don’t be uneasy. I’m here for the same reason you are.” She unclasped the cloak, took off her shoes, and prepared to step in.

“Where are the others?” she asked, leaning back and watching him tread water, in the pool.

He said that the others went on down the mountain, and that he would follow them later.

“I thought I heard them moaning, and sobbing.” She dipped a toe into the water, and then quickly withdrew it. The young man couldn’t be sure, but he might have seen a few bubbles rise, and a tiny hiss of steam.

Eventually, he explained their situation to the woman. She listened closely, thought for a moment with her chin in her hands, and then spoke.

“Possibly I can help you, and I might be of use to you.”

The boy seemed incredulous, and she went on.

“I can see by your face that you don’t believe me – but who can say whether I don’t have a team of oxen at my house, oxen fit and strong enough to transport a hundred trees in a week?”

After quickly apologizing, he laid out for the woman, in a long speech, all that the peasants had suffered throughout the last two seasons. She would understand how his nerves were tense, his mind overwrought by many long sleepless nights, the gnaw of hunger, and the fatigue of work.

As he talked, a scowl gradually darkened her face, like the shadow of night. She turned her head in the direction of the castle, high on the mountain. For his cruel, inhumane, tyranny, she swore, vengeance must be done. Vengeance, she said, turning back to the man, her face clearing and brightening again, would be done – but for a small payment.

The young man followed her with his eyes, listening closely to this speech. And at the end of it, in a kind of trance, he stepped out of the water and gathered up his clothes. Tell me anything, he said. Whatever you demand, poor as I am, I shall try to pay.

The green woman stood up, re-fastened her cloak, and slipped back into her shoes. “Well,” she smiled, her eyes flashing with ironic fire, “I don’t ask much – nothing more than your firstborn son.”

Hearing these words, he understood that this woman before him was no human being, but perhaps some wood-sprite, goddess, nymph, some otherworldly creature. He turned his face away, leapt up onto the rocks, snatched his clothes, and scampered bare-naked down the mountain, as fast as his legs could carry him.

Behind him, he heard her great laugh piercing through the blooming forest. “Think it over! turn it over a hundred times in your head. And then come back in three days, to this spot. You’ll find me here, waiting for you!”


3.

Because of his age, or maybe because of who he was, the young man’s fear had evaporated by the time he’d returned to the village. In his heart of hearts, like every man, he felt that he was the equal of any god or goddess – if not in strength, then at least in cunning and trickery. The challenge fired his heart, and even before the sad spectacle of his hungry wife and two children greeted his eyes again; before the men, weary and disconsolate, broke the sorrowful news to their wives; before nightfall, when he sat at his food-less table, and listened to the muffled sobbing of his family, while the aroma of candlewax and boiled leather wafted from the next room – even before all this, he had decided in his heart to return in three days, and agree to her proposal. First, that evening, he had to attend a town council at the meeting-house in the center of the village. Before he left, he gazed for a long time at the face of his son, 16 years old. 

At the meeting, the crafty young man told the village elders, in company with the other townsmen, everything he had seen that day by the mountain spring. He said to them, The responsibility for the welfare of this village falls on me. Don’t let yourselves and your wives and children be troubled on account of ghosts or demons. I can see no alternative. There is no other way open to us. If anyone here will contradict me, let him do so.

The hall was silent for a moment, and then an old man in the back cheered his bravery, but cautioned him against hastiness. The rest, as superstitious and uneasy in their minds as the old man, were unanimous in their agreement with his opinion, the general view being that, first, they should attempt to build the orchard on their own – and only then, if they failed, or if their inhuman lord increased his demands until they became insupportable, they would listen to whatever advice the young man’s youth was capable of offering. Everyone was in accord, the one youth excepted. The council broke up without a word. Each returned to his wretched home, and waited for morning.

Two days passed, and every sort of disaster seemed to befall the peasants and their animals, as they struggled to move the trees over the high mountains. The wagons broke, three of the oxen broke their ankles, one man lost his finger, another his eye, another his heart. By the end of the second day, they had not succeeded in hauling even one apple tree out of the forest.

The council met again, and now seriously discussed the young man’s proposition. The danger to their families, the wrath of some god or goddess – these concerned the older men above all. The young man emptied his tankard, after the general discussion had ended, and the private conversations had subsided – and spoke. If the sword should fall on anyone’s head, let it be mine! he shouted. Someone came forward, then, and clapped him on the shoulders. And so, the following morning, the young man walked up the mountainside to the cold spring, alone.


4.

Of course, only he knew the real object that was at stake. But he had two choices: to promise her his son, and fulfill that promise, or to promise her his son, and fool her. He was a strong and clever man, who would have pit his wits against any man in the town. This or any woman – goddess, sorceress, whatever she was – would have a hard row to hoe in trying to fool him. So he hoped. Packing his gear that morning, he had convinced himself that his deception was already a done deal.

Anna was the name of this man’s wife, the wife he left at home with the children before setting out on the mountain that morning in April. Anna, carrying on her head a basket filled with provisions, hurried to the front door, just as he was leaving. A little wind from the kitchen followed her rapid steps, like a whistling through the cracks in the wall. Inwardly, she was upset. Upset because she wanted to accompany him up the mountain. She’d noticed his strange behavior the night before, and this fired her curiosity. She wasn’t the sort of woman content to sit at home, carrying out the daily tasks and duties, and taking care that her son and daughter behaved themselves. If she had advice to give on some subject, she would give it – no one could tell her otherwise.

After saying her farewells, and handing him the food basket, she stepped inside and engaged a maid to watch over the children for the day. Less than a half-hour after her husband left, and the rest of the women set out into the fields, she started out of the house, muffled in a green cloak. After a couple of hours, she caught sight of him, sitting against a tree and eating out of the basket. When he set out again, she followed a short distance behind, a few feet beyond the edge of the forest path.
 
When Anna guessed that she was within a hundred yards of the waterhole, she slipped off the trail into the forest, sweet-sounding, full of the songs of the birds, and carpeted with grass. About fifty feet away, she dug a little trench behind a large tree root, and waited for her husband to come into view. She didn’t wait long.

Her vision was partly obscured by the tree branches (the leaves were still very small, undeveloped and unfolding), but she could clearly perceive the figure of a woman, sitting on the rocks at the pool’s edge –and also the shadow of another person approaching, taller, masculine, hailing the woman on the rocks with a  loud – yet shaky – voice. Suspicion and jealousy prickled her thoughts.

Then they opened their conversation. While she could hear her husband’s words distinctly, only snatches of the woman’s speech made their way to her ear. It was a voice in the middle-range, with a lawyerly precision in its choice of words, with sudden and unpredictable crescendos and diminutions of volume. There was a dark and smoky texture to it also, which Anna couldn’t place. Something that sent shivers up her spine, the more she listened.

Stealthily, as quietly as possible, Anna crept on her hands and knees from tree to tree, and closed the gap between her and the mountain spring by half. Now that she was within earshot of the woman, and could make out each one of her words, she hardly dared to breathe, or move a finger – but listened and listened. Transfixed by the red costume under the green hood and robe, Anna waited, eager to hear what the woman would say and do. 

“Yes, that is the usual payment, and I’m quite accustomed to it. I have never done work for any other kind of payment, and I refuse to lower my standards in this case.”

“I see that you won’t accept any other reward,” said her husband, ill at ease. “But at the moment there is simply no son that I can offer you. You must accept this payment in advance.”

The woman stepped forward, and her eyes blazed, and her green robe turned greener, her red clothes turned redder, and her tongue of flesh sounded like a tongue of fire. “Good sir, except in special cases, and on certain terms, I accept no payment in advance. What security can you pledge? What can you offer me? What assurance do I have that you will fulfill your promise?”

The man stepped back a few paces. His confidence began to wane, and he worried that – quite possibly – he was swimming out of his depth. “My word,” he stammered. “Isn’t my word enough?”

“I’m very busy,” she answered, as a flicker of blue flame escaped her eye. “I have many places to visit today, and a good many appointments. If you imagine that you will be able to postpone this issue, with your word alone, you’re mistaken. I can’t be coaxed or wished away by a word. What else do you have?”

Exasperated, he threw up his hands. “Nothing!” he cried. “I have nothing but my word, my word and the clothes on my back.”

“But you do,” she answered him. “You do have something else. You have your life. Give me that for safekeeping.”

“My life? I don’t understand,” the young man said, now trembling despite himself.

“No matter,” said the green woman. “You will. I’m within my rights.”

She sat down on the rocks and untied her robe, which slipped soundlessly to her feet. Her clothes were a blinding redness.

The man watched her with a vague but growing sense of foreboding. “What is it?” he asked. “What are you doing?”

Without looking up or responding to him, she reached into one of her back pockets, and produced a little powder-case or cuticle-kit in the form of a seashell. She tapped on it with one of her long, red nails, and it clicked open like a little wristwatch. Perhaps Anna could see, even from as far away as her hideaway, what was inside, or perhaps she merely imagined it after the fact, in order to embellish and lend more interest to her story. Whatever the case, this is what she reported.

Five miniature men, each one-inch tall, naked against the light, blinked and held up their hands in unspeakable terror when they saw her face, her long fingers. Casually casting her eye inside the shell, she selected her morsel and then nudged him tenderly outside the group with the red nail of her little finger.

Picking him up, she brought him before her red lips, drawn in a sardonic pout. “Oh,” she moaned, to no one in particular, but perhaps to the young man, now slowly backing away, his eyes deadlocked on her fingers. “Oh, you see what trials I have to suffer. When will they ever end?” The shrunken man fought wildly against her fingers, wildly and vainly. She flicked him quickly in between her half-parted lips, as casually as an almond. “Oh,” she went on, now chewing, her lips still drawn in a pout. “My job gets so difficult, some days.” She swallowed. “You people will never know.”

Snap-shutting the shell, she buried it again in one of her pockets, and stood up. “But I’m very satisfied by your promise, knowing that you’ll do what you can.”

The young man shuddered in body and soul, and turned his back, running as fast as his legs could carry him.

“What’s the matter with you now? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost!” She laughed a deep, blazing laugh. “Well, what shall I do with you?” She tapped her chin with her finger, with a dry humor, and watched him go a few yards down the road.

“No,” she said. “That won’t do at all. You must come back.”

If Anna hadn’t seen this with her own eyes, she wouldn’t have believed the tale. To her horror, to her complete bewilderment, she watched as her husband vanished into thin air. And then she saw the green woman glide over to the spot where he’d disappeared, and lean down, and pick up something small between her fingers.

“Can it be true?” Anna whispered to herself, open-mouthed. “Can this be my life?”

There were no two ways about it – her husband was about two inches tall, and curled up in the woman’s palm (whoever she was, thought Anna, though not in so many words).

The green woman swept back across the rocks to her seat and her robes, and she thought for a moment, her chin cupped in one hand, and the young man clenched in the other. She took off one of her shoes – over the water, Anna heard a wailing cry, calling for help – and considered for a moment. But, shaking her head, she decided against it, and reinserted her warm foot into the shoe, smothering all sound. 

Then she pulled back her red undergarments, and examined them for a moment. No, she seemed to think, there was no room there either. Nor (she felt with her fingers) up her asshole, even after she broke wind and expelled a few handfuls of lecherous friars and a couple popes, lodged up there for the last five centuries. There was always room to spare, a thousand extra rooms, for the clerical orders. But it wasn’t the place for a double-dealer like this man. So she ended up taking out her little case again, shell-shaped. 

“You’ll be safe in here,” she said, smiling archly, her eyes flashing fire. “Until I need you again.

“But now there’s work to do. Your village is saved – thanks to you. It’s now or never, my tiny friend! I must get started.”

Anna waited until the woman had walked off and vanished like a wandering shadow, deep into the forest. Then she ran. She ran, and didn’t stop running – until she returned to the village.

When she stepped again inside the village precincts, a surprise awaited her.

1.

At the forest border, Anna fell in with a large, clamorous crowd. One man within the crowd, a feather in his cap bobbing above the sea of people, recognized her while she was still a considerable distance apart and, with an accusatory finger, pointed her out to the rest of the people.

“She’s the one I saw!” he brayed. “The green overcoat – it’s just the same!”

There was some excitement and disorder among the people, as they followed the man’s finger. A little knot of officials and village elders detached themselves from the rest of the group, and approached her.

“Ma’am,” one of them said, impersonally, laying his hands on her wrist, “come with us.”

“But what have I done?” Anna demanded, hardly able to believe her eyes and ears. It all seemed a dream to her.

“Witch! Witchery!” screeched some particularly strident voices in the crowd, which was growing larger and more confused by the second.

The man, his hand still latched onto her wrist, looked behind, conferred for a moment, nodded, and turned back. “Your husband is missing, Anna, and you’re…well, you see how it is.”

“Black foul-hearted she-devil!” a man barked, and as some mad hyena in the crowd tried to rush her, but was held back by other hands, Anna decided to comply.

“What is happening to me…” she thought to herself. “Where can I turn?”

The man signaled to someone behind him, and together they apprehended her, partway dragging her heels over the roads and past the townhouses, taverns, and squares to the empty jail. In a dank, cold, and filthy cell, they locked her up until such time as the town council determined what to do with her. Anna, in her white calico servant’s dress – now that her incriminating green cloak had been taken from her for examination and evidence – crumpled onto the ice-cold floor of her cell. The whistling that used to follow her steps now grew into some huge and terrible cacophonous roaring that circled around and around inside her head, until she could no longer think or move.

“This is the worst. There is no worse,” she thought. “This is the abyss. Someone help me.”

That Saturday night, as the town elders deliberated and discussed the three most important topics – namely, the planting of the orchard, the disappearance of the young man, and the arrest & incarceration of his wife, the only suspect – the night winds blew wildly outside. In the air and in the gorges between the mountain and valley, there was a terrible pandemonium, a crashing and howling through the shutters and rafters of the houses, up through the trees, and all the way up to the barred doors of the cruel lord’s castle, knocking on the gates all through the night – like some uninvited guest. Barbaric music rose up through the floorboards and stones of the houses, through the leaves of the trees, through all the streets.

Everyone, young and old, listened closely to this new, windborne music, which captivated and imprinted itself upon their minds and souls. Some say they saw visions, ghosts, and demons on the storm-winds, and others saw torches instead of lightning-bolts, and others a great, seventy-foot tall apparition on the crest of the mountain, a shadow in the shape of a woman. The lightning flared and flashed, and the thunder rolled and rumbled. The clouds themselves crossed swords and battled together.

And that night, some say (though by no means all), a visitor came to Anna in her cell, and gave her the message that we all know today.

The next morning, all the men in the village woke up from unquiet dreams, dreams in which a giantess, dressed in a green cloak, descended from the mountain and stole them from their windows during their sleep, forcing them to worship her as a goddess, enslaving them, and alternately terrorizing and petting them. Many woke up troubled, in the middle of the night, believing they were inside her hot shoe, and condemned for their lives – and beyond their lives – to serve her as loyal foot-slaves, either willingly or unwillingly. They woke up in a rank sweat that smelled to them, for a few brief moments, like her feet.

Others dreamed that this strange and wandering giantess had converted them each into her pussy-pet, and that during the day, she dropped them in a little pouch on the inside of her odorous garments, rarely washed so that, by breathing in her personal smell, and servicing her daily, her womanhood would come not only to represent the world, but to take the world’s place in their lives.

There were others whom she kept in a jar in a  little pantry, while she was away during the day. Coming back in the evenings from the fields, she would twist open the glass, and peer inside, looking for a nice refreshment after her work, her sweaty hair pulled back in a bun. In his dream, as she selected him and him alone, he approached her red, overpowering lips, and as he looked up into her face, was suddenly appalled to see there not some strange and anonymous woman, but the eyes and lips of his own wife (sleeping peacefully beside him in their bed). He passed through the ruby gates, and woke up terrified.

Some got up from their beds, after their unpleasant dreams, walked to the window, and opened the shutters while the storm raged outside. Immediately, a foul and poisonous wind blew through the room, sealing their eyes shut, and swelling them up for hours or days afterward.


2.

The leaves of the trees were limp with rainwater as the sun rose again over the mountain. Some of the tallest trees had collapsed during the night, uprooted by the stormy winds. People peeked out of their houses, timidly. And most of the men, young and old – or all of them – looked up at their wives, sisters, mothers, and friends with strange, shameful looks, as though conscious of a secret, and uncertain whether the other could read or already knew his secret thoughts.

A scout who left for the mountain, early the next morning, came back in the afternoon and reported to the astonished men that all the apple trees had been planted. The orchard was finished. There are some who also claim that the message was given to the messenger by a woman in green, wandering through the terraced gardens. 

That same afternoon, as Anna languished in her prison  cell, one of the castle knights rode into the village square, and exhorted the people to hear him. A crowd gathered around, led his horse to the tethering rail, and waited for him to speak.

The knight, standing on a wooden pedestal in the middle of the square, took off his helmet – and the crowd gasped. Long rolls of black hair streamed over her shoulders, down over the iron plates. 

“A woman!” someone cried out. Her eyes smoldered darkly, as she wet her lips and prepared to speak.

“Yes, I thank you,” she replied, “for distinguishing me from a man. I’ve come from the castle on the mountain, to extend on behalf of my good lord his true and sincere gratitude for your work on his orchard. He is well-pleased.”

A few inquisitive voices spoke out among the throng. “Who are you? I’ve never seen you before.”

“A friend of your master’s,” the woman knight answered.

“On what authority do you speak to us?”

“On your master’s authority.”

There was a murmuring among the people. Some eyed the knight aslant and asquint, turning back to talk in suspicious undertones with his fellow.

“Do you carry his insignia?” A different voice asked.

“No, I carry the crest of own family.”

“Which is?”

At this impertinent question, the light in her eyes flickered a few times, and her voice took on a new authority.

“I hear from the high castle that there is a woman shut up in your jail. What crime has she committed?”

But now the people turned against her, and were more reluctant to show her their respect. No one felt obliged to respond to this question, and the crowd was silent. Her face blazed up again – as a fire does for a few seconds after a dirty pile of leaves and twigs has been added to it – and then subsided. She decided to change her tack.

“My friends,” she began. “I admit, I did not come on behalf of your lord. I came to free you from his tyranny. On the other side of this mountain, an army waits to besiege the castle on the hill.  I make only two requests. First, when your lord conscripts you to fight for him tomorrow in battle, do not heed his call. And second, I ask to be given a private audience with the woman you’ve locked up – locked up unjustly, I feel. Do as I say, and you will gain your freedom. Oppose me, and you will be opposed. That is all.”

The townspeople conferred together, and the low murmuring and sideways glances continued. After a few minutes, they gave her their decision.

“We, the people of this village, reject both your proposals. We shall not aid an unknown knight – much less a woman whose nobility is in question – in an attack upon our lord’s castle. Though we love our lord little, we love and esteem you not at all. Second, we will not grant you the conference you desire with a woman now under the custody of our town council – much less deliver into your hands a woman suspected of witchery, before her innocence has been proven to the satisfaction of our court.”

The knight’s eyes, on hearing this decision, burned more darkly, and with a more sinister fire than was usual. She marched back to her horse, swung her legs over its back and mounted. Turning it around by the bridle, she faced the crowd.

“Ungrateful wretches!” she shouted. “If you could only recognize your defenders when you see them! Who do you think brought the orchard to the tyrant’s garden? Who do you think has already conquered, and now resides in your lord’s castle? I do! Now that you have rejected me, and rejected the messenger, whom you now keep in shameful condition in your prison, you will know what it means to have me as your enemy, and not your protectress. Send a delegation to me tomorrow at my castle, and I will give you my terms.”

With that as her final word, she put on her helmet, and spurred her horse out of town, through the forest, and up the mountain.
 
Many of the townspeople felt cold  shivers run down their spines. They didn’t know why. In any case, they decided to send their ten elders up to the castle, on the following morning, to see what might be done.


3.

That night, gentle breezes rippled the leaves of the forest trees, and the stars in the sky burned with a quiet flame, as they shone down on the town. Two men walked around the meeting-house with holy water, dribbling a consecrated circle in the dust, because Anna was held there – and if the first scout’s report was in fact true, then she must indeed be considered a witch. The sound of laughter, and of singing, as of some long procession, emanated from outside the town, from the forest, the hillsides, and even (it seemed) from the dark castle on the mountaintop. 

Meanwhile, in the jail cell, Anna sat in a corner, her thoughts, like tiny candle-flames, alternately snuffing out and rekindling, as she thought of her husband.

But when morning come, and the sun reappeared out of the mouth of the abyss beyond the edge of the world, ten peasants took ten horses and rode up the mountainside, along the forest path, to the castle.

Only a few servants survived the takeover, and only a few of the ones who remained chose to stay on in the castle as servants or footmen. So for twenty minutes the ten picked men of the delegation were forced to stand outside the walls, with their horses, until someone came to the castle gate and unlatched it – and it was a woman who welcomed them, and let them inside. That was the first surprise.

When they entered the main hall, the tables and boards were richly spread with goblets of wine, venison, boar’s meat, and bear steak. That was the second surprise. Several women, a few of whom they recognized as the wives of servants, knights, and noblemen, sat by the long, oaken table drinking, laughing, making good cheer, and generally having a good time together. That was the fourth surprise.

The fifth surprise came when the woman knight advanced toward them, armor-less and cordial, in a billowing green gown. She welcomed them, and drew them over, past the table, full of convivial talk, laughing, and the lavish display of food, up the stone steps (steps which they themselves had chiseled and measured), to the small library, furnished with eleven chairs, and well-lit from the south during the afternoons. Please, she bid them, take a seat wherever you like. The men thanked her. Each picked a chair, and waited for her to speak.

She sat down herself, and then looked them over, one at a time, very carefully.

“First,” she said, “I must tell you a story. Yesterday, I met your lord on the edge of the forest, when he was riding with his falcon; and as he rode, his dagger jolted back and forth in its sheath. I stepped out of the forest, and hailed him from a distance. My lord, I said, as he came nearer, and I heard the jingling of his spurs, give me aid against the cruel and cold-hearted man who persecutes me. He unsheathed his dagger, and leapt down from his horse. Where is he? asked he, whirling around in circles, and craning his neck toward the forest. Follow my steps, I begged him, and I’ll show you. And so I set off running toward this very castle, he behind me ahorse, and not very far behind.

“When we had come to the gates, I again beseeched him, saying, My lord, your great valor alone is proof against such a villainous tyrant. He lives in this castle. Wait, and let me knock at the gate now, for entrance. Do not leave me. The lord, of course, stared at me with wide, cowlike eyes, wondering perhaps if I were some madwoman or else – well, it doesn’t matter now. Because the gate opened to me, just like this…”

Opening her closed palm, she revealed their little master, cowering against the light, and clutching her pinky finger for safety. One of the peasant men stood up, staggering, and stumbled backwards to the door. A shaft of light passed from the woman in green to him – and whistled over his body. He instantly shrank to a couple inches.

“No,” the woman said. “You’ll stay here. All but one of you.”

“I don’t understand,” the man on the far left fretted, a quaver his voice like a loose fiddle string. “Why would you do this?”

Silently pulling back her dress, and shoving the man, with a quick slap, up between her ass-cheeks, she answered: “For two reasons. First, because the one man you sent me attempted, and failed, to cheat and deceive me. The orchard was paid for with his life. As for the deception alone, I would have ignored that slight against my honor and dignity, if you hadn’t also rejected my demands of yesterday, on behalf of the poor man’s wife and children, and the welfare of your fellow-citizens. 

“Therefore, I have come to the opinion that you are unfit to govern this town. And because you are unfit, I have decided that, until the governing council has transitioned into other, more impartial and compassionate hands, I will govern the town myself, and give it my protection – but I will accomplish this by my own laws, and with my own institutions. Since, in this case, the women have committed no offense against me – indeed, all offenses have been committed against them, in the person of one woman –  they will come to inherit the positions of power. New ceremonies will be introduced, in keeping with my new and just rule. Anna, to whom I will return her husband, on condition that she accept my demands, and save her hometown from further ruin – ruin that would be bound to follow if any other lord should come to re-occupy this castle – Anna will tell you the rest.

“But now,” she said, her face becoming stern, “it is time to deal with the ten of you.”

She pointed to the man second from the right, a middle-aged fellow with short, straight brownish hair. She ordered him to approach her. He glanced around briefly at the other men – and then stood up, shaking visibly in all his joints.

“Closer,” the woman said. He moved closer, about four feet away from her.

“Now kneel down,” she commanded. He looked back at the other men, helplessly.

“Don’t look around. Look in my eyes.” He did as she told, quaking and quivering in every muscle.

“Now,” she explained, “I will tell you what you must do. You must go back to the village – you alone. And the moment you arrive, you must free that woman from her cell. If anyone tries to prevent you from carrying out this task, show them my seal. The woman – Anna – will give you further information. That’s all. You may leave.”

The man left the room in a fog, hardly able to comprehend what was happening to him.

Then she spoke again, to the others. “As for the rest of you, I’m afraid you’ll never see your town again.”

Clapping her hands together, twice, the twin doors of the library opened with a rush of skirts and nine raggedly dressed girls.

As they lined up at the back of the room, there was a sudden, audible crunching sound, and one of them cried out. “Oh!” she yelped,  and picked up the worn-out shoe-sole of her right foot with both hands, inspecting the sole. “Oh, it’s one of the elders! Oh, I’m sorry, I’m very sorry!” 

Pale-faced and openmouthed, unable to speak a word, the eight elders of the village council stared at the servant girls.

“Eight of you,” said the woman in green, “will leave this room new women, joined with new men under the new marriage yoke. You, my dear, unfortunately, will have to wait another day. Please show her out.” The unfortunate girl left the room, sniffling quietly, and disappointed.

Some of the men protested. “I have a wife! And children!” 

“No speaking. There was only one man among you who could return to his wife today – one man whose merits match hers – and that was my messenger, who has already left. Each of you has been judged unworthy – and these fine and generous women behind you, who have no house or husband to speak of, the poor, orphaned wards of this castle, will, I’m sure, give you whatever warm homes they possess. They’re happy. And because they’re happy, you must learn to be happy also. These are the terms. The old are annulled, and your wives, tonight, will already be seeking new husbands.”

She thought for a moment. “Call back the other girl,” she told the young maidservant nearest the door.

When the poor maid had returned to the room, nervously, her eyes bright red with weeping, she stood by the door with her head bowed.

“Daughter,” she said. “I have changed my mind. Come forward.” As the sad-faced servant maid came forward, the lady in green reached behind her robes, and plucked the old, tyrannical master from her asshole with a wet plop. “Clean him off, and wear him in your shoes until he becomes pliant, obedient, and kind,” she ordered.

The girl, overjoyed by her turn in fortune, restrained her desire to embrace this woman, her mistress & benefactrix, and ran back to the door, bowing a dozen times as she went. Though the eight elders, to say truth, despised and hated their old lord as deeply and as much as any one man is capable of despising and hating another, they couldn’t help feeling a degree of sympathy for him and his fate – as the poor girl took off her leathery shoe, and carefully, gently packed him inside with her fingers, whispering something to him as she did so. The door was shut behind her, and it seemed that their master’s cruel and tyrannical life, his proud saga, had come to an inglorious end. In this way, the proud are humbled, and the humble exalted. The lady in green continued to speak.

“The corruptible force in your village was a man – a lord. Now that he is underfoot – so to speak – I see that the old cycle of oppression and suffering, new men and their new crimes, is coming to a stop. Through time, through history, I’ve learned that this is the best, the most peaceful arrangement by which human society can be constituted. 

“Whenever you worship one of these poor girls, you pay me reverence also. Though you don’t know who I am, and you never will. But do as I say, and your village will prosper forever.”

At that point, the eight remaining girls stepped forward, and took the hands of the elders, one by one.

But now, said the old woman, interrupting her story, let us turn back toward the village, where Anna is waiting for her husband impatiently. Eight new weddings are being planned, and I’m sure you all would hate to miss them as much as I would.

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.

1.

One of the priestesses took off her robes, that night, and stepped into her closet, where five of her slaves rushed out from their cages and carried off her things. When they came back into the light, she was relaxing on the bed, reading an immense, gigantic historical tome, and humming softly to herself. Knowing their jobs (it was the only job they had, since they were sixteen), they pushed a water bucket forward to her bedside, and waited. After twenty minutes, she swung her legs over the side and doused her feet in the bucket, splashing the water around, playfully, as she continued to read and hum to herself. The men added dry soap, scents, and a few minerals, and focused diligently on their task.

The storm winds blew outside. Before they were finished, she raised her feet a few inches over the basin, and then rested her soles along its edges, on either side. The men took out their towels, and carefully dried them off – and they were about to retire again, when she suddenly swiveled one of her feet off the edge, and pinned the head toweler down under her foot. Stunned, terrified that his time had come, he couldn’t move a muscle. After a very long, tense minute, she looked down at him, lifted her sole off his body, and absentmindedly wiped her toes back and forth across his face.

Later that night, she picked one of the men to join her until morning. As her hand reached down below the bed, they all backed away, slowly, except for one – one who was too scared to move at all. This was the man she wanted.

Up on the bed, between her legs, slowly, carefully, and gently, he chose his spots, and started to lick. As time passed, she began to swell and open up like a rose, and he, haltingly, moved lower. The rain tapped on the wooden shutters outside, and she went on reading her gigantic book. By the time she felt she was ripe enough to shove him bodily inside her, all the rest of the men had fallen asleep for the night. Her scent, fluids, and hair surrounded him – poor man – and it wasn’t long before his job was done. She pulled him out, and left him there, sticky and crusty in her juices, until the next morning, when she licked him off and returned him to his cage. And so he lived.

What was his reward, though (apart from the joy of serving one of the high priestesses)? There was a life to come.


2.

A few raindrops began to fall over the lawn, and many of the women held out their hands to catch the drops. Some of the youngest girls stuck out their tongues, swallowing the first misty droplets as they fell from the sky, the leaves, the apple-tree blossoms. Everyone got to their feet, and looked up at the threatening clouds moving, high above them, across a gray, stormy sky. The shower would last until the next morning, murmured one of the women, and a few of the others covered the tops of their heads with shawls and coats.

 Their husbands, without waiting for instructions, scurried back into their pockets, shoes, or knee-high church socks, now quite damp from the early raindrops and dew. The women reluctantly took up their clothes and articles, and with difficulty stuck their wet and grass-stained feet into their morning socks. Among them was one initiate, a young girl who, during the storytelling, somewhat bored by the history of her village, sat on the grass and waited impatiently for the evening, when she and her new husband would finally be alone. 

A quarter way through the hour-long story, the light broke through the buttons of her breast pocket, and her hand, smelling faintly like the soil and grass, with light grassy streaks crossing the palm, groped about for his tiny body. When her fingers found him, he felt a strange rush of joy and fear, because In a moment, he thought, I will see her face.

But he didn’t see all of her face. Her hand stopped just in front of her lips. As he looked up, he saw her nostrils, expanding and contracting, and the little sensitive hairs inside her nose. There was a low whistle as she breathed, and then, before he could even turn his head, her tongue wrapped around him and sucked him inside her mouth. For the next three-quarters of an hour, she slurped and sloshed his body around, in and out of her mouth, like a little piece of candy. For the first few minutes, he could only think about his aching muscles, and the disgusting feeling of her wet tongue, forcing him in and out between her smacking lips.

But then, as time passed – and as he often had no choice but to drink down mouthful after mouthful of his young wife’s saliva, or, say, to swallow the stray pieces of her lunch that she picked from her teeth with her tongue – he gradually forgot that it was his body in her mouth. And soon, a feeling of pleasure, at first very dull, but then (like the sound of her smacking lips) growing stronger and stronger, overtook him. He started to share in her pleasure, and realized, with a funny shock, that he was the reason she was happy – or at least the reason she was able to pass the time pleasantly during a long story. 

Then it was only a short time before he submitted and gave in completely to her. That was the first time – but that original realization would come back to him again, and again, and again, until his death. 

Some of the middle-aged women, who had lived with their husbands for over fifteen years at the very least, thought privately to themselves as they walked back to the manor house. Awkwardly fitting their damp socks into their shoes, they wondered, There are some things I believe, and others I find hard to believe. Some of the sacred myths are worth hearing and studying. But, they thought, as the boot squeaked on, and they pushed themselves up, I wonder how many myths and how many stories I’ve lived in my own life, stories that are better than all the great myths put together – and as good as the old stories are, they can’t explain everything. 

Inside the big stone and wooden house, that night, there was much feasting and drinking, laughing and lovemaking. As they went to bed, each to their separate chambers, the moon rose huge, pale, and yellow over the rainy mountain, just before dawn, and illumined all the ruins, stones, deserted chambers, shrines, warm houses and festive decorations through the narrow valley and all along the tree-speckled hillsides, now soaked with the spring shower. Each of them, men and women, fell cozily to their beds, and the men slept where they could – next to their wife, on the pillow, on top of her chest, stomach, between her legs, inside her sock, or under the bed, dropped among her personal items. The hearts of all the men, but especially the women, beat uncannily and excitedly on that sacred day, and began to slow down only as they slipped off, stage by stage, into the otherworld of their dreams. But what could these people dream of, people whose own lives were made up of the stuff of dreams?


3.

Sometimes, a visitor would come by horse or foot over the mountaintop, and look down into the valley. A few young maidens would greet him along the forest borders of the town, and lead him down into the village. He would stop at the shops, stores, taverns, and houses, and eat the food, joke with the children, and trade and talk with the adults.

Or so it can be imagined, because, in the complete, six-hundred-year-old annals of the village, there is no record of any such visitor.