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.