The Dollmage

Annakey ran alongside the river until the houses were all past her. She ran until there were no more bridges, until the fields turned to thorn and thicket, and on until the underbrush turned to saplings and the saplings to shadowed forest. She ran until she came to where the river comes fast out of the mountain. It is a feared place. Here the bear and the cougar come to water and the wolves come to howl. Here the great trees have spirits and hang down their long branches to pinch and scratch. Here there are eyes in every hole. Annakey did not care that cougars and bears had lapped at the water, nor that there were bones in the shallows.

Annakey is afraid of only one thing, and that is not it.

Look into her eyes now. Though you keep your stones hard by your sides, though you wish to have my tale over so you can execute her, there is no fear in her eyes. No, Annakey is afraid of only one thing.

What is it, the children ask. I will not tell you now. Later. My temper is frayed from sleeping in the open last night. It is a wonder you do not wear out your voices, snoring all night. So many snores! It is useful for keeping the bears and wildcats away at night, but hard on a Dollmage’s temper.

As I was saying, Annakey sat on a rock at the riverbank and listened to the sound of the rushy water. I will tell you what Annakey learned as she sat upon that rock.

First, Annakey learned that morning to be alone. That is a great power.

Second, she learned that there is cruelty in the world. She did not yet understand that those who hurt others do so because they believe that people desire to hurt them. She did not know yet that such people suffer more than the ones they hurt, for they must live in their own skin, in a world of their own making, a world full of enemies. Annakey would be years older before she learned this, but today she had learned about cruelty. That lesson in itself was valuable.

Annakey did not appreciate the lesson. Her throat and chest ached. The flat rock she lay on absorbed the heat of the sun, but Annakey felt the cold of its heart. Icy water slicked the rocks in the shallows. After a long time she noticed that in the river shallows was a patch of clay. It was clean and slippery, pale green in color. She dug at it with her fingers, retrieved a handful, and began to work it. She made a sheep.

The pain in her throat and chest began to diminish.

For the first time Annakey looked at her surroundings and found that it was a wondrous place. The trees were thick all around, but had backed away to make a small, round clearing by the river. The grass was thick and soft here, not too high, and scented with bee-lace and mud orchids. The trees hung their branches over the clearing protectively. Even the water was tamer here, eddied into a quiet little bay at the foot of the large, flat rock that Annakey was sitting on. It charmed her. It was like a little room in the woods just for her. There was even a hidey-hole, for one of the trees had a huge knot in its trunk. She put the clay sheep in the knothole, but there would be enough room to hide more treasures if she were to come here again.

When Annakey returned to the village and learned that Roily the cow had drowned, she came to me, her face the color of the pale green clay under her fingernails.

“I drowned Roily,” she said. “I will pay.”

“You made the doll, but Renoa threw it in the river. It is prideful to think you did it, to think you have the power.”

Annakey looked down at her hands, relieved that they had done nothing appalling and without her permission. Only then did she think to blush under my rebuke.

“Nevertheless,” I said, “you must promise me that you will not make any more such animal dolls. I have told the villagers I will watch you.”

She nodded. A nod is as good as a promise.

After a few days, she noticed that some people would no longer speak to her as she went about her work, and those who did spoke to her differently than before. Still Annakey smiled, but oh, such tucking away of bitterness there must have been.

At the end of the day, Annakey returned to her hiding place. She brought with her an old wool blanket so dense it could keep out a morning’s rain. She brought dried fruit and a fishhook, a spoon, a pot, a small box of oil, and salt. Carefully she took her clay sheep out of the knothole and laid it on the large, flat rock by the river.

She gathered moss for a lawn for the clay sheep to eat in. She found pebbles for boulders and bits of pine for bushes and small-leafed twigs for great trees. She fashioned a shallow bowl of clay and filled it with water for a pond. She broke bits of her hair to float in the pond for fishes. Tiny bluebells and baby’s breath that she found growing wild on the river-bank were sweet flowers for her sheep in his meadow. She kept her promise to me, however, that she would not make any more animal dolls. Her sheep had the meadow to himself.