The Dollmage

Renoa had learned already about armature, which is the frame or body core of a doll, made of metal or wire or wood. Later that day, when she had played a little, we would spend some time on pigments. I would teach her to bind it with egg white, and perhaps I would teach her how to make gall ink. Tomorrow I would teach her to make a peddler doll, with an apron full of pockets into which would go pins and buttons and small things. With a peddler doll, these important things would never get lost. Even if you mislaid them and forgot to put them back in the peddler doll’s pockets, they would reappear there. It was one of my favorite tricks of the trade.

Still later, Renoa would make a pauper doll, of rags and odds and ends, to remind her to be generous to the poor. After the pauper doll, I would teach her to make nesting dolls to give to a child who was not growing well. She could make a moss doll to give to a hunter so he would not get lost.

In my dreaming I did not hear what was going on in my own backyard until it was too late. Looking out I saw Renoa and several of her friends standing around the chicken coop, watching Annakey work. They were laughing at her.

Annakey took her shovelful of manure and dropped it on Renoa’s feet. Then the girls were laughing at Renoa instead, and her face was blank with rage. Before I could poke my head out the window again, Renoa stepped forward and pushed Annakey into the muck. She pushed her so hard her whole body was covered. Even her hair dripped with chicken manure.

Annakey was not smiling. For a moment she sat, stunned, in the manure. She moved her hand and seemed to pick something filthy out of the manure. She looked at it, brushed it off a little. The girls watching her shrieked and groaned and made make-sick sounds. Annakey stood up and walked away.

She walked to the end of the village. People laughed as she went by, thinking it had been an accident. She did not notice, for her mind was fast upon the thing she had found in the chicken offal. She walked past Oda Weedbridge’s house. She walked to the end of the valley to where the mountains begin to bunch up their toes, and into, the pathless forest. She walked until she reached the place where the river comes down from the mountain, until she came to her secret place.

When she was there she washed the thing she had found in the manure and put it into her sheep’s meadow.

It was the same little man she had swept up in my house years ago, the one I had thrown into the yard. She studied the man doll, and studied it more, until she knew.

How many times had Annakey desired to fill her meadow with sheep or cows or goats, and then remembered that she must not disobey me. Now she would not keep her promise, for she knew the man doll was her father, and she would make a valley for him and a story for herself.

Annakey bathed in the cold river until she was clean. For a long time she sat by the river in the sun, until the pain in her chest eased. She touched her promise doll on the thong around her neck and stared at the little man doll standing beside her sheep. Comparing the two, she could see that the sheep was the work of a child, accurate, but withholding something. She took more clay from the river. She made another sheep.

This time she felt different. As her hand caressed the slippery clay, she felt a wisdom in her eye, a love in her fingers, a cunning in her wrists and thumbs. This time she thought less about accurate imitation. Now she thought about a sheep, how it was to be a Sheep, to know all the little grasses blade by blade, and to be able to pick them one at a time with your teeth. She knew the smell of field and wood, earth and leaf. She was a sheep, smelling the earth, tasting it. She felt her dainty hoof treading among the gilly mushrooms, the tickle of a ladybug in her ear, and the pain of hoofrot. She knew the taste of bluebells, saw the dew that gathered in the dimples of the earth—wine, sweet wine. She felt the warm, musky comfort of her fellows all round, ever-round day and night, safe, safe.

Then she felt a desire to walk away to that dandelion, or that clover. She knew that she was fashioning Follownot, Oda’s sheep, who was fed in winter on chopped straw and dried peas, and who had such a taste for flowers she would wander away from the herd.

She did not know she was feeling power. She could only feel her joy that when she was done it was a fine thing, and that she could see into the little things eyes and know its name. “Follownot,” she said. She had begun to make a valley doll, and she knew how.