The Dollmage

For two days, she sat watching the shepherds at their work, smelling the smoke of their breakfast fires. At night when they were asleep in the sheep shelter, she buried herself beneath the dry leaves of last year’s fall. In the day, she watched as an outsider, as one who no longer belonged. On the first day, her food ran out and she did not care. On the second day, she fasted. There was no smile on her face. She made a meadow, and out of twigs and twine she built a sheepcote, not knowing if her heart would let her live to bring it to me. With bits of wool she found caught on thorn bushes around the edges of the meadow, she made each sheep in the meadow. It did not ease her frown.

On the third morning, Annakey’s rage came with her hunger.

She laid aside the sheepcote and began to make a doll, chanting Areth’s name as she made it.

The body she made of the black clay mud of the forest floor. It was a bloated, distorted body, hardly recognizable as human. She wove clothing and hair of twigs and stems. She put a real spider in the dolls head for bad dreams and wicked imaginings, and closed the spider in, alive, with a lump of clay. She pierced her finger with a thorn, and in the chest of the doll she dripped real blood for a wounded heart. In the doll’s stomach she placed a worm, and that too she closed in alive. She made arms and legs of sticks, as one who is unable to help himself. She gave the doll no eyes, and especially no mouth.

Annakey was untucking. She was untucking all that she had suffered in her young life, drawing it out of her heart like long slivers. Into the doll she poked small slivers of dried pine needles. Into the doll went all the sadness and hurts, all her hungry nights and her cold days, her lost father and her dead mother and her rage against Areth.The last was so glaring she could see nothing else. She did not know that she had poured all the bitter bits behind her heart into the doll. She called the doll, “Areth.”

Annakey set the doll in the crook of a tree and looked at it for a long time.

This was a doll of power.

She looked at her hands in wonder, but the knowledge of her gift was not equal to her sorrow. If she should show this to Dollmage... But she would never show this to Dollmage. In its blank face she saw, mute and burning, the wish to return evil for evil. She could not show the doll, but she could put her anger in it.

Just then, she heard a rustling in the bushes. She buried herself in her bed of last year’s leaves, thinking to hide herself from a shepherd.

It was two men of the robber people. They came on silent feet and spoke their rough language within her hearing.

Annakey knew her evil doll had drawn them.

Annakey knew also that if they saw the summer meadow, by morning many of the sheep would be gone. The robber people would not care for the sheep. They were hunters only, and excellent thieves. They would steal the sheep, and Annakey’s people would be forced to leave their beautiful valley in the spring.

As quietly as she could, Annakey pushed a few leaves onto the doll of the sheepcote she had made. The robber men came closer. She could not yet see them from her lair, but she could hear them laughing low, talking to each other in their strange tongue. She pushed a few more leaves onto the sheepcote, and then a few more. She could see the robber men now, naked but for animal skins, their skin leathered from the sun, for they did not build houses. They lived in caves in the winter and wandered in the summer. Annakey pushed enough leaves onto the sheepcote doll to hide it completely.

The robber men stopped short. They seemed to be lost.

They sat down near enough to Annakey that she could hear their talk. The robber people have a different language than the valley people, of course, but since the coming of our people we have learned some few words of their language. From her hiding place Annakey could see the robber men gesturing down toward her village and using the word “beautiful” and laughing. She knew that the robber people had a plan to steal women from the village.

A beetle crawled on Annakey’s arm, but she did not care, for a spider crawled in her heart. Around her neck hung her promise doll, and it was speaking to her. “Did you not promise to save your people? You must not die.”

After a little time the robber men stood and continued on their way, in the opposite direction from which they had come. The summer meadow with its sheep was safe for now The robber men would return to their people and tell them they had scouted this part of the forest and had found nothing. They would not come this way again for a long time.

Annakey emerged from her bed of leaves. She looked up at the evil doll she had made, still hanging in the tree. She could either live or hate, not both. There was no time for hating right now. She knocked it out of the tree and kicked some dirt and leaves over it.