E.L. Mellor
A young thief grabbed my satchel of herbs as I walked home from the Burmister’s house on a damp evening in early spring. I cursed my ears for not hearing him creep up behind as I chased him down the street and into a blind alley, my stride hampered by skirts. Halfway to the town wall, I nearly caught him, but suspicion slowed my steps. The postern at alley’s end had been locked shut for as long as anyone could remember, so where did he think he was going? A stranger might not realize there was no way out through the east wall, but a lad his age should have easily outpaced a woman four decades older. I stopped.
He kept running. Light from a moon nearly full angled into the space between stucco walls, streaking silver in the dark hair that flew out behind him. The boy paused and looked back for a moment before he reached the wooden door, then seemed to run straight through it. I thought it must be a trick of the moonlight or my dimming eyes, that he’d simply withdrawn to one of the shadowed corners on either side. No thief’s escape, then, but a trap for an old woman.
I backed out, keeping my hand on the knife at my belt until I reached my shop and barred the door behind me, where the familiar scent of herbs and old wood slowed the race of my heart. Never one to cower from a blow, I’d fended off thieves in the past but could no longer deny my waning strength. Long afterward I lay awake in the chamber above, still burning at the loss of my satchel.
Yet I’d known more dire losses through the years, and this one, at least, could be set right. The thief had not taken the Burmister’s coin, kept safe in a pocket beneath my skirt, and Mirek the shoemaker would sew me a new satchel for a fair price. I fell asleep breathing the lavender that hung from the beams overhead.
A dream took me back to the alley. I saw a door shining in the light of a full moon, flanked on either side by my grandmother and the old woman who’d held the shop before me. My Babka stood tall and straight as I remembered her, the bones of her face in fierce outline beneath sunbrowned skin, crowned with a silver braid. A head shorter, Yaja the herbalist appeared as I’d only heard others describe her, a softly rounded old woman with shrewd eyes and a crooked smile.
My heart filled with sorrow that I’d never repaid them for their gifts. I yearned to run to them, to give the thanks I’d forgotten when young, but, in the way of dreams, my legs felt stone heavy and moved as slowly. The women joined hands across the door, as if to bar my way, and faded to mist before I could reach them.
*
The pungent sweetness of steeping aniseed filled the shop next morning as I checked my stores of herbs and unguents. A pain stabbed the back of my knee, no doubt from running after the boy, while the dream haunted my thoughts.
Years had passed since I’d recalled the week spent with Yaja. When I wandered into her shop seeking work, she was not merely old and worn, like my Babka before she died, but a decrepit ruin of a woman. Her withered flesh had sagged from its bones like wax on a candle, and the odor of decay followed her painful steps when she made the effort to rise from her bed.
A girl had arrived in town a month or so before I did, claiming to be Yaja’s niece summoned from the countryside to nurse her through an illness. She looked enough like the herbalist that no one doubted her story, although Yaja had seemed hearty as ever when last seen. After several weeks of keeping the shop and giving polite answers to all who asked after her aunt, she vanished overnight.
The wife of the shoemaker across the street had found Yaja trembling on a pallet in the kitchen behind the shop, unable to climb the stairs to her bedchamber and looking as if she’d aged a hundred years. Some suggested the girl had poisoned her to steal what coin she’d saved, but the old woman met questions with silence, saying only, “She won’t return.” When I appeared the next day asking for work, her neighbors reacted with wariness to the arrival of a second strange girl. Although my clothes and hair were filthy from sleeping on the ground during my journey, Yaja wouldn’t let them throw me out. She insisted on hearing how much I knew of herbs and where I came by my knowledge.
After I told her what my grandmother had taught me, she said to the shoemaker’s wife, “The girl knows enough to be of use, and I need a nurse. Let her stay with me, and you can go back to your own work.”
I cared for her as well as I could, while the women on the street visited and brought food, but nothing I knew or Yaja suggested helped in the least. Desperate with both sympathy for the old woman and fear of losing my place, I asked if there were anything more I might try. Yaja said there was only one thing left to do—I should bring a man of law, and she would deed her shop to me, if I promised to sell herbs and remedies to the townspeople in her place.
“They need my herbs, and I abandoned them,” she whispered in her broken voice.
“You couldn’t help getting ill.”
“I should have chosen an apprentice—a few quick-witted girls asked—but I could never bear seeing someone young about the place.”
The vanished girl had clearly not taken the herbalist’s stash of coins, as some claimed, since Yaja paid the man of law with a few and gave me the rest. She told me to buy a good woolen gown and order a new pair of shoes from the shoemaker, Mirek’s father.
“And keep your hair neatly braided. People will trust you better if you look prosperous and respectable. They’ll need time to accept a stranger in the shop, and a young one at that.”
I overheard Yaja’s last words to the shoemaker’s wife, “I paid my own price.” A day later, the townspeople carried her out to the graveyard beyond the postern in the west wall.
It never crossed my mind at sixteen that I might not know enough to carry on in the herbalist’s stead. Having made what I thought a clever escape from the manor where my mother had bound me to work, I felt equal to any challenge. The plague years had taught me otherwise, of course, but the afterglow of that sunlit bravado bore me through dark hours.
Once the aniseed syrup had cooled, I poured it into flasks to replace what I’d lost with the stolen satchel. The town saw a lot of croup in the chill of early spring.
*
That afternoon, Mirek stepped from his shop across the street as I set out for the market square to buy more honey. He and his granddaughter went instead of his daughter, since Leshka was so close to her time.
I told Mirek of the boy who stole my satchel, as Bozhena looked over the first greens of spring at a farmer’s stall.
“A stranger?” he asked.
“I’ve never seen him before. Either he didn’t know there was no way out through that postern or he’s so new to town he mistook the east wall for the west.”
“What did he look like?”
“Near my height, maybe fifteen or sixteen years. Pale, dark-haired, slender. Too pretty.”
Mirek laughed. He knew I’d never had much time for men. “Like Tomaszek?”
The blacksmith’s handsome son had most of the town’s girls and a few of the boys hanging out of windows to watch him pass when his father sent him on errands. A boyhood spent wielding bellows and hammer had added sinew to height, and his skin glowed rosy bronze.
“No, not like Tomaszek. This boy looked as if he’d hardly worked a day in his life, though he wore the clothes of a laborer.”
Bozhena picked out the freshest bundle of greens on the table and haggled over the price. Mirek paid the farmer, then said, “I’ll cut out a new satchel as soon as I can get leather at the tanner’s. The wine merchant’s shoes need to be finished, and Leshka may not be able to work much for a while, but if you don’t mind Stash doing the stitching, you can have it in a week or two.”
As we walked back to our street, I asked Bozhena. “Will you follow your brother into the trade?”
“No. My Jadek says I haven’t the knack for leatherwork, but now that I help keep the house, Matka can make more shoes.”
*
The Burmister’s infant boy wheezed with croup for a second night, while a little girl near the south gate burned in a fever, so I packed aniseed syrup and herbs in a small scrip which I held close. The full moon lit my walk back to the shop. When soft footsteps began to follow mine along the street, I pulled out my knife and turned to find the boy behind me.
“What do you want? You already have my satchel.”
His eyes glittered in the moonlight as he approached, looking me up and down with the same sort of lewd stare I’d gotten a month or so before from an old vagabond who’d staggered into my shop. My life had not left me ignorant of the desires of men, but this shook me. I was old enough to be the boy’s babka.
He whispered, “You’re still a fine-looking woman. I wish I’d known you when you were young. Come with me!”
At that moment, Mirek called from his doorway, “Felcha, is all well?”
The boy fled toward the alley, Mirek and I following. We watched him run toward the postern, and, once again, he seemed to disappear. When we reached it, Mirek’s lantern shone into empty angles.
“It looked like he ran straight through,” he said, as he held the light higher.
I trailed the tips of my fingers over the door. For the few inches lit only by the lantern, it felt as wood always did to me, alive with the sun and warmth of summers long past. When I reached the moonlit strip at its center, my two longest fingers sank in slightly, as if the boards were rotting fruit that only looked sound. I pulled my hand back as from a flame.
We turned and left the alley in silence. My fingertips burned, while fear wrapped itself around my heart, as it seldom had since the plague. Mirek waited for me to enter at my door and bar it before he crossed the street to his own. We said nothing more than good night—for what could we say?—but his deep voice made a blessing of it, which I carried upstairs. My fingers still felt as if they’d touched fire. Sleep took its time, and in my dreams every path led to the moonlit door.
*
Sunlight leaking through the shutters woke me early next morning. Glad to find my fingertips no longer burned, I held my left hand up to the light. It was brown on the back, red on the palm, hardened by a half-century and more of work—all but the tips of the two inmost fingers, which now felt soft and smooth, their nails perfect ovals. Even at sixteen I didn’t have such hands; work had roughened them long before I was grown.
How could a boy run through a door? How had my fingers sunk into solid wood and been so changed? Half-remembered tales of magic flitted through my mind. Perhaps the postern had been cursed in some way. And I wondered about the beautiful boy. Was he a sorcerer? Or one of the demons priests warned of? No ordinary boy of his years would speak to an old woman as he had to me.
While it was still early, I went across to Mirek’s shop to show him my hand and ask what he thought. Because I found him leaving to fetch the midwife for his daughter, I said nothing but that I would bring chamomile and wormwood to ease her labor.
“Leshka thinks Bozhena’s young yet to attend the birth and hopes she can stay with you,” Mirek told me as he left.
Bozhena stomped into my shop a short while later, bearing a basket with greens, turnips, and a piece of pork.
“Matka said I can sit with Jadek and Stash in the shop or come here, so I’m going to cook stew for us all,” she said, in a tone that made clear how offended she was at being sent away.
She asked for fennel seed and juniper berries, then wanted to know which barrel held kasha and whether I had an onion. As the stew simmered on the fire, she went to the baker in the next lane for rye loaves. Bozhena took a share to the midwife in late morning, then called her grandfather and brother to my table. It was a rare blessing not to have make my own dinner, and the girl did know how to cook. We all talked and laughed as we ate.
After Mirek and Stash returned to their leatherwork, Bozhena offered to help in the shop. She’d been in and out of my door almost since she could walk, always asking what lovage tasted like or what elecampane might be good for. Sometimes she helped me gather from field and wood those plants that didn’t grow in my small patch outside the town walls, although Bozhena’s housekeeping duties had kept her home more since her father’s death that winter.
“How old were you when your father died?” she asked, as we stripped dried rosemary leaves from stems.
“About twelve.”
“What happened to you after that?”
“My Babka and I gathered herbs to sell along with the remedies we made from them until she died two years later, when I was about Stash’s age. Then my mother sent me to work as a servant for a pan and pani on a manor, and I was allowed to walk home once a month to bring her my wages.”
Bozhena looked more curious. “How did you come here?”
“After two years I took my month’s wages and ran away, then walked for three or four days to reach a market town far enough from the manor that I wouldn’t be found. I asked for an herbalist who might want a helper and found old Yaja dying without an apprentice. She left the shop to me.”
I didn’t tell Bozhena that I had run, in part, because the father and son of the manor had begun trying to catch me alone. The boy I could duck or swat, but when illness kept the lady of the household in her bed, the man began to grab at me and demand that I meet him at night. Telling my mother would have been of no use, since she wanted my wages, and I knew I could not avoid the pan much longer.
“Did you ever have a husband?”
“No. I made my way alone.” I’d also refused the other choice my mother offered, to marry an old farmer with two wives buried.
We talked of herbs until Stash came in midafternoon to say the baby had been born, and they left to see their new sister. I’d almost forgotten about my fingers. No one else had noticed them, but their wrongness left me uneasy, and they made the rest of me seem older. It struck me more keenly how my hands had begun to stiffen and my legs to ache on cold mornings.
*
Late that night when all was quiet, and I thought Mirek would not be keeping watch, I walked to the alley as the first moonbeam touched the door in the east wall. I was neither surprised nor frightened to hear the boy creep up behind me a third time.
“So you’ve come,” he said. “I knew you would. When the door’s full lit, go through and you’ll be made young again.”
Had I not seen my fingers sink into the wood and lose all signs of their years, I would have called him mad and fled. Instead, I waited.
As the bar of moonlight on the door widened, I thought of what I might do with my old strength revived. From time to time I glanced at the boy. “I want to see you beautiful,” he said from the other side of the alley, where he leaned against the wall.
No one who knew me would have tried to tempt me in such a way. At sixteen I’d looked like any healthy young girl, with shining hair and pink cheeks, but had never been accused of possessing beauty, nor had I cared enough how men saw me to feel much grief for what I’d lost. Youth was no lure; death I feared not at all. Only the thought of lingering in the world too weak to work frightened me. I wanted never to become as frail and helpless as Yaja when I met her.
We watched together, beautiful boy and old woman, as moonlight crept across the door, until most of it shone silver. Yet still I hesitated, wary.
“Go now,” he urged.
I remembered how Babka and Yaja had seemed to bar my way in the dream.
“What is the cost?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, after a long pause, “it feels like you’re on fire when you pass through, and I think you must go through at every full moon to keep the change. A month ago, I stumbled down the alley one night and leaned against the door. I fell into a faint thinking I was burning alive, only to awaken on the ground outside the wall next morning, looking as you see me.”
“Where did you go? You haven’t been in town.”
“Out to the countryside. Plenty of farmers will hire a boy for the spring planting, even a thin one, provided he can work. I returned with a month’s wages to buy clothes that weren’t in tatters and to look for you.”
I stepped back a pace, not liking the way he eyed me. “I’ve never had much time for men—nor boys, either, even pretty ones.”
He smiled in disbelief. “You’ll feel different once you’re made young. Go now,” he said again. “It only works for the three nights around the full moon. When light fades from the planks, it will be an ordinary door again.”
Might I have found a way to hold on to my strength so I’d never need to lean on anyone? Then I thought of my shop. What would people say when I appeared with a smooth face and dark braids again? The priests would no doubt hear of it, and I’d have to leave town, work, friends—the life I’d built over forty years. The price to regain what I’d lost would be all I still had.
The alley was a dead end, a trap for an old woman.
When I turned to leave, he came a few paces nearer and seized my arm. I recoiled and pulled away, not so much out of fear as from the smell of him. He gave off the stench of a dying old man, or maybe a three-day corpse. Worse than that, for in the presence of the sick or dead I felt no more than natural disgust, while this caused the blood to pound in my head and my heart urged me to run as far and fast as I was able from both him and the door. His smell also seemed somehow familiar, and I strove to remember where I’d met it before.
The force with which I’d wrenched myself from his grasp left the boy stunned for a few moments, but he soon came at me again, desperation contorting his face until he looked almost like one of the gargoyles on the church roof. “You must go with me!”
“That’s why you took my satchel? To lead me through the door after you?”
“I can’t keep this shape otherwise. I don’t want to be old and sick. I don’t want to die.” Tears trickled from his eyes.
My revulsion grew. This was no sorcerer or demon, just a feeble old man desperate to regain his youth. “How do you know you need to bring someone through?”
“I felt myself growing weaker as the moon waxed, just before I came back to town. I thought I only had to pass through the door again, but when I did so on the eve of the full moon—earlier that night I took your satchel—I wasn’t given the same strength and health as a month ago. I felt …”
He stopped and looked at me.
“It was as if the door … spoke. It wants me to bring someone else. That’s the price of staying young.”
It seemed less than likely that a spelled door would grant unending youth in return for merely passing that gift on to another. A rich pan might be able to shift the cost of his good life to servants, but someone had to pay in the end. Yaja’s last words whispered through my mind, I paid my own price.
The smell. Yaja had reeked of it in the days before she died. I’d felt the same urge to run then, too, but at sixteen I thought perhaps it was natural to an old woman dying of some wasting disease. The years since had taught me that no living being should give off such a stench.
Those who’d suspected the plump, pretty girl might not be kin to Yaja were right. For about a month she’d looked after the shop and the herbalist, people said, while Yaja was not seen again until after the girl vanished.
“So once you found yourself unrestored, you came back into town, saw me, and tried to bring me through.”
“I’d seen you before, when I came to your shop in the winter to get something for my sick stomach. You gave me herbs and an earful, told me to keep myself cleaner and not drink so much. It struck me afterward that things might have been different if my wife and children hadn’t died in the plague, or if I’d taken another wife to look after me. Once I was young again, I thought to come back for you and have another chance.”
Wrenched with pity and scorn, I backed away.
“Please,” he whimpered but let me go unhindered. Then he turned and stepped through the door.
*
After a restless night, I arose at the first hint of dawn, checking my stores of herbs and making more of remedies unneeded, just to give my hands something to do. The fingertips that had sunk into the door remained smooth.
Not long after townspeople began setting out for work and errands, someone pounded at the door of my shop. I unbarred it to find Stash. My first thought was of Leshka and the baby, but he said, “They found a sick man outside the north gate this morning. We saw him carried into the gatehouse when we were at the tanner’s, and my Jadek sent me to get you.”
“I’ll go at once.”
“Do you want me to come so I can run back if you need anything?”
“No, stay and mind your shop.” I locked the door and handed him my ring of keys. “Keep those so Bozhena can get in, if I send someone to fetch herbs or unguents.”
When I arrived at the gatehouse, Mirek was standing outside. I walked into the inner room with a guard and found what I had foreseen, a decrepit ruin of a man on a pallet. The leather satchel on the floor told me why the shoemaker had waited. He knew his own work.
I forced myself toward the man through the reek, much worse than it had been the night before. He was thin, with a few strands of white hair clinging to a mottled scalp. The deep blue of his eyes had gone cloudy.
“Do you need anything?” I asked.
“You …” His voice creaked.
“Yes, it’s me.”
“I … hurt.”
“Not for long.” Yaja had lived barely a week.
Back in the outer room, the guard who’d found him asked, “Can he live?”
I shook my head. “Take him to the hospice.” The church would feed and tend him for the days he had left; my herbs were of no use.
“What ails him?”
“Just … old age.”
He held the satchel out. “The shoemaker said this is yours.”
It looked a bit dirtier, perhaps, no different otherwise, but its touch repelled me. Mirek said little as we walked back to our street. I told him I still wanted a new satchel, so I left the old one as a pattern when I went to his shop for my keys.
My own shop felt too close. I grew restless, unable to work, and went out. The clear light and sparkling air of a spring morning made me feel a shade less old. As I walked, I wondered whether the east door might somehow draw me back during the next full moon and what would happen to my fingertips if I fought its pull. Would they turn black and die on my hand as I’d seen happen to some with plague or putrid fevers? If so, I’d count it a small price to pay for all that remained.
I paid my own price. Perhaps Yaja had feared growing weak and ill alone, as I did. I wished I’d met her before the door changed her. Had she gone through by ill luck or in search of some path not taken in her youth? In the end, she’d righted the mistake as well as she could, without pulling anyone else into misery, and given me a chance at a life I’d been glad to live.
“Never trust the old,” Yaja told me once during the week I’d tended her. “We covet your strength and beauty.”
But my Babka hadn’t felt that way, and neither did Mirek. Nor did I. I longed to watch Bozhena increase in wisdom, Stash make shoes to take others on journeys, and Leshka’s new baby smile and fatten and stumble on the cobblestones until she found her feet.
Streets I’d known for forty years looked new to my eyes. I wandered them as one just arrived in town, until I found myself standing before a door which glowed faintly golden along the top. It was the postern in the west wall, the door of night errands and the dead. As light spread across its thick boards, I knew it was time to seek another to fill my place, one who would learn and thrive as the life within me faded.
The patch of sunlight grew, and with it my knowledge that the moonlit door was barred to me, by Babka’s teaching, by Yaja’s gift of the shop, by my choice to run from both the manor and unwanted marriage. My path led through the door to the west. I ran my changed hand along its sunlit wood to feel the warmth of a hundred summers.
***
E.L. Mellor attended the Ultimate Science Fiction Workshop in 2008 and the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2010. When not writing, she works as a freelance academic editor and spends any spare time on music and dance. This is her first published story. Her website can be found, eventually, at elmellor.com.