evening in the castle
I followed the Pixie around for nearly two and a half hours, hanging curtains in a vast multitude of rooms. By the end of it my arms and back ached and I was beginning to feel more and more likely to fall off a ladder in a moment of exhaustion and die. My eyes were tired from the sun’s pouring into them all morning. At home I had never given thought to the work our housekeepers did. I would have pooh-poohed the very idea that they might like a young man’s help. Now I was beginning to feel sorry for them.
Despite her prosaic occupation, the Pixie grew more mysterious to me by the minute. The scrap of cloth with its initials fascinated and haunted me. She might be royalty, kidnapped from her cradle so some despot could have her throne and left here to live in obscurity forever under the Giant’s dreadful eye. Or perhaps her mother had been a fugitive from a foreign land, and had given the Pixie the scrap of cloth to somehow lead her back home—or else the Giant had simply taken her from some happy cottage somewhere. The possibilities were endless, and the Pixie, with her radiant beauty and laughing eyes, seemed to fit every one perfectly.
And then there were the others: all the others. They seemed to come from every nook and cranny in the castle, their numbers growing all the time: forty or more of them, with Nora the oldest and unchallenged leader; the Pixie their muse; and Illyrica, whom I nearly knocked over by turning around quickly without realizing she was behind me, their pale and silent ghost. The three were the oldest of the Giant’s charges, and the little girls adored each of them in their own way.
The sun began at last to set behind the great trees. It cast rays of fairy light over the lawns and gardens. I had been huddled with the gaggle for some hours around a heap of lumber near a small creek that ran behind the house, trying to make sense of the piles of lumber and half-attempts at building which they called a boat. With the setting of the sun they began to tug at my hands, leading me out from the deep green shadows of willow and water back toward the house, whose white stone walls glowed with the pinks and purples of the sky, deepening in a velvet twilight.
We passed through the wooden doors, and music greeted my ears: the soft plucking of a lute, a serene, welcoming song that held in its notes the good-hearted dying of the day. I expected to see the Poet, but he was nowhere in sight. Rather, the Pixie was seated on a wooden bench in the flagstone entryway, the Poet’s lute cradled in her arms, smiling and greeting each of the children in turn with her eyes. She turned her eyes on me as well, but it was not with the same look of welcome. For once her look was inscrutable.
The doors to a large, soft room were thrown open, and into it the children pulled me. It was soft, I say, because it was furnished with hundreds of cushions and curtains, and deep rugs adorned the floor. Flames danced merrily in fireplaces at each end of the room, and the occupants of the house were already gathering around them; sitting in little circles, laughing and talking. At one end Illyrica sat with two little girls in her lap and one hanging around her neck, a look of contentment on her face. The girls chattered merrily to her, but not a word did she answer. Illyrica never did, for she was mute. She was a pale, ethereal beauty, with white-blonde curls that she tied at the nape of her neck and blue eyes that spoke more eloquently than voice ever could—but only rarely did they say anything. Illyrica kept her own counsel, even with her eyes. The one flaw in her beauty was a scar across her throat. Though no one ever told me so, I supposed it to be the cause of her silence.
Nora sat cross-legged at the other end of the room, surrounded by little girl-children who lay in every possible position on the cushions all round. A thick golden book lay open in her lap, and she was reading from it. Her voice was quiet yet commanding, and her audience was riveted. She looked a very different figure here than she had standing marshall over the laundry pots. Her face was rosy from the day’s work, and her eyes shone with deep delight—whether in the children or in the story, I could not tell.
Isabelle and the others who had brought me in let go of my hands and rushed to join their comrades around Nora. She looked up when they joined her. Something fell over her face when she saw me, and her voice faltered, but a moment later her shoulders were square and resolute and I was ignored as she continued to read. I was saved from awkwardness when the Pixie appeared behind me, the lute forgotten, and clapped her hands. The whole room surged to their feet at once, and the soft room was abandoned for the dining hall.
Fresh bread graced the supper table, with cherries from a nearby orchard and a great pot of hot chocolate. I filled up on it well enough. I might have wished for a leg of meat or a tankard of ale, but either would have seemed madly out of place in the great white house. When dinner had ended the whole tribe returned to the soft room. I followed them, to find that an enormous wooden chair had been brought out of hiding and placed in the center of the room. The children had arranged themselves all around it. The Giant sat there in the midst of them. Illyrica rested on the floor on one side of him with her head on his knee, and the Pixie sat on the other side. Nora stood behind the Giant with her eyes full.
I had not seen the Giant in the light before. I saw now that he was a very great man in stature, but only a man. His thick hair and beard, once coal black, were beginning to grey. He wore dark peasant clothes, and his massive hands were worn and wrinkled. He looked up and saw me. His eyes seemed to declare his pride in his little kingdom, and yet I thought I saw tears in them. The next instant he blinked, and the illusion was gone.
“Will you not stay with us this time, Angel?” the Pixie asked. Every child in the room leaned forward to catch his answer, but he shook his great shaggy head and looked at me again.
“No,” he said in a deep, gruff voice. “No, my girls, I have only come for that one there.”
He pointed a finger at me. Every head turned my way.
Every head but Nora’s. Her eyes were resolutely on the floor, and she would not look at me.