“Don’t listen to Fr?ulein Thrush. Such a busybody. Always sticking her beak where it’s not wanted. Now you’ve got here, help me out.”
The boy swiveled. The thrush had no more to say, but she rolled her head skyward and let loose with a melodic curse.
The trees began to pull back. While their branches still thrashed, they no longer beat him. The boy was able to lean nearer and look at the knobby figure squatting among dead leaves and needles. If the boy could find the nerve to touch the mouse-size gnome, the creature would fit in his palm.
“You help me and I’ll help you,” said the gnome. “Foundlings united. Where’s the harm in a plain exchange like that?” His small face floated a little toward the scalp of his skull. The boy wondered what was wrong with his petitioner. His arms were fused around his knees. His spine had no give. Only his expression was alive, or so it seemed to the boy. “Why are you waiting?”
“I’ve never met anyone like you before,” said the boy.
“Consider this your unlucky day,” warbled the thrush, hopping from branch to branch.
“I’m a citizen of this land, enough said,” insisted the gnome. “Treat me no different from the way you treat anyone else. Manners, child.”
“I don’t have manners,” the boy explained. “We live in the forest between hither and yon, and no one else lives near us to be mannerly with.”
“So you’ll be wanting to set out for the great town,” said the thrush. “Some call it the Temple of First Desires.”
“More like the Mausoleum of Holy Disappointments,” said the gnome. “You don’t want to go there. But to business. You were a soldier hunting a stout limb to use for a crutch, is that so?”
“Hardly a soldier!”
“A vandal, no less,” said the thrush. “You murdered our sister with that axe.”
“What’s done is done,” snapped the gnome-thing to the bird. “Though it beggars belief, another immortal dame is fallen. Boy, I will help you carve from her corpse a branch suitable for your uses. All you need do is release me from the soil where I am planted, and I promise to help you. Grab me as you would a handle, and pull.”
As the boy’s hand prepared to close around the figure, the thrush shrilled, “Go away! Don’t dig him out! He is a schemer, he is not your friend. It’s his fault we are in such a fix.”
Though a talking bird might be rare, a gnome was rarer still. The boy closed both hands around the gnome and began to tug. The thrush darted and battered, trying to flush the boy away. But having begun to worry the creature loose, the boy wouldn’t stop. The gnome grunted in pain or some private exertion of his own. Before too long, the boy fell backward on his rump. Clots of soil rained down upon his face and chest.
“Aha!” cried the gnome. “Free at last, Fr?ulein. We shall see what is what.”
“We will never get back now, but be homeless forever,” wailed the thrush.
The boy brushed dirt from his mouth. He studied the excavated object. The gnome proved to be the handle of a short, sharp knife. The squatting figure was like a bitter, glaring vegetable, and the knife below him a single denticle.
“Enough of your moans and premonitions,” said the gnome to the thrush. To the boy: “Beyond lies Dame Ash, whom you murdered. I shall help you carve a cane or a crutch from what is left of her. When I have paid you for my liberty, you will put me down and let me go.”
The thrush said to the gnome, “Haven’t you done enough damage?”
The gnome told the boy how to select a limb, how to flex it to produce maximum stress before slicing into it. Though the excavated knife-blade was short, it was hard and sharp. It made quick work of the job. The boy felt that the gnome himself was pushing upon the blade to force it through the pure wood.
“You’ve begun your afterlife with another act of malice,” said the thrush from behind him. Her voice was now low and it hummed with feeling. The boy turned. The thrush was nowhere to be seen. Instead, the bird’s voice issued from a soberly handsome woman. She wore a wreath of woodland laurel. Bracelets of ivy adorned the sleeves of her shift. One hand was lifted to her brow, as if fending off the sight of the hacked branch.
“What you have done,” she said.
“I could do nothing else,” said the boy. “The old man is a woodcutter. It is all I know.”
“I won’t give you comfort,” she said. “You murdered our sister and carved up her corpse. I won’t allow you passage in our realm. Off, back,” said the princess, the queen, the thrush-goddess, whoever she was. She threw her hands out, dismissing the boy.
“So we agree on one thing,” said the gnome to her. “Let him go. Yes, loosened at last, I can now trouble you at my pleasure. It’s been too many centuries of stasis for me to uncoil all at once, but uncoil I will.”
“Scoundrel. I shall be ready,” she said to the gnome. To the boy, she added, “Though it troubles me, I send you back. Exiled. You’ve earned no place among us.”
“Now set me down,” growled the gnome to the boy, “and our transaction is completed.”
The boy put the knife between his teeth as he picked up the severed limb of the maiden tree.
“Not my concern,” cried the queen to the gnome. “That’s what comes of trusting the innocent. They’re as malign as everyone else. Save yourself, if you can.”
She raised her hands, and a chorus of birdsong rose all around them. A maelstrom in the air, of summergreen leaves and pine needles and bits of bark and twig. With both his hands on the newly trimmed staff, the boy closed his one capable eye. It felt as if the forest were retreating, and the Queen of the Thrushes with it. The gnome on the head of the blade swore fiercely, but the boy didn’t open his jaws.
7.
The sound of speaking voices brought the boy around. The surprise wasn’t so much that he was alive again but that the voice wasn’t the old man’s voice. The old woman was talking to a visitor—the first they’d ever had.
Dirk tried and failed to raise himself on his elbows. He wasn’t in his loft but laid out upon the bearskin in the nook that the old woman sometimes called her changing room. The cloth that hung in the doorway blocked Dirk’s view of the main room.
He was so surprised at the novelty of a guest to the waldhütte that he lay his head back down and just listened.
“You are very good at telling these tales,” said the visitor. He had a kindly tone, the sort that seemed to welcome further comment. “They come out of you so naturally. Do you have children or grandchildren to tell stories to?”
“Not a one,” said the old woman. “It’s just me and the old man here, and always was. I wouldn’t have a child about here. I couldn’t stand the bother.”
“Your command of the old folk tale is impressive, given you’ve no youngster to sit agog at your feet.” （Dirk held his breath.） “Tell me another.”
“Come back tomorrow,” replied the old woman. “I have mending to do, and hog fat to render, and I can’t sit in the sunny hours amusing you with tales of the forest. Are you able to find your way here again?”