“Who are you that you ask after the red shoes?” he roared.
He is trying to scare me, thought Elsa, and she would not be scared. She told him of Karen and her story, and as she did, he seemed to grow smaller and sadder.
“I remember her,” he said, hunching his shoulders up. “She came to my door. She was only skin and bones. Her legs were scratched and bloody. She could not stop dancing although she could barely breathe and could no longer hold her head up straight. She begged me to strike the shoes from her body, and I could see nothing else to do. I used my axe as best I could, and she bled terribly and fell against me. The red shoes danced away into the woods, carrying her feet with them.” He looked off towards the north, to where the woods loomed dark and green, and the sunlight feared to go. “I have never been afraid of what I do until I did that thing. Nor yet have I ever been able to forget that sight of her feet set free to dance in the red shoes.”
“The shoes stole her feet,” said Elsa firmly. “And I am going to find them.”
The executioner looked into her eyes for a long moment. Then he nodded. He took her into his cramped, crooked house. He fed her thin soup and black bread and replenished her milk. He found a comb so that she might straighten her hair and retie her doll’s ribbons. Then he took her to the path that led into the woods.
“Further I dare not go,” he said. “I have killed too many men. Though I only did as the laws required, they do not know that, and they wait for me in the woods. But you are a good child, and they cannot touch you.”
Elsa thanked the executioner and walked down the rutted path into the woods. All the while, the executioner watched her go.
In the deep woods, it quickly became dark as night. The few sunbeams were paler than the moon’s had ever been. The path was pitted with the tracks of deer and the wolves that followed them. The roots of trees crisscrossed the way and caught at Elsa’s toes to trip her up. Overhead, invisible in the branches, the crows called to one another to come see this new thing. They laughed hard and harsh when she stumbled. The wind wormed its way between the tree trunks to make her shiver and tease her hair. The whole world smelled of moss and old graves.
Elsa walked on. She looked this way and that for some sign of the red shoes in the gloom, but she saw only the white ghosts of the dead men, their heads lolling on their shoulders, waiting for the executioner to come to them. But they did not come onto the path, and they did not touch her.
Elsa walked on. She ate her bread and drank her milk, and she held her doll. The path grew narrower until it was only a winding thread. Gnarled trees and unkind bracken reached out their crooked twigs to poke and prod her. They tore at Clarissa’s dress and tried to snatch away her ribbons.
At last, when Elsa was so tired she was afraid she could go no further, she saw a woman sitting on a great, arching tree root. She was as brown, knobby and gnarled as that root, with a great hump over her left shoulder. Indeed, Elsa might have thought she was just another part of the tree if her eyes had not gleamed so brightly in the darkness.
“Hello, my little maid,” the old woman said in a voice as soft and rich as loam. “Where are you going all alone?”
“I am going to find the red shoes,” replied Elsa. “Have you seen them?”
“Well, now.” The old woman tapped her chin. “That is a large question. Let us have some of that bread and milk and think about it.”
So, Elsa sat beside the old woman and shared out her bread and milk, which the old woman took with great smackings of her lips and slurpings of her tongue. She belched and rubbed at her wagging dew-lap and scratched herself about the body and the head. Elsa did her best to remember her manners and not stare, but it was very difficult.
“Now then,” said the old woman, when all the food was gone. “You say you are looking for the red shoes? They are here.”
“I must make them give Karen her feet back.”
“Ah!” she exclaimed archly. “Well, finding them is one thing, and catching them, that’s another altogether.”
Elsa stuck her chin out as she had with her father. She did not have to say anything though. The old woman nodded.
“Very good,” she said. “So. You must follow the path. It will go under a tree and over a stream. On the other side of that stream, you will come to a clearing where a great oak has fallen. There you will find a soldier with a red beard playing on a fiddle. Do not let him see you. After a time, he will call the red shoes and make them dance for him. They will not look as you think they might, and you must not be afraid.”
“I will not be afraid.”
Again, the old woman nodded. “Good. The soldier will make the shoes dance until they cry out, “Give us rest! Give us rest!” And the soldier will answer, “You will have no rest until I grow weary, and I never grow weary while I watch you dance!” You must cry ‘Soldier, soldier, give me the red shoes!’ He will answer you, “ ‘Little Elsa, Little Elsa, give me a dance!’ Then he will play his fiddle, and you will dance.”
“Then what do I do?”
“Ah. Then, my child, you will dance until you give him something he wants as much as the dance.”
“What is that?”
But the old woman shook her heavy head and shrugged her humped shoulder. “That is what you must find, Little Elsa.” Then she sprang down from the root and scampered into the forest, and she was gone before Elsa could draw her next breath.
Elsa sat there for a long time, listening to her own heartbeat and to the laughter of the crows. Then she gathered her empty cup and handkerchief and climbed down off the root. Elsa walked on. The woods grew darker, and the path grew narrower still. There was a place where a tree root arched over it like a doorway, and Elsa walked through. A stream cut it neatly in two with silver water and muted laughter. She jumped over it, landing unsteadily on her tired feet.
Ahead she saw a place that was gray instead of black. Gradually, her aching eyes saw it was a clearing, and she saw the black corpse of a tree lying like a fallen giant in the middle. Her breath seized up in her throat, and she left the path that was her only guide, and, one hesitant step at a time, she moved toward that gray place. The trees laid their branches on her head and shoulders, cautioning, trying to hold her back and turn her away. She had to push past them as she pushed past her brothers and sisters to see the parades in the streets. As she drew closer, something tickled at her nose, a strange smell she did not expect in such a place. Tobacco.
Elsa dropped down to her knees. Awkwardly, for she kept hold of Clarissa in one arm, she wriggled forward. The ragged hem of the tree trunk pointed toward her, and past it she could just see a man’s black boots, and a brown hand, and a trickle of white smoke rising toward the gray evening sky.
Elsa made her decision. She crept carefully into the hollow of the great fallen tree. The worms and beetles paused in their work to see who this new neighbor was. The punk wood turned to powder as she touched it and showered down into her hair and eyes. She rubbed her eyelids, held in her sneezes and peered out through a slit in the bark that allowed her to see just a little slice of the clearing. But that slice held the soldier with his red beard wild and uncombed and his scarlet coat shining with gold braid.
The soldier sat on a stone, his legs stretched out and his black boots crossed. He puffed contentedly on a long-stemmed white pipe. Thick smoke poured from the bowl and from his mouth as it opened and closed, rising up as if it were what made the clouds that had gathered so thickly overhead.
After a time, he seemed to weary of smoking. He knocked out his white pipe against his black boot heel and tucked it into his coat. Then, from somewhere Elsa could not see, he took out a little fiddle and curving bow. He drew the bow across the fiddle strings and the music leaped up as merrily as the flames in her home’s hearth. He set to playing at once. The swooping, soaring notes rang through the forest, making the air shiver. The tune he played was strange and sad and merry and frightening all at once. Elsa’s feet itched at the sound of it. They were tired no more and wanted to be up and moving. Her ears strained to hear more. She clutched at Clarissa and bit down on her tongue. She tried hard to remember the other sound, the one that brought her here, the thump, thump, creak, creak of Karen’s crutches and wooden slats on the kitchen floor. As she did, the tune did not call quite so loudly.