I bent my head. “Thank you for helping me to see this. She will be ever under my eye.”
You thought I was humble, but in truth I was only saying I would watch Annakey more closely, that she might not cause any more trouble. I felt it my place to care for you in this way.
“Words are like dolls,” Renoa said later when I told her what the men had said. “They make things happen.”
“Now you begin to see,” I said.
I took the God doll down from the shelf in the other room and took the parchment out of its hiding place. “‘Words are Gods dolls,’ ” I read.“ ‘With a word he made us. Only to us, his children, did he give words and the power to make.’ That is why the promise is so important. If we break a promise, a word means nothing, and if a word means nothing, then we have lost the power God gave us.”
“But ... but with that power came the freedom to lie, the ability to destroy a real thing with words,” Renoa said. You see how clever she was at a young age.
“Yes. That is why we have promise dolls, to watch our words, and to help us keep the promise that God placed in us. Now here is our power: to make the story of our village by the art of our hands. Dollmage is storymaker. Through the eyes of the Dollmage is the story told.”
Renoa looked at me boldly and as an equal. “Yes, I begin to see.”
I picked up a carving knife and a piece of wood and began to teach her, but my old hands shook and I could not think why.
Chapter 5
Inscription on the Lullaby dolclass="underline"
Promise doll, do not weep,
This promise I must keep.
Promise doll, do not sleep,
This promise I will keep.
As I said, Annakey ran away when Renoa led the other young people to taunt her. Now I will tell you where Annakey ran. How do you know, Dollmage? you ask with your eyes. How can you tell us the truth about Annakey, where she went and what she thought? The children know, but I forbid them to tell. Believe me only when I tell you that the Dollmage is the storymaker. Listen to me then, as the children do.
Annakey ran alongside the river until the houses were all past her. She ran until there were no more bridges, until the fields turned to thorn and thicket, and on until the underbrush turned to saplings and the saplings to shadowed forest. She ran until she came to where the river comes fast out of the mountain. It is a feared place. Here the bear and the cougar come to water and the wolves come to howl. Here the great trees have spirits and hang down their long branches to pinch and scratch. Here there are eyes in every hole. Annakey did not care that cougars and bears had lapped at the water, nor that there were bones in the shallows.
Annakey is afraid of only one thing, and that is not it.
Look into her eyes now. Though you keep your stones hard by your sides, though you wish to have my tale over so you can execute her, there is no fear in her eyes. No, Annakey is afraid of only one thing.
What is it, the children ask. I will not tell you now. Later. My temper is frayed from sleeping in the open last night. It is a wonder you do not wear out your voices, snoring all night. So many snores! It is useful for keeping the bears and wildcats away at night, but hard on a Dollmage’s temper.
As I was saying, Annakey sat on a rock at the riverbank and listened to the sound of the rushy water. I will tell you what Annakey learned as she sat upon that rock.
First, Annakey learned that morning to be alone. That is a great power.
Second, she learned that there is cruelty in the world. She did not yet understand that those who hurt others do so because they believe that people desire to hurt them. She did not know yet that such people suffer more than the ones they hurt, for they must live in their own skin, in a world of their own making, a world full of enemies. Annakey would be years older before she learned this, but today she had learned about cruelty. That lesson in itself was valuable.
Annakey did not appreciate the lesson. Her throat and chest ached. The flat rock she lay on absorbed the heat of the sun, but Annakey felt the cold of its heart. Icy water slicked the rocks in the shallows. After a long time she noticed that in the river shallows was a patch of clay. It was clean and slippery, pale green in color. She dug at it with her fingers, retrieved a handful, and began to work it. She made a sheep.
The pain in her throat and chest began to diminish.
For the first time Annakey looked at her surroundings and found that it was a wondrous place. The trees were thick all around, but had backed away to make a small, round clearing by the river. The grass was thick and soft here, not too high, and scented with bee-lace and mud orchids. The trees hung their branches over the clearing protectively. Even the water was tamer here, eddied into a quiet little bay at the foot of the large, flat rock that Annakey was sitting on. It charmed her. It was like a little room in the woods just for her. There was even a hidey-hole, for one of the trees had a huge knot in its trunk. She put the clay sheep in the knothole, but there would be enough room to hide more treasures if she were to come here again.
When Annakey returned to the village and learned that Roily the cow had drowned, she came to me, her face the color of the pale green clay under her fingernails.
“I drowned Roily,” she said. “I will pay.”
“You made the doll, but Renoa threw it in the river. It is prideful to think you did it, to think you have the power.”
Annakey looked down at her hands, relieved that they had done nothing appalling and without her permission. Only then did she think to blush under my rebuke.
“Nevertheless,” I said, “you must promise me that you will not make any more such animal dolls. I have told the villagers I will watch you.”
She nodded. A nod is as good as a promise.
After a few days, she noticed that some people would no longer speak to her as she went about her work, and those who did spoke to her differently than before. Still Annakey smiled, but oh, such tucking away of bitterness there must have been.
At the end of the day, Annakey returned to her hiding place. She brought with her an old wool blanket so dense it could keep out a morning’s rain. She brought dried fruit and a fishhook, a spoon, a pot, a small box of oil, and salt. Carefully she took her clay sheep out of the knothole and laid it on the large, flat rock by the river.
She gathered moss for a lawn for the clay sheep to eat in. She found pebbles for boulders and bits of pine for bushes and small-leafed twigs for great trees. She fashioned a shallow bowl of clay and filled it with water for a pond. She broke bits of her hair to float in the pond for fishes. Tiny bluebells and baby’s breath that she found growing wild on the river-bank were sweet flowers for her sheep in his meadow. She kept her promise to me, however, that she would not make any more animal dolls. Her sheep had the meadow to himself.
When Annakey returned home she did her work with a song and a light hand. Even when the work became heavy and long, when the other children played while Annakey must weed and clean and cook, she had a meadow for her mind to live in.
Because of her pet deer, Renoa’s desire to do the work of a Dollmage left her again. She would stay all day upon the mountain and come home only at dark. At times she slept in the woods. She took her friends from the village to places no one had seen. She became respected for her knowledge of the wilderness and all things in it.
I prayed for the day the deer would go wild again and leave her. Once I tried to take her clay deer from her pocket as she slept. I would put the doll over the mountains, far away from the Seekvalley village doll. But she woke, and her eyes glowed in the darkness like a wild animal’s.