Now I will tell you the third and biggest reason why I disliked Vilsa.
The fall before Annakey and Renoa and Manal and Areth were born,Vilsa’s husband, with another man, went away to look for another valley. “There will not be enough land for our son’s sons,” Fedr Rainsayer had declared at a village meeting.
You older ones will remember. Fedr said, “My tally stick says in the next generation there will be dearth.”
“There are no more valleys,” I told him at the meeting. “The valley where my great-grandmother lived was taken over and infested by robber people. All the villages around were destroyed. Only we survived. We came here to the only other valley that could be found in the endless range of mountains that make up our world.”
“We have no choice but to look,” Fedr said gravely. “We must think of our children and our grandchildren.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “You are going to your deaths,” I said.
Then Vilsa Rainsayer spoke up. “Dollmage, where is your faith? Is this not your art? Do you not remember that when our great-grandmother was young and the robber people came, she made a doll of this valley? She made it first, and so it was found, and so we live here. Could you not make a doll of another valley?”
“Of course I remember,” I said. “I care for the village doll she made to this day. I add to it. Nothing is built in the village until it is first added to the valley doll. I make the story of the village by it.” But my pride was damaged. How dare she instruct me, I thought.
Vilsas voice became gentle, and she touched my hand. “Make us a doll of a new valley, and my husband will find it. Make him safe among the deep passes and the slag peaks, Dollmage, and he will find a new valley.”
Now I knew her gentleness was to appease me, but it offended me almost worse than her instructions. I tried to make a new valley doll but my pride was taking up all the room in my heart. There was no room left for my art to breathe. Also, I was not so young as my great-grandmother had been when she made a new valley doll.
I tried to make something. I tried, but it would not come. I might have seen even then that my powers were dwindling, but at the time I blamed Vilsa. I thought, I cannot make the doll of a village that is not there. Well, she would have something, and so I got out my materials and began. Finally I fashioned something, a valley held by five mountains. It was done. There were crags and water and wild forests. There were pines on the stony slopes, and flowering oak and blue-holly on the valley floor. To the untrained eye it was sufficient, but I knew that it had not come from any place real.
When I showed it to the men who journeyed, they looked at it solemnly and nodded and said good-bye. Vilsa Rainsayer, when she looked at it, however, was not pleased.
“Dollmage, is there no deer-trod in the thicket?” she asked.
“There is game. It is midday and the hart sleeps.”
“Dollmage, where are the roosting birds and the mice and the owls?” she asked.
“Sleeping in their holes,” I said sharply.
She looked puzzled. “I see no dens, no nests.” She walked around it. “Is there no cornflower in the meadow? Is there no nettle? No wild corn or creepers?”
I glared at her. I hated her then. How dare she criticize! She as much as said she saw no art in it, no dreaming, no vision, and she might have found no better way to insult me.
She became afraid for her husband and begged him not to leave. He and his companion, Petr, the fieldmaster’s hermit brother, disappeared into the mountain forest. When they were gone, I took the new valley doll.
I meant to set it on the floor in the corner, but it slipped out of my hands.
It smashed against the wall, breaking, and the small pieces I had made for men flew onto the dirt floor. It was dark. I looked for them on my hands and knees, sick in my heart. I could not find them. After a time I gave up, and left the mess in a dark corner of the room for the mice to gnaw and the beetles to crawl upon.
“Well,” I said to the dark in the room, “I told them they were going to their deaths.”
The guiltier I felt, the more I blamed Vilsa. When it was known in the village that Vilsa had a child growing in her, I began to despise her. God had not sent me a child. To make things worse, though she was pregnant, she was still beautiful, and her house was still cleaner than mine.
Now you know why I did not like Vilsa Rainsayer. When she gave birth to a daughter on the same day as Mabe Willowknot, I liked her even less. I asked God why he was doing this to me. “To make you wise,” he said. I was surprised. I was already very wise.
The thunderstorms ceased in the night and the dawn rose on sleet showers. I went to visit Mabe Willowknot.The turf in the village common was spongy underfoot so I did not frighten the swans that fed on the river, nor did Mabe hear me coming. Her infant child was crying, but Mabe lay unconcerned.
“Let her sisters pick her up,” she said to my cross look. “I’ve fed the child.” She was a winter peach: sour, and at her center a hard core.
“What will you name her?”
She shrugged. I named the child Renoa after the baby I never had, and I began to love her.
Then I went to see Vilsa Rainsayer. Her roof needed thatch, and the shed door was in poor repair, but what was to be expected? Her husband had still not returned. When people suggested that she mourn for her husband, she only laughed. She refused to believe that he was dead. She was a quiet lass, but bone stubborn.
Vilsa sat in a rocker, cradling her babe as if she had given birth to her own heart. The floor of stone flags was clean as a river pebble. Before the fire were two sturdy chairs, and on them were thick, soft cushions, newly sewn, the stuffing smelling sweet of ladies’ bedstraw. The fire was cheery, the mantel dusted, the hearthstone scrubbed, and the chimney breast decorated with a swag of dried flowers.The pottery sink was without stain, the cream pans were polished, and the kettle scrubbed. Through the bedroom door I could see a bed, thick with quilted comforters, and a few worn clothes hung clean and mended on hooks. A chest at the foot of the bed had been freshly oiled. There were clover tarts in a basket on the table, the scent of them warming the house as much as the fire.
I love clover tarts, but today the smell of them made me gag.
“How could you clean today?” I asked.
She was pale, but prettier for it. “My friends have been kind,” Vilsa said.
“You were not supposed to be the one,” I said to her.
“Forgive me, Dollmage, but is God not the one who gave me to deliver in the storm?” Her voice was deferent, but strong in the truth. When was she going to learn not to be more right than me?
“Perhaps,” I said, “but she will not be Dollmage.”
“Have you made her promise doll already?” she asked, surprised.
“No.”
“Then we will see.”
She did not see that I wanted to slap her for her insolence. Everyone else feared and flattered me, and I had become used to it.
She could not keep her eyes off her baby child. Why did that also cause me a small pain at the back of my heart?
“What will you name her?” I asked in the most civil tone I could manage.
“Annakey, for her father loves that name.”
“Let me give you some advice,” I said.
“Yes, Dollmage.”
“It is foolish to love your Annakey so. A child who is adored and meets with nothing but kindness in its own home will be baffled when it meets the world full of greed and cruelty. A child who is protected does not learn to fight, does not learn to be wary and sly.”