Black Pearls - Louise Hawes [49]
Aunt Hazel, I suppose, had neither the strength nor the will to chase after the old woman. For she sat where she was, long after the hag had left, staring vacantly at the fire and only sometimes at me. "It was just one song," she said at last. "Not so much to ask." She shook her head and tears collected in the ridges under her eyes. "Not so much to give."
That was when she stood and faced me, holding up one hand as the horse trainers do at Tinley Faire. "Play," she ordered, and lowered her hand again.
I tried to run from the feeling that rose in me as she uttered her command. I found, however, that I was frozen into a crouch, my folded legs held fast by the longer strings of the fiendish harp. So there was no escaping the rush of song that filled my chest and wanted to force itself from my throat. I had seen wrens and doves trembling in the throes of their songs, their tiny bodies convulsed in the effort to set them free. And now here was I, equally in thrall to a melody I must release or die.
My mouth opened and the song poured out. My golden arms rose, without my willing it, to pluck the strings attached to my own breast. The pain and the joy I felt as the music echoed in my chest made me remember the smile on Our Crucified Savior in the church at Warwick's Ford. I marveled at the exquisite torture I was inflicting on myself, and would not have stopped it for all the world.
As I plucked and sang the very tune she had been unable to make me play a few hours before, my aunt stared at me in horror. Her mouth open, her eyes wide, she listened, as still as a statue, to "The Turtle Dove's Lament." When the last note had ceased shaking my poor bones, she woke as if from a trance.
"It is a beautiful tune," she said, staring into my unblinking eyes. "But I would rather die than hear it again!" Poor Aunt sank to her knees before me then, begging a forgiveness my frozen lips could never speak. "This is not what I intended," she cried, rending her dress and pulling her hair out in great fistfuls. "This is not what I meant at all!"
It was only a week before my aunt succumbed to the shock my transformation had caused her already tender constitution. Unable to help, I watched in horror as she grew ever weaker and finally, whimpering like a starving animal, let death put an end to her suffering. Nor could I call out to those who buried her and sold all her possessions to the scrap dealer. Except for the harp, the great golden harp in the shape of a kneeling girl.
None of the greedy folk who bought me (each paid a handsome sum, and then recouped it by selling me for even more to someone else) could make me play the way my aunt had done. It was only a monster, a murderer and thief, who was able at last to put the magic to work. I suppose he was accustomed to giving orders, to treating others like dogs, for once he had stolen me from my owner and climbed the mountain to his palace, he did not sit beside me and try to pluck my strings as the others had. Instead, he pointed his terrible finger at me and thundered, "Play!"
That was the first concert I sang for the giant, but hardly the last. Just as all the tales say, he loved to listen to his magic harp. In fact, it became a ritual for him each evening after supper. No sooner had the dishes, with their mess of gnawed bones and rejected bits of gristle, been cleared from the table than the huge fellow would count the money he had made off with that day, call for his magic pullet to lay a golden egg, and at last demand of his wife, "Where is my golden harp?"
I often wondered if the little russet hen were under an enchantment, too. Perhaps she was a young girl like me, or even a good dame who had offended some magician or spell-weaver. Perhaps it cost her the same pain and gave her the same throbbing joy to lay her eggs as I experienced when I sang my songs? Often, when the giant lifted the bird from her nest and commanded, "Lay!" I felt the same loosening in my throat, the same heat in my veins that accompanied