Black Pearls - Louise Hawes [56]
As always, all the onlookers gasped and begged to touch the marvelous orb. As it was passed from hand to hand, Jack kept his eye on this latest treasure. All the while, he smiled and stroked the careless, preening hen.
Too soon, however, he tired of this familiar triumph and called out as the giant always had. "Where is my golden harp?" he thundered, though all could see the servant had fetched me and was placing me upon a tassled rug at his side. When all was still, Jack made a great show of rolling up his sleeves. He pointed a ring-bedecked finger at me and stared imperiously from under his brows. "Play!" he commanded.
You have surely guessed what happened next, for the lad still had no song for me to play, no melody I could draw from his heart. After my silence came the usual curses, and the tantrums. Jack tried and tried but could not make me sing.
Finally, just as before, I was carried to the door. In front of all his gaudy guests, my master proclaimed that a harp which didn't play was not worth keeping. The door was thrown wide and the entire company drew back from the night. It seemed to me Jack struck a pose, holding me on his shoulders, like Atlas with the world. Time seemed to stop, several ladies tittered nervously, and someone gasped. At last, though, he mustered all his strength and hurled me with such venomous fury that the strings were torn from my chest and I lay, as if dying, under the eaves of his coachman's shed.
***
Spells are supposed to be broken with good deeds. Or with the answer to a riddle. Or with true love's first kiss. But that is not the way the enchantment that bound me was at last undone. I doubt the bandylegged giant-killer who hurled me from his house cared where I landed—but had he used only a little less arm or a bit more gentleness, the magic might not have been throttled out of me. And had his good mother rushed to retrieve me instead of giggling nervously and calling for more savories, I might not have fallen into that healing sleep.
When it was over, it was as if a dream had ended or a fever broken. I woke to the whickers and warm breath of a handsome bay, leaning from his stall to nibble my hair. I felt a tingling in my arms and legs, a ringing in my ears and skull, and the heady, dimly remembered rush of blood through my veins. Without knowing what I did, I raised myself onto one elbow and opened my eyes to the sight of my own two legs, my long-lost knees and shins. There was pain, yes. But nothing I could not endure, would not have suffered doubly, for the sake of what came next. I stood, sweet heaven, I rose up and walked.
Surely nobody noticed the poor girl who struggled to her feet by the stables. Who stood for a moment, eye to eye with the bay, then turned toward the open fields behind the great house. There were no words, only a rhythm in my head that moved my feet, that called my name, that drew me to the forest where the moon was setting.
When I passed the door through which I had been tossed—was it moments or days before?—I heard no voices and all was still and dark. Yet as I left behind that sullen house, there came again the shadow song I had felt in someone's dream—was it days or years before? The two figures in the dream were clearer now, and I could hear Jack's father laughing, see him hoist his small son to his shoulders. He sang a tune to the little boy, a tune I could have played, music I might have sung. For the time it takes a candle to smoke and then go out, I lingered to listen. The pull to soothe my master, to find at last the song that would bring him rest, held me. But then I heard again the pounding in my ears, the rush of my own blood.
My song. Though I had been so long bewitched that I barely remembered what it was to have a will of my own, I heard a new tune now. No one had pointed at me. No one had shouted, "Play!" Yet clear as a stone dropped in a still pond, loud as the call of geese across the sky,