In the Night Garden

“There was. I was here; I fought. We were pressed into service as cannonballs. We learned new words, too. I was shot into the side of a bull elephant, and his blood swallowed me up. And after, when the fields were full of violets and blood-spattered balls, mothers began to take us home and give us to girls who were not sweet as cream and honey, but clever as bees. There was a war; I am a veteran. Does that make me sound brave to you? Does it make you like me?”

Perhaps a grown woman would have been more circumspect. “You are a golden hedgehog all my own! How could I like you better than I do?”

His red eyes flared and dimmed in the late afternoon light. The grass seeds and dandelion dust had settled around him in a floating halo of white. “That is fortunate, for I am going to marry you. That is what I am owed, after all my loyal service—even ordnance should come home to wife and biscuits. I have been your toy. I like you; your hands have always made me blush. I have waited as long as I can, until you were grown enough to smile on me. After all the amusement I have given you, do you not think some recompense is due? This is what I demand, and this is what shall occur.”

I laughed from my belly. I laughed as only children without fear may. “I like you, Ciriaco, but I am not going to marry you! Even if you were not a hedgehog and I were not a girl, I am only a child and very far off from fitting a wedding dress.”

“I am the mountain,” he growled. “I am owed. I have not forgotten who I was before the war—I must be fitted to a princess, an innocent girl whose fingers have yet known no rings. It is the way of things, and I will not be denied just because I am not a pretty ruby crown or a bracelet of silver and sapphires.”

“Hedgehog, I am not a princess. My parents are grain merchants. We eat well and dress well, but it is a pretty poor kind of royalty, even among the huldra. Princess of bread and beer!”

“That is princess enough.”

“I’m sorry, poor beast. I will not marry you.”

I had hardly spoken when they came: gold and copper and silver and tin, ball after ball rolling through the grass, iron pitted and pocked, quartz streaked in grime. They opened up into hedgehogs, their red eyes slitted and sharp, glaring at me from beneath furrowed and shining brows. I stepped backward, as though a pail of water had been overturned at my feet.

“There are few enough of us who are left,” rumbled Ciriaco in his yellow throat, “but enough to keep you safe and still. Your parents will not miss you—they gave you a golden ball, after all. Most probably they expected you to go missing long ago and are even now wondering why you do not get on with it.”

I clenched my fists. “I am not wicked,” I insisted.

“Then why have they left you all alone to amuse yourself with abandoned war relics? Why does no one call you in to dinner? Why does no one cry, ‘Oh! Where has my pretty daughter gone?’”

I twisted my tail in my hands. “I am not a favorite—that doesn’t mean I am wicked, and it certainly doesn’t mean I shall do whatever my talking toy tells me to.”

Ciriaco growled, a sound like clock hands scraping together. At this the two hedgehogs nearest me, a cast-iron fellow and a sow of copper, leapt forward, drawing a handful of quills from their backs like young men drawing their swords. They each seized in cold, stubby hands the long ropes of my hair and with a little roll and a little flip, pinned my curls to the earth, driving their quills in like tent stakes. I tugged and wept but could not pull free. Ciriaco raised his eyes to me, moist and scarlet.

“If I say I love you, will you soften?”

“No, my own golden ball, I am only a child. I will not be a wife.”

The other hedgehogs, smooth and ordered as a little army, began to tear into the earth as I struggled, pinned by their quills. They tore up strips of wet brown sod with bits of grass and yellow flowers still clinging to it, and began to build.

“I shall build us a house, Oubliette, a house for living and loving and cooking and dying, and you will live in it whether you like it or no,” cried Ciriaco, and he danced with a terrible joy while his family worked, their backs shimmering in the last of the sun. His golden feet tamped the soil, and the sod bricks grew around me. “I shall be no one’s ball again!” he sang.

Indeed, through the night they built up the house, and closed me into it like a rafter. By dawn only my eyes and mouth were left naked—and out of the cracks between the soft bricks flowed my trapped hair, with more quills than I could count wrapped up in the dark strands and plunged deep into the field, each lovingly contributed by the hedgehog architects. From a distance, all anyone might see was a humble sod house, with bits of old tree bark showing through the walls. The sheaves of hair stretched from the house like an awning, and Ciriaco reclined in their shade.

The other hedgehogs shrugged and rolled once more into gleaming balls. In the swelling morning, they trundled off through the now-bare field.

“I love you, Oubliette,” said my golden ball. “Put your hand to my head again and I will put a quill ring on it, and we will be happy in the house I have made for you.”

I cried quietly, my tears running muddily through the bricks. “Please, please. Let me go home.”

“You are home—you are the very substance of home.”

So it went. He asked to bend his quills into a ring every day, and every day I felt mud climbing my nose and refused. He was right, you know. No one came crying: “Oh, where has my pretty daughter gone?” No one looked for me. Perhaps a golden ball is nothing but a ball of yarn to lead difficult cats skipping away from their mothers. Perhaps I am wicked in some way I cannot guess, some way which a hedgehog or a miller’s boy can see, but a girl may not.

Finally, Ciriaco left me during the evenings, satisfied at last that I could not pull my hair free, nor escape his house. He rolled away and out of sight, burrowing into leaves and blossoms for warmth, leaving me to frost and hardening sod. I felt as though I too were bounded in blisters like diamonds, clapped up in a cold mountain. My tears froze on the fringes of grass sprouting from the walls when winter came—and when winter came, and the house was dusted with snow, like a new grandmother’s hair, my rescue came shambling into the field where I stood, my knees bent and burning.

THE TALE

OF THE

TWELVE COINS,

CONTINUED

HER BREATH HAD MADE THE SMALL SPACE BETWEEN us warm.