Ballad I
“One is one and all alone
And evermore shall be so.”
—trad. English folk song
Once there was a woman who was condemned to boil in a pot of water for ever and ever.
After her trial, a powerful magician led her away in chains and cast a spell upon her body, so that though this woman might twist and roil in the scalding vat for centuries, her flesh should not corrupt nor her fragile nerves become accustomed to the pain. And a fire was laid on a hilltop, and a great iron cauldron set thereon, and the clearest well-water poured therein. And the magician wrought a second spell, once the water was at its highest boil, such that no part of this arrangement should alter with the passing of the years.
The king himself took up the woman by her chained wrists and lowered her thrashing into the pot, though the steam reddened his royal face and the spattering drops burned his royal skin. And when she was all beneath the water, and the whole assembly could see that the spell held true and the condemned woman did not die, they made great rejoicing, and trooped heartily back to court to feast the justice of the king.
The sun went down, and the woman did not die. The stars came out, and still she lived. The new day’s sun rose, and she learned that it made no difference whether she opened her mouth to scream or not, because the water hurt her everywhere.
The magician had been as good as his word, and for all the time the woman boiled in the pot the pain never slackened. By degrees, however, she learned to share the cauldron and her freckled body with the unceasing hurt, and so she did not go mad. Little by little, she found things to occupy herself in those hours not set aside for wailing: astronomy (though made more difficult by the shifting film above her head), memorizing with eyes and fingertips every rough centimeter of the iron that bottled her, counting to impossibly high numbers.
She did not track the days. She knew nonetheless that it had been a long time since the king released his grip on her wrists, when she looked up to see a man’s face peering down into her pot. It was not a screaming hour, so she lifted her own face up as close as she could to scrutinize him. He was very young; he wore a helmet; when he saw that there were eyes gazing into his own from beneath the steam, he staggered away in disgust. He was back a moment later, wiping his mouth and making gestures to the effect that he had come to rescue her.
“Wait,” she said laboriously, feeding each word into a separate bubble so he could hear her as they burst. “What kind of world is it, out there? Who is king?”
Speaking slowly, so that she might read the words on his lips, the knight (for that is what he was) named a man who had been a toddling grandchild when she had been condemned.
“There was a war,” he said, after that. “The king you knew, he wanted the magician to make him immortal, like you. The magician wouldn’t. So, there was a war, a long one, and we’re just now getting back to doing things the way they should be done.”
“I see,” the woman said. “And how do you punish wrongdoers, in this new time?”
“Oh,” said the knight. “Well, all of our magicians are dead. The war killed them. So we just dip wicked people in boiling oil, and they die. Sometimes we cut their heads off with sharp axes, if we have run out of oil.” The woman could not see his feet, but she guessed by the movement of his head that he was shifting his weight from one to the other, uncomfortably. “Can we talk about something else, please?” he asked.
“Certainly,” the woman replied. “How did you know I was here, after all this time? Am I written of, in your chronicles?”
The knight only looked more uncomfortable. “No,” he said after a moment. “I don’t even know what you did to be punished in this way. My grandmother told me as a boy that, when I became a knight, I would have to travel the country healing pain and injustice. The king knighted me yesterday, and when I asked my grandmother where to go first, she said she had heard of a woman trapped in agony, somewhere in these hills.”
The woman tapped her feet against the side of the pot, a constrained little dance she sometimes did when she was thinking. “How did you plan to get me out?” she asked the knight, as kindly as she could. The pain was creeping up on her again, and she knew it was edging close to her designated period of wailing.
“I hadn’t really thought that far, to be honest,” the knight replied. “I wasn’t even sure of finding you. Maybe I could put the fire out, or tip the pot over so that the water all runs out and you can go free.” He gestured vaguely at the sky, still seeming perplexed.
The woman shook her head, strands of her hair borne up in tangles by the quick-moving water. “I do not think that will work,” she said slowly. “The magician put a spell on the fire so it would never go out, and on the water so it cannot be reduced. I think you have to pull me out with something. Do you have such a thing as a rope with you, perhaps?”
The knight gazed down with pursed mouth. It was an unattractive expression on someone so young. The woman thought, though she couldn’t be sure, that he’d propped his hands on his armored hips. “You don’t seem to be in much agony, for someone who’s been in a pot of boiling water for three generations. After all, you’re talking to me calmly enough, and your skin isn’t even red. I’ll bet that water isn’t really boiling at all.” And, so saying, the knight reached both arms down into the water, as if to take her hands.
He didn’t even brush her with his fingertips before he leapt back, screaming. She saw the slivers of exposed skin at his wrists blistering for an instant before they vanished from her sight, and for a long moment after she could hear him blundering away through the wood, his horse and quest forgotten.
After that, the woman went a long time without beholding another human face. Deer and birds she saw aplenty, and insects that gusted around the plumes of steam in the summertime. Once, she heard a disturbance and craned her head back to see the triangular face of a bear peering down at her, rain-matted and solemn.
Much later, after so long that the woman had started to forget the rules of her language, knowing now only the dialects of water and of iron, she heard a rhythmic tapping on the side of her cauldron, as if someone were striking it repeatedly with a heavy branch. The woman tapped back as best she could, and then tipped her face to view the surface, which she had not done in many years except to occasionally take in sun or starlight.
Over the rim of the pot, there appeared the face of a girl, younger even than the knight had been. She looked startled, though not as if she wanted to follow in the knight’s footsteps and vomit. “Hello,” the girl said, shaping the letters very slowly. Even so, she had to repeat the word two or three times before the woman understood and made a reply.
“Hello,” she said, and watched the girl’s face as she took in her accent, distorted even further by the water. Under the seething of the water-pain, her throat ached from even this minor exercise after disuse. “What year is it?”
The girl told her. Then she had to tell her again, not because the woman hadn’t understood the first time, but because she could not immediately accept that so much time had passed.
“What are you doing here?” the woman in the pot asked, when she had recovered somewhat. “Surely I am forgotten in the world, after all this time.”
The girl nodded, her short, sunbright hair bouncing slightly. “There are houses all around this wood, now. Mine is over there,” she said, pointing. “No one has built any just here yet, though, because it’s not convenient with the hill. And the old people still tell stories about a witch who lives in a boiling cookpot, and tricks men into reaching in there after her, so their hands are all burned away. I guess that’s you.”
“Only one man. And I told him to use a rope, and he put his hands in anyway.”
“Oh. Well, that was stupid of him.”
A crow flew by, at the edge of the woman’s field of vision. “Do you have such a thing as a rope?”
The girl shook her head. “No. My mother might keep some in the garden shed, though. I’ll see about bringing it tomorrow.”
“Only if you bring someone bigger and stronger, to do the pulling. You look very small, and I wouldn’t want to pull you in by mistake.”
The girl considered for a moment, then smiled broadly. “I’ll ask my brother. He’s much taller and stronger than I am, and I’m sure he could pull you out without even feeling the weight.”
It had been so long since the woman had felt anything out of the ordinary, that it took a minute before she could recognize the odd sensation in her chest as hope. “I would like that very much,” she replied, quietly, trying not to let this feeling show. “Thank you.”
“That’s all right,” the girl said. “I’m sorry you’re in the water. It looks like it hurts a lot. Have you been in there a very long time?”
“Yes,” the woman said. And she told the girl what year it had been, when the king had dropped her into the water.
“I won’t wait,” the girl broke out after a short, stunned silence. “I’ll come back with my brother tonight, and you won’t have to stay there anymore.” And, without saying goodbye, she spun around and ran back the way the woman presumed she had come.
The woman lay coiled in on herself at the bottom of the pot, imagining what it would feel like to hold a rope between her hands, to have air brush her skin. She wondered if she could leave the pot that way after all, or if the surface of the water would hold her down as if it too were iron. She wondered if her fingers could grip the offered strand, if there would be any strength left in them after all this time. She watched the sun move, and counted the minutes, because there was nothing else to do. Once there came faint rustlings and calls in several voices, as if some people were searching through the wood, but none of those steps passed her cauldron by, and none of the calls could have belonged to the child; they were too deep, too fretted, too harsh.
She waited all that day, and all that night, but the girl did not return. Nor did she return the next day, or the night that followed, or on any of the weeks that gave way to months that dissolved into more uncounted years.
The next time the woman saw a set of human features, she barely recognized them for what they were. The face was like her own, but sunburnt and worn all over, and around its battered edges lay an equally weathered, woolen hood. The eyes were bright and deeply-set, the mouth a crooked, inquisitive slash. She could not fathom the words it framed, could not shape her own in reply. Instead, she moved her head and arms in the way that made words like what the water and the iron said to each other, and what the fire muttered as it crackled on eternally beneath them. The face stared down a while, uncomprehending, then twitched its mouth sadly and went away.
It was not gone for long, and when it returned it brought more faces with it. With the many faces, after a time, came sounds of hammering and other labors, and from what the new things made of salvaged wood and metal said to the sides of her pot, the woman learned that her discoverers had built a house around her prison, and that a great many of them lived there in secret, hiding from the ruinous years of fire and of plague that raged outside. Some of those indwellers, the house-struts told her, spoke amongst themselves of men riven from their hands and young girls driven mad on this same hill, locked away insisting on a length of rope, but their whispers were drowned out by the opinion of the one who had first found her, who said she was only a sad woman and in pain.
That one returned almost every day, to look at her and talk a while, and after a few months the woman came to understand his speech, though she could not make her mouth and throat respond in kind. He told her that he and the people with him used her ever-burning fire to light their lamps at night, and the heat given off the great curving sides of the cauldron to keep warm. This pleased her, to think of a mass of furtive, struggling bodies thriving on what the magician whose voice she could not now remember had meant only to do harm, and she turned in slow circles each time the visitor mentioned how useful she was.
One day he asked her, cautiously, if he and his companions could skim some of the water from her pot with their curved wooden dippers.
“We will be very careful,” he said solemnly. “We do not think you will run out of water; we think it will prove to be like the wood in your fire, which burns always and is not consumed.” He adjusted the edge of his hood, scratched anxiously at the leathery side of his nose. The woman noticed for the first time that there were blotched scars along his jawline, as though he had once had a close encounter with a pot much like her own.
“Yes,” she said in the languages of water and iron, assuming a stiffened pose and scritching her nails along the bottom of the pot. The man, who did not speak either of these languages, understood her actions as assent. A smile cracked his face. He had taught his voice and body to lie fluently, which was more than the woman had ever managed; the anxiety was a mask. He would have taken the water, even if she had said no. His shantytown was thirsty.
And so began the skimming of the water, the time of careful hands that reached with long-stemmed dippers and later with buckets and gratefully carried her water away. The level in the pot never grew lower, and the hurting never diminished, but the woman liked to see the coarse-grained wood and sometimes to brush against it with her cheek or fingertips. She liked to see the multitude of faces that glanced in, first with fear and then with thanks written in their brows and lips.
Her water was clean, the man said, cleaner than anything else he had drunk. It did not taste of flesh, it did not give its drinkers spasms or blisters or evil dreams. They were all so thankful.
The woman turned heels-over-head.
Time passed, but it seemed to the woman that it went more slowly. The shanty children sang to her, and dropped down petals that wilted on the steam. The grown ones called her benefactor. On the bottom of the pot, she stirred a growing collection of small coins and stones that were their offerings of thanks.
Then came a day when the first man’s face appeared troubled. “My sister drank your water all through her pregnancy,” he said, soft and halting. “Her child is now two years of age. Yesterday, the small one fell headfirst into a fire, and was not burned. She did not even cry. What price have you exacted for this gift?”
“Price?” the woman said with her body, which by now the man mostly understood. And she let all the long years of boiling, all the hurt that she could no longer pour through her throat, show in her eyes.
The man jumped back as if a tongue of fire had licked up to brush his face. She had thought that maybe he would return after a few moments, either to offer apology or to tell her that the household he had brought there could not stay, would brave the treacheries of the world outside in order to be free of her gifts, of the strange bounty her hurt engendered. This did not happen; he did not come back, nor did the dippers and buckets reach down into her domain all that day or the next.
Still she felt the fire giving of itself to the string of lanterns that visited its edges all through the nights, and by this she knew that the indwellers had not gone away. On the third night, she pressed her whole body flat against the iron, hands splayed wide, and listened more closely than she ever had before to what the beams of the house-town conducted to her. She spread her senses as widely as she could, and marveled that she had never attempted this in all the time she had been boiling there, for this is what she heard:
Feet echoing through the tenuous floors. Under the floors the still earth, colder than the air but warmer than the rains, and the creatures that burrowed in it for shelter, and the worms that ate of it for sustenance, and far under all of them, the pressed stone that held petrified bones and ancient trunks of trees. Above the floors voices floating, sharp and questing for the corners of the room, corners her mind built to match the shapes of sound that moved among them. Fires, caged in lanterns and tucked into sand-lined pits in the floors. Water poured, rags sweeping and soaking in the hot brew.
Blood smeared on sheets, on the ground, on two sets of hands. A bed shaking. The stifled, desperate moans of a long birth, and at last the harsh, thin cry of someone new to the world’s sharp air. The woman let go of the iron then, let the water carry her up a little way, so that only her hands remained pulled to the bottom by her chains. She floated in quiet all through the rest of that long night.
In the morning they brought the baby to her, red and creased and squinting. The man, gloved, held his child’s head steady with one hand, and with the other dipped its arm into the restless brew. It did not scald, and the baby did not cry out, and the woman wept hot tears as she dragged her bound wrists high and wrapped her fingers around the newborn’s for an instant before the small one was withdrawn. The next day, all the water-gatherers would frown as they drank, and say their gleanings reeked of salt.
The woman turned in no more circles, toyed no longer with her pebbles and her coins. She strained her memory, trying to call back the days before the pot, days she had not thought of in many hundreds of years, and succeeded only in recollecting the iron strength of the king’s grip as he lowered her down, and the grey hairs that mottled the magician’s mustache. Every time she shut her eyes, all the gazes that had ever met hers from the other side of the water seemed to pass before her in succession; they stared back with disgust, with pity, with supplication, and with judgment.
She wondered sometimes if the children of the great house that had been built around her, the children who did not burn, would in some distant year cry havoc and tear the place from the keeping of their elders. Each newborn was still brought to her, as if for a test—though whether a test of her seeming power, or of the child’s ability to take it in, she could not say—and to each successive hand, she clung a little longer. Some night, she promised herself, she would seize that little hand as tightly as she could, and drag the proffered child low to nuzzle at her breast. There, beyond the reach of those who had brought the infant crying into the air, she would clasp it in her own chains, and kiss those still-shut eyes that flickered from the heat.