A tale by Eugene Marckx
There once lived a woman who practiced left-handed magic. She taught her only daughter this art from childhood until the two of them grew quite close. Then the daughter fell in love with a young man, the son of the miller in that village. Her mother waited patiently, and her time came when war broke out and all the young men were called to fight for their king.
After her lover went off to war, the daughter lost all appetite. Weeks went by, and she felt alive only when news of the fighting came. But soon enough the battles began to sound so much the same to her. Gradually she went back to her gardening and weaving and tending chickens. Months went by. Only then did her mother remind her how glad her young lover had been marching off to war. "How happy! How light his step! How handsome in that uniform! How proud his parents! They were all so happy!"
"Mother, don't!"
The woman smiled to herself. It was enough. Months descended like giant footsteps while the endless battles of the war went on. The village was stripped of pack horses, and all the cattle and hogs were carted off to feed the soldiers. The miller's barn was emptied of flour and grain. People hunted and foraged in the wild hills to keep from starving, and old ones died from lack of bread and broth, food that before the war had been taken for granted. After a year, foraging became a normal routine, and also hoarding.
The villagers thought themselves lucky that the battles were far away, but sometimes they fell into dark hard questions about their sons or husbands. Had they died? Had they died with courage? Had they been wounded and left to die? Had they survived but somehow been stunted? The news they got was never of any men in particular, but only of battles and generals.
The woman would never dare whisper such a question. She and her daughter lived on what came from their garden and their chickens, from their weaving and sewing. Sometimes the woman made a charm or potion or pronounced an incantation at someone's request, but most of the villagers feared her left-handed magic. These were uncertain times. One must be careful.
Then came news of the final victory. The war had ended. All the villagers gathered in the church to pray. The woman and her daughter made their prayers aloud with the rest. And fields grew tall with grain. Cows, horses, sheep and pigs gave birth again. And the villagers awaited their sons and husbands. Some men came marching back in smart uniforms along the same road they had gone. Others came straggling in with a sleeve stitched up or on crutches with a pant-leg folded and pinned. And they talked in words that shocked their neighbors and sisters. Or they didn't talk at all, but drank and drank whatever spirits they could find to fill up the emptiness. Their families began to wonder what kind of victory they had made.
And some never returned at all. They had fallen in battle, buried in far away fields. A letter of grateful thanks came to the grieving parents or widows with the king's seal on it. But weeks after the last soldier and the last letter had come, the daughter's lover had still not returned home. Then she grew stony-eyed in the village. The miller asked all the returning soldiers what they knew of his son. Many had seen him fight with valor and with great ferocity in the last victory, but none had seen him in the aftermath. They thought he had fallen. Yet no letter came to the miller. The daughter kept a vigil some distance from the miller's household.
Under the spreading stars of night she saw the shadow of a man lurch to the miller's door. Light from the hearth inside gave a silhouette of the man she knew, but the miller's wife shrieked at the door. The miller grabbed the man and pulled him inside, but even with the door shut the daughter heard the shrieks go on and on. Then there were shouts, and the shadow she knew staggered outside and off to the barn. Hours went by. The moon rose over the valley like a cocked smile. The daughter finally crept down to the barn. She knew it well, knew where he was asleep. She had slept with him there before. Yet now as she looked at him asleep in the moonlight she saw his hands with black calluses at the palms, his beard half-burned and his face twisted in brute ugliness. She gave a shudder and stepped away from him.
Late the next day in the garden she told her mother what she had seen. "What can be done to bring him back?"
The woman turned to look at her. These had been happy years, in some ways the best. She wanted a few more. "We must change him into a bird. His spirit runs too deep. It must be released." Her daughter nodded, and they set about making ingredients for a charm to use in turning him into a barn owl. On the night of the full moon the daughter went to him once more in the empty stall. He greeted her, and she came toward his ugly face, embraced him and slipped the charm around his neck. Then she spoke the incantation her mother had taught her.
He collapsed. She watched. He did not grow small. He did not grow wings. He turned brutish and hairy. His hands became hooves, his mouth jutted with big teeth into a snout, and his ears went straight up sharp over his head. His eyes went dull and looked up at her. She ran from his stare. As she ran home she saw an animal charge out of the barn, screeching and running into the upland wilds. It kicked and galloped and made hideous screeches.
In days after she heard the miller tell of the donkey he found. What luck after the old one had gotten so sick and had to be put out of its misery. "This donkey comes from wild stock. When it turns the millstone, it doesn't like that load one bit, but I know how to beat a donkey."
The daughter did not ask her mother what went wrong. One mistake was enough. So they lived quietly the same as always. Everyone laughed when they heard the donkey bray. They knew the miller was using his whip. But no one laughed when the miller's wife ran shrieking into the river and drowned. After a few years the donkey grew more docile, and the miller used it to haul a cart of flour to market and return with hay. The cart would pass by the woman's house, and once her daughter asked off-handedly how the donkey could be made human again.
"Solstice was last week. He could eat rose petals after solstice."
That night the daughter went to the miller's barn and heard the donkey kicking in his stall. "Hush! Your father will come. Here, I brought you a bag of rose petals. Feed on them."
The donkey buried his face in the bag and devoured the petals. As he did so he shrank down and lost his donkey hair, and yet thick welts remained on his back from the whip. Then he looked at his beloved and burst into tears. He fell to the floor and shook in great sobbing throws until she thought he might turn back into a donkey. But no. he was a man, only a man, naked and sad. He could not even look at her again. She opened the gate of the stall, but he crawled away from her, and so she left him and went back to her mother to spend a restless night.
The next day he walked into the village square, still naked, and began to call. The pastor's wife ran out and wrapped him in a robe. He called and called until people knew to bring the woman of left-handed magic and her daughter before him. He told of his love for the daughter and how it had withered when their magic had turned him into a donkey. The pastor and the elders took the two women and scarred their faces, arms, hands and backs with hot tar. The young man wandered away from their shrieks, the same sounds his own mother had made.
The women were banished to the wild hills. Then the miller held a great celebration for the return of his son. But at the raising of glasses the young man let out a donkey bray and stripped off his shirt. "See these scars on my back? They were given out to the backs of those who made me a donkey. But the pain now is twice what it was!" He brayed and brayed for his love who had been sent away blackened with tar and shame. Then when they toasted his health he smashed his glass and struck out his own eyes. The miller called for doctors, but none could help. His son was blind now.
And yet things grew worse. The young man must eat rose petals once a week or he would grow long ears and a snout. Villagers offered him all their roses, but an early winter frost killed the last rosebuds. Then the blind young man turned back to a donkey, a fate he accepted at last. He wandered blindly into the wild hills. His father searched day after day but came home without him. Others also went out for him, but storms drove them in again, and through the dark bitter cold of winter no one found the donkey. He was so blind he did not even know himself, and so sad the bitter cold could not touch him. He stumbled onto food enough where he turned, and yet he did not wonder, day by day, how it was laid before him. He simple plodded on.
When Spring returned to the hills, he felt the warmth but then caught a glimmer of light. He squinted toward it as his hooves stumbled over stones. He came to a pool rippling in the breeze, but when the breeze calmed he saw a donkey face, his own. But down the middle of that face the skin was tearing. He stared, and yet with only hooves he could do nothing. At that moment two black hands touched him and tore back the >kin. For once he really could see: two black hands and a black face, the face of his love. She wept over him and helped him out of that skin, a new man but older.
He looked at her black hands and arms, black face and back. Now he bent over her and wept. With his own hands he took the skin of the donkey and scrubbed at her hands, her arms, her face and back. Scars on her face and body did not disappear, but only turned ruddy from his tears and scrubbing. And her back was still streaked with black tar. Nothing could be done.
But she said, "Look down in the pool here at your own face."
He saw the twisted ugly face that had once frightened her in the barn. Nothing could be done. Yet they were married in that way, out of their experience. They lived and loved each other far away from the village in the wild hills. And some believe that their children are living in those hills even today.