Assa’s Eggs

Chapter 3

An animal growl, off to the side, made her hair stand up on end. She stopped and swung her pitchfork around to face the sound.

She took in great breaths of air. It was cold and bracing. Her lungs hurt and her limbs ached beyond anything she had ever experienced before. Her entire being was electric with dread and excitement. It was as though some being had invaded her body and pushed out her normal personality. She felt the air pressing on her skin. The very cells of the leaves and tree limbs around her fairly crackled and simmered with a sound so loud she thought her ears would split. The handle of the pitchfork, clutched in her fists, seemed heavy and the grain of the wood felt like it was carving itself into her skin.

Another snap of twigs, this time from the other side. She was supposed to call out to her parents, so that they would run to her and lend support. Three was stronger than one, after all, but a peculiar need for a solitary confrontation overcame her. She kept silent, if only to keep her ears open to the possibility of more noise from the unknown source. She half expected the intruder, whoever it was, to spring up and fall upon her at any moment.

Assa gathered her wits about her, took one deep long breath, held it, then released it slowly, and shouted to the night around her, an incoherent cry of exaltation, with a good chance that it would be the last sound she would ever utter, and ran toward where the snapping sound had been.

She stepped over cushiony moss, around branches and advanced with fierceness, brandishing her pitchfork in front of her, ready to use it on whatever was daring to invade her home.

She ran for several seconds, encountering nothing.

She stopped and spun around. The tines of her pitchfork clanged against a tree: curious sound, like the tissue of the tree was tuning up for a song.

She pricked her ears to the night. She thought she could almost hear the sizzling of the stars in the sky above her, but no more sounds from the woods.

A few seconds later she heard the footsteps of her parents, running toward her. They crashed through the woods and were upon her in no time.

Are you all right? they asked, breathless.

I’m fine, said Assa.

We heard your call, said her father. What did you see?

Nothing, said Assa, I saw nothing.

Her mother held Assa’s face between her palms. Child, she said, what happened?

There was something here, said Assa. Then it was gone.

The three of them stood in the darkness for several seconds, listening. Then Assa’s mother spoke. I think maybe you are attuned to the spirits, she said.

The next few weeks changed everything. Word spread over the land that the king was happy with his new queen. The royal couple’s children all got along very well indeed. Their blended family was like a tonic of good feeling and warmth. They filled all the inhabitants of the king’s land with joy and merrymaking.

Many of the extortionists were found out and publicly executed for their wickedness. Assa’s parents felt uneasy about such a course of action. They thought that perhaps a lesser punishment would have been more appropriate, but Assa did not agree. They were the lowest form of life, she said, bent only on furthering their own fortunes with no regard whatsoever to the welfare of others.

Her parents could not disagree with Assa’s assessment, but still favored a retribution that did not dispatch the miscreants to the realm of death.

Assa stated her support for the action once more, then fell silent on the subject. She was learning that people can love each other without agreeing on everything.

Meanwhile, as if the land itself approved of the royal household, crops grew with unprecedented fecundity. Couples across the land began making children again. A general buzz of activity and prosperity was everywhere. When the new crop of grain came in, the mill was overwhelmed. Assa and her parents worked day and night turning the grain into flour for the land. People wanted to make loaves of bread and cakes and biscuits and cookies. It was a glorious time.

Assa asked her parents a couple of times about that night with the curious sounds in the woods. She wanted to know from her mother what it meant that she had some connection with the spirits.

Some people have an affinity for ghosts, said her mother. I think you were so excited that night that you heard ghosts. You experienced a contact with the spirit world. My grandmother had the same thing. She spoke about hearing the spirits.

What about you? asked Assa. Have you ever heard the spirits?

No. And neither did my mother. It’s not a common thing, but it can run in families even if it sometimes skips a generation or two.

Assa nodded. She liked that she seemed to have this power, but she wasn’t sure exactly what she was going to do with it.

For the moment, she let it be and spent her days helping at the mill and taking her lessons at school. And it was at school that she first heard of a new crisis on the land. One of her schoolmates told her that the queen’s children were homesick and wanted to go back to their island.

At first, Assa did not believe this. Didn’t everyone know that the children were supremely, deliriously happy in their new home? Didn’t everyone agree on this? Wasn’t it completely true?

Other students at school corroborated the story of her classmate. They said they had heard things from their parents. The children were not of this land. They did not find contentment in the woods and fields and rocky shore here. They longed for the sandy island where they grew up.

Assa took this information back to her parents, who listened with interest.

Such things happen, said her father. They will be homesick, surely, for a while, but they will get over it.

Assa’s mother looked doubtful. Some things, she said, cannot be fixed with time. They require a more drastic remedy. The children may have to return to their island.

Assa’s father nodded, reluctantly. If such a thing occurs, he said, then the king will be sick at heart, and our land will be plunged into despair again.

Assa listened to her parents speak of their land descending into chaos again and she was afraid for herself and everyone else in the kingdom, but she tried to keep an optimistic outlook on her life. After all, she was still a young woman, not quite grown up yet. It was to her advantage to maintain a sunny disposition. Everyone said this was true. Everyone knew that if you kept a light heart, you would be more likely to have a good life.

Assa believed this with all her being. She saw it in her parents. They were humble people, but they often said they were the luckiest people in the world because they had their health, and meaningful work, and Assa. They really couldn’t ask for anything more.

Assa spent the next year absorbed in her studies. She wanted to learn everything she could about the world, but she soon found that the facts and figures, the dates and biographies that existed in the books she studied at school were less than she could have hoped for. There was something sterile about them. She took to walking the beach near the mill. The great ocean brought the energy of the depths and the expanse of water in incessant waves that some found monotonous, but Assa found to be very comforting in its constant power. The ocean never rested, and never wavered. This was a miracle, Assa was sure of it.

When she had her fill of the beach, she climbed the rock that rose out of the coast on the edge of the bay. From there she surveyed the round inlet of water. Three rocks rose out of the center of the bay. The townspeople thought of them as people. They stood like sentries, guarding the town from the ocean, or so it seemed. On the other side of the bay, a small harbor sheltered a few fishing boats. They went out most days and returned with their holds full of fish, which the locals ate and traded with other towns. Many came to Assa’s town for the dried seafood and left very happy.

As Assa stood on the point of rock at the entrance to the bay, she tried to see the world for what it was: a rock covered in some places with water, since that was plainly what was before her. Yet, she could not make herself believe the world was so simple. All kinds of creatures roamed the rock and lived in the water. Wasn’t that the world, too, just as much as the physical elements?

And what of the spirits that her mother spoke about? Where were they? Did they live in people, or did they float around in the air? Or were they in the rocks? Did anyone know?

Assa had not repeated the experience she had the time she was guarding the mill, so Assa doubted her mother’s belief that Assa had powers of perception regarding the spirit world, whatever that was. But then, she had not repeated the experience of terror she felt on that night. So maybe she had to be terribly frightened to contact the spirits? It seemed a strange way to arrange the world. Shouldn’t people have communication with the spirits all on their own? Why would an unpleasant emotion have to be in place beforehand?

It all whirled around in Assa’s head.

Sometimes she went back to the spot where she had felt the odd sensations that her mother believed to be contact with ghosts. She tried to bring back the fear as she stood on criss-crossed piles of branches and matted layers of leaves. The birds sang out in the trees above her. They made it impossible to call in the terrible fear. They were so sunny and cheerful.

Assa called back to them, then laughed. Who needed the spirit world, anyway? Not her. Not if it meant that she had to remove herself from the joy of the world as it was here and now.

As the months went on, the rumors of the royal family grew more and more dire. The children, it was said, had grown quarrelsome with each other. The king’s sons wanted the queen’s daughters to be more like themselves. They required them, so it was said, to eat the food of the new land, wear the clothes of their new land, and behave in manners appropriate to their new land.

The daughters refused to do so. They begged their mother to take them back to their island. They threw temper tantrums. They destroyed their rooms, throwing things about and making a general mess of everything. They screamed at night with sorrow and grief. Those living closer to the palace heard them, and said it was a terrible sound, like the dying wails of slaughtered animals.

Assa doubted that. She thought they must be exaggerating, until one night when the sea was calm and the air was still with the absence of wind, Assa heard piercing wails cut through the night. They made the hairs on her arms and neck and back stand up.

It was a terrible sound, and then it came again. There were two of them, intertwined in the night, like some horrible death song that floated above her and snaked into her ear. She immediately felt fear for herself, and the night in the forest when she protected her family’s mill came back to her. She felt the spirits of the queen’s daughters wrap themselves around her and squeeze her.

Assa rose from her bed and tried to run away from the sensations, but she could not. They were too closely wrapped around her. She ran from her room, through the house, and out the front door and into the night. She ran toward the edge of the mill’s property and did not stop running.