The Widow and the Wizard
Last updated 25 March 2008
Once upon a time, a widow lived in an attic. By day she slept, but by night she took the loose strands of hair which a pair of sparrows brought to her each eventide and she spun thread, which she then cast upon her loom.
Each fortnight, when she had spun enough hair, she would weave these threads into carpets lush and vibrant. Each painted a story — some of tigers caught in a jungle pit, others of the moon fallen to the earth, still others of the mountains swallowing up cities. With each carpet she would toil all night long, wiping the cold sweat from her brow as she worked the loom. Dawn's rays would find her fast asleep, but the sparrows would fly in through the open window and carry the carpet away to the market, where a merchant would sell the carpet for six gold pieces and give three back to the sparrows to return to the widow.
One wintry afternoon, one of the queen's handmaids was passing through the market when she caught sight of the widow's carpets, hanging on poles in the merchant's booth. She stopped to look. The tigers and moons and mountains were pretty, but she fancied none of them enough to spend her meager allowance. None, that is, until she spotted the very last carpet — a dark lavender weave, with a brilliant gold spiral emanating out from the center. The handmaid had never seen anything like it. Looking at it gave her a funny feeling in her head, as if she were falling a great distance. And yet it felt good somehow. She knew she had to buy it. And so she took six gold pieces from the little bag dangling at her waist and gave them to the merchant.
Upon returning to the palace, however, the handmaid found that as soon as she crossed the gate, the hustle and bustle ceased and all sounds died away into a heavy silence. She ran through the courtyard and into the palace itself, but every person she came across stood frozen as a statue, with a distant look in their eyes as if carried away to far shores beyond imagining. It wasn't long before she reached the queen's chambers.
Flinging open the doors, however, she saw what she had feared: even the queen was motionless, one arm raised as if to block herself from something to the side.
The handmaid turned and dropped the carpet in horror as she caught sight of a tall witch towering above her. As soon as the carpet left the maid's hands, she too froze into a statue, with the distant look glazing over her eyes in an instant.
"At last," said the witch, the corners of her lips twitching upwards. She snatched the carpet and wrapped it around her. With a few mumbled words, the carpet sparked and burst into flames, and both it and the witch vanished in a cloud of smoke. Neither were ever seen again.
Until midwinter's eve twelve years later, that is.
It began with the sparrows.
They had quickly noticed that everyone -- the widow, the merchant, and everyone else they encountered -- had become still as glass. Sensing a formidable danger, they flew to the north, searching for someone with the power to break the witch's spell. For years they flew. In every village they passed, they chirped around and asked every bird they could find if any wizards lived there. Most of the time there was one or two, living in a hut or shack around the outskirts of the village.
Unfortunately, however, the sparrows found that none of these wizards had enough power to break the spell -- some had wasted their years drinking ale and other concoctions and didn't have enough strength of mind to combat the spell, others had dabbled too much with the dark and had watched their powers become diluted, and yet others had grown tired of being different from the villagers and had abandoned their powers to become like everyone else.
After ten years of this, the sparrows were on the verge of giving up hope. Was there no one left? They had circled the land, from the great sea to the west all the way to the high, towering mountains of the east, from the deserts up north down to the swamps and marshes of the south, and they had found nothing. Not a single wizard.
Then they found one. He was a young boy, only twelve years old, raised by the village's elder wizard for his parents had died of the cholera shortly after he was born. Within moments of seeing the boy wizard, the sparrows knew that here was power raw and undiluted, strong enough to break apart the enchantment the witch had left strewn across the land.
After conversing with the elder wizard and explaining their need, the sparrows set off with both the boy and his guardian for the frozen land. For two years they journeyed, and many wondrous and amazing things happened to them, but those are stories for another time.
We return to our story on midwinter's eve, when the boy and his advisor arrived at the gates of the city, guided by the overhead flight of the sparrows. They pushed open the gates -- which, rusty from disuse, dangled from their pins like a loose tooth -- and entered the long-dead city. The sparrows chirped at the boy not to be alarmed, for all of the frozen folk that dotted the grounds and courtyards and paths would no doubt give anyone a shock, but they could not move. The boy and the elder wizard walked in a few steps and stopped.
There was nobody there.
In confusion the sparrows circled around the city. Dashing under the high overpasses that led from the clay buildings up to the palace, flying through the courtyards and marketsquares that flanked the queen's residence, they found nothing. No people selling their wares or hunched over against walls, no cockroaches skittering across the dusty streets, no cats prowling the skinny alleys for underfed rats. Nothing.
The sparrows returned to find the elder wizard walking around the courtyard just inside the gates. Sitting on the cobbled stones of a dry fountain, tracing his finger in the air where the water used to spout, was the boy.
They fluttered down to him and with flicks of their heads told him what they had found. He cocked his head to the side as he looked at them -- no, looked past them. They turned their heads but could see nothing but clouds in the sky. He said nothing, although his lips were moving. The sparrows looked at each other. Was he working his magic? They couldn't feel the usual tingle in the air that burned whenever the boy cast his spells. Had they chosen incorrectly?
Then, with a sigh, the boy shrugged. "I don't know."
The sparrows cocked their heads. The boy had to know. Over their two years of journeying, they had been in awe as he melted rocks, grew food out of the desert sands, and day after day defended them from the cutthroats. No other wizard they'd seen had even come close to his power. It crackled. It ruffled their feathers. It made them think of their home nests, far away in another country. But now, when they needed it most...nothing?
He had to reconsider, they told him. He could try harder. He must. The witch wouldn't stop at conquering a mere city; her thirst for power and control was already insatiable, they said, and with each town and village she seized, she would drink in more of that intoxicating brew that twisted the minds of those who wield power. One by one the cities would fall, until nothing was left but her.
The boy blinked. "I can't do it. I'm sorry."
This couldn't be happening. The sparrows flew over to the elder wizard, who was poking his head into the abandoned guard building next to the gates. Explaining the boy's refusal, they implored him to do what he could. "Let me talk with him," the old man said. "Give me a few minutes."
As he walked out of the building, however, his limbs froze in place. He teetered, his balance off-center, and fell to the stones. Had he died? The boy was still sitting in the fountain, waving his finger in the air.
Then the rusty hinges of the gate creaked. In a puff of a dust, in walked the witch, wrapped in the lavender carpet with the gold spiral.
From their perch on the roof of the guard building, the sparrows froze in horror. Their hope drained further down the empty fountain with each heavy, precise step the witch took toward the boy. Silence hung in the air. Oblivious to the death that stalked him from behind, the boy continued his aimless game. Hadn't he noticed?
Step by step the witch drew nearer. She passed the old man, stopped, nudged him with her foot. He could have been dead for all the sparrows knew. Then, as the witch prodded the man's arm, the sparrows noticed the toe of her shoe. In disbelief they looked closer at the witch's face. It couldn't be. But...it had to be. The same high cheekbones, the same crow's feet at the corners of her eyes, the same mole just under the left ear. And yet a different aura had engulfed the widow, dark and imminent like a pregnant volcano, utterly unlike the innocent carpetmaker the sparrows had brought hairs to so long ago.
By now she towered just behind the boy. He was just a child -- like all the children the sparrows had followed around years ago, snatching a hair from a girl's cloak, another from a boy's scarf. Hairs that now lay spun in gold and lavender. Dangerous hairs.
With one hand gripping the carpet tightly across her shoulders like a shawl, the witch reached out the other and placed it on the boy's head. Or tried, rather -- she pushed down but her hand slid off as if it were water. She tried again. Once more she couldn't even touch the boy. He remained unaware that she stood behind him.
As the corners of the witch's mouth compressed in a snarl, she let go of the carpet to push on the boy's head with both hands. In a trice the sparrows glanced at each other, swallowed, and circled around behind the witch. With a nod of their heads they grabbed at the carpet and flew upward.
In that moment two things happened. Upon feeling the carpet leave her frame, the witch spun around, pointed a long, slender finger at the sparrow on the right, and shrieked a string of harsh words that cut straight through the bird. The two halves of its already dead body let go of the carpet and plummeted into the fountain directly beneath it.
As the other sparrow continued its flight, time slowing down to a crawl as it watched its friend's life end with a snap, the boy dropped his finger and pointed it down the throat of the fountain. Immediately a gushing flame of water leapt a hundred feet into the air, blocking the sparrow and the carpet from the witch's view. The boy stepped back. In a moment the watery tongues of the pillar splashed down on the cobblestone, grabbed hold of the witch, and disappeared with her down through the fountain into the depths of the earth.
When the water had returned to its home, the boy whistled, but there was no need, for the sparrow had already begun its descent. It reached him and dropped the carpet into his outstretched arms. In the same movement it flew down to the stones surrounding the fountain and peered into the darkness, looking for any sign of the dead sparrow. There was nothing.
"Sorry about your friend," said the boy, joining the sparrow on the edge of the fountain. A dewdrop-size tear slid down the bird's short beak, dangled for a moment, and then fell down into the dark abyss. The sparrow looked at the boy. Perhaps he could...?
The boy shook his head. "I don't know how." He motioned back toward the guard building. "But he does." They both looked over to where the old man had lain.
He was no longer there.
A nervous twitch crept into the boy's eyebrows. His mentor and advisor, the one who had taught him everything he knew -- gone. Had the water somehow caught hold of the man and swallowed him in the fountain as well, without the boy or the sparrow noticing? Possible, the boy thought, but unlikely.
He stood up. As he began walking over to where the old man had fallen, a glint caught his eye. There on the ground, lying where his advisor's head had lain, was a small stone replica of the fountain.
The boy knelt down and picked it up. "He went down the fountain."
With a blink the sparrow flew over and perched on the boy's shoulder. How did he know?
"It's a message," he said. "A pointer. He's done this before." The boy stood up and slowly began walking back to the fountain. "Looks like he followed the witch down there."
The sparrow looked down the throat of the fountain. Nothing but webby darkness. They'd just have to wait, then, for the elder wizard to return.
"No," said the boy. "We've got to go down there."
Cocking its head in disbelief, the sparrow looked at the boy. He was serious. But...but it was impossible.
"The witch is still alive."
And with a gulp, the boy pulled himself over the lip of the fountain, his legs dangling into the yawning abyss. "You coming?" And then he let go. Not even a second had passed before the boy had completely disappeared.
A fool! thought the sparrow. Only dangers lurked beneath the earth, far from the outstretched freedom of the sky, hidden from the blanket of sunlight. Did the boy know nothing of the creatures that dwelt on the inside of the crust? Headstrong follies of youth, that's what it was. But as the sparrow looked down the fountain, thinking about how the boy was probably dead already, it realized with a sigh that there was nothing else the child could have done. And so the sparrow followed him, down into the darkness.
To be continued...
