The Girl Who Loved Mountains Read online

  The Girl Who Loved Mountains

  Layla Lawlor

  The Girl Who Loved Mountains

  ©2020 Layla Lawlor

  All rights reserved

  www.laylalawlor.com

  Contents

  1. The Girl Who Loved Mountains

  2. About the Author

  The Girl Who Loved Mountains

  “When I was a child, they told me the mountains were the bones of giants. What are your mountains made of?"

  The girls giggled when my translator, Su, put the question to them. "Maybe I asked it wrong," he said to me.

  "No, that's all right," I said. "It's a strange question."

  I was sitting at the base of the stone retaining wall for a terraced field, and the girls were all lined up on its edge in the sunshine, swinging their legs and swishing their skirts while they spun wool from the baskets beside them. Except for the notebook in my lap, I would have liked to join them. It was a familiar scene to me; I had spent many hours like that as a child, gossiping with my cousins and our friends while our hands were busy with a basket of wool. We walked around the village dangling our spindles so casually we often forgot they were there.

  One of the girls asked a question in the light, flowing local language. The way they spoke in some of the mountain valleys was as different from my home village as anything I'd heard in the city. Here, though, it teased the ear with familiar patterns. I could even catch some of the words, just a shade off from the ones I knew. I felt as if I could almost understand it, if I could only listen hard enough.

  My mother had once said something similar to me about the language of the rivers and the trees.

  "She asked if you're the story lady," Su said. Well-worn laugh lines creased around his eyes as he smiled. Su was a goatherd from the valley over the next hill who'd agreed to translate for me, out of a yearning to break up the boredom of his existence, I suspected, more than the pittance I could pay him. "They've heard of you."

  "Yes, I'm the story lady," I said, smiling at them. This must have come across even without the translation, because they broke into a flurry of happy, excited chatter among themselves.

  "They're happy to see you," Su said, looking amused. He often seemed entertained by me and my informants, as if he found us quaint or silly; I had learned to ignore it. "They have plenty of stories for you. Where shall I have them begin?"

  "Tell them I'm most interested in stories about the mountains," I said. "But I'll hear whatever they have to say."

  A girl with a spattering of lighter freckles across her brown nose spoke, and Su said, "She asks if you have heard the story of the Mountain Wife."

  I had collected several variants of this one. It was one of the two most common versions of the mountain creation stories; my own village's tale of murder and giant bones was the other. "Tell her I would love to hear it."

  The girl broke into a wide smile, revealing very white but crooked teeth. "You already know this one," Su translated for her—the standard opening formula for a story in this part of the mountainland. In my village we always said Have you heard this one yet? "In the time of the long ago, Goat Woman wished to be married. But her father wanted to keep her home to cook and to clean for him. Many suitors came to her door. He set each one an impossible task. One, he set to counting every hair in his herd of goats. Another, he gave a bucket and told to empty the river. When each one failed, her father killed him.

  "'I'll run away!' she said. 'I curse you! If no suitor is good enough for you, I will marry the mountain himself!'

  "And he laughed. 'The mountain does not know you. The mountain does not care for you. Where will you go, that I cannot find you and bring you home?'

  "So she took all her herds and her spinning basket and her loom, and she went north, to the place where the sky meets the ground. Her youngest sister came with her ..."

  I wished I could have spoken to the girls without a man mediating between us. It's always easier to talk to female strangers with only women present. And Su was one of those rather difficult people who always seems to be laughing with you, not at you. He was easily charming and the girls seemed to like him, but I never really had.

  But he had a natural storyteller's voice, rising and falling in a gentle cadence that was easy to listen to. A lot of the herders in my village had been the same. They spent a lot of time talking to their goats, or to themselves.

  "Now Goat Woman's sister was very beautiful, and the mountain loved her as soon as she stepped foot upon his lowest meadows. He spoke to her, in the babble of the streams, in the rush of the wind in the trees."

  I felt gooseflesh prickle my arms, as it sometimes did when I heard my mother's old stories in the cadence of someone else's voice.

  "'Don't you hear it,' the youngest sister said to Goat Woman, 'the mountain's voice, telling me how beautiful I am?'

  "'I hear nothing,' Goat Woman said. 'It's only the wind in the trees.'

  "But the mountain called to her sister, all the same."

  The freckled girl spoke faster as she got caught up in the tale. Her friends chimed in with comments. I tried to scribble down the gist of it. Later, by rushlight or beside a campfire, I would reconstruct what I had not written down from memory, along with notes on the storytellers themselves.

  I also found myself cataloguing as I wrote. This version of the story was the one I'd come to refer to in my notes as Mountain Wife 6, very similar to the way they told it in the Snow Pass area. Goat Woman's sister was the bride this time, rather than Goat Woman herself, and her sister's bridegroom pitched his mountain tentpoles—the pillars that held up the northern sky—to make a bower to attract her.

  I had heard that the bower custom was still practiced in some of the more remote villages, with young men building little houses of brush to woo girls in.

  "And from the poles he draped wreaths of clouds and bower-lights," Su said in his light, laughing voice, as the girl's words ran on like a brook below his. "You can still see the lights ripple when the wind blows just right and billows the tent roof of the sky."

  In the story as we told it in my village, Goat Woman and her sisters spied on the bridegroom and learned he was really her father in disguise, trying to trick them in punishment for running away from him. Theirs was a brutal revenge: they killed him, making the mountains from his bones and the rivers from his blood. In other parts of the mountain country, the bridegroom was a different character. This story, I noted, was the bridegroom-opponent kind, but not the taboo-bridegroom sort, and wound onward toward the innocent bride's disillusionment with her new lover.

  "... and when her sister fled the third time, and hid in Goat Woman's house, she grew very angry: he had mistreated her sister, so she decided it was time for something to be done. When he came looking, she met him at the door.

  "'Go into your bower,' she told the Mountain Bridegroom, 'and I will send her to you.' So he went into the bower, and while he waited, Goat Woman took a withered apple from the top of her apron, and with deft hands, she twisted corn husks into the arms and legs of an apple-dolly. When she blew on the dolly, it stood up and turned its beautiful face to her, and it was the same as her sister in every part. Then Goat Woman took a special piece of cloth she had woven, and wrapped it around—"

  A girl in a purple headscarf elbowed the freckled storyteller and whispered something. The girls all looked up. The shadow of the great mountain peak behind the village had fallen across us while we were talking, bringing an early autumn chill with it.

  This mountain had dominated my journey for days now, as it dominated the village and all others nearby. It was a great slab-sided monster with waterfalls trailing in thin silver curtains down its cliffs and ravi
nes. The village nestled in its foothills, but the mountain's steep meadows and ridgelines, now a tapestry of evening-blue shadows, seemed to hang almost weightlessly above us, tantalizing with late-season wildflowers and turning leaves.

  "What's the matter?" I asked. "Did I say something wrong?"

  Su laughed. "They have to go home and do their chores, miss. You've kept them out too late. They say the Old Man will catch them and punish them."

  "Is that the same as the Mountain Bridegroom?" I asked, intrigued. My village had a similar saying, conflating the Mountain Bride story with the bogeyman who steals unwary children. I hadn't seen it much elsewhere.

  But Su's laughing eyes crinkled at me, and he didn't translate. The girls were stuffing half-spun wool into baskets and gathering up the colorful shawls they had draped over the sun-warm rocks. It was clear we were done for the day.

  "Tell them I'm most frightfully sorry and I hope I haven't gotten them into trouble. But they must come back tomorrow and tell me how the story ends!"

  He translated, and the girl who had been telling the story said something back.

  "She says it doesn't end, not really. Good stories never do."

  The stars were coming out in a purpling sky. The bright star they called the Ox Star here, and the Ploughman's Star in my village, had just become visible around the mountains's steep flank. In my home village it was lower, as we were farther south. It was strange to see it so high in the sky, as if it, too, wanted to scale the mountain's tempting heights.

  In the long blue shadows, the girls went trotting off toward the village, swishing their boldly patterned skirts from side to side. I asked the last straggler, "Does anyone graze their flocks up on that mountain?"

  She looked surprised when Su translated my words, and he gave back her reply: "No, miss. Everyone knows better than that."

  "Is it dangerous?"

  "It's just not done," she said, through Su's translation, and went skipping off toward the village's welcoming lights with her friends.

  Su and I pursued a slower and more winding pace, mostly because I wanted to sketch the wooden idols along the path. In my home village we also had these, but ours were poles with faces carved at the top of them. We called them the Old Barley-Men. At this time of year, with summer closing into autumn, they would be draped with flowers and wreaths of barley grass, their wood carefully oiled to bring out its shine before we set them ablaze on Closing Night, fresh-brewed ale and barley cakes placed at their feet for their sustenance.

  Here, however, the idols were roughly man-sized—ours were taller—and it seemed they were simply erected and then abandoned to molder away. No one fed them or even bothered to cut back the brush. More than once, I jumped when I saw a face in a tangled thicket, the crudely carved features emerging from the leafy shadows. In the growing dusk it seemed the commonland below the village—a patchwork of meadows, fields, and bands of woods—was alive with woodland people peering at us from the thickets and hedgerows.

  "Do you think that's a good idea, miss?" Su asked, nodding to the face taking shape under my pencil.

  I blamed him for the way the drawing seemed to be looking at me now. Cold sweat prickled my spine. It was easy to believe that unseen beings watched me through carved wooden eyes from the thickets. I abandoned my unfinished drawing and flipped back to annotate my notes while we walked, since the story was still fresh in my head.

  "It's so fascinating to me how the stories repeat themselves," I said. "Even versions that seem very different are often the same deep down, when you look at their motifs and themes."

  "City talk," he said with that slightly mocking smile. He seemed to consider me a bit stuck up, as if I spoke that way to make myself sound smarter, and not just because it was the way I'd learned to talk about these things with my fellow researchers.

  "No, no—I meant that a great many stories say the same thing in different ways. There are patterns. This one, for example, is about rules and breaking them, but who gets punished in the story and who gets rewarded depends on who violated the worse taboo. You had stories like that, didn't you?"

  "Some," he said.

  For all his help with translating, Su never wanted to tell me his own village's stories. He seemed to think I was going to do something with the knowledge—something magical or nefarious.

  "Goat Woman's father is wrong," I said. "Little girls have to grow up. But sometimes the story is about the father trying so hard to keep his daughters with him that he does something truly wicked to stop them from leaving, by marrying his own daughter, and they punish him for it. And sometimes it's about the girls running away and finding something even worse in the woods, because parents do know best, after all."

  I wondered which version this would turn out to be; I needed to hear the rest of the story to know. Sometimes Goat Woman was able to slip her sister out of her bridal vows to the canny and cruel Mountain Bridegroom, but sometimes she took her sister's place, or he found a loophole at the end to claim her anyway. In the version of the story I'd heard as a child, the wicked father-bridegroom was killed by his daughters with their sharp knives—but we'd still been warned, as children, not to listen to the wind when it seems to make voices whisper in the woods, because it might be the Mountain Bridegroom calling his little girls back to him.

  "Breaking the rules leads to trouble," Su said. "Every story agrees on that."

  He had been traveling with me for a couple of weeks now. I'd hitched a ride from a place called Border-Town (on the borders of where and what, I never did figure out) with a pair of carters who dropped me at a crossroads which, they assured me, was within walking distance of a nearby village. I had stopped to eat my lunch in the shade of a rowan tree hanging over a stream, and that was where I met Su watering his goats.

  "Hail, friend," I said, the only words I knew in the dialect of that valley. The carters had taught them to me on our placid ride into the hills from Border-Town. At least I hoped that's what they'd taught me.

  When Su doubled up with laughter, I feared the worst. But it was only my accent he was laughing at. ("Carters?" he said to me later. "Are you sure you didn't learn from the carter's donkey?")

  We eventually found a common tongue in my own language, which he spoke because he used to travel widely as a peddler before settling down. He invited me home for the night. We walked up the stream along a narrow goatpath, in and out of patches of shade, to a leaping waterfall and a house buried in the hill beside it. It was an old house, one of the dirt-floor hill-houses with the livestock at one end and the family at the other, a ditch separating them for manure and offal. I had lived in such a house as a child. It felt like coming home.

  Su's wife was a friendly, broad-faced woman who welcomed me inside and fed me heartily on flatbreads stuffed with spiced meat. I explained that I was traveling to collect stories and invited them to look through my notebook. I could tell by the way Su's wife skipped from page to page that she was only being polite and could not read. But I could tell, equally, that Su was avidly reading the lines of my chicken-scratch scrawl.

  I wondered where he'd learned to read. There were no books visible in their hut.

  When I explained I was always hoping to find local translators to help me, a quick conversation ensued, and Su said he would be happy to come along with me for a while. His wife, he said, could tend the flocks in his absence. I didn't ask about children. There were none in evidence, and I had yet to meet a couple of advanced middle years, with no children in the house, who wanted to be asked about it.

  Tonight our wandering steps had led us to a village called Rowan Grove. Su, it turned out, had arranged lodging for the night in the house of a local weaver. Looms being large and expensive, most families did not own their own. Instead they brought their spun wool to the families who were fortunate enough to own one, paying for the weaver's services with some of the cloth.

  It seemed this couple were doing well at it. Their house was one of the few two-story ones in the vill
age, with an older stone structure below and a new wooden addition up top where the family slept. It even had a chimney, something I'd rarely seen outside the larger towns.

  The wife, Meham, knew a little of my native tongue. Her mother came from a town over my way, which turned out to be our market town when I was a child. She was delighted to practice the language on me, and to hear about the places I knew that her mother might have known also. It also turned out that one of the girls from the stone-wall gang was Meham's daughter, quiet Liss with her purple headscarf and fast, shy smile.

  "Your daughter's friends mentioned someone called the Old Man," I said. Liss and her siblings had gone out to milk the family's goats, while Su and I helped bring in firewood. "That sounds like a story I've heard in other places, the Old Man of the Mountains. Some say he is Goat Woman's husband, others say he is her father."

  Su grinned at me, as if to say Up to your tricks again, miss? But he translated dutifully to Meham's husband.

  "He is neither," Meham's husband told us, by way of Su. "He is the person who lives in that mountain." He pointed above us, where the great peak blotted out the gathering stars.

  "A spirit person, or someone who went up there to live?" I asked.

  The frustrating answer seemed to be "both and neither." No one really wanted to talk about him. They said it was bad luck. Between bits and pieces of other stories over supper, which I scribbled one-handed on the notebook spread out on the table at my elbow, I managed to learn that unmarried young women were not allowed to go out after dark. The Old Man, Meham told me in a ringing voice, would be smitten with their beauty and take them away—and she looked pointedly at a rather downcast Liss.

  "Never?" I asked, thinking of how often my girl cousins and I had been dispatched on errands, running between the village houses or carrying dinner to our boy cousins tending the flocks in the pastureland.