Rumple What? (2 page)
*
For the simple reason that the king gives not a rat’s sphincter about the fate of the baby, one can tell that the newborn is a girl. One can assume this even though the child’s gender is undocumented.
When his wife begs him for guards because someone is likely to take the baby, he laughs at her and asks who would want such a bawling parcel of stink. She does not know that he knows about the little man, and it costs her all the courage she never knew she had to tell him that she did not herself spin straw into gold. Will he kill her now? No; he laughs again, this time in quite an ugly way, because it has been necessary for her to admit that the little man spent three nights with her, and that she promised him her firstborn. He asks her what the gold-spinner wants with the baby. She whimpers that she does not know. Again she pleads with him to safeguard the child. “Why should I?” he demands, shouting with cancerous laughter. “It might not even be mine!” He says this not because he thinks it true, but simply because he can. He says it to press his advantage, to consummate his power over her, to complete her despair.
Triumphant, exit the king.
*
When the little man opens the locked door to the queen’s chamber and goes in, he is unprepared for the emotional maelstrom that greets him, for he had assessed the miller’s daughter as the most pragmatic of peasants. Yet there she sits in the great canopied bed, hugging the infant to her velvet-robed bosom and weeping as he has never seen her weep before. And offering him all the riches she has, necklaces of emerald and ruby and diamond, rings of sapphire and gold, if he will only let her keep the child.
“But I care nothing for necklaces and rings,” he says.
“You did before!”
“Only because the narrative demands a sequence of three.”
“Let me give you my third child, then!” Fierce, desperate, this time she does not weep in a messy mucus-prone manner; today, hers are the tragic, crystalline tears of a true queen.
“But you promised me this baby,” he insists, knowing that he is in the right, although her tears pierce his heart.
“Please!” She knows, also, that a queen must keep her promises. “Is there no power that can persuade you otherwise?”
“No power can prevent me except one: if you should guess my name.”
His own compassionate honesty drags this truth out of him, for it is a very serious matter, the naming of names; as he is something more than a normal Tom, Dick, or Jane, anyone who knows his true name would possess power to command him. This is how wizards control genies and demons, by the naming of names.
The queen realizes what a chance he has offered her. “Grant me, then, three days—” It must, of course, be
three
days. “—to discover your name, I beg of you.”
He can’t believe what a doughnut he is being. Yet, “Very well,” he replies, turning away.
“A hint! At least give me a hint!” The queen cries as the baby starts to whimper at her breast. “Is yours a short name or a long one?”
“Outlandish and multisyllabic. I will be back tomorrow to see how you are doing.” And off he goes, knowing himself to be a soft-hearted fool, and knowing just as well that she nevertheless considers him an imp of evil, and that he will be so depicted in human retellings of his story for the next millennium or two.
*
Along with love and womanhood, the baby has taught the queen the awesome power and significance of names, for she must name the child, and feels all the responsibility of the nomenclature not yet accomplished.
But far greater is the weight of divining the name that will save her baby—for so she perceives the matter; she cannot imagine what the bizarre little man could want with her child other than to eat it, perhaps, or sacrifice it in some fiendish rite, or starve it into a bony monster like himself, or whatever it was that fairies did with the babies they stole from cradles.
All day, hugging her child, she sets herself to thinking of names. That night she lies awake nursing the infant and trying to remember all the outlandish, multisyllabic names she has ever heard in her life. In the morning she summons the court scribe to begin a database—she herself can neither read nor write—and she sends out messengers to bring her more names, and more. But in the darkest hollow of her heart she knows that so many possible names are far beyond her ken; even a computer naming all the names of deity would take a few minutes before the stars would begin to blink out.
*
When the little man whispers the name of the door and walks in, the queen is ready for him.
th the reader, just as
She tries first some fairytale-type names she made up during the night. “Is your name Goldenhands? Is it Goldfingers? Goldspinner? Treasurewright?
“No, no, no, and no.” Marveling anew at his own idiocy, the little man gives her another hint. “Your majesty, my name makes no sense.”
“Moon Unit? Dweezil? Madonna? Rosencrantz, Guildenstern?”
“No, no, no, no, no.”
And so it goes all that day and the next. Kasper, Melchior, Balthazar, Schwarzenegger, Engelbert, Humperdinck, ad infinitum and ad nauseum; wearisome to the max for all concerned, especially the little man. He nearly decides not to show up for the third day, but he grits his pointed teeth and reports to the queen’s chamber.
And he senses at once that, overnight, something has immensely changed. That royal woman, with babe in arms, welcomes him with dry eyes that emanate a strange gleam. “Rumplebedsheets,” she greets him.
Oh, no. He begins to feel alarmed. “My dear little miller’s daughter—”
“It’s Rumple something. Rumple-for-skin?”
“No.” Then he repeats, shocked, “No!”
“Rumplestockings? Wait! Rumple—Rumple-shins-skin?”
“You are still trying to make sense out of me.” When nothing makes sense. He feels his own eyes as sharp as knives begin to drip the clear blood that is tears, for he knows what she has done, like generations of mothers before her, for the sake of her child.
“Rumple-stilts-skin!” she cries.
He feels weak, he feels her power over him, he has to sit down. “Almost,” he admits. “Not quite. You’re spelling it wrong.”
“Spelling? I know nothing of spelling! But I know your name is Rumpelstiltskin!”
“In the original German,” he hedges, “it is Rumpelstilzchen.” And in the French Grigrigredinmenufretin, in the Swedish Bulleribasius, the Finnish Tittelintuure and the Italian Praseidimio, and there are many more, in Estonian, Czechoslovakian, Hebrew, Japanese and so on, for like any self-respecting supernatural being, our oddling has many names, of which the miller’s daughter knows only one.
“Rumpelstiltskin,” she repeats in vast and bitter triumph, for it is just as the little man says in the story; the devil has told her. She has made a pact with the devil, bargaining away her soul to save her child, trading it for the knowledge of Rumpelstiltskin’s name. So she belongs to the Prince of Darkness now. But her baby does not. Her baby, body and soul, belongs to no one but her.
Rumpelstiltskin has been defeated. But he does not, as the devil and the tale expect, stamp off in a suicidal rage. There is no longer any need for him to rip himself in half, as it has been proven that he is not an evil being.
He sighs in great, everlasting sadness and makes a strange request. “I would like to give the little one a name.”
“What?” The mother is startled, for she had thought his interest in her baby was culinary. “How come?” For the first time she really looks at the little man. “What did you want with my child?”
Such is his weary sorrow that he does not even try to explain. Yet, now that she has shaken hands with Lucifer, she sees the light.
“Oh, for crying out loud,” she whispers, “you wanted the exact same thing that I have.”
Unspeaking, he stares back at her with spindle-sharp eyes.
“You get out of here,” she orders. Recent events have made her a fitting mate for the king; they will be two of a kind from now on.
Her command lifts him to his feet, but before he departs he asks again, “Allow me to gift the little girl with a name.”
And in her shameless greed the mother agrees to let him bless with the power of a faerie name the child he cannot possess.
He touches the babe’s rose-petal cheek and names her, “Softasilkskin.”
Then he goes away with his head hanging, his woodcock nose directed toward the ground, and is never heard from again.
But Softasilkskin, despite her deplorable parents and to the devil’s disappointment, grows up to be the good and beautiful Princess Silkskin, meets a Handsome Prince and Lives Happily Ever After, even though everybody else in the story is royally screwed.
Edgar Award–winning author
Nancy Springer
,
well known for her science fiction, fantasy, and young adult novels,
has written a gripping psychological thriller—smart, chilling, and unrelenting…
DARK LIE
available in paperback and e-book in November 2012
from New American Library
Dorrie and Sam White are not the ordinary Midwestern couple they seem. For plain, hard-working Sam hides a deep passion for his wife. And Dorrie is secretly following the sixteen-year-old daughter, Juliet, she gave up for adoption long ago. Then one day at the mall, Dorrie watches horror-stricken as Juliet is forced into a van that drives away. Instinctively, Dorrie sends her own car speeding after it—an act of reckless courage that puts her on a collision course with a depraved killer…and draws Sam into a desperate search to save his wife. And as mother and daughter unite in a terrifying struggle to survive, Dorrie must confront her own dark, tormented past.
“A darkly riveting read...compelling.”
—Wendy Corsi Staub, national bestselling author
of Nightwatcher
and
Sleepwalker
“
A fast-paced, edge-of-your-seat thriller that will have you reading late into the night and cheering for the novel's unlikely but steadfast heroine.”
—Heather Gudenkauf,
New York Tim
es best-selling author of
The Weight of Silence
and
These Things Hidden
Learn more about all of Nancy’s titles at her website, www.nancyspringer.com.