A Wild Swan by Michael Cunningham Read Free Book Online Page A

paranoid king who had escape tunnels dug, miles of them, opening out into woods, country lanes, and graveyards.
    The girl, however, is surprised and impressed when you materialize in the chamber full of straw. It has nothing to do with magic. Already, though, you’ve got credibility.
    At first glance you see why the miller thought his gamble might work. She’s a true beauty, slightly unorthodox, in the way of most great beauties. Her skin is smooth and poreless as pale pink china, her nose ever so slightly longer than it should be, her brown-black eyes wide-set, sable-lashed, all but quivering with curiosity, with depths.
    She stares at you. She doesn’t speak. Her life, starting this morning, has become so strange to her (she who yesterday was sewing grain sacks and sweeping stray corn kernels from the floor) that the sudden appearance of a twisted and stub-footed man, just under four feet tall, with a chin as long as a turnip, seems like merely another in the new string of impossibilities.
    You tell her you’re there to help. She nods her thanks. You get to work.
    It doesn’t go well, at first. The straw, run through the spinning wheel, comes out simply as straw, shredded and bent.
    You refuse to panic, though. You repeat, silently, the spell taught to you by Aunt Farfalee (who is by now no bigger than a badger, with blank white eyes and fingers thin and stiff as icicles). You concentrate—belief is crucial. One of the reasons ordinary people are incapable of magic is simple dearth of conviction.
    And, eventually … yes. The first few stalks are only touched with gold, like eroded relics, but the next are more gold than straw, and soon enough the wheel is spitting them out, strand upon strand of pure golden straw, deep in color, not the hard yellow of some gold but a yellow suffused with pink, ever so slightly incandescent in the torchlit room.
    You both—you and the girl—watch, enraptured, as the piles of straw dwindle and masses of golden strands skitter onto the limestone floor. It’s the closest you’ve come, yet, to love, to lovemaking—you at the spinning wheel with the girl behind you (she forgetfully puts her hand, gently, on your shoulder), watching in shared astonishment as the straw is spun into gold.
    When it’s all finished, she says, “My lord.”
    You’re not sure whether she’s referring to you or to God.
    â€œGlad to be of service,” you answer. “I should go, now.”
    â€œLet me give you something.”
    â€œNo need.”
    But still, she takes a strand of beads from her neck, and holds them out to you. They’re garnets, cheap, probably dyed, though in this room, at this moment, with all that golden straw emanating its faint light, they’re as potently red-black as heart’s blood.
    She says, “My father gave me these for my eighteenth birthday.”
    She drapes the necklace over your head. An awkward moment occurs, when the beads catch on your chin, but the girl lifts them off, and her fingertips brush against your face. The strand of beads falls onto your chest. Onto the declivity where, were you a normal man, your chest would be.
    â€œThank you,” she says.
    You bow and depart. She sees you slipping away through the secret door, devoid of hinges or knob, one of the many commanded by the long-dead paranoid king.
    â€œThat’s not magic,” she laughs.
    â€œNo,” you answer. “But magic is sometimes all about knowing where the secret door is, and how to open it.”
    With that, you’re gone.
    *   *   *
    You hear about it the next day, as you walk along the edges of town, wearing the strand of garnets under your stained woolen shirt.
    The girl pulled it off. She spun the straw into gold.
    The king’s response? Do it again tonight, in a bigger room, with twice as much straw.
    He’s joking. Right?
    He’s not joking. This, after all, is the king