Dreamfisher by Nancy Springer Read Free Book Online

Dreamfisher
    By Nancy Springer
    “…except for the inhabitants of a nameless mountain in Barbary, who themselves have no names; nor have they dreams.” (From a fragment attributed to Herodotus.)
    They lived on the mountainside very simply, the men hunting meat, the women gathering nuts and berries, the children playing at being men or women. They spoke names of things, of course, to say “Bring me sticks for the fire,” or “I am going to dig roots,” but these names had come down to them through generations, bestowed by some creator at the beginning of time. Fearing to take upon themselves the function of gods, they did not name one another; they were few enough, and needed only to point. To say “that man” would have been impolite, and to say “the fat man” or “the bent old woman” would have been very rude. Children learned early only to point. They learned early to kill rock rabbits and skin them and cook them and eat them. They learned to throw stones and gather firewood.
    All the children learned these straightforward ways readily, except for a certain girl.
    She looked no different than the others—dark eyes and shaggy dark hair, tawny skin, bare callused feet—but wrong things came out of her mouth. “Cake!” she cried, pointing at the round russet disc of the setting sun, one edge hitting against scalloped clouds. “Cake! Someone is eating it!”
    “No, no!” her mother whispered, glancing around to see whether others had heard. (They had.) “It is the sun.” Sun was sun, not a round flat cake of seed meal baked on the hot stones by the fire.
    “It looks like a cake!”
    The mother should have punished her then and there, the others declared. But the mother was too tenderhearted, and the girl went on in her wrongheaded ways. “It looks like a flower!” she would declare of a rose-and-white cloud. Or, “See, the shadows in the moon, they look like a rabbit sitting up on its hind legs!” But the moon was the moon, not a rabbit. “See that yellow flower, it looks like a dragon’s head!” And the wrongnesses she said grew more perilous day by day, so frightening that other children stayed away from her, or were ordered away, and adults muttered when they saw her coming.
    All too soon the girl began to experience the monthly courses of a woman, and it was time for her to find a mate.
    Often this process took care of itself, but not in the case of this girl. Her mother acted on her behalf, arranging matters with an older man who, although respected, had no woman, because—well, it would have been very, very rude to say, but—
    “No! He looks like a bear turd on feet!” the girl wailed when her mother brought the man to her by the village spring, where everyone had gathered for the rite of joining. “No, I can’t! I won’t!”
    The man’s lumpy brown face flushed even darker with anger. “Be silent,” he ordered.
    “No! You are a giant turd!”
    “Turd,” some boy in the back whispered, snickering.
    His mother hit him to hush him, but the damage was done. Folk gabbled with terror; what unknowable craft was in this girl? The man now called Turd picked up a stone from the ground and hurled it at the girl who had named him.
    It struck her on the chest hard enough to stagger her. Others roared with echoing wrath and joined in, elder men and women throwing stones the size of their fists. If any had caught the girl on the head they would have felled her, but they cut and bruised her body and legs so that she cried out. Looking for her mother, she saw her standing to one side, weeping but not trying to stop the others as they all joined in. Smaller stones flung by children hit the girl in the face. She turned and fled down the mountainside until she could no longer run. Then she fell to the rocky ground, sobbing.
    * * *
    She awoke at dawn, shivering from lying on cold stone, stiff and bruised. Blinking, she sat up to rub her eyes, but winced when she touched her sore, swollen face. Then