The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (Vintage International) by A.S. Byatt Read Free Book Online

mantises. There were larger creatures too – cats and rats and badgers and kittens and a white goat. There was a low, peaceful, lively squeaking and scratching of tiny voices, welcoming and exclaiming. In one corner was a spindle and in another was a loom, and the old lady had just put aside a complicated shawl she was crocheting from a rainbow-coloured basket of scraps of wool.
    ‘One of you needs food,’ said the Old Woman, ‘and three of you need healing.’
    So the Princess sat down to good soup, and fresh bread, and fruit tart with clotted cream and a mug of sharp cider, and the Old Woman put the creatures on the table, and healed them in her way. Her way was to make them tell the story of their hurts, and as they told, she applied ointments and drops with tiny feathery brushes and little bone pins, uncurling and splinting the Scorpion’s tail as it rasped out the tale of its injuries, swabbing and stitching the Toad’s wounded head with what looked like cobweb threads, and unknotting the threads that entwined the cockroach with almost invisible hooks and tweezers. Then she asked the Princess for her story, which the Princess told as best she could, living again the moment when she realised she was doomed to fail, imitating the Scorpion’s rasp, and the Toad’s croaking gulp, and the husky whisper of the Cockroach. She brought the dangers of the Forest into the warm fireside, and all the creatures shuddered at the thought of the Hunter’s arrow, the Fowler’s snare and the Woodman’s axe. And the Princess, telling the story, felt pure pleasure in getting it right, making it just so, finding the right word, and even-she went so far-the right gesture to throw shadow-branches and shadow-figures across the flickering firelight and the yellow pool of candlelight on the wall. And when she had finished there was all kinds of applause, harmonious wing-scraping, and claw-tapping, and rustling and chirruping.
    ‘You are a born storyteller,’ said the old lady. ‘You had the sense to see you were caught in a story, and the sense to see that you could change it to another one. And the special wisdom to recognise that you are under a curse-which is also a blessing-which makes the story more interesting to you than the things that make it up. There are young women who would never have listened to the creatures’ tales about the Woodman, but insisted on finding out for themselves. And maybe they would have been wise and maybe they would have been foolish: that is
their
story. But you listened to the Cockroach and stepped aside and came here, where we collect stories and spin stories and mend what we can and investigate what we can’t, and live quietly without striving to change the world. We have no story of our own here, we are free, as old women are free, who don’t have to worry about princes or kingdoms, but dance alone and take an interest in the creatures.’
    ‘But –’ said the Princess, and stopped.
    ‘But?’
    ‘But the sky is still green and I have failed, and I told the story to suit myself.’
    ‘The green is a very beautiful colour, or a very beautiful range of colours, I think,’ said the old lady. ‘Here, it gives us pleasure. We write songs about greenness and make tapestries with skies of every possible green. It adds to the beauty of the newt and the lizard. The Cockroach finds it restful. Why should things be as they always were?’
    The Princess did not know, but felt unhappy. And the creatures crowded round to console her, and persuade her to live quietly in the little house, which was what she wanted to do, for she felt she had come home to where she was free. But she was worried about the sky and the other princesses. Then the Cockroach chirped to the old lady:
    ‘Tell us the rest of the story, tell us the end of the story, of the story the Princess left.’
    He was feeling decidedly better already, his segments were eased, and he could bend almost voluptuously.
    ‘Well,’ said the old