A BODY AT REST

The man was staring at her again. Riva stood at the sink washing dishes and saw him standing in the shade of the trees outside the kitchen window.

“Mum,” she said.

“What now?” asked her mother, chopping vegetables for stew.

“Nothing,” Riva said after a pause. Her mother came up behind her and peered over her shoulder. The man was standing there and staring at Riva, but her mother’s eyes scanned the scene without pausing. After a moment, her mother went back to her chopping.

“Don’t bother me over nothing,” she said.

“Yes, Mum.”

On laundry day at the end of the week, the two of them were outside scrubbing linens with water hauled up from the stream, heated in a pot over the fire and poured into the wash basins. Her mother had gone inside, and Riva was just hanging up the last wet sheet when she lost her grip and the end whipped past her face. Looking beyond it, she saw the man standing not ten feet from her.

She froze, her hands outstretched still to tangle with the unwieldy sheet. He smiled; his teeth were glaring white.

Her mouth was open to say something, but the sheet whipped back around in the breeze and slapped her across the face. As she grabbed ahold of it, she knew before she lowered it that he would have disappeared.

She left her empty basket where it lay and walked towards the woods. Although she knew enough about husbandry to distinguish a poisonous plant from a useful one, she didn’t recognize the flower she found in the place where the man had been standing. She knelt down by the plant, hesitating at the thorns twined about its stem. The scent of the bloom was strange and intoxicating, and she found herself grabbing the flower and ripping it from its nest of leaves. As she did so, one of the thorns pricked her, so that a single drop of blood fell to the earth. She put the wound to her mouth and sucked on it. The taste was bitter on her tongue, leaving an uneasy feeling behind.

Still, she carried the flower inside the house with her. That night, she placed it under her pillow and slept with its sweet fragrance drifting around her. Her dreams were vivid and troubling, but forgotten upon waking.

In the morning, the temperature dropped dramatically as it sometimes did in the middle of spring. She wore her petticoats doubled and her thickest woolen cloak when she went to fetch water from the stream. After the chores were done, her mother declared she was setting off for town.

“I won’t be long,” she warned her daughter.

Riva knew she should complete the list of chores her mother had given her, but instead she retrieved the flower from under her pillow. Holding it in one hand, she walked into the woods where she had last seen the man.

Her bare feet seemed guided by Providence, and she avoided rocks and sharp twigs with ease. She pulled her cloak tightly around her and her breath frosted the air around her.

When she broke through into a small clearing, the sudden touch of sunlight on her head woke her up. She turned to look behind her, but the trees crowded at her back and their intertwined branches seemed impenetrable. Fear shivered through her.

“Riva,” said a voice. It was lilting, reminding her of the folk songs patterned after the staccato of falling rain. She turned her head and there he was in the bright sun with her, a million jewels of light glinting in his midnight hair. He held a hand out to her and she reached out her own fingers, noticing only at the last moment that she had extended her arm with the hand holding the flower. He smiled and grasped her hand, flower and all, and the petals were crushed between their two palms.

She felt a flicker of pain--thorns, piercing her skin. It failed to wake her from the trance of the man’s touch. Something on the edge of her thoughts hinted about the dreams of the night before, but the memory did not come fully forward. She closed her eyes against the brilliance of the day.

With his hand, he drew her closer. The light flickered against her eyelids.

There was movement and sensation, both overwhelming. Then the night descended, a darkness covering everything with its touch.

#

Riva opened her eyes, and the world was soft-edged and overlapped by shadows. She pushed against the ground, and her bones snicked and clacked in a painful manner. Although she managed to draw herself upwards, tendon and sinew protested every action. As her head lifted from the ground, there was a slithering sound like a hundred snakes, and she looked at the grass and saw a rushing towards her of… something. A weight pulled against her head and she realized the endless coils were attached to her, a nest of hair entwined in the groundcover of the clearing. Her hair, endless loops and curls, tight and painful on her scalp. Her neck strained, but she managed to pull herself up eventually and found herself sitting upright in the center of a sea of tarnished yellow.

Even so simple a move exhausted her. She sat still for a while, noting the trees ringing the space where she was. The clearing was much as she remembered it, but the day was warm now and her rucked-up petticoats too hot.

A voice interrupted her wandering thoughts. Just her name. She turned her head and the dark-haired man appeared in her line of vision.

Her mouth was dry and her tongue fumbled as she tried to make sounds. “Hush,” said the man and she found herself closing her mouth.

A youth stepped out from the trees and stopped next to the man. He was in that awkward stage consisting of doorknob-shaped elbows and knees, limbs stretched thinly between the knobby joints. There was something strange about the boy, but the light was poor and she couldn’t see him well in the growing darkness.

The man bowed once, a courtly gesture that seemed oddly natural in the clearing. Then he faded backwards. She blinked and there was only a hollow space where he had been. The boy remained behind, staring at her.

“H-help,” she croaked. The boy’s eyes darted up to the crown of her head and he drew a knife from his pocket, frightening her for just one moment--until he knelt beside her and sawed at the strands trapping her to the ground. By the time he was finished, it was full dark and the moon had not yet appeared.

Too dark to go anywhere, she thought. The boy watched her--she could see his eyes gleaming in the dark, like a cat’s eyes reflecting and amplifying the dim light of the stars.

She tried to say, “Sit,” but her voice failed her. Still, he seemed to understand, for he sank to the ground next to her.

Although she had done nothing so far, weariness filled her. She didn’t try to speak again, simply lay back into the hollow where she had woken, a curious bare patch of earth sunken slightly into the ground. Curling up, she pillowed her head on her crossed hands and fell asleep.

#

Light woke her, or perhaps the sound of birds trilling softly nearby. She turned her head and saw the boy. He was upright and watching her, as if he hadn’t moved all night. His gaze felt like ants creeping on her skin, and she shivered in the warm light of the dawn. The sun was behind him, but she could see enough to notice there was something wrong with his eyes--one was pale as cheese, the other a dark black. Instead of giving him a quizzical look as one might expect, it made him seem dangerous, as if he were a wild beast come to stare at her, considering whether or not to take her for a meal.

Her mouth was still dry, but she found that she could speak. “Let’s go home.”

The boy said nothing, but he stood when she stood and followed her out of the clearing. She headed south, the woods familiar to her, the trees like old friends who nodded gently as she passed them. Eventually, she noticed a large tumble of boulders she knew was near to her house. With a glad cry, she turned slightly to orient herself and began to walk more quickly. When she came to the stream, she knelt to drink. Hunger was nothing new to her, so she ignored the grumbling in her stomach that accompanied the weight of the liquid in it. Instead, she turned her head and saw the boy kneeling beside her and scooping up the water to drink.

The action was so normal that she relaxed. She wondered why he was with her, why the man had led him to her. But more than her curiosity about him was a homesickness that clogged her throat and stopped her from asking. He followed her without protest as she stood and moved off along the bank of the stream.

She’d been thinking her own thoughts, letting her feet choose their way for a while before she realized they should’ve already broken free from the trees and into the clearing where she lived with her mother. Perhaps she’d been so caught up in her thoughts that she hadn’t seen it? However, if they continued on, they would eventually reach the village. She often made toys for the children there, carved out of bits of deadfall from the forest. The mothers were fond of her; perhaps they would give the two of them something to eat and find a place for the strange boy.

They walked on, the stream gurgling beside them. Each moment, she kept thinking they would come out of the trees and see the village. Her legs were tired, her stomach clenching with hunger. Perhaps now, she thought, again and again.

Her heart thudded in her chest when she realized the light was fading. They had been walking for hours. She sank down to her knees and was suddenly angry when the boy squatted beside her. What could he know about disappearing houses, vanishing towns? The stream was the same, she was sure of it. But her home was gone, and the village also.

Pain lanced through her middle. “I’m so hungry,” she whispered.

The boy stood up and walked away. She watched dully as he disappeared between one tree and the next. The comfort she had found in the forest at the beginning of the day disappeared beneath a sharp stab of fear. A night bird screamed in the distance and her breath hitched.

She waited as the shadows deepened. The texture of the night was muffled under the trees, the darkness closing down over her head and pressing against her sodden heart. Perhaps she would have cried, but she felt too exhausted to try. Instead, she sat on the cool ground, numb and unsleeping.

Movement in the woods, and her heart knocked against her throat. She didn’t recognize the boy until he stood right before her, for he was a shapeless figure in the deeper shadow of the trees. He held something out to her, but she couldn’t tell what it was until her hands dropped beneath the weight of his offering. It was a hare, neck flopping against her hands.

She placed the offering on the ground beside her--nothing to be done with it in the dark. “Thank you,” she said softly. The boy sat down beside her. Eventually, between one breath and the next, her head fell forward and she slept.

 She woke with a sharp pain in her neck when she moved it. “A bed,” she murmured. “A quilt. Food…” And then she remembered the hare.

They had nothing to make a fire. She skinned the creature with the boy’s knife and they ate what she could scrape off its lean bones. Afterwards, she washed the blood off her hands in the stream and took a long drink before they continued on their way.

She no longer knew where to go. But there was no reason to stop. So she walked on, and the boy followed.

On the third day, it rained. Her dress was filthy from travel and ragged from scraping against tree branches. The cloth stuck to her skin and she felt even dirtier than before because of the heat and wet. “Ugh,” Riva said to the boy. “I wish we could--”

A crack of thunder interrupted her words, and she couldn’t breathe. She tried to say something, anything, but found the world had frozen around her. The ground reached out and smacked her in the back of the head, which made the pain in her chest even worse. If she had any breath, she would have cried out. But it seemed she could not speak.

The boy bent over her. His hands were on her face and she saw he was moving his mouth. She wanted to laugh--here she was, speechless, and him trying to say something. A reversal.

“Mother,” she heard him say in a voice like a lilting song. His fingers caressed her face and the look in those strange eyes made her heart pause. Weary, she closed her eyes.

#

The hunter came out of the woods and his gun dropped from his fingers. He covered his mouth with one hand. There, a teenage boy bent over an old woman on the ground. Her chest was red and wet, like a gaping mouth.

The boy turned his head toward the intruder on the scene, and the hunter stopped with his phone halfway out of his pocket. He had been about to call 9-9-9, but there was something off about the boy, something that gave him pause. The boy’s great eyes blinked at the hunter and the man heard, unbelievably, an animal growl rising from that thin chest. He half-turned back to reach for his gun.

He never made it. Many years later, the gun was found by a child playing by the water, who stared at it curiously. Grown round by vines and carried up the trunk of a tree, the ancient rifle pointed straight upwards, mute testament to an outmoded practice. Guns were now irrelevant, a strange thing of the past. But the rifle stood sentinel still, as if to shoot at the blue, blue sky of heaven.

Alison McBain has over 40 publications in magazines and anthologies, including Flash Fiction Online, Abyss & Apex, Bards and Sages Quarterly and Frozen Fairy Tales.

MUKASHIBANASHI 7: TARO URASHIMA

MUKASHIBANASHI 7: TARO URASHIMA

Taro Urashima is the Japanese Rip van Winkle or Peter Klaus, who lives among the Pacific merfolk. Now more about these merfolk, and the fact that they're as close to dragons as they are to Norse mers or Mediterranean sirens and nereids, will be told below in the tale itself.

Mukashi mukashi, in a little coastal village on a little island, there lived a stripling by the name of Taro Urashima. He was a good-natured, kind-hearted lad, and no matter if he, like most of his countrymen, lived off the ocean as a fisherman catching fish and seafood in a little junk-like sailboat, he had a soft spot for all the various animal species that dwell in the vast Pacific. 
One bright summer morn, when about to set sail, he saw the three village bullies tormenting a green sea turtle which the tide had beached upon the shore. Now you may have noticed that not all boys are as friendly as they ought to be, and these three wicked brothers were the worst lads on the whole island, so they were beating on the poor beached turtle's carapace as if it were a drum, or trying to break it with beach pebbles, as one of them did, in fact. Who knows how old this reptile was --turtles can live for centuries!--, and how mournful a look she had in her eyes!
"Let the poor thing go!" Taro said, but the three bad boys kept on with their cruelty. So he kept on trying to coax them with friendly smiles, and even offering the bullies a pair of koban from his own savings; that settled it, the three brothers went away, and Taro put the free turtle in his boat and, after having calmed her on board, set her free in the middle of the ocean.
A few days after that, Taro got lost in a terrible storm, so far away from land that all he could see were leaden waves as high as mountain peaks with snow-crests of foam. He was still young and inexperienced, after all, and thus he had set sail without looking forwards at the ominous nimbus clouds. His sailboat was a tossing and turning nutshell, and soon it capsized, as it should, and the poor stripling was swallowed up by the waves only to cling to something hard, round, and with a plaque pattern that turned out to be a rather familiar carapace. In her beak, the turtle held a strand of algae, and she seemed to encourage Taro to consume it. So he put the algae to his lips, and, wincing slightly, swallowed it whole. Right then he began to be overcome by a strange drowsiness, and, as he fell asleep, he heard the turtle speak in his own language: "Please cling to my carapace tight, Taro Urashima."
Now Taro would have drowned and been torn away by the currents had he not clung that tightly to the turtle, and he felt that his kindness had been rewarded with such a life-saving deed, and, as he fell unconscious clinging to the turtle's carapace, she plunged back into the Pacific, fathoms below, with Taro on her back. The stripling did not drown, however; evidently, the algae he had ingested proved to be some kind of gillyweed that endowed him with underwater respiratory organs.
When Taro Urashima awoke he looked left and right, and wondered what ever had happened: he lay on a bed with a mattress of algae, in the midst of a bedchamber made out of brightly coloured coral; he doubted whether he was dead or alive. What's more, he was underwater, yet he could breathe saltwater and stay alive for some reason. Looking down, he saw the gills, like a blood-red collar, protruding on the sides of his throat. Various cetaceans (dolphins, orcas...), turtles, an octopus, a pair of puffers, and three maidens with gills and dragon tails --dragons from the waist downwards-- surrounded him in the bedchamber. Luminescent sea jellies lit up the chamber as lamps of cold, icy light.
Since childhood, Taro had, like many other children, heard of the Dragon Palace, the court of the dragons or merfolk. In Asia, unlike here in Europe, dragons are considered creatures of the water rather than fire; they live in both freshwaters and seas, they can turn human from the waist downwards as reptilian merfolk, or into green turtles... and their ruler, the Dragon Queen Otohime, keeps her court at a royal palace of colourful corals right in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Hither it was that Taro Urashima had been carried. So the Dragon Palace was not a folktale!
A shrill squeaking from the dolphins, like a cetacean fanfare, filled the bedchamber and in strode the loveliest maiden Taro had ever seen, also with a dragon's tail for legs and a collar of gills; but by the array of the pearl tiara and coral jewellery she wore, he recognized none other than the Queen herself.
Standing up to bow very low in her presence, Taro began to feel a little twinge in his chest as she approached.
"You saved Our life, Taro Urashima, when We were beached on your shore not long ago. As a token of Our gratitude, you are heretofore a guest of honour at Our court; an honour which few to no mortals have ever held."
"Th-th-thank... you..." a blushing, awkward Taro replied, not understanding why the lovely voice of Otohime and the look in her eyes, so reminiscent of the one she'd had as a turtle, made him feel at a loss for words. She clapped her dainty hands and more octopi entered, carrying a tray full of delicacies of sushi and algae in each of their arms. After the feast, all the courtiers --fish and turtles, dragons and cetaceans-- danced with one another in a ballroom full of luminescent jellies, and the Queen herself danced with her mortal guest, whom she had proclaimed to be her consort.
The next day, she gave the stripling a tour of her palace, showing him the turtles which the mer-dragons rode through the ocean, the rehearsals of the court's dolphin choir, the lovely lush anemone and algae gardens, and she led him to a garden arbour with four windows, each one oriented towards a different cardinal direction; the eastern window showed cherry blossoms and butterflies in springtime on land, the southern one a searing summer complete with loud chirps of cicadas, the western one the warm colours of the autumn maple woods, the northern one a winter landscape enchanting with snow and frost. In such a manner did the merfolk amuse themselves, since they could not live on land, by looking at what it was like through these enchanted windows.
There were also many different theatre plays and operas performed at the Dragon Palace, as they were at any mortal royal court on land; and a new show, which always was an exciting one, was put on every day.
Thus sped what seemed to be a week, or maybe a fortnight, among underwater courtly entertainments, when the stripling began to miss his good mother and friends back in his native village. Queen Otohime lent him one of her fastest turtles to take him to shore, as well as the antidote algae that would give the lad back his lungs, and the two consorts took their leave of one another with a warm kiss and a little lacquered casket, a tamatebako (what we here in Europe call a Pandora's box), for a keepsake with the obvious interdiction not to open it.
Now anyone should know that the greatest temptation when it comes to Pandora's boxes is to let the lid fly open. You cannot entrust such a box to anyone because the interdiction has the effect of making the longing for opening the box grow stronger and stronger until the lid is finally pried. Yet the gods, all over the world and across cultures, keep on giving away Pandora's boxes to mortals precisely for that reason.
When he had swallowed the seaweed that made him become human once more, Taro Urashima came in sight of his own shore... or was it his own shore? He might as well have said with the Ancient Mariner: "Is this the hill? Is this the shrine? Is this my old country?" Because a middle-sized town stood where his village should have been, yet he recognized the hills and the cliffs in its environs, and the local shrine, as those of his native community.
Upon landing, most of the faces that met his eye were strangers'. He asked for his mother left and right, and an aged man, about a century old, was the one to give him a reply: Mrs. Urashima had fallen seriously ill and died, her heart having ostensibly broken in twain, when her only boy Taro had not returned from the ocean on that stormy summer day ninety years ago.
Steeling himself, holding back the tears, Taro asked the old man: "Did Taro Urashima really never return?" And the aged one replies: "My lad, you are the spitting image of that young man... Last time I ever saw him, I remember, my brothers, bless their souls, and I were playing with... or rather bullying a beached turtle, and he coaxed us to leave it be in exchange for a pair of koban..."
So the old man was one of those three bad boys who had bullied Otohime on that bright summer morning... and it had been ninety years ago! Storming uphill to the shrine, looking all over the cemetery, and finding his mother's grave overgrown with moss, drying up his tears on the hard gravestone, the stripling realised that time sped far slower in the underwater realm of dragons than on land... Now there was no place left for him... The temptation to open the lacquered box could not be stronger. He counted to three and lifted the lid.
The casket was full of purple mist, or smoke, which Taro Urashima breathed in, as he rapidly weakened and aged into seniority, just like Walter Donovan in The Last Crusade. 
At this point, all sources differ when it comes to relating the end of his tale. Some say he finally crumbled into dust, just like Walter Donovan. Others relate that he lived on in his own birthplace as the local old madman, entertaining children with anecdotes of the century before during the decades he had left of his life. A third version, the one towards which I am the most inclined, states that he ran back down to shore and begged the Ocean Queen for his pardon; Otohime forgave him and fed him more gillyweed, and thus he returned to her coral palace as her consort, for the centuries to come.


REMARKS ON THIS TALE:

• The Year-Inside-Hour-Outside chronology of magical lands is also mentioned in references to Celtic Fairylands and in Story the Third of Andersen's Snow Queen, with the good witch's garden of eternal springtime in which Gerda is kept for half a year: she enters in mid-springtime and does not leave until late autumn, around November. However, just like Rip van Winkle, Peter Klaus, or the Seven Sleepers of Norse lore, Taro Urashima is kept in the underwater realm of dragons for decades.
• As for Asian dragons and their overlapping with merfolk, I explain it in the story itself. To give another example, seahorses are called "baby dragons" (tatsu no ko) in Japanese. The same I have said about dragons and merfolk goes for Pandora's boxes.
• Juan Valera has retold this story in Spanish and made it quite popular in Spain.
• The story, due to its Year-Inside-Hour-Outside premise, is one of the most frequently retold mukashibanashi, lending itself particularly well to science fiction, since in outer space, just like in the realm of merfolk, time moves at a far slower pace than on Earth. It's therefore also been used by serious physicists, in academia, to explain the theory of relativity to students.
• "Urashima-jótai" (浦島状態) is a phrase used in popular culture to describe someone who has been left behind by the times, or otherwise rendered unaware of his changing environment. It can also be used describe someone who is unfamiliar with a formerly familiar surrounding, upon his return from an absence. Its Western equivalent is Odysseus syndrome / el síndrome de Ulises, obviously taken from the titular character's return to Ithaca in the Homeric Odyssey.
• A Brazilian TV commercial for the airline Varig which aired in the late 60s and 1970 (as a promotion for Expo 70) did feature Taro as a fisherman who nursed a sick turtle - the retelling of the storyline was that he and the turtle ended up in Brazil and living among natives (with two mountain peaks resembling Sugarloaf and Urca Hill (landmarks of Rio de Janeiro), where he is marooned for the remainder of his life, aging into an elderly man (with imagery of Brazilian landscape including Iguaçu Falls). Despite his old age, one of the natives gives him a sealed box - he opens it where he experiences reverse aging and it has a Varig Airways boarding pass (plane ticket) - a second TV commercial has him back in Japan where he meets up with his relatives and back in his village until a tsurumaru transforms the village into a futuristic scenery - the landscape of the Expo 70 grounds. In both TV commercials, Varig Airlines was promoting its Rio de Janeiro to Tokyo international route.

THE SNOW QUEEN - STORY III

THE SNOW QUEEN

A FAIRYTALE IN SE7EN STORIES

STORY THE THI3D 

THE FLOWER

GARDEN

After Kai had been missing for a few days, Gerda began to fear the worst. But the sun was shining, and its bright rays seemed to say to Gerda that Kai was still alive. From butterflies fluttering and bumblebees bombinating around, from the scent of newly-opened scarlet and ivory roses and supple peaseblossoms, she felt the presence of her missing friend in the springtime air. The songbirds, too, with their fine spring plumage and cheerful chittering, assured Gerda that Kai was not dead. And thus, she soon decided that he was indeed alive, and one particularly fine April day, she made up her mind to look for him.
She set out the very next morning, at the crack of dawn, wearing her most treasured possession — her new red shoes, which she had received for her birthday. Kai had never seen those shoes, and Gerda wanted to show them off as soon as she found him. She had an idea that, if she went to the river that ran through the town, the water might carry some news of Kai to her.
Gerda sat by the river, and watched as the stream carried by the tales and news of the thousands of souls that it passed every day. But there was no news of Kai.
"I know," thought Gerda, "if I throw my shoes into the river, and wish very hard, maybe they will lead me to Kai." Gerda could not throw very far, and the water simply carried her shoes back to the bank where she sat.
There was a small rowing boat tied to a stump nearby. Gerda clambered aboard and walked gingerly to the front of the boat, thinking that from here she could throw the shoes further out into the river. But as she cast her shoes into the water, the boat slipped its mooring and began to drift out towards the centre of the river.
Gerda looked around for help, but there was no one down by the river, on either bank, apart from her. The fishing boat had pointed itself downstream, and was beginning to pick up speed. Gerda's red shoes bobbed along in its wake, but were soon left trailing behind as the boat was propelled forwards by the strong currents of the rapids.
Gerda gripped the side of the boat and cried for help, glancing in desperation at the banks of the rivers. But only the shorebirds heard her. The sedge-warblers and curlews flew the length of the riverbank, keeping pace with Gerda's boat and calling, encouraging her. "Here we are," they cried, "we will fly with you. We won't let you come to any harm!"
Gerda was comforted by their song. Her grip on the boat relaxed, and she looked around. Grassy meadows with sweet-smelling wildflowers were home for cows and sheep. Willows dipped their slender branches in the stream and drank, with their tangled roots clung fiercely to the water's edge, while their branches dipped into the water’s edge like a toddler would with their toes.
Gerda's spirits rose. She began to believe that maybe the river was carrying her to Kai.

Hours passed, and gradually the river became more winding, and the currents slowed. Gerda marvelled at a cherry orchard on the left bank; the blossom was so dense and so pure white it took her breath away. The boat seemed to be drifting towards the orchard, and, as she got closer, Gerda spied a little cottage amidst the cloud-like blossoms. The cottage had a thatched roof and odd little windows. A small white wicket gate at the entrance to the garden was guarded by two soldiers, one on either side,
Gerda called out to the soldiers, but they were lifesized nutcrackers, made of wood, and thus, could not answer. As the boat finally nudged against the riverbank, an old woman emerged from the cottage. She wore a large-brimmed straw hat, gaily painted with hundreds of different flowers, and she walked with the aid of a stick or cane. As the old woman drew closer, Gerda realised that she was even much older than Kai's grandmother. Her face was wrinkled like an old apple, but she was smiling and her eyes looked kindly.
"You poor thing!" the old lady said. "You look cold and half-starved. Where have you come from?"
Gerda told her the whole story; the old lady sighed and looked sympathetic, but when Gerda asked if she had seen Kai, she only shook her head.
"You must eat, my dear, before you continue your journey. Come into my house and have some cherries," she offered with a smile.
Gerda thought this sounded like a wonderful idea, and she followed the old lady through the beautiful flower garden into the curious thatched cottage. The panes in the stained-glass windows were made up of tiny squares of blue and red, and the sunlight shining through the coloured glass made everything seem a little odd.
Gerda sat down at the wooden table, and the old lady brought out a bowl full to overflowing with ripe ruby-red cherries.
"Eat as many as you like," she urged, and, as Gerda tucked in, she started to comb the little girl's long fair hair.
Gerda was unaware of it, but the old lady know how to work magic. Not wicked magic like the sorcerer with the mirror, but simple small enchantments. As she combed Gerda's hair, the wise woman, who had been very lonely since her husband died and her children left her, thought how nice it would be to have some company for a while. The longer she combed, and the more Gerda ate, the less the little girl thought about her journey and her lost friend.
After the meal, the wise old woman let the tired little girl have a sleep on the sofa, tucked up with a warm patchwork blanket and a plump pillow smelling of violets and lavender. While Gerda slept, the old lady went out into her flower garden, She clicked her fingers, and all the rose bushes sank back into the ground, for Gerda had told her about the roses in the window-boxes, and the sorceress feared they would remind the girl of her lost friend Kai.
The next few days passed peacefully for Gerda. She played in the old lady's beautiful flower garden; she was amazed at how many different types and colours of flowers there were. Each and every morning, the sun shone on the shrubs and flower beds, and the blooms opened, welcoming the light and warmth of the star of stars. Gerda helped the old lady water and prune the garden,  even fixing the thatched roof for the rain not to get in, and, in return, the sorceress taught her the names of all the plants she didn't know, and how to recognize each flower's distinctive perfume and healing properties.
For all the variety and colour in the garden, at the back of her mind Gerda knew there was something missing. The garden felt incomplete. It was the old lady's straw hat that solved the mystery for her. One day, it was left lying on the table, and Gerda was looking at the lovely flower drawings round the rim. The most beautiful of them all was a scarlet rose — a painted rose that the old lady's spell had missed.
Gerda rushed out into the garden. Surely there must be roses here; maybe she had simply missed them; maybe they were in some quiet corner that she rarely visited. She found no roses. For some reason, this made her feel very sad, and, as she sat by the flower beds, a teardrop rolled down her left cheek and fell on the soil. By chance, it fell on one of the very spots where a rose bush once had stood. As Gerda's tear touched the soil. the rose bush sprang from the ground, fully in bloom, released from its enchantment.
Gerda, too, was free of the enchantment that had imprisoned her. Seeing the rose bush yield clusters of ivory flowers, she remembered Kai, and how she had set out on a journey to find him.
"Do you think my friend is still alive?" she asked the ivory roses.
"You must keep looking," the rose bush answered her, "for we have spent many days underground, and Kai was not amongst the dead and buried."
Gerda wandered around the garden one last time, and asked all the flowers if they had seen her friend Kai. The tiger-lily, the moonflowers, the snowdrops, and the perfumed hyacinths all told tragic tales; they made Gerda feel lonely and afraid, The buttercups cheered her up with a pretty song full of sunshine and kisses, but couldn't help her find Kai. The narcissus was no help either, it was too busy gazing at its own reflection in the pond to answer. Each and every flower told a different story, but the stories were their own, and told Gerda nothing of their friend.
She knew that she had to leave the old lady's garden straight away, so she picked up her skirts and ran as fast as she could. The garden gate was locked, but Gerda pulled as fiercely as she could and the rusty hinges gave way. As she went through the gate, Gerda realised that the garden's eternal springtime was just an illusion. In the outside world, spring and summer were over, and she shivered in the autumn winds.
"I have wasted so much time," she sighed. "I must not stop again!"