Read Sister Emily's Lightship Online
Authors: Jane Yolen
Sister Emily's Lightship
and Other Stories
Jane Yolen
For David and Marilyn, more than thirty years of love and thanks
The Gift of the Magicians, with Apologies to You Know Who
Creationism: An Illustrated Lecture in Two Parts
Dick W. and His Pussy; or, Tess and Her Adequate Dick
T
RAVELING SOUTH FROM AMBERT
you must pass the old stoney abbey of La Chaise-Dieu. It was near that abbey in 1536 that a young woman fell asleep on a dolmen and dreamed of the virgin. There are some who said such dreams come as a consequence of lying out in the night air. Others that it was the cold stone beneath her that prompted such haverings. A few bitter souls said that she was, alas, no better than she should have been and women like that cannot dream of the Queen of Heaven and it was perforce a lie.
But the dreamer was a simple peasant woman caught out between Ambert and Le Puy, having turned her ankle on the rough road. She did not realize how close she was to the abbey or she would have gone there for the night. The dolmen, raised up as it was, kept her free of the damp and safe from vipers. Such safety was the extent of her imagination. She did not dream of the virgin; she was waking and she saw me.
I was caught in the Aura of a time change, when the centuries lie side by side for the moment of Pass-Through. The woman saw what she thought was a crown of stars on my head, which was nothing more than the Helmet. Aura and Helmet and an untutored sixteenth century mind. What else could she believe than that I was either an angel or the Mother of God?
When I saw her and realized that I had been caught out, I swore under my breath. “Merde!”
If the expletive startled her, she did not show it. I believe she must have mistaken it for a name.
“Marie,” she whispered, crossing herself three or four times in rapid succession before passing out in an excess of ecstasy and oxygen.
I knew enough to leave her alone and hurry along my way. My destination was a small town in Auvergne where a cottage awaited me. I was well versed in the local dialectâOccitan. It sat comfortably on my tongue. The stories in Henri Pourrat's vast collection of regional tales I had memorized, my memory only slightly enhanced by Oxipol. I was always a good and quick study. As my teaching machine chose to jest with me in the same dialect: “Qu'aucu t'aye liceno.” (“Someone has been teaching you a lesson!” No one has ever said machines have good senses of humor. It has to do with a lack of the funny bone.)
It was my duty to infiltrate the community and interpolate several stories artfully prepared by our Revolutionary Council some three thousand years in France's future. Odd, isn't it, that with all the time traveling we have done since the invention of the Module, it has become abundantly clear that no shot fired, no knife thrown, no spear in the gut has the power to change the world of the future. Le Bon Dieu knows we have tried. Hitler blown up. The Khan poisoned. Marie Antoinette throttled in her cradle. And all to no avail. History, like a scab, calcifies over each wound and beneath it the skin of human atrocity heals. Only through stories, it seems can we really influence the history that is to come. Told to a ready ear, repeated by a willing mouth, by that process of mouth-to-ear resuscitation we change the world.
Stories are not just recordings. They are prophecies. They are dreams. Andâso it seemsâwe humans build the future on such dreams.
If I am successful in my storytelling, the Auvergne of the future will be a garden of earthly splendor. Gone will be the long lines of the impoverished children walking dull-eyed toward Paris under the lash of the Alien Horde. Gone will be the ravaged fields, the razed houses, the villages' streets strewn with bones.
But when I stepped into the past, ready to play my part for the future, wrapped in the ocreous glow of transfer, a peasant woman lying uneasily on a dolmen with a bad ankle added a new story, one we had not planned: how the Mother of God visited Ambert that spring. The peasant circles would soon be abuzz with it and it would in its own way change the future of the Auvergne. Would it bring a resurgence of piety to the land whose practical approach to religion had led to an easy accommodation with the socialism of the twentieth century, the apostasy of the twenty-first, the capitulation to Alien rites of the twenty-second? Without the Council's Modular Computes I could not know.
“Merde!” I cursed, stepping back.
She crossed herself and fainted.
Smoothing my skirts down, I glanced toward the road. I had planned to add two stories to Pourrat's collection. One was a Beast fabliau, about two mice and a cricket who throw off the yoke of slavery put on them by a race of cats, the other a tale we call Dinner-in-an-Eggshell which is about discovering the alien that lives in your house. We hope that one or the other or both will have the effect of warning our people. The odds have been calculated carefully but I will never know if they will succeed.
The traveler cannot return from the trip. I expect to live my thirty years as a weaver in the cottage hard by the mill, telling my stories that will pass from my mouth to my neighbors' ears at night when we work at our several tasks, one perhaps scutching hemp, another spinning, the servants tidying their threshing flails. Oh, we will have a lovely time of it, for what else is there to do on a cold harvest eve but tell stories before the fire before bundling off to our straw beds.
A woman was nursing her baby and it was the sweetest child you can imagine, with bright blue eyes and a mouth like a primrose.
One March day, the mother took her child and put him in his crib by the fire and went out to get water for the stone sink. When she returned, she heard a strange, horrible snuffling sound from the baby's crib.
She almost dropped the jug in alarm, and ran over to see what was wrong. And what did she see? Instead of her sweet baby lying in his crib, there was a
something
on the pillow as ugly and misshapen as a toad. It had bulging eyes and a green tongue and when it breathed, it made an awful snuffling sound.
The mother screamed, but then she knew what she had to do because this was a fairy's changeling child. She would have to compel him to speak and it would be no easy task, because she would have to surprise him.
So for three days she pretended to the changeling that she thought it her own child. She petted it and praised it though its very looks made her ill.
On the third day, she said to herself aloud, “I have ten strong laborers coming over for dinner.” And she rushed about the house getting ready for them, filling six milk pails with milk and four basins with cream carving away a side of lard and taking down an entire rope of onions.
“Oh me, oh my,” she sighed, “what a job to cook dinner for ten in an eggshell.”
The changeling sat up in its crib, a startled look on its ugly toad face.
Three hundred years I have lived well,
But never seen dinner in a white eggshell.
At that, the mother took out a whip and she whipped and whipped the baby, crying:
Ugly toad in baby's cot,
My sweet baby you are not. Who are you?
And because the ugly changeling had already spoken, it had to speak again. It cried out because the whip hurt it. “I am a fairy child. Ow. Ow. Ow.”
At that the fairies had to come and take their ugly baby home, bringing the mother's own child in exchange.
She picked him up and hugged him to her and she never let him out of her sight again.
To The Armies of the Revolution:
We greet you.
The enemy is gone. No more do we suffer under their whip. No more do we offer them our sons and daughters as slaves.
Now we must rebuild our nation, our world. Now we must tell the story of our travails and recall our heroes home.
âThe Marian Council
My good Robin is as fine a husband as a woman could want. And a fine storyteller, too. His stories are of the landâwhen Fox stole fish from the fishmongers, when Crow lost his cheese. He expects me to tell only women's stories, the stork tales, the tales of
ma mère l'Oye.
This I know. This I do. I tell the tales my Maman told me. ButâohâI wish in this one thing Robin could know my heart. When Maman was dying, she often rambled about a world ruled by frogs and toads. A world in which humans were able to travel along the great river of time, but backward, only backward.
“I am a traveler,” she would cry out, and weep. And Papa could not help her then, nor Jouanne or me. We would hold her hands and only when we said, “Maman, tell us a story,” would she be comforted.
“A story,” she would say, the mist going from her eyes. “I can tell you many stories. I
must
tell you many stories.” She called them
pourrats,
these tales, and they were such strange stories. Hard to understand. Hard to forget.
I tell them to my own children, as Jouanne does, I am sure, to hers. But stories do not feed a mouth, they do not salve a wound, they do not fill the soul. Only God does that. And the Mother of God. We know that surely here in our village, for did not two women just thirty years past see Mary, Mother of God, on a dolmen? Her head was crowned with stars and she named herself.
“I am Marie,” she said. “Believe in me and you will be saved.”
One of the women who saw her was Maman.
T
HEY CALL THAT WHITE FLOWER
that covers the lawn like a poplin carpet Snow in Summer. And because I was born in July with a white caul on my head, they called me that, too. Mama wanted me to answer to Summer, which is a warm, pretty name. But my Stepmama, who took me in hand just six months after Mama passed away, only spoke the single syllable of my name, and she didn't say it nicely.
“Snow!” It was a curse in her mouth. It was a cold, unfeeling thing. “Snow, where are you, girl? Snow, what have you done now?”
I didn't love her. I couldn't love her, though I tried. For Papa's sake I tried. She was a beautiful woman, everyone said. But as Miss Nancy down at the postal store opined, “Looks ain't nothing without a good heart.” And she was staring right at my Stepmama when she said it. But then Miss Nancy had been Mama's closest friend ever since they'd been little ones, and it nigh killed her, too, when Mama was took by death.
Papa was besot with my Stepmama. He thought she couldn't do no wrong. The day she moved into Cumberland he said she was the queen of love and beauty. That she was prettier than a summer night. He praised her so often, she took it ill any day he left off complimenting, even after they was hitched. She would have rather heard those soft nothings said about her than to talk of any of the things a husband needs to tell his wife: like when is dinner going to be ready or what bills are still to be paid.
I lived twelve years under that woman's hard hand, with only Miss Nancy to give me a kind word, sweep pop, and a magic story when I was blue. Was it any wonder I always went to town with a happier countenance than when I had to stay at home.
