Oddest of All (18 page)

Only then—and mostly because he did not know what else to do—did Nils swallow the piece of meat he had been holding in his own mouth.

In that moment he was changed forever.

 

Nils and his mother lived in a cottage at the edge of the great northern forest. Though they were far from rich, they did not want for any of the necessities of life. In part this was because Therese was a skilled gardener and seamstress. But it was also because Beloved sent Therese a small bag of gold every year, as token of her appreciation for what her husband had done. And, though the two did not know it, other Hunters kept watch on the cottage, to make sure they remained safe.

After the first year, Therese did not say anything to Nils about the gold. This was because the one time he saw it he shrieked in horror and fled the cottage, and it took her seven hours to find him.

Despite being safe and having enough to eat, Therese did not rest easy, for two things gnawed at her heart. The first was sorrow for her lost husband, who had been gruff and demanding but also a cherished companion. The second was Nils, who grew stranger and more dreamy with every passing month. Something in the boy's eyes when he gazed into the woods troubled her. Even worse were the days when he sat at the side of the cottage staring into the forest and singing wordlessly to himself—a song so filled with longing that it made his mother weep, which was something the boy himself never did.

Sometimes she would sit down beside him and ask, “What are you looking for, Nils?”

“I don't know,” he would whisper. “Something. I want
something
, Mother. But I don't know what it is.”

These were strange words to hear from a boy who was but five years old, and they troubled Therese greatly.

Once, he woke her in the middle of a rainy night, saying, “Listen!
Listen!”

“It's only the rain,” she said, caressing his golden hair.

“No, not the rain. The voices
in
the rain. What are they saying? I can't understand them!”

When Therese told Nils there were no voices, at least none that she could hear, his eyes grew wide and he crawled into bed beside her, where he spent the rest of the night shivering in terror.

Despite these things, much of the time Nils was one of the happiest creatures in all the north. This was partly because he loved the great forest behind their home and spent most of his hours playing there.

At first his love for the forest worried Therese, who feared he would get lost in the deep strangeness of the place. When the boy was still little she tried putting him in a sort of harness and tying him to a tree so he could not wander more than thirty feet away. The first time he escaped from the harness—he was six, and she never did figure out how—she was seized with panic and she plunged into the forest in search of him. She had been looking for over an hour when he ambled up to her, seeming surprised to find her so upset. When she snatched him up he patted her cheeks with his little hands and crooned, “Don't cry, Mama! Don't cry!”

“Where have you been?” she demanded, anger and relief mixing in her voice.

“Looking for something.”

“Looking for what?”

Trouble clouded his eyes. “I don't know,” he said sadly, twisting in her arms so he could stare back into the forest. “There's something my heart needs to find. But I don't know what it is.”

Therese carried him back to the cottage, her heart pounding, though she could no more say what she was afraid of than Nils could tell her what he had gone in search of.

Another time he frightened her by running into the cottage and crying angrily, “The eyes under the bushes won't come out and play with me!” When she tried to get him to tell her what he meant, all he would do was point at the bushes near the edge of the woods and howl, “There! There! The eyes under the bushes.”

“What do they look like?” she asked tenderly, her heart breaking with sorrow for his sorrow—and with fear that he was mad.

“I don't know,” he whimpered. “All I can see is their eyes.”

As for Nils's own eyes, they came to be a matter of some discussion in the village, for as he grew older they turned—so slowly that none could say when it happened, but as surely as the changing of the seasons—from blue to silver. Eventually “the boy with silver eyes” was all that some of the villagers would call him, as if they had never known his real name. Of course, these were the same ones who would spit between their fingers and make a sign to ward off evil when he passed. The other boys teased him mercilessly, of course, calling him “witchborn” and “moonchild.”

As much as some of the villagers feared Nils, once he reached a certain age he found that others—specifically young women—were irresistibly drawn to him. This caused him no small distress. It was not that he didn't like having girls follow him around; part of him rather enjoyed it. But they would follow whether he wanted them to or not, and—even worse—whether or not they already had boyfriends.

For a peace-loving boy, he had an astonishing number of fights.

When Nils was sixteen he went to his mother and said, “It is time for me to make my way in the world. I must leave you now.”

And though she wept, she knew that he was right. She offered him gold to help him on his travels, but he would not take it, for it still filled him with horror, though he could not say why.

The day he left home Nils had not gone far into the forest when he realized that Sylvie, one of the girls from town, was following him.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I don't know,” Sylvie replied, seeming not only confused by the question but startled to find herself alone with him in the wild. “It's just that—well, I thought you were leaving, Nils, and the idea scared me. Our town will not be the same without you—without your eyes.” Reaching out a trembling hand, she stroked his cheek.

Before Nils could think of what to say he heard a furious roar. Looking past Sylvie's shoulder he saw her father, a beefy man with large fists and an even larger temper, racing toward them.

Feeling no need to prove his valor, Nils turned and fled, running as far and as fast as his feet would carry him. He dashed through the darkening woods, vaulting over fallen logs, splashing through crystal streams, stumbling over rocks and root-rippled ground, until at last he flung himself down beneath a vast old oak, where he lay clutching his side and gasping for breath.

He had been there for some time before the tree began to speak to him.

“You are different,” it said, in a voice that seemed to come from the earth itself, rising in slow waves that Nils heard not with his ears but with his very skin.

“I know,” said Nils ruefully.

“Don't . . . talk . . . so . . . fast,” replied the tree, speaking so deliberately that it took four hours to finish the sentence. “Just . . .
listen.”

So Nils, who felt as if he had grown roots himself, lay still and listened, slowly and deeply, in a way he never had before. And as he lay there, nestled in the tree's roots, it murmured to him the forest secrets, telling him it had waited hundreds of years for a human who could hear it.

“You have a long road ahead,” said his new friend. “Seeds that are just sprouting will be trees many times your height before your heart will be at peace. You must learn to sing four things: the songs of the Earth, the Fire, the Water, and the Air. Three to save a life, the last to put your own soul at rest. This I know from the soil on my roots and the sun on my leaves, from the rain and the wind, which carry me news.”

This took many days and nights to say, of course, and Nils stayed all this time without moving, locked in a sort of trance.

Finally the tree fell silent, and Nils stretched as if waking from a dream. He looked around.

The woods were dark, and he had no idea how long he had been here, nor, in truth, where he was.

“Well, my lad,” he said to himself, “you've done it this time. But morning will come soon enough.”

He was gathering some leaves to make a rough mattress when he noticed an ugly little face peering over one of the thick roots that rumpled the ground around him. He caught his breath and held motionless, afraid of frightening his visitor. He knew those eyes; they were the eyes he had seen from the time he was little. But now, at last, he could see the face that went with them, and he knew it was because the tree had changed him, taught him to see more slowly.

The eyes blinked and began to back away.

“Don't go,” whispered Nils, his voice low but filled with urgency.

The creature ducked behind one of the thick roots. Nils strained his ears but could hear not the slightest rustle in the leaves. He counted ten long breaths, then said softly, “Are you still there?”

“No!”

Nils laughed. “Good. I was afraid you were going to stay and bother me all night long.”

“You're not supposed to be able to see me,” said the voice querulously. “No one can see us these days.”

“Well, I didn't used to be able to see you,” confessed Nils. “Just your eyes.”

“As if that's not enough! Well, since you've already seen me, there's no point in hiding.” And with that the creature climbed over the root. Not quite two feet high, it stood, hands on hips, staring at Nils defiantly.

“What are you?” Nils asked in astonishment.

“You can't tell?” replied the little man, sounding more irritated than ever. “Look at these ears!”

And, indeed, his ears were of interest, since they were pointed and at least twice as large as would have seemed normal for the size of his head.

“Look at these hands!”

The creature held out his hands, which were corded with veins. The fingers were long, the knuckles thick and knobbly.

“Look at this nose!” he fairly shrieked, plucking at the oversized sausage that grew between his eyes. “I'm a goblin, you fool. A goblin! And now that you've seen me, I'll have to take you to the land below.”

“I should probably tell my mother before we go,” said Nils.

The goblin sighed. “You really are a bit of a simpleton, aren't you? No one gets to leave a message before taking such a journey!”

Suddenly Nils heard mutterings and stirrings all about him. A moment later he saw dozens of pairs of eyes—and a moment after that the goblins those eyes belonged to. With a cry, the ugly creatures rushed forward and snatched him off the ground. As Nils thrashed and struggled and cried out for help, they scampered across the forest floor, bearing him on their shoulders. Their little hands were incredibly strong, and fight as he might Nils could not escape.

What the goblins did not understand was that if they had only asked, Nils would have been perfectly happy to go with them on his own. He was eager to see new places, in the hope that he might, at last, find what he was searching for.

Moonlight lay in silver puddles upon the forest floor. The branches of the trees cast strange and threatening shadows. Nils's captors followed a stream to a waterfall that hid the mouth of a deep cave; when they scampered behind the falls, Nils had passed from the world we know to the strange and secret world of the goblins, which they call Nilbog.

Down they went, through secret stony passages, deep into the earth. Sometimes they traveled in darkness complete, sometimes on paths lit by torches topped with flickering flames of green, and more than once through caverns where the only light came from thick shelves of fungus that glowed pale blue.

The goblins came at last to the vast cavern where their king's castle had been built. They carried Nils across the drawbridge, through the gate, and into the presence of the king, who sat upon a throne carved from stone and clutched a ruby scepter while he scowled at the world.

“Why have you brought this human here?” demanded the king.

“He can see us!” cried the goblin to whom Nils had first spoken.

This so startled the king that he dropped his scepter. “Put him down,” he ordered.

Immediately, the goblins let go of Nils, who fell to the floor with a painful thump.

The king stepped down from his throne to stare at him. “You have strange eyes,” he said at last. “So perhaps it is true. Can you really see us?”

“I can,” said Nils, trying to keep his voice from quaking.

“Prove it!”

So Nils described the king, telling him every detail of how he looked, from the wart at the end of his wobbly nose to the curving claws at the tips of his thick green toes.

To Nils's astonishment, the king began to weep. “At last!” he cried. “At last! It's been so long since anyone could see us that I had begun to fear we no longer existed. For you, my boy, a great boon is in order! Follow me!”

With goblins capering behind them, the king led Nils to the treasure chamber of Nilbog. Throwing wide the great doors he cried, “Take what you wish, lad. Anything you want is yours!”

Nils gasped. The room was filled with all things strange and wonderful, with goblin gold and massive gems, with swords and spears and kitchen knives, with shields and crowns, and enchanted jewels that whispered their names in the night. But as he looked, only one thing caught his heart, a plain harp made of dark wood that sat at the edge of the chamber. He remembered what the tree had told him, that he must learn to sing. So he plucked the harp from the pile, saying, “I'll take this.”

“But it is worth hardly anything,” said the king.

“It is what I want.”

“It doesn't even have all its strings,” protested the king, eager to have Nils take something finer and more precious. “See, the longest one is broken. Take something else.”

“You have offered a boon,” said Nils stubbornly, “and this is what I would like. May I have it?”

“I suppose so,” grumbled the king. “But never say the goblins were stingy with you.”