Free Rumple What? by Nancy Springer Page A

time the king, that total oinker, adds that if he doesn’t kill her, he will marry her, as if this were supposed to be an inducement ?
    So this time, when the little man shows up, the miller’s daughter is weeping wearily, for no matter what happens, she’s out of luck. When he asks what she’ll give him to spin the straw into gold, she replies “I have nothing left,” which is, of course, not true. She could offer him the oldest of incentives, quite expects him to request same, and really doesn’t care, although she supposes that, for the dubious sake of survival, she will—
    So she is totally taken off guard when, instead of bargaining for the pleasures of her body, he says, “Oh, that’s okay. Just promise me your firstborn child.”
    She is astonished; what on earth does the little man want with a baby, all that noise and filth? But of course she agrees; who wouldn’t? A firstborn child, which might or might not happen sometime down the road, is the merest abstraction when one is a teenager faced with death at sunrise.
    *
    To take now the little man’s point of view: Eureka! The baby! This is the prize he has sought all along, caring nothing for the baubles, the necklace, the ring, and as for the girl herself—yes, indeed, she is quite appealing in her peasant-wench way, and he knows she is desperate enough to let him embrace her, but within his strong, solitary mind he also knows that such intimacy would provide only the most temporary of respite from his terrible loneliness.
    For he is uniquely alone. It is one of the Seven Egregious Unfairnesses of his life that he is out of place even among supernatural manifestations. He is neither dwarf to delve in the earth with other dwarves, nor pixie to dance in the moonlit mushroom-ring with other pixies, nor elf, sprite, fetch, bogy, nixie, leprechaun, brownie, or any sort of acceptable faery-goblin. And his is a situation most unjust, for, while giants sometimes live alone because of their grisly habits, and ogres because they are odious, the singular little man has committed only kindness, namely, the spinning of straw into gold.
    Yet he could save the miller’s daughter’s life a thousand times and she would still give him the same wary look, like a barn cat. Because she is an ordinary person, and he is not. In the minds of those who consider themselves normal, who are normal, otherness is suspect. Deformity (being auger-nosed, chicken-limbed and only three feet tall) signifies evil. Doing impossible things means the devil’s help, reason for fear.
    But the baby will know none of this! Never will the baby look at him with misgiving; the baby will not only accept him, but love him! No baby can help but love, completely and helplessly and forever after, the one who nurtures it. And nurture it he will, as well as any mother; he will give it magical milk to drink, and what are a few soiled diapers to a being with the power to spin straw into gold? He will provide well for the child. And once he has possession of it, and especially once it grows a bit and can talk with him, he will be no longer a misfit, alone, but he will belong to a clan of two.
    Now he must wait for the miller’s daughter to give birth, that is all. And even if it takes a few years—which seems unlikely, given the buxom bloom of that girl—but even if she has the sagacity to delay the inevitable, the singular little man will pass the time in patience, as he has already passed many, many years, tens of hundreds of years.
    *
    To the king, who scarcely deserves a viewpoint, it’s about time something went right. One of the Seven Most Unfair Grievances on his rather limited mind is that he had no choice what to do with his life, no options other than to be king after his old man croaked, yet he never got to be a Handsome Prince (he is an oinker in face as well as in heart) and therefore he never found a Beautiful Princess willing to be his bride. Or a Fair Lady. Or any female the least bit