WINTER ' FOURTEEN
hips, and dark as shrivelled elderberries. The loops of Rapunzel's hair criss-cross it: a giant, golden cobweb.
Round the peg, over the peg, down the hole. Round the peg, over the peg, down the hole.
At the end of each night, the witch descends the pit, skipping the cobweb to its hub. She grasps the
braided cord, lowers herself and tugs, so it hangs down the centre of the pit like a plumb line. Slowly,
slowly, hand over hand, she climbs downward. Knitted into position, Rapunzel sees nothing.
"Where does it go?" She has asked the question often these last seven years.
"To the centre of the earth," the witch replies, as she always does. "I am knitting you into the soil,
the rock, the fire at the earth's heart. You will be the golden thread running through the centre of creation."
Each day Rapunzel contemplates, while the witch is lost in earth's inner regions. Through the window
she can never reach, she watches the ever-changing sky, feels the sun's warmth on rice-pale skin, hears
the mating call of the blackbird, smells the scent of nettles after summer rain. Each sound, each smell
is as intimate as her own heartbeat.
"The witch is wrong," she thinks in her silent heart. "Creation is the golden thread that runs through
me."
The French-knitted cord tugs at the roots of Rapunzel's hair, as questing badgers tug at the roots of
ancient oaks. The witch climbs, skips, takes out the polished stick to knit once more. She tugs at her
handiwork and descends back into the darkness at the centre of the earth. Beyond the forbidden window,
the stars come out: silver on ebony. Beryl, garnet, aquamarine. An ancient song of the spheres thrums
in Rapunzel's temples.
"She cannot knit me to the stars," Rapunzel thinks. "Out there, I float free, encircling the round
world. She cannot knit cords with my heart."
The rope of hair tugs, but it is different. After seven years of knitting, every night the same, Rapunzel
knows it is different. She strains to turn her head. Hairs snap. She bites her petal-pale lips in pain.
Something is rising from the pit, straight and dark as a stick of obsidian. A second cord of French-knitted
hair, standing tall like a young tree. Climbing up it come a pair of feet in toed stockings, legs in patterned
silk breeches, a torso in a loose silk jacket, rising upwards and yet impossibly hanging as though their
owner were standing feet-down on the ground. And from the centre of the golden web comes a man's voice:
"I am knitting you into the soil, my prince. Into the rock, the fire at the earth's heart. You will be
the golden thread running through the centre of creation."
The Linnet's Wings