“You didn’t do your task rightly,” she said, “but as I promised to give this youth a name and to listen to the story he had to tell, I shall have to let it be. You may tell the story now, Gilly of the Goatskin.”
They sat at the fire, and while the Old Woman of Beare spun threads on a very ancient spindle, and while the corncrake, the cuckoo and the swallow picked up grains and murmured to themselves, Gilly of the Goatskin told them the Unique Tale. And the story as Gilly of the Goatskin told it follows this.—
A Unique Tale
A King and a Queen were walking one day by the blue pool in their domain. The swan had come to the blue pool, and the bright yellow flowers of the broom were above the water. “Och,” said the Queen, “if I might have a daughter that would show such colors—the blue of the pool in her eyes, the bright yellow of the broom in her hair, and the white of the swan in her skin—I would let my seven sons go with the wild geese.” “Hush,” said the King. “You ask for a doom, and it may be sent you.” A shivering came upon the Queen. They went back to the Castle, and that evening the nurse told them that a gray man had passed in a circle round her seven sons saying, “If it be as your mother desired, let it be as she has said.”
Well, before the broom blossomed again and before the swan came to the blue pool, a child was born to the Queen. It was a girl. The King was sitting with his seven sons when the women came to tell him of the new birth. “O my sons,” said he, “may ye be with me all my life.” But his sons moved from him as he said it. Out through the door they went, and up the mound that was before the door. There they changed into gray wild geese, and the seven flew towards the empty hills.
No councillor that the King consulted could help to win them back again, and no hunter that he sent through the country could gain tale or tidings of them. The King and Queen were left with one child only, the girl just born. They called her “Sheen,” a word that means “Storm,” because her coming was a storm that swept away her seven brothers. The Queen died, my hearers. Then little Sheen was forgotten by her father, and she was reared and companioned by the servants of the house.
One day, when she was the age her eldest brother was when he was changed from his human form, Sheen went with Mor, the Woodman’s daughter, and Siav, the basket-maker’s foster-child, to gather berries in the wood. Going here and there she got separated from Siav and Mor. She came to a place where there were lots of berries and went step after step to pick them. Her feet went down in a marsh. She cried to Mor and Siav, but no answers came from them. She cried and cried again. Her cries startled seven wild geese that rose up and flew round her. “Save me,” she cried to them. Then one of the wild geese spoke to her. “Anyone but a girl we would save from the marsh, but such a one we cannot save, because it was a girl who lost us our human forms and the loving companionship of our father.” Then Sheen knew—for the servants had often told her the story—that it was one of her seven brothers who spoke. “Since ever I knew of it,” said she, “the whole of my trouble has been that I was the cause of your losing your human form and the companionship of our father who is now called the Lonely King. Believe me,” said she, “that I would have striven and striven to win you back.” There was so much feeling in her voice that her seven brothers, although they had been hardened by thinking about their misfortune, were touched at their hearts and they flew down to help her. They bore up her arms, they caught at her shoulders, they raised up her feet. They carried her beyond the marsh. Then she knelt down and cried to them, “O my brothers dear, is there anything I can do to restore you to your human forms?” “There is,” said the first of the seven wild geese. She begged them to tell it to her. “It’s a long and a tiresome labor we would put on you,” said one. “If you would gather the light down that grows on the bogs with your own hands,” said another, “and if you spun that down into threads, and wove the threads into a cloth and sewed the cloth into a shirt, and did that over and over again until you had made seven shirts for us, all that time without laughing or crying or saying a word, you could save us. One shirt you could weave and spin and sew in a year. And it would not be until the seven shirts were put upon us that the human form would be restored to each of us.” “I would be glad to do all that,” said Sheen, “and I would cry no tear, laugh no laugh, and say no word all the time I was doing this task.”
Then said the eldest brother, “The marsh is between you and our father’s house, and between you and the companions who were with you to-day. If you would do the task that would restore us to our human forms, it were best you did not go back. Beyond the trees is the house of a lone woman, and there you may live until your task is finished.” The seven wild geese then flew back to the marsh, and Sheen went to the house beyond the trees. The Spae-Woman lived there. She took Sheen to be a dumb girl, and she gave her food and shelter for the services she did—bringing water from the well in the daytime and grinding corn at the quern at dusk. She had the rest of the day and night for her own task. She gathered the bog-down between noon and sunset and spun the thread at night. When she had lengths of thread spun she began to weave them on the loom. At the end of a year she had the first shirt made. In another year she made the second, then the third, then the fourth, the fifth and the sixth. And all the time she said no word, laughed no laugh and cried no tear.
She was gathering the bog-down for the seventh and last shirt. Once she went abroad on a day when the snow was melted and she felt her footsteps light. Hundreds of birds were on the ground eating plentifully and calling to one another. Sheen could hardly keep from her mouth the song that was in her mind. She would sing and laugh and talk when the last thread was spun and woven, when the last stitch was sewn, and when the shirts of bog-down she had made in silence would have brought back her brothers to their own human forms. She gathered the scarce heads of the cannavan or bog-down with one hand, while she held the other hand to her lips.
Something dropped down at her feet. It was a white grouse and it remained cowering on the ground. Sheen looked up and she saw a hawk above. And when she looked round she saw a man coming across the bog. The hawk flew towards him and lighted on his shoulder.