The Girl Who Married the Reindeer

by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

I

When she came to the finger-post

She turned right and walked as far as the mountains.

Patches of snow lay under the thorny bush

That was blue with sloes. She filled her pockets.

The sloes piled into the hollows of her skirt.

The sunset wind blew cold against her belly

And light shrank between the branches

While her hands raked in the hard fruit.

The reindeer halted before her

And claimed her as his wife.

She rode home on his back without speaking,

Holding her rolled–up skirt,

Her free hand grasping the wide antlers

To keep her steady on the long ride.

II

How could they let her go back to stay

In that cold house with that strange beast?

So the old queen said, whose son her sister had married.

Thirteen months after she left home

She'd travelled hunched on the deck of a trader

Southwards to her sister's wedding.

Her eyes reflected acres of snow,

Her breasts were large from suckling,

There was salt in her hair.

They met her staggering on the quay;

They put her in a scented bath,

Found a silken dress, combed her hair out.

They slipped a powder in her drink

So she forgot her child, her friend,

The snow, and the sloe gin.

III

The reindeer died when his child was ten years old.

Naked in death his body was a man's.

Young, with an old man’s face and scored with grief.

When the old woman felt his curse, she sickened,

She lay in her tower bedroom and could not speak.

The young woman who had nursed her grandchildren nursed her.

IV

The boy from the north stood in the archway

That looked into the courtyard where water fell,

His arm around the neck of his companion —

A wild reindeer staggered by sunlight.

His hair was bleached, his skin blistered.

He saw the woman in wide silk trousers

Come out of the door at the foot of the stairs,

Sit on a cushion and stretch her right hand for a hammer.

She hammered the dried, broad beans one by one,

While the swallows timed her, swinging side to side:

The hard skin fell away, and the left hand

Tossed the bean into the big brass pot.

It would surely take her all day to do them all.

She saw the child watching, her face did not change.

A light wind fled over them

As the witch died in the high tower.

She knew her child in that moment:

His body poured into her vision

Like a snake pouring over the ground,

Like a double–mouthed fountain of two nymphs,

The light groove scored on his chest

Like the meeting of two tidal roads, two oceans.