“Then what do I do?”
“Ah. Then, my child, you will dance until you give him something he wants as much as the dance.”
“What is that?”
But the old woman shook her heavy head and shrugged her humped shoulder. “That is what you must find, Little Elsa.” Then she sprang down from the root and scampered into the forest, and she was gone before Elsa could draw her next breath.
Elsa sat there for a long time, listening to her own heartbeat and to the laughter of the crows. Then she gathered her empty cup and handkerchief and climbed down off the root. Elsa walked on. The woods grew darker, and the path grew narrower still. There was a place where a tree root arched over it like a doorway, and Elsa walked through. A stream cut it neatly in two with silver water and muted laughter. She jumped over it, landing unsteadily on her tired feet.
Ahead she saw a place that was gray instead of black. Gradually, her aching eyes saw it was a clearing, and she saw the black corpse of a tree lying like a fallen giant in the middle. Her breath seized up in her throat, and she left the path that was her only guide, and, one hesitant step at a time, she moved toward that gray place. The trees laid their branches on her head and shoulders, cautioning, trying to hold her back and turn her away. She had to push past them as she pushed past her brothers and sisters to see the parades in the streets. As she drew closer, something tickled at her nose, a strange smell she did not expect in such a place. Tobacco.
Elsa dropped down to her knees. Awkwardly, for she kept hold of Clarissa in one arm, she wriggled forward. The ragged hem of the tree trunk pointed toward her, and past it she could just see a man’s black boots, and a brown hand, and a trickle of white smoke rising toward the gray evening sky.
Elsa made her decision. She crept carefully into the hollow of the great fallen tree. The worms and beetles paused in their work to see who this new neighbor was. The punk wood turned to powder as she touched it and showered down into her hair and eyes. She rubbed her eyelids, held in her sneezes and peered out through a slit in the bark that allowed her to see just a little slice of the clearing. But that slice held the soldier with his red beard wild and uncombed and his scarlet coat shining with gold braid.
The soldier sat on a stone, his legs stretched out and his black boots crossed. He puffed contentedly on a long-stemmed white pipe. Thick smoke poured from the bowl and from his mouth as it opened and closed, rising up as if it were what made the clouds that had gathered so thickly overhead.
After a time, he seemed to weary of smoking. He knocked out his white pipe against his black boot heel and tucked it into his coat. Then, from somewhere Elsa could not see, he took out a little fiddle and curving bow. He drew the bow across the fiddle strings and the music leaped up as merrily as the flames in her home’s hearth. He set to playing at once. The swooping, soaring notes rang through the forest, making the air shiver. The tune he played was strange and sad and merry and frightening all at once. Elsa’s feet itched at the sound of it. They were tired no more and wanted to be up and moving. Her ears strained to hear more. She clutched at Clarissa and bit down on her tongue. She tried hard to remember the other sound, the one that brought her here, the thump, thump, creak, creak of Karen’s crutches and wooden slats on the kitchen floor. As she did, the tune did not call quite so loudly.
The soldier finished his tune with a flourish of notes, each higher and brighter than the last. He laughed, as if delighted at his own cleverness, and lowered the fiddle from under his chin.
“It is dull,” he said, tapping the bow against his boot. “To play all alone. It is much better to have someone to dance to the music.” Once more, he touched the bow to the strings and began to play. It was a schottiche he played, merry and sprightly, a song about swinging around and leaping up high and holding hands while you both spun together about the floor. It broke Elsa’s heart to hear it in the wilderness where there was no one to dance to such a pretty thing, but she held herself still.
The red shoes came.
They crashed through the bracken, loud and clumsy. Once, they might have been shining leather with embroidered toes and gilded heels, but now they were black with blood. It spilled out of the horrible stumps of Karen’s lost feet, severed so cleanly above the ankle. Elsa had thought Karen’s feet would be worn away to bones by now, but they were not. The blood poured like a flood of tears, running down onto the forest floor so that the shoes and Karen’s feet must dance in her own blood, without stopping and without rest, while the soldier played his merry tune about lovers spinning around the floor. The schottiche finished, and then came a polka, and a waltz tune, a reel from England, and a jig from Ireland. All the dances of the world were drawn down by the soldier and poured out so that the shoes must dance.
Elsa thought and thought. It was hard, because the soldier’s tune kept pushing into her mind and filling it up so that her thoughts had to crowd around the edges of the music and could not come together to make ideas. She held Clarissa tighter and tighter. She watched the soldier’s fingers fly on his fiddle strings and the bow dart back and forth. She watched the red shoes dance. The soldier laughed louder than the crows even, and there was so much blood.
You must give him something he wants as much as the dance, the old woman had said. Something he wants as much as the dance.
Then, an idea came to Elsa. She bent her head and whispered to Clarissa, who listened in silence, as she always did.
“Give us rest!” cried the shoes, the voice muffled by blood and torn by exhaustion. “Give us rest!”
The soldier laughed, and Elsa saw that his eyes were as shiny and black as his tall boots. “You shall have no rest until I grow weary, and I never grow weary while I watch you dance!”
Elsa thrust her doll through the split in the fallen tree trunk and in the high voice she used to make Clarissa speak in all her games, she cried out. “Soldier! Soldier! Give me the red shoes!”
The soldier turned toward her, and she saw his black eyes shining with a merriment that cut through the air like lightning. He did not hesitate, not for an instant, in his playing. The tune changed seamlessly from one lively reel to the next.
“Little Clarissa! Little Clarissa!” The soldier called out. “Give me a dance!”
The doll twitched in Elsa’s hand, and Elsa dropped her swiftly. Instead of falling to the ground in a heap as she was used to, Clarissa landed neatly on her own two white cloth feet. She lifted up the hem of her lace dress and skipped as merrily to the center of the clearing as if she were on her way to a birthday party. The doll danced up to the red shoes and back again, bowing politely and circling ’round them, her white feet treading in the fresh blood and soaking it up, becoming red themselves. Elsa wondered whether they ever be clean again.
But she had no time to mourn her doll. Now she had both hands free, and she could creep from the hollow tree and ease herself around the clearing’s edge. The soldier played faster, and the little doll and the bloody red shoes danced together to his laughter and his music. His bow flashed and his fingers flew. He attended to nothing but the show in front of him as Elsa crept behind.
Then, quick as a cat, Elsa snatched the bow from the soldier’s hand and ran back to the fallen tree. The soldier stared at his knobby hand for a moment, as if he could not believe what had just happened. In the middle of the meadow, the shoes hesitated, turning this way and that on their toes, and Clarissa stood, smiling, holding her hems in her hand, waiting patiently, as she always did.
“Soldier! Soldier!” cried Elsa holding the bow high. “Give me the red shoes or I will break this bow over my knee!”