When most of us think of dwarves, we think of Snow White’s seven friends, adorable and friendly. Or perhaps the noble lords of the underground that Tolkien portrayed in The Lord of the Rings. But the ancient Norse myths painted an image of a darker, subterranean race, a race firmly linked with stone and greed and evil. Of all the origin-tales, the dwarf in our next story is closest to these ancient dwarves — and yet nothing like them at all.
Rugel is the last of his kind, a dwarf alone in the world and lost from his moorings. He’s a thief and a trickster, a murderer and an unwilling wizard. Now his wanderings have brought him back to his childhood home, where he must confront himself and the shambles of his life.
Wagner says that this story is about a man who spends his whole life running away from incredible pain and loss, a man who is afraid to make a life for himself. “But luckily,” she says, “it’s also about the transformative power of love and the ways it can give even the most desperate person courage and power.”
Now that’s magic.
The Secret of Calling Rabbits
Wendy N. Wagner
The breeze shifted as Rugel ran, and he caught a scent upon it, sweet and strong, a scent that reached into the depths of his memories and twanged them. He lost his footing at the power of it, and he threw himself into a bush beside the path, gasping. He preferred running to hiding, but he couldn’t run with that scent thickening the air.
His pursuer shouted again. “Wait! Show me how you did that!” Her voice distracted him from the smell of the past; it focused his mind on the pressing problem of survival. He should have never come back to this place.
She came closer, and Rugel peeked out at the little girl on the path. Her knees, bared by her too-short shift, were scabbed and grass-stained as she spun a slow searching circle. Rugel crouched further down inside the currant bush. He was a dwarf — though “dwarf” was a generous measure of someone his size — and he had a gift for going unseen; perhaps the girl would lose sight of him.
“Please!” the girl cried. She stopped in front of the bush, picking out his gnarled face from the tangle of undergrowth. “I saw you call the rabbit.”
Rugel cursed to himself. He should never have summoned the hare, or, having called it, he ought to have killed it. Now he’d go hungry, and this Big creature had seen him. But it was a child Big, he thought with a measure of hope, and children were easily scared.
“Go away!” he growled.
She stood solid, brown eyes fierce.
He tried again. “I’ll kill ya!”
Her lip trembled at his words, but not much. She had seen him pet the hare. Now she could not imagine him performing violence. He had killed before, both animals and humans — although never children, only grown men bent on harm — but she did not know that. She had only seen a very small man, tiny as herself, running his fingertips over the calm back of a brown rabbit.
He straightened himself up out of the currant bush. “You’ve got to have dwarf magic to call animals, girl,” he called. “You don’t have it.”
“Can’t I learn it?”
“No.” He barked the word. Two hundred years of running and hiding and sneaking around the edges of the world had given him a voice as leathery and tough as his face. It should have sent her home crying.
And it did. Or it did start her crying, anyway. Even dripping tears she stood fast, staring at him while her shoulders quaked without sound. He could hardly stand to look at all that mute unhappiness.
Face half-twisted away, he grumbled: “Why are you crying?”
“I’m so lonely,” she whispered. “Peter’s sick and Mama’s milk dried up so they had to sent the baby to Auntie Relda’s. And Papa’s farming all day and hunting all night to pay the witching bill. I’m all alone.” The tears grew larger and the quaking grew stronger. A tiny sound came up in her throat, barely audible.
The sound pained his ears. He didn’t like the sounds children made when they were unhappy, and he didn’t understand her story. But he knew alone. He stepped away from the currant bush. “Who’s Peter?”
She swiped the snot from her face with her sleeve. “My brother. He stepped on a nail last week and then he couldn’t move his leg. So Eva the Witch put him on a cot in her house and bound his ankles with magic cord and rubbed his whole body with tincture of mandrake root.”
Mandrake. That was the smell. Rugel shivered.
He should have never come back to this place.
The girl had caught her breath and now added, in a pleased voice, “I’m going to be a witch like her when I grow up.”
He examined her face and could tell by looking that she was right. There was human magic pricking in the back of her eyes. Right now if she put her mind to it, she probably could call that hare out of the bush. But he wasn’t going to tell her that.
His silence did not discourage her. “Papa says our village is cursed.”
“Yes?” Feeling a story coming, Rugel sat down to take the weight off his feet. They ached sometimes. He’d like a better pair of boots, but he was only a so-so shoemaker. Maybe he would steal a pair, the next village.
The girl squatted so she could still see his face. “It rained so much this winter the rye fields washed away. That’s something bad.” She lowered her voice. “And I heard Papa tell Eva he thought there was something in the woods stealing our luck. Maybe something as bad as a hobgoblin.”
With his wizened brown face, Rugel had been called worse things. And he’d stolen plenty. Once his people had practiced the arts of calling ore from the dark places of the earth, of spinning straw into gold, but this was great earth-magic, and he, the last of the dwarves, did not dare such workings. He made do with safer, minor talents: animal charming, theft, invisibility. But not here. Even those shabby excuses for magic were too risky in this forest that reeked with the stink of mandrake.
The little girl settled onto her bottom, stretching her legs in front of her with a sound of contentment.
“I’m Rachel,” she announced.
He grunted. Her eyes were as round as a hare’s as she stared at him. She expected him to introduce himself, he realized. And for the first time since he was very young, he was tempted to tell someone — this girl — his name. He hadn’t heard his name spoken in another’s voice in so, so long.
He jumped to his feet. “I’ve got to go.”
“Will I see you again?” She sounded excited, tangling her legs in her hurry to catch up with him.
“Maybe, maybe not,” he called over his shoulder, and drawing on all his woods-craft, disappeared into the bracken. An odd piece of him wanted to hide and watch her enjoy his disappearing act. But instinct and habit kept him running. Instinct, and a breeze carrying the graveyard smell of mandrake.
Rugel didn’t want to see the girl again. He told himself that as he followed the game trails, fouling the wires of any un-sprung rabbit snares he found. It was a tiny revenge undersized for its risk. The men of village were already on-edge. If they caught him, they’d tip to violence.
He pinched a wire between his fingers, feeling a fading warmth. The trap was freshly sprung, the rabbit twitching when Rugel came across it. He could use magic to melt that wire, heat it until it boiled in the palm of his hand. It would be easy; there was so much power waiting in the rich earth of this place. It called to him and the quiet coals of magical talent hidden within him.
He struggled to resist the temptation to soak up power and blast every last wire snare in the forest. He was painfully close to the village. If he scaled the boulder beside him, he could see the roofs of the little town. It was smaller than the dwarven village they’d built it over. He refused to look at it. And if he allowed himself to use magic now, he’d never get away from that sight.