Mountain Flower, part II

The first time Ruth had heard the tale of the mountain flowers, she had been seven years old, and her mother had asked her to sell flowers for a bit of extra money. They had been especially poor then, with no man to provide for them, and so few people in the village who offered work to a woman. Ruth’s mother offered that Ruth keep busy while she was away at work, and since she already liked to pick wildflowers, why not sell them. Ruth had wanted to protest that wildflowers were for giving to your mother to put on the dining room table, something pretty to look at. She had not understood how desperately they needed the money. But since they had no dining room table, anyway, she had held her tongue and done as her mother asked. 

After perhaps a week of selling flowers, all wild and just beginning to bloom in the fresh spring weather, she had earned what seemed to be a fortune. It was surely only a few coins, but Ruth was proud to hand over the money to her mother every night, knowing that she had earned it all on her own. Her mother, every night, warned against selling to strangers, to the traveling men passing through the village. “Sell to the people you know, Ruth,” she said gently but firmly. “The blacksmith’s wife, or the baker, or the woodworker, yes?”

“Yes, mama” replied Ruth, and every day, that is what she did. 

Except for the day that the blacksmith’s wife and the baker and the woodworker were all tired of buying the same flowers, day after day. They offered instead to give her their money without taking the flowers, but Ruth wouldn’t take it. She was too stubborn and prideful. She wandered the village, searching for someone else to buy from her, but no one would - except, of course, for the traveling men. 

She saw one as the sun was beginning to set and she had still not sold a single flower. He was stooped over slightly, probably from the travelers pack strapped to his back, and the hair on his head was feathery and white. She peered at him, thinking hard, forgetting that her mother had told her it was impolite to stare. Of all the commands her mother had given her, in fact, the only one she could recall was that she was to sell her goods only to the people she knew - never the strangers. But would it not be worse to come home and have nothing to give to mama? She debated silently with a small voice telling her she must obey her mother. But this man looks so kind, with pale blue eyes that smiled at her now as he looked up. 

Banishing her mama’s warning voice from her mind, she strode bravely over to the man. “Would you like to buy some flowers?” she asked, trying to remain confident in her decision. The traveler’s eyes scanned the basket of mountain blooms she had picked that morning. He stooped even lower to inspect them, then faced her, looking serious. “Where did you pick these?” he inquired. 

Ruth gestured to the hill a ways away. “The hill behind my home.” She didn’t mention that her home was something of a blanket tent by the pond. 

The man picked up a blue daisy and then put it back. “Do you know the best place for flower picking?”

Ruth shook her head. 

“I hear” he continued “That there is a mountain where magical flowers grow.”

Magical flowers? Ruth marveled silently at how much money those would sell for. She and mama could live in a mansion, just like the one on the hill where she picked flowers. “Where is the mountain?”

“North of here, in the mountainlands. We are in the valleylands, yes?” He pointed into the distance, to snowy peaks that looked so small from far away, but Ruth knew must be giants. “And there are the summits that make your home, the valleys.”

“What makes them magical?” She asked, picturing glowing violets or roses with especially long thorns.

“They have what every person wants to have at some point or another in their lives.” He smiled wistfully. 

“What’s that?” Ruth was beginning to become impatient with the man’s vagueness.

“A way to heal. A way to cure ourselves.”

“They heal you magically?”

“Any disease or injury, they say.”

Ruth’s eyes widened slightly as she imagined what her life would be like if she could have those flowers. “Why doesn’t anyone pick them and give them to those who need them?” Her father, for example, who had died in the war before she was born. How many soldiers could have been saved with such a thing? Maybe then, her father would be alive, her mother wouldn’t always be so sad, and they would have a real home. Ruth was only seven, but she knew what they had didn’t count. 

“Oh, many try, some succeed, but it is a treacherous climb to the top of the mountain. The question is always, my dear,” -he tucked a small forget-me-not behind her ear- “is it worth it?”

“Ruth!” her mother’s angry voice carried from over the pond to where the little girl and old man were standing. “Ruth, come here, now!”

Ruth turned, at once guilty for disobeying her mother, to see her standing with one hand on her hip, the other carrying a bundle of fabrics she must have been delivering to someone in town. Her eyebrows were furrowed deep into snapping brown eyes. Her dress was rumpled and slightly smudged from ink at the dressmakers. Ruth turned back to the man, but already he was gone. She searched the distance, hoping to see a hunched figure ambling away, but he was nowhere to be found. He had disappeared.

And he hadn’t even bought any flowers. 

Ruth was getting tired of bread and water. The chunk of cheese she had brought along on her journey was long gone. The only resources she had were provided by the men in her group. At every meal, if one could be so generous as to call the silent moments spent huddled around a fire nibbling at frozen bread a meal, Ruth found herself thinking longingly about the food her mother used to cook. Wild onions fried in butter and spices, beef stew made with red wine, rosemary and lemon loaves dripping with butter and covered in cinnamon… her mouth watered even as she put food into it. 

It was perhaps the thing she missed the least, however. Her village, her friends, the warmth and comfort of her home, and, of course, her mother were things she wished to have again far more than any food. But the dinners and breakfasts she no longer had were easier to concentrate on than those things. They were more inconsequential. They couldn’t distract her. They weren't hard to think about.

Her mother had always said that things were hard. Not sad or awful or frightening. Just hard. Like it meant that it could be conquered, overcome. Hard, not impossible. Hard, not terrible. That’s what this mountain is, Ruth thought. Hard. 

That much was certainly true. It was the seventh day climbing the mountain, the tenth day of her journey. Had it really been so little time? To Ruth, it felt like months. Perhaps years. And the way her illness was affecting her seemed to only lengthen it even more - like the time was being stretched like maple candy between the fate’s fingers. Everything being held in a strenuous balance before breaking into pieces. 

Ruth had been a fragile child when she was very little. If anyone had any sort of sickness, she was bound to catch it. Now, it seemed this was again the case, although she still held out hope that it was only a common fever, nothing serious.

When one is climbing a mountain that holds magical healing flowers at the top, however, it is of little concern what type of illness it is exactly. It made the climb harder and the reward at the top all the more promising. 

Ruth was now sitting with the rest of her traveling companions (if one could call them that), forcing herself to eat just a bit more bread. She didn’t want to seem ungrateful, lest they find it offensive enough to make good on their threat to leave her behind. And she needed the energy, the strength. They were slowly getting closer to the summit, but still it was a long way. Her mouth felt dry, and the roll was dry as dust on her tongue, but, bit by bit, she forced it down her throat. I have to be my own mother now, she told herself sternly. Take your medicine, Ruth. (the food) Walk a bit farther, Ruth. (Up this terribly tall mountain) Try harder, Ruth. (That one made her want to scream in frustration) Calm down, Ruth. 

It’s hard, but you can do it. 

Suddenly, all the men stood at once, as if they had silently come to the decision to move on. Ruth scrambled quickly to her feet and set off behind the men, who were already striding purposefully up the next hill. 

“Here we go again,” Ruth muttered under her breath. The wind carried her words away so that no one might hear them.

“The top is only so far away as you make it.”

For a moment Ruth wondered if she had only imagined the words that she heard so suddenly and clearly. They cut through the howling wind straight to her, like they were meant for only her to hear them. She blinked and looked around for who had said it, but only men, like one small, determined creature made of hunched shoulders slowly going up the slope, could be seen. It sounds like something Mama would say, She thought to herself, and wondered if perhaps her mother had said it at some point and it was only coming back to her now. It was rather a situation-specific thing to say, unless one was speaking of a metaphorical mountain that had to be conquered; this too, however, was the sort of thing her Mother would motivationally talk about. But what does it mean? Ruth’s groggy mind felt somewhat subconsciously that it was an easy thing to figure out, but it was too tired to even try. 

Just as Ruth ruled the phrase off as imagined or recalled from a very long time ago, she heard it again. She realized one of the six men was gone from her view. One was behind her, close enough so that his sharp voice would go through to her. She turned for just a moment to see his dark, melancholy eyes. “I didn’t make the mountain tall - the fates did.” she heard herself saying without thinking the words first. “Believe me, if I could make the top any closer, I would.” 

The man smiled. “If you think it is far away, it will be, but if you tell yourself it is close,” his eyes seemed to shine as if they knew something Ruth didn’t “perhaps the climb will seem much shorter.”

Ruth said nothing for a moment, her tired mind trying to understand what he said while still keeping her legs moving and her heart beating and her lungs breathing. It was hard work. “You remind me of my mother,” she said finally, since it was the only thing she could think of. Anything sensible to respond with had disappeared from her brain. 

For just a second, the man smiled. It was a fleeting smile, but a glad one that told Ruth that he knew that it was good to sound like her mother; it was what she needed. 

“Thank you,” Ruth whispered, and quickened her pace, leaving the kind-eyed man behind before she could know if he had heard her. 

The wind was slowly blowing her away. It hissed through her hair and ears, seething in her mind and pulling her apart, bit by bit. It whispered to her, terrible things. You’ll never make it, it said every time she stumbled or fell. The top of the mountain is too far. Your mother is too sick. You are too sick. Your love will be the end of you, just like she said. 

Ruth wanted to scream at it, to tell it she knew it was lying. Days had passed, and here she was, still alive. Not the wind, not the snow, nor the mountain or the sickness that was like a gale inside her, had killed her yet. I’m still alive! Ruth wanted to tell the wind. She wanted to fight the one thing she knew she couldn’t control, the one thing that would only laugh at her screams and cries. 

“It’s only the wind, Ruth.” she told herself. She had taken to speaking to herself in the past couple of days. Who else would she take up a conversation with, after all? None of the men, and they were the only other people on the mountain. The kind eyed man had not spoken to her since she had walked away from him. She had fretfully wondered since then if he was angry with her, for some reason, or thought her odd for saying thank you, or that he had just forgotten about her completely. The last frightened her the most - that if she somehow didn’t come back down from the mountain, there would be no one who would remember her, remember why she had even climbed the mountain in the first place… 

But she couldn’t let herself think like that. They were near now, terribly near. Ruth sometimes thought she could smell the sweet perfume of the healing flowers, floating on the wind past her before it was whisked away. Perhaps she only imagined it, but it gave her hope. The top was only as far away as she made it, and each time she convinced herself that she saw a faint blue glow (she had begun to picture the flowers as some sort of shining irises) or that she felt the wind die down, or the clouds clear so that she could really now see the peak, and it wasn’t really so far in the distance, the top was a bit closer. 

The group was resting now, and Ruth had her eyes set on the top, imagining that vast field of shimmering, magical flowers, each pulsing with the beautiful power to heal even the worst illnesses or injuries. She rubbed her cold, stiff hands against her neck, which was warm from all the blood that flowed under her skin there, and pressed them to her cheeks. Her hands cooled her face and the fever warmed her hands, so it often worked out well. 

She pictured her mother’s face, lighting with joy as she walked through the door, so glad to just see Ruth come home. And when she knew that she had returned with the flower, too, that they could go back to their happy life, so full of love, just the two of them, with no fear of the sickness…

Ruth suddenly felt very tired. She knew that the men would soon be moving on, but if she only closed her eyes for a moment…

I visited the healer today, Ruth.

You did? About your headaches? Have they been so bad, mama?

Yes. And there have been other things. Sit down, my dear. 

What other things?

Sit down, child, and I will tell you. 

Yes, mama. 

I began to have pains in my back, as well, a few days back. Last night I had a terrible cough, and this morning I tasted blood whenever I opened my mouth.

What?

I didn’t understand it, but it worried me, so I went to see the healer. 

What did he say? Mama?

It’s a very bad illness, Ruth.

What are you saying?

I am saying, my dear, that I am very sick and there is nothing we can do. That is what the healer told me. He said that there is no cure. 

Are you sure? He can’t have really meant it! There are always cures! You aren’t… mama? 

I wish I could say it wasn’t true, my dear. But-

There must be something we can do!

But we must face this bravely. Listen to me, Ruth. We must be strong.

But it isn’t fair! 

I know, my dear. 

After what happened to father, and now… you never did anything wrong…

Oh, my sweet daughter, don’t cry. You know that isn’t true. I have done things wrong. But I know it isn’t fair. I know. 

Are you going to die?

Yes. 

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To be continued...

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Again...

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I keep going over on the word limit...

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