The Weasel and the Well That Held a Broken Oath

She had lost herself in the desert in her good clothes, the road home swallowed by sand, and now her throat was a coal. Then she saw the rope, and the bucket, and the dark eye of a well sunk into the wasteland. She lowered herself down the rope to drink. When she had drunk her fill, the rope would not lift her. She braced her feet against the stone and pulled, and the desert above her gave back nothing but light.

So she cried out.

A Voice From Inside the Stone

A man crossing that emptiness heard a woman calling from under the ground and stopped where he stood. He leaned over the rim. A voice came up out of the dark, sweet and afraid, and the hair on his arms rose. He did not reach for the rope. Demons sit in desert wells. They call in a woman's voice, and a man who answers is never seen whole again.

"Are you a daughter of Adam," he said down into the shaft, "or one of the others?"

She swore she was flesh. She named her father, named her town, named the noble house she came from. Only then did he set his hands on the rope and haul, and she rose out of the well wet and gasping into the heat, a young woman in ruined finery standing in front of a stranger in the middle of nowhere.

He could not stop looking at her. "Marry me," he said.

The Heavens, the Weasel, and the Well

She did not laugh and she did not run. She asked who he was, and he told her he was a priest, a man of good blood himself. She told him a marriage was not a thing two people did alone in a desert. They would go to her father. They would pledge themselves first, here, so that whatever came after, the bond was already made.

"And who," she said, "will be our witnesses? There is no one for a day's walk in any direction."

At that moment a weasel broke from a clump of scrub and ran past their feet and was gone into the rocks. She watched it vanish. Then she looked at the black mouth of the well that had nearly kept her, and at the white sky overhead.

"The heavens," she said, "and this weasel, and this well. Let them be our witnesses."

They gave each other their word over the running animal and the standing water. Then they parted, he toward his life and she toward her father's house, each carrying the oath like a stone sewn into a hem.

The Woman Who Would Not Be Married

She kept it. That was the terrible part. When her parents brought suitors, good men with good offers, she met them at the door behaving like a woman with a demon inside her. She tore at herself. She spoke in voices. She frightened them out of the courtyard one after another until the matchmakers stopped coming and the town agreed, in low voices, that the noble daughter was possessed and no longer marriageable. She let them believe it. Year after year she let them believe it, and waited.

He did not wait.

Somewhere out beyond the desert the priest forgot the well and the weasel and the wet girl he had pulled into the sun. He married another woman. In time she bore him a son, and the boy became the light of the house.

The Witnesses Come to Collect

When the child was three months old, a weasel came into the house. It went to the cradle and fastened on the boy's throat, and by the time they reached him he had bled white and still.

They buried him and grieved and, because grief loosens its grip in time, they had another son. That one learned to walk. One day he toddled out of the door alone, found the lip of a well, leaned to look at his own face in the water, and went in headfirst. They pulled him out drowned.

Two sons. A weasel at the throat of one and a well closed over the other. The mother sat in the wreckage of her house and said to her husband, "Children do not die like this for nothing. A weasel. A well. Tell me what you have done."

And the priest remembered. He remembered the desert, and the rope, and the noble girl, and the small running animal, and his own mouth swearing by the heavens and the weasel and the well. He told his wife everything. She did not scream at him. She looked at the two small graves and said, "Go and take the portion God set aside for you."

The Portion God Set Aside

So he went to find her. He came to her town and asked after the noble daughter, and the people told him, gently, that she was mad, possessed, that she frightened off every man who came near and could not be given to anyone. "I will take her anyway," he said.

They brought him to her, and she put on the show she had worn for years, the writhing, the wild voice, the clawing at the air that emptied courtyards. He stood through it. Then he spoke two words into the noise.

The weasel. The well.

She went still. The demon fell off her like a cloak. She looked at the man in front of her and knew the face from the rim of the shaft in the desert, the one who had asked if she was human before he would save her, and the oath that had eaten both their lives stood up between them and was finally satisfied. The witnesses had counted everything. Now the account was closed.

They married. She had waited so long that there was nothing left to wait for, and they lived out their days in peace, husband and wife at last, watched over by the heavens, the weasel, and the well.