Fiddleeebod

Harpo’s second ‘thinzer’, The Little Hutter, sees a young hutter maiden dare to visit her banished brother, who broke the supreme hutter rule by speaking his name aloud. Little Hutter is pictured below, wearing her harvest celebration garb.

The eldest hutter maiden busily cleansed her oat comb. The middle youngling tended to the bean patch. The youngest of the three wandered dreamily by herself, whishing swish through the tall grassy grain.

“Little hutter, shouldn’t you be helping middle sister?” called the eldest.

“I told her to wander, sister,” said the middle youngling. “She was sprouting far too dreamy for bean patch work.”

Three hutter maidens, sisters all, there they were on a sunny summer’s day out in the oat fields and out in the patches surrounding the white and red spirals of the conical cottage which was, fair and true, their lives long home. Absent were their parents, gone on a trading trek to Fiddleeebod Castle with a load of ladgecakes and some palmpear pies. The sisters were left on their own to cope and muddle as best they could. They coped and muddled fitfully well. The eldest, a full fifteen of bar years, was dutiful, trustworthy and efficient. She knew her thimbles. The middle, twelve bar years grown, was methodically competent and hard working. Her stitches ran straight. The littlest, the youngest of the three, standing eight bar years tall, was a drifty dreamer who stood and gazed more than enough out across and far into the distant sky above the Orrun Mountains. Her threads were tangled and sometimes lost. She thought things. She wondered where her brother was. What brother? Her banished brother. Banished? Yes. Sent away for speaking his name out loud. Why? Hutters must never speak their names or, truth to tell, reveal them in any other manner you or I or the wittiest water wizard could think of. It was not done. The brother of the three hutter maidens had done it. Banished seven long years in the past to beyond the farthest fringes of the Outer Orchards, the littlest hutter maiden remembered nothing, not the least sliver of nince, about him. She knew him only by tale and teardrop on Mother hutter’s cheek.

“Little hutter, come, it is time for nibblesnack,” called the eldest sister, helping middle sister spread out the checkered cloth.

Little hutter heard her sister’s call, but paid it no heed. She sat surrounded on all sides by walls of grassy grain. In thought she tapped her pale blue cheek with a pale blue finger. Her big brown eyes were raised to the sky. Her straight black hair, parted in the middle, hung lank to the shoulders of her tunic. Tunic and tannerbritches, there she sat, thinking, plotting, planning. She had a secret secret.

“Little hutter! The mollywater is poured! Quell your thirst!” shouted the middle sister.

“Little hutter! Where are you?” shouted the eldest, stamping her booted foot.

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Excerpts, Harpo Chronicles by Steve