Content Warnings (click to reveal)
Discussed: Violence, Mental Illness
The Marigold Princess
Once, there was a village of farmers in a valley tucked deep in the mountains. They grew rice in long and wide paddies that criss-crossed the lowlands, a basin into which the monsoon rains would pour. But one year the wet season was long, and so the paddies flooded and many crops were destroyed, leaving the farmers with barely enough to eat and sell. Desperate, they prayed for a miracle each night as they went to sleep, their stomachs churning with hunger.
One morning, as the farmers headed to their paddies to work, they discovered a patch of marigolds at the centre of their fields, basking in the colours of the rising sun. As they parted the flowers to see how their roots could grow, they found an infant girl sleeping peacefully on the marshy ground. So they took her in and called her the marigold princess, and treated her as nothing but a blessing. Even though she was often a sickly child, burning with fever and complaining of aches here and there, everyone doted on her. They felt encouraged by her warm smile, which melted away the pain of their sore backs as they bent over to plough and seed, their hoarse throats as they yelled to drive away the birds, and the dull throbbing of their blistered palms and swollen feet. After her arrival, the farmers toiled harder than they ever had before, and their village flourished as their harvests grew year by year.
When the girl was four, a terrible accident happened in the fields. A young boy, unaccustomed to the weight of the sickle, struck his father’s leg with its blade. At the same time in her home, the girl screamed, clutching her leg. Knowing this was different from the phantom pains of which she often complained, her adoptive parents rushed her to the village healer, where the injured man was also brought. Curiously, the man felt no pain, even as his wound was washed and sewn shut, but the girl cried at every stitch. That was how the villagers learned of her divine ability: she could relieve the pains of all those who lived in the valley and bear them within her small body.
To protect the girl, the villagers kept her blessing a secret at first, but the word spread, and people came from all sides of the mountains to be healed. The villagers charged the visitors more to stay in homes closer to the girl’s to quicken their healing, which brought another wave of prosperity to the village. Meanwhile, under the growing weight of afflictions, the girl became weaker and was increasingly bound to bed. But she remained determined to play her role, like the farmers who rose early to avoid the blazing sun, whose heat she had eased from their backs and onto her own from the day she arrived. Although she was offered huge sums to leave the village and tend to distant clients, she always refused and asked them to come to her instead, fearing her absence would burden her hardworking family with the pains she withheld.
As the girl grew into a young woman, visitors came to her with more complex conditions. She was especially good at healing diseases of the mind, though they sometimes left her unconscious for hours at a time. She learned to dispel the most stubborn nightmares, sleep-wanderings, feelings of guilt and grief and despair. She could turn apathetic recluses into lively folk dancers, troublemaking sons into diligent labourers, wayward children into respectable youths. All without leaving the cool shade of her home, where her weakened body could rest in the richest silks and indulge in the finest foods that the villagers and visitors brought to her in gratitude, and she greatly reciprocated their care. As far as she knew, her life was a comfortable one, and she wanted for nothing.
One day, two new visitors came: a mother, who hoped the princess would heal her daughter from delusions that threatened her marriage. So the princess placed the young woman’s hands in her own and drained away the delusions, which drew the princess into a deep sleep. She dreamed of rooms filled with books and learning all their stories; of finding work and lovers with abandon; of roaming and dancing into the depths of the night. The delusions were so vivid and enchanting that when she woke three days later to her concerned family and the arousing aroma of their food, she longed to dream again.
Although she resumed her healing work shortly after she awoke, the princess found herself more often in bed, feigning exhaustion as an excuse to slip into sleep. The delusions came more and more easily, radiant as marigolds and stubborn as their stout stalks, which made the flowers hard to pick. Meanwhile, the year’s monsoon season arrived and became a most unfavourable one. The villagers stayed free of pain and disease, but the princess could do nothing about their drowning crops. The money from her services helped, but the wild winds and rains tore through too many of their fields and homes, more than she could endure. The roiling pain of the villagers’ empty stomachs paralysed her with despair, and eventually she found she could not move at all. Nothing could restore her, and so her worried parents turned to the village healer. The old woman took one look and ushered her parents away. When they were alone, she gazed at the princess with great pity, as she was unbearably familiar with her condition.
“You have learned to dream,” she told the princess, stroking her hair. “But if you wish to heal us and protect us from suffering, your dreams will not be enough. Do you understand?”
The princess pondered the old woman’s words for a while before she understood. That night, she asked her parents to carry her to the patch of marigolds where she was found and held back her tears as she watched them walk away. She breathed in the chirps of the crickets and the mud seeping into her silk gown as she let herself sink into the wet earth with her arms outstretched. As she willed the skies and ground to relinquish their pain to her, she thought about how it was all deeply, bitterly unfair; she would never learn to read, or travel further than her frail legs could carry, or spend the night in the arms of another. But she would have to be content, she thought, anticipating the pain that would ravage her. Because this was her place in the world, her duty.
Miraculously, as her body shuddered and strained to contain the impossible, she felt as though her thoughts had been heard and all her pain began to leach away. She gasped at the lightness of her limbs, the strength in her knees, the flutter in her heart that urged her to run. And so she did, wild and without a care, away from her disintegrating body and up into the skies, where she could see the village and the paddies and the roads that led through the mountains to distant cities and towns, where she hoped to live her next life. When the villagers woke the next day, the girl was long gone. And all the fields in the valley were filled not with rice, but with rows upon rows of marigolds, their brilliant heads standing tall and defiant in the morning light.
Coco X. Huang is a Chinese-Australian writer, musician and scientist. She primarily writes fiction and poetry and enjoys creating interdisciplinary hybrid works that challenge and extend conventional forms.
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