وعده ی مجسمه ساز

The Sculptor’s Promise

Once upon a time, there was a young sculptor named Cintolo. He served a king in a realm so far underground that neither the sun’s beams nor the moonlight could find it. He filled the royal gardens with flowers sculpted from rubies and fountains sculpted from malachite. He carved busts of the king and queen that were so lifelike, everyone believed they could hear them breathe.

Their only daughter, the princess Moanna, loved to watch the sculptor work, but Cintolo never managed to sculpt her form. “I can’t sit still for that long, Cintolo,” she said. “There’s too much to do and too much to see.” Then one day Moanna was gone. And Cintolo remembered how often she’d asked him about the sun and the moon and whether he knew what the trees, whose roots laced the ceiling of her bedroom, looked like above the ground.

The king and queen were so heartbroken that the Underground Kingdom echoed with their sighs, and their tears covered the sculptor’s flowers like dew. The Faun, who advised them on all affairs of beasts and the sacred things breathing underground, sent out his messengers—bats and fairies, rabbits and ravens—to bring Moanna back, but all those eyes were unable to find her.

The princess had been gone for 330 years when one night the Faun walked into Cintolo’s workshop, where the sculptor had fallen asleep amid his tools. He longed to comfort Their Majesties by chiseling Moanna’s countenance from a beautiful moonstone, but as hard as he tried, he couldn’t remember the princess’s face.

“I have a task for you, Cintolo,” said the Faun, “and you won’t be allowed to fail. I want numerous sculptures of the king and queen—as numerous as the uncurling fronds of ferns—to grow from the soil in the Upper Kingdom. Can you make them?” Cintolo wasn’t sure, but no one dared to say no to the Faun, as he was known for his temper and his influence on the king. So Cintolo went to work. One year later, hundreds of stone columns grew out of the Upper Kingdom’s soil, wearing the sad faces of Moanna’s parents, carrying the Faun’s hope that the lost princess might one day walk past them and be reminded of who she was. But once again, many years passed and there was no news of Moanna. Hope died in the Underground Kingdom like a flower bereft of rain.

Cintolo grew old, but he couldn’t bear the thought that he might die before his skills had helped to bring his royal masters’ lost child back. So he asked for an audience with the Faun.

The Faun was feeding the swarm of fairies that served him, when the sculptor walked in. The Faun fed them with his tears to remind them of Moanna, as fairies tend to be quite forgetful creatures.

“Your Horned Highness,” the sculptor said, “may I offer my humble skills one more time to find our lost princess?”

“And how do you intend to do that?” the Faun asked as the fairies licked another tear from his clawed fingers.

“Please allow me not to answer your question,” Cintolo said. “I don’t know yet whether my hands will be able to create what I see in my mind. I hope, though, that despite my silence you will agree to sit for me so I may sculpt you.” “Me?” The Faun was surprised by Cintolo’s request. But in the old man’s face he saw passion, patience, and the most valuable virtue of all in desperate times: hope. So he dismissed all other duties—of which the Faun had many—to sit patiently for the sculptor.

Cintolo didn’t use stone for this sculpture. He carved the Faun’s likeness from wood, for wood always remembers it was once a living tree, alive and breathing in both kingdoms, the one above and the one below.

It took Cintolo three days and three nights to finish the sculpture and, when he told the Faun to rise from his chair, so did his wooden image.

“Tell it to find her, Your Horned Highness,” the sculptor said. “I promise it will neither rest nor die before he does.”

The Faun smiled, for he noticed another rare quality in the old man’s face: faith. Faith in his art and in what it could do. And for the first time in many years the Faun dared to hope again.

But there are many roads in the Upper Kingdom and, although the sculptor’s creature walked through forests and deserts and crossed plains and mountains, it couldn’t find the lost princess and fulfill its creator’s promise. Cintolo was devastated, and when Death knocked at his workshop door, he didn’t send Her away, but followed Her, hoping to forget his failure in the land of oblivion.

Cintolo’s creature felt his death like a sharp pain. Its wooden body, aged and weathered by wind and rain and all the miles it had traveled in its search, stiffened with sadness and its feet wouldn’t take another step. Two columns rose from the ferns lining the path it had followed. They wore the sad faces of the king and queen, for whose daughter it had searched in vain for so long. Determined to fulfill its quest, the creature plucked out its right eye and laid it on the forest path. Then it walked stiffly into the ferns and turned to stone next to the king and queen it had failed, its mouth open in a last petrified sigh.

The eye, forever bearing witness to the old sculptor’s skills, lay on the wet ground for countless days and nights. Until one afternoon three black cars came driving through the forest. They stopped under the old trees and a girl climbed out. She walked down the path until she stepped on the eye Cintolo had carved. She picked it up and looked around to see from where it might have come. She saw the three weathered columns, but didn’t recognize the faces they wore. Too many years had passed.

But she did notice one of the columns was missing an eye. So she walked through the ferns until she was standing in front of the column that had once been Cintolo’s wooden faun. The eye from the path fit perfectly into the hole that gaped in the weather-beaten face and at that moment, in a chamber so deep underneath the girl’s feet only the tallest trees could reach it with their roots, the Faun raised his head.

“Finally!” he whispered.

He picked a ruby flower from the royal gardens to lay on Cintolo’s grave and sent one of his fairies up to find the girl.