The second type of story deals with the adventures of a girl sent by
her wicked stepmother to a mill during the dangerous Twelve Days,
nominally to get some corn ground, but really in the hope that she
will fall a prey to the Callicantzari. Having arrived at the mill the
girl calls in vain to the miller to come and help unload her mule, and
entering in search of him finds him bound to his chair or dead with
fright and the Callicantzari standing about him. They at once seize the
girl, and begin to quarrel which shall have her for his own. But the
girl keeps her wits, and says that she will be the wife of the one who
brings her the best bridal array. So they disperse in search of fine
raiment and jewels. Meanwhile she sets to work to grind the corn, and
each time a Callicantzaros returns with presents, she sends him on a
fresh errand for something more. Finally the corn is all ground, and
she quickly loads the mule with two sacks, one on either side, clothes
herself in the gold and jewels which the Callicantzari have brought,
mounts the mule and lies flat on the saddle covered over with a sack,
and eluding the Callicantzari who pursue her, like the muleteer in the
previous story, reaches home in safety.
The wicked stepmother seeing that her plans have miscarried and that
her stepdaughter is now rich while her own daughter is poor, determines
to send the latter the next evening to the mill. She too finds the
mill occupied by the Callicantzari, but not being so shrewd as her
half-sister either falls a victim to the lust of the monsters, or is
killed and eaten by them, or, in one version[534], is stripped of her
own clothes, dressed in the skin of her mule which the Callicantzari
have killed and flayed, and sent home with a necklace of the mule’s
entrails about her neck.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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