by Tara Maya
Continued in Taboo, Book 2 of The Unfinished Song
Author's Note
Every story starts from a seed, the tiniest grain of an idea. The seed that began this story planted itself in my mind ten years ago. It was simple: I wanted to tell a fairy-tale. With the fairies left in, as they so often aren’t in the retellings.
This is just the beginning of the story, of course. I hope you wouldn’t think I’d end a fairy-tale in failure. Even the Littlest Mermaid, in the original Hans Christian Anderson story, though she perished because her lover was untrue, gained a soul. Besides, the older, true “folk” fairytales almost always have happy endings. A grusome sort of happy, in some Grimm versions, but happy.
This story has a happy ending too, and it’s already written, in case you were worried I was one of those authors who might depart to another plane of existence before finishing my story. I am the morbid sort who worries about that a lot, so I wrote the ending first.
That wasn’t hard to do, because the whole thing is based on a myth. I shan’t tell you which myth, because then you would know the end, but chances are, you haven’t heard of it anyway. It’s Polynesian, and I’ve only found one reference to it.
Some stories are omnivorous. They overlap and interweave, they transform and transmute like the lycanthropes and pumpkins they describe. Therefore, although The Unfinished Song began as as a simple retelling of an obscure Polynesian legend, it quickly gobbled up other fairytales, legends and myths, churning and turning them into something a little bit old, a little bit new.
The first fairytale I learned as a child was Cinderella. Not surprisingly, there is a bit of Cinderlla in this story. (We’ll get to that bit in a later novel in the series. There’s a pretty dress invovled, but no glass slippers, since they haven’t invented glass yet.) A bit of Beauty and the Beast. (Oh, just wait til we meet the man in black! What? Of course there has to be a man in black. Come now, really.)
But many of the fairytales that found their way in were stranger ones. If you’ve read the novella Tomorrow We Dance, or the Author’s Note about it in the anthology Conmergence, you may know that it draws on The Pied Piper and The Emperor’s New Clothes.
The very idea of the Tavaedies, and their secret societies, and their power dances, comes from Native American and African sources. The fae of Faerarth are not Celtic, despite the familiar name.
Originally, I wrote the first three chapters of Dindi’s story set in a quasi-medieval landscape of castles and peasants, knights and pricesses. Familiar ground for fantasy readers, and a resonable setting for fairytales.
Yet wrong.
Something about it didn’t satisfy me. Maybe it was just that the medieval period is overdone in the genre, and I wanted to stretch further than that. In addition, though, I wanted to set the story in a primordial time when all the fairytales of the world were first being written, an age when the population of the world was limited to the first seven tribes. I called it Faearth because it is a time when fae still openly roam the earth. There are seven tribes of peoples in Faearth, seven and no more.
So the technology and social structure of Faearth is neolithic. Neolithlic means “new stone age,” which means they have all the major inventions to make them more civilized than cave dwellers: weaving, sewing, clay thattched houses, beaten gold. But they have no bronze, and definitely no iron. They have bows but not swords. I did decide to allow them horses, but horse-riding is new to them, and in many clans, they still think it more fit to eat than ride a horse.
The astute reader will also notice that I have mixed European fauna with North American flora. They grow corn, but they have wild horses, and so on. Other customs are shamelessly stolen from real cultures too. There was a culture in India that used to raise slaves as their own children, until some need arose for a human sacrifice. Then the mariah (their term, which I borrowed) would be ritually killed. This struck me as a particularly heartwrenching form of human sacrifice. It’s one thing to kill your prisoners of war. This is more like killing your foster children.
Another suspect combination is the sequoia forests of Yellow Bear, roughly based on my own native California, and the hakurl, beloved rotten shark dish of Blue Waters. Hakurl is a real dish, but not served anywhere near California. You can buy it in Reykjavik, Iceland (officially as far from California as you can get without leaving the planet). In case you thought such a food could exist only in fiction, or that I exagerated its charms, Michael M. described hakurl in an article on, “The Worst Meals on This Earth”: “So what does hakarl taste like then? It tastes like crying. It tastes like broken promises. It tastes like the Lord God Almighty ripping the Bible out of your hands and saying, “Sorry, this doesn’t apply for you. I think you want ‘Who Moved My Cheese?’” It tastes like the Predator wading into a Care Bears movie and opening fire.” Exacttly what you would expect Vikings to eat, in other words.
This eclectic mix is not due to botonical or anthropological ignorance on my part. It was a deliberate decision, to show a primeaval earth yet undivided into continents. Not that I want to insist Faerarth is our earth separated only by time. If it is our earth at all—I am agnostic on this point—it is separated from us by a great deal more than time, and by a great deal less. I cannot explain more clearly, as faeries are involved, and their sense of time and space is notoriously suspect.
If you are still mad at me for ending this novel on a cliffhanger—and I don’t blame you if you are, I would be too—I hope you will let me make it up to you by presenting an excerpt from the sequel, The Unfinished Song: Taboo.
An Excerpt from Taboo
The Unfinished Song, Book Two
Tara Maya