Beyond the Woods: Fairy Tales Retold

by Paula Guran

  “Ah, Antithias,” she said, smiling at me, “even djinns age, though corked up in a bottle slows down the process immeasurably.”

  I spoke Homer’s words to her then: “In youth and beauty, wisdom is but rare.” I added in my own cynic’s way, “If ever.”

  “You think me wise, then?” she asked, then laughed and her laughter was like the tinkling of camel bells. “But a gaudy parrot is surely as wise, reciting another’s words as his own.”

  “I know no parrots who hold Virgil and Homer in their mouths,” I said, gazing at her not with longing but with a kind of wonder. “No djinn either.”

  “You know many?”

  “Parrots, yes; djinn, no. You are my first.”

  “Then you are lucky, indeed, Greek, that you called up one of the worshippers of Allah and not one of the followers of Iblis.”

  I nodded. “Lucky, indeed.”

  “So, to your wish, master,” she said.

  “You call me master, I who am a slave,” I said. “Do you not want the freedom you keep offering me? Freedom from the confining green bottle, freedom from granting wishes to any master who draws the cork?”

  She brushed her silvery hair back from her forehead with a delicate hand. “You do not understand the nature of the djinn,” she said. “You do not understand the nature of the bottle.”

  “I understand rank,” I said. “On the sea I was between the captain and the rowers. In that house,” and I gestured with my head to the palace behind me, “I am below my master and above the kitchen staff. Where are you?”

  Her brow furrowed as she thought. “If I work my wonders for centuries, I might at last attain a higher position within the djinn,” she said.

  It was my turn to smile. “Rank is a game,” I said. “It may be conferred by birth, by accident, or by design. But rank does not honor the man. The man honors the rank.”

  “You are a philosopher,” she said, her eyes lightening.

  “I am a Greek,” I answered. “It is the same thing.” She laughed again, holding her palm over her mouth coquettishly. I could no longer see straight through her though an occasional piece of driftwood appeared like a delicate tattoo on her skin.

  “Perhaps we both need a wish,” I said, shifting my weight. One of my feet touched hers and I could feel a slight jolt, as if lightning had run between us. Such things happen occasionally on the open sea.

  “Alas, I cannot wish, myself,” she said in a whisper. “I can only grant wishes.”

  I looked at her lovely face washed with its sudden sadness and whispered back, “Then I give my wish to you.” She looked directly into my eyes and I could see her eyes turn golden in the dusty light, I could at the same time somehow see beyond them, not into the sand or water, but to a different place, a place of whirlwinds and smokeless fire.

  “Then, Antithias, you will have wasted a wish,” she said.

  Shifting her gaze slightly, she looked behind me, her eyes opening wide in warning. As she spoke, her body seemed to melt into the air and suddenly there was a great white bird before me, beating its feathered pinions against my body before taking off towards the sky.

  “Where are you going?” I cried.

  “To the Valley of Abqar,” the bird called. “To the home of my people. I will wait there for your wish, Greek. But hurry. I see both your past and your future closing in behind you.” I turned and, pouring down the stone steps of my master’s house, were a half-dozen guards and one shrilling eunuch pointing his flabby hand in my direction. They came towards me screaming, though what they were saying I was never to know for their scimitars were raised and my Arabic deserts me in moments of sheer terror.

  I think I screamed; I am not sure. But I spun around again towards the sea and saw the bird winging away into a halo of light.

  “Take me with you,” I cried. “I desire no freedom but by your side.”

  The bird shuddered as it flew, then banked sharply, and headed back towards me, calling, “Is that your wish, master?” A scimitar descended.

  “That is my wish,” I cried, as the blade bit into my throat.

  We have lived now for centuries within the green bottle and Zarifa was right, I had not understood its nature. Inside is an entire world, infinite and ever-changing. The smell of the salt air blows through that world and we dwell in a house that sometimes overlooks the ocean and sometimes overlooks the desert sands.

  Zarifa, my love, is as mutable, neither young nor old, neither soft nor hard. She knows the songs of blind Homer and the poet Virgil as well as the poems of the warlords of ayyām al-‘Arab. She can sing in languages that are long dead.

  And she loves me beyond my wishing, or so she says, and I must believe it for she would not lie to me. She loves me though I have no great beauty, my body bearing a sailor’s scars and a slave’s scar and this curious blood necklace where the scimitar left its mark. She loves me, she says, for my cynic’s wit and my noble heart, that I would have given my wish to her.

  So we live together in our ever-changing world. I read now in six tongues beside Greek and Arabic, and have learned to paint and sew. My paintings are in the Persian style, but I embroider like a Norman queen. We learn from the centuries, you see, and we taste the world anew each time the cork is drawn.

  So there, my master, I have fulfilled your curious wish, speaking my story to you alone. It seems a queer waste of your one piece of luck, but then most men waste their wishes. And if you are a poet and a storyteller, as you say, of the lineage of blind Homer and the rest, but one who has been blocked from telling more tales, then perhaps my history can speed you on your way again. I shall pick up one of your old books my master, now that we have a day and a night in this new world. Do you have a favorite I should try—or should I just go to a bookseller and trust my luck? In the last few centuries it has been remarkably good you see.

  Jane Yolen, author of over two hundred short stories and over 350 books, is often called the Hans Christian Andersen of America—though she wonders (not entirely idly) whether she should really be called the “Hans Jewish Andersen of America.” She has been named both Grand Master of the World Fantasy Convention and Grand Master of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. She has won two Nebulas for her short stories, and a bunch of other awards, including six honorary doctorates. One of her awards, the Skylark, given by the New England Science Fiction Association, set her good coat on fire, a warning about faunching after shiny things that she has not forgotten.

  “The Mussel Eater” is a reimagining of a Maori tale, “Pania of the Reef.” There are various versions of the story, but none are told as deliciously as Cade’s nor are the consequences of curiosity and desire quite so consuming.

  The Mussel Eater

  Octavia Cade

  The Pania is sitting in a rock pool, grooming. Karitoki can’t help but be fascinated—Pania usually stay in their packs, out beyond the harbour and away from town. Even living by the ocean as he does, he has never been so close to one before.

  “I was curious,” she says, when he asks her. She has seen him eyeing her, seen him moving closer, and holds out one of her hands. It is stronger than his, and the nails are pointed. “Are you curious, too?”

  Her hair feels like seaweed—air-dried, stiff with salt, and so matted with sand from the shallows he can hardly get his fingers through it. “Let me,” says the Pania, reaching with her razor nails, but he pushes her hands away and undoes the strands himself, unknotting, untangling, easing the way with sweet water and ignoring her moue, half-disgusted, at the freshness of it.

  “You smell like the sea,” says Karitoki.

  “What else would I smell like?” she says, and beneath the salt and the brine and the under-tang of shellfish is a faint, sweet odor of rot, of mussels left too long on the beach and under the sun, of the torn fragments left by seabirds, breaking open calcium carbonate and leaving fleshy feet to spoil. When he is done with her hair, he sits back and watches her coat herself with oil.

  “T
he water’s cold,” she says. “It helps to keeps the heat in.” And she went on insulating herself, applying fish oil to her legs, her feet, oil glossing over the bare hint of scales. Karitoki has seen this before, on a boat travelling along the coast: Pania on the rocks, sunning themselves and basting until their bodies gleamed and their flesh was bright against the waves. He and the other young men would watch them from the deck, fascinated by their plump shine, the flash of bone and breast. And beneath all fascination would be the longing to swim with them as the seals swam, around their fins and nuzzling up to the sturdy fish-scent of them, all danger and teeth and ruthless purpose. But Karitoki is not a seal, and so his swimming is perilous. Pania are guardians but they are not his; they exist to dote on dolphins, on whales and seals and ocean mammals and they have little tolerance for threats. Karitoki is no threat, he wishes no harm—but he has never been near enough to prove this and the Pania, oiling herself before him, is now so very close. His fingers itch to touch her. He wants to show that he is friendly, that he can be trusted.

  The Pania lets him help in return for the mussels he has dug up out of sand, and Karitoki’s hands shake as he wets his palms, makes them slick and slippery. The oil is strong, pungent. He will smell of fish for days. “Do you always use this?” he says, and his hands are warm on the Pania’s collarbones, the sharp protuberances of shoulder blades.

  “What else should I use?” she says. “What else is there that smells so wonderful?” And Karitoki, who makes his living with mussels, who breathes in the redolent, wine-scented steam of their braising but who prefers that scent on his plate and not on his women, is briefly silent.

  “I can bring you something that smells better,” he says.

  He brings orange oil to the ocean, boiled out of pith from the Northland orchards and fragrant. When he smooths it onto the Pania’s legs, onto her webbed feet, she smells of groves and distilleries and he laps at her skin until he feels scales on his tongue. She’ll only allow it for so long—the oil is thin and stinging, and when it’s left on too long it makes her itch. She washes it off in salt water while he digs for mussels on the beach. Just a few, barely enough, but they share them out between them.

  The Pania eats hers raw, but Karitoki steams his in a pan over a driftwood fire, steams them with oranges and fennel until they’re plump and sweet. He offers some to her, but though her teeth gleam at him like bone spears she doesn’t eat cooked food. Instead, she winds the fennel through her hair and uses an orange as club, to smash the little crabs in their rock pools so she can suck out their insides.

  He walks her back out to sea, and tries to look like he’s enjoying it. The Pania had laughed when he’d left his sandals on, snickered through her fingers and looked at him with cheerful mockery, so he’d shrugged them off and tried to move as if he didn’t care what he stepped on.

  “You can’t feel the bottom if your feet are all tied up like that,” she says, and the sandy bottom squelches beneath his toes. He can see her give a little shimmy with each step, to embed her feet further in, to luxuriate in sensation.

  “It’s not the sand I’m worried about,” he says, squeamish. Karitoki digs for mussels but he’s seen the long-liners, seen what the paddle crabs do to their lures, stripping the lines in minutes while the fish swim away unbaited. And he’s played in the water himself, enough to be pinched and nipped to bleeding as the crabs cover the bottom like cobblestones.

  “Think yourself lucky,” says the Pania, wallowing, the water hip deep now and enough for her to swim in so she does, her body slick and undulating beside him, her thighs thick as his waist, plump and gleaming with fat. Even when she had walked beside him she had not been worried—the crabs could sense a Pania, and scuttled away from the webbed feet, the fin-fringed legs, the quick clawed hands and gleaming teeth.

  When a crab catches hold of Karitoki’s foot he swears, just a little and under his breath at that, and the Pania is under the water before he can blink, snatching his foot and the crab both, and if he gets his foot back before he’s overbalanced back into the water, it’s only because the crab lets go after the Pania has bitten through its shell. He hears the crunching, underwater as it is, and when the Pania surfaces water is streaming down her and she’s spitting out shell in fragments.

  “Teeth are better than oranges,” she says.

  There is crabmeat caught in her gums. Her teeth shine like broken glass in her mouth, but not the glass that washes up on the beach as pebbles, worn smooth by the ocean, opaque. They shine like sharks’ teeth, and if Karitoki thought to check his foot for bleeding he thinks better of it now. Instead, he shifts his weight forward a fraction, buries his pinched flesh in the sand behind him, and stays very, very still. Pieces of crab are floating in the water around him. Too small for the Pania, but he knows they would attract gulls if the situation were different. But gulls, like crabs, know a Pania when they see one, and have no wish to be stuffed, feathers and beak and eggy salt flesh, into that gaping maw. Karitoki knows she could do it—snatch a bird from its dive and devour it, bones and all, as easily as she consumed the crab.

  The Pania gleams her sharp teeth at him. “Much better than oranges,” she says.

  Karitoki brings olive oil to the ocean, a pressed pale liquid that glimmers green on the Pania and makes her skin shimmer. It spills down her in viscous waves, over her shoulders and down her arms in slow currents, making her skin shine bright in the sun. The Pania cups oil in her hands, smells the trees and the fruit and the warm wood echo of it, and she spills it over Karitoki in turn, spreads it down his back, working it into muscles and keeping her nails away.

  It takes damp sand to scrub it all off, to make her smell of fish again, and while she does Karitoki cuts up mussels into chunks, binds them with egg and flour and onions and fries them in oil. The Pania squirms closer in the sand, fascinated with the bubble and spit, but when Karitoki turns the fritters in their pan she is splashed by the spatter, just a little, and retreats to the sea, hissing, will not let him cool her burns with oil. When he turns to make a second batch he sees the bowl is gone, and the Pania is out of reach, finger-licking and scooping the raw mix into balls in her hands. She swallows them whole and sends the bowl floating back, while Karitoki eats his fritters with oil-stained hands, with lemon and pepper.

  They spend their time in rock pools, mostly. The Pania can come ashore if she wishes, but she loves the salt water too well to leave it, and Karitoki can only bear it so long before his skin starts to pucker and shrivel. Instead, he sits on the rocks and dangles his feet in the water, compares his own pink flesh to hers, glossy and finned and well muscled for swimming, the expanded chest, the extra capacity for lungs and breath.

  “You could come just for an afternoon,” says Karitoki. “We wouldn’t ever be out of sight of shore.” He’s kept quiet, mostly, about the time he spends on the beach, the time he spends not digging mussels, but even if they are hidden by rocks it is not a private place and people talk, are suspicious with him. His brothers don’t believe he’s made a friend. “How much have you got to talk about?” they ask, not willing to grasp that he’s not interested in talking, not really. If only they’d see the Pania close up, he thinks. It’s one thing for adolescents to stare from a distance, to gaze upon the plump sweet flesh of the pack and swallow down their desire, but having the curves under his own hands, feeling the slick of oil and inhaling the harsh fish scent of it is something else entirely. They don’t believe his stories, don’t believe that a Pania would allow him so close. They’d change their minds if he were to take her hand and bring her to them, but instead they look at his picnic basket and saucepan with skepticism. “Why would you bother?” they ask. “Even if you wanted to risk getting up close, you know they won’t eat anything but raw.”

  “If I could only persuade her to try,” says Karitoki. He knows how mussels taste, is bound to them by position as well as preference, for the mussel beds are a family occupation and there was never any other career for him
. Knows, too, dozens of recipes, hundreds of them; knows what appeals to those who like sweet flavours and those who like sour, those who like grapes with their food and those who’d rather have their shellfish soaked in ale. “Perhaps if she tried, she could see that it wasn’t all bad,” he says.

  “You’re trying to make her follow you home,” says his oldest brother. “To make her leave the pods, leave them to fend for themselves. Good luck! You’ll need a better bait than cooked mussels to turn a Pania’s head.”

  Karitoki does not give up. He returns the next day, brings butter to the ocean and braises mussels for her; sautés them in the butter with garlic, leaves them to simmer in wine and a few fragrant strands of saffron. Karitoki offers her some of the sauvignon when he is done, the bottle only half-empty after braising. “This is what keeps me warm,” he says, and if that is the truth it is not all of it, for wine can bring a warm body in more ways than one and Karitoki has used it before for seduction. But when the Pania tastes it, brings the bottle to her mouth, her teeth close on the glass and bite it off, and if he did not snatch it from her she would have cut herself on the edges. Dragging the bottle away, he spills some on her by accident.

  She laps it up, screws up her face. “It’s so sour,” she says. “I don’t like it.” She prefers the butter, likes the way the little pats of it sit in her hands and soften until she can work it into her skin, between the wet fish creases of her. The butter, he thinks, is worst of all. She no longer smells purely of fish—she is rancid fish, now, and there are small lumps left on her flesh where the butter hasn’t yet sunk in.

  But the Pania is happy, sniffs herself in constant fascination. “It’s like fat,” she says. “Like the blubber on the seals, or the whales.” She wears it as if it were perfume as well as warmth, and Karitoki eats upwind of her.