How to Fracture a Fairy Tale

by Jane Yolen

  Sskarma closed her eyes in thought. The other two little dragons were half-asleep.

  Grandfather Dragon did not answer their questions, but let the story answer the questions for him.

  The Great-Grandfather of All Dragons stretched and rose. He unfurled his wings to their farthest point and opened his mouth and roared out gout after gout of flames. All the knights save the white knight knelt in fear. And then the Great-Grandfather pumped his wings twice and leaped into the air. Boulders buffeted by the winds rolled down the mountainside toward the Men.

  The Great-Grandmother followed him, roaring as she flew. And they circled around and around in a great, widening gyre that was much too high for the puny Man arrows to reach.

  Then the white knight called on all his archers to put down their bows, and the others to put aside their weapons. Reluctantly they obeyed, though a few grumbled angrily and they were all secretly very much afraid.

  When the white knight saw that all his knights had disarmed themselves, he held his shield up once more and called out “Come, Worm” in his own tongue. He made the Man sign again, head to heart, shoulder to shoulder. At that signal, the Great-Grandfather of All Dragons and his mate came down. They crested a current of air and rode it down to the knight’s feet.

  When they landed, they jarred nearly fifty slithes of earth, causing several of the Men to fall over in amazement or fear or from the small quaking of the ground. Then the dragons lowered their heads to Ssgggi.

  And the Man walked over to them, and first to the Great-Grandmother and then to the Great-Grandfather he lifted his fist and placed it ever so gently on a certain spot on the nose.

  The Great-Grandmother thrummed at this. And then the Great-Grandfather thrummed as well. And the white knight joined them. The two dragons’ bodies shook loud and long with their thrumming. And the army of Men stared and then laughed and finally cheered, for they thought that the great-grandparents were afraid.

  “Afraid? Afraid of puny Men? They were shaking because they were thrumming. Only lower animals like rabbits and lion and deer—and Men—shake when they are afraid. I’ll show them afraid!” cried Sskar. He leaped into the air and roared so hard that this time real flames came out of his nose slits, which so surprised him that he turned a flip in the air and came back to earth on his tailbone, which hurt enormously.

  Grandfather Dragon ignored him, and so did the other little dragons. Only Mother Dragon, from her corner in the cave, chuckled. It was a sound that broke boulders.

  Sskar limped back proudly to his grandfather’s side, eager to hear the rest of the story. “I showed them, didn’t I?” he said.

  8.

  “Hear this,” said the white knight Georgi, first in Man talk and then in the old tongue so that the dragons could understand as well. “From now on dragons shall raid no Man lands, and Men shall leave dragons alone. We will not even recognize you should we see you. You are no longer real to us.

  “In turn, dragons will remain here, in this vast mountain wilderness untouched by Men. You will not see us or prey on us. You will not even recognize us. We are no longer real to dragons.”

  The Great-Grandfather roared out his agreement, as did the Great-Grandmother. Their roaring shattered a small mountain, which, to this day, Men called Dragon’s Fall. Then they sprang up and were gone out of the sight of the army of Men, out of the lives of Men.

  “Good,” said Sskar. “I am glad they are out of our sight and out of our lives. Men are ugly and unappetizing. We are much better off without them.” He stretched and curled and tried to fall asleep. Stories made him feel uncomfortable and sleepy at the same time.

  But Sskitter was not happy with the ending. “What of Ssgggi?” she said. “Did they ever see him again? Of all Men, he was my favorite.”

  “And what of the dragons’ Thanksgiving?” said the littlest two, wide awake now.

  Sskarma was silent, looking far out across the plains, across to Dragon’s Fall, where the boulders lay all in a jumble.

  Grandfather touched Sskarma’s shoulder gently. “There is more,” he said.

  She turned her head to look at him, her black eyes glistening. “I know,” she said. “Ssgggi came back. He would have to. He loved them so. And they loved him.”

  Grandfather shook his head. “No,” he said. “He never came back. He could not. Dragons no longer existed for him, except in his heart. Did not exist for him—or for any Men. Of course,” Grandfather added, “Men still exist for us. We do not have Man’s gift of tongue or of the imagination. What is—for dragons—is. We cannot wish it away. We cannot make the real unreal, or the unreal real. I envy Man this other gift.”

  Sskarma closed her eyes and tried not to cry. “Never?” she asked softly. “He never came back? Then how could there have been a Thanksgiving?”

  Dragons keep promises Grandfather continued for they do not have the imagination to lie. And so the Great-Grandfather and the Great-Grandmother and all their children, for they finally had many, and their children’s children never bothered Men again. And, since Men did not believe dragons existed, Men did not bother dragons. That is what dragons give thanks for. In fact, Men believed that Saint George—as they called him in later years—had rid them forever of dragons.

  And so things have stood to this very day.

  9.

  Mother Dragon rose at the story’s end. “You have a Man’s imagination, old one, though you deny it. You have a gift for making up stories, which is another way of saying you lie. Sometimes I think you are more Man than dragon.”

  “I tell the truth,” growled the old dragon. “This is dragon history.” Huffily, he cleaned his front claws.

  “It is true that the word history contains the word story,” said Mother Dragon. “But that is the only thing I will admit.”

  Grandfather Dragon houghed, and the smoke straggled out of his nose slits.

  “And now if we are to have a real old-fashioned dragons’ Thanksgiving, to celebrate the end of stories and the beginning of food, I will have to go hunting again,” said Mother Dragon. “A deer, I think. I saw a fat herd by Dragon’s Fall, grazing on the sweet spring grass.”

  “May I come?” asked Sskar.

  Mother Dragon smiled and groomed his tail for him. “Now that you have real flames you may.”

  “The others and I will gather chestnuts,” said Grandfather. “For the celebration. For Thanksgiving.”

  Sskarma shook her head. “I would like to stay behind and clean the cave.”

  The others left without an argument. No one liked to clean the cave, sweeping the bones over the side of the cliff. Mother Dragon and Sskar rose into the air, banked to the left, and winged out of sight so that they could approach the Fall from downwind. Grandfather Dragon and the three young dragons moved slowly along the deeply rutted mountain path.

  Sskarma waited until they had all left; then she went out and looked at the great old pine tree that grew near the cave mouth. About five slithes up was a slash of white, the mark left by a dragon nail, a slash they all called Ssgggi’s Mark. She looked at it for a long time and calculated how quickly trees grow. Then she stood up alongside the tree. The mark came up to her shoulder.

  “Ssgggi,” she said. Then she said it three more times. The fourth time she said it, it came out “Georgi.”

  “Georgi,” she said a fifth time. This time it sounded right. Smiling quietly to herself, Sskarma glanced around the wilderness and then once into the sky. Far away she could see one of the great silver birds Grandfather always warned them about. “Georgi,” she said, and went back in to clean the cave.

  Green Plague

  IT WAS ONLY A small village high up in the mountains, but the tourists loved it. The water was clean, the air fresh, and the native population wore quaint costumes, not unlike the ones their great-great-grandparents had worn, only made more comfortable with zippers and Velcro fastenings.

  The village’s fortunes were based on the legend of a piper and a plague of
rats some five centuries earlier, and they had carefully cultivated it for tourist trade.

  Not that anyone believed the legend. As the mayor said, “A lie, but our own.”

  And a very profitable lie it was. There were dioramas of the alleged incident in the town hall. Schoolchildren, in their adorable costumes, sang songs about the rats in the amphitheater for visitors, in German, Spanish, Italian, French, English, and Japanese. Trips to the town’s cheese factories were the highlight of every tour, with twiddly oompapa music piped in to the factory elevators. In fact, all of the brochures about holidays in the little town were decorated with pictures of rats, though they bore little resemblance to the rodents of old, but were as cuddly as the plush toy mice that were sold in the village gift shop, along with plastic piccolos that could flute half an octave at best.

  Very profitable indeed.

  Still the townsfolk were more than a little surprised when they awoke one morning, less than a month till high season, to another kind of plague.

  “Frogs!” thundered the village mayor to the hastily convened council. His fleshy jowls trembled with the word. He held one of the offending green invaders by a leg and waved it above his head.

  “They’re everywhere,” complained a thin-faced man who was the mayor’s chief rival. He shuddered with distaste.

  “In the bathtub,” said one councilor.

  “And the buttery,” said another.

  “Under the beds,” said a third.

  “And doing the breaststroke in the toilet bowl,” thundered the mayor. He was popular for saying things plainly and because of it had been elected seven years in a row, a village record. “These frogs will ruin business. And we have just been named Attraction of the Year by the National Board of Tourism.” They all knew that this was an important citation. It meant that booklets about the village would be in every guide and information shop in the country free of charge. It meant they could expect an increase in visitors of almost 300 percent in the upcoming year. “We must do something to rid ourselves of this green invasion,” the mayor concluded.

  The council wrestled for about an hour with the problem while green peepers, leopard frogs, and bullfrogs hopped about their feet.

  At last the mayor thundered, “This is a plague of biblical proportions!”

  “In proportion to what?” asked the thin man.

  That started them on one of their epic arguments. No one expected to get out of council chambers until noon.

  But just then a very large and hairy frog climbed onto the council table. Its eyes bulged in a horrible manner, as if any minute they were going to fall right out of its head.

  “Trichobatrachus robustus,” the thin man said, shuddering again as he did so, “from West Africa. I, at least, have been doing my homework.”

  The big frog stared right at the mayor, who, in a sudden panic, hastily adjourned the meeting until the early afternoon.

  Gratefully, the councilors all fled the room, leaving the frogs in charge.

  In the center of the village, the full extent of the green plague could now be seen. What had been a trickle of family Ranidae at breakfast had, by lunch, become a tidal wave.

  Put simply: There were frogs everywhere.

  Some were small green blobs and some were enormous teninch-round boulders. They seemed to stretch from the foot of Grossmutter to the foot of Harlingberg, the two mountains that made up the sides of the village’s valley.

  The children were the only ones who were enjoying the spectacle. They had abandoned their own games of tag and hideand-seek to start frog-racing and frog-jumping contests with the more agreeable frogs.

  But as frogs continued to flood into the town, even the children lost interest. A frog or two or seven in the street is one thing. But a frog floating languidly in your milk glass or curled up on your pillow or draped across your toothbrush is another.

  By evening the frogs outnumbered the citizens by a thousandfold. And still the green plague continued.

  “We need a piper!” the mayor whispered. A day of thundering had reduced his vocal chords to single notes. The councilors had to strain to hear him in a room now crowded with frogs who were peeping and thrumming and harrumphing with spring pleasure.

  At that point, everyone on the council—and the mayor himself—trooped down to the village gift shop and tried tootling on the plastic piccolos. They hoped, one and all, that the legend might actually have some base in reality. But tootle as they might, it was soon quite clear that there was not a real piper among them.

  A second day of frogs went by and the roadways were thronged with green. Beds were slimed. Kitchen floors uncrossable. The school yard was a mass of undulating froggery.

  The locals began to pack up and move—slowly, because the one highway into the village was covered with both frogs and persons from the media trying to get in. The news organizations, at least, were delighted with the green plague.

  “Maybe that will get us a piper,” the mayor said to the council after one particularly grueling interview with CNN. And even the thin man had to agree.

  And then down the side of Harlingberg Mountain, which being quite steep was relatively frogless, came a drummer. He was a tall, skinny, scruffy man with legs like a stork’s. His clothes resembled a personal rummage sale: a green jacket that had once had some sort of emblem on the sleeve; dark pants that were neither black nor blue but somewhere in between; and a white shirt that had certainly seen better days, and probably a better night or two, for it was the tattered remnant of a fancy dress outfit. The drummer had been only partially successful in tucking his shirttails into the pants and one side hung down, obscuring the right-hand pocket, which was just as well as the pocket was no longer there. A pair of granny glasses were perched on his rather prominent nose and made his eyes seem to bulge, rather like those of Trichobatrachus robustus. He had a green swatch of cloth tied around his forehead, which did not succeed in keeping his scraggly yellow hair out of his mouth.

  A pair of bongo drums were strapped to the tattered man’s back and he was carrying a bodhran, a Gaelic hand drum that is played in the best Irish bands.

  Once he made his way down the mountainside and found himself right at the town gates, the tattered man marched on his long stork legs through the green swale of frogs, banging all the while on his bodhran. Unaccountably, the frogs opened a path for him, then fell in line behind, hopping feverishly in 4/4 time to keep up with his long strides.

  He marched right up the stairs and into the town hall, marking time with the drum. Pushing aside the green invaders, clerks and secretaries opened their doors to stare at him.

  “The mayor?” he cried, over the sound of his drum.

  Two secretaries and the assistant in charge of weddings, funerals, and bank holidays pointed to the council room door.

  Without losing a beat, the drummer stork-legged into the room with his hopping parade behind.

  The mayor and council were once again hard at work arguing, but when they saw the drummer and what followed him in two precise lines, they stopped.

  “Welcome indeed,” said the mayor. “A drummer will do. Name your price.” He really knew how to get to the point.

  “A bag of gold bullion and a twice yearly gig at the amphitheater,” said the tattered drummer. “For me and my band.”

  The mayor pulled out a piece of paper, swatting away a large guppyi frog from the pen drawer as he did so.

  “It’s from the Solomon Islands,” remarked the thin councilor, pointing to the large frog. The mayor ignored him.

  Pen in hand, the mayor asked the drummer, “What is the name of your band?”

  “Frog,” said the drummer. “Formerly known as Prince.”

  “Figures,” said the mayor. He began to write.

  “We’ll want guarantees and merchandise rights as well,” said the drummer. “And the ability to do a video of the concert intercut with frames from the frog parade.”

  “Done,” said the mayor. He knew bette
r than to argue. Or to go back on his promise. The town legend had taught him that much.

  They both signed the paper and then the mayor had one of his secretaries run off copies in triplicate. The councilors put their own signatures in the margins and the mayor handed the drummer a bag of gold. He had, in his own way, done his homework.

  The drummer carefully lifted his shirttail, tucked his copy of the agreement in his right pocket, and turned. Smiling, he began drumming in earnest on the bodhran; it was a rhythm in 5/8 time.

  The frogs hopped about, forming two straight lines behind him.

  Then they all marched out the door, down the steps, along the road, through the village gates, up over Grossmutter Mountain, and were gone, followed by the eager media.

  Every last frog left behind the drummer.

  For good.

  Or for bad.

  It depends on how you feel about frogs.

  Back at the council room only the thin councilor had noticed that the signed contract the drummer put in his missing pocket had floated down onto the floor. Surreptitiously he picked it up and stuck it in his own pants, under the belt, for safekeeping. He knew how short memories were—for plagues and for promises. He ran against the mayor at the next election.

  “We will not go from one plague to another!” was his rallying cry. The villagers knew what he meant. Frogs were one thing. A little bit of slime here, a pond full of tadpoles there. Rock-and-roll fests, however, were another: farmyards destroyed; garbage everywhere; and any number of hippies staying on in the village forever. It had happened to a dozen towns on the other side of the mountain.

  The thin man won the election overwhelmingly. No one seemed to remember the tale of the piper and the rats when in the voting booth, except for the loud mayor.

  “We must not break our promise,” he warned.

  “What promise?” retorted the thin man, patting the paper under his belt surreptitiously.

  The mayor could not convince the voters that history and story have more in common than five letters. He lost in a landslide.

  In the fall all the children in the village over the age of fourteen left in a school bus for a rock concert in the next town over the mountain. There was a group called Forever Green that was currently popular. The drummer was known to be toadally awesome.