Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales

by Goss, Theodora

  “Two secrets, Missus?” he asked, nearly playful. “I thought it always had to be three.”

  “Did you, soldier? Then no doubt three it will be, for you. But the third one you’ll have to discover yourself.”

  “Fair enough. Do I get my bed and board as well?”

  “Sleep in the shed, eat from the cook-pot. As for your leg—don’t fret. That comes included.”

  During that first day she was very busy inside the main hut that was her house, behind a leather curtain; at witch-work he assumed.

  Outside he got on with the chores.

  All was simple. Even the white goat, despite its wicked goat eyes, had a mild disposition. The shed allotted as his bedchamber was weather-proof and had a rug-bed.

  As the sinking sun poured out through the western trees, she called him to eat. He thought, sitting by the hearth fire, if her witchery turned out as apt as her cooking, she might even get rid of his pain for good. Then some few minutes after eating he noticed his leg felt better.

  “It was in the soup, then, the medicine?”

  “Quite right,” she said. “And in what I gave you at noon.”

  He had tasted nothing, and stupidly thought it was relief at this interval that calmed his phantom leg. He supposed she could have poisoned him too. But then, she had not.

  “Great respects to you, Missus,” he said. “I’m more than grateful. May I take some with me when I go?”

  “You can. But I doubt you’ll need it. There’s another way to tackle the hurt of your wound. That’s the first secret. But I won’t be showing you until tomorrow’s eve.”

  He was relaxed enough he grinned.

  “What will all this cost me?”

  “It will,” she said, “be up to you.”

  At which, of course, he thought, I’d best be careful, then. God knows what she’s at, or will want. But the fire was warm and the leg did not nag, and the stoop of dark beer, that was pleasant too. Well, she had bewitched him, in her way. He even incoherently dreamed of her that night. It was some courtly dance, the women and the men advancing to and from each other, touching hands, turning slowly about, separating and moving gracefully on . . . There was a young girl with long golden, golden hair, bright as the candlelight. And he was unable to join the dance, being old and crippled; but somehow he did not mind it, knowing that come the next evening—but what the next evening?

  The succeeding day, at first light, he noticed the large pawmarks of wolves in the frost by the witch’s door, and a tiny shred or two that indicated she had left them food. There had been no nocturnal outcry from the goat or chickens. Another bargain?

  Everything went as before. Today the goat even nuzzled his hand. It was a nice goat, perhaps the only nice goat on earth. The chickens chirruped musically.

  When the sun set, she called him again to eat.

  She said, “We’ll come now to the first secret. It’s old as the world. Older, maybe. And once you know, easy as to sleep. Easier.”

  Probably there was more medicine in the food—his resentful leg all day had been charming in its behavior—but also tonight she must have put in some new substance.

  He woke, having found he had fallen asleep as he sat by her fire, his back leaning on the handy wall.

  She was whispering in his left ear.

  “What?” he murmured.

  But the whispering had stopped. She stood aside, and in the shadowy sinking firelight she was like a shadow herself. The shadow said, in its young, gentle and inexorable voice: “Easy as that, soldier. Nor will you ever forget. Whenever you have need, you or that wounded leg, then you can.”

  And then she slipped back and back, and away and away, and he thought, quite serenely and without any rage or alarm, Has she done for me? Am I dying? But it was never that.

  He floated inwards, deep as into any sea or lake. And then he floated free . . .

  Children dream of such things. Had he? No, he had had small space for dreams of any sort. Yet, somehow he knew what he did. He had done it before, must have done, since it was so familiar, so known, so wonderful and so blessed.

  He was young. He felt twenty years of age, and full of health and vigor. He ran and bounded on two strong, eloquent legs, each whole and perfectly able. He sprang up trees—ran up them, impervious to pine-needles and the scratch-claws of branches, leapt from their boughs a hundred feet above and flew—wingless but certain as a floating hawk—to another tree or to the ground below. Where he wished, he walked on the air.

  The three gray wolves, feeding on bits of meat and turnip by the witch’s door, looked up and saw him; only one offered a soft sound, more like amused congratulation than dismay. Later a passing night bird veered to give him room, with a startled silvery rattle. A fox on the path below merely pattered on. Later he went drifting, careless, by three or four rough huts, where a solitary man, cooking his late supper outdoors, stared straight through him with a myopic gaze. Blind to nothing physical—he was dexterous enough with his makeshift skillet—the woodlander plainly could not detect Yannis, who hovered directly overhead. Even when Yannis, who was afterwards ashamed of himself, swooped down and pulled the man’s ear, the man only twitched as if some night-bug had bothered him. A human, it seemed, was the single creature who could not see Yannis at all.

  He roamed all night, or at least until the fattening moon set and the sky on the other side turned pale. Effortlessly, he found his way back to the witch’s house. A faint shimmering line in the air led him. He followed it, aware it was attached to him, and of its significance, without at all understanding, until at last he found it ran in under the shed-house door, and up to the body of the man who sat propped there, so deeply asleep he seemed almost—if very peacefully, in fact, nearly smugly—dead—and slid in at his chest. The cord that binds me, while I live, he thought. And only I, or some very great witch, could see it.

  He paused a moment, too, to regard himself from outside. Rather embarrassed, he reassessed his value. Aside from the leg, he was still well-made. And strong. He had—a couthness to him. And if not handsome, well, he was not an ugly fellow. He would do. He was worth quite a lot more than Yannis, since his crippling and invaliding out of the army, had reckoned. Yannis gave himself a friendly pat on the shoulder, before pursuing the cord home into his physical body, and the warm, kind blanket of sleep that waited there.

  “You will never forget now,” she said, next morning. “Whenever you must ease the spirit of the leg, you need only release your spirit. Then the leg will never fret you, no matter that its physical self is gone and it sits in a jail of wood, just as you do in the prison of flesh we all inhabit till death sets us free.”

  “Is it my soul you’ve let out, then?” he asked her. Since waking up again he had been less confident. “Isn’t that going to upset God?”

  She made a noise of derision and dipped her bread in the honey. “Do you think God so petty? Come soldier, God is God! How could we get these skills if it weren’t allowed? But no, besides. It’s not the soul. The soul sits deeper. It’s your earthly spirit only you can now release, which is why it has the shape of you and is male and young and strong. And too—as you’ve seen—nothing human, or very few, will ever espy you in that form. You will be invisible. Which, when you reach the city, can render you service.”

  “You think I’ll use the knack to do harm.”

  “Never,” she said. “Would I unlock it for you, if I thought so?”

  Yannis shook his head. “No, Mother.”

  “And I am your mother, now?”

  He said, quietly, “She was yellow-haired and pretty. I don’t insult you, Missus. And anyway, I meant . . . ”

  “There,” she said, and she smiled at him. She had a sunny smile, and all her teeth were amazingly sound and clean, especially for such an old granny as she was. “And now, Yannis, I will give you the second secret. Which is less secret than the first.”

  He sat and looked warily at her as she told him. “You’ll gain the city by
nightfall. There is a king there, who is a coward, a dunce, and as cruel as those failings can make a man. He has twelve girls by three different wives, all of these queens now dead, and mostly due to him. But the princesses, as we must call them, as we must call him a king—for they’re all the royalty we’ll get in such a land as this—are at a game the king is frightened of. He wants to be sure what they do, for unsure he is, and to spare. And when sure, to curb them. But he dares not take on the task himself.”

  “This is the tale I heard elsewhere,” said Yannis, who had sat forward, partly eager to forget for a while about spirits and souls and God.

  “You may well have heard it, for rumors have been planted and are growing wild. Already the king has hired mercenary men to spy on the girls and catch them out. These mercenaries were of all types, high, low, and lowest of the lowest, even one, they say, a prince, but doubtless a prince in the same way of this king being a king. All fail, and then the king gladly has them murdered. That is his bargain. The man who spies on and renders up the princesses, him the king will make his princely heir. But fail—and off with his head.”

  “If it’s so hard to catch his daughters, then why try?”

  “Because it is never hard at all. Those who watch the girls, or would do, the princesses drug asleep, being themselves well-versed in witchcraft. Whoever wants to find out anything must not taste a bite nor swallow a sip in that house, unless it be from the common dish or jug, and sampled by others. Or if he is forced, he must only pretend. And immediately after he must feign slumber or better—slip into a trance so sleeplike, so deathlike, it will convince the sternest critic. Then he may follow those girls as he wishes, and learn all and everything. Providing, of course, none can see him.”

  Yannis said, “For example, by letting his spirit free from his body.”

  “Just so.”

  Next a silence fell. It came down the chimney and through the two little windows with the shutters, and sat with the witch and the soldier, timing them on its endless noiseless fingers to see how much longer they would be at their council.

  At last Yannis said, “Two secrets, then. What is the third?”

  “I said already, son, you must find the third secret yourself. But some call it Courage and others Arrogance, and some blind fool Madness. You must act on what I have taught you, that is the third secret. Now, go milk my goat, who has fallen in heart’s-ease for you, and bid my chicks goodbye. Then you shall set off again, if you’re to reach the city gate by sundown.”

  Yannis stood like a man distracted. Then he said, “Either you want my death, and so have done this. Or else you mean me to prosper. But—if that—then why? I’m nothing to you.”

  “For sure perhaps, or not,” she said. “But I have been something for you. For even when you were a warrior in the wars, you have cared for me.”

  “But Missus—never ever did I meet you before . . . ”

  “Not me that speaks these words, but so many others—womankind. My sisters, my mothers, my daughters, the daughters of my daughters—all of those. For the old woman and the young woman, they the rest of the soldiers might have killed for uselessness, or put to a use that would have killed them too. Those women that you helped, that you defended, and hid, that you gave up your food to. Women young and old are dear to you, and you in the midst of turmoiled men, blood-crazed and heartless, have where able been a savior to my kind. And so, also to me, Yannis, my son.”

  Then Yannis hung his head, lost for words.

  But she, as she turned in at the leather curtain, said to him, lightly, “I will after all tell you a third thing. It is how the old beast of a king knows his daughters are at dangerous work.”

  Yannis shook himself. “How, then?”

  “By the soles of their feet.”

  II

  They used a different language in the city—in their buildings, their gestures. While their speech contained foreign phrases, and occasional passages in a tongue that was so unlike anything in the regions round about that it took him time to fathom it. However, he came to realize he had heard snatches of it before. It was an ancient and classic linguistic of which, racking his brains, he saw he had kept a smattering.

  Most of the city was of stone. But near the center—where a wide, paved road ran through—the architecture was, like the second language, ancient, and some even ruinous, yet built up again. Tall, wide-girthed pillars, high as five houses stood on each other’s heads. Large gateways opened on terraced yards. A granite fountain played. Yannis was surprised. But the metropolis had been there, evidently, far longer than those who possessed it now.

  On a hill that rose beyond a treed parkland, a graveyard was visible, whose structures were domed like the cots of bees. He had never seen such tombs before. They filled him with a vague yet constant uncomfortable puzzlement. He did not often turn their way. And he thought this reaction too seemed apparent with the city people. Where they could, they did not look into the west.

  The sun set behind the hill about an hour after he had got in the gates—he had made very good speed. But it was darkly overcast, and the sunset only flickered like a snakeskin before vanishing.

  How strange their manners here.

  The innkeeper that he asked for chances of work, or shelter, answered instantly, in a low, foreboding tone, “Go to the palace. There’s nowhere else.”

  “The palace . . . ”

  “I said. Go there. Now off with you or I call the dogs.”

  And next, at a well in the strengthening rain, the women who cried out in various voices, “Off—go on, you. Get work at the palace! Get your bed there. There’s nowhere else.”

  And after these—who he took for mad persons—the same type of reply, often in rougher form, as with the blacksmith in the alley who flung an iron bar.

  All told, a smother of inimical elements seemed to lie over the old city, the citizens hurrying below with heads down. Maybe only the weather, the coming dark. Few spoke to any, once the sun went. It was not Yannis alone who got their colder shoulder.

  The last man to push Yannis aside also furiously directed him, pointing at the dismal park, by then disappearing in night-gloom. “See, there. The palace. And don’t come back.”

  To which Yannis, thrusting him off in turn, in a rush of lost patience answered, “So I’m the king’s business, am I? Are you this way with any stranger who asks for anything? Go and be used and win—or die?”

  But the man raised his fist. In a steely assessment of his own trained strength—which the witch’s teaching had returned him to awareness of—Yannis retreated. No point in ending in the jail.

  Black, the sky, and all of it falling down in icy streamings, which, even as he went on, altered to a spiteful and clattering hail. He thought of falling arrowheads. Of the horse which fell. Of the surgeon’s tent . . .

  At the brink of the park a black crow sat in an oak above. And Yannis was not sure it was quite real, though its eye glittered.

  I am here by Something’s will.

  But the will of what? A king? A witch? Some unknown sorcerer? Or only those other two, Life and Death.

  In the, end, all the trees seemed to have crows in them. Stumbling over roots and tangles of undergrowth, where rounded boulders and shards nestled like skulls, Yannis came out onto a flight of stony stairs. It was snowing, and the wind howled, riotously bending grasses and boughs and the mere frame of a strong man. And then a huge honey-colored lamplight massed above out of a core of towery and upcast leaden walls.

  He judged, even clapped by now nearly double and blinkered by snow, that the palace was like the rest, partly ancient, its additions balancing on it, clinging and unsure. But it was well-lit, and rows of guardsmen were there. One of them, like the unwilling ones below, trudged out at him and caught him, if now in an almost friendly detaining vice. “What have we here?”

  “I was sent here,” said Yannis, speaking of Fate, or the fools in the city, not caring which.

  “That’s good, the
n. Will cheer him up, our lord. Not every day, would you suppose, some cripple on a stump can enhance the evening of a king.”

  His own king had once spoken to Yannis. The king had been on horseback, the men interrupted, respectfully standing in the mud, just after the sack of some town. The king had commended them for their courage. It was ritual, no more, but Yannis had been oddly struck by how the king looked not like other men. That was, the king was not in any way superior—more handsome, say, let alone more profound, yet different he was. It had not been his fine clothes, the many-hands-high horse. It perplexed Yannis. The king seemed of an alien kind—not quite human, perhaps, but nor was it glamorous.

  This king was nothing like that anyway. When Yannis first saw him he was some distance off, but even over the sweep of the tall-roofed, smoky, steamy, hot-lit hall, he appeared only a man, ageing and bearded between black and gray, and drunk, possibly; he looked it.

  The guardsman who brought Yannis in quickly pushed him into a seat at one of the lower tables. Here sat a cobbler, tellable by his hands, some stable grooms still rank from their duties, and so on. A lesser soldier or two was in with the rest. The guard said, “Eat your fill. Have a big drink and toast his kingship. Don’t get soused. He’ll be talking to you later.”

  The tables where the king’s court sat near him lay over an area of painted floor just far enough off to indicate status. The king’s own High Table was up on a platform. It faced the hall, but directly to its left side another table spread at a wide angle. The king’s table was caped in white cloth-of-linen, hung with medallions of gold. It had utensils, beakers, and jugs of silver and clear gray crystal. It was crowded, the Master occupying the central carved and gilded chair. The left-hand table meanwhile had a drapery of three colors, a deep red, a plum yellow, and a chestnut shade. But no medallions hung on it. The jugs were earthenware. It was also completely empty, but having twelve plain chairs.

  An armorer next to Yannis asked questions and commented. Where did Yannis come from? Oh, there—Oh, that little war? A horse did for his leg? What luck! Try that pie—best you’ve tasted, yes?