Lucifer finishes reading the letter aloud, his voice falsetto and bitter. The messenger who carries it is asleep under a tree, filled with ale generously provided by the fine young gentleman he met on the road.
The Devil pushes a thoughtful breath from his lips and lifts his hand. As his fingers pass over the parchment the letters dance and jumble, like feet on hot coals. He reads it aloud once more, his voice his own, his smile fat and happy.
The king slumps in the saddle. A letter arrived this morning. Before his unseeing eyes, his army sprawls like a field of poppies in their red armor.
My Dearest Son, your wife has given birth to a monster, a child with the head of a dog. She is cursed. Pray tell me how to deal with this abomination. Your Loving Mother, Constance.
A soldier approaches, the naked blade of his sword catching the sunlight, and the king is reminded of his wife’s sheen. He rouses himself, startled. Madchen has been nothing but a loving wife. She has never shown a sign of being anything other than she appears: a sweet, gentle, kind girl. If they have been afflicted with this burden, then they shall bear it together.
“Where is my scribe? I would have him take a letter.”
“Now, your Majesty?”
“Now.”
Royal messengers really aren’t what they used to be, thinks the Devil as the man’s snoring rings in his ears. He turns his attention to the letter, which astounds him.
This man, this idiot king, still wants his wife. Loves her, supports her, bids her have courage in the face of her adversity; bids her be strong until he returns and they will shoulder their burden together. What does he think? That they will teach their dog-headed son to fetch?
He spits his disgust and the letters dance once more. There will be no more joy for Madchen.
Constance lifts her head and wipes her mouth, thankful that no one is around to see her illness. Her son’s letter sent her for the basin on first reading and the sensation did not lessen with the second. She has put it aside, determined not to read it again.
From the window she can see Madchen and Hildebrand. The boy is almost a year old now but the size of a child twice that age, straight and stocky as his father was. He is a determined, curious child, fearless. He loves his mother with all his heart.
Madchen speaks with the head gardener as the boy plays with the palace wolfhounds. The beasts tower over him but they are tender, never too rough. Madchen, ever an attentive mother, raises her eyes regularly to check on him as she discusses her plans for a new garden.
Constance looks over her shoulder to the letter. It moves, caught by a breeze, as animated as the malice it contains.
Kill them both. Destroy the corruption. Cut out their tongues and eyes to prove you have obeyed your king. Do not hesitate, Mother, strike swiftly.
The Queen Mother gingerly folds the letter and slides it to the bottom of a jewellery box. Her hands tremble as she contemplates her next step. She will do her duty as a mother and as a regent.
“Hello, little queen.”
Madchen, drenched by his voice, turns to face him squarely. She feels her son wiggling on her back and wills him not to draw attention to himself.
“What’s that, my sweet? Offspring?” He swings down from the branch. He has been waiting for two days while she trudged away from the palace. “What lovely silver hands you have.”
Still, she does not speak.
“Still alive, I see. Tsk tsk. Naughty Constance disobeying her son’s orders. It’s a sad state of affairs when you can’t trust the Queen Mother.”
“Why? Why do you dog my steps? You could have anyone you wanted; why me?” She despairs. “Why won’t you leave me alone?”
“Because you said no.” He leans in close, his long nails playing across her face as gently as a breeze. “But you can change it all, you know. You still fascinate me, damn you. Say yes, now.”
Madchen stands on tiptoe and kisses him. He will, he thinks, be merciful, now that she has been brought low, and she still makes him ache: his love and hate entwine like mating snakes. She pulls back, fixes him with her argent eyes and gives him a hard smile.
“You will never know the taste of me again. I hope the memory of that kiss lingers until the last trumpet sounds.”
He strikes out and she falls but does not hit the ground even though her child and clothes do. Thousands of feathers break through the parchment of her skin. Her silver hands, immune to eldritch change, clatter on the stones of the path as, instinctively, she beats the air with new wings.
Hildebrand stops crying and stares at the large, snowy white owl. Madchen lets out a screech of anguish.
“Enjoy your life, Madchen. Try looking after your child with nothing but feathers.” He will think, from time to time, of the feathered maiden but he will not imagine she might escape his malice.
He disappears before she can finish her swoop at his head and her claws meet nothing but air. She settles beside Hildebrand, a picture of despair, and her son’s hand reaches out to stroke her. He presses his face to her feathers and notes, to his comfort, that she still smells like his mother.
Time and guilt have bent Constance like metal subjected to a fierce heat.
It is four years since she sent her daughter-in-law and grandson into the woods. The eyes and tongue of a gentle hind and her fawn float in a sealed glass jar, awaiting her son’s request for proof. She received no acknowledgement of her last letter. Indeed, no word has come from her son at all, although troubadours and tinkers bring news of how he continues his war.
Letters bring her nothing but dread and the one that arrived today lies on a bureau, set aside from the documents she is signing. Her secretary pours hot, red wax onto the documents then stamps the royal seal into the molten mess as it cools. When the pile of papers has disappeared she turns her attention to the letter. The parchment crackles under her hands as she breaks the seal.
Her son returns, within the week, his war won, his dominions safe.
Constance folds the letter and adds it to the small archive in the jewellery box where her son’s inhuman instructions have lived these last years. She slips away, down the staircase leading to her private garden.
In a pear tree sits the large white owl that has taken to visiting her. The creature is truly beautiful, an artwork with strange silver eyes. Constance scratches at the bird’s neck and it emits a soft, sad sound.
“I’m so scared, my lovely owl. My son returns and I will see once and for all if he is a monster. What if this man who came from me is something less than I believed him to be?” She sighs. “Tell me, white owl, will it hurt more or less?”
The creature starts and screeches. Her wings stretch wide and she takes off as if startled by the news. Constance watches her go, bereft.
The owl circles down into a clearing. Dryads have coaxed their trees to weave branches into a roof, climbing vines and shrubs form the walls of a small hut. It is simple but comfortable, made with care.
In the clearing stands a boy, big for his age. A quiver of handmade arrows is slung across his back and a bow is in his hand. He sets snares and hunts for food now that he is old enough; but he never hunts the birds of the air. The storm of his mother’s wings draws his attention and he watches her graceful landing, marvelling as always.
He is a child of silence: he has no memory of human speech, nor can he speak the language of birds. Communication between mother and son is rudimentary, one of love, not of sound. Hildebrand does not feel the loss, but it frustrates Madchen, for she had words before this time of feathers.
How can she tell her son that his father returns? How can she tell him that they are in danger? She will defend her child to the death. She does not know if it will be enough.
The king wanders.
Constance showed him the jar containing evidence of his wife and son’s fate. He struck her, would have drawn his sword had she not pulled the letters from the jewellery box and thrown them at him. Their contents stayed his hand and broke his heart.
Finally, Constance, assured of his innocence in the matter, told him of their exile. He vowed to find them and set off through the private garden, into the woods, with neither food nor drink nor companions to sustain him.
That was five days ago and his kingly garb is ragged and dirty; he looks like a beggar. His boots, right enough for riding, are not meant for walking miles and miles across forest floors. He discarded them on the second day, finding the blisters too painful to continue shod. Forest creatures play in and around the stinking leather as the king stumbles deeper into the woods.
He finds a stream and follows it, lapping at the crystal water from time to time in the hope that it will stop his belly from constant complaint. Any extra flesh he may once have carried has disappeared and his mind is strangely clear, freed of earthly considerations. If he cannot find his wife, his love, his beloved burden, there is nothing in life for him.
Then there is his son. The child is not real to him; Hildebrand is merely a concept, a chimera. The king has no memory of touch, or sound, or smell on which to hang his heart. His child is a lesson he must learn. If he can find him.
A clearing opens before him. Woven branches and vines form a small shelter, outside of which stands a boy. The child sees the man, sees his face stripped clean by suffering, but makes no sound. Behind him, the trees and foliage move and shift, fold back into themselves until the little hut is no more. The child casts a look over his shoulder; his home is gone.
The king takes in the boy, his black hair and sturdy limbs, and starts across the clearing. There is a rush of air, the beating of great wings, and Madchen swoops at him, her talons drawn. He falls, bloody scratches on his face, and the bird plummets to follow up her attack.
The owl’s screech is replaced by the screaming of a human voice, long silenced. Hands and fingernails slap and claw at him as he sees his wife’s face, transfigured by grief and anger and fear. He does not fight her, merely lies beneath her and watches as her rage plays itself out.
She hears, as her screams subside, his first words to her in almost five years.
“Madchen, my love, my silver bride.”
Her hands fail her, her rage washes away like an ebb tide. She sobs and collapses. Her husband wraps his arms around her and holds her until she lifts her silvered eyes to his dark ones, to feast upon his face, to consume the changes the years have wrought.
As they kneel in front of each other, Hildebrand approaches, uncertain how to treat this man who may be an enemy, or a friend—he cannot read his mother’s strange behaviour. He stands just out of reach.
Madchen raises one hand to her son, keeping the other firmly caught between her husband’s palms. Hildebrand stares for a moment then reaches out to touch the white-skinned limb. Madchen’s hands, restored to her as wings during her feathered phase, are whole.
The Devil has watched, drawn to a casual mirror visit, his miscalculation causing his jaw to drop. That she would once again be willing to blindly sacrifice herself for someone she loved and so earn release from his spite, did not occur to him―that a fully-limbed owl might become a fully-limbed maiden. He clenches his hands into fists, his nails cutting into the soft flesh (which heals immediately). Lightning spits from his fingertips, he points towards Madchen’s image but finds that the silvery sparks go the wrong way, licking up to his wrists, boiling around his own hands. This malignancy will not leave him. His shoulders slump, defeated.
Husband and son each hold one of the pale hands in wonder as they rise, the little family, and begin their journey to the castle where Constance waits with watchful eyes and an anxious heart.
* * *
Afterword
If ever there was a question which has the power to induce a stroke on a writer, (or at the very least a fit of apoplexy), it’s: “Where do you get your ideas from?” On good days, I wave my hands vaguely and shrug. On the less-good days, I insist that they all come from www.awesomeideas.com.
Admittedly, neither of these answers helps anyone. The spark of an idea can come from something as mundane as looking at the shapes in the coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup, or a supernova collision of thoughts at just the right time—and in the right place. Hopefully, you have a pen and paper handy, because shower-ideas (those which occur in the shower) are the worst—scribbling a brilliant plot outline on a steamy mirror just doesn’t cut it. Trust me.
So I thought I might disclose the genesis of each of the stories, as well as I can remember them. Or lie about them. Y’know, whatever.
Bluebeard
This is a version of the old tale and was one of the stories I wrote for my Masters. The first line popped into my head and I knew it was a young girl watching her mother, loving her but judging her. The setting of the French bordello and then the country house were both very clear, and I liked the concept of walls being both a protection and a prison. My heroine is a mix of both immense intellect and a childish need for a mother’s love and protection―and she’s desperate to know she’ll always come first in her mother’s heart. Even though―or perhaps particularly because―this was a version of Bluebeard, I wanted my female characters to survive, for mother and daughter to save each other. I also liked the idea that the slaughterer in this case was a woman; a crone, quite fearsome and judgmental, threatened and vicious about sexuality and its open display. This story first appeared in (Summer 2006 issue), and it gained an in the2007 (ed. Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link and Gavin Grant).
The Living Book
At first I was thinking about a woman whose body was made up of the leaves of a book that could be peeled back so you could read her. Further contemplation changed it to her having the ability to make the text appear on her body as and when requested―the words of any book. I liked the idea of her being one of the treasures of Byzantium: I imagined this adorned woman moving slowly and elegantly through the ornate and formal corridors of a palace, and then riding in a chariot like a Roman triumph. Although she was a created thing she had developed a personality―the wants and desires and needs of any human. When those needs were not met or recognised―particularly the needs for love and care―her reaction was perhaps both less than and at the same time extraordinarily human. This story has not been previously published.
The Jacaranda Wife
I’d had the idea of jacaranda women in my head for a while. My study looks out into the backyard where there is a giant jacaranda tree and one rainy day I was writing―or rather, not so much writing as staring out the window at the tree, which was in season and the bunches of purple flowers were so heavy with rain that they looked, well, pregnant―so that’s where that idea came from originally. I hadn’t written any stories set specifically in Australia, so I thought it was something I would/should try, to set a tale against a very Australian landscape. My mother’s family came to Australia with the Second Fleet and settled in Port Macquarie initially, and their family property was called Rollands Plain. The idea of the woman going back into the tree came from having an Irish character and the Irish legends of selkie wives whose skins are stolen by their husbands. The jacaranda has been transplanted all over the world―just like ideas and stories and fairytales―and I like the sense of it not quite belonging, of a strangeness in the landscape. This story is an Australian fable, which has roots in a European fairytale tradition. This story was first published in Jack Dann’s Dreaming Again2008 and gained an in the 2008 edited by Ellen Datlow (2009).
Red Skein
This a reworking of Little Red Riding Hood, inspired by Angela Carter’s The Company of Wolves, and it is another of the stories from my Masters. I liked the idea of Little Red being not only brave but far more dangerous than she was depicted in the later versions of the fairytale. I was also exploring the idea of the frictions between parents and children, specifically how mothers often want to see themselves in their daughters. When they instead see a difference, often a terrible unrecognisable difference―they can react badly. This story first appeared in , Fall 2006 issue.
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p; The Chrysanthemum Bride
In 2006 I read about two men in a remote part of China who had been murdering prostitutes and selling them as brides for afterlife marriage to families who’d lost unmarried sons. The idea was so weird and so grotesque and so strangely juxtaposed in modern society that it stuck in my bowerbird brain. I couldn’t get the story to shift onto the page, though, until a few months later when I was on a visit to Sydney and went to an art gallery and saw the quote that appears at the beginning of the story. Everything fell into place―I could see the main character and the setting and everything. I actually scribbled the story during a Billy Crystal performance at the Princess Theatre! This story was first published at Fantasy Magazine in December 2009.
Frozen
Believe it or not this was inspired by watching the film Kinky Boots. The opening scene has a little boy alone on a boardwalk, with his father (I think) inside drinking. I had been thinking about lost children, how parents can be so careless with their offspring, and how society makes great noise about protecting kids but all of this doesn’t seem to stop the flow of discarded children. I also wanted to write a story in which you couldn’t really tell if the narrator was a male or female. I know some readers find this frustrating, but it was an experiment in voice for me and I like the result. This story was first published in , Issue 8, April 2009.
The Hummingbird Heart
Some years ago I read an Aztec fairytale called The Hummingbird’s Fear, which posits the idea that hummingbirds were sprung from a woman’s guilty heart―which is an awesome concept. The only similarity with this work is that there’s a hummingbird involved. I woke up from a dream of a mother putting a metal box into her child’s chest; the more I thought about it the more I wondered what you might put into the box to simulate a heartbeat. The natural answer seemed to be an immortal hummingbird―but of course! I liked the idea of transplanting the hummingbird to the Aegean―where they do not naturally occur―because it was also a kind of a transplant and a colonisation of Antiope. This story was first published in the Spring 2008 issue of 2008 edited by Ellen Datlow (2009).
The Girl With No Hands and Other Tales Page 14