I turned my head again to the idea of the wolf-girl, staggering through her stone house.
“You would have me mate using only my teeth?” I said to Zeus.
“And what fine teeth they are,” he said, standing again, cocking his head to the clouded sky as if gauging the descent of his boy up there.
“But I’m a king!” I screamed. “And I was—I was only honoring you, the mightiest of the gods!”
“Mighty no more,” Zeus said, and we watched together as the boy thumped down from the sky, coming down on the rocky shore face-first, his back folding over the wrong way, shards of white splashing up, a lone gull banking over to investigate. “With what you’ve introduced to my stomach,” Zeus went on, “I now must live out the rest of my days as a mortal. As must we all in Olympus.”
“I can take it back,” I pled. “Let me—I can bite it from you, if you’ll but—”
“Run off now, Lycaon,” Zeus said, waving me away. “I still have enough of myself left to lodge another punishment, should you so desire.”
For a long moment I glared at him, then I stared across at his broken boy on the rocks, and then I looked out to the trees, arrayed against me like everything else.
“We will tear the throat from your precious mankind,” I said to Zeus at last, my chest growling the promise true. “There will be no more pretty children for you to steal.”
“Perhaps,” Zeus said. “And perhaps they will come for your kind, Lycaon. For your children. Perhaps you will be hounded for ages, until you become but a legend.”
He stared at me then as if daring me to rush at him, finish this now. When I didn’t—I didn’t know whether to try on two feet or four—he gave me his back, walked to the beach, perhaps to mourn his broken boy, perhaps to feast on his liver.
Note that he walked. He didn’t sprout wings and glide over.
Truly, that meat I’d introduced to his system was festering, was corrupting.
True natures indeed, mighty Zeus.
As for me, my children are no longer my children—we pass in the night, our teeth flashing—and my first daughter of this new form has children of her own, minor whelps I hear crying from the town walls, where the men pierce them and hang them. It weighs on my heart, their cries.
I still keep to the shadows, yes. To that lonely turn in the road.
Look back if you want. You might even chance to see me.
I’m those footfalls drawing ever and ever closer, then retreating to the shadows just for the thrill of it, just to hear you scream, then finally rushing close on two feet, to hold you close.
Zeus in all his wisdom would have me hounded through the centuries.
Not likely. Not while the roads are dark, not while my teeth are still the sharpest things in that darkness.
Hold steady now, I don’t want to bite too deep.
You will be the second of my new children. Together, the night will be ours to do with as we will.
Punishment? Hardly. More like a gift.
Mighty Zeus, that dead Olympian, his last divine act was to give us the future, child.
Let’s take it by the neck, now, shake it until our fur is matted red.
I said before that this mouth was incapable of smiling?
I was wrong, child.
All I do now is smile.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
* * *
I forget who I told Navah and Dominik I was going to write about, but when I sat down, all I could see was that famous old painting or carving or whatever it is of Lycaon turning into a wolf because he tried to feed Zeus peoplemeat. I couldn’t stop wondering why Lycaon would do that, and what the fallout of it had been. The story we always hear, it stops with Lycaon scampering off, all properly punished, now doomed for the rest of his days. But I didn’t want to let Zeus off that easy, just because he knew what was in his stew. Not saying Lycaon’s the victim here—that is his son cubed up into that bowl—but I am saying that Zeus isn’t exactly the hero, either. So I went with Lycaon into those dark woods of his future, and then started to see that his future and this world we live in, they’re kind of the same place. Thanks to Zeus, I suppose. Who still isn’t a hero. Who, like Lycaon, is the author of his own end. As we all tend to be, whether we’re gods or werewolves or that person in line for a burger, giving the person at the register unnecessary grief—grief we’ll bite into momentarily, and then have to live with forever.
* * *
STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES
CURSES LIKE WORDS, LIKE FEATHERS, LIKE STORIES
BY
* * *
KAT HOWARD
WHEN I WAS YOUNG, I cast a curse.
Young. I barely even know how to think of the word now. Young is seven when you are nine. Young is twenty when you’re twice that age.
Through my own fault, I have lived over nine hundred years.
There are few mercies in a life stretched so long. The greatest has been one I thought at first to be a horror: that I too am cursed out of my own self, and into the shape of a bird. A black-winged war raven, one of Morrigan’s own daughters. It is a different sort of witness, this one with wings.
The other mercy is this: The story is finally ending, and I have survived to see it.
* * *
Niamh’s flight into Shannon Airport had been a misery, storm-plagued and sleepless. Not content to simply harry her across the Atlantic, the storm chased her overland, hissing down rain and setting a chill into her bones. The trip to Ireland wasn’t a happy one to begin with, but this truly seemed excessive.
On the drive there, windshield wipers scraping uselessly against the torrent, knuckles white on the wheel, she thought she saw a swan, lightning-white against the clouds, blown on with the wind. She shook her head as if to clear the image and focused more fiercely on the road.
The small house on the edge of nowhere smelled like her great-uncle Aífraic, a combination of wool and peat and pipe tobacco, like his ghost still rocked in the old wooden chair near the hearth. Everything had happened too fast and too far away, and now all she had left of him was an empty house, his boxes of papers, and a promise she had flown thousands of miles to keep, a broken-hearted bird on her loneliest migration. Niamh poured a glass of whiskey and sat in the rocking chair and wept.
* * *
It’s fitting that the end of the story comes in grief. That’s how it began as well. The grief of a husband, for a wife lost. The grief of a sister for a sister gone.
For a moment, it seemed like he and I could pass through our shared grief together. That we could both honor her memory and make it our own. But then I asked him for a child, for one that would be ours. He refused, and my grief turned to acid in my heart. It turned to a curse on his children, the ones that were his and hers and never—never, as he told me again and again—mine.
I am the only one left living who knows all the pieces of this story. That, too, is a curse.
* * *
When Aífraic had asked Niamh to come back at the end, at his end—“come home,” he’d said—he’d told her it was because there were things she needed to know.
“Then why not tell me now?” she’d asked, speaking the words through the salt of tears.
“I can’t tell the story until it’s over,” he’d said. “It’s not rightly mine to tell until then.” He’d given no more of an explanation, other than to tell her the answers were here, in his house on the edge of the sea.
And now, here she was. Too late to ask any questions, too late to hear the answers in Aífraic’s low, warm voice. Another sorrow, to set stone-like on her heart. But she had promised, and she was here, and so she would search for the echoes of whatever stories remained.
She found the notebook of poems half a glass of whiskey later. Tucked in a box full of crumbling papers and notebooks gone thin with time, Swan Poems in pencil inside the front cover, less a title than a category. Three downy white feathers were pressed beneath it.
The pages were worn and yellowed, and
all covered with words. Some had numbers as well, dates meant to mark the span of their writing. Or no—something else. If they were dates, those numbers in Aífraic’s looping scrawl, they would have made him impossibly old. Niamh pushed that puzzle aside, and read.
Aífraic had always been fascinated by swans, and he had passed that fascination on to her when she was a child. Niamh remembered a summer when she was perhaps thirteen, walking the sand in too-big borrowed wellies, even the extra socks she wore not thick enough to quiet the sensation that at any moment her feet might go out from under her.
“There used to be swans that lived there.”
Her eyes had followed the direction of Aífraic’s hand. It did not look as if anything could live on the island of Carricknarone, its jagged outcropping sharp as ravens’ teeth in the frigid Sea of Moyle.
“Swans? Out there?”
The cloud-chased sun sparked off the foam of the waves, the water moving like ripples of shattered glass.
“Not recently. Hundreds and hundreds of years ago. A strange enough occurrence that people still speak of it.” That was the sort of thing that mattered to him: people telling stories.
“Have you ever seen one?” she’d asked.
Aífraic had laughed, a great bark of sound that startled seagulls into flight. “And how old is it you think I am, girl?”
Still, every time she looked out onto that water, Niamh also looked for swans, imagining the white of their feathers reflected in the white of the waves.
She built up the fire, and read the poems.
* * *
I barely thought of them, those transformed swan children, for the first three hundred years I had set the curse to run. We were separate things, and their story was no longer mine, or so I thought.
Besides, my powers were growing. As punishment for what I had done to his children, my husband had cursed me into the shape that terrified me most: a raven, an avatar of blood and war. But war is a story that is always told, and the more times a story is told, the more power it has. So I flew, and I witnessed, and I counted the dead until I no longer knew the numbers for their counting, and then I counted again.
And the worst was that all through the counting, through that terrible subtraction, I felt myself grow stronger.
* * *
Some of the poems were in Irish. Niamh’s heart clenched as she looked over the unfamiliar words in the familiar handwriting. She had taken the required classes at school and remembered how to say a phrase here and there—small talk about the weather, or the cuteness of someone’s dog—but not much more than that. She had always felt there would be time to relearn, later, and now it seemed that later had snuck up and tapped her on the shoulder when she wasn’t looking. She thought, though, that she could make out what must be the word for swan, eala, from the frequency with which it appeared.
The margins were full of swans, sketches in smudged and fading pencil.
The poems were works of hardship, of longing. Of deep-felt desire for a place where one could fold their wings and rest, could take shelter from storms, could know small and quiet comforts. They didn’t seem like poems about birds, but rather poems about exiles:
Imagine a story as you would imagine a bird on a great migration. One that passes out of sight for so long as to be forgotten. One whose return is a herald of some great newness.
Imagine a story as something that returns.
Reading them, she remembered something Aífraic had told her once: that some swans had human speech, those that had been enchanted into their bird form rather than born into it, but as part of their curse, they could speak only poetry.
“Why would that be a curse?” she had asked.
“Who ever listens to poetry and believes it to be true?” Aífraic had smiled his answer, but it was a smile like a knife, sharp-edged and keen.
* * *
Something in me shifted after that. A change of heart, if not of appearance. It is all well and good to be an avatar of war, to glory in the blood and the battlefields, but after so long, and so many dead . . . The Morrigan may have been made to endure such witness, but I was not.
There had been new stories told in Ireland for years, stories whose telling drowned out the older voices, that rewrote old truths to serve new ideas. Stories that changed goddesses to saints and everyday magic to holy miracle. Stories of a God of Peace, who offered forgiveness. I wasn’t sure I believed them all—I myself was a story, and I knew how little truth was in my own—but this forgiveness happened after a journey to a place. And the thing about a place is, you don’t need to believe in it for it to be there. And so, unbelieving, but desiring forgiveness all the same, I flew.
They called the place a Purgatory, and gave its keeping over to their Saint Patrick. I flew there and stayed the required time, but had no visions of my sins or my redemption, only of time, stretched out and silent before me.
Even now, they tell the story of the raven who flew to Purgatory. It has been twisted and metaphored into nothing I recognize beyond the journey, but it matters to those who hear it, and so who am I to say that the story they tell is wrong?
* * *
Aífraic had been a collector of stories, always. He was as interested in the laughing ones exchanged at the pub, embellished and altered for dramatic effect, as he was in those written down in formal cadences. He listened to them, and shared his own, trading one for another, using words to warm a cold night. “I’ve always felt that stories die a bit, when they aren’t told,” he’d said. “So this is how I make sure they’re remembered. This is how I keep them alive.”
The stories Aífraic had loved best were full of birds—a king cursed into bird-shape for angering a priest, and a great goddess of war who sometimes took the form of a raven. Niamh’s favorite had swans: a witch had cursed four siblings, a princess and three princes, into swans and then forbidden them from landing on Ireland for nine hundred years. It was a sad and lonely and beautiful story, and hearing Aífraic tell it had made her heart ache in the same way that a slant of light on water or the shine of white feathers in the sky did.
But visits had fallen off after the summer she turned thirteen, and then stopped altogether. Her parents had decided to emigrate to America—to join the flock of wild geese that were constantly flying from Ireland’s shores. And while she called Aífraic her great-uncle, there was no actual tie of blood between them. Their ties had been those of proximity, a kind neighbor and an eager audience, the shared love of a place and its stories.
After the move, they wrote letters sometimes, sent holiday cards, but it wasn’t the same, and silence filled the spaces where the stories had been.
Still, she thought of him occasionally, particularly during the fall migrations when flocks of birds would cloud the sky, and she missed his stories, and so she’d tried to find them on her own.
She learned that the swans in her favorite story weren’t cursed by a witch, but by their mother’s sister, and that the curse lasted long enough to see the conditions of its fulfillment made impossible. The fact that they turned human again at the end—just long enough to be baptized by an extremely convenient priest—before crumbling to dust . . . Well, she wondered who would ever want to hear a story like that except for possibly a priest.
Everything she loved about the story was gone.
She had almost stopped reading then. The betrayal of the story felt like a kind of death, like a curse that overwrote her memories. Someone had taken magic, and turned it into nothing more than propaganda. But then she’d thought back to something Aífraic had said once: that sometimes stories got so old, they forgot the truth of their telling. So she looked to see if there were other versions of this story, ones that remembered.
She found them, variant texts and preferred versions, but they all shared that same unsatisfying ending—the brief transformation to something flightless and ancient, just long enough to be baptized. As if that was the point of the story. As if there were more magic in priests t
han in the old gods of Ireland.
* * *
There was a blessing, inside of the curse. The children would wear swan-shape for nine hundred years, but that shape would also protect them from age and its related mortality. But unaging is not undying.
It was Fiachra who died first, blown from story by wind and storm, and by my curse, which kept him from safety. When the news of his death came to me, I flew on a pilgrimage across Ireland, to the shores of the Sea of Moyle. It was a journey of atonement, though I knew such a gesture was too small, too late. Half the time of the curse was gone, and neither that nor their brother could be returned to those who were left.
The three remaining swans were there, and with them one other. A fisherman, Aífraic, who took to the sea and sailed his boat among them and listened to their stories.
* * *
Aífraic had flown to America when her parents died. He was the only one from Ireland who had. “I thought you needed someone here who knew their stories.”
After the funeral, they’d gone to a local pub, held their own private wake. Aífraic knew stories that Niamh didn’t, like that of the local terrier who vigorously hated laundry hung out to dry. “Sure, he’d steal anything he could reach, and then run off with it. One day, he managed to get ahold of a whole line, and ran up and down the street, your ma’s delicates flapping like flags behind him.” Niamh had laughed until she cried, but these tears were easier than the funeral ones.
Aífraic’s presence at the funeral had been enough for her to reconnect with him. She visited when she could, and each time, they’d go to the beach, and they’d watch for swans. She asked him once about the swans in the story she had found, the priest and the baptism that seemed so alien to the magic that the rest of the story had. “Who’s to say what the right ending is? Maybe it’s the one that sounds like magic, or maybe it’s the one people want to hear. Maybe only those in the story know the truth of it.”
“But it doesn’t fit. It feels like two different stories stuck together by someone who didn’t care.”
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