Beyond the Woods: Fairy Tales Retold Read online

  BEYOND THE WOODS

  Other Anthologies Edited by

  Paula Guran

  Embraces

  Best New Paranormal Romance

  Best New Romantic Fantasy

  Zombies: The Recent Dead

  The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2010

  Vampires: The Recent Undead

  The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2011

  Halloween

  New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird

  Brave New Love

  Witches: Wicked, Wild & Wonderful

  Obsession: Tales of Irresistible Desire

  The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2012

  Extreme Zombies

  Ghosts: Recent Hauntings

  Rock On: The Greatest Hits of Science Fiction & Fantasy

  Season of Wonder

  Future Games

  Weird Detectives: Recent Investigations

  The Mammoth Book of Angels & Demons

  The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2013

  Halloween: Magic, Mystery, & the Macabre

  Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales

  Magic City: Recent Spells

  The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2014

  Zombies: More Recent Dead

  Time Travel: Recent Trips

  New Cthulhu 2: More Recent Weird

  Blood Sisters: Vampire Stories by Women

  Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep

  The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horro: 2015

  The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas: 2015

  Warrior Women

  Street Magicks

  The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction

  Night Shade Books

  an imprint of Start Publishing LLC

  Copyright © 2016 by Paula Guran

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Start Publishing LLC, 101 Hudson Street, 37th Floor, Jersey City, NJ 07302.

  Night Shade Books is an imprint of Start Publishing LLC.

  Visit our website at www.nightshade.start-publishing.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978–1-59780–838-5

  Cover illustration by Marta Sokolowska

  Cover design by Claudia Noble

  An extension of this copyright page can be found on page 526.

  Printed in the United States of America

  eISBN: 978-1-59780-586-5

  For Tanith Lee

  19 September 1947–24 May 2015

  Long before Tanith’s passing, I’d decided to dedicate this anthology to her. Angela Carter may be the mother of the modern fairy tale, but Tanith Lee was one of its closest aunts. You’ll find Carter rightly revered in most every academic exploration of fairy tales; Lee is seldom mentioned. Carter has always been considered “literary,” while Lee is labeled as “genre.”

  Ultimately, I think Tanith Lee is probably as influential among today’s fairy tale writers—whether they are aware of it or not—as Angela Carter.

  But Lee did not write only fairy tales; she was a prolific creator of many varieties of fiction. She deserves appreciation from more than just the fairy tale corner. Being honored with a World Fantasy Life Achievement Award at least acknowledged the importance of her body of work.

  Two of her stories grace this volume, the first—“Red as Blood”—and the last, “Beauty.” That, too, had been decided before her passing.

  Tanith touched a multitude of lives and I treasured my own long-distance friendship with her. She was—and, I suspect, remains—a magical being. You see, I finished the copyedit of “Beauty” for this tome and checked my email. I found a note from Tanith’s much-beloved husband John Kaiine. He had been kind enough to email me the details of the ceremony that celebrated her life.

  Read the last two sentences of “Beauty” yourself.

  You decide if the timing was sheer coincidence . . .

  Or if her magic remains.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: Throwing In

  Red as Blood

  In the House of Gingerbread

  The Bone Mother

  Follow Me Light

  The Coin of Heart’s Desire

  The Glass Bottle Trick

  The Maiden Tree

  The Coat of Stars

  The Road of Needles

  Travels with the Snow Queen

  Halfway People

  Catastrophic Disruption of the Head

  Lavanya and Deepika

  Princess Lucinda and the Hound of the Moon

  Fairy Tale

  The Queen Who Could Not Walk

  Lebkuchen

  Diamonds and Pearls: A Fairy Tale

  The Queen and the Cambion

  Memoirs of a Bottle Djinn

  The Mussel Eater

  Bears: A Fairy Tale of 1958

  The Moon Is Drowning While I Sleep

  Rats

  Beyond the Naked Eye

  Good Hunting

  By the Moon’s Good Grace

  The Juniper Tree

  Greensleeves

  Beauty

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction: Throwing In

  Paula Guran

  “The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.” — W. H. Auden

  Marina Warner’s wonderful little book, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale, was published in late 2014. Delightfully readable, concise yet detailed, it provides the general reader with an excellent and up-to-date introduction to the evolution of the fairy tale as “a valued and profound creation of human history and culture.”

  The book also reminded me of the term “wonder tale.” I think it is really more appropriate, if not as familiar, nomenclature.

  But I fear, if I were to attempt anything like a comprehensive introduction here, I would wind up quoting far too much of it. So I’ve taken a very informal approach.

  It is not that I feel Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale is devoid of debatable points. I’ll leave all such discussion to the more academic except for a single point I will dare to address in my most unscholarly fashion. Warner writes:

  The most difficult task has now become how to make a story of child abandonment and cannibal witches bearable for children at Christmas, as well as for those older and more knowing, in order to keep the truth-telling inside the stories. Increasingly, the tendency now is to leave them to us, the grown-ups.

  I think Warner missed something. Actually, quite a few somethings.

  This anthology collects previously published stories primarily suitable for adults—both retold tales and new wonder stories.

  Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s anthology series of Snow White, Blood Red; Black Thorn, White Rose; Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears; Black Swan, White Raven; Silver Birch, Blood Moon; and Black Heart, Ivory Bones is comprised of original fiction by authors who retold or invented new fairy tales. So did my own Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales.

  Kate Bernheimer’s “literary” anthology, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales, was also for adult readers.

  But—

  Datlow and Windling have also edited books for children: A Wolf at the Door, Swan Sister, and A Troll’s Eye View: A Book of Villainous Tales, as well as those for slightly older readers: The Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest, The Faery Reel: Tales from the Twilight Realm, The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales, The Faery Reel: Tales from
the Twilight Realm.

  Although called “speculative fiction,” many of the stories for young adults in Firebirds, Firebirds Rising, and Firebirds Soaring, all edited by Sharyn November, are wonder tales.

  More recently there have been the Gavin Grant and Kelly Link-edited Monstrous Affections: An Anthology of Beastly Tales; Rags and Bones: New Twists on Timeless Tales, edited by Melissa Marr and Tim Pratt; and Unnatural Creatures: Stories Selected by Neil Gaiman (and Maria Dahvana Headly).

  And that’s just off the top of my head and personal bookshelves.

  As for recent fantasy novels intended for young adults and teens that could be recognized as extended wonder tales—the list is far too long to even begin.

  Truth-telling stories are not just told in books these days. I’m not even considering dance, drama, music, art, cinema, or television.

  What new stories will become classic “guides” and repositories of human culture can only be determined with time. But they are being produced.

  On a similar note . . .

  There is a learned professor, Armando Maggi, who believes fairy tales have lost their magic. That, even though we need new myths to guide us through reality, we aren’t capable of inventing them; we just keep going back to the old tales and reinterpreting them. Since the complexities, moral ambiguities, and raw unpolished shock and violence of the original narratives have been simplified into stories suitable for children, we can no longer dream.

  Evidently, Professor Maggi believes we have no new stories to replace the old and that no one is “saving” fairy tales by writing new ones.

  Poppycock!

  Professor Maggi must not read much fiction (or explore other arts and media). A myriad of fairy tales are being marvelously reinterpreted or retold or newly invented. And far from being sanitized for the kiddies, many of these narratives are just as gritty, transformative, subversive, weird, and powerful as what came before. Some are inventive and adventurous while maintaining a certain fidelity to their antecedents. Others, as Angela Carter sought to do, put new wine in old bottles so the pressure of the new wine explodes the old bottles.

  And authors are also using the “wine” of non-Western cultures to broaden the basis of our dreams.

  Gee whiz, Professor Maggi, this has been going on for about forty years!

  You’ve never heard of (to name only a few) Holly Black, Susannah Clarke, Lev Grossman, Gregory MacGuire, Robin McKinley, Marissa Meyer, Catherynne M. Valente, or Jane Yolen? Not even Neil Gaiman?

  That we have lost some of the “morals,” essential elements, and characters from the earliest tales is, no doubt, true. And one cannot argue with the good professor when he states the first step to rediscovering the power of fairy tales is to fully comprehend their roots, to explore the history of oral and written storytelling.

  At least I think these are points he espouses in the 448 pages of his book, Preserving the Spell: Basile’s “The Tale of Tales” and Its Afterlife in the Fairy-Tale Tradition. Admittedly, I gained my impressions from reading interviews and excerpts and the like. As of this writing, the book has yet to be published. Since the excerpts I’ve read are stultifying and the book costs $55.00, I doubt I’ll be reading it any time soon.

  But when the University of Chicago Magazine relates how Maggi is invariably asked, when giving talks on the subject, “So, where are the new stories?” he can’t answer the question except with, “It has to be a cultural change. It can’t be one person who saves fairy tales,” and he implies this is not being done by anyone—one feels one’s perceptions are probably valid.

  As for exploration, understanding, and rediscovery—I also see this is currently being accomplished and has been for decades. I’m sure his book is another valuable contribution to the study of fairy tales. But it’s not as if Maria Tatar, Marina Warner, Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Jack Zipes, and so many others have been sitting on their hands since Max Lüthi’s simple examination of fairy tale plot, structure, style, and meaning in Es war einmal: Vom Wesen des Volksmärchens (1962) or Bruno Bettelheim stirred the cauldron by analyzing fairy tales in terms of Freudian psychology in The Uses of Enchantment (1976) . . . or all the scholars before.

  As for non-experts, there seem to be a lot of folks interested in finding out more about the beginnings of the old stories they now know in several forms. They are finding free sources online and reading. Example: Jack Zipes’s The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm made all 156 stories from the Grimms’ 1812 and 1815 editions available in English for the first time. The pricey hardcover (or ebook or audio book) published in 1914 by Princeton University Press is selling quite well, and not just to libraries.

  They are also reading “new” old tales. Published by Penguin in 2015, The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales, authored by Franz Xaver Von Schönwerth, and compiled by Erika Eichenseer, reveals 500 fairy tales that were locked away in a German archive for over 150 years. For a “social science” book it has gained considerable attention and decent sales.

  Ahem.

  I’m not sure I was ever on a track here, but if I was, I’ve probably derailed. In sum: Fairy tales are transformative and human beings need them. But the stories themselves transform and evolve even as new ones are invented. Not all of them are going to please everyone or fulfill what they see as cultural needs or even entertainment. But since nowadays they seem to go in so many directions, chances are that some of them are taking whatever one feels is the proper path. The roots of wonder stories are vast and extend all over the world; those rhizomes don’t result in a single vertical stem. They branch out and wind about and weave here and there; they diversify, multiply, mutate, and sprout in infinite variety and fresh new fictional flora.

  And they aren’t at all hard to find.

  In fact, there are thirty of them right here in your hands!*

  Paula Guran

  July 2015

  *You might check out the acknowledgments page at the end of this book. You’ll find the original sources for the stories selected are both numerous and diverse: seven different print or online magazines, fifteen different anthologies from three countries, four different single-author collections, and a photo book.

  Twists on “Snow White” are now common, but Tanith Lee’s “Red as Blood” (1979) was probably the first to so profoundly invert and subvert the traditional. The intersection of fairy tale and a certain horror trope was also a significant innovation. Lee’s use of Christian mythology recalls the Brothers Grimm, but unsettles fantasy readers accustomed to more secular symbolism. The story was nominated for both the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards.

  Red as Blood

  Tanith Lee

  The beautiful Witch Queen flung open the ivory case of the magic mirror. Of dark gold the mirror was, dark gold as the hair of the Witch Queen that poured down her back. Dark gold the mirror was, and ancient as the seven stunted black trees growing beyond the pale blue glass of the window.

  “Speculum, speculum,” said the Witch Queen to the magic mirror. “Dei gratia.”

  “Volente Deo. Audio.”

  “Mirror,” said the Witch Queen. “Whom do you see?”

  “I see you, mistress,” replied the mirror. “And all in the land. But one.”

  “Mirror, mirror, who is it you do not see?”

  “I do not see Bianca.”

  The Witch Queen crossed herself. She shut the case of the mirror and, walking slowly to the window, looked out at the old trees through the panes of pale blue glass.

  Fourteen years ago, another woman had stood at this window, but she was not like the Witch Queen. The woman had black hair that fell to her ankles; she had a crimson gown, the girdle worn high beneath her breasts, for she was far gone with child. And this woman had thrust open the glass casement on the winter garden, where the old trees crouched in the snow. Then, taking a sharp bone needle, she had thrust it into her finger and shaken three bright drops on the ground. “Let my daughter have,” said the wom
an, “hair black as mine, black as the wood of these warped and arcane trees. Let her have skin like mine, white as this snow. And let her have my mouth, red as my blood.” And the woman had smiled and licked at her finger. She had a crown on her head; it shone in the dusk like a star. She never came to the window before dusk; she did not like the day. She was the first Queen, and she did not possess a mirror.

  The second Queen, the Witch Queen, knew all this. She knew how, in giving birth, the first Queen had died. Her coffin had been carried into the cathedral and masses had been said. There was an ugly rumor—that a splash of holy water had fallen on the corpse and the dead flesh had smoked. But the first Queen had been reckoned unlucky for the kingdom. There had been a strange plague in the land since she came there, a wasting disease for which there was no cure.

  Seven years went by. The King married the second Queen, as unlike the first as frankincense to myrrh.

  “And this is my daughter,” said the King to his second Queen.

  There stood a little girl child, nearly seven years of age. Her black hair hung to her ankles, her skin was white as snow. Her mouth was red as blood, and she smiled with it.

  “Bianca,” said the King, “you must love your new mother.”

  Bianca smiled radiantly. Her teeth were bright as sharp bone needles.

  “Come,” said the Witch Queen, “come, Bianca. I will show you my magic mirror.”

  “Please, Mama,” said Bianca softly, “I do not like mirrors.”

  “She is modest,” said the King. “And delicate. She never goes out by day. The sun distresses her.”

  That night, the Witch Queen opened the case of her mirror.

  “Mirror, whom do you see?”

  “I see you, mistress. And all in the land. But one.”

  “Mirror, mirror, who is it you do not see?”

  “I do not see Bianca.”

  The second Queen gave Bianca a tiny crucifix of golden filigree. Bianca would not accept it. She ran to her father and whispered: “I am afraid. I do not like to think of Our Lord dying in agony on His cross. She means to frighten me. Tell her to take it away.”