Mythic Journeys Read online

  Priya Sharma’s “Thesea and Astaurius” is a fresh look at the myth of Theseus, the Minotaur, the Labyrinth, Ariadne, and Daedalus. In the original story, Ariadne helps Theseus by giving him a ball of thread that helps him navigate inside the Labyrinth and escape from it. As promised, Theseus marries Ariadne. But, at the first landfall their escape ship makes, the island of Naxos, Theseus deserts Ariadne. Ariadne either hangs herself or marries the god Dionysus. The goddess Artemis may have killed her the moment she gave birth to Dionysus’ twins. Or maybe not. The original story is said to represent ideas about the civilized versus the uncivilized or natural versus the unnatural. But Sharma takes us much further—out of space and time.

  “Foxfire, Foxfire” by Yoon Ha Lee deals with a fox spirit. The concept began in China, but drifted into most Eastern Asian cultures. (It is also found in a lot of modern speculative fiction; I know of quite a few examples.) The details of the cunning shapeshifter—called kitsune (fox) in Japan, húli jīng (fox spirit) in China, and kumiho (nine-tailed fox) in Korea vary, but the entity usually likes to take the form of a beautiful woman. Depending on the tradition, the fox can be a mischievous trickster, benevolent, malicious, or downright evil. (By the way, baduk is the Korean name for the board game Go; yut is another board game.)

  Although some traditions see the owl as wise and enlightening, in many Native American cultures—as in “Owl vs. the Neighborhood Watch” by Darcie Little Badger—the nocturnal avian is considered an omen or messenger of death. Similarly in ancient Rome, an owl’s hoot predicted imminent death. In India and China owls are harbingers of misfortune. In England, even as late as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the owl was associated with death.

  Atalanta, in Greek mythology, was a fleet-footed huntress. In Tansy Rayner Roberts’s clever “How to Survive an Epic Journey,” she also becomes an Argonaut, one of the heroes on Jason’s ship the Argo who sought the Golden Fleece. Here we get a woman’s viewpoint of the search for the Golden Fleece and what came after.

  You’ll find some sort of solar deity in most ancient mythologies. Many of them are humanoid and ride in or drive a vehicle across the sky. Ekaterina Sedia draws on Eastern Slavic myth in “Simargl and the Rowan Tree” to tell us of a mortal who dies, becomes the guardian of heaven, and does a good job of trotting along behind the sun god’s chariot. When he’s free of that responsibility, he has time to get into trouble.

  “The Ten Suns” by Ken Liu is another science fictional myth. But you’ll find the same elements in many ancient tales: an inquisitive hero who can’t abide commonly held belief, a sidekick with a special power, and a mystery/problem to solve.

  Any body of mythology has maidens in it. They are young and beautiful and—unless they are divine—powerless. Sometimes they go on to live happily ever after. Sometimes they don’t. Like the title character in “Armless Maidens of the American West” by Genevieve Valentine, they may become legends, even while they still exist in the flesh.

  Labyrinths and monsters are potent symbols. We’ve already encountered one set, but “Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream” by Maria Dahvana Headley is a profoundly different story.

  Did I mention monsters? “Zhuyin” by John Shirley, the only previously unpublished story in this anthology, is an outright scary monster tale. The original serpent-bodied Chinese celestial deity (known in English as the Torch Dragon) that inspired the author may look terrifying, but is not really menacing. According to Shanhaijing (translated by Anne Birrell): “When this deity closes his eyes, there is darkness. When the deity looks with his eyes, there is light. He neither eats, nor sleeps, nor breathes. The wind and the rain are at his beck and call. This deity shines his torch over the ninefold darkness.”

  As Rachel Pollack explains, “The story of ‘Immortal Snake’ was inspired by a very old tale, published early in the twentieth century by the mythographer Leo Frobenius . . . ‘The Ruin of Kasch’. . . Kasch was an actual place in the ancient world, its location in Africa precisely known. The modern name for the land of Kasch is Darfur.”

  “A Wolf in Iceland Is the Child of a Lie” by Sonya Taaffe ends our journey. It is related to Norse myth. Maybe this is a good place to mention that J. R. R. Tolkien acknowledged his fantasy was heavily influenced by the myths of the Northern Europeans. His work became popular—in fact, fantasy as a genre was initially dominated by imitations of Tolkien. Elements of Germanic and Nordic mythology are often found in some forms of fantasy and far too many video games and MMORPGs.

  Enough of my cartography. Hope you enjoy our Mythic Journeys. May the gods be with you. Or maybe not . . .

  —Paula Guran

  Written on a Týr’s day in the month of November 2018

  “LOST LAKE”

  EMMA STRAUB AND PETER STRAUB

  Eudora Hale spent the warm months in Fairlady with her mother, and the cold months in Lost Lake with her father. That’s how it seemed, at least. Now that she was old enough—nearly thirteen—Eudora knew that whatever the time of year the sun would never reach Lost Lake the way it did Fairlady. Some parts of the world were difficult to find, even for beams of light. Sometimes Eudora thought she was the only person in the country who traveled back and forth between the two cities; her train car was always empty, with the uniformed ticket-taker her only companion for the halfday journey. When she reached her destination, her mother or father would be waiting in an otherwise uninhabited station. Eudora assumed that the train tracks still existed as a polite acknowledgment to the days when people still used to go back and forth between the two small cities.

  Dawn Hale’s white house stood on a corner lot in the neighborhood closest to the center of Fairlady. There were window seats in all the bedrooms. The wide lawn ended at the rounded cul-de-sac. Eudora and her mother were never in the house alone—Dawn had two friends who had their own bedrooms in the house, and their daughters shared Eudora’s large room overlooking the smooth asphalt of the street and the houses on the other side of the circle. For half the year, Lily and Jane were Eudora’s sisters, her playmates, the ears on the receiving end of her whispers. Sometimes the girls took their pet rabbits down to the culde-sac and let them hop back and forth, knowing that they would never run away. A porch wrapped all the way around the house like a hoop skirt with a latticed hem, and when Eudora was in Fairlady, she liked to crawl underneath it and dig her fingernails into the rich dirt until they were black. Eudora loved Lily and Jane, both of them blond like their mothers, but she also loved being alone, underneath the house, where the soil was cool and dark.

  The custody agreement was unusual: none of the other children ever left Fairlady, even if their fathers were elsewhere. Eudora had pleaded to go back and forth between Fairlady and Lost Lake, and the judge had been persuaded by her tears. Half the year exactly, split down the middle. Her school in Fairlady had finally accepted the situation, and dutifully handed out reading lists for the months she would be away. There was a library at her father’s, in a room they called the fortress, and Eudora knew where to find what she needed. When it was Den Hale’s turn with his daughter, he was more likely to show her how to aim a pistol, how to shoot an arrow into the center of a target, how to remain unseen using leaves and branches, how to build a fire using only her bare hands.

  The night before she was due to go to Lost Lake, Eudora sat in the kitchen with her mother and their friends. The women were baking pies; the girls, breaking off the ends of sweet green beans. Lily and Jane sat on either side of her, all of them dumping the beans into a large, shallow bowl in front of Eudora.

  “Did I give you the list of books for school? Have you packed your new sweater?” Dawn asked the questions to the whole room, clearly going down a list in her head. “Where is your toothbrush? Do you have clean socks?” Dawn didn’t know anything about Lost Lake—she hadn’t ever been, but Eudora knew that though her mother had agreed to the arrangement, it rattled her nerves.

  “Yes, Mother,” Eudora said. Her small suitcase was already
packed, mostly with books. The clothes she wore in Fairlady would be of little use to her in Lost Lake. When she was very small—a pip, her father liked to say—Eudora didn’t notice all the empty space around her, the air in between what people said and what she knew to be the truth, but now she could see it everywhere. She kept snapping the ends of the beans until the room filled with the smell of warm apples and sugar and then she too felt sad about leaving.

  After dinner, when the girls had been sent to bed, Lily and Jane climbed into Eudora’s bed.

  “Promise you’ll come back,” Lily whispered.

  “Don’t stay away too long,” Jane added, her mouth only inches away from Eudora’s cheek. She was the eldest of the three, already fifteen, and tended to worry.

  “I always come back,” Eudora said, and that satisfied her friends. They slept in a pile with their arms and legs thrown over each other, hearts beating strong and safe inside their chests.

  On the train the next day, she was as alone as she had expected to be. The conductor who sat slumped into his blue uniform far back at the end of the car could not be counted as company, nor did he wish to be. Boredom and resentment clung to him like a bad smell. For the first time on one of these journeys to Lost Lake, being alone made her feel lonely. A wave of homesickness rolled through her, though she had been away from home no longer than an hour. She missed the white house, she missed her friends tumbling like kittens around her, and she missed her mother, who started worrying about Eudora as soon as she took her suitcase from the closet and opened it up. You would almost think Lost Lake was a dangerous place, you’d just about have to think jaguars and leopards and madmen with straight razors came stalking out of the forest to flit through the alleyways and little courts of the town. . . . Eudora realized that she felt guilty about having caused her mother such anxiety. She couldn’t even talk her out of it, because Dawn refused to hear anything about Lost Lake. If you didn’t close your mouth, she closed her ears.

  Lily and Jane weren’t much better, and their mothers were the same. They all acted like Lost Lake was a childhood nightmare they had sworn to keep out of mind. At home—the clean, white house, fragrant with fresh, warm bread and cut flowers, which she missed so piercingly at this moment—when Eudora spoke her father’s name or that of his community, Lily and Jane, and their blond mothers, Beth and Maggie, looked at the ground and swiveled back and forth, like shy bridegrooms. Suddenly errands were remembered; something in another room, a book or a sewing basket, had to be fetched immediately. No one was going to tell her not to mention Den Hale or his remote northern world; yet it was clear that she was not supposed to say anything about that side of her life. (In Lost Lake, such strictures did not hold. Eudora had the feeling that people in Lost Lake spoke very seldom of Fairlady only because they found it completely uninteresting.)

  One other person she was aware of traveled regularly between her mother’s world and Den’s, and that person made the journey much more frequently than she. It occurred to Eudora that the conductor, as unpleasant as he was, might be uniquely placed to answer questions that until this minute she had not known she needed to have answered. Eudora turned around in her seat and in a loud voice called out, “Excuse me! Hey! Conductor!”

  The man opened a sleepy eye and took her in. He shuffled his upper body within the baggy uniform, lifted his cap, and rubbed the top of his head, still regarding her. He appeared to be either shocked or profoundly angry.

  “My name is Eudora, hello. I want to talk about you, Conductor. For example, where are you from, where do you live? Which end of the line?” She had never seen him in Fairlady, so he almost had to live in Lost Lake, although he did not much look like the kind of person you met in and around her father’s town.

  “Neither end. Wouldn’t have a thing to do with them places, nope. Don’t like ’em. Don’t believe they’re very fond of me, either. Nope. That’s been tested out and proven true.”

  She squinted at him.

  “Do you live in some town in between?

  “There ain’t no towns between Fairlady and Lost Lake. All the civilization in this state’s a hundred miles to the east. In here, where we are now, this part’s pretty empty.”

  “Well then, where do you live?” The second she asked her question, she knew the answer.

  “I live here. In the second car up.”

  “Are there ever any other passengers?”

  “Maybe three-four times a year. Someone’s car broke down, that’s usually the reason. Or sometimes there’s official business, where a couple of big shots ride back and forth, whispering stuff they don’t want me to hear.”

  For a moment, Eudora contemplated this picture, trying to imagine what kind of “official business” would demand so much in time and secrecy. Then she remembered the real reason she had wanted to get into the conversation.

  “Conductor, you spend your whole life on this train, but most of the time, you never have any tickets to collect because you’re here all alone. I’m your biggest customer, and you only see me twice a year!”

  He sneered at her. “You think I’m just a conductor, but I’m not. There’s more to this train than you, young lady. It isn’t really a passenger train, not mainly—did you never look at the other three cars?”

  “I guess not.”

  Eudora could summon only the vaguest, blurriest images of the other cars. Ranked behind the lighted windows of the passenger car, they had seemed dark and anonymous. It had never occurred to her that they might be anything but closed, vacant versions of the car she always used.

  “There’s freight, in there. Most every morning and night, people load boxes into those freight cars. Big ones, little ones. I don’t know what’s in ’em, I just know it’s worth a lot of dough. And I’m the guard over all that stuff. I’m security.” The conductor checked to see if she had taken in the immense gravity of what he had just divulged. Then he slid off his seat and began to saunter toward her.

  Eudora paused, a little unsettled by the conductor’s approach but not much caring about the freight. What was the big deal about some boxes? “I want to ask you another question. You must hear people talk sometimes. Have you ever heard anything about a man named Den Hale?”

  “Dennhale? No, I never . . . Oh, Den Hale. You said Den Hale, didn’t you?” He had stopped moving. “Right?”

  “Yes,” she said, wondering. “Right.”

  “You work for him, or something?”

  “No, I . . . no. He’s my father. He picks me up at the other end.” The conductor’s narrow head moved forward, and his shoulders dropped. For a long moment, he looked as though he had been turned into a statue. Then he wheeled around and moved swiftly down the polished wooden aisle. At the end of the car, he hit the release button and moved across the dark, windy passage into the next car. Resoundingly, the doors clanked shut. Eudora was not certain of what had just happened, but she did not think she would see her new friend again on this journey, nor did she.

  Just past ten at night, eight hours after her departure, the little train pulled into the Lost Lake station. Eudora expected to see her father waiting on the platform, but the man occupying the pool of light from the nearest hanging lantern was not Den Hale but his friend, Clancy Munn. A tough character, Munn was roughly the size of a mailbox, squat, thick, and at first glance all but square. It was funny: when in Fairlady, she all but forgot about Clancy Munn—he was unimaginable in her mother’s world—but here in Lost Lake, he felt like reality itself. Clancy’s daughter, Maude Munn, was Eudora’s closest friend in Lost Lake. She was more fun to be around than the girls in Fairlady, with their sweet breath and brushed hair. It was as if the big strawberry birthmark on Maude’s left cheek had cranked up all her inner dials, making her louder, faster, and more daring than most other people. Eudora knew no one more alive than Maude.

  When Clancy and Eudora left the shelter of the platform, the slight breeze, already much colder than the air eight hours to the south, whipped itself int
o a strong wind that cut through the summery jacket her mother had bought for her as though it were tissue paper. Eudora leaned in close to Clancy’s thick body.

  “It’s always so much colder here.”

  “You like it this way, only you forget.”

  She laughed out loud, delighted. It was true: the details and sensations of Lost Lake were falling into place all around her like a jigsaw puzzle assembling itself, reminding her as they did so how much she enjoyed being here. She liked cold weather, she liked seeing snowflakes spinning erratically through the air . . . she liked the huge fireplaces, and the thick wooden walls, and the great forest.

  Clancy turned on the heat in the cab of his truck, and they drove in contented quiet the rest of the way to Eudora’s father’s house.

  Eudora asked for news of Maude, chattered about the conductor, and fell asleep on the last section of the journey. She came half awake only after the pickup had passed through an automatic door and entered a vast underground parking space. “We’re here, sweetie,” Munn said, and gently shook her shoulder.

  Eudora swam instantly back into consciousness and looked around at all the empty parking spaces on both sides. Munn smiled and left the cab. Far off to her right, three men in black coats were dragging long, narrow boxes from the back of an old van and stacking them against the wall. Eudora had seen this activity, or others like it, every time she returned to Lost Lake, but had never before wondered what it meant. She scrambled out of the cab and trotted toward Munn, who was already twenty feet in front of her, carrying her heavy suitcase as if it were empty.

  “Hey, Clancy,” she said, and he looked back over his shoulder, grinning. “What are those men doing, next to the wall over there?”

  “What does it look like they’re doing?” He had not stopped moving forward, and was no longer smiling at her.