These people had a little window at the back of their house from which a splendid garden could be seen, which was full of the most beautiful flowers and herbs. It was, however, surrounded by a high wall, and no one dared to go into it because it belonged to an enchantress, who had great power and was dreaded by all the world.
One day the woman was standing by this window and looking down into the garden, when she saw a bed which was planted with the most beautiful rampion-rapunzel, and it looked so fresh and green that she longed for it, and had the greatest desire to eat some.
This desire increased every day, and as she knew that she could not get any of it, she quite pined away, and began to look pale and miserable.
Then her husband was alarmed, and asked, “What ails you, dear wife?”
“Ah,” she replied, “if I can’t eat some of the rampion, which is in the garden behind our house, I shall die.”
The man, who loved her, thought, Sooner than let your wife die, bring her some of the rampion yourself, let it cost what it will.
At twilight, he clambered down over the wall into the garden of the enchantress, hastily clutched a handful of rampion, and took it to his wife.
She at once made herself a salad of it, and ate it greedily. It tasted so good to her—so very good—that the next day she longed for it three times as much as before. If he was to have any rest, her husband must once more descend into the garden.
In the gloom of evening, therefore, he let himself down again. But when he had clambered down the wall he was terribly afraid, for he saw the enchantress standing before him.
“How can you dare,” said she with angry look, “descend into my garden and steal my rampion like a thief? You shall suffer for it.”
“Ah,” answered he, “let mercy take the place of justice, I only made up my mind to do it out of necessity. My wife saw your rampion from the window, and felt such a longing for it that she would have died if she had not got some to eat.”
Then the enchantress allowed her anger to be softened, and said to him, “If the case be as you say, I will allow you to take away with you as much rampion as you will, only I make one condition—you must give me the child which your wife will bring into the world. It shall be well-treated, and I will care for it like a mother.”
The man in his terror consented to everything. And when the woman was brought to bed, the enchantress appeared at once, gave the child the name of Rapunzel, and took it away with her.
Rapunzel grew into the most beautiful child under the sun.
When she was twelve years old, the enchantress shut her into a tower, which lay in a forest, and had neither stairs nor door, but quite at the top was a little window. When the enchantress wanted to go in, she placed herself beneath it and cried: “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair to me.”
Rapunzel had magnificent long hair, fine as spun gold, and when she heard the voice of the enchantress she unfastened her braided tresses, wound them around one of the hooks of the window above, and then the hair fell twenty ells down, and the enchantress climbed up by it.
After a year or two, it came to pass that the King’s son rode through the forest and passed by the tower. Then he heard a song, which was so charming that he stood still and listened. This was Rapunzel, who in her solitude passed her time in letting her sweet voice resound.
The King’s son wanted to climb up to her, and looked for the door of the tower, but none was to be found. He rode home, but the singing had so deeply touched his heart that every day he went out into the forest and listened to it.
Once when he was thus standing behind a tree, he saw that an enchantress came there, and he heard how she cried: “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.” Then Rapunzel let down the braids of her hair, and the enchantress climbed up to her.
“If that is the ladder by which one mounts, I too will try my fortune,” said he. And the next day when it began to grow dark, he went to the tower and cried: “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.”
Immediately the hair fell down and the King’s son climbed up.
At first Rapunzel was terribly frightened when a man, such as her eyes had never yet beheld, came to her. But the King’s son began to talk to her quite like a friend, and told her that his heart had been so stirred that it had let him have no rest, and he had been forced to see her.
Then Rapunzel lost her fear, and when he asked her if she would take him for her husband, and she saw that he was young and handsome, she thought, He will love me more than old Dame Gothel does.
And she said yes, and laid her hand in his. She said, “I will willingly go away with you, but I do not know how to get down. Bring with you a skein of silk every time that you come, and I will weave a ladder with it. And when that is ready, I will descend, and you will take me on your horse.”
They agreed that until that time he should come to her every evening, for the old woman came by day.
The enchantress remarked nothing of this, until once Rapunzel said to her, “Tell me, Dame Gothel, how it happens that you are so much heavier for me to draw up than the young King’s son—he is with me in a moment?”
“Ah! You wicked child!” cried the enchantress. “What do I hear you say? I thought I had separated you from all the world, and yet you have deceived me.” In her anger she clutched Rapunzel’s beautiful tresses, wrapped them twice around her left hand, seized a pair of scissors with the right, and snip, snap, they were cut off, and the lovely braids lay on the ground. And she was so pitiless that she took poor Rapunzel into a desert, where she had to live in great grief and misery.
On the same day that she cast out Rapunzel, however, the enchantress fastened the braids of hair, which she had cut off, to the hook of the window, and when the King’s son came and cried: “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair,” she let the hair down.
The King’s son ascended, but instead of finding his dearest Rapunzel, he found the enchantress, who gazed at him with wicked and venomous looks. “Aha!” she cried mockingly, “you would fetch your dearest, but the beautiful bird sits no longer singing in the nest. The cat has got it, and will scratch out your eyes as well. Rapunzel is lost to you. You will never see her again!”
The King’s son was beside himself with pain, and in his despair he leapt down from the tower. He escaped with his life, but the thorns into which he fell pierced his eyes. Then he wandered quite blind about the forest, ate nothing but roots and berries, and did naught but lament and weep over the loss of his dearest wife.
Thus he roamed about in misery for some years, and at length came to the desert where Rapunzel, with the twins to which she had given birth—a boy and a girl—lived in wretchedness.
He heard a voice, and it seemed so familiar to him that he went toward it. And when he approached, Rapunzel knew him and fell on his neck and wept. Two of her tears wetted his eyes and they grew clear again, and he could see with them as before.
He led her to his kingdom, where he was joyfully received, and they lived for a long time afterward, happy and contented.
Open Your Window, Golden Hair
TANITH LEE
At the point where the trees parted, he saw the tower. It seemed framed in space, standing on a rise, the pines climbing everywhere toward it in swathes, like blue-black fur, but not yet reaching the top of the hill. A strange tower, perhaps, he thought. The stone was ancient and obdurate, in the way of some old things—and these not exclusively inanimate. He could remember an old woman from his youth, that everyone called a witch, crag-like and immovable in both grim attitude and seeming longevity. Someone had said of her that she had never been younger than fifty, and never aged beyond seventy—“But in counted years she’s easily ninety by now.” The tower was like that.
Brown raised his binoculars and studied it attentively, rather as he had so many landmarks on his excursion through Europe; he did this more as if he should than because he particularly wanted or needed to.
But the tower was rather odd. Caug
ht in that mirror-gap of spatial emptiness, only the cloudless sheet of earliest summer sky behind it, turning toward late afternoon, a warmly watery, pale golden blank of light. The tower was nearly in silhouette. Yet something hung down, surely, from the high, narrow window-slits. What was that? It had a yellowish effect, strands and eddies—creepers, perhaps.
Should he check the tower in the guidebook? No. He must make on to the little inn which, he had been told, lay just above the road to the west. It would take about half an hour to reach it, and by then the sun would be near setting. He did not fancy the woods after nightfall—at least, not alone.
He was not sure about the inn. They were so welcoming and kindly-spoken he suspected at once they might be planning to rob him, either directly or through the charges they would apply to his bed and board.
But the evening went on comfortably enough, with beer and various types of not unpleasant food. There was a fire lit, too, which was needed, since, with sunfall, a slight but definite chill had seeped into the world. Brown had selected and retained a good seat to one side of the hearth. Here, after his meal, he smoked and wrote up a few brief notes on the day’s travel. This exercise was mainly to provide something with which to regale acquaintances on his return. He sensed he would otherwise forget a lot. The general run of things did not often linger very long in his mind. Having, then, made a note on it, he asked the so-genial host about the tower.
“Oh, we do not speak of it,” said the host gravely. “It is unlucky.”
“For whom?” bantered Brown.
“For any. An old place, once a witch’s fortress.”
“A witch’s, eh?”
The host, having refilled Brown’s tankard, straightened and solemnly said, “It is unlucky even to look at it. To go there is most inadvisable.” And after this, rather belying his previous assertion that one had better not talk about the tower, he announced, “Long whiles ago, back in times of history, it was said a creature also lived in the tower, the servant of the witch. She had bred it by force on a human woman, they say, and all the while the mother carried this monster-child, the witch fed the woman special liquids and herbs of power from her own uncanny garden. When the baby came forth, the mother, no surprise to us much, died. The creature then grew in the charge of the witch, and did her bidding for evil, and for all manners of ill.”
“A fascinating story,” said Brown, who thought he was actually quite bored.
“There is more,” said the host, now gazing starkly up at the inn’s low, smoky rafters. “Men were drawn to the tower, and somehow clambered up there. They were lured by the vision of a lovely young woman with golden hair, who would lean out of the narrow window and flirt with and exhort them. But when they reached the stony place above and crawled in at the window—Ah!” exclaimed the host quite vehemently, making Brown jump and spill some of his beer—perhaps a ploy, so he would have to purchase more—“Ah, sweet Virgin and Lordship Christ, protect and succor us. No one must look at the tower, or venture close. I have said far too much, good mister. Forget what I have uttered.”
Brown dreamed. He had gone back to the tower.
However, he was much younger, maybe eighteen or seventeen years of age. And his father was standing over Brown, as so often Mr. Brown senior had done, admonishing his son: “Don’t touch it, boy. It isn’t to be touched.”
Yet surely—it was. All that golden floating fluff—like golden feathers escaping from a pillow full of swansdown—which down had come from golden swans.
“But it’s so sweet, Father,” said Brown.
And frowningly woke in the tiny bedroom up under the roof at the forest inn.
Midnight, harshly if voicelessly, declared his watch.
Now he would be awake all night.
Next moment, Brown was once more fast asleep and dreaming …
Treacle goldenly flowed. Of course it was sweet. He tasted it, licked it up, swallowed and swallowed, could not get enough. He had been deprived of confectionery when a child; his strict father had seen to that.
The only difficulty was that the treacle also spilled all over him. He was covered in the stuff. There would be such trouble later. Better, then, to enjoy himself while he could. Brown opened his mouth wider, and held out both his eager, clutching hands.
The next day dawned bright as any cliché, and Brown got up with the abrupt, rather dreary awareness that he must now go on with his exciting, adventurous journey across Europe. What, after all, was the point, really? Had he been a writer he might have made something of it, some book. Or a playboy would have used the time pretty well, though in a different way and through an unlike agenda. But Brown? What could Brown do with it? Bore people, no doubt, with badly recollected snippets of this and that. Even snippets like the tall tale the inn-host had cooked up last night. It had caused some funny dreams, that. What had they been? Something about sweets, was it, and—gold? Ridiculous.
Brown ate his breakfast in an ordinary silence, which the host respected. If the man felt either embarrassed or scornfully amused at his previous storytelling, one could not be certain. He might even, Brown decided, have forgotten it. Conceivably, he subjected every traveler who spoke of anything to some such dramatic recital.
After breakfast, Brown paid his bill, and left the inn.
His next stop was to be a town by a river, both with unpronounceable names. It should take about four hours to reach the unpronounceable town. If everything ran to plan.
Presently, Brown, striding through the sun-splashed blackness of the forest, realized he must have taken the wrong track. For it seemed to him the landscape was familiar. That leaning sapling, for example, and the fallen pine beyond—and then that break in the trees, through which the daylight currently streamed so vividly.
Brown halted, staring out with disfavor and a degree of annoyance. And there, sun-painted now on the sky, stood up again the old tower, with the pines still climbing toward it, and the yellow weeds still hanging down by the windows.
For a long while Brown paused, gazing at the tower. It was not a great distance away, perhaps a couple of miles, or not so much. He noticed a slender path of trodden earth ran down through the forest here, that seemed to lead directly to the foot of the hill, which really, itself, was not significantly steep.
He found he had walked forward without noticing it, and was on the beginnings of the path, descending toward the shallow valley that lay below the hill. See what sheer indolence, mere indifference, could lead to! Did he truly want to go in this direction? Did he want to climb up and gape at a nondescript ruin—which probably it was, a ruin, when one saw it up close? Then again, why not? It was all the same to him. One more rather pointless episode. Climbed up to tower, he mentally penned in his notes: Nothing much to look at. Perhaps dating from the 15th century; creepers all over it. Not much of a view, as surrounded on all sides by the forest.
As he had believed, the path and the subsequent climb were not overly taxing for a man who had, so far, mostly walked through two or three countries already.
Well before noon, he had come up and out just below the hilltop, and the stonework loomed in front of him.
Something about the tower was, after all, rather interesting—but what? It was lean, which had made it look taller, though it was not in fact high—perhaps thirty-five feet. It was constructed of a darkish, smoothish stone, polished subsequently by weather, like the carapace of some hard, smooth, rugged sea-creature, possibly. The narrow window-slits appeared quite a way off from the ground, but were, of course, only some twenty-eight or thirty feet up. Nor would they be so narrow, one reasoned, when viewed at their own level. Something he would not be able to do. It was not a tower to climb, not in any way. Nor did he wish to. What, besides, could be up there—an empty stone space?—or else it was full of the wrecked debris from some previous era, only left unthieved because it was so worthless.
But there was a curious and strangely pleasant smell that hung around the tower. It did not resemble the ba
lsamic fragrance of the pines, let alone their other flavors of dryness and wetness, fruition and fading death. On the contrary, the tower had a—what was it? A sort of honeyed scent, like the tempting sweetmeats of the Middle East.
Was it the peculiar hanging creepers that gave off this aroma? There seemed to be nothing else that would do so.
Brown was reluctant to go nearer and sniff at them. They were doubtless full of insects, and might even have tiny thorns. One could never tell with alien species. Their color, however, was really after all quite beautiful. Less yellow than a golden effect, a shining radiant hue.
There now, despite his caution, he had approached very close. In fact, there seemed nothing remotely injurious about the plant. It was, if anything, extremely silken, and totally untangled—as if (fanciful notion) combed by careful and loving hands. And yes, the perfume was exuded by these multiple “locks.” Irresistibly, Brown leaned forward and drew into his lungs the delicious scent. What was it that this recalled for him? Was it confectionery—or flowers? Exactly then, something gleamed out above him.
Involuntarily, Brown’s neck snapped back. He found he gaped up the stem of the tower at the single window-slit directly above. He noted as he did so that, oddly, the creeper actually seemed, instead of having grown about the stone embrasures, to be extruded from their openings—hung out of the windows like some weird and ethereal washing, falling free thereafter down the tower wall.
But what had that been meanwhile—that glimpse he had had—something which passed across the slit thirty feet above; something white and vivid and—surely—alive … ?
Arrested there, straining his neck, Brown was aware in that moment of a wild memory, the line of some poem, or of a song made from one, a piece by a well-known and respected poet and novelist—Thomas Hardy, was it?—Golden Hair—open your window—Golden Hair—
Something shifted, some loose array of pebbles, or a rock, under the sole of one of Brown’s boots. Losing his balance, instinctively he grabbed for the side of the tower. But his hands missed their purchase and met instead the warm waterfall of the creeper. How strong it was, yet exquisitely silky and soft, vibrant with its own aureate and glowing life force. A delight to touch, to hold. And the perfume now, pouring over him, wonderful as some mysterious drug.
Fearie Tales Page 4
