Beyond the Woods: Fairy Tales Retold

by Paula Guran

  But she understood how keeping him there was as unnatural as imprisoning a wild animal. She ordered certain clothing to be made. One day Merlin returned to his rooms and found on the bed robes and a cloak with the moon in all its phases and fine leather boots like the ones her majesty had noticed older Merlins wearing.

  The youth had never seen anything so splendid. He changed and went to her private rooms where she was waiting. “Sir Merlin, you have fulfilled and more the tasks for which you were summoned,” she said and he saw how hard this was for her. “You are dismissed with our thanks and the certainty we will meet again.”

  Merlin bowed low. And before the royal tears came, or his own could start, he found himself hurtling backward through the centuries to the hermit Galapas and the Crystal Cave.

  Merlin didn’t linger there but immediately set out across Wales, finding within himself the magic to cover miles in minutes. One story Victoria had told was of a king trying to build a castle before his enemies were upon him.

  Each day the walls would be raised and each night they would be thrown down. All were in despair until a bold youth in a cloak of moons appeared. He tamed two dragons that fought every night in the caves below the castle and made the walls collapse. Merlin knew he was that youth.

  4.

  “Queen Victoria,” a commentator said at her Golden Jubilee, “inherited a Britain linked by stagecoach and reigned in a Britain that ran on rails. She ruled over a quarter of the globe and a quarter of its people.”

  At Balmoral Castle in the Highlands late in her reign the queen went into high mourning because a gamekeeper, John Brown, had died.

  “Mrs. Brown mourns dead husband,” was how a scurrilous underground London sheet put it.

  In fact, Brown, belligerent, hard-drinking, and rude to every person at court except her majesty, was the only one on Earth who spoke to her as one human being to another.

  He died unmourned by anyone but the queen. But she mourned him extravagantly. Memorial plaques were installed; statuettes were manufactured.

  He was gone but the court’s relief was short-lived. To commemorate becoming Empress of India, Victoria imported servants from the subcontinent. Among them was Abdul Karim who taught her a few words of Hindi. For this the queen called him “the Munshi” or teacher and appointed him her private secretary.

  Soon the Munshi was brought along to state occasions, allowed to handle secret government reports, introduced to foreign dignitaries. He engaged in minor intrigue and told her majesty nasty stories about his fellow servants. The entire court wished the simple, straightforward Mr. Brown was back. Victoria’s children, many well into middle age, found the Munshi appalling. The government worried about its state secrets.

  “Indian cobra in queen’s parlor,” the slander sheets proclaimed.

  The queen would hear nothing against him. But she knew he wasn’t what she wanted.

  “Oh the cruelty of young women and the folly of old men,” Merlin cried as he paced the floor in the tower of glass that was his prison cell.

  Nimue the enchantress who beguiled his declining years had turned against him, used the skills he’d taught her to imprison him.

  When he was a boy, Queen Victoria had told him about King Uther Pendragon, whose castle walls collapsed each night. Solving that, young Merlin won the confidence of Pendragon. The birth of the king’s son Arthur, hiding the infant from usurpers, the sword in the stone, the kingdom of Britain, and all the rest had followed from that.

  But Victoria never told Merlin about Nimue. She thought it too sad.

  “Sired by an incubus, baptized in church, tamer of dragons, advisor to kings, I am a cambion turned into a cuckold,” he wailed.

  Most of his magic had deserted him. He hadn’t even enough to free himself. Still he did little spells, turned visiting moths into butterflies, made his slippers disappear and reappear. Merlin knew he had a reason for doing this but couldn’t always remember what it was.

  Then one morning while making magic he found himself whisked from the tower and summoned to a room crammed full of tartan pillows and with claymore swords hung on the walls as decoration. Music played in the next room and an old lady in black looked at him kindly.

  The slump of his shoulders, the unsteadiness of his stance, led the Queen of England, the Empress of India, to rise and lead him over to sit on the divan next to her.

  “That music you hear is a string quartet playing a reduction of Herr Mendelssohn’s ‘Scottish Symphony,’ ” she said. “Musicians are on call throughout my waking hours. You told me long ago this was how things were arranged at the Royal Court in 2159.”

  It was a brisk day and they drank mulled wine. “The sovereign of Britain requires a wizard to attend Her,” she said, “for a period of time which She shall determine.”

  Merlin realized he was rescued. And when the Munshi walked into the room unannounced, the Wizard stood to his full height. Seeing a white-bearded man with flashing eyes and sparks darting from his hands, the Munshi fled.

  Everyone at Balmoral marveled at the day her majesty put aside her secretary and gave orders that he was not to approach her. All wondered if someone else had taken his place but no evidence of that could ever be found.

  People talked about the eccentricities of Queen Victoria’s last years: the seat next to hers that she insisted always be kept empty in carriages, railroad cars, at state dinners, the rooms next to hers that must never be entered.

  At times the queen would send all the ladies and servants away from her chambers and not let them in until next morning.

  Some at court hinted that all this had shaded over into madness and attributed it to heredity. Most thought it was just old age, harmless and in its way charmingly human.

  In fact a few members of her court did see things out of the corners of their eyes. Merlin could conjure invisibility but his concentration was no longer perfect.

  Her majesty walking over the gorse at Balmoral in twilight, on the shore on a misty day at Osborne, in the corridors of Windsor Castle would suddenly be accompanied by a cloaked figure with a white beard and long white hair.

  When the viewer looked again he would have disappeared.

  She talked to Merlin about their prior meetings and how she cherished each of them. The wizard would once have sneered at the picturesque ruins and the undefendable faux castles that dotted the landscape near any royal residence. Now he understood they had been built in tribute to the sage who’d saved the young princess, the handsome magician who had helped choose her husband, the quicksilver youth of her widowhood.

  When she finally became very ill at Windsor, Queen Victoria had ruled for more than sixty years. Merlin remembered that this was the time when she would die.

  He stayed with her, put in her mind the things he knew she found pleasing, summoned up music only she could hear. He wondered if, when she was gone, he would be returned to Nimue and the tower.

  “She assumed the throne in the era of Sir Walter Scott and her reign has lasted into the century of Mr. H. G. Wells,” the Times of London said.

  In the last days when her family came to see her, Victoria had the glass with the parchment inside it under her covers. Merlin stood in a corner and was visible only to the queen.

  When her son who would be Edward VII appeared, Merlin shook his head.

  This man would never summon him. It was the same with her grandson who would be George V.

  A great-grandchild, a younger son who stammered, was brought in with his brothers. Merlin nodded: this one would summon him to London decades later when hellfire fell from the skies.

  The boy was called back after he and his brothers had left, was given the parchment, and shown how to hide it.

  “You are my last and only friend,” Victoria told Merlin. He held her hands when she died and felt grief for the first time in his life. But he wasn’t returned to his glass prison.

  Uninvited, invisible, utterly alone at the funeral, he followed the caisson tha
t bore the coffin through the streets of Windsor, carried the only friend he’d ever had to the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore.

  “We say of certain people, ‘She was a woman of her time,’” an orator proclaimed. “But of how many can it be said that the span of their years, the time in which they lived, will be named for them?”

  “A bit of her is inside each one of us,” said a woman watching the cortege.

  “And that I suppose is what a legend is.”

  In the winter twilight with snow on the ground, Merlin stood outside the mausoleum. “I don’t want to transfer my mind and soul to another human or beast, and I won’t risk using that magic and getting summoned. There’s no other monarch I wish to serve.”

  He remembered the Hermit of the Crystal Cave. Old Galapas hadn’t been much of a teacher, but Merlin had learned the Wizard’s Last Spell from him.

  It was simple enough and he hadn’t forgotten. Merlin invoked it and those who had lingered in the winter dusk saw for a moment a figure with white hair and beard, wearing robes with the moon in all its phases.

  The old wizard waved a wand, shimmered for a moment, then appeared to shatter. In the growing dark what seemed like tiny stars flew over the mausoleum, over Windsor, over Britain and all the world.

  Richard Bowes has published six novels, four story collections, and seventy-five short stories. His work has appeared on a couple of dozen award short lists, and he has won two World Fantasy, a Lambda, Million Writers, and IHG Awards. Recent stories have appeared in Ellen Datlow’s The Doll Collection, The Magazine of Science Fiction & Fantasy, Farrago’s Wainscot, Uncanny, Tor.com, XIII, Interfictions, Best Gay Stories 2015, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2015, The Time Traveller’s Almanac, and In the Shadow of the Towers.

  Jane Yolen, the prolific author of scores of modern fairy tales, tells a clever story about a wise slave and an equally astute djinn. In pre-Islamic Arabian folklore, djinn (or jinn) are a race of supernatural beings who could be called through magic to perform desired tasks. The familiar “genie” in a bottle/lamp icon comes primarily from the tale of Aladdin collected in The Book of 1001 Nights. Although it is a genuine Middle Eastern folk tale, “Aladdin” was not included in the original Arabic versions of The Nights. Antoine Galland—whose Les Mille et une nuits, contes arabes traduits en français was the first European translation—included the story and six others not in the Arabic manuscript after hearing them told by a Syrian Maronite monk, Hanna Diab.

  Memoirs of a Bottle Djinn

  Jane Yolen

  The sea was as dark as old blood, not the wine color poets sing of. In the early evening it seemed to stain the sand. As usual this time of year the air was heavy, ill-omened. I walked out onto the beach below my master’s house, whenever I could slip away unnoticed, though it was a dangerous practice. Still, it was one necessary to my well-being. I had been a sailor for many more years than I had been a slave. And the smell of the salt air was not a luxury for me but a necessity.

  If a seabird had washed up dead at my feet, its belly would have contained black worms and other evil auguries, so dark and lowering was the sky. So I wondered little at the bottle that the sea had deposited before me, certain it contained noxious fumes at best, the legacy of its long cradling in such a salty womb.

  In my country poets sing the praises of wine and gift its color to the water along the shores of Hellas, and I can think of no finer hymn. But in this land they believe their prophet forbade them strong drink. They are a sober race who reward themselves in heaven even as they deny themselves on earth. It is a system of which I do not approve, but then I am a Greek by birth and a heathen by inclination despite my master’s long importuning. It is only by chance that I have not yet lost an eye, an ear, or a hand to my master’s unforgiving code. He finds me amusing, but it has been seven years since I have had a drink.

  I stared at the bottle. If I had any luck at all, the bottle had fallen from a foreign ship and its contents would still be potable. But then, if I had any luck at all, I would not be a slave in Araby, a Greek sailor washed up on these shores the same as the bottle at my feet. My father, who was a cynic like his father before him, left me with a cynic’s name—Antithias—a wry heart, and an acid tongue, none proper legacies for a slave.

  But as blind Homer wrote, “Few sons are like their father; many are worse.” I guessed that the wine, if drinkable, would come from an inferior year. And with that thought, I bent to pick it up.

  The glass was a cloudy green, like the sea after a violent storm. Like the storm that had wrecked my ship and cast me onto a slaver’s shore. There were darker flecks along the bottom, a sediment that surely foretold an undrinkable wine. I let the bottle warm between my palms.

  Since the glass was too dark to let me see more, I waited past my first desire and was well into my second, letting it rise up in me like the heat of passion. The body has its own memories, though I must be frank: passion, like wine, was simply a fragrance remembered. Slaves are not lent the services of houri nor was one my age and race useful for breeding. It had only been by feigning impotence that I had kept that part of my anatomy intact—another of my master’s unforgiving laws. Even in the dark of night, alone on my pallet, I forwent the pleasures of the hand for there were spies everywhere in his house and the eunuchs were a notably gossipy lot. Little but a slave’s tongue lauding morality stood between gossip and scandal, stood between me and the knife. Besides, the women of Araby tempted me little. They were like the bottle in my hand—beautiful and empty. A wind blowing across the mouth of each could make them sing but the tunes were worth little. I liked my women like my wine—full-bodied and tanged with history, bringing a man into poetry. So I had put my passion into work these past seven years, slave’s work though it was. Blind Homer had it right, as usual: “Labor conquers all things.” Even old lusts for women and wine.

  Philosophy did not conquer movement, however, and my hand found the cork of the bottle before I could stay it. With one swift movement I had plucked the stopper out. A thin strand of smoke rose into the air. A very bad year indeed, I thought, as the cork crumbled in my hand.

  Up and up and up the smoky rope ascended and I, bottle in hand, could not move, such was my disappointment. Even my father’s cynicism and his father’s before him had not prepared me for such a sudden loss of all hope. My mind, a moment before full of anticipation and philosophy, was now in blackest despair. I found myself without will, reliving in my mind the moment of my capture and the first bleak days of my enslavement.

  That is why it was several minutes before I realized that the smoke had begun to assume a recognizable shape above the bottle’s gaping mouth: long, sensuous legs glimpsed through diaphanous trousers; a waist my hands could easily span; breasts beneath a short embroidered cotton vest as round as ripe pomegranates; and a face . . . the face was smoke and air. I remembered suddenly a girl in the port of Alexandria who sold fruit from a basket and gave me a smile. She was the last girl who had smiled upon me when I was a free man and I, not knowing the future, had ignored her, so intent was I on my work. My eyes clouded over at the memory, and when they were clear again, I saw that same smile imprinted upon the face of the djinn.

  “I am what you would have me be, master,” her low voice called down to me.

  I reached up a hand to help her step to earth, but my hand went through hers, mortal flesh through smoky air. It was then, I think, that I really believed she was what I guessed her to be.

  She smiled. “What is your wish, master?”

  I took the time to smile back. “How many wishes do I get?” She shook her head but still she smiled, that Alexandrian smile, all lips without a hint of teeth. But there was a dimple in her left cheek. “One, my master, for you drew the cork but once.”

  “And if I draw it again?”

  “The cork is gone.” This time her teeth showed as did a second dimple, on the right.

  I sighed and looked at the crumbled mess in my hand, then sprinkled t
he cork like seed upon the sand. “Just one.”

  “Does a slave need more?” she asked in that same low voice.

  “You mean that I should ask for my freedom?” I laughed and sat down on the sand. The little waves that outrun the big ones tickled my feet, for I had come out barefoot. I looked across the water. “Free to be a sailor again at my age? Free to let the sun peel the skin from my back, free to heave my guts over the stern in a blinding rain, free to wreck once more upon a slaver’s shore?”

  She drifted down beside me and, though her smoky hand could not hold mine, I felt a breeze across my palm that could have been her touch. I could see through her to the cockleshells and white stones pocking the sand.

  “Free to make love to Alexandrian women,” she said. “Free to drink strong wine.”

  “Free to have regrets in the morning either way,” I replied. Then I laughed.

  She laughed back. “What about the freedom to indulge in a dinner of roast partridge in lemons and eggplant? What about hard-boiled eggs sprinkled with vermilion? What about cinnamon tripes?” It was the meal my master had just had.

  “Rich food like rich women gives me heartburn,” I said.

  “The freedom to fill your pockets with coins?” Looking away from her, over the clotted sea, I whispered to myself, “‘Accursed thirst for gold! What dost thou not compel mortals to do,’” a line from the Aeneid.

  “Virgil was a wise man,” she said quietly. “For a Roman!” Then she laughed.

  I turned to look at her closely for the first time. A woman who knows Virgil, be she djinn or mortal, was a woman to behold. Though her body was still composed of that shifting, smoky air, the features on her face now held steady. She no longer looked like the Alexandrian girl, but had a far more sophisticated beauty. Lined with kohl, her eyes were gray as smoke and her hair the same color. There were shadows along her cheeks that emphasized the bone and faint smile lines crinkling the skin at each corner of her generous mouth. She was not as young as she had first appeared, but then I am not so young myself.