Pamela Dean

by Tam Lin (pdf)

  TAM L I N

  Pamela Dean, P.J.F.

  T H E F A I R Y T A L E S E R I E S

  C R E A T E D B Y T E R R I W I N D L I N G

  TOR

  fantasy

  A Tom Doherty Associates Book

  NEW YORK

  This book is for Terri Windling

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to quote from The Lady's Not for Burning by Christopher Fry © 1950, 1976, 1977 by Christopher Fry. Published by Oxford University Press.

  TAM LIN

  Introduction copyright © 1991 by Terri Windling, The Endicott Studio Copyright © 1991 by Pamela Dyer-Bennet

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  49 West 24th Street

  New York, N. Y. 10010

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dean, Pamela

  Tam Lin / Pamela Dean.

  p. cm. — (Fairy tale)

  "A Tom Doherty Associates book."

  ISBN 0-312-85137-5

  1. Tam Lin (Legendary character)—Fiction.

  I.

  Title.

  II. Series.

  PS3554.E1729T36

  1991

  813'.54—dc20

  90-49033

  CIP

  Printed in the United States of America

  First edition: April 1991

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

  I am grateful to Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer, and to Steven Brust, Emma Bull, Kara Dalkey, and Will Shetterly, for their ability to be both honest and encouraging; and to my husband, David Dyer-Bennet, kindest of project managers.

  I N T R O D U C T I O N

  F A I R Y T A L E S

  There is no satisfactory equivalent to the German word märchen, tales of magic and wonder such as those collected by the Brothers Grimm: Rapunzel, Hansel & Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin, The Six Swans, and other such familiar stories. We call them fairy tales, although none of the above stories actually contains a creature called a "fairy." They do contain those ingredients most familiar to us in fairy tales: magic and enchantment, spells and curses, witches and trolls, and protagonists who defeat overwhelming odds to triumph over evil. J. R R. Tolkien, in his classic essay, "On Fairy-Stories," offers the definition that these are not in particular tales about fairies or elves, but rather of the land of Faerie: "the Perilous Realm itself, and the air that blows in the country, I will not attempt to define that directly," he goes on, "for it cannot be done. Faerie cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible."

  Fairy tales were originally created for an adult audience. The tales collected in the German countryside and set to paper by the Brothers Grimm (wherein a Queen orders her stepdaughter, Snow White, killed and her heart served "boiled and salted for my dinner,"

  and a peasant girl must cut off her own feet lest the Red Shoes, of which she has been so vain, keep her dancing night and day until she dances herself to death) were published for an adult readership, popular, in the age of Goethe and Schiller, among the German Romantic poets. Charles Perrault's spare and moralistic tales (such as Little Red Riding Hood who, in the original Perrault telling, gets eaten by the wolf in the end for having the ill sense to talk to strangers in the wood) was written for the court of Louis XIV; Madame d'Aulnoy (author of The White Cat) and Madame Leprince de Beaumont (author of Beauty and the Beast) also wrote for the French aristocracy. In England, fairy stories and heroic legends were popularized through Malory's Arthur, Shakespeare's Puck and Ariel, Spenser's Faerie Queene.

  With the Age of Enlightenment and the growing emphasis on rational and scientific modes of thought, along with the rise in fashion of novels of social realism in the nineteenth century, literary fantasy went out of vogue and those stories of magic, enchantment, heroic quests, and courtly romance that form a cultural heritage thousands of years old, dating back to the oldest written epics and further still to tales spoken around the hearth-fire, came to be seen as fit only for children, relegated to the nursery like, Professor Tolkien points out, "shabby or old fashioned furniture . . . primarily because the adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused."

  And misused the stories have been, in some cases altered so greatly to make them suitable for Victorian children that the original tales were all but forgotten. Andrew Lang's

  Tam Lin, printed in the colored Fairy Books series, tells the story of little Janet whose playmate is stolen away by the fairy folk—ignoring the original, darker tale of seduction and human sacrifice to the Lord of Hell, as the heroine, pregnant with Tam Lin's child, battles the Fairy Queen for her lover's life. Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty bears only a little resemblance to Straparola's Sleeping Beauty of the Wood, published in Venice in the sixteenth century, in which the enchanted princess is impregnated as she sleeps, waking to find herself the mother of twins. The Little Golden Book version of the Arabian Nights resembles not at all the violent and sensual tales actually recounted by Scheherazade in

  One Thousand and One Nights, shocking nineteenth-century Europe when fully translated by Sir Richard Burton. ("Not for the young and innocent . . ." said the Daily Mail.) The wealth of material from myth and folklore at the disposal of the story-teller (or modern fantasy novelist) has been described as a giant cauldron of soup into which each generation throws new bits of fancy and history, new imaginings, new ideas, to simmer along with the old. The story-teller is the cook who serves up the common ingredients in his or her own individual way, to suit the tastes of a new audience. Each generation has its cooks, its Hans Christian Andersen or Charles Perrault, spinning magical tales for those who will listen—even amid the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century or the technological revolution of our own. In the last century, George MacDonald, William Morris, Christina Rossetti, and Oscar Wilde, among others, turned their hands to fairy stories; at the turn of the century lavish fairy tale collections were produced, a showcase for the art of Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Kai Nielsen, the Robinson Brothers—published as children's books, yet often found gracing adult salons.

  In the early part of the twentieth century Lord Dunsany, G. K. Chesterton, C. S.

  Lewis, T. H. White, J. R. R. Tolkien—to name but a few—created classic tales of fantasy; while more recently we've seen the growing popularity of books published under the category title "Adult Fantasy"—as well as works published in the literary mainstream that could easily go under that heading: John Barth's Chimera, John Gardner's Grendel, Joyce Carol Oates' Bellefleur, Sylvia Townsend Warner's Kingdoms of Elfin, Mark Halprin's A Winter's Tale, and the works of South American writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Miguel Angel Asturias.

  It is not surprising that modern readers or writers should occasionally turn to fairy tales. The fantasy story or novel differs from novels of social realism in that it is free to portray the world in bright, primary colors, a dream-world half remembered from the stories of childhood when all the world was bright and strange, a fiction unembarrassed to tackle the large themes of Good and Evil, Honor and Betrayal, Love and Hate. Susan Cooper, who won the Newbery Medal for her fantasy novel The Grey King, makes this comment about the desire to write fantasy: "In the Poetics Aristotle said, 'A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility.' I think those of us who write fantasy are dedicated to making impossible things seem likely, making dreams seem real. We are somew
here between the Impressionist and abstract painters. Our writing is haunted by those parts of our experience which we do not understand, or even consciously remember. And if you, child or adult, are drawn to our work, your response comes from that same shadowy land."

  All Adult Fantasy stories draw in a greater or lesser degree from traditional tales and legends. Some writers consciously acknowledge that material, such as J. R. R. Tolkien's use of themes and imagery from the Icelandic Eddas and the German Niebelungenlied in

  The Lord of the Rings or Evangeline Walton's reworking of the stories from the Welsh

  Mabinogion in The Island of the Mighty. Some authors use the language and symbols of old tales to create new ones, such as the stories collected in Jane Yolen's Tales of Wonder, or Patricia McKillip's The Forgotten Beasts of Eld. And others, like Robin McKinley in

  Beauty or Angela Carter in The Bloody Chamber (and the movie The Company of Wolves derived from a story in that collection) base their stories directly on old tales, breathing new life into them, and presenting them to the modern reader.

  The Fairy Tales series presents novels of the later sort—novels directly based on traditional fairy tales. Each novel in the series is based on a specific, often familiar, tale—yet each author is free to retell that story in his or her own way, showing the diverse uses a modern story-teller can make of traditional material. In the previous novels of the Fairy Tale series (published by Ace Books), Steven Brust uses a folk tale from his Hungarian heritage to mirror a contemporary story of artists and courage and the act of creation in The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars. In Jack the Giant-Killer, Charles de Lint creates a faery world in the shadows of a modern Canadian city; as with the Latin American "magic realists," the fantasy in this novel tells us much about the real world and one young woman's confrontation with the secret places in her own heart. In The Nightingale, Kara Dalkey turns Hans Christian Andersen's classic story into a haunting historical novel set in ancient Japan, a tale of love and magic and poetry which evokes the life of the Japanese imperial court as deftly as did the diaries of the imperial court ladies, written so many centuries ago. Patricia Wrede has set the Grimm fairy tale Snow White and Rose Red in Elizabethan times, creating a charming and romantic novel set in the enchanted forest of an England That Never Was. (With this book, the Fairy Tale series moved to Tor Books.)

  The novel you hold in your hand, the fifth in the Fairy Tale series, is quite simply a tour-de-force by Pamela Dean, whose distinctive voice and delightful ensemble of characters marks her as a superior writer in what one reviewer has dubbed "the Fourth Street School" of stylish and intelligent contemporary fantasy (named after the annual Fourth Street Fantasy gathering of writers, artists, and readers that takes place in the author's home city of Minneapolis). Dean has taken the Scots fairy tale and folk ballad Tam Lin and beautifully transformed it into a story that is both modern and timeless. I am very proud to include it in the Fairy Tale series.

  We have more Fairy Tales in the works for you— Katie Crackernuts, Briar-Rose, and others—by some of the most talented writers working today, retelling the world's most beloved tales in editions lovingly designed (by the award-winning Boston artist/illustrator Thomas Canty) as all good fairy tale books should be.

  I hope you will enjoy them all.

  —Terri Windling

  Editor, The Fairy Tale Series

  Devon, England, August 1990

  CHAPTER 1

  The year Janet started at Blackstock College, the Office of Residential Life had spent the summer removing from all the dormitories the old wooden bookcases that, once filled with books, fell over unless wedged. Chase and Phillips's A New Introduction to Greek was the favorite instrument for wedging; majors in the Classics used the remedial math textbook, but this caused the cases to develop a slight backward tilt, so that doughnuts, pens, student identification cards, or concert tickets placed on top of them slid with indistinguishable slowness backward and eventually vanished dustily behind. The generally harried air of most Classics majors was attributed by their friends and roommates entirely to their reliance on an inferior wedging system for their bookcases. Janet's father said he doubted that this pervasive student theory accounted for the actions of the Office of Residential Life in replacing the bookcases, if only because the Office of Residential Life had only once paid the slightest attention to any student opinion or request, this once being in the spring term of 1969, when their three cramped rooms were appropriated by a group of students who felt that the war in Viet Nam bestowed on all those of draft age the right to coed housing.

  Janet doubted this account of the students' reasoning; her father's opinion of the Office of Residential Life was, however, woefully accurate. One look around the room they had given her confirmed it. She had the names of two roommates. The room had three closets, three desks, three chairs, three bureaus. But it had two sets of bunk beds (enough, that is, for four people), and it had, replacing the three (or maybe four) tall, solid bookcases with five shelves each, a measly four shelves, warped boards wobbling a little on their brass brackets, which had not been inserted into their strips evenly, probably because the strips themselves were installed crookedly on the wall.

  "How many people are supposed to be in here?" demanded her mother.

  "Three," said Janet, tragically.

  "Open that box of books, then, and grab two of those shelves. Nobody else is going to bring six boxes of books to college."

  "I don't even think they read," said Janet, still tragically.

  "What makes you think they don't?" said her father.

  "One of them didn't write me back at all, and the other one talked about beer and Bach and tennis."

  "Which one did which?" said her mother, slamming two handsful of Heinlein juveniles and a fat chunk of Hermann Hesse paperbacks onto the lowest shelf.

  "Mom, if I'm stealing two shelves they shouldn't be the lowest ones."

  "Your roommates are probably taller than you are."

  "Everybody is," said her sister, who at twelve was, and blond to boot.

  "Which one did which?" said her father.

  "The Chicago one wrote; the Pennsylvania one didn't. Mom, don't bang that one around, it's coming apart."

  "That's mine," said her sister.

  "Lily-Milly, it is not. I never gave it to you."

  "Don't call me that!" shrieked her sister.

  "Apply to your parents," said Janet, wrestling her footlocker along the carpeting into the alcove that held one of the desks. It featured a window overlooking, down a long slope tangled with rough grass and dandelions, a round and self-conscious lake full of ducks and algae.

  "Where's Andrew?" said the male parent, with good timing but genuine concern.

  "Talking to some of the girls in the hall," said Lily. She wandered back along the room's long narrow entrance, where the three closets were—and where had that fourth roommate kept her clothes, for heaven's sake? thought Janet—and after a moment could be heard proclaiming happily, "Jannie, he's telling them about the time you put the garlic in the—"

  "God damn it!" howled Janet, lunging for the door. "I should have gone to Colgate! I should have gone to Grinnell! I should have—"

  "Don't say it," said her mother, "or I'll throw The Wind in the Willows right out the window."

  "I should have gone to Harvard!" shrieked Janet, recklessly diving into the crowd of girls in the hall and laying impetuous hands on her only brother. "You get in here now!"

  "Jannie," he said, as solemnly as only an eight-year-old could, "they say there's a ghost in your room."

  "Oh, of course," said Janet brightly. "What a relief. I couldn't think what that extra bed was for."

  "She's very quiet," said the Resident Assistant, a tall and round-faced young woman who had written Janet a perfectly responsible and sane letter about the college, just as though Janet's father had not taught here for twenty-two years.

  "Who was she?" said Janet, still tugging her brother along but aw
are of the necessity of being civil. Luckily, Andrew was cute and redheaded, and the four girls in the hall were regarding him benignly.

  "Classics major," said a short black student, as if that explained everything.

  Everybody at Blackstock who was not a member of the Classics Department talked like that. Janet had never met a Classics major; the professors she had met from that department seemed no more peculiar than those of any other. But it was one of Blackstock's tenets.

  They will never fix the Music and Drama Center; it always snows on Parents' Weekend; Classics majors are crazy.

  "What class?" Of course, they might have chosen her as the butt of one of the innumerable jokes played on freshmen; faculty brats were favorite targets.

  "Ninety-nine," said an even smaller girl with glasses.

  "Janet Margaret Carter," said Lily from the doorway, "come unpack these books."

  "I'll see you at the meeting tonight," Janet said generally, lugged her brother back into the room, and banged the door shut.

  Her mother was leaning out one of the windows; her father was sitting on her desk.

  "Look what you made your mother do," he said.

  "You made her do it," said Janet, more or less automatically. She let go of Andrew but stayed between him and the door. "She couldn't stand to hear any more about how nobody in the entire Department of Humane Letters at Harvard—not that there is one—is doing anything but painstakingly reconstructing Aristotle." Having delivered her standard speech, she absorbed what her mother had threatened—to throw The Wind in the Willows out a fourth-floor window. She said with much more force, "Mom, how could you?"

  "Colgate," said her mother, not turning from the window. Her voice was unnaturally calm for the subject they were discussing. The morning sunshine haloed her red head. "Or Cornell, maybe—the little one, that is."

  "It's too late now," said Janet. "Why don't you all just go home now, and I'll come for Sunday supper in a month or two."

  "Walk down with us and get your book," said her mother.

  The book had landed flat on its front in a clump of dandelions. Janet brushed it off and felt the binding tenderly. It had been so battered already, any new damage was hard to locate. Her mother had given it to her on her eighth birthday, and if Janet had ever thrown any book anywhere her mother would probably have put her on bread and water and Eugene Field for a week. It must be very stressful after all, sending your oldest child off to college, even if college was about ten blocks away.