Something Rich and Strange

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  Enter the realm of Faerie: compelling, enchanting, and filled with perilous beauty. It is a world most of us visit only in dreams. Now it is brought to vivid reality by acclaimed fantasy artist Brian Froud, coauthor of the bestselling Faeries and designer for the films The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. In a magnificent quartet of books, Froud and some of the finest writers in the fantasy field explore the wonder and the danger of a world inextricably bound to our own.

  They have lived among us for centuries—distant, separate, just out of sight. They fill our myths, our legends, and the stories we tell our children in the dark of night. They come from air, from water, from earth, and from fire. Faeries.

  SOMETHING RICH

  AND STRANGE

  by Patricia A. McKillip

  Megan is an artist who draws seascapes. Jonah owns a shop devoted to treasures from the deep. Their lives, so strongly touched by the ocean, become forever intertwined when enchanting people of the sea lure them further into the underwater world…and away from each other.

  BRIAN FROUD’S FAERIELANDS

  SOMETHING RICH AND STRANGE

  A Bantam Spectra Book/November 1994

  SPECTRA and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of

  Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell

  Publishing Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1994 by Byron Preiss Visual Publications, Inc.

  Text copyright © 1994 by Patricia A. McKillip

  Introduction, artwork, and Afterword copyright © 1994 by Brian Froud

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information address: Bantam Books.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McKillip, Patricia A.

  Something rich and strange / Patricia A. McKillip.

  p. cm. — (Brian Froud’s faerielands)

  ISBN 0-553-09674-5

  I. Title. II. Series.

  PS3563.C38S66 1994

  813'.54—dc20

  94-11546

  CIP

  Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

  * * *

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries.

  Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway,

  New York, New York 10036.

  * * *

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES Of AMERICAKPH 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For my mother:

  for all those beach walks

  with and without champagne.

  With special acknowledgment of works by

  Joseph S. Levine and Jeffrey L. Rotman,

  Dr. Keith Banister and Dr. Andrew Campbell,

  Jacques Cousteau, and of Joseph Le Conte’s

  Compend of Geology.

  Full fathom five thy father lies;

  Of his bones are coral made:

  Those are pearls that were his eyes:

  Nothing of him that doth fade,

  But doth suffer a sea-change

  Into something rich and strange.

  The Tempest

  Contents

  Introduction

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Afterword

  Introduction

  by

  For years I worked as an illustrator, crafting pictures to other people’s words. But over time the spaces between the words became more and more important to me, for in those spaces my mind and my imagination were set free. In 1976 I moved from London to a small country village in Devon, along with my friend Alan Lee and his family. Walking through the woods and across the hills of Dartmoor, among stone circles and Bronze Age ruins, Alan and I soaked in the spirit of the land, the folklore surrounding us, and created the book Faeries. With that book I began to do more than illustrate other people’s words: I began to record my own vision of the world, and stories without words, in pencil lines and paint.

  I still live in the country, in a Dartmoor longhouse with a thatched roof, along with my wife, Wendy, a sculptor, and my son. My work continues to be influenced by the beautiful land surrounding me, and I’ve discovered under its influence that communications from Faerie are wordless: first touching the heart and soul, and only later the rational mind. And so for years now I’ve created images that are meant to be evocative rather than illustrative, whispering words and suggesting stories of their own.

  I work intuitively, the images appearing before me and demanding attention, their meanings and voices unclear until much later, when the sketch or painting is done. This was the approach I used when I designed two of Jim Henson’s movies: The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. The scripts and the characters developed organically from my sketches and paintings rather than the other way around. And here again, in the Faerielands books, the drawings came first, the words second, as the authors responded to images in the art.

  I created the Faerielands art in the summer and autumn of 1991. Later that autumn I met with the four authors who were to write the books, Charles de Lint, Patricia McKillip, Midori Snyder, and Terri Windling, along with the series co-creator Robert Gould and the producer Byron Preiss, and spread out the drawings and paintings I’d completed—over fifty of them in all. The writers divided the images among them, choosing the ones they were most drawn to, and then they each went away to write the story the pictures whispered to them. They had the freedom to write whatever they chose, just as I’d had the freedom to paint what I chose; yet we’d agreed on a central premise: a recognition that Faerie, inextricably bound as it is to nature and natural forces, is gravely threatened by the ecological crises that human beings have brought to our world.

  Faerie exists at the heart of any land; it is not confined to the woods of England. Thus the stories would not be set in the landscape where the pictures were created, but in the lands the writers knew and loved best: the Canadian woods, the American Pacific coast, midwestern farmland, the Sonoran Desert. The images I’ve drawn show that faerielands are everywhere and anywhere. The insistent impulses of Faerie are all around us, expressed first in lines that become a root, that grow into a tree, that transform into a face, that become a magical bird that takes us into another land. Like DNA code, any small fragment of a painting or drawing has the potential to open up into complete inner worlds. The images invite viewers to step into their magical space. They are gateways into the faerie realms.

  Something Rich and Strange

  The symbol of The Wild Wood by Charles de Lint, the first book in the Faerielands series, was the mask, a symbol of secrets. Now we have Something Rich and Strange, the second book in the Faerielands series, and its symbol is the rabbit, a symbol of rebirth and transformation.

  When I first moved to Dartmoor, I noticed a strange design painted above the doorway of a shop in my village: three rabbits in a circle joined together by three communal ears. A little while later I spied the design once again, carved in the roof of the twelfth-century village church. The swirling motif held a mystery. What did it signify, I wondered?

  I discovered that the three connected rabbits were called “tinner’s rabbits” and subsequently found them dancing around many a roof boss of the old stone moorland churches. The triple rabbits were an alchem
ical symbol for tin, adopted as an emblem by the men who worked the tin mines that once were scattered across the hills of Dartmoor. The mining stopped centuries ago and nature has since reclaimed the tinworks, covering their stones with ivy and bracken, folding them back into the earth. Yet the tinner’s rabbits still remain, a potent symbol of this land, harkening back, some say, to even older times, when the rabbit was the sign of the old religion and rabbits or hares were witches transformed.

  Gradually I discovered more as I followed the trail of the rabbit through old books and legends. The rabbit (or hare, for they are interchangeable in the world of symbolism) is an emblem that can be found across Europe, in its churches, its artwork, and its myths. Some traditions equated the hare with the human ego or the soul, and as such it often made an appearance in late medieval paintings and statues of the Virgin Mary (although some interpret this symbolism differently, as triumph over lust). The ancient Greeks depicted the figure of Tragedy holding a white hare, indicating the transformation of the human soul through the fire of suffering (an idea later picked up by the medieval alchemists). The hare was also allied to Eros and Aphrodite, but more importantly to Hermes/Mercury—it was a messenger or oracular animal. The hare was a luminous symbol in Chinese, African, Egyptian, Native American, Buddhist, and Hindu mythologies as well. Worldwide it was considered a lunar animal, associated with transformation and the goddess.

  The three joined hares are the triple goddess: maiden, mother, and crone. Birth, death, and renewal. The circle of the three rabbits indicates this cycle, the great cosmic dance overseen by the goddess. We know the triple goddess as an eternal archetype in the human psyche and under many guises: the three Fates, three Graces, the Thriae (three goddesses of the Delphic oracle), the three Norns, the Deae Matrones (Celtic trinity of goddesses), the three fairy queens in Arthurian legend, and the three witches in Macbeth. An evocative name for the triple formations of hares in medieval times was the “hunt of Venus.” This was a way of expressing the concept of an ancient fertility goddess known by different names over time. In one guise the Anglo-Saxons knew her as Eostre, the goddess of the spring, bringing renewed life to plants and animals. The rabbit was Eostre’s totem beast (an image that survives to this day in the form of the Easter bunny). The British queen Boudicca also used the hare as her personal totem, deliberately identifying herself with the goddess of nature.

  The ancient Celts who lived on Dartmoor also knew the triple goddess, she who had dominion over the earth and the moon. To them the lunar hare represented intuition, divine madness (lunacy), rebirth, and transformation. The old tinners shared space underground with this sacred animal, knowing that the goddess whispered in its large, receptive ears, making it the carrier of divine messages. In this one beast the secrets of the earth itself were brought into the lunar light.

  Finally one more secret revealed itself when I learned that to the Celts this great goddess was also the queen of the Otherworld, or Underworld: the queen of Faerie. The triple rabbit is her symbol as well. Those three rabbit ears linked together form a three-sided gate, an entrance into the Faerie realms.

  A simple painted symbol over a shop doorway was my own gateway into Mystery—a journey that took me across Europe and through history and then brought me back to my own front door. It gave me a better understanding of my moorland home, the real world that surrounds me, and at the same time gave me insight into the mythical landscape that underlies it. The shop has since changed owners; it’s a wine shop now (which must make the faeries grin). But the tinner’s rabbits are still there, brightened up in fresh new paint, for those who wish to muse upon them…and be lured through Faerie’s gate.

  This is only one of the many gateways into Faerie. Dartmoor is my entrance to that realm, and so my drawings express Faerie denizens born of our rich moorland soil, wind and water, fire and stone. But every land has its gates into the Otherworld; they are universal, like the rabbit and the hare. Author Patricia McKillip has drawn inspiration from my pictures to create a story from the land she loves best, with its own gateways into Mystery. Faerie lies all around us, appearing and disappearing again as quick as a flash of long ears in the grass. If you follow the hare, it may lead you on a journey into lunacy, or death, or rebirth, or transformation…or into the mythical landscape that underlies the land where you live, wherever that may be.

  One

  Megan dipped her hand into the tide pool, drew the shining out of the sea.

  It was the gold foil, wire, and cap from a champagne bottle someone had flicked into the water. She dropped it into the capacious pocket of her jacket, already jingling with beer caps, the plastic lid off a gallon of milk, a couple of sand dollars, blue and yellow sea glass, half of a Styrofoam float, a flattened Orange Crush can, and a three-quarter-ounce weight knotted to a foot of fishing line. She waited for the water to still, then studied the pool again. A dozen sea urchins, a starfish, chitons, anemones… She pulled the sand dollars out of her pocket, poised them in the sand beneath the starfish, waited for the ripples to subside. Something she had disturbed on the bottom rose to the surface of the pool. She fished it out: foil from a cigarette pack. She rolled it into a ball between her fingers, dropped it into her pocket, her mind still absorbed by the pool, the line of rock that formed it, the bits of broken shell, sandstone, agate, jumbled on the bottom. She eased into a smooth place among the barnacles beneath her, and began to draw rapidly, before the tide turned.

  She was a tall, lean, taciturn young woman, with long straight pale hair that she let grow past her waist. Her blue-gray eyes could be found, not easily, under the drift of her hair, or beneath the reflections in her glasses. She drew seascapes in ink and pencil and hung them in Jonah’s shop, among the jewelry and fossils and shells and other oddments he sold. Three years before, he had hired Megan to paint a shop sign. She had shown him her seascapes; he had hung a few; tourists had bought them. Somehow, despite his crotchety manner and her reticence, they had, in the sort of dart-and-dance courtship displayed by mute and easily startled fish, indicated an interest in one another. His eyes opened and glittered beneath his shaggy hair; she flashed her sudden, rare smile. So they lived together above the shop beside the sea, where changing tides of sound tumbled constantly about them as if they were creatures in some invisible tide pool.

  Something waved at Megan from a cleft in the stone: a tiny crab, venturing out. She waited for it, drew it as it picked its way across the bottom. She studied the drawing, added some graceful fronds of sea moss. Lately she had started experimenting with pale, delicate washes of color over black ink. Jonah, who thought pastel colors were trendy, commercial, and sentimental, disapproved. “Next thing,” he grumbled, “you’ll be making kittens out of cowrie shells.” But, as Megan pointed out, shoving massive oceanography books under his nose, the secret sea, beneath its bland surface, was garish with color.

  Wind rippled the water. Megan, waiting for the starfish to come into focus again, debated color. The starfish was crimson; she could try a light red wash. Something popped suddenly to the surface and floated: the champagne cork. She stared at it, and then at her drawing, wondering if she had absently sketched a cork in among the sea anemones. She picked it out, put it in her pocket. Gulls cried overhead; pelicans flew low over the distant tide. She tasted salt on her lips. The water shivered again, wind-stroked; the wind was rising. She felt chilled suddenly, sitting on a cold gray rock under a gray sky. She leaned down to gather her sand dollars. The wind grabbed her hair out of her jacket, tossed it over her shoulder, into her mouth, into the water. She spat hair irritably, groping for the shells. An anemone sucked at her finger. A pen she had balanced among the barnacles rolled into the water. She groped for that, too, stirring sand into a roiling cloud. Her fingers hit something smooth, hard. She pulled it out: a beer bottle.

  She checked her drawing incredulously: no sign of a beer bottle. It must, she decided, have been buried in the sand; her groping had uncovered it. She stuffed it into her poc
ket, retrieved the shells and, finally, the pen. She gazed into the pool, thinking: Now what? The champagne bottle? The pool, suddenly limpid, gave her back her face: great, square eyes, a little hard mouth, like a parrotfish’s mouth, fit for nibbling coral, long pale tentacles that searched the air for microscopic life. Entranced by the fishy vision, she no longer recognized herself.

  She pulled back, remembered her own face. She slid the drawing pad into its waterproof case and stood up slowly, cramped and weighted with flotsam and jetsam. “You can’t sweep the sea,” Jonah would say as she pulled garbage and treasure from her pockets. “No,” she would answer, “but I can tidy a tide pool.” Then she would show him her drawings.

  She had three that day: one a mound of sea urchins, one a carpet of anemones, and the last, which he lingered over longest, intent, musing, picking at his teeth with his thumb. He took his hand away from his mouth finally, pointed.

  “I don’t recognize this.”

  Megan looked over his shoulder; their heads touched. Sea lettuce, she was about to say, glancing at the shapeless, fluid lines. The word caught; her mouth stayed open. It wasn’t algae; it had an eye; it crawled across the bottom, small, rippling, horned. She took a breath, perplexed.

  “I don’t either.”

  Jonah watched her as she pored through her books. She sat on a stool beside the counter dividing the kitchen and dining room, drinking tea out of a clay mug, her head bent, her smooth, pale hair spilling over the book, her hands, her knees. He loved her hands: slender, long-boned, beautifully proportioned. She could moor a boat with those hands, hammer a nail, pitch a tent. She could fold origami paper into a bird; she could draw a spider web strung with dew. Now her hands were flicking pages as she searched through photographs of underwater life for the odd little animal wandering through her drawing. The wind was rattling the windows; the full tide sounded as if it were heaving great driftwood logs and old sunken ships across the beach to their doorway.