3 Dead Princes: An Anarchist Fairy Tale (15 page)

BOOK: 3 Dead Princes: An Anarchist Fairy Tale

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The Bird disappeared for what seemed a short while, and came back with a redfish, maybe three feet long.

“Shall I do the honors?” asked The Fool. Taking a knife from his belt, he slit the belly of the fish and began gutting it.

“I took the liberty of eating,” said the Bird. “You’ll have to eat yours raw of course. Your human predilection for cooked food? We can’t afford …

“… the smoke signals,” finished The Fool. “No problem,” and he looked to Stormy.

“I know, I know,” said Stormy, “good brain food.” The Fool handed her a piece of the pink-red flesh. She winced as she took a bite, but it tasted far better than she’d thought.

Then the questions began again. Brain food indeed. The Gricklegrack had told her many things as they flew, with her ear pressed to his feathered side. But she had a lot more things she wanted to know now. “You said my dad had a theory that intelligent life existed before the dark times. I don’t understand how all the stories could be wrong, how everything I learned at school, all the books in the library could be wrong.”

The Gricklegrack preened his feathers and considered how to answer.

“They’re not all wrong. But there are other stories than the ones you know. We grickles have a whole library’s worth of our own. Then new discoveries change what we thought we knew. Twenty winters ago everyone to a man would swear that water could not run uphill. But your father invented a machine that made water run uphill. The story changes in good ways and bad ways. Ask The Fool here. A master of stories. The story changes as it gets passed along.”

The Fool was busy chewing on a hunk of fish, and he grinned with his mouth full. Stormy wanted to ask the Bird if he and his kind had a completely different beginning story to the one she had been taught, but Emmeur was on a roll now. Even The Fool could not get a word in.

“Take your own story. We, your father and I, got the message from Gwynmerelda. You accidentally killed a prince in self defense, but already, in a couple of days, the chittle-chattle tells how you brutally murdered him while he slept.”

“Did not. I—. It was an
accident.
”

“I know that, and you know that, but the story itself does not know that. The story adapts to what its listeners want to hear. You pass the story down across tens of winters, and it travels across land and sea where beings have different languages, and before you know, it’s a tale of how the brave princess, disguised as a boy-jester, made it her business to travel the west, ridding the land of corrupt princes.”

“But I don’t want that. I don’t want to kill princes. I hate the story.”

“Ah yes, but the story has a life of its own now. However some things remain more or less intact. The essence of the story, which in this case is the unusual fact that the Princess kills the prince, is, well, in fact … ’er, a fact.”

“He was the one who came prowling and groppelling into my bedroom,” Stormy protested.

“Yes exactly!” the Bird agreed. “The devanimal is in the details, but the real details remain invisible to everyone else,” said the Bird. “So when the story gets out into the world, the people hearing it, the audience, re-imagine the invisible details to make the story fit their situation or their way of thinking. They make it their own.”

“But they can’t!” said Stormy stormily.

“But they do,” said The Fool. “We all do. It’s the way we are.”

“After hundreds of winters,” the Bird went on, “there is no telling how different a story is from the way it was first told. We wouldn’t even know if the story was based on real happenings, or just grew out of a pretendsuppose night tale.”

The Fool nodded vigorously in agreement as he chewed more of the fish.

“Now, leapfrog for a moment. Think of the passage of hundreds and thousands of winters. Your father has a theory that creatures, flowers, and trees are like stories. We all possess a fundamental essence made up of invisible details, or kinks as Walterbald calls them. Then as the forces of nature change the earth belches and spews lava, the sea rises and falls, the ice advances or retreats these kinks change, too, and shape what creatures and plants look like. What we look like.”

“Over millennia, those invisible kinks made you a girl, and me a bird. However, if we went far enough back, you and I might once have been fish.” In this, The Gricklegrack was closer to the truth than he knew. The Fool paused, then shrugged and took another piece of the redfish.

“Nooo!” said Stormy as she saw dream pictures of strange creatures in her head. “That really is devanimaltalk.”

“The way your father describes it, we creatures become transkinked, according to how our invisible details respond to nature. It’s a leap of imagination, but we have been uncovering facts that seem to back it up. You see the process speeded up in how your actual experience has become transfigured into the folk tale of The Three Dead Princes.”

“What? What?” Stormy could not believe what she was hearing. It seemed that, whether she liked it or not, she had been cast as the prince-killer extraordinaire. The play had been written, and they were already performing it in the streets. It was not a good feeling.

“For instance. Your mother grew roses,” said the Bird. And suddenly Stormy was rapt with attention again. “She spliced red and lilac roses, and cross-bred them and cross-bred them again, until eventually she grew a deep purple rose that had never before been seen.”

Stormy had seen that rose growing in the gardens at Bald Mountain Castle. The story people told was that Ursula had been able to grow a purple rose, because of the enchantment that she felt for Waltherbald, and he for her.

“Ursula was as clever as she was beautiful. She saw qualities in each rose, for each individual rose is different, as each person or bird differs from his kin. Over successive growing seasons she brought out certain kinks that enabled her to make a new rose.”

“Your grandfather is a chicken magician,” piped up The Fool, finally finished with his fish and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “The Mountain White, which gives us eggs in winter. Most chickens don’t lay when it is cold like the Morainian cold. But Jakerbald is a great cross-breeder. A hardier chicken than that the world has never seen.”

“It was Ursula’s rose growing and Jakerbald’s chickens that led Walterbald to his theory,” said Emmeur, “that all living things can be and have been transfigured by nature. That a certain rogue quality can become stronger in a creature down through generations. And if it is useful in how that creature deals with the changed nature of the world, it becomes part of that creature’s essence. If the earth were old enough, the creature could be changefigured again and again over hundreds and thousands of winters. It happens so slowly we never see it happening before us unless we are growing roses or raising chickens.

“Sometimes a new creature emerges, and maybe meets up with the old one, and they are two different creatures. Gricklegrack lore tells of many different creatures on the eastern side of the Mezzala Ice Mountains. Like people, like birds, but different in some way. Perhaps whoever, or whatever is on Nukeander’s longships are transkinked humans?”

“Or, maybe, we are transkinked from them,” offered The Fool.

“But how can the world be so old? My wangodmatist teachers say it is sixty-two hundred summers old,” insisted Stormy.

“The dark times happened. Whatever caused them, whoever was around before, during or after, godmatists and scientics alike agree, that they happened. I have seen the evidence with my own eyes. Far to the north a whole mountainside collapsed after an earthrumble. There are thousands of winters of white ice lying over what seems like a thin strip of black ice, which could be a few hundred winters thick. Below the black ice are thousands upon thousands of winters more of deeper gray-white ice. One can read it, like the rings in a tree. It was bogglingly too many layers to count.

“You humans tell tales of the Black Cat and his mountains.”

“You’ve seen the Black Cat?” quivered Stormy, suddenly remembering the talking cat from her dream.

“Yes. But an old proverb says that you will not find the Black Cat because …”

“… because he found the sun and changed his coat,” sang Stormy, finishing the line.

“I have seen the Black Cat. He was frozen dead in the Great Ice Wall. That does not mean he no longer exists. However, my fellow grickles and I have travelled the northlands for generations. We know of many strange beasts, but no black cat bigger than a castle cat. But ,” and here The Gricklegrack paused for effect, “… I have seen the White Cat. He is indeed a giant among beasts. I did not stick around long enough to see if he talked.”

“Could it have been an albino?” spouted The Fool. “Like the white man who sells white rabbits in the marketplaces of the south. Like a juggler I once knew. White with pink eyes.”

“No. There were a whole family of them, almost invisible against the snow. I saw their red eyes coming just as I took to the air. Just in time. A moment before I smelled them two moments after, they would have been upon me. It may be that, like the snowfoot hare, the black cat changed his coat for winter, and now because he lives on the fringes of the Ice Wall, he stayed white.”

“But you are black. You live up north. Why aren’t you the great white bird?” protested Stormy.

“Why aren’t I black and white, like the snow-capped eagle, or the magpie, or the white-walled dolphin? Most Morainians are fair skinned. Your mother, though not originally from Morainia, was fair skinned, like most northern peoples. But you, Stormy, have darker skin than either your father or your mother. Yet you look like both of them. Somewhere in your story, your mother’s father, or his mother’s mother, or someone along one of the lines, travelled from across the world. And part of the traveler is in you.”

Stormy was boggled by such wild thoughts. But as they came from The Gricklegrack, and were sprinkled with remembrances of her mother, she also felt strangely comforted.

“It is a mystery,” The Bird continued. “It may be that the wangodmatists are right, that the creator came and put man on the earth to teach the animals a lesson. If that were the case, however, then I would not be talking to you now. I have read the wangodmatist
Book of Life
and there is no talking bird in any of its myriad tales, before, during, or after the dark times. The problem is that some wangodmatists believe, or pretend to believe it really doesn’t matter which that their story is rigid as a metal pole. Worse, given the chance, they would use their book as a weapon to beat your father around the head with.”

Stormy winced, and the Fool gingerly put a reassuring arm around her shoulder.

“Tools over weapons, my dear girl,” said the Bird. “Ideas over ideologies. Like the wonderlook. It helps us see things in new ways. If we have the tools and the imagination to look at the world afresh, then we will never cease to be startled by what we find in it.”

Through a break in the trees, Stormy saw the first night star far above, and remembered that she had flown here. After everything that had happened was still happening before her very eyes she wondered,
how can the world ever look the same again?