Once Upon a Summer Day (2 page)

And again I thank the other members of the Tanque Wordies Writers’ Group—Diane, Katherine, John—for your encouragement throughout the writing of this Faery tale.

And thank you, Christine J. McDowell, for your help with the French language. (I would add, though, that any errors in usage are entirely mine. Of course, the errors in English are mine as well.)

Thank you, James C. Grams, for your knowledge of wines and the patter of sommeliers, some of which appears herein.

Lastly, thank you, Grandmaster Tal Shaked, for allowing me to use your chess (échecs) problem in Chapter 37. (A fuller explanation of that specific puzzle can be found in the Afterword.)

A
re fairy tales but relics of altogether greater stories that A once might have been told, pale remnants of much longer, even epic sagas? To me it seems a possibility. Oh, perhaps not
all
fairy tales are faint echoes of once-mighty shouts, but I think
some
of them surely must be.

You see, what many contend is that most fairy tales are stories from way-back-when, tales that were orally passed from person to person, and so they were unadorned and short and rather easy to remember. And many of them simply were to entertain, while others had a point to be made, whether it be a moral or a truism.

Some of the most beloved stories, those most likely to be passed from folk to folk, were co-opted by religion, and the heroes and heroines were said to be part of a particular religious group, whereas the villains were part of the old order—witches, goblins, trolls, and the like. Hence, these tales were used by whatever religion seized upon them to foster goodwill or belief, or to recruit. And some of the tales were shortened again to do this, or so I do believe.

But as I said in the foreword of another book
(Once Upon a Winter’s Night),
back when bards and poets and minstrels and the like sat in castles or in hovels or in mansions or by campfires, or entertained patrons as they travelled along the way, surely the original tales were much longer, when told by these “professional” storytellers, than the tellings of the less skilled. And so the bards embellished their tales with many more wondrous encounters than the later, altered—shortened—versions would have them be. After all, in the case of a bardic storyteller, she or he would hold audiences enthralled for long whiles with accounts of love and seduction and copious sex and bloody fights and knights and witches and dragons and ogres and giants and other fantastic beings all littering the landscape of the tale as the hero or heroine struggled on.

And so, I believe it is entirely possible that many of these splendid bardic sagas were severely shortened as the number of bards dwindled, and the people who were left to remember and pass on the tales simply didn’t have the oratory skills to tell stories of epic scope. And so they grew shorter and shorter over time as particular portions of a tale went missing bit by bit, until they were pared down to the point where practically
anybody
could tell the story.

For example, were some great bard to tell a grand and glorious tale of the scope of, say,
The Iliad,
or
The Odyssey,
or even
The Lord of the Rings,
and were any one of these orally passed down through the ages from person to person, and if those passing on the tale were “common” folk, I believe the story would have dwindled a bit with each telling. And then, if one far-after day some Grimm brothers decided to write the beloved story down as it had come to be told, it might turn out to be an eight-page fairy tale.

Yes, I admit that’s quite extreme, but I simply use it to make a point: that oral tales are difficult to pass on unless they are simple and short and rather easy to recall, or unless the people involved have phenomenal memories.

Thank heavens for writing, eh?

Don’t misunderstand me; I am not putting down the fairy tales we’ve all come to cherish. I love them dearly: from the simplest “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” and other tellings I heard from my mother and grandmother to the Andrew Lang collections—
The Crimson Fairy Book, The Red Fairy Book, The Pink Fairy Book,
and on through
Orange, Yellow, Olive, Green, Lilac, Blue, Violet, Grey,
and
Brown:
i.e., the spectrum—to the works of more modern writers, such as Dunsany and White and Tolkien (arguably, they were fairy-tale writers though their works are labeled fantasy these days), to some of the works of current writers.

What I am saying instead is I’ve always felt that many wonders were lost by what I think might be the shortening and altering of each age-old folk and fairy tale to fit a different song from that which the old bards and my Celtic ancestors would sing.

And so, a few years past, I wrote my first “restored” fairy tale (
Once Upon a Winter’s Night
) to tell (in a traditional manner and style) one of the time-honored tales as I think it once might have been told. And now here I am again with
Once Upon a Summer Day,
my second “restored” fairy tale. And once more I have chosen a tale that not only is one of my favorites, but is a favorite of people around the world.

And since it is a romance in addition to being an adventure, once more you will find French words sprinkled throughout to represent the “Old Tongue.”

By the bye, in my version of
The Blue Fairy Book
this story is but six pages long; the version of the Brothers Grimm is even shorter and probably better known. I thought that much too brief, and, as is apparent, I did lengthen it a bit. But then again, I claim that I am telling the “real” story, and who is to say I am not?

Dennis L. McKiernan
Tucson, Arizona, 2005

T
here is a place in Faery where eternal summer lies upon the land; it is a region of forests and fields, of vales and clearings, of streams and rivers and other such ’scapes, where soft summer breezes flow across the weald, though occasionally towering thunderstorms fill the afternoon skies and rain sweeps o’er all. How such a place can be—endless summer—is quite mysterious; nevertheless it is so.

Separated from this magical realm by a great wall of twilight is another equally enigmatic domain, a region graced by eternal autumn, and here it is that crops afield remain ever for the reaping, and vines are overburdened with their largesse, and trees bear an abundance ripe for the plucking, and the ground holds rootstock and tubers for the taking. Yet no matter how often a harvest is gathered, when one isn’t looking the bounty somehow replaces itself.

Likewise, lying past this realm, beyond another great wall of half-light, there stands a land of eternal winter, where snow ever lies on the ground and ice clads the sleeping trees and covers the still meres or, in thin sheets, encroaches upon the edges of swift-running streams, and the stars at night glimmer in crystalline skies.

And farther on and past yet another twilight border lies a place of eternal springtime, where everlasting meltwater trickles across the ’scape, and trees are abud and blossoms abloom, where birds call for mates and beetles crawl through decaying leaves and mushrooms push up through soft loam, and where other such signs of a world coming awake manifest themselves in the gentle, cool breezes and delicate rains.

These four provinces are the Summerwood and Autumnwood and Winterwood and Springwood, magical regions in the twilit world of Faery. They by no means make up the whole of that mystical realm. Oh, no, for it is an endless place, with uncounted domains all separated from one another by looming walls of shadowlight, and with Faery itself separated from the common world by twilight as well.

But as to the four regions, a prince or a princess rules each—Alain, Liaze, Borel, and Céleste—brothers and sisters, Alain and Borel respectively having reign o’er the Summer- and Winterwoods; Liaze and Céleste, the Autumn- and Springwoods.

They got along well, these siblings, and seldom did trouble come their way. Oh, there was that difficulty with the disappearance of Lord Valeray and Lady Saissa, and the two curses leveled upon Prince Alain, but Camille had come along to resolve those problems, and everything had then seemed well in order, at least for a while, though there yet was a portent of darker days to come. But at that time joy lay upon the land, with Camille and Alain betrothed, the banns posted, and preparations for the wedding under way.

Yes, all was well in these four realms, or so it seemed.

But then . . .

. . . Once upon a summer day . . .

 

Out in the gazebo upon the wide lawn of Summerwood Manor, Borel sat and watched four black swans majestically gliding upon the wide, slow-running stream, the graceful birds keeping a wary eye upon the Wolves lying asleep upon the sward, all but the one who kept watch and eyed the swans just as warily, though a predatory gleam seemed to glint in the eye of the grey hunter. A balmy breeze stirred the silver of Borel’s shoulder-length locks as he leaned back in the wickerwork chair, his long legs stretched out, his soft-booted feet resting upon a padded footstool. From somewhere nearby came the hum of bees buzzing among garden blooms, and lazy clouds towered aloft in the cerulean sky and cast their quiet shadows down.

How peaceful it was on this gentle day, and Borel closed his ice-blue eyes, just for the nonce, his mind drifting along with the building clouds. How long he remained thus, he could not say, yet there came a muted sound of . . . he knew not what.

Borel frowned and opened his eyes, and then sat bolt upright, for the gazebo was changing, the floor turning to flag, the open sides to stone walls, even as he looked on in amaze. And beyond the windows of the now-stone chamber a seemingly endless number of free-floating daggers filled the air and blocked the light and cast a gloom o’er all.

Opposite from him in the dimness stood a slim young lady, as if in meditation or prayer. Her head was bowed and her long golden hair fell down across the white bodice of her flowing dress. Her delicate hands were clasped together just below her waist. Across her eyes lay a black, gauzy cloth or mayhap a band of shadow, as of a dark blindfold, or so it appeared.

And the lady quietly wept.

Borel stood and stepped closer. “Demoiselle, why do you weep?”

“Aidez-moi,”
she said, her voice but a whisper.
“Aidez-moi.”

Borel jerked awake and found he was on his feet, and the wind blew hard and moaned through the filigree, the late-afternoon sky dark with the oncoming storm. Then the summer rain came thundering down, and Borel’s Wolves took shelter within. And while black swans sought refuge in the overhang of a streamside willow, Borel looked about, seeking . . . seeking, but not finding, even though it seemed there came to his ears an ephemeral echo of a desperate whisper flying past on the weeping air:
“Aidez-moi.”

“I
tell you, Alain, it seemed quite real.”

Alain sighed. “A stone chamber surrounded by daggers and a blindfolded, golden-haired damsel within?”

Borel nodded. “And she needs help.”

They sat in the game room at a small table on which lay an échiquier, the pieces arrayed before them, the brothers only a few moves into the match, for, after Borel had unnecessarily lost one of his hierophants, Alain had asked what was it that distracted him, and Borel had told of the vision.

From somewhere outside came the rumble of distant thunder as the remains of the storm moved away.

“And you think it was a visitation and not a common dream?” asked Alain.

“It seemed totally real at the time.”

“And your Wolves . . . ?”

“They were outside the gazebo and sensed nought, or so I deem, for they were not agitated.”

“Hmm . . .” mused Alain, running his fingers through his dark hair. “One thing is certain: the gazebo did not remain stone, and perhaps never was. I think if there was a visitation, it was you going to her rather than the other way ’round.”