Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 51, page 12
It was terrible to wait, because the grass might be growing weaker just to grow stronger again in a little while. Perhaps she was missing her last chance to free the child. But the queen thought of how you might lift and tug and tear—and have in your arms a baby bleeding from ten thousand wounds. The queen did not believe in the “malign sorcerer” for whom all the king’s men were hunting. She was afraid of the grass itself. It was alive; it had, if not a mind, then at least a will of its own. It had taken her baby for its own inscrutable reasons: and it would not willingly let her go.
She said nothing. No one else noticed that the grass was fading. In the middle of the night she came into the nursery very quietly. The nurse was drowsing in her chair. What of the child? From the cradle came the very faintest of sounds, a breath of a sigh. The queen looked down at her baby. Uprooted, shut away from the sunlight and the air, in spite of the earth that had been carried with it, the grass was withering. Already the blades were turning yellow and wan, like something grown in darkness under a stone. The princess lay still. Her eyes were open. She looked up at her mother, patiently: quietly accepting the suffering that was marked on her face, with no more outcry than the grass itself … which was also dying.
The queen saw that it was too late. Whatever made the baby a separate being, separate from the tendrils that bound her, was lost. She was the grass. Uprooted, she would wilt and fail and die. The queen stooped and picked up the whole bundle in her arms. She was so blinded by tears that she stumbled and several times almost fell as she hurried down the stairs, through the great, still, dark rooms of the palace, and across the gardens to the apple orchard. There, standing out dark in the moonlight, was the small ragged trench where the turf had been cut away. The queen knelt beside it. She looked down into the pale, dreaming face of her lost daughter. There was no longer the faintest hint of recognition in the princess’s open eyes, or of any human expression. She put the bundle into the hole, and scratched and worked the soil until she had done all she could to make the plot whole again. Then she went to the gardener’s potting shed and came back with a can of water. It was as she sprinkled water indiscriminately over baby and grass and earth that she understood the full strength of the enchantment. For the baby stirred, and started to laugh. Looking up through the moonlit drops, she smiled as if she was greeting her mother. But it was obvious that she did not see the queen at all. As surely as Persephone, overtaken in the flowery fields of Sicily by the king of the dead, this child had been kidnapped by the powers of the earth. She was gone, she had been stolen out of the human world … maybe forever.
• • • •
It was a tough fight, but in the end they let the queen have her way. The king thought the whole thing made him look a fool. Within hours, the conjurors and the alchemists and the amateur heroes would be pouring into the palace grounds, eager to do battle against this wicked spell. Now the queen wanted him to cancel everything, and let well alone. The king said he couldn’t see anything “well” about it. He had a six-month-old daughter staked out like a cucumber vine in his backyard, and how could it possibly make sense to leave a situation like that undisturbed? Luckily for the queen, the bulk of magical opinion soon came over onto her side. The professionals felt that the kind of power that would be needed to break the bond between grass and baby would certainly break the baby, too. The theory that the baby herself had done it appeared, and quickly gained ground. They decided it must be necessary for the princess to be enchanted like this, so that some prince (whose identity would emerge in time) could fulfil his destiny by freeing her. “Wait until she’s older—” was the general run of advice. “Let Nature take its course.” The queen found that these wise counsellors were reluctant to look her in the eye, as they took their fees. She felt that she understood their message only too well. But the king was satisfied.
The first thing he did, when he had been forced to wind up his rescue operation, was to assemble a team of architects, and get them designing the daintiest little summer-house, an orchard palace to be built around the enchanted apple tree … The queen was very sorry to do it, but she had to stop him again. She knew the poor man was doing his best, and that his rather inarticulate nature found relief in action, even the most futile action. But she also knew that his dainty arbour would kill her daughter. The baby’s nature was one with the grass, and neither wind nor rain nor snow nor frost must be taken from her. She must live the life of the earth to which she was bound, or no life at all.
“What do you want me to do?” cried the king. “Go down there and tramp on her?”
“Of course not,” replied the queen. “It would upset you horribly to do that. But she wouldn’t mind, not if you trampled her into mud. She’d be back, as soon as you gave her a chance. That’s what you must understand. She is the grass. Oh, I hope you’ll be ready—”
“Ready for what?”
“When winter comes.”
• • • •
Winter came, and under the apple tree the child sickened and faded, as the queen knew she must. The king bore it very well, except for one frosty day when he was caught creeping down to the orchard, unrolling an extension lead behind him, an old one-bar electric fire hidden under his robe. But the queen’s persistence was rewarded in the spring, when the child bloomed like the loveliest of April days. All through the summer, she was well and strong; all through the winter, she faded: and so it went on, through many winters and many springs. As well as thriving and failing with the changes of the season, the princess grew with real human growth, from a baby into a girl. The grass grew with her, so that her lengthening limbs made a green girl-shaped mound under the tree—a kind of horizontal topiary. Though she never spoke, and grew entirely silent before she was a year old, her eyes were alive. They opened to the daylight, closed at night, and seemed to smile at sun and rain. Some people said she was lovely—as far as you could see. Then, just as the girl in the orchard reached “marriageable age,” the queen died. She was still young. But she had spent so many hours sitting out under that apple tree, in all weathers—and perhaps she wasn’t very strong to begin with: anyway, she died. It happened suddenly. A cold turned in a day or two into fever and inflammation of the lungs. The queen hardly knew she was ill before she found herself on her deathbed, comforting her weeping husband.
“Don’t be sad. My daughter has taught me. I am not afraid to lie down in the earth. I believe she is happy, maybe happier than any of us. But my dear …”
Afterwards, the king had a sneaking conviction that if she had managed to talk any more, she would have forced him to promise to leave their daughter in peace. But luckily she didn’t. So, after a decent interval, he began his preparations.
The court physician was called to a consultation in the orchard, with the king, the court magician, and a crowd of other functionaries. He gave the grass princess as thorough an examination as was possible, and told her father, looking very grave, that even if she was released, there was little chance that his daughter could ever “live a normal life.”
“And if one of these heroes of yours could somehow free her,” said the great man. “Would he want her? Have you considered that she must be horribly scarred?”
“But it is magic,” protested the king. “When the spell is broken, everything will be fine.”
“There are some enchantments,” declared the physician, “that aren’t worth breaking.”
But the court magician supported the king. Years of doing nothing about a bad magical situation on his own patch had galled his pride. He had always secretly resented the queen’s triumph, and he and the physician were old rivals. He saw the grass princess problem as opportunity—not for himself, of course, but for the prestige of his discipline.
He sighed—a wise and reluctant sigh that put the blame for anything that went wrong firmly on his master’s shoulders. “I don’t think it is possible,” he declared, “for us to accept the advice of medical science. Though we take these considerations seriously, we have here to do with a matter of destiny—a concept that ‘medical science’ cannot, with all due respect, fully understand. By my art, I have learned that the princess must and will be freed … by one bound as she is bound, and scarred as she is scarred …”
“What?” spluttered the king. He stared at the magician accusingly. He had thought the two of them were agreed. There was nothing really wrong with the princess, no reason why she should not make a complete recovery—
“Ah—” The sage blinked. He had not meant to say that. Sometimes these things happened to him. It was one of the disadvantages of his profession. Just occasionally, one was not altogether in control. He corrected himself hurriedly. “Metaphorically speaking, that is. Bound and scarred as—er—a metaphor for the heroic experience.”
The physician snorted. “I thought we were concerned about the girl, not the ‘destiny’ of some unknown youth. Well, I wash my hands of the whole affair”. He stalked off, and the consultation was over. Magic had won the day.
• • • •
Alas, it seemed that the doctor’s pessimistic estimate was shared by the eligible young princes and nobles around about. There were ten or twenty young men who should have been the princess’s suitors—some rich and handsome, some not so rich or not so handsome, all of them eager to make a good marriage. But they were not interested in the mound of grass in the king’s orchard. The king became uncomfortably aware that his daughter had become a joke amongst his neighbours’ sons. If you suggested to anyone that he should try his hand at “the grass princess job,” it meant you considered his prospects to be in very poor shape indeed.
• • • •
There came a grey, cold day in November, two years after the death of the queen. Under the old apple tree, the princess lay wan and haggard and worn. The shape of her in the grass didn’t change with the seasons now that she was grown, but in winter, her face, what you could see of it, looked like that of a sick little old woman. It was her birthday; she was eighteen years old. A young man rode into the gardens, dressed for hunting. His name was Damien. He was the same age as the princess—a rather dishevelled young man, with a look of angry unconcern. He had come dressed up for this quest, his manner seemed to say, but that didn’t mean he took it seriously. He left his horse and came down between the trees. He had been sent here from the palace office, but he surveyed the scene in bewilderment. There was something distinctly macabre going on. Two middle-aged noblemen and a pack of servants were cavorting around the dead body of an old woman … who appeared to have been long buried, except that her face and one withered hand had been dug up. Somebody was tying balloons in the branches above this half-exhumed corpse—
“Excuse me. Can you direct me to—”
They didn’t hear him. The whole crew had suddenly burst out singing: “Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday to you!” Suddenly the prince realised where he was and what he was seeing. He had not imagined it would be like this. Evil enchantment had a distant, romantic sound … He decided to leave, quietly.
“Hey!” yelled one of the middle-aged men. “Hey—you there, wait!”
He recognised the king. The other gentleman must be the court magician. The king was a friend of the prince’s family. He couldn’t escape now. He bowed, awkwardly.
“Hail, sire. I have come, if you will permit me, to attempt to free your daughter from foul enchantment, and thereby win her hand in marriage.”
No one spoke. A manservant who was holding a pink iced cake on a tray coughed. The princess’s nursemaids gaped at him, making him feel extremely self-conscious. Damien, who had few friends and was oblivious to gossip, did not know that he was the only suitor who had taken up the king’s well-publicised offer. He was unnerved by this reaction.
“So, what do I do? Do I kiss her, or what?”
He saw that there was something else showing besides a withered face. The princess’s hand lay by her grass-grown side. The fingers were bare; they looked like thin and sallow grass roots. He guessed he must take her hand. The king and the magician were still staring, as if affronted by his presence. He stepped forward and went on one knee …
“No, no, no—”
One of the servants was pulling him to his feet. The two older men moved, making a barrier between the grass princess and her suitor. They were dressed identically, in sober suits under dark court robes. Their eyes were smug and old. He didn’t even want the princess: but there they stood, age and authority incarnate, between Damien and all the world’s prizes …
“I see,” he said angrily. “I’m not good enough. Fine. I’ll be on my way.”
“Ah—” The king suddenly produced a smile. “Not so, ah, not so fast, young man. You see there are certain—ahem—requirements. You can’t expect to win the hand of an enchanted princess just like that!” He laughed lightly. “You’d better come to my magician’s office.”
The magician had devised a list of tasks. He had spent time on this, and performed several magical operations, in his dark tower away in the remote fastness of the West Wing. He was proud of his list. He felt that it reflected the importance of the grass princess affair, in the annals of magic, and that the success of the hero would also, and rightly, be the crowning achievement of his own career. Prince Damien studied the list of magical treasures that he had to secure—beg, borrow, or steal—while the king and the magician explained to him how he would be welcomed when he’d completed his tasks. There would be a newly devised and very impressive ceremony. He would be escorted in state to the orchard, where he would take the princess by the hand—and she would rise from the grass, a beautiful maiden, ready to be his bride. He must, of course, agree to complete confidentiality. No interviews, no publications except with the express permission of the palace Office of Magic.
Damien wasn’t paying attention. The first item he had to deliver was the silver sword of the Divine Huntress. His spirits rose. He signed everything they put in front of him. There were handshakes all round. The king and the magician returned to the birthday party and Damien rode away, full of hope and determination.
“Unfortunate case,” said the king, when the boy was gone. “Young Damien. The mother ran off, you know, back to her own people under the hill. But the son’s completely human. One of those things, genetics, they call it, I believe: It can play tricks. So he ended up with his father, who married again. There’s a pack of new kiddies, new wife can’t stand the boy of course, and his father is doing his best to fix the succession. It would be a funny thing if he—well, you know. I had a soft spot for his mother … but that was long ago.”
The magician nodded thoughtfully, but his eyes gleamed. “Fairy blood!” he remarked. “Things are falling out very well for me … Ah, for the princess, I meant, of course.”
Damien knew exactly what to do. The Divine Huntress is another name for the goddess of the moon. The silver sword would have to be a moonbeam. For any other young prince or sprig of the nobility, the first task might have been impossible. Moonbeams tend to slip through one’s fingers, and it was clear that the “sword” had to be a functional weapon. For once, his mixed race was going to be an advantage. His mother had lost interest in him, the way those people tend to lose interest in fleeting human affairs. But he still had friends (as far as those people can be called friends) under the hill. He rode straight away to Wild Swan Lake, where his mother and his father had first met, one midsummer dusk long ago. There, on a night of the full moon, he tapped on a certain door (invisible to wholly human eyes) in the hillside that rises from that lakeshore. He was not allowed beyond the threshold. He would never be allowed beyond, unless he consented to give up his humanity, but he spoke to someone there. The first price demanded was a strip of skin the whole length of him, but he beat the fairy haggler down. He gave up a strip of skin from around his wrist, and didn’t ask—he thought he’d rather not ask—what it was for. In return he was given a black, polished tree root shaped like the hilt of a sword, and a long sheath of birch bark, sewn with spider thread. Then he knelt at the water margin and touched the hilt to one glimmering silver ripple, which slipped into the bark sheath as if they’d been made for each other.
He returned to the palace a month after he’d set out. His wrist was painful, and there’d be a scar there for life, but he was feeling confident. The king and the magician received him in strict privacy. In the West Wing, in the magician’s comfortable study on the floor below his magical laboratory, they dimmed the lights. The magician took the fairy sheath and, slowly, drew out the sword of the Divine Huntress. The bright scalloped blade shone like silver. He laughed in delight. “Excellent! A triumph of my art—!”
“Well done!” said the king.
Damien noted that somehow his achievement had become the old conjuror’s “triumph.” But it didn’t matter. He had questing-fever now. He set out at once for the uttermost ocean, where he was to mine the yellow foam for a bushel of mer-gold. This transaction was not so simple. The Smith of the Uttermost Ocean lived in the galleries of a great cavern of green serpentine, that was half-filled by the tide twice a day, and only visited by one questing hero or so in a generation. He was a lonely and embittered minor divinity, and he insisted that Damien had to work for his gold, as well as pay for it. The Smith knew how to distil many precious and useful ores from the sea. He was an exacting taskmaster and he treated Damien like an apprentice. Damien spent two years in the damp, snakestone gloom, the roar of the waves a constant booming in his ears, learning more than he had ever desired to know about the trade of smithying and the inner nature of metals. Time and again, he thought he’d completed his task, and then the Smith, who complained that the terms of the engagement were vague, changed his mind as to what quantity of gold constituted “a bushel.” But at last, he managed to escape with his prize.
