Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback by Tanith Lee Read Free Book Online Page A

she wonders (not entirely idly) whether she should really
    be called the “Hans Jewish Andersen of America.” She has written
    a lot of fairy tale poetry as well, and has been named both Grand
    Master of the World Fantasy Convention and Grand Master of the
    Science Fiction Poetry Association. She has won two Nebulas for her
    short stories, and a bunch of other awards, including six honorary
    doctorates. One of her awards, the Skylark, given by the New England Science Fiction Association, set her good coat on fire, a warning
    about faunching after shiny things that she has not forgotten.
    ••
    • 56 •

    •
    My lovely green-eyed Mother told me many traditional fairy
    tales when I was an infant, following these up with her own
    wily re tellings.
    The influence of these can be seen in my children’s collection
    ( Princess Hynchatti ) published in the 1970s but written by me in the 1960s. In these stories are such things as a prince who falls in love with the witch helping him to win the difficult, task-setting princess, and the prince who drives a swan nearly crazy by repeatedly kissing
    it—wrongly—sure it is a princess under a spell . . .
    Evidently such magical twists still obsess me.
    Tanith Lee
    •
    • 59 •
    • 60 •

Below the Sun Beneath
    •
    Tanith Lee

I
    Life drove him into death, so it had seemed. It was the choice
    between dying—or living and causing death, to be corpse or corpse-maker. Perhaps Death’s own dilemma.
    He had joined the army of the king because he was starving.
    Three days without eating had sent him there; little other work that winter. And the war-camp was bursting with food; you could see it
    from the road: oxen roasting over the big fire and loaves piled high and barrels of ale lined up, all a lush tapestry of red and brown and golden plenty, down in the trampled, white-snowed valley. He had
    fought his first battle with a full belly, and survived to fill it again and again.
    Five years after that. And then another five. Roughly every sixth
    year, the urge came in him to do something else. But he had mislaid
    family, and even love. Had given up himself and found this other
    man that now he had become: Yannis the soldier.
    And five years more. And nearly five . . .
    The horse kicked and fell on him just as the nineteenth year was
    turning towards the twentieth. Poor creature, shot with an arrow it
    was dying, going down, the kick one last instinctive protest, maybe.
    But the blow, and the collapsing weight smashed the lower bones
    in his right leg, and he lost it up to the knee. All but its spirit, which still ached him inside the wooden stump. Yet what more could he
    • 61 •
    • Below the Sun Beneath •
    expect? He had put himself in the way of violences, and so finally
    received them.
    The army paid him off.
    The coins, red and brown, but not golden, lasted two months.
    By the maturing of a new winter he was alone again, unemployed
    and wandering, and for three days he had not eaten anything but
    grass.
    Yannis heard the strange rumour at the inn by the forest’s edge. The innwife had taken pity on him. “My brother lost a leg like you. Proper old cripple he is now,” she had cheerily announced. Yet she gave
    Yannis a meal and a tin cup of beer. There was a fire as well, and not much custom that evening. “Sleep on a bench, if you want. But best
    get off before sun-up. My husband’s back tomorrow and if he catches
    you, we’ll both get the side of his fist.”
    As the cold moon rose and the frosts dropped from it like chains
    to bind the earth, Yannis heard wolves howling along the black
    avenues of the pine trees.
    He dozed later, but then a group of men came in, travellers, he
    thought. He listened perforce to their talk, making out he could not hear, in case.
    “It would seem he’s scared sick of them, afraid to ask . Even to pry.”
    “That’s crazy talk. How can he be? He’s a king . And what are they?
    A bunch of girls. No. There’s more to it than