My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry(69)
It was the Noween who brought the fears to the Land-of-Almost-Awake, in another of Granny’s tales, more eternities ago than anyone could really count. So long ago that at the time there were only five kingdoms, not six.
The Noween is a prehistoric monster that wants everything to happen immediately. Every time a child says “in a minute” or “later” or “I’m just going to . . .” the Noween bellows with furious force: “Nooo! IT HAS TO BE DONE NOOOW!” The Noween hates children, because children refuse to accept the Noween’s lie that time is linear. Children know that time is just an emotion, so “now” is a meaningless word to them, just as it was for Granny. George used to say that Granny wasn’t a time-optimist, she was a time-atheist, and the only religion she believed in was Do-It-Later-Buddhism.
The Noween brought the fears to the Land-of-Almost-Awake to catch children, because when a Noween gets hold of a child it engulfs the child’s future, leaving the victim helpless where it is, facing an entire life of eating now and sleeping now and tidying up right away. Never again can the child postpone something boring till later and do something fun in the meantime. All that’s left is now. A fate far worse than death, Granny always said, so the tale of the Noween started by clarifying that it hated fairy tales. Because nothing is better at making a child postpone something than a fairy tale. So one night the Noween slithered up Telling Mountain, the highest mountain peak in the Land-of-Almost-Awake, where it caused a massive landslide, which demolished the entire peak. Then it lay in wait in a dark cave. For Telling Mountain is the mountain the enphants have to climb in order to release the tales so they can glide over into the real world, and if the tales can’t leave Telling Mountain the whole kingdom of Miamas will suffocate, and then the whole Land-of-Almost-Awake will suffocate. For no stories can live without children listening to them.
When dawn came, all the bravest fighters from Mibatalos tried to climb the mountain and defeat the Noween, but no one managed it. Because the Noween was breeding fears in the caves. Fears need to be handled carefully, because threats just make them grow bigger. So every time a parent somewhere threatened a child, it worked as fertilizer. “Soon,” a child said somewhere, and then a parent yelled, “No, nooow! Or I’ll—” And, bang, another fear was hatched in one of the Noween’s caves.
When the warriors from Mibatalos came up the mountain, the Noween released the fears, and they immediately transformed themselves into each individual soldier’s worst nightmare. For all beings have a mortal fear, even the warriors from Mibatalos, and the air in the Land-of-Almost-Awake slowly grew thinner. Storytellers found it increasingly difficult to breathe.
(Elsa obviously interrupted Granny at this point because her whole thing about fears transforming themselves into what you are most afraid of was actually nicked from Harry Potter, because that’s how a boggart works. And then Granny had snorted and answered, “Maybe it’s that Harry muppet who nicked it from me?” And then Elsa had sneered, “Harry Potter doesn’t steal!” And then they had argued for quite a long time about that, and in the end Granny gave up and mumbled, “Fine, then! Forget the whole bloody thing! Fears don’t transform themselves, they just bite and try to scratch your eyes, are you SATISFIED now or what?” And then Elsa had left it there and they went on with the story. ) That’s when the two golden knights showed up. Everyone tried to warn them about riding up the mountain, but they didn’t listen, of course. Knights can be so damned obstinate. But when they came up the mountain and all the fears welled out of the caves, the golden knights didn’t fight. They didn’t yell and swear as other warriors would have done. Instead the knights did the only thing you can do with fears: they laughed at them. Loud, defiant laughter. And then all the fears were turned to stone, one by one.
Granny was fond of rounding off fairy tales with things being turned to stone because she wasn’t very good at endings. Elsa never complained, though. The Noween was obviously put in prison for an indeterminate length of time, which made it insanely angry. And the ruling council of the Land-of-Almost-Awake decided to appoint a small group of inhabitants from each of the kingdoms, warriors from Mibatalos and dream hunters from Mirevas and sorrow-keepers from Miploris and musicians from Mimovas and storytellers from Miamas, to keep guard over Telling Mountain. The stones of the fears were used to rebuild the peak higher than ever, and at the foot of the mountain the sixth kingdom was built: Miaudacas. And in the fields of Miaudacas, courage was cultivated, so that no one would ever again have to be afraid of the fears.
Or, well. That is what they did until, as Granny once told Elsa, after the harvest they took all the courage plants and made a special drink of them, and if you had some of it you became incredibly brave. And then Elsa did a bit of Googling and then she pointed out to Granny that it wasn’t a very responsible analogy to divulge to a child. And then Granny groaned, “Oh, right, okay, let’s say they don’t drink it, it’s just THERE, okay?!” So that’s the whole story of the two golden knights who defeated the fears. Granny told it every time Elsa was afraid of anything, and even though Elsa was often quite right in her criticism of Granny’s storytelling technique, it actually worked every time. She wasn’t at all as afraid afterwards.
The only thing the story never worked on was Granny’s fear of death. And now it wasn’t working on Elsa either. Because not even fairy tales defeat shadows.