Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback(19)

Yannis said, “For example, by letting his spirit free from his body.”

“Just so.”

Next a silence fell. It came down the chimney and through the two little windows with the shutters, and sat with the witch and the soldier, timing them on its endless noiseless fingers to see how much longer they would be at their council.

At last Yannis said, “Two secrets, then. What is the third?”

“I said already, son, you must find the third secret yourself. But some call it Courage and others Arrogance, and some blind fool Madness. You must act on what I have taught you, that is the third secret. Now, go milk my goat, who has fallen in heart’s-ease for you, and bid my chicks goodbye. Then you shall set off again, if you’re to reach the city gate by sundown.”

Yannis stood like a man distracted. Then he said, “Either you want my death, and so have done this. Or else you mean me to prosper.

But—if that—then why? I’m nothing to you.”

? 69 ?

? Below the Sun Beneath ?

“For sure perhaps, or not,” she said. “But I have been something for you. For even when you were a warrior in the wars, you have cared for me.”

“But Missus—never ever did I meet you before . . . ”

“Not me that speaks these words, but so many others— womankind.

My sisters, my mothers, my daughters, the daughters of my

daughters—all of those. For the old woman and the young woman, they the rest of the soldiers might have killed for uselessness, or put to a use that would have killed them too. Those women that you helped, that you defended, and hid, that you gave up your food to. Women young and old are dear to you, and you in the midst of turmoiled men, blood-crazed and heartless, have where able been a savior to my kind. And so, also to me, Yannis, my son.”

Then Yannis hung his head, lost for words.

But she, as she turned in at the leather curtain, said to him, lightly, “I will after all tell you a third thing. It is how the old beast of a king knows his daughters are at dangerous work.”

Yannis shook himself. “How, then?”

“By the soles of their feet. ”





II


They used a different language in the city—in their buildings, their gestures. While their speech contained foreign phrases, and occasional passages in a tongue that was so unlike anything in the regions round about that it took him time to fathom it. However, he came to realize he had heard snatches of it before. It was an ancient and classic linguistic of which, racking his brains, he saw he had kept a smattering.

Most of the city was of stone. But near the center—where a wide, paved road ran through—the architecture was, like the second language, ancient, and some even ruinous, yet built up again. Tall, wide-girthed pillars, high as five houses stood on each other’s heads.

Large gateways opened on terraced yards. A granite fountain played.

Yannis was surprised. But the metropolis had been there, evidently, far longer than those who possessed it now.

? 70 ?

? Tanith Lee ?

On a hill that rose beyond a treed parkland, a graveyard was visible, whose structures were domed like the cots of bees. He had never seen such tombs before. They filled him with a vague yet constant uncomfortable puzzlement. He did not often turn their way. And he thought this reaction too seemed apparent with the city people. Where they could, they did not look into the west.

The sun set behind the hill about an hour after he had got in the gates—he had made very good speed. But it was darkly overcast, and the sunset only flickered like a snakeskin before vanishing.

How strange their manners here.

The innkeeper that he asked for chances of work, or shelter, answered instantly, in a low, foreboding tone, “Go to the palace.

There’s nowhere else.”

“The palace . . . ”

“I said. Go there. Now off with you or I call the dogs.”

And next, at a well in the strengthening rain, the women who cried out in various voices, “Off—go on, you. Get work at the palace!

Get your bed there. There’s nowhere else.”

And after these—who he took for mad persons—the same type of reply, often in rougher form, as with the blacksmith in the alley who flung an iron bar.

All told, a smother of inimical elements seemed to lie over the old city, the citizens hurrying below with heads down. Maybe only the weather, the coming dark. Few spoke to any, once the sun went. It was not Yannis alone who got their colder shoulder.