Briar Rose (2 page)

novels of the Fairy Tale series, published by Ace Books, Steven I used a folk tale from his Hungarian heritage to mirror a contet rary story of artists and courage and the act of creation in The the Moon, and the Stars. In Jack the Giant-Killer, Charles de Lint cr(

a faery world in the shadows of a modern Canadian city; as the Latin American "magic realists,"

the fantasy in this novel us much about the real world and one young woman's confr tion with the secret places in her own heart. In The Nightingale, Dalkey turned Hans Christian Andersen's classic story into a h ing historical novel set in ancient Japan, a tale of love and magi(

poetry which evokes the life of the Japanese imperial court as c as did the diaries of the imperial
Page 6

court ladies, written so r centuries ago.

With the fourth volume, the Fairy Tale series moved tc

Books. In Snow White and Rose Red, Patricia Wrede move(

Grimm fairy tale into an Elizabethan milieu, creating a charmin romantic novel set in the enchanted forest of an England that was. And in Tam Lin, Pamela Dean transformed the Scots fair and folk-ballad of that name into a novel of knowledge and d set at a modern midwestern university.

The novel you hold in your hands, the sixth in the Fairy Series, is by one of the most acclaimed makers of modqn m6

Jane Yolen. Yolen has taken the German tale Briar Rose, also k Briar Rose

13

as Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, and turned it into a contemporary tale both dark and bright, both terrifying and inspiring. It is an honor to include this excellent novel by one of my all-time favorite writers in our ongoing Fairy Tale series.

We have more Fairy Tales in the works for you by some of the most talented writers working today, re-telling the world's most beloved tales in editions lovingly designed (by the award-winning

Boston artist/illustrator Thomas Canty) as all good fairy tales should be.

I hope you enjoy them all.

-TERRI WINDLING

Editor, The Fairy Tale Series

Devon, England, and

Tucson, Arizona, 1992

HOME

But far above these as a source of myth, are the half-heard scraps of gossip, from parent to parent, neighbour to neighbour as they whisper across a fence. A hint, a carefully garbled disclosure, a silencing flnger at the lip, and the tales, like rain clouds, gather. It could almost be said that a listening child has no need to read the tales. A keen ear and the power to dissemble-he must not seem to be listening-are all that is required.

-P.L. Travers: About the Sleeping Beauty

Everyone likes a fairy story because everyone wants things to come right in the end And even though to tell a story is to tell some kind

Of untruth, one often suspects that what seems to be untruth is really a hidden truth.

-Ralph Harper.- The Sleeping Beauty

Page 7

"Gemma, tell your story again," Shana begged, putting her arms around her grandmother and breathing in that special smell of talcum and lemon that seemed to belong only to her.

'Which one?" Gemma asked, chopping the apples in the wooden bowl.

"You know," Shana said.

'Yes-you know, " Sylvia added. Like her sister, she crowded close and let the talcum-lemon smell almost overwhelm her.

Baby Rebecca in the high chair banged her spoon against the cup. "Seepin Boot. Seepin Boot. "

Shana made a face. Even when she had been little herself she'd never spoken in baby talk. Only full sentences; her mother swore to it.

"Seepin Boot. " Gemma smiled. "All right. "

The sisters nodded and stepped back a pace each, as if the story demanded their grandmother's face, not just her scent.

"Once upon a time," Gemma began, the older two girls whispering the opening with her, "which is all times and no times but not the very best of times, there was a castle. And in it lived a king who wanted nothing more in the world than a child.

" 'From your lips to God's ears/ the queen said each time the king talked of a baby. But the years went by and they had none."

"None, none, none," sang out Rebecca, banging her spoon on the cup with each word.

Briar Rose

17

"Shut up!" Shana and Sylvia said in unison.

Gemma took the spoon and cup away and gave Rebecca a slice of apple instead. "Now one day, flnally and at last and about time, the queen went to bed and gave birth to a baby girl with a crown of red hair. " Gemma touched her own hair in which strands of white curled around the red like barbed wire. "The child's face was as beautiful as a wildflower and so the king named her

. . . "

"Briar Rose, " Sylvia and Shana breathed.

"Briar Rose, " repeated Rebecca, only not nearly so clearly, her mouth being quite full of apple.

It was spring, or at least so the calendar said, but a soft snow hz been falling all night, coating the Holyoke streets. The Lynx labon up the slippery hill, chugging instead of purring like the Merced they'd had to leave behind in the shop.

"I told Mother that Mercedes was a lemon, but she on laughed," Sylvia said, playing once again with her gold-shrin earring. She'd already worried the right one off and was at work the left.

"And I told her Father would have done a damned sight bett taking a mistress instead of a Mercedes for his midlife crisis. For o:

thing, they're cheaper!" Shana always had to get off the better lin(

The two of them smiled at each other, their quick tongues, da hair, wide-set eyes, and high
Page 8

cheekbones marking them as twii though actually they were eighteen months apart.

Becca, the youngest, smiled at them both, but she was not p, of their magic circle and never had been. Guiding the sputtering lit beige car up the last hill, she forced it through an attempted spin-C

with a sure hand.

"Come on, Rocinante," she murmured. The car had already bE

very secondhand when she bought it and Rocinante was the oi name that presented itself at the time. She never felt right ab(

Briar Rose

19

owning something that performed for her without giving it a name.

"Come on, baby, up and over."

The Lynx managed to crest the hill and Becca turned it expertly to the right on Cabot Street, coasting to a stop in front of the three-story brick nursing home.

"Here we are," she said, as much to the car as to her sisters.

Sylvia and Shana got out quickly, volleying curses at the snow, and walked in briskly. They didn't even stop to stomp off the wet, clinging snow from their Ferragamo boots.

After locking all four doors of the car, Becca followed. At the last minute she lifted her face to the snow and tongued in some snow-flakes. Magic, she thought. Even when she had to drive in it, snow had always held some kind of magic. Especially this year, with a drought forecast on every channel.

There was a musicale in progress in the Home's square entry hall.

It was being led by a balding man with a banjo who urged everyone to sing along in a voice made breathless by his enthusiasm. About forty residents, in five fairly even lines of wheelchairs and straight-backed rockers, were trying to follow his lead. Except for Mrs.

Hartshorn, off in the corner again, tying knots in her long, faded hair like a white Rastafarian.

Even the nurses ignored her.

"Hello, Mrs. Hartshorn," Becca said companionably as she went by, not expecting any answer, and not getting any.

A ragged chorus of "Oh, Susannah" was straggling towards some kind of conclusion with at least two of the staff attempting har-mony. Becca checked but didn't see her grandmother in the crowd.

Since they'd been summoned because Gemma was failing rapidly, Becca only looked from habit.

Some of the residents recognized her and Mr. Silvers waved. She blew him a kiss which he caught in an exaggerated mime, as a child might.

Shana was already stabbing away at the elevator button as if expecting that repeated jabs would bring it faster. And Sylvia was replacing her earrings and pulling the taupe sweater down over her flat stomach.

Becca didn't hurry. She knew it would be a while before the tchery machine answered its summons, even longer before it would settle with a squeal onto the first floor.

When the door creaked open at last, two of the nursing staff

"Why, hello, Becca," said one. "She was alert and asking for y The other merelv inclined her head. She was Mrs. Hartshor
Page 9

Becca smiled at them both, an extra-broad grin to compensate her sisters who hadn't even acknowledged the nurses' presence, if w te uniforms rendered them invisible. Then she crowded ii

"Three," Becca prompted, doubting either of them remembei Thev'd onlv visited twice in four years, living so far away, on(

"I know, I know," Shana said with an exaggerated sigh. I I

"We both have," Sylvia added, now playing with the heavy E

chain around her neck, picking at the Hands of God as if she cc pry them apart. "But it's so hard, Becca, I don't know how ',

I mean," Sylvia kept on as if Becca hadn't spoken, "if I E

here I couldn't see her every day. Not in this place. Not the 1

Becca smiled again, but closed her eyes because she was af that if she kept them open, they would see she was on the verg tears. And then they'd start in on her again, about how at Geml age, with the arthritis and diabetes, it was just as well she di know anything, couldn't suffer, as though the body felt no pa the mind wandered in the past. Gemma wasn't that old and she far from senile, Becca thought fiercely, the anger at last fighting I She was about to remark aloud on it when the elevator stol and the door opened onto the nurse's station. No one was there an open notebook and scattered papers on the countertop , 2-ma Sylvia said, her hands noi her hair, nervously smoothing the -~.ides, checking the black v

"Mostly they lie in it," Shana *ib. "Old houses and old pf smell and I don't plan to live in a9T;z one or be the other,"

'Think of the alternative," Becca enuttered, angry with herse.

ou

ed.

Briar Rose

21

rising to Shana's bait. Apart, her sisters were strong, competent women, Shana in real estate and Sylvia a social worker. But together they became bickering children. Becca knew this, had spent days prepping herself for their visit. Yet again, like every other time they came back home, the quarreling had started. She bit her lip and silently led the way down the hall. Only Mrs. Benton was still in her room, crying softly to herself. Becca couldn't think of a time when she visited that Mrs. Benton wasn't crying, calling out for her mother. The rest of Third West were downstairs finishing "Oh, Susannah" and probably starting on "You Are My Sunshine," but Mrs. Benton was sobbing like a heartbroken child.

Becca turned sharply into room 310 and looked around at the neat, spare furnishings. They'd been lucky to get this room because

Gemma loved sunlight and it was an unusually sunny corner room.

Page 10

Today, though, with the snow falling outside, the room was gray and cold.

"Hello, Gemma," Becca said brightly to the old woman propped up in the bed. The bearclaws quilt was tucked in so tightly around her, it was almost possible to ignore the fact that she had on a posie restraint, tying her to the bedsides. The television was crooning a game show. Sylvia snapped it off in passing.

Shana went over and kissed her grandmother on the cheek, dry little kisses that barely touched the skin yet still left marks where they landed because the old woman's skin was so brittle. Sylvia waited her turn and then did the same, missing the cheek by a hair's breadth.

There were tears shimmering in her eyes. She lowered the side of the bed and kissed her again.

Having done their duty, Shana and Sylvia straightened up and Sylvia went to stare out the window at the snow. Shana moved to the foot of the bed and set her Vuitton tote softly on top of the quilt.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, Becca took Gemma's hand in hers.

It felt boneless, as though whoever had once resided in the skin had moved, gone.

"Left no forwarding address," Shana whispered, as if reading Becu s thoughts.

"Gemma? Gernma, it's me, Becca," Becca said breathily. "I've brought Syl and Shane to see you.

We love you."

"We love you," they chorused dutifully.

For a long moment there was no response at all and Becca 22

Jane Yolen

wondered if Shana had been right and there was truly no one ho Then, as if slowly returning from a far journey, Gemma filled skin again, breathed a shuddering sigh, and opened her eyes.

were the faded blue of a late winter sky.

Becca squeezed her grandmother's hand carefully, aware h fragile a thing it was she held.

"Gemma . . ." she began again

"Once upon a time," Gemma said, her voice like a child's, and whispery. "VA-iich is all times and no times but not . . ."

stopped, drew in a little breath that nonetheless seemed to fill up again. ". . . the best of times."

Her breath was as pale as her and smelled like old potpourri, musty and sweet.

"Oh God," Sylvia said, her voice tight, "not that again."

didn't leave the window and stared even more intently at the sn as if fascinated by it, but her shoulders were shaking and B

hoped she wasn't going to cry. Shana was a noisy weeper, as if were trying to bring everyone in on her grief, and Gemma a became agitated when someone near her cried.

"Once upon a time there was a castle," Gernma said.

stopped.

"What castle?" prompted Becca.

"We all know what castle, Becca. Leave it!" Picking off an invi hair from her cream-colored blazer, Shana hissed, "Don't ma any worse than it is."

Becca opened her mouth to argue, but the old woman had fi back to sleep.

'They waited about twenty minutes, but she didn't rouse agai

"That's it, then," Sylvia said, consulting a thin gold watch turning briskly from the window.

"Time to go." Her eyes were and there was a single thin mascara line down her right chee
Page 11