My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (24 page)

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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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“Tell me,” he said one day. “Where did you come by such a steed?”
“He is my inheritance, sire,” I said.
“All of it?” he asked.
“He has become,” I reluctantly admitted, “all of it.”
“And what do you suppose such a horse might be capable of?” he asked.
What indeed? Knowing not what to respond, heart sinking, I shook my head. “I do not know,” I said.
“My advisors tell me,” he said, “that a steed such as yours and a rider such as you are just the sort to rescue my daughter,” he said.
I stammered something out. To be honest, the princess had been absent before I arrived at the castle and I had all but forgotten about her.
“You have my leave to go, and you shall marry her if you succeed,” he said, already turning away. “But if you do not return in three days with my daughter, you shall be put to death.”
 
Dapplegrim!
I thought.
Dapplegrim!
For I knew it was not the king’s advisors who were to blame but my own accursed horse, my only inheritance, who in growing strong had left countless bodies in his wake. And would, by the end, I was sure, leave countless more, perhaps my own among them.
I drew my sword and went to the stables, prepared to kill the animal. But as I entered he looked up quick and stared me down with blood-flecked eyes, and I became as meek as a newborn lamb. I sheathed my sword and took up the currying brush and rubbed his mirror-like coat even sleeker than it had been before. And as I did so, he was there within my mind itself, his hooves leaving bloody tracks across my brain. And when I had finished brushing him, I had grown calm and determined and knew exactly what I must do.
 
And so Dapplegrim and I rode out of the king’s palace, a cloud of dust rising dark behind us. I loosed the reins and let the animal direct himself, and he rode swiftly over hill and dale, skirting the edge of a thick forest, moving, ever moving.
There came to be, in the distance, veiled in haze, a large squat shape which in the end resolved into a strange, steep-sided mountain. It was toward this we rode, and at last we were there.
Dapplegrim looked the mountain up and down, and then, snorting and pawing the ground, he rushed it.
But the wall of rock was as steep as the side of a house and smooth as a sheet of glass. Dapplegrim rode best he could and made it a good way up, but then his forelegs slipped and he tumbled down, and I along with him. How it was that neither of us was killed I must ascribe to the same dark power that had led to the horse becoming the monster he now was.
And so
, I thought,
Dapplegrim has failed, and for this I shall lose my head.
But barely did I have time to catch my breath when Dapplegrim was snorting and pawing the ground, and made his second charge.
And this time he made it farther and might even have made it all the way to the top had not one foreleg slipped and sent us hurtling and tumbling down.
Failed again
, I thought, but Dapplegrim would not have it so. In a moment he was up and pawing the ground and snorting, and then he charged forward, his hooves spitting rocks high in the air. And this time he did not slip but gained the top. There he stove in the head of the troll with his hooves while I threw the princess over the pommel of the golden saddle, and down we rode again.
 
My story should have ended there. I had done as I had been instructed. I had rescued the king’s daughter and should by rights have had her hand in marriage. Happily ever after, as they say. By rights it should have gone thus, were lords as honest and just as they expect their servants to be. But by the time, on the evening of the third day, Dapplegrim and I had returned with the king’s daughter, Dapplegrim choosing to carry us all directly into the throne room, the king had had ample time to think. He had time to reconsider a promise rashly made to a mere servant and, with the help of his advisors, had begun to wriggle free of it.
For as I returned and laid before the king the promise he had made me of his daughter’s hand, I found he had grown cunning and deceitful.
“You have misunderstood me,” he claimed. “For how could I give my only daughter to a servant unless he were to prove himself more than a servant?”
But what is this?
I wondered.
How is this not what Dapplegrim and I have just done by rescuing her where all others have failed?
But the king, fed his lines by his advisors and set upon repeating them as he had learned them, paid little attention to the expression on my face.
There were, he told me, three tasks to accomplish. I must first make the sun shine in his darkened palace despite the mountain blocking the way. As if that were not enough, I must find his daughter a steed as good as Dapplegrim for our wedding day. Third—but I had already stopped listening by this time, and would be hard-pressed to repeat what the third task was to be.
Then, when he was finished, the king leaned back and looked up at me, a satisfied expression smeared upon his face.
I nodded and thanked him for his indulgence, and then began to turn away. And it was just then that Dapplegrim caught my eye, and I was transfixed.
 
In retrospect, I am not surprised how things turned out. Indeed, each and every one of our yearly reunions upon the hillside should have suggested to me how things would end. For there was Dapplegrim galloping through my skull and a strange red haze overwhelming my vision. And before I knew it, I had drawn my sword and lopped free the head of my king. And then, as, screaming and whinnying, they tried to flee, the heads of his twelve advisors. And finally, for good measure, that of his beloved daughter.
 
It was not long after this that I myself became king, for the people were afraid to do otherwise. I have done my best to serve justly and flatter myself to think that more often than not I have done so. When I have not, it is less my own fault than that of the dapple-gray horse, huge and monstrous, who, when he fixes his eyes upon me and calls for blood and pain, I find I still cannot refuse.
 
So why have I told you, you who would serve me, this? Why does the mad king at whose feet you throw yourself and beg for a place bare his soul to you thus? Is it, you worry, that he has no intention of giving you anything?
No, you shall have a place if, after having listened to me, you still do so desire. But you must know it is not me you shall serve. You, like me, shall serve Dapplegrim. And he is not an easy master.
I grew up reading a blue hardbound multivolume illustrated set of fairy tales and myths the name of which I no longer remember, even though many of the stories and some of the illustrations I still carry around in the suitcase that is my skull. From there, I graduated to Andrew Lang’s compilations, and then I forgot about fairy tales for a while. It was only when I started reading the Brothers Grimm to my children that it became clear to what degree fairy tales had structured my thinking as a human and as a writer.
One of the tales I’ve thought about most over the years is the Norwegian folktale “Dapplegrim,” collected by Lang in his
Red Fairy Book.
It has an obsessiveness to it that I think is astounding, and I love the matter-of-fact way that slaughter becomes a founding principle for the story itself. I’ve always felt the story had a remarkably modern thrust to it, in the same way that some of the Icelandic Sagas, despite being written hundreds of years ago, do. My own telling of the tale tries to bring out what I think is psychologically implicit in the story. There’s a tone and a darkness to the original that I love, and I also love the notion of the horse itself as a kind of embodiment of the subconscious, an indication of a split within the psyche that both enables the narrator and that he feels enslaved to. The result is, I hope, something like Nick Cave’s updating of murder ballads: something true to the original which, despite maintaining the original setting, feels contemporary in attitude, mood, and thrust.
—BE
MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM
The Wild Swans
HERE IN THE CITY LIVES A PRINCE WHOSE LEFT ARM IS LIKE ANY other man’s and whose right arm is a swan’s wing. He’s a survivor of an old story. His eleven formerly enchanted brothers were turned from swans back into fully formed, handsome men. They married, had children, joined organizations, gave parties that thrilled everyone right down to the mice in the walls.
The twelfth brother, though, got the last of the magic cloaks, and his was missing a sleeve. So—eleven princes restored to manly perfection and one with a little something extra going on. That was the end of that story. “Happily ever after” fell onto everyone like the blade of a guillotine.
Since then, it’s been hard for the twelfth brother. The royal family didn’t really want him around, reminding them of their brush with the darker elements, stirring up their guilt about that single defective cloak. They made jokes about him, and insisted they were only meant in fun. His young nieces and nephews, the children of his brothers, hid whenever he’d enter a room and giggled from behind the chaises and tapestries. He grew introverted, which led many to believe that swanarmedness was also a sign of mental deficiency.
So finally he packed a few things and went out into the world. The world, however, was no easier than the palace had been. He could land only the most menial of jobs. Every now and then a woman got interested, but it always turned out that she was briefly drawn to some Leda fantasy or, worse, hoped her love could break the old spell and bring him his arm back. Nothing ever lasted long. The wing was graceful but large—it was awkward on the subway, impossible in cabs. It had to be checked constantly for lice. And unless it was washed daily, feather by feather, it turned from the creamy white of a French tulip to a linty, dispiriting gray.
He’s still around, though. He pays his rent one way or another. He takes his love where he can find it. In late middle age he’s grown ironic, and cheerful in a toughened, world-weary way. He’s become possessed of a wry, mordant wit. Most of his brothers back at the palace are on their second or third wives. Their children, having been cosseted and catered to all their lives, can be difficult. The princes spend their days knocking golden balls into silver cups or skewering moths with their swords. At night they watch the jesters and jugglers and acrobats perform.
The twelfth brother can be found most nights in one of the bars on the city’s outer edges, the ones that cater to people who were only partly cured of their spells and hexes, or not at all. There’s the three-hundred-year-old woman who got nervous when she spoke to the magic fish and found herself crying, No, wait, I meant
young
forever into a suddenly empty ocean. There’s the crownletted frog who can’t seem to truly love any of the women willing to kiss him. In those places, a man with a single swan wing is considered lucky.
If you’re free one night, go out and find him. Buy him a drink. He’ll be glad to meet you, and he’s surprisingly good company. He tells a great joke. He has some amazing stories to tell.

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