Tales of Wonder

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Tales of Wonder

Jane Yolen

All these tales
—
and more
—

are for David

and my favorite tellers:

Connie and Barbara, Laura, and Carol

Contents

Introduction: The Bright Ring of Words

The Pot Child

Sun/Flight

The Moon Ribbon

The Gwynhfar

The Sleep of Trees

Boris Chernevsky's Hands

In the Hall of Grief

Cards of Grief

Old Herald

Sule Skerry

The White Seal Maid

The Bird of Time

The Weaver of Tomorrow

The Boy Who Sang for Death

The Lady and the Merman

Wild Goose and Gander

The Boy Who Had Wings

The Girl Who Loved the Wind

Brothers of the Wind

The Golden Balls

Johanna

The Sow, the Mare, and the Cow

Cockfight

Brother Kenan's Bell

Sans Soleil

The Seventh Mandarin

The Soul Fisher

One Old Man, with Seals

Names

Sister Light, Sister Dark

A Personal History by Jane Yolen

Introduction The Bright Ring of Words

I am a Storyteller who tells onto the printed page and often find myself recalling Montaigne's poignant phrase “We are, I know not how, double in ourselves.” For the maker of literary fairy stories is both a part of and apart from the great tradition of Story. Most successful when invisible, the author of such tales should be anonymous. Yet my stories are written not by Anon, that centuries-old master of many forms, but by a particular twentieth-century eclectic mythologizer (horrid word) living in America, in New England, surrounded by children, an Apple computer, cable TV, a nearby McDonald's—in fact all the accoutrements of modern life.

There is a charming verse by Robert Louis Stevenson that begins:

Bright is the ring of words

When the right man rings them,

Fair the fall of songs

When the singer sings them.

Still they are carolled and said,

On wings they are carried

After the singer is dead

And the maker buried.

And that same sentiment was reiterated to me by a young correspondent who wrote: “Your tales will live forever. I hope you live to 99 or 100, but who cares.” Who cares, indeed. Outside of my own family and friends, it is not the “I” who matters but the tales told on the page. If they can then leap from the page onto the lips of a dedicated oral teller and live on, kept alive by the folk process of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, that is glory indeed.

For any storyteller there are two starting places for a tale. One is physical, touchable, knowable, and immediate. The other lies deep in the hidden recesses of the heart. Often years stretch between the two starting places, and the author feels like a weary traveler trudging through an unknown landscape with a tatter of map clutched in a desiccated hand. Suddenly the map matches a place, the squiggles of line translate into a river or a mountain, a moment in map time becomes a meeting. A story begins.

The Japanese have a word for it:
saku-taku-no-ki
.

Saku
—
the special sound a mother hen makes tapping on the egg with her beak
.

Taku
—
the sound the chick makes tapping from within
.

No-ki
—
the moment when the tappings come together
.

Saku-taku-no-ki
is the instant when the chick pecking on the inside of the egg and its mother pecking on the outside reach the same spot. The egg cracks open. New life emerges. In just that way a story begins, with the physical tapping on the outside and the answering emotion tapping from within.

After the story emerges—sometimes long afterward—one can chart its course. For example, “Names” began when I met a woman whose mother had survived Dachau. This woman was on such a severe diet that she had lost forty pounds in two months and looked, according to her husband, like a concentration-camp victim. Though the irony seemed lost on her, it was not lost on me. Yet the story is not
about
the woman, whom I scarcely knew. It is about me, for it was written at a time when I was struggling with my teenage daughter who was feeling bowed under by the weight of my “name” as a writer. Still, I hope the story is now about neither the dieting woman or me but about Rachel Zuckerman, the girl in the tale. Similarly, “The Lady and the Merman” had its ostensible beginning at a poetry reading where a young man read a very bad poem about the ocean washing away words he had written in the sand. At that time I was immersed in research about the legends and lore of the Mer, the underwater seafolk. But the tale is about my relationship with my own father, though the woman, Borne, solves her problem in a way I would not.

Saku-taku-no-ki
.

The tale, then, is both a map of the human psyche who began it and a map of the characters within. But a story needs more than an author. It needs a reader as well before it is complete. Often I receive mail from readers who have found in one story or another of mine their own “tale of the heart.” That is when I know I have succeeded.

In fact, I most often describe the tales I write as “tales of the heart.” They are not old stories retold, straight from the folk, a direct link with the oral tradition, copyrighted in my name. Nor are they modern variants on an old tale, transcribed and branded mine in the manner of a Charles Perrault or a Madame Le Prince de Beaumont. Rather they are stories of my own devising—biography mixed with dream, real life crossed with visions—lent tone and style by a conscious and unconscious remembering of folk rhythms which I have come to by prodigious readings of old stories and singings of ballads and come-all-ye's and cante-fables. If Jungian archetypes inform them as well, so be it. If modern science fiction has lent occasional substance, I am guilty of that, too. There is an eclecticism to modern telling. Stories lean on stories, art on art. I can only trace my own sources so far before I realize that, in the end, it is the story that matters, not the parts: the tapestry of tale and not the individual threads. And just as kings and dragons and the Mer-folk swimming through the murmurations of the sea do not necessarily signal the old, so one cannot sum up all of modernity with a computer chip.

In a world of cable television and video arcades, I write about magical things because, like Emily Dickinson, “I dwell in possibility.” I tell tales of transformations and transfigurations knowing that I use folk metaphor as a kind of literary shorthand—at times. But there is something more. I would
like
to believe that there is that of faerie in each of us, a little trickle or stream that, if we could but tap it, would lead us back to the great wellspring of magic we share with every human being, every creature—and the world.

J
ANE
Y
OLEN

Phoenix Farm

Hatfield, Massachusetts

The Pot Child

There was once an ill-humored potter who lived all alone and made his way by shaping clay into cups and bowls and urns. His pots were colored with the tones of the earth, and on their sides he painted all creatures excepting man.

“For there was never a human I liked well enough to share my house and my life with,” said the bitter old man.

But one day, when the potter was known throughout the land for his sharp tongue as well as his pots, and so old that even death might have come as a friend, he sat down and on the side of a large bisque urn he drew a child.

The child was without flaw in the outline, and so the potter colored in its form with earth glazes: rutile for the body and cobalt blue for the eyes. And to the potter's practiced eye, the figure on the pot was perfect.

So he put the pot into the kiln, closed up the door with bricks, and set the flame.

Slowly the fires burned. And within the kiln the glazes matured and turned their proper tones.

It was a full day and a night before the firing was done. And a full day and a night before the kiln had cooled. And it was a full day and a night before the old potter dared unbrick the kiln door. For the pot child was his masterpiece, of this he was sure.

At last, though, he could put it off no longer. He took down the kiln door, reached in, and removed the urn.

Slowly he felt along the pot's side. It was smooth and still warm. He set the pot on the ground and walked around it, nodding his head as he went.

The child on the pot was so lifelike, it seemed to follow him with its lapis eyes. Its skin was a pearly yellow-white, and each hair on its head like beaten gold.

So the old potter squatted down before the urn, examining the figure closely, checking it for cracks and flaws, but there were none. He drew in his breath at the child's beauty and thought to himself, “
There
is one I might like well enough.” And when he expelled his breath again, he blew directly on the image's lips.