The stories we tell are important. The ones we tell to others & the ones we tell to ourselves.
What use is a story?
As well ask what use is a potato? We all know what a cheap but powerful packet of nutrition a potato is. Teach your slaves to farm potatoes, then free them to be peasants. They will love you and you will be freed of the responsibilities of slavery – feeding, clothing, sheltering and caring for your chattels. Freed, they will grub in the dirt for potatoes and make their own little societies. Breed them for strength and intellect by encouraging the development of capitalism and competition within a market-based economy and you can pluck out the best to be your servants. Aristocracy 101. That's the use of a potato.
The use of a story is that we all tell the stories about where we came from, what we did there, who betrayed us and what licence that gives us now, in this new place. Listen to the stories people tell. Listen well and you will know just how they will hurt you.
People hear stories about Gowe and want to go there.
When they arrive dockside in Gowe Harbour on the River Pi, they look up. At the warehouse buildings, the houses piling up the hill, the distant palace. Gowe docks have a utilitarian beauty when the sun shines. The next thing people do is look down to see what they've stepped in. Gowe is the market town for the region. Animals are herded in to be slaughtered or exported or harnessed to machinery. There are sheep and pigs and goats, carts and rain and puddles. Stand still in Gowe and you'll start to collect a layer of mud. Or worse. Live in Gowe for a week and you'll be dripping filth from head to toe. For a child in Gowe clothing is optional because skin is easier to wash than cloth. A boy who can keep his shirt and trousers clean in Gowe has a head start over the rest and won't be thrown straight out of the Palace. After a while the people in the Palace will get to know his face and send him on errands. Trust builds. Some days he might even catch a distant glimpse of King Philip, Queen Beatrix or their daughter Princess Miriam. Mostly, though, a boy with ambition would hang around the guard house and Dillan, the Sergeant at Arms would one day say,
"Well boy? Want to go for soldiering, is it?" And the boy's eyes light up.
"Yessir. If it please you sir."
"What's your name, then?"
"Ritchie, sir."
Dillan's a kind man, the boy is clean so he must be part of the palace and after that he joins in drill every morning as the sun rises, learning with a wooden sword. Dillan soon realizes he's older than he looks. Ritchie admits with a grin that he doesn't know how old he is. Neither of them talks about where he lives because Dillan can see a raw talent in Ritchie that he wants to nurture. They pretend he lives near the kitchens and Dillan persuades Cook to give Ritchie a hunk of bread and cheese every day.
Sometimes as Ritchie wanders through the palace, chewing his sandwich, he finds things.
"Mama there's a boy."
Nurse Whimper turns. She is taking a healthful stroll in the sun, with young Princess Miriam on one side and her own daughter Winifred, who everyone calls Little Whimmie, on the other. Her eyes are not kind. Ritchie is suddenly dry-mouthed with terror. He holds out his fist and opens it. On his palm a silver bangle with a broken clasp.
"My bracelet!" cries Miriam.
Nurse Whimper isn't a bad person, just formidable. She doesn't cry thief or call the Guard. Miriam and Little Whimmie watch the boy. Miriam licks her lips and simpers.
"Where did you find that then?" asks Nurse Whimper sharply.
"Courty'd." Ritchie jerks his head behind him.
"Well, you're a good boy for bringing it to me. Give it to Little Whimmie." Little Whimmie, watching him all the time, takes the bangle off his palm. A swift smile and then she solemnly turns and hands it to her mother.
"And here's a penny for being a good boy." Says Miriam, holding out a coin.
"'nks" And he runs. It's the closest he's ever been to real power, the sort that can destroy you with a word.
#
One word, that's all it would take to finish Ritchie forever. "Thief" would do it. "Intruder" is another. "Impertinent" could go either way, depending on the tone.
Words have even more power when they are brought together into stories. Some stories travel the world; others hang about where they have happened waiting for someone to tell them. Like those sad bouquets that mark fatal crash-sites on human roads.
What kind of story is this one? You may well be wondering by now. Not one of those dark sad fearful stories hiding in the shadows whispering "Don't tell me. Not at night". More like a potato: big bold leaves and an ordinary-looking flower above the ground and below, oh below my faithful, hard-working reader, a clump of fruit like a net of fish, each one nestling in rich dirt sucking in moisture and goodness. Potatoey mouths pulsing greedily, sucking at the world. All connected loosely, all different sizes and shapes, some readily digestible, some green and dangerous. Of course the interesting point about potatoes is they fertilise the ground around them as they grow; breaking up the soil and fixing nitrogen to leave the world richer for their passing. Stories can do that too.
Then there are the other sorts of stories, not like potatoes, that wait on overhanging branches to pounce like a jaguar or a tick. They tell themselves ruthlessly, lips against your ragged flesh, right into the blood. These are stories like a disease that make you sick with longing, dying to be in them.
This story is a little bit of both - a little like those potatoes and a little like a tick. You're bitten. Even if you stop reading now and the tick drops off you still have some of its venom in you.
Talking of venom, let's meet Collunda.
#
No-one hears from the dragon for a while and Tara settles back into sunny somnolence. Her inhabitants remain intrigued by literacy – a habit that affects the very highest to the very lowest.
"Y'know, Beattie," says King Phillip,looking up from his book, "Young Miriam is too interested in boys. She watches drill every morning, doncher know?"
"There is a...thing...drat it," Queen Beatrix puts down her knitting and rummages through the magazines and books and knitting patterns obscuring the comfy sofa in the Solar. "Here!" she flourishes the latest copy of The Ladief Choif. "It's called Finishing School." She reads:
"One is entranced to discover this delightful service. One sends away one's gauche, clumsy, embarrassment of a daughter and a few short years later one receives back a sophisticated young lady, trained in the gentle arts, equally ready with watercolour brush, harp or stiletto blade. So much more presentable and useful in a modern aristocracy than her more rustic cousins."
The King and Queen are silent for a moment. Both, no doubt, imagining chubby, forthright young Miriam on the screens of their inner cinemas.
"Well, says Queen Beatrix uncertainly. "It can't hurt."
"If she wants to," says King Philip.
Summoned to the Solar, Miriam has no objections.
“A few conditions, Papa.”
“Eh what?”
“My rooms are to be left untouched, nothing changed. I’ll need a retinue to go with me. Oh, and that boy Dillan is training up. I think his name’s Ritchie.”
Beatrix tuts and rolls her eyes.
“Boys! At your age!”
“What about him?” says King Philip, warily.
“He’s mine.” Says Miriam. “No-one else can have him.” The King and Queen exchange a look. Beatrix shrugs.
“Very well,” says King Philip.
“Good.” Says Miriam.
Both of them manage to conceal their relief when they wave goodbye to the incredible responsibility that is a child and Miriam's coach rattles away across the drawbridge. Ritchie stands behind Dillan. Little Whimmie peeps at him from behind Nurse Whimper. The boy freezes and stares straight ahead. Nurse Whimper murmurs softly and Little Whimmie's head snaps around, face bright red. The King and Queen and assembled courtiers and Palace functionaries standing behind them watch the coach rattle away across the wide Taran Plains towards Frentia.
#
Which is how, in a bold experiment in mixed-species schooling, Princess Miriam of Tara finds herself in an exclusive all-girl boarding school standing by a desk next to my mother Collunda, a faery. It's a bit like finding yourself on a train sitting next to a chimpanzee in a business suit. The faery has a faint green tint to her skin, black hair down to her knees, eyes as green as spring leaves.
"Oh!" Miriam blushes and looks away. The eyes watch her - calculating, noticing. The top of Collunda's head is level with Miriam's chin.
"Come, sit down beside me." Collunda sits down and pats the seat next to her. "I mean you no harm." Faeries always say that. You can believe it if you like. Miriam sits down and then keeps her attention fixed on the philosophy master for the rest of the lesson, for once learning something, namely that if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got.
"Sounds good to me," says Miriam hereditary monarch who is planning to spend the afternoon hunting with her retinue.
"The me that is sittin’ here talking to you has come from the living classrooms of Side. I've an interest in human-kind. You're such a quick breed. You flash and die like a field mushroom in summer. You sparkle then tarnish like that bracelet you wear. We're a longer breed. We grow a harder shell," says Collunda softly, pinning Miriam with her direct gaze. She has an accent somewhere between Irish and Russian. She is uglier than Miriam but much, much more exotic. Miriam covers her silver bracelet with one hand. She has heard of thieving fairies and their wiles. Whimmie has taught her that if she doesn't want to get abducted and spirited over the border into Side to become a faery plaything, she should follow the mortal Rules: always call them Fair or Good, be careful what you wish for and never, ever ask questions. Miriam, hereditary monarch, doesn't believe she is in danger and probably wasn't listening anyway.
"Why aren't you in Side, growing flowers and painting sunsets?" says Miriam, meaning why isn't Collunda somewhere else and not eyeing up expensive bracelets. Collunda takes a deep breath and mentally edits what she says next. Faeries are practically immortal and can take a long time to tell the poem and the story of the thing that lives inside what they want to say.
"I want to change some things."
"Like what?" Miriam is shocked at being spoken to so informally but her curiosity is piqued, despite her suspicions.
"There's a...It's a...I'd like not to spend a thousand years in a peppermint fishtrap." Says Collunda because this short-speaking that humans do is too rushed for her thinking to keep up with. Miram glares. She's heard about this. Faeries will entwine humans in arguments about ridiculous nonsense things to distract them while they steal all their silver.
"Don't you have some leaves to polish or something?" says Miriam, flouncing out.
The girls sleep four to a dorm-room; Princess Miriam, Princess Celeste, Lady Estella and Collunda. Celeste and Estella are studying criminology and are spending a week in the dungeons. That night Collunda lies awake thinking about how to say what she means. Miriam lies awake wondering when Collunda plans to sneak across the dorm and steal her bracelet.
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"I'd like to get something different to what I've always got." Murmurs Collunda into the darkness. Miriam sits up in bed, intrigued.
"Why?"
"Because I doesn't wanty-want to spend my incredible immeasurable life painting frilly-frocked, flighty-floss flowers, thass why. Worrabout you?"
"Goodness me." Miriam says, a little shocked by Collunda's passion and her shift into faery-English. "I'm a princess. I'm perfectly happy."
"You don't want, deep in your heaving reaving cleaving heart, a litty-bitty-bit more?"
It is odd enough that either of them has escaped traditions that would have had Miriam learning in a lonely Palace schoolroom from tutors and governesses and Collunda growing up in a gooseberry patch with her Faery peer group being overseen by Fruit Fairies until she found a vocation and a mentor. What's odder still is that from this whispering in the dark the girls manage to overcome the barriers of tradition, class and inter-species distrust and find they agree on a number of important things: Parents are stupid, boys are smelly and if Collunda hates flowers and doesn't want to spend her immortality painting them she should start studying something different right now. To seal their friendship, Collunda gives Miriam a magic starlight feather so pale it glows in the dark. Miriam gives Collunda her silver bracelet and immediately suspects that was Collunda's plan all along.
#
"Fungi," says their biology teacher the next day, "are the most dangerous and least understood life-forms in the universe".
"Cool!" breathes Collunda, who knows exactly how those fungi feel. She stays behind after class to ask question after question. She stays up all night poring over books in the library. She sneaks out of the school at first light to watch mushrooms and toadstools bursting out of the ground. She stands in a clearing gazing at the dripping heads of delicate purple mushrooms slowly drying and wilting and turning to dust. She breathes the dust and slips her focus through to Side to meet the faery she has just inhaled.
"Myceli-what?" the small faery waits for more words but Collunda is thoroughly infected now with the human penchant for short, direct communications. "Speak!" yells Collunda.
"Ohhh...well..." it raises one arm, strands of something whitish-purple drip from the arm and away, floating in the air like cobweb threads. "Here is me, a knitty thing, with every kin-cousin or under-skin-uncle or ask-what-you-may-aunt or-"
"Get ON with it!" Collunda interrupts.
"I..." the faery waves its arms. Threads flicker in the air. Other faeries begin to gather. They are attached to the ends of the threads. Threads that arc over Collunda's head and wriggle through fallen leaves beneath her feet. The world is suddenly a writhing, floaty mass of threads and faeries.
"An' you're just the one type?" the violet-skinned faeries just blink. No-one in Side can cope with staccato human language.
Collunda uses the last of the dust in her sinuses to re-focus on Tara. Her head will ache for days but it was worth it. Back in the library she delves into human books about mycelial networks and falls asleep every night with compressed chunks of human knowledge spinning around her brain.
That one sentence from her biology teacher starts Collunda on a path that will never lead to flower-painting and pretty sunsets.
And in the meantime Collunda and Miriam are the very best of friends.
#
Moley is not a fungus. But its magic lives in the mycelium that wraps around its black root and breathes out spores in the scent pumped out of Moley's white flower. It's an allium, possibly allium nigra, so its tiny flowers form a ball at the end of a long stalk. Humans and faeries alike should stay away from it. They certainly shouldn't boil it up with honey in an old tin billycan out in the woods one night under a full moon.
Collunda and Miriam sit by their small fire, whispering and giggling. First years aren't allowed out unsupervised. Collunda has persuaded fungus into a wooden door latch so that it rotted and let them out. Miriam has snapped, "Don't be so impertinent!" in her best Peer of the Realm voice at a maid who asked where they were going and sent the maid off white-faced and teary-eyed.
Collunda hooks a stick under the billy can handle and lifts it off the fire. They pour a little of the sticky black mixture into two wooden bowls.
"Go on then," says Collunda, twinkling at Miriam through the steam of the bowl she is holding to her face. With the moonlight and the firelight and the steam, Miriam thinks Collunda doesn't look ugly at all.
"You first," says Miriam.
"Together," says Collunda. They count to three and swallow the mixture down. It hits them hard, it hits them fast. Miriam is lying on her back with her eyes squeezed closed.
"I feel sick!" she says.
"Look at the moon!" says Collunda urgently. Miriam opens her eyes. "Isn't it the most beautiful thing you ever saw?" whispers Collunda. And it is, dear reader, because that is the nature of Moley. Every suggestion becomes reality. "I'm beautiful," says Collunda, "and so are you!"
"And the trees are handsome courtiers," says Miriam.
Up on their feet, the girls trip through the wood, curtseying to trees and admiring how beautiful they themselves have become.
It doesn't last long. By the time they sneak back into the school, Miriam is once again aware that she is plump and a little pop-eyed; Collunda knows she has warty green skin and a nose with a definite tendency to hook. But the beauty of Moley is that the memory is more than skin deep. As they slide under the bedcovers and drift off to sleep, Miriam murmurs,
"We are beautiful." And Collunda replies,
"We sure as certain are."
#
Sunset light is mango and peach and nectarine and apricot. There must be a place in the world where sunsets smell of fruit. This sunset, however, smells of rot. Miriam holds her nose with one hand and flaps at the smell with the other. The girls are out in the wood again. Second-years now and pursuing more complex pleasures.
"Collunda, that's revolting!" Collunda grins her cheery grin and says,
"Good innit?" Miriam edges closer.
"It's disgusting. What is it?"
"Sit down beside me," says Collunda. "I mean you no harm."
"You always say that," says Miriam remembering an evening of mushroom potions that was a lot less pleasant than the Moley. But she sits next to her friend on the fallen tree trunk. They have been friends for two years. They both say they are 13. As a princess, Miriam can be whatever age she chooses. She is accepting 13 at the moment because it is an interesting number. Collunda mostly grew up in the faery realm of Side where time moves...differently. The year in Side isn't calculated from seasons or planetary rotations. The faer calculate the year from the heartbeats of their Queen. According to Collunda, a passionate year when the Queen is in love will pass faster than those languorous years when she lies around in her bower sipping nectar and telling long involved stories about her ancestors.
"About as roughy as a stormy sea is to a glass o' water," Collunda once explained to Miriam, "a year in Side is 30 years here in Tara."
"So how old are you really?" Miriam asked.
"How would I know?" says Collunda. Truth to tell, the faer being practically immortal, they are more concerned with important things like painting the sky the right colour, than with the human fixation on measuring everything.
Miriam stamped her foot,
"You must know, stupid!"
"I've bin to 12 Eisteddfods."
"Then you'll be 13 next birthday. When's your birthday?" Collunda wrinkled her nose. "And don't say you don't know!" yelled Miriam, stamping her foot again.
"When's yours?" said Collunda.
"1st of April," said Miriam.
"So's mine," said Collunda and refused to budge from that.
Today in the forest, she has a dead rabbit staked out on a cowpat. Pale fungi are growing from its stinking body. Long white stalks ending in shaggy, black and white bodies.
"Inkcaps," says Collunda happily. "Perfeckly edible. An' they're going in the teachers' stew tonight."
"What?" Miriam is both delighted and horrified.
"Corpsicles!" Colunda leans forward and picks the mushrooms one by one.
The girls giggle all through dinner no matter how much the teachers glare at them.
#
There are other nights when Miriam sleeps deeper than usual and wakes in the morning with no suspicion that Collunda has spiked her bedtime tea and been out to the Wild Wood without her.
"This fungi," says Collunda's biology teacher, "is particularly dangerous."
It doesn't look like much. A thin brown stalk rising out of a cowpat wearing a pointy pixie hat. Gold Tops, Silly Bins, Blue Bloods and Pixie Baits, none of the mushrooms known as "magic" are much to look at. Collunda swallows.
"Tell I how you can be sure. Certain sure. Cross your heart with blood and moonshine sure."
The biology teacher obliges. Despite the Moley that is nudging at her to tell Collunda what she wants to hear, she has to answer that sort of question as truthfully as she knows how.
"Good then," says Collunda. "You'll be wantin' a nice stroll home to your beddy bed where you'll has the best sleep ever and think in your thoughts that this is all a big daft dream." Exit left one blinking, sleepy teacher, leaving Collunda centre stage with some small mushrooms that seem to be begging her to befriend them.
"Jest a liddle nibble."
In Ancient Times tribes the world over developed special rites of passage for those of their young who are extra curious, extra reckless and not the sort to be placated with the offer of a sharp blade and a boatload of raiders just begging for it. Those rites of passage allow for some gentle experimentation with the wilder side of consciousness and help the young in question divert the results into art, music, interior decorating or complex astronomy. What they don't do is cast their young into a fog of fungi, a mist of mycelium, a haze of hallucination and allow the plants themselves to do the teaching. The plants know exactly where to point their alkaloid fingers. They weave their flying carpet out of central nervous system neurotransmitter receptors and voltage-gated sodium channels. A little spark here, a little wiring change there. If this was a mechanic you'd keep it away from your car. If this was a doctor, it would be laughing maniacally and clacking the gynaecological tongs together.
"Have some more," urges a warm fungal voice in Collunda's head. "Then we can open this door."
Some doors, of course, should remain closed. The closet with the monster inside should not be opened after dark. The plastic Niagara also known as the tupperware cupboard should not be opened in front of your mother-in-law. The little wooden door your great-grandfather built at the entrance to the ancient, crumbling copper mine should stay closed and locked.
The mushrooms don't know this. The mushrooms only know the joy of rewiring unsuspecting mammals into something that is going to spend the rest of its days living wild-eyed on the edge of the herd and spreading the mycelium far and wide.
Collunda emerges at first light from the woods wearing a pointy pixie hat she has woven from local grasses. She falls into bed.
"Are you alright?" whispers Miriam.
"Willows and weeds, lianas and leaves, nothin’ to see." Collunda mumbles some more, dribbles and sleeps for two days.
#
In their third year at school, Collunda stands in front of a laboratory bench, Moley in one hand and Silly Bins in the other. The plants have never met before. "Pollen and spore" is not a story like "Romeo and Juliet". There is no romance in the air. Not yet.
Every plant has its fungal friends. Remember the mycelium growing around the roots of Moley? Here it is again. On the bench in front of Collunda is a tray of rich soil full of worms and wrigglies. Collunda scatters spore from the Silly Bins across the tray, then she breaks up the Moley mycelium and gently mixes that in. Then she holds her hands over the tray and thinks about love. Waves of suggestive thoughts pumping into the tray of soil. If she was a man she would be masturbating and adding faery seed to the mix but she wants this to be more than just sex. In the soil of the tray she builds a strange little world where endless Moley people hold hands with endless Silly Bin people and two plants that have never had a thought like this in their heads ever before tell each other all the stories they know about Beauty falling in love with The Beast. Endless crossbreed children skip and giggle and fall in love until Collunda and the plants have no idea where Moley ends and Silly Bin begins.
"Moleystool," whispers Collunda and she has named it and it is done.
#
As they usually do, Collunda and Miriam test Collunda's new discovery on the teaching staff.
Miriam arrives late to dinner, slipping into her place beside Collunda at the long refectory table with a sly grin. Collunda feels a small bag being tucked into her skirt pocket.
"How much did you put in?"
"About half of it."
The teachers have their own stew every night. It is supposed to be better than what is fed to the girls. That wouldn't be difficult.
"Oh, I bet this is horrible," says Maths as the dark, lumpy liquid is doled out. The other teachers pick up their spoons. They all slurp in miserable silence, discovering that the soup is, indeed, horrible.
"I think it's worse than usual," whimpers Art, close to tears. All the teachers immediately discover, to their horror, that this is true. The stew is indeed worse than usual. In fact,
"It's worse than anything I've ever tasted," groans Literature.
"Mine has living things in it," wails Geography. The teachers erupt from the table and run for the doors, to the clean outside where they can vomit and scream. Biology, who has only stirred her soup, not tasted it, puts down her spoon and beckons to Collunda.
"Uh-oh."
Collunda climbs the three stairs up to the platform where the teachers' table is.
"Well?" says Biology.
"I..." Collunda likes this human. She respects her for her knowledge, her cool analytical mind and her love for her subject. She has fed her Moley before and thought it hadn't been detected.
"I should make you eat all the soup they have left." Says Biology. "Making sure, of course, that you know it is poisonous and will burn in your gut like a lump of hungry tapeworms until the day you die."
Collunda stares. In all her years at the school she has never encountered any challenge to her belief that the faery world is a closed book to people so obsessed with written words and evidence-based science.
"I won't, of course," says Biology. "I am a teacher and I want you to learn the right things from this experience. Next time you wish to test something new, what will you do?"
"Um...use first years?"
"No!" Biology bangs her spoon on the table. "You will come to me and we will experiment properly. On mice. In a clean laboratory. Together. You have great potential, girl. Do not waste it on cheap stunts like this. It is not worthy of you. Off you go."
Collunda returns to her seat.
"What did she say?" hisses Miriam.
"I have worth," whispers Collunda. "I am worthy."
"Of course you are!" says Miriam. "Was she cross?"
"Not...really."
#
Miriam groans into thick darkness.
"Is it an earthquake?"
"Shh!" Collunda lets go of the shoulder she has been shaking. "Come with me, I want to show you something."
Collunda has been spending whole days in the laboratory with Biology learning Advanced Scientific Method. Collunda has not wasted her time. They creep out of the dormitory, through the silent corridors and up stone and then wooden stairs. In the attics the air is dusty and a little damp. Moonlight filters in through gaps in the roof tiles. Collunda raises a hand, concentrates and gestures. Toadstools pop out of the floor boards in a circle about four feet across.
"Cool," says Miriam. "Can I go back to bed now?"
Collunda grabs her hand.
"No! Come on!"
"Umm..." they step into the ring, the world shimmers and they are standing in a crowded marketplace. Hot sunlight, goats running free, stallholders yelling in a language neither of them speaks.
"What happened?"
"I can take us anywhere," hisses Collunda. "Come on!"
They wriggle through the crowd to a nearby stall.
"Ahhhh, Mees Collumba! Here! Coffee!"
They sip tiny cups of a bitter, spicy brew.
"I healed his dog," says Collunda.
"We can go anywhere! You brilliant, brilliant thing! Let's go to Bannix and assassinate my uncle." Cries Miriam.
Collunda rolls her eyes.
"No! We're just going to use it to have a good time."
"That's a waste."
Forty restaurants, thirty pleasure cruises and seventeen rock festivals later, they are third years and Miriam has changed her opinion.
"This is the best yet!" she says. Collunda's powers have grown and they are in a 5-star restaurant in the South of France in the human world. The local bank manager was recently summoned to the vault to look at a fungal infestation and record the loss of 1000 euros. He is wondering if the area manager will believe that the fungus ate them. Collunda meanwhile is tucking some of those euros under a glass to pay their bill.