Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback

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.

The last man to push Yannis aside also furiously directed him, pointing at the dismal park, by then disappearing in night-gloom.

“See, there. The palace. And don’t come back.”

To which Yannis, thrusting him off in turn, in a rush of lost patience answered, “So I’m the king’s business, am I? Are you this way with any stranger who asks for anything? Go and be used and win—or die?”

But the man raised his fist. In a steely assessment of his own ? 71 ?

? Below the Sun Beneath ?

trained strength—which the witch’s teaching had returned him to awareness of—Yannis retreated. No point in ending in the jail.

Black, the sky, and all of it falling down in icy streamings, which, even as he went on, altered to a spiteful and clattering hail.

He thought of falling arrowheads. Of the horse which fell. Of the surgeon’s tent . . .

At the brink of the park a black crow sat in an oak above. And Yannis was not sure it was quite real, though its eye glittered.

I am here by Something’s will.

But the will of what? A king? A witch? Some unknown sorcerer?

Or only those other two, Life and Death.

In the, end, all the trees seemed to have crows in them. Stumbling over roots and tangles of undergrowth, where rounded boulders and shards nestled like skulls, Yannis came out onto a flight of stony stairs.

It was snowing, and the wind howled, riotously bending grasses and boughs and the mere frame of a strong man. And then a huge honey-colored lamplight massed above out of a core of towery and upcast leaden walls.

He judged, even clapped by now nearly double and blinkered by snow, that the palace was like the rest, partly ancient, its additions balancing on it, clinging and unsure. But it was well-lit, and rows of guardsmen were there. One of them, like the unwilling ones below, trudged out at him and caught him, if now in an almost friendly detaining vice. “What have we here?”

“I was sent here,” said Yannis, speaking of Fate, or the fools in the city, not caring which.

“That’s good, then. Will cheer him up, our lord. Not every day, would you suppose, some cripple on a stump can enhance the evening of a king.”

His own king had once spoken to Yannis. The king had been on horseback, the men interrupted, respectfully standing in the mud, just after the sack of some town. The king had commended them ? 72 ?

? Tanith Lee ?