Once Upon a Fairy Tale Read online

  Once Upon

  a Fairy Tale

  Alma Alexander

  K O S

  Kos Books

  A & D Deckert

  343 Sudden Valley Drive

  Bellingham WA 98229

  Originally published as

  "The Dolphin's Daughter and other stories"

  Longman UK (Pearson Education Limited)

  First Publication 1995; Ninth Impression 2004

  Original copyright as Alma Alexandra Hromic

  Smashwords Edition

  Print Edition

  Table of Contents

  Foreword

  The Dolphin's Daughter

  My Music Was My Life, My Life Was My Music

  The Perfect Rose

  On some of Alma Alexander's other works

  Other books by Alma Alexander

  Contact Alma Alexander

  About the Author

  Author's Note

  Foreword

  These three stories hold a special place in my heart, because they were The First.

  They were published in a book entitled 'The Dolphin's Daughter and Other Stories' by the educational division of Longman UK. These books were distributed in schools, and had comprehensive "What did the author mean?" questionnaires in the back (which meant that an entire generation of British and other Commonwealth schoolchildren may have hated me with a passion because the curriculum asked them to read my mind…)

  The book was first published in 1995, and it went on to have nine reprints. For several years this wonderful little book of three stories which I love brought me stayed out there, being taught, being read, hopefully waking up SOMETHING besides frustration and annoyance in the kids who were presented with the fairy tales which flowed from my pen. Because – and here's the secret – these were stories that were NEVER written for children. They were penned for grown-up readers, the kind who would read Oscar Wilde's fairy tales and weep over them. I don't write tacked-on happy endings. In my stories there is seldom a Happily Ever After. I like my stories as I like my chocolate – dark, and a little bittersweet.

  These three tales have had a respectable academic run, although their presence has been fairly limited in the world outside the classroom. But I have seldom been prouder of a book than I have been of this one, my first-born, and I am thoroughly delighted to have the opportunity of presenting these stories to a whole new audience and in a new medium, making them accessible to a new generation of readers.

  Welcome to the Alexander Triads, Book 1: Once Upon A Fairy Tale.

  Alma Alexander

  Summer 2011

  This story owes a great deal to Oscar Wilde, whose dark and twisted fairy tales I had devoured as a young reader. It also owes a lot to the dramatic stories of Hans Christian Andersen, from whom I think I learned to trust passion (however tragic) rather than a rote happily-ever-after ending tacked on just because "it's a fairy tale". It's ALWAYS a happy ending for some, and not for others. I know that when I wrote that last line in the story I was making a mental bow in Wilde's direction, because it is HIS kind of envoi, the kind of bittersweet line that lingers in the mind and the memory.

  Chapter 1: The Dolphin's Daughter

  There was once, long ago, a land by the sea. In a castle which stood on a high rock overhanging the sea, there lived a king and a queen with an only son, a prince who would one day inherit the kingdom.

  As the young prince grew into manhood, the time came for him to choose a bride, but none within the borders of his kingdom suited him. So his father arranged a match with a young princess from a kingdom across the sea. Soon the matter was concluded and the bride set sail in a gilded ship from her land to come to her husband's kingdom and be wed.

  The voyage was long, and often stray winds blew them off their course into strange waters, from which they then had to find their way back to their path. They saw strange golden fish that flew from the water and shone in the sunshine; once a shadow of something huge and dark passed underneath their ship, and the vessel rocked from the wake of its passing.

  All was well until, almost within sight of the end of their journey, the skies darkened as though night had fallen in the middle of the day. The sun was hidden in darkness; the wind grew stronger and stronger. It whipped and tore at the sails. A bitter rain began to fall, and the black waves broke into white foam across the ship's bows. They had brought the princess, whose name was Lilla, into her cabin for safety when the storm broke, but there was no safety to be had from that storm. Soon the wind was too strong to fight. With a sigh of surrender, the main mast of the ship gave way and split with a crack of thunder, falling like a felled tree straight down through the ship's deck and into the ocean. Water poured into the hole it had made. Still attached to the ship by the ropes and the rigging and the heavy wet remains of ragged sails, the mast, bound with bands of black iron, began to sink slowly into the ocean depths and to drag the ship under with it.

  In the confusion, many tried to save their own lives, forgetting about the precious passenger who had been entrusted to their care. Sailors leaped overboard and drowned in the foaming sea. The captain and the princess's personal attendants tried to get to her to save her, but all were swept away to their own dooms by the crashing waves and the roaring wind. Princess Lilla was flung into the angry ocean clinging to a piece of battered driftwood and for a while fought to stay afloat; but soon the weight of her soaked skirts and wet hair began to pull at her with invisible fingers. Her grip on her raft began to slip. She raised her beautiful eyes to the black and purple skies, and her tears mixed with the rain on her face.

  "Ah, Prince Brion!" she sighed. "I was not fated to be your bride! I go rather to the halls of the King of the Sea, to see all the drowned sailors that the sea has taken to grace his court!"

  As she let go of the raft, and watched it swirl away into the oblivion of close, wet darkness, she heard a voice at her side. "Land is not far, lovely lady, and I can take you there."

  "Who speaks?"

  "I am Atlan," said the voice, and a huge grey dolphin swam up beside her, buoying Lilla up and refusing to let her sink. "I will save you… but I ask a price, lovely lady."

  "If I can pay it, it is yours," said Lilla.

  "You will bear children," said Atlan. "Your eldest child shall be mine, the dolphin's daughter. You must bring your eldest daughter to the sea, to me, and let me take her. That is the price I ask."

  Because children were far away and her own life was precious and so nearly gone, Lilla whispered, "I promise." Then she fainted away.

  When she awoke, she was in a bed hung with pale blue velvet and a woman wearing a crown of gold was bending over her. "Lilla," the woman greeted her. "We were afraid we had lost you. But by a great miracle, while your ship was lost with all aboard, you were found, fainting but alive, on our beach two days ago. Luckily you were recognized from your portrait, and brought here. Now everything will be all right."

  And so it was. When she recovered her strength, Lilla was wed to Brion. Within a year she reigned as Queen at King Brion's side when the old king passed away. In due time, the young Queen was brought to childbed and delivered of twin girls.

  "Twins!" she thought. "That means there is no eldest daughter. The bargain is void." So she never told her husband of her miraculous survival from the shipwreck, or of its toll.

  It soon became apparent that the dolphin's daughter was different than her sister. The younger twin, named Atalia, was bright and happy, with blue eyes and curly fair hair. The elder, called Delphine, was dark with huge eyes and heavy, straight black hair, and she never uttered a human sound. The King remarked on this difference before long. Lilla, who knew there was a reason behind it, was finally brought to confess
her adventure in the sea. But Brion was a proud man, and unwilling to give of what was his.

  "No child of mine belongs to another, whatever his claims!" Brion declared. "Whatever her faults, this is a princess of the royal line, and no daughter of a fish from the depths! Here she was born, and here she stays."

  But Delphine was hard to be with, because she was always surrounded in an uncanny silence which made anyone near her uneasy and watchful. She was beautiful, in an eerie way, and her eyes were big and dark and dreamy, full of unfathomable secrets. All too soon everyone drifted away to the bright and captivating Atalia, and left the silent princess to herself. Before long, Delphine was lodged into a separate tower, which had long stood empty, right out over the emptiness of the water beneath its overhanging rock, crumbling away in places and with its own entrance through a small postern gate and a steep stair that led directly down to the sea.

  The King and Queen soon forgot their oldest daughter, who lived alone but for a handful of attendants out in her tower. They had pretty Atalia to be proud of, and within three years of the birth of the twins, Queen Lilla gave birth to a son and heir to the kingdom. They called him Tarion, and the whole land celebrated his birth for a month. Tarion grew into boyhood, and by the time he was old enough to remember, his oldest sister was quite forgotten. So he grew up believing the while-and-golden Atalia to be his only sibling.

  Delphine grew too, in her oblivion. She had always been striking, but she grew into a sleek and strange beauty that was quite as arresting as Atalia's much vaunted glory, although her own made no songs as her sister's did. The dolphin's daughter often came down from her tower in the early mornings, before anyone was awake, and sat watching the dawn break over the wide sea. It was as though she was waiting for something; but whatever it was, it never came.

  The years passed, and the two royal sisters turned eighteen years old. Atalia had a court ball to celebrate her birthday; her sister celebrated hers alone, in the company of nobody but the few old servants assigned to her. They felt pity for the poor girl and baked her a special cake themselves, to mark the occasion as best they could. But Delphine only smiled at them with her eyes, and stroked their thin, veined old hands. In all her eighteen years she had never been heard to utter a word, although one of her servants swore that she had once heard her singing by the ocean in the early morning light – a strange, plaintive tune with no words to speak of but with a melody that broke the heart.

  The ball was still going on in the early hours of the morning. The night had been still, and only gentle waves were lapping on the shingle beach below Delphine's tower when she came down to the sea in the dark hour just before dawn. The moon was full and golden, and there was a silver-sparkling path laid at Delphine's feet from the shingle beach to the distant horizon. The Princess watched it for a long time, alone, and then she stepped into the water at its beginnings. The sparkling water swirled around her feet; the moonlight dressed her hair with gold and touched her raiment with silver. She took another step, and her gown lifted and swirled around her legs. Her hair flew like a silken flag in the soft breeze. The water was around her waist, her gown a lighter billow in the darkness around her, when suddenly the silence was broken by a cry from the other end of the beach, where one of Atalia's guests must have come out to clear his head in the morning air.

  "Help! There is a woman drowning! Wait, wait, I will help you!"

  Delphine turned her head at the sound, and saw a tall boy of perhaps fifteen years of age, dressed in a stiff court gold and brocade. He was flinging away his short cloak and racing across the shingle towards her. She had never seen her brother and did not know him; neither did he know of his hidden sister, or of the mystery of her life. All he saw was a woman in danger, and his actions were born of instinct and purity. All she saw was a bright youth rushing into danger. She raised her hands in a gesture of warding off, still silent but it was dark and he leaped into the sea without seeing. Their common blood spoke, and she loved him for coming without question, and he would sooner have died than had been thwarted in his rescue.

  But there was another cry, a scream of anguish from the castle which began spilling its light and its people on to the beach. Even as it echoed out across the water, a huge wave rose above the two figures in the water and then crashed down on to the figure of the young prince, shrouding everything in a spray of foam. When the waters settled again, the Queen saw standing in the ocean a giant around whose knees the deep water swirled. In his hand was the limp body of her only son. There was nothing there to connect the giant with the dolphin who had brought her to safety many years ago to claim her crown – nothing except the darkness of his eyes, eyes which she only now really recognized as belonging to her eldest daughter: the dolphin's daughter.

  "I am Atlan," said the giant. His voice shook the castle on its rock, and pieces of rubble broke off Delphine's tower and fell into the sea with white splashes. "I made a bargain with you long years ago, and even marked that which you bargained away as my own. You chose to keep what was mine. Today I exact a different price. I asked for a life; it is your choice that you paid with a death."

  His fingers closed over the limp body of the prince that lay in his palm. For a while he stood there, impassive to Lilla's cries and Brion's raillery and Atalia's tears. He watched them all for a long, silent moment, and then stirred to return to his depths. The ocean whispered around his massive legs.

  Then a different voice spoke. It cut through all the moans and cries and stifled everything into silence. Everyone who heard it heart it differently – some said they heard the deep and somber darkness of the ocean's depths; other swore it was like the play of sunlight on the surface of the sea on a summer's day; still others spoke of distant and eerie melodies playing within it, like the songs of whales. But with one short word it stopped everything, and all eyes turned to the girl who had spoken – a slight, dark girl with the eyes of the sea who had never spoken before in all her eighteen years.

  "Wait," she said, and they all did. The giant Atlan turned to look at her, standing at his feet, looking at him with his own eyes. "I was your price," Delphine said. "And every day for years I have come to the sea's edge and waited for you to call me. Why did you not come to me then? And even now, when I had started walking to you without your call, you come in wrath to take an innocent who tried naught but to save your child from what he thought was a certain death, as it would have been for any of his race? You now claim a death instead of the life that was owed you, and which has always been yours, unclaimed. So be it. But claim the death of that life, not of another's. Lay no revenge at the door of the innocents. Let my brother live; take your daughter in his place."

  "It is too late," rumbled Atlan. "I took the death that was given."

  "Mine is the death that is given – the one you hold, you stole!" said Delphine. Father, take me – let him live."

  "It was your life I wanted, beside me in the deeps," Atlan said. "Your death at my hand was never in the bargain."

  "Rather at yours, who has claim, than at those of others who have no right," said Delphine.

  Atlan stood in silence for a long time. Then, slowly, he stooped to lay the motionless body of Prince Tarion in the shallow water at his mother's feet. Delphine stooped over him and kissed him gently on his cool and marble-white brow, smoothing his wet hair away from his face. "Live, then, and remember me," she whispered very softly, and then turned and went willingly into Atlan's open hand. When his fingers touched her, she shivered and then lay limp at lifeless in his huge palm. At the same time, Tarion shuddered where he lay, and drew a shallow breath. They all bent to succor him, and so none but Tarion himself, whose eyes opened and looked past the crowds of those who would aid him on to the sea, saw the first touch of dawn on the waters. In silence so total it was deafening to Tarion's ear, the young prince saw the giant Atlan raise his eyes to the sky and open his mouth in a silent scream of anguish, and then fall, a wall of sparkling, disembodied foam, into the water
s of his birth.

  "Look," somebody called out, "the Princess! The Princess!"

  Tarion sat up and looked where they had pointed. He saw lying in the shallows of the beach the body of the dark and lovely young woman whom he had tried to save from drowning only moments before. Her eyes were closed and she was smiling.

  "Who was she?" the young Prince cried.

  "The dolphin's daughter," said someone.

  And so she remained. Royal she might have been, but over his priests in matters ecclesiastical her father had no rule, and because of her end, none would bury her in sacred ground. She was laid in a distant grave, close to the sea; and often from it the people who passed near swore they heard plaintive song. Above her grave a tree grew, a tree the like of which grew nowhere else in the land. It had fruit that grew the color of the eyes of Atlan, and it tasted of the ocean, or of tears.

  -----0-----

  This one actually owes its existence to a song – something that had a set of lyrics which pushed me into thinking of a certain KIND of story. I have to confess to being somewhat astonished, myself, when the immortality angle came into play – because that wasn't planned. As usual, I started writing A Story, waiting to see where it could lead me – and it led me to this tragic little clearing in the woods, with a broken man and a broken violin and the trembling strains of a fading sad melody. There's an air of Eastern European melancholy in this story. In its own way it's an homage to all the folk tales I cut my teeth on as a small child, back in Old Europe, where ancient forests still lay in the realm of living memory and magic still clung to their shadows.

  Chapter 2: My Music Was My Life, My Life Was My Music

  The old forest knew Niklas. He would come wandering along the shadowed paths playing his nut-brown fiddle, and the leaves on the trees would dance for the joy of his music. The stags would come to the edge of the paths to watch him go by, and the rabbits played leapfrog to his rhythms in the long grass of the clearings. Birds knew his tunes, and would sing along. Music always followed in Niklas's wake. He lived for the music, and the music came tremblingly alive for him, pouring from under his bow, wrapping the frets of his violin, making the forest laugh and lilt.