Once Upon a Fairy Tale Read online

  The fiddle had been a gift from his grandmother for Niklas's thirteenth birthday. The two of them lived alone in a cottage deep in the woods, and Niklas had never seen either his father or his mother. Grandmother would say nothing about the gift except that it had always belonged to the family, and was very old - and that it had been left for him to have when the time came. And it seemed to be a magic fiddle, because it seemed to teach Niklas how to play it, guided his fingers to play the right notes. The first time he held it in his hands he could play any tune he wanted. It was as though playing the fiddle was something he had always know how to do, and had merely remembered something that he had forgotten. And so taken was he by his gift that he did not see his grandmother weep when she saw what had happened, and did not ask her why she was crying.

  Niklas had been admonished not to leave the forest where he lived. Once he had asked his grandmother, when he was still very young, if the forest covered the whole world. She could have told him then that it did. But she had sighed, and sat him down, and explained that there was a whole wide world outside of the forest. That had been only the first time that she had told him that he must never enter it. There had never come another day when she did not repeat those words to Niklas. And, because he was happy, he did not wish to disobey her. The world held no call for him. He was happy to roam his forest home with his fiddle. The beasts all knew him and came to him if he called to them, and he could make the tiny wild flowers in the clearings sway to his music like graceful little dancers. He could make the nightingales sing for him. He was king of his kingdom. He was happy.

  One day he was sitting on the low bough of a favourite oak tree and playing his fiddle when he heard an unfamiliar sound. He stopped playing to listen and soon the noise grew closer. Along the path that meandered beneath his swinging feet a procession of riders came slowly, weaving their way through the woods. There was an expression of fear on the lead rider's face, and he kept making strange signals with his hand, as though warding away evil spells. Behind him, on a milk-white palfrey, rode the most beautiful girl Niklas had ever seen. She had long golden hair that streamed like sunshine down her shoulders, and she had the eyes of a fawn. She didn't seem as afraid as her escort, because she was smiling as she looked around her, and she was humming a tune, very softly, under her breath. Niklas listened intently for a moment, and then, carried away with the girl's beauty, his fiddle seemed to leap into his hands and he played an echo of the tune she was humming. Instantly the cavalcade came to a milling halt beneath him, and scared voices were raised in raucous query. She alone, the girl, looked immediately up to where he was sitting, and smiled.

  "Why, hello," she said. "That was well played. What are you doing here all alone?"

  "Playing the fiddle," said Niklas.

  "Come down! Come down here at once! Are you alone? Where are your parents?" chattered the lead rider, quite pale, but recovering. "Where did you come from, anyway? What is a youngster like you doing in the Enchanted Forest on his own? Who sent you here?"

  "I live here," said Niklas, "with my grandmother."

  "But nobody lives here," said the girl reasonably. "This is the Enchanted Forest."

  "I do, I live here. Where are you from? Where are you going? I have never seen anyone pass this way before."

  "I am'..." she began, but the lead rider leaned over to clutch at her arm.

  "Princess!" he remonstrated urgently.

  "He is only a child, Ilon!" she said, shaking him off. "I am Princess Briagha. I come from my father's house, to marry Prince Balach. I go to my wedding, forest boy."

  Niklas laughed, and played a snatch of a happy tune on his fiddle. "Luck to you, then!" he said, and laughed again. He played faster and faster, and soon the fear on everyone's faces began to melt as the smiles came. The princess clapped her hands in time to his music and laughed joyously, and even dour Ilon was surprised into a smile. When Niklas stopped, breathless, Princess Briagha held out her hands to him.

  "Oh please come and play at my wedding, forest boy! You make such happy music, and I know that my betrothed will welcome you, as I do!"

  Niklas laughed out loud and leapt down from his perch on the tree. Such was his joy at having been asked by this beautiful girl to play his music at her wedding feast that he quite forgot his grandmother's constant words of warning.

  "You can ride behind Ban," said Princess Briagha, and a handsome young man swept off his plumed hat and laughed down at Niklas. The knight leaned down from his mount and helped Niklas clamber up behind him, his fiddle tucked between them. Then Ilon gave the signal and they moved off. The Princess rode beside Ban and Niklas, and talked happily about her wedding; Niklas listened avidly and it was only when he felt the sunshine hot on his bare head that he turned and saw the edge of the Enchanted Forest being relentlessly left behind him. For an instant his grandmother's voice came to him, and her words about the forest returned to touch his mind. He shivered where he sat with a sense of doom, knowing, for just an instant, that he had done something irrevocable. But then Briagha's lilting laugh drew him back, and he turned his back on the forest. Somewhere far ahead he thought he could see a castle of many turrets, each flying a white pennant to welcome the new bride. And soon he would be playing at a Royal wedding.

  In the joyous chaos of their arrival at Prince Balach's castle, Niklas somehow seemed to be left behind in the throng. The cooks fed him, because he came in with the Princess and they assumed that he belonged to her. But he could not ever get close to her again, for she was always surrounded by throngs of other, more important people. Once he saw her walking with Prince Balach and came to bow to her, but she was laughing up into her Prince's eyes and did not see him, and Prince Balach merely swept past him with haughty eyes. Niklas retreated, and watched from a distance. It was not his lot to be numbered into the friends of the princely pair. The day of the nuptials was drawing near; and then, surely, Briagha would remember her strange troubadour.

  In his innocence, Niklas had thought that he was to have been the only player at their feast. He stood in the decked hall with his violin, and surveyed the throngs of musicians and singers that milled about waiting their turn. If it had been within his power, Niklas would have turned and run all the way back to the Enchanted Forest, where he was loved and where his music was eagerly awaited. But once again he was stayed by the sight of the Princess, more beautiful than ever in her wedding gown. Surely she would remember him when the time came? Niklas found himself an unobtrusive place in the musicians' gallery, and settled down to wait.

  Course after course of the wedding feast was served, and the music poured from the musicians' gallery like silver waterfalls. When one lot stopped, another began, and they in their turn were succeeded by others. Niklas waited, silent. He waited for a moment of silence when he would be called to play. But the moment never came, and the feast was already drawing to a close. Niklas's eyes filled with tears, because he finally knew that he had been a whim, chosen and then forgotten. Uncalled, his violin leapt into his hands and he began playing, very softly, a quiet melody. At first nobody heard him over all the din, but soon the other musicians began to, and one by one the other instruments stopped. In the spreading silence from the musicians' gallery, the laughter and chatter in the hall began to still as the notes of Niklas's violin came sweeping down to them, suddenly filled with power. They carried a different message to all who heard him play, and Briagha was not the only one who wept behind her hands. But Niklas, seeing her weep, was moved once again by her beauty and the violin changed its tune. Soon he had the entire hall clapping their hands and stamping their feet, and the Royal couple were laughing with joy at one another and dancing in the midst of the hall.

  Eventually Niklas's violin died slowly away and his hands dropped from the magical instrument, exhausted. There was a moment of silence while the guests realized that the music was over, and then the rafters shook with their cheers and their clapping. They brought Niklas down from the gallery on their h
ands, and set the finest of wines before him. Briagha herself sat beside him and fed him from her own plate.

  "How handsome the lad is," the people murmured to themselves, seeing him sitting there. "And such golden hands. Surely there can be no better fiddler in the world!"

  But when he was finally escorted, transported beyond happiness by the acclamation he had gathered at Briagha's wedding, to his new chambers, high up in the towers and close to Briagha's own, Niklas saw his reflection in a polished shield that hung on his wall, and he was no longer the boy who had left the Enchanted Forest only days ago. He was taller by a head, more; he had the rangy body of an adolescent and no longer the small round smiling face of the boy from the Enchanted Forest. His fingers were longer and stronger, and on his upper lip was the first faint shadow of down. Thus Niklas at last understood the price he had paid for trespassing beyond the borders of his forest. He would know adulation, and fame; but he would never again have immortality.

  He stayed at Balach and Briagha's court for some time, their treasure and their pride; but he did not play often, and it was soon obvious that he aged a little every time he did. After a while Niklas slipped out one day and walked away. He did not look back. He did not know that he was missed, and looked for; but that all too soon he was put aside and replaced by newer entertainments. The name of Niklas the Fiddler became a tale.

  Niklas traveled the world, playing the fiddle when he needed money to survive, and every time he played he aged a little more. In the space of a few years he had gone through adolescence into middle age; in a few more he was an old man. Soon the fiddle was put away, for Niklas feared that he would carry himself beyond the last boundary, and there was one thing he wanted to do before he laid down his charmed life. He wanted to go home. If the price of his final melody was to be his life, he wanted to play it beneath the eaves of the Enchanted Forest.

  His travels took him, now a stooped and white-haired old man, past the castle where once he had played at a wedding feast. He knew he ought to have walked straight past and turned his back on the castle walls where he had known such bitter sorrow before he had known joy. But it was stronger than him. He walked inside and asked to see the Prince.

  "The Prince, forsooth," said one of the knights in the entrance hall. "Do you think we allow every vagabond off the street to see the Prince? The Prince has better things to do."

  "But he will want to see me," Niklas said, "he or Princess Briagha. Yes, she will remember me. It was she who brought me from the forest, a little Gypsy boy, to play at their wedding feast. I would like to play for her once again."

  "Liar," said another knight, "I was at their wedding feast. The Gypsy who played for them was young, merely a boy. It has only been a few years since they were wed; the Gypsy boy could not have become a grandfather in that time."

  "Please," said Niklas, "my music is my life, my life my music. Both are drawing to a close. Let me play for my beautiful Princess once more."

  "Listen," said another voice, and Niklas turned, recognising it for that of Ban, who once carried him to this castle on his own horse. But Ban showed no recognition, and he had not been speaking to him but to the other knights. "The old man wants to entertain us. Well, would you like to see an entertainment? I will throw him out myself. Come!"

  Niklas started to speak, but Ban picked him up and carried him through the oaken gates into the courtyard, pitching him outside into the horse-churned mud beside the main paved roadway. He stood on the top step of the castle entrance, his hands on his hips. Behind him crowded the other knights. They were all laughing.

  "Play, old man!" Ban called. "Play for Princess Briagha now!"

  Niklas picked himself up painfully and dragged himself out of the outer gates, the knights' laughter following behind him. He glanced up once as he walked away, and ghostly white pennants seemed to fly from the battlements, as a different, kinder laughter flooded the courtyard in his memory. But then the pennants were gone, and he knew he would never hear Briagha laugh again. He hunched his shoulders against the cold and began shuffling slowly in the direction of the forest.

  He had nothing to eat or drink, but something gave him strength to continue even when everything seemed lost. It was almost beyond his belief when he looked up and realised that the first branches of the Enchanted Forest were spreading over his head, and he wept when he saw them, recalling the days of his innocence in their shadow. He moved in deeper, deeper, until he could move no longer and simply sat down beneath an ancient oak. He drew out his violin and looked at it for a long time, his tears flowing freely; then he slowly lifted it up on his shoulder and laid his chin on the place it had worn smooth so many years ago. His hand was shaking as he laid the bow upon the strings, and he should have played false, his notes trembling out of true and discords marring the forest's peace. But the violin burst forth into a bubbling melody that flowed into the trees, seemingly unguided by Niklas's hands, finally asking the question as to who, here, was the player and who the played.

  The stags heard the air and lifted their heads in wonder. The rabbits and the foxes pricked their ears. The flowers in the clearing, beginning to fade as the autumn set in, allowed the last of their summer color to blaze out as they began swaying in a dance they had almost forgotten. Somewhere deep in the forest, an echo reached the cottage where Niklas's grandmother still dwelled in the forest peace and she stood quite still for a moment before reaching for her shawl and hurrying, led by an unerring instinct, towards the clearing where Niklas was playing his violin. The song had a name, and the name was woven of the words he himself had spoken in the castle courtyard to a jeering crowd: my music is my life, my life my music. And both were ebbing away, the melody dying on a high, sobbing note that only a violin can draw out from within the depths of a soul before flowing into a reverent silence made poignant by the absence of sound.

  Niklas was dead by the time his grandmother reached him, his violin broken in two by his side. In the silence he was surrounded by the beasts who had loved him, and who were the only ones to grieve over his passing. And his Grandmother wept over the frail old man, for she knew of his journeys and his seeking, and the love that had destroyed him in the end.

  She raised a cairn over him where he had sat down to play his last air, over him and over the broken violin. And a new spell was woven about the Enchanted Forest. For the infrequent travellers who chanced its perilous paths now came out telling of a cairn in a clearing, the occasionally-glimpsed wraith of a small, dark-skinned boy, and a strange melody which now hung in the shadows between the trees, its sad refrain repeating the same few sorrowful words: my music was my life, my life my music.

  -----0-----

  Another one with a heavy debt to Oscar Wilde. His "Nightingale and the Rose" is one of the few stories that can bring me to tears every time I read it. There is something so numinous about it, so lyrical, so transcendently tragic, that my young heart and mind was completely drowned in its power when I first met it… and nothing has transpired to change that, in the years that have since passed. In some ways this was my conscious attempt to write the SORT of story that "Nightingale and the Rose" is. Of course, when I wrote this tale I was in my late twenties, and my experience of true tragedy remained locked in stories; this means that "The Perfect Rose" may have only scratched the surface of the things I meant for it to have to say. But it's my own little Wilde tale, and I have a special fondness for it. In my own mind, indeed, the beauty of the White Rose, "…the most perfect rose that ever was…", will never pass away.<

  Chapter 3: The Perfect Rose

  There lived once in a land far away to the East, so far that it sat right under the sun when it rose every morning, a great king. He was a good king, a wise and powerful one; he was young and strong, and he loved his people, and they him.

  There came a time for the King to choose a bride, and ambassadors from many lands flocked to his city, each extolling the princess of his own country. When the princesses arrived for him to choo
se, he looked at them all and immediately pointed to a very dark and very lovely princess from a land close to his own borders.

  "She and no other will be my Queen!" he vowed.

  So the wedding was celebrated; the people rejoiced and threw rose petals and flowers of jasmine before her whenever she passed by. She smiled at them with her little rosebud mouth and out of her slanting, dark eyes. She waved with a dainty little hand, and her wrists were heavy with the gold and jeweled bracelets the King had given her to prove his love for her.

  Now the King had a rose garden in the grounds of his palace, hidden from all eyes by a high wall. He loved this garden, and was proud of it. He often walked in it, along paths bordered by red, white and yellow roses, enjoying the fragrance that perfumed the air. Nobody else ever went there, not even the Queen. Never were the roses cut from the trees while still in bloom, but only when they were dry and ugly; then the King himself would cut them and take them away. No one ever saw the roses except the King; it was his only selfishness in his life, the only thing he did not share even with his dearly beloved Queen.

  She, a spoiled princess who had become a pampered queen, grew more and more jealous of the Rose Garden. She even began to think that the King went there to meet another woman, whose eyes then saw what her own were denied. Her hate grew and festered because she never spoke of it to anybody. She became determined to see what she was forbidden to look upon. She made plans.