Sourdough and Other Stories Read online

  Sourdough and Other Stories by Angela Slatter

  This edition is published by Tartarus Press, 2010 at

  Coverley House, Carlton-in-Coverdale, Leyburn,

  North Yorkshire, DL8 4AY, UK.

  Sourdough and Other Stories © Angela Slatter, 2010.

  Introduction © Robert Shearman, 2010.

  Afterword © Jeff VanderMeer, 2010.

  ‘Sourdough Homunculus’ illustration © Stephen J Clark, 2010.

  ‘Little Radish’ was first published at Crimson Highway in Feb 2008.

  ‘The Angel Wood’ was first published in Shimmer #5, Autumn 2006.

  ‘Sourdough’ was first published in Strange Tales II, Tartarus Press, 2007.

  ‘Sister, Sister’ was first published in Strange Tales III, Tartarus Press, 2009.

  The publishers would like to thank Jim Rockhill and Stephen Clark

  for their help in the preparation of this volume.

  Contents

  Copyright Information

  Introduction by Rob Sherman

  The Shadow Tree

  Gallowberries

  Little Radish

  Dibblespin

  The Navigator

  The Angel Wood

  Ash

  The Story of Ink

  Lost Things

  A Good Husband

  A Porcelain Soul

  The Bones Remember Everything

  Sourdough

  Sister, Sister

  Lavender and Lychgates

  Under the Mountain

  Afterword by Jeff VanderMeer

  Acknowledgements

  INTRODUCTION

  by Rob Shearman

  WE are shaped by the stories we’re told. And the first stories we’re told are fairy tales.

  Nowadays, this may not be strictly true, of course. Kids may be dangled on the knees of overprotective parents, and read stories of hungry caterpillars, or shown cartoons with easily digestible morals, or sung ballads which are all about emphasising the importance of the letter ‘B’. But the kids reject them in the end. In the end, they come back to the fairy tales, the ones that have been handed down through generations—the ones that feel elemental.

  Angela Slatter’s tales too feel elemental. As you read them, you can’t but help feel you’ve read them before—or snatches of them, at any rate. Surely you heard these when you were children? They’re like the fairy tales you can only dimly remember—the lesser-known ones kept in the back of the books you read when you were small—perhaps hidden because they were stranger, and meaner, and more disturbing. The elements are all there; there are castles, and princesses, there are spinning wheels and cursed marriages.

  And what Angela catches so well about the fairy tale is the very matter-of-factness of these stories of magic and weirdness. About how very casual are its cruelties. This is a world in which bargains are made that rarely serve either party well, in which a person can pull off her own thumb in order to distract an enemy, in which tongues can be cut out with only mild regret, in which souls can be lost, futures destroyed, whole identities wiped and stuck inside idiot dolls.

  The effect of all of this is to create a universe in which, for all the magic and wonder to be seen, individual lives are cheap and hard and soon forgotten. And in which the very phrase ‘live happily ever after’ can be flung as an ironic rebuke.

  The brilliance of this is that, however cool Angela’s style, the impact is anything but. They’re very moving, these stories—because every time the bizarre clashes against her characters, a spark is given off. The women who inhabit these dark tales give up their lives or their destinies for their children or their lovers or their lords. But as they do so they burn with a simple but forceful need for love, for tenderness, and for acceptance. They may not always feel they deserve it, and they may know too much about the vagaries of the cruel world they live in to expect anything better. But it’s the collision of the fairy tales we read as children, and the very real passions of the adults suffering within them, that for all their quasi-medieval settings make Slatter’s stories feel modern and relevant and true.

  One of the ways this works so well is the way that within the fairy tales Slatter creates, the characters too are always seeking fairy tales of their own. They’ll tell stories of Rapunzel to each other, in a book which has already played off the Rapunzel clichés to devastating effect. They’ll tell stories to selfish little children, who are unaware that in the telling of them they are being absorbed into cruel fairy tales of their own. They’ll create dolls of gems and real hair, and put inside them their souls. Women literally give their entire lives as they struggle to express themselves—whether it be the fine art of a tapestry, or the earthy food of baked bread. These are characters in what would typically be seen as escapist fantasy trying to escape into new fantasies of their own. There are fictions within fictions within fictions, and the effect of reading Slatter’s stories one after the other is honestly dizzying. Some stories bounce off the other, so that what may read simply enough is thrown into colder and disturbing perspective by the tale that succeeds it. ‘Ash’ is a haunting tale of witchcraft—but it is made great by ‘The Story of Ink’ that follows, which turns ‘Ash’s’ redemptive ending on to its head with harsh irony—and ‘Lost Things’, the black comic tale of yearning for a mother’s love that follows, gives an extra twist to the pair of them.

  That’s what’s so remarkable about Angela Slatter’s writing. On the one hand she is writing short stories with such craft, embracing the fact they’re short; these are economical tales that you might imagine being told to wide-eyed children around a burning fireplace. But the cumulative effect of them all is that a whole new world is produced, and you begin to feel bit by bit that you’ve been hoodwinked by Slatter—that this isn’t a collection of disposable fairy tales at all, but something much more intricate, something which feels more like a novel. At the same time Sourdough and Other Stories manages to be grand and ambitious and worldbuilding—but also as intimate and focused as all good short fiction should be. It’s a remarkable piece of trickery, as subtle and as crafty as anything practised by the witches in the book itself. But it also suggests again that effect of stories within stories, of magic within magic, of wonder without end.

  And it’s that wonder that, ultimately, makes Angela Slatter’s tales of sacrifice and compromise still feel so uplifting. There’s a fascination with art, and with invention, and it runs through every chapter of the book—there’s a magic in the fact that in a world of lust and savagery, in which men can disappoint and be (literally) reduced to animals, that there is still the instinct to create things of beauty. Nowhere is this better shown than in the certain prose style of Angela Slatter herself, who has a rare gift for being at the same time both vividly direct and hauntingly poetic. And what she shows us is that there are always fresh stories to be told. As we realise that the heroines of one story are the descendants of those in others—and have turned their histories already into fairy tales of their own—we realise too that there’s a tough resilience to these women. There are always new heroines, choked up with their hopes and desires—and no matter how the world tries to crush them down, that these desires still win through. It’s what gives the book its generosity. The women of Angela Slatter’s stories may individually be broken and browbeaten—but together they are irrepressible.

  When we grow up, we find ourselves in a world that looks unkindly on magic. It’s seen as something childish, rather than childlike. And we watch the news on television to learn about Real Life (whatever that may be), and we read stories which are aching with naturalism. But I think there’s a part of us which is still yearning for the tales that we were told as childr
en, the ones that shaped us, the ones that taught us the value of imagination. Fairy tales may very well be the greatest of all the tales we’ll ever read; when we’re first given them they seem so simple, so easily recognisable—and as we grow older, we see the darkness behind them, their passions and their horrors. They may well be the only stories which seem to age with us, and they can’t be outgrown or easily left behind. The joy of Angela Slatter’s book is that she’s given us a set of fairy tales that are at once both new and fresh, and yet feel as old as storytelling itself. And take us back into a place that is mysterious and shocking and scary—and very beautiful.

  THE SHADOW TREE

  ‘WHY are you so dark, Ella?’ squeals Brunhilde, the king’s daughter. She is thirteen years old. It is the fourth time she has asked me the question since she and her brother invaded my rooms this afternoon. They are both verminous brats, exactly the kind I seek. The other one, the youngest, is not out of swaddling cloth so I cannot yet judge him. Sometimes it is simply enough to leave them to do harm where they may.

  ‘Yes, Ella. Why so dark? Do you roll in the dirt at night or sleep in the cinders?’ Baldur is fourteen and equals his sister in unpleasantness, occasionally surpassing her. Platinum blonde hair and violet-blue eyes, they are shining, flawed metal, the worst that a royal house can offer: cruel, spiteful, selfish, beautiful, utterly confident of their position in life.

  ‘Nigra sum sed formosa,’ I answer, pleased at the blank stares they give. ‘Does your tutor not teach you Latin, then?’ I click my tongue, a gesture both despairing and scornful. I do not translate that I am dark but comely. ‘Ignorant children, what a blot upon the world.’

  Brunhilde throws herself at me, and hangs off my skirt, trying to tear the fabric. If she had eyes and mind to see beyond the ordinary, she would notice that the material was fine once, a heavy brocade embroidered with gold and silver thread. The filaments are so aged and dull now their shine is lost to all but the most observant. She begins a chant and will not stop. ‘Why, why, why, why, why, why?’

  ‘Shut up, Brunhilde.’ Baldur sometimes sees further than his sister, sometimes he tries to dig. She drops away, sits on the cold floor and sulks. ‘You do not know your place, Ella.’

  ‘My place is here for the moment, for as long as I choose,’ I say. I do not mention that warming their father’s bed now and then gives me licence to say what I please—within measure. My position as herbalist gives me power, too. I supply the physician with the medicines upon which his reputation rests. Ladies of the court come to me for unguents to keep their skin soft, or for drafts to get rid of inconvenient pregnancies. The Queen occasionally asks for something to make her husband sleep and so relieve her of his demands for a night or two. Men want love philtres to help them do their best by their womenfolk, or to make them eloquent before the King. The Archbishop, Serenus, comes more often than most.

  I have been here six months, threading my way through the life of the palace and this little city of Lodellan, which thinks itself large. Soon it will be time to go.

  ‘You do not speak like a servant. You do not behave like a servant.’

  ‘Yet I am a servant,’ I finish curtly. ‘Now, get out of my room, and take your squalling sibling with you.’

  ‘You cannot order us about!’ squeaks Brunhilde.

  ‘I can and have. Now out, or there will be no stories tonight, nor for a sennight to come.’ Here is my real power over them: the tales I tell. They have become small addicts, to our sessions and the drops of mandrake I put in their milk. The nights when I am not telling their father fables of a different sort, I spend beside their beds, recounting myths and legends to take into their dreams. Even though the children are vile, this weaving of words is a pleasure for me, and it furthers my ends. I suffer no illusions: they do not love me. As long as I provide an amusement, it will stave off the moment when they turn on me.

  ‘Not like the one you told last night, Ella,’ Baldur says warily. I shake my head, hide my smile. I gave them the history of the Erl-King and in the morning they both woke with tears on their cheeks.

  ‘No, I’ll tell you something exciting, something secret,’ I promise.

  When they have gone, I unlock the door to my workroom and step inside. A thin cat detaches herself from the shadows under one of the benches. She glides around my skirts, mews to be gathered up. She’s black, with the greenest of eyes, tiny and frail still. I rescued her from the children a month ago; they were tormenting her in the stables, had already executed her kittens and dangled their limp bodies in front of her. For a long while, the cat wouldn’t eat, but eventually I coaxed milk into her mouth and loved her into living. She is gentle and sad.

  For their efforts, Brunhilde and Baldur spent two weeks vomiting and shitting, fed with one of my potions, and their sheets sprinkled with a compound that made them break out in red, itching spots.

  The cat’s face against mine is warm and she is soft in my hands. I hold her like a child, and survey the room. It is dim because some of the plants and powders I work with do not like the light. It smells musty, but layered with sweetness and something bitter and dark at the very base, like rotted roses. In the end, it reminds me of home, a comfort and an ache at the same time, to remember a place and an exile from it.

  Hesitantly, I uncover the mirror that waits in one corner. It’s big enough to show my face and torso, faded dress, cat in arms. My skin is deep olive, burnt by the sun as I tramp the hills beyond the forest for herbs, my face an oval set with dark eyes and an unbalanced mouth—upper lip thin, the lower full. My brows are straight, and my hair as black as the cat’s fur. I have the look of a gypsy, a wanderer.

  I wonder if perhaps my time has passed and I can return. In hope, I touch the glass, feel it cool under my fingertips, wish that I could travel through it, through the doors between worlds, back to my own place. My exile isn’t yet done. The surface remains hard, unbroken, impenetrable. The cat makes a soft noise, like sympathy. I bury my face in her fur.

  ***

  The Queen seeks a sleeping draft, not for her husband this night, but for herself. She wears lines of trouble on her brow, drawn sharp around the corners of her mouth. Her eyes, the same colour she passed on to her children, seem darkened by her thoughts.

  ‘Thank you, Ella.’ She is polite and gentle and I am puzzled that she bred those two vipers. Sensing the direction of my mind, perhaps, she tells me: ‘I worry about my children.’

  ‘Madam?’ I feign ignorance.

  ‘I don’t like them, Ella. I don’t like my own children. What sort of mother does that make me?’ Her voice holds pain and a kind of battered love.

  ‘Quite a normal one, madam,’ I tell her honestly. ‘Parents see children as an extension of themselves, so when they go wrong, we often don’t like them. Love them, yes, but like them, no.’

  ‘Do I even love them? Did I love them?’ she asks herself. ‘How did they get so? They are cruel and thoughtless and selfish. I know what they did to that cat you’ve adopted.’ She puts her face into her pale hands. ‘How? Didn’t I love them enough?’

  ‘Sometimes that’s where you do wrong, madam, too much love, insufficient discipline. They are spoiled, have been their whole lives. They have been taught to think only of themselves, of no one else’s desires or wants or needs. They think not to return love, but only to expect it.’

  She looks at me like a coiled snake; I have gone too far.

  ‘You asked me, madam. I answered you with truth,’ I say quietly, lowering my head. She deflates and begins to weep. I try to temper her grief. ‘There is the baby, madam. The smallest one may yet bring you happiness.’

  I tuck the rich linens around her, whispering that the drink will help her dreams, but the posset remains untouched. She will take it, though, in her own time; she will wish for a brief oblivion. I leave. The King’s page waits outside the door; I shake my head.

  ‘Then you will do for tonight,’ he tells me.

  I lean close. ‘It wo
uld be better for you to learn some respect. Else watch what goes into your food, my lad.’ I take pleasure in the way he blanches, dip my head mockingly and make my way to the King’s chambers.

  He is a thin man, voracious in his appetites; amazing amounts of food disappear down his gullet but have no effect on his lean frame. He looks like an ascetic, but eats like a glutton. His hair is white-blonde, long and fine. He likes the way my dark skin looks against his pale flesh, he likes the things I do to him, fulfilling desires he dares voice to no one else. He knows that I am a well for the things he wishes to keep hidden. Funny that no one in this palace ever questions my ability to catch and keep secrets.

  I think the children’s shortcomings must spring from his blood. This twice-born man is not a good king.

  ***

  ‘You’re late,’ accuses Brunhilde, sitting high against her puffed-up pillows, an enormous doll propped next to her like a silent sister. The doll’s eyes move, the creature just barely animated by a tiny piece of soul. Baldur has crept across from his own bed and curls at the foot of his sister’s like a lazy dog. The baby sleeps in a nursery elsewhere under the watchful eyes of three nurses. Governesses do not last with these older two, which is how and why I have gained such leverage.

  ‘I was seeing to your parents. Now, hush, or there will be no tale.’ I settle myself on a corner of the bed, my back resting against the carved post, my legs crossed under my skirts, my hands lying loose in my lap, waiting until the story needs them.

  ‘I have told you before of the Robber Bridegroom and how he was defeated by a clever girl,’ I begin. They nod, eyes growing wide as my voice takes hold. ‘Before his demise, he was the finest thief in the land, and this is because he knew the location of a shadow tree.’