Maiden, Mother, Crone

by Joanne Harris

Genres: Fantasy; Fantasy Anthologies & Collections; Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology

Synopsis

Join Joanne Harris on a beautiful journey through her gloriously reimagined take on traditional British folktales. Drawing inspiration from The Child Ballads, this collection brings together her award-winning novellas A Pocketful of Crows, The Blue Salt Road and Orfeia. Published in one beautiful volume for the first time, this collection also includes a brand new introduction by Joanne Harris, and three original short stories.

Take a moment and step into this stunning, evocative world where nature, magic and fate are inextricably linked, and one wrong - or right - step can lead you from the modern world and into an adventure filled with both danger and wonder.

Release date: November 16, 2023

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 592

Sample

Everyone knows Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Most people could name at least half a dozen of these traditional European folk tales, although they may not be as familiar with the original versions as they are with the Disney adaptations. Most people know some version of The Little Mermaid; Hansel and Gretel; The Red Shoes; The Snow Queen; Rapunzel; Snow White; Rumpelstiltskin. They form an important part of our literary heritage, and writers and artists have found themselves returning to them again and again. And yet, our own Child Ballads, arguably as rich and important a resource as Grimm or Perrault, remain largely unknown to the general public, except in the world of folk music, and in certain academic circles.

That’s one of the reasons I chose to draw inspiration for my three illustrated novellas – A Pocketful of Crows, The Blue Salt Road, and Orfeia – from Child’s Ballads, rather than choosing a more familiar tale. Child’s Ballads are very particular to the British Isles. They speak directly to the history and geography of these islands. They are our Grimm’s Fairy Tales, our Mother Goose, and we ought to know them better.

So, what are Child Ballads? They are a collection of 305 traditional ballads, collected and anthologized by Francis Child during the second half of the 19th century. The lyrics and Child’s studies of them were published as The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, and they exist now as a record of the folklore, language and dialects of the British Isles over more than five centuries. Some of the ballads deal with familiar themes. Some are versions of Biblical tales; some tell the stories of folk heroes like Robin Hood and King Arthur – although people who have been brought up with the Hollywood versions of either may be in for a surprise. Some of the ballads are historical, some fantasy; some are darkly humorous, and a number are murder ballads – the folk equivalent of true crime. Most date from the 17th century or later, but some date all the way back to the 14th century; and most exist in multiple variants, changed by region, dialect or simply over the passage of time.

Like Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the Child Ballads are often very dark. Gruesome murder, monsters both human and inhuman, sexual assault, grief, guilt and betrayal feature heavily. Some are long and detailed; others exist only as fragments. But as a body of work, they have a distinctive character of their own, forming an important link to our shared past, our culture, our shared dreaming. These are not the histories of kings and politicians, but of the common folk, passed down through generations, not through writing, but through song. They are songs designed to be sung at work; in the home; in the alehouse. Their humour is rude; their view of the world is both bleak, and strangely hopeful.

What they are not is childish, or fanciful, or trivial. Even at their most surreal and strange, they serve as a means of expressing thoughts too subversive, or taboo, or painful to explore without the use of metaphor. They are the songs of revolt against oppression; of anger at the unfairness of life; of hope for a better future; of love and loss and laughter and grief. They are the soundtrack of our shared humanity, depicting the struggle of ordinary people; their dreams, and sometimes their nightmares. These nightmares are not so different from ours. Monsters of all kinds abound – murderers, rapists, seducers, abusers – and most of their victims are women and girls, crying out for justice.

In folk tales and ballads, as well as in life, women are often given roles that enable the hero’s journey, without having a journey of their own. The three stages of womanhood – maiden, mother and crone – are all viewed through the lens of what a woman can offer to men. The Maiden is either the hero’s reward, or the monster’s victim – both roles are dependent on her virtue and her desirability. The Mother (who can also take the role of the Wicked Stepmother) exists either to nurture her son, or send him into the wilderness; and the Crone (or her malignant double, the Witch), offers either wise advice, or a challenge to be met. In all three instances, the woman exists to serve the hero, to offer him what his story needs. Rarely do we hear the woman’s story, and even then, it’s a cautionary tale for women to guard their virtue, respect their husbands, obey their fathers, submit to men.

That’s why, in my three novellas, I’ve tried to give those women a story outside of their traditional roles. In A Pocketful of Crows, the maiden – seduced and abandoned – takes back her power and agency. In The Blue Salt Road, I’ve flipped the traditional narrative of the selkie woman enslaved by human beings, and made it a story of gender and race, motherhood and redemption. And in Orfeia, I’ve taken two stories: the Orpheus myth (retold in Child’s Ballads as King Orfeo) along with the sinister Elfin Knight, and made them the tale of a woman’s grief, an older woman’s journey. All three stages of womanhood are represented here; and in this compilation, each one is accompanied by a new tale from the Honeycomb world, in which I use the conventions of folklore to make a tradition of my own. And although I sometimes quote the original texts of the Ballads, I have deliberately chosen to subvert, rather than remain faithful to the original. Anyone who has read The Gospel of Loki will understand that I’m interested in retellings that challenge, rather than confirm, the world of the source material. Stories that cannot change are doomed to die and to be forgotten. The Child Ballads themselves, with their many variants, show how stories mutate and change to suit different times and surroundings. It is by adapting our stories that we keep them alive. In this way we learn from the tales of our past. In this way we try to correct the mistakes made by our ancestors. And no, these tales are not comfortable. Nor are they for children; except for the child within us all, always in search of the next stage of our personal story; a story that links us with the past as well as with the future.

The year it turns, and turns, and turns. Winter to summer, darkness to light, turning the world like wood on a lathe, shaping the months and the seasons. Tonight is May Eve, and the moon is full for the second time this month. May Eve, and a blue milk moon. Time for a witch to go travelling.

Tonight I am a vixen. I could have been an owl, or a hare, or a lark, or a wolf, or an otter. The travelling folk can take any guise. But tonight – this special night, when wildfires burn and witches fly – tonight, I am a vixen.

I leave my clothes by the fireside. The feather skirt, the wolfskin cloak, the necklaces of polished stones. Naked, I turn in the firelight; moon-silver, fire-golden. And now I can hear the sounds of the night: the lapping at the water’s edge; the squeak of a mouse in the long grass; the calling of owls in the branches. I can hear the tick-tick-ticking of a death-watch beetle in a beam over half a mile away; I can catch the sleepy scent of lilacs on the common. I cast my gaze further. The vixen is near. Half-asleep in her warm earth, she senses my presence and pricks up her ears. The three fat cubs beside her are sleepy, filled with warm milk. But the vixen is restless, sensing me so close, so unfamiliar.

I send her the small, persistent desire for a run beneath the stars. She lifts her head and flexes her jaws, wary but still curious. I send her the feel of the cool night air, the mossy ground beneath my feet, the hunger in my belly. Shivering, I turn from the fire and walk into the forest. The ground is soft and damp and cold. It smells of rain, and bluebells. My skin is striped with moonlight, brown and silver under the trees. For a moment I see the vixen, red as embers under smoke, a single flash of white at her throat, trotting alongside me.

The scents of the forest intensify, a tapestry of shining threads that run in every direction. The vixen’s fur is warm and thick; I am no longer shivering. For a time I run alongside her, feeling her strength and the fierce joy of hunting under a blue milk moon, with the promise of blood in the air and summer no more than a heartbeat away. Then, in a moment, we are one.

Wild creatures feel hunger differently. My own is deep as wintertime; frugal as old age. The vixen’s is joyous; exuberant; sniffing for frogs under the turf; snapping at moths in the shining air. We reach the river – voles and rats – but I am hungry for something more. I follow the river until it leads to a place of open fields, and from there to the edge of a village, where the scent of prey is strong. I follow the trail of a speckled hen into a wooden henhouse, and there I am without mercy, leaving nothing but feathers.

The moon is ringed with silver – a sign. The air is sweet as summertime. Belly full and with blood on my jaws, I linger in the meadow mist, under the bank of hawthorn that marks the village boundary. Then after a time, smelling smoke, I leave the vixen to return to her cubs and, naked in my own skin, I lie down in the sedge-grass and listen to the sounds of the night, and hear the owls a-calling, and watch the long, slow dance of the stars.

Tonight marks the coming of summertime. Fourteen summers I have known. Wildfire, hearth fire, bonfires lit against the dark. Cherry blossom, love charms, village girls with warm hearts, dancing in the circle of stones that stands around the fairy tree. The village girls are white and soft. Their laughter sounds like tame birds. Geese, perhaps, their wings clipped, plump, well fed, obedient. Village girls are new-baked bread. Village girls have blossom skin. Village girls have braided hair that shines like evening sunlight.

I am not a village girl. I am brown, and brisk, and wild. I hunt with the owl, and dance with the hare, and swim with the trout and the otter. I never go into the village, except as a vixen or a rat. The village is dangerous to our kind. The Folk would kill us if they could. But tonight is different. The hunt has made my blood sing. And so I linger under the thorn, smelling the scent of the young grass and listening to the distant sound of voices from the clearing.

There comes the sound of footsteps on the path by the hawthorn. A village girl with primrose hair is standing by the fairy tree. The Folk call it that, even though they know nothing of the Faërie. But there are charms – the bone of a hare; a name, stitched on red flannel – that even a village girl can use. And on May Eve, by a blue moon, a love charm hung from a fairy tree may bring even a village girl the quickening of summertime.

The fairy tree is a hawthorn. Twisted and raddled, old as Old Age, half-eaten with mistletoe, she stands inside the circle of stones that some Folk call the fairy ring. Every year, I tell myself: maybe this is the year she will die. But every year the pale buds break from those cracked and knotted boughs. The fairy tree is hopeful. Her blossom barely lasts a week. But every year she quickens, and bears a handful of scarlet berries.

The girl has a charm. They always do. A love charm, or perhaps a spell to make herself more beautiful. I watch from the hedge as she ties it in place. The shadows of the fairy stones flicker in the moonlight.

Tonight she will dream of her young man, restless on her virgin’s bed. Perhaps she will watch the bright May moon slicing past her window. And tomorrow, or the next day, he will see her standing there – a girl he has seen many times before, but never noticed until now – and he will wonder how he could have been so blind as to miss her.

When she has gone, I take the charm. She will think the fairies have taken it. A scrap of red fabric, the colour of blood, torn, perhaps, from a petticoat, and pushed through a polished adder-stone. I had such a charm-stone once, but I lost it long ago. Where did the village girl find hers? How long did she take to embroider the charm, by the light of her candle? What name did she speak as she knotted the thread?

I look at the tiny stitches. Six little letters, embroidered in silk. I myself cannot read words. There was no-one to teach me. But I do know letters; those magical signs that speak from the page, or even the grave. There is power in them, a power that even the Folk do not understand. Letters have meaning. They can make words. And words can build almost anything – a law, a chronicle, a lie.

The name in the letters is W-I-L-L-A-M. This is the name his mother gave him. This is the name his lover will speak into his ear, in the dark. This is the name they will carve on his stone, when they put him into the ground.

I have no name. The travelling folk have neither name nor master. When I die, no stone will be laid. No flowers will be scattered. When I die, I will become a thousand creatures: beetles, worms. And so I shall travel on, for ever, till the End of the Worlds. This is the fate of the travelling folk. We would not have it otherwise.

I carry the charm to my place in the woods. A hut of split logs and willow and moss, all lined with skins and bracken. My firepit is just outside, and my iron cooking pot. Hungry, I fry some fiddleheads, and with them some bacon, a handful of herbs and the hindquarters of a rabbit that was hanging in the smoke. And then I tie the village girl’s charm over the entrance to my hut, with all my beautiful coloured things. A blue glass bead, some yellow wool, the whitened skull of a magpie. The coloured things that I collect and hide away in the forest.

Coloured things are forbidden to us, we the canny travelling folk. Colours mean danger to our kind; they reveal us to the enemy. Our folk hide from everyone – even from each other. Our folk know to keep aloof, to never show their colours.

Village girls wear coloured things. Ribbons on their bonnets. Scarlet flannel petticoats. Village girls are not afraid. Village girls like to be noticed. But brown is easy; brown is safe. In the forest, no-one sees a brown girl slip from tree to tree, to vanish in the bracken. In the forest I am a doe, a stoat, a fox, a nightingale. Berry-brown, I live in the trees. Brown, I cast no shadow.

This is how I go unseen, untroubled by the village folk. Only their dogs know where I am, and they have learnt to keep away. I have eaten dog before, and will again, I tell them. I sit on my wolfskin blanket, wrapped in my skirt of homespun cloth and my coat of sparrow feathers and I look into the smoke to see what the future will bring me.

Tomorrow is May Day. The flowery month: the month of hawthorn and of bees. Tomorrow, there will be merriment, and dancing on the village green. Tomorrow, the village girls will dress the springs and wells with flowers, and leave offerings for Jack-in-the-Green, and crown a maiden Queen of the May. But that’s no concern of mine. I have no need of garlands. I have the bluebells in the wood, and the hawthorn in the hedge. No young man will steal my heart with words of love and garlands. No young man will catch my eye. When the heat is on me, I will go into a doe, and take my pick of the young bucks, and never once look back.

The vixen sleeps in the warm earth, surrounded by small, furry bodies. The brown hare in the moonlight dances on the hillside. The barn owl hunts: the field mouse runs; the fire dies down to embers. And I will go into my hut and draw the deerskin curtain, and go to sleep on my narrow bed of brown wool and of bracken.

Today, I will be a skylark, flying sweetly into the blue. Or perhaps I shall go into a hare, and run across the hillside, and box the shadows of the sedge, and nibble at the cowslips. Today, I am restless, uncertain of what I want and where to go. Over my breakfast of broken bones, I feel the morning sun on my face and long for the freedom of the hills.

But food is not yet plentiful, and travelling must be paid for. Last night’s adventure has left me weak, in spite of the strength of the village girl’s charm, and so I take my collecting bag – the charm safe in my pocket – and set off for the riverside, the open fields and my willow traps, which might catch me a bird or two, or maybe even a rabbit.

Today I am lucky. I bag four thrush, some May buds and a pocketful of fiddleheads, those tight little ferns, which, like the Folk, are so tender while they’re young, but bitter poison when they grow. It is enough. I turn to go back, but suddenly I hear horses’ hooves on the path behind me. A riding-horse with iron shoes, trotting at a lively pace some quarter of a mile away. Quickly, I step off the path and hide behind a deadfall of broken trees. The horseman will be gone soon, and then I will be on my way.

A few minutes later, I see the horse, a chestnut with a black mane, and riding, a man in a May-green coat, wearing a garland of flowers. Quickly, my hand seeks the village girl’s charm. An adder-stone gives protection for those who do not want to be seen. The stone is smooth and cool in my hand. The scrap of scarlet petticoat shows bright between my fingers.

I would not normally look up. I do not want to be noticed. And yet I am curious to see more of the horse and its rider. Carefully, I peer out from between the spurs of the deadfall just as he passes beside me, the buttons on his green coat flashing in the sun.

A nobleman, then – I can tell by his boots, and by the way he looks around as if he owns the trees themselves. His hair is as smooth as his horse’s flank. Why do I even notice him? Is it the adder-stone in my hand, that wants me to see him more clearly? I raise the polished stone to my eye and look at the man through the narrow bore. Somehow I know that he will look back. I know that his name is W-I-L-L-A-M. And now, as he turns, as I knew he would, I see that he is handsome.

Just at that moment, the fine brown horse stumbles on the stony path. The young man, taken off balance, slips and falls out of his saddle. The horse rears up, its eyes wild, its hooves striking sparks against the stones. The young man will be trampled, and there is no-one to help him. And so I jump out from my hiding place and catch the horse’s bridle.

A soothing cantrip: the horse is soon calmed. Wild horses are different. Wild horses do not welcome our touch. But this one is a riding-horse; nervous, but trained to the bridle. I turn now to the master, who is lying on the path. He is a little dazed by the fall, but he is out of danger. I notice that he is very young, barely older than I am. I tether the horse to a nearby branch and prepare to vanish into the woods.

‘Wait.’ I turn, and see him watching. His eyes are blue as a jay’s wing. ‘Who are you?’

I do not answer. A named thing is a tamed thing, and my people are wild for ever. I ought to ignore him and walk away. His kind are so often dangerous. And yet, he looks harmless enough on the ground, mud on the sleeve of his fine green coat, his cheek scratched by a bramble. And he sees me – really sees me. I can see a tiny reflection of myself in his eyes. Perhaps that’s why I want to stay, to hear the sound of his voice again, to have him look at me that way and see myself in his blue eyes. No-one sees me, as a rule. Even when I show myself, no-one really sees me.

‘Who are you?’ he says again. His voice is as soft as deer velvet.

I shake my head.

‘Don’t be afraid. Who are you? Where are your people?’

My people are the wolves, the hare, the wild bees in the forest. My people are the birch trees, the roe deer, and the otter. My people are the travelling folk that travel on the campfire smoke, and go into the fox, the wolf, the badger and the weasel. And I am not afraid.

I lift my chin and say: ‘The woods.’

‘Then you must be the Queen of the May,’ he says, and stands, and picks up his May Day garland, which has fallen to the ground. It is a garland of strawberry leaves, woven together with wild rose.

He places it gently onto my hair. ‘Do you have a name?’ he says.

Of course not. Names are for tame folk. Names are for those who are afraid of our kind of freedom.

I think of the village girl’s adder-stone charm. I say: ‘I know yours. It’s W-I-L-L-A-M.’ He smiles. I wonder why he is not surprised that I know his name. Then I realise that he knows all the village girls know his name. All the village girls notice him. All the village girls dream of him, and whisper his name into their pillows. The surprise would be if I did not.

For a moment his arrogance leaves me mute. But even that has a kind of charm. He reminds me of a young stag showing off his first pair of antlers. He has the same kind of awkwardness, of playfulness, of confidence. Something unlike the rest of his kind. Something almost wild.

‘It’s Will-i-am.’ He writes it in the dust of the path. W-I-L-L-I-A-M. With that extra stroke. The village girl must have spelt it wrong.

‘Will-i-am.’ It sounds as sweet as water from the well. He smiles again. I rarely smile. I have no-one to smile for. And now I know why I took the charm from the fairy tree last night. Now I begin to understand my restlessness, my hunger. Something was missing from my life. Something I never suspected was wrong. And now, today, something has come to answer the quickening call of the May.

W-I-L-L-A-M.

W-I-L-L-I-A-M.

It is only one letter. A single stroke. But I can feel it, nevertheless. He too has a space inside, like the hole in the adder-stone. An emptiness waiting to be filled. Something that was missing. And although I can barely read his name scratched into the dusty path, I already know in my secret heart that the thing that was missing was I.

Today, I am a hawthorn tree, all trembling and shaken. I slept with his garland at my side, and this morning it was still green, although the roses had faded. And so I went into a bird – a linnet, brown and busy – and sang, and flew, and flew, and sang, and yet could not leave the young man behind or forget him, as I could forget those tame young men from the village.

What sickness is this? Why do I not take pleasure in my freedom? The air is bright; the sky is blue; the wind is filled with promise. Why then do I feel so unlike myself, so restless and strange, so incomplete? Why then do I ache, and fret, and pine, and rage, and question?

I fled when, for the second time, the young man asked to know my name. He tried to follow, but was too slow and clumsy in the undergrowth. I fled through thicket and bramble and thorn, then crossed where the river ran shallowest, following the secret paths that only deer and foxes know. But W-I-L-L-I-A-M stayed with me somehow, and in the song of the linnet I heard his name, and in the sound of the wind, and all day from the sky I watched for his horse, and for the green of his coat, and listened for the sound of his voice. But I did not see or hear him again, and finally, I went back to my hut and tried to eat, but could not; and tried to sleep, but could not; and tried to forget him, and could not. Instead I remembered a song of the Folk; a song that maidens sometimes sing:

I took this fair maid by the lily-white hand,

On a green mossy bank we sat down;

I gave her a kiss on her sweet rosy lips,

A tree spread its branches around …

The very next morning I made her my bride,

Just after the breaking of day;

The bells they did ring, and the birds they did sing,

And I crowned her the Queen of the May.

What witchcraft is this? What malady? I try to purge myself of him with wormwood and valerian. I am no village maiden, to sigh over bells and songbirds. I am no girl of the Folk, to dream of weddings and garlands. I should not have taken the village girl’s charm from the branch of the hawthorn tree. The hawthorn is vengeful and cunning and old – to steal from her was a mistake. I pull the piece of scarlet silk from the heart of the adder-stone and throw it onto my cooking fire. The stone I drop into the stream, to tumble back towards the sea. The hawthorn will forget, in time, and things will be as they once were. And yet, for all that, William remains in me, like a splinter in my heart. And when I sleep at last, I dream of a night in midsummer; and in my dream he is warm and sweet, and tastes of blood and strawberries.

Today I am a speckled frog in the rushes by a lake. The lake is deep and black as bog: its waters cold from the mountains. A dozen waterfalls and streams come to plunge their feet in the lake: otters live on the islands that rise above the surface. Today it is raining; soft fine rain like stitches of the finest silk. And yet there is no joy to be had, not in the lake or in the woods, not in the rain or in the open sky, for my love is far away and there is no pleasure without him.

His name is William MacCormac. I heard it from a white-headed crow, who heard it from a black sheep, who heard it from a tabby cat that lives in a dry-moated castle. The castle belongs to a rich old man called Sir John MacCormac. He is the laird of this piece of earth, and William is his only son.

The travelling folk have no castles, no wealth. We do not hold lands or territories. Instead we have the mountains, the sea, the lakes and the moors and the rivers. This is our inheritance. But William will one day inherit everything his father owns: the castle, the horses, the farms, the sheep, the gold, the grain, the granaries. All the tame things his father owns will pass into his service. By the reckoning of the Folk, William will be a rich man. And rich men are courted wherever they go, by noblewomen and village girls; by commoners and courtesans. One day he will fall in love, and that girl he will marry. And their names will be spoken aloud in the church, and wedded to one another. And she will wear a muslin veil, and he will wear a garland. And he will give her a golden ring, to bind her to him for ever. And he will never once be mine, or look at me with love in his eyes, for who could love a brown girl who never stays in her own skin?

I wish I had kept the adder-stone. Such a stone is a powerful charm, and looking through the hole in its heart by the light of a tallow candle, you can see as far as the ocean – even, perhaps, through castle walls. If I had kept the adder-stone I would watch him as he slept. I would watch wherever he went, until at last I tired of the game. But the charm is lost, though the spell stands strong, and all I can do is hope to forget the young man in the May-green coat, who crowned me with wild roses …

Today I am a nightingale at your bedroom window. My song is sweeter than honey, and yet you do not hear me. Instead, you sit in your chamber and read from a book bound in red leather, and sometimes you sigh and look outside, but you cannot see me, nor do you know how eagerly I watch you from my stony perch.

There is a sprig of whitethorn lying by your bedside. Ill luck to the sleeper who lies by the may. Tonight I shall go into a mouse, or a rat, or a housecat, and steal into your bedroom. There I shall take the bad-luck bloom and leave a wild rose in its place – a wild rose, like the ones you placed in my hair. A wild pink rose, still fresh with the dew, and tender as the morning. And then, maybe, you will think of me, and know that I still think of you.

A cat yowls in the darkness. I would not choose to travel with her. Housecats are at best only half-wild; fawning and purring for favours. But no-one questions a housecat, or hinders her coming and going. Why do you sigh, sweet William? Why are you so restless? I scratch at your door: you let me in. I caper and purr at the touch of your hand.

‘Puss, puss,’ you say. It is almost a name. What a strange thing it must be, to be named. What a strange and terrible thing. No man will ever name me, not as a cat, and not as myself. And William is drawn to wild things, or he would never have looked at me.

‘Puss, puss.’ I take a giant leap onto the silken coverlet. Your bed is as b. . .