MUKASHIBANASHI 12: THE OROCHI (GREAT SERPENT)

I have chosen this particular mukashibanashi since today 23rd of April is not only Shakespeare Day, but also the commemoration of a tale so familiar as that of Saint George AKA Sir George or George the Dragonslayer, the Anglo-European trope namer for a premise which, in spite of needing no recap, I feel compelled to sum up: reptilian monster (dragon, in the widespread Western version) beleaguers community, is appeased with allotted children and/or maidens while the local adults are powerless; stranger armed with sword (Sir George, in the widespread Western version) shows up on the eve of the last sacrifice (crown princess, in the widespread Western version), uses his blade to slay monstrous reptile, is rewarded with the hand of the final damsel in marriage, there is much rejoicing.
Now Sir George has a pre-Christian Shinto counterpart in a mukashibanashi; in fact, the Dragonslayer or Damsel-and-Dragon mytheme (folktale type 300) is, just like Cinderella or the Flood, one of the most widespread around human culture, through the ages and across the globe.

Orochi storybook, Escuela de Arte, Castellón - 

glad to see some local talent take on this myth!

So the province of Izumo, thousands of years ago, was terrorised by a monstrous reptilian beast: a hydra-like eight-headed serpent called the Orochi (大蛇 ie the Great Serpent), with 16 eyes golden as physalis with vertical-slit pupils, and so unreasonably large that not only would he cover a range of eight mountains when lying down, but that all kinds of plants (from pines and cedars to ferns and mosses) grow on his back (oui, and if a monster has a thriving ecosystem growing on top, it's obviously as unreasonably old as it is unreasonably large, having been there since the night of times). And, as always when a reptilian monster sets its sight on a human community, lots were cast once in a year to pick a child or a maiden who would be sent to the hydra (or dragon, or lindwyrm, or whatever -in other myths of this cycle-) as sacrifice to appease the reptilian beast. The villagers have long since resigned themselves to their fate and to hand over the appointed yearly tribute.

In the most widespread version, the final damsel, the last local child to be sacrificed to the Orochi, the girl saved by the slayer and subsequently betrothed then married to him, is clearly a damsel as we know the stock character: an adolescent maiden called Kushinada, who had furthermore previously lost all of her older sisters to the Serpent, keeping her parents in obvious life-or-death anxiety as soon as she is revealed to be the orochi-bait for that year.

Then, as you might have foretold, in comes a stranger, armed with a sword, who cannot stand the situation and, on the very day of the final damsel's sacrifice; determined to slay the monstrous reptile, this stranger appoints himself as a champion for the locals.
Now the former ocean god --now, Susanoo is NOT Ryuji. He (Susanoo) got laid off as ocean god and replaced with the dragon emperor due to various cosmic-horror crimes that disrupted the universe, but that is another story and will be told some other day; what matters is that Susanoo was fired and turned into a human (while Ryuji took his position in change of the ocean)-- has been living in Izumo as a supernaturally powerless human, though armed with his trusty katana, for three or four years and farmed rice and made straw hats and (what is the most relevant) gotten familiar to the Orochi cycle of the oversized many-headed reptile slithering into the village, being handed a child or a maiden that he tied up in his coils, then slithering out again with his prey to his lair.
So Susanoo is appalled by the villagers' resignation and perceived powerlessness... but fortunately, just like Blackadder, he has a cunning plan that abso-bloody-lutely cannot fail. The fact that Kushinada's parents run the local distillery plays a lead role in this plot...

So, on the eve of the fateful day, he has all the locals in the province gather up all the sake they have got and bring it to the distillery. Since he has garnered the trust of all of them, they obey his orders to the letter. Then he has commanded Kushinada's parents and their staff to distill all that sake - and the result are eight vats of rice vodka, one vat per Serpent head, which the distillers bring to the centre of that village, arranging the oversized, or rather Orochi-sized, shot-glasses in a circle, in the middle of which he stands with a drawn katana and shoulder to shoulder with the damsel.
And very soon in slithers the Great Serpent, its eight heads snaking through the sky, with glowing physalis-golden slit-pupil eyes. In some versions, he smells the liquor from afar with all of his forked tongues, in others the eyes on one head catch sight of one vat, but in all versions the Orochi is terribly thirsty and only used to hydrating with water and the blood of his prey... Soon all eight heads were lowered down to the vodka vats and drank heavily... and, as foretold, quaffing all that liquor to the last drop causes the Serpent to fall asleep, crashing down like a massive treetrunk, out like a light, all eight heads swaying in drunkenness!
After hydrating the hydra, Susanoo takes advantage of the opponent's unconscious state and puts that sword-arm to good use by beheading those clouded heads left and right --off with those heads!-- down to the last one. Hailed as the hero who just saved the province (and of course as the fiancé of the damsel he has just saved), he decides to gut the Orochi to see whether there are any objects of value inside (if you find only a one-legged tin soldier or only a golden ring inside a regular catfish, a reptilian monster's gut is a treasure trove!)... and sure enough, when he's almost finished with all the eviscerating, his own blade clanks and finds a hard resistance, striking steel instead of bones, at the tail end near the cloaca. Sure enough, it's time to get his hands dirty with blood and fat and digested vodka when our hero tucks his arms all the way up to his shoulders into the gutting wound at tail-end height... Voilà that he comes out with two katanas, his own and a shortsword (and, of course, his sleeves and arms full of gunk, crud...)! The second sword, the shortsword the Orochi had swallowed, just radiates power (like the Shinto equivalent of Valyrian steel anyone?)... It makes perfect cuts even into the smallest blades of grass, and can even cut through clouds without them being able to regenerate! So he calls the new blade the Shortsword of Gathering Clouds (Murakumo no Tsurugi 叢雲剣), which sounds as badass as any Westerosi named blade (Ice, Lightbringer, Oathkeeper...). However, the current popular name of this katana, one of the regalia of the Imperial House even in the present-day Reiwa era (the latest crown prince, in fact, is due soon to receive it from the hands of his abdicating father Akihito as part of the coronation ceremony), is the far less epic-sounding Shortsword of Lawnmowing (Kusanagi no Tsurugi 草薙の剣) or simply Lawnmower (Kusanagi 草薙). For a relic that has been with royalty since the night of time, doesn't it sound a bit funny? Seriously, what is far cooler, Oathkeeper or Lawnmower?


In spite of this fact, and for all that Kusanagi 草薙 means Lawnmower, the history behind it has given inspiration in anime to many instances of badassery (and favourites of mine):

• the surname of the Major (the female protagonist) in Ghost in the Shell
• the name of an epic starship in Gundam SEED -- it's even an Izumo-class starship!
• one of Nistro's three heroic champions (the other two are Excalibur, from Arthurian lore, and Gandiva, Arjuna's archery bow from the Mahabharata -depicted as a sagittarius-!)
• eccentric mentor Cal Kolter's original surname in the subsequent Yu-Gi-Oh continuity
• Sailor Uranus' Space Sword
• outside anime, in franime, lonely prodigy and privileged rival Kagami Tsurugi

The Orochi, in turn, has inspired various reptilian villains in anime, for instance:

• the Pokémon Hydreigon (combined with more Western hydras and dragons), 
• the Digimon Orochimon (whom Jeri, drawing from her afterschool life as an underage barmaid in the family business, even got wasted, referencing the hypotext in his monster-of-the week episode, episode 31),
• the exceedingly Voldemort-esque sissy villain Orochimaru -- who even, referencing the hypotext, has the Kusanagi Shortsword stored inside himself, and draws steel from his throat!
• the Yo-Kai Venoct (an Orochimaru parody expy) and Slurpent (a one-headed but eight-tongued rattler serpent with a weak head for strong drink)

When I first encountered this story, I was surprised! The basic structure is folktale type 300, just like Saint George, ie "damsel and dragon classic": reptilian monster beleaguers community, is appeased with allotted children and/or maidens while the local adults are powerless; stranger armed with sword shows up on the eve of the last sacrifice, uses his blade to slay monstrous reptile, is rewarded with the hand of the final damsel in marriage, there is much rejoicing. According to Maria Tatar, the "damsel and dragon" scenario is given even more weight in popular imagination than it is in the original tales; the stereotypical hero is envisioned as slaying dragons (and frequently rescuing damsels from them) even though, for instance, the Brothers Grimm had only a few tales of dragon (and other monster) slayers among hundreds of tales. Decades before, Northrop Frye himself identified the damsel-and-dragon premise as a central form of the quest. Even in the very first James Bond film, Doctor No, the titular villain's lair is guarded from intruders by a reptilian-looking, flamethrowing armoured vehicle. James and the Bond Girl du jour are menaced by the "dragon," do battle with it, yet have their friend Quarrel (the squire or sidekick) killed (obviously torched to death quicker than you can say "dracarys"), and both are captured by the crew of the Dragon Tank.

But nowhere else in any other damsel or dragon tales from any other culture or epoch does the hero make the monster drunk. Or gut the slain monster like a fish for bonus spoils, for that matter. Though, in various Hispanic versions on both sides of the pond, the serpent or dragon (lagarto) is eviscerated by the hero, and its latest prey set free into the light, just like it occurs with the Big Bad Wolf in Grimm stories (Seven Goat Kids, Red Riding Hood...) and the fish in the Tin Soldier.

The closest things I could first find as parallels to the Orochi story were the widespread cycle of dragonslayer versions (mostly Anglo-European, whether Western or Slavic) where the monster is fed a decoy, a lifesized doll or animal figure that is actually a disguised bomb (most frequently a powder-keg, like in the case of the Wawelski dragon who lived underground in Kraków, or the lagarto that terrorised the Andalusian town of Jaén; but the decoy that bursts down the throat can also be full of iron nails, of quicklime or tar, or -more recently- a motor engine, like the last meal of the shark Bruce in Jaws).

In the feminist tale The Practical Princess, a dragon demands that a king should sacrifice his daughter to him so that he will leave the rest of the kingdom alone. But the princess saves herself by making a "princess dummy" out of straw, a lifesized decoy doll like a scarecrow, and filling it with boiling tar. The princess dresses the dummy in one of her own gowns, then goes to the dragon's cave where she offers herself as a sacrifice, while actually hiding herself and presenting the decoy at the entrance to the den. The unwitting dragon swallows the straw dummy whole, and the tar explodes inside the dragon's stomach, killing him. Afterwards, the princess observes, "Dragons are not very smart."

Moving on from fish and reptiles to mammals, Chaucer's Minotaur is choked to death when Ariadne gives Theseus balls of bees-wax the size of plums to force-toss down his opponent's throat. Among the Fon people of Benin, the young hero To Kpavi saves a local village from a human-eating male lion by tossing hot coals down his throat. Further up north in a nomadic Saharan tale, similarly, a jackal who had decided to become vegan (due to an epizootic among the herbivores) gets the recommendation from nigh-unaffected insectivores (who are everything but i. stupid and ii. keen on becoming the Jackal's next meaty meal, should this veganism not last) to start his fruit diet with unpeeled cactus pears, and one such fruit, with its prickles, gets stuck in his throat and nearly chokes him to death. Cactus pears fed to canids also pop up across the pond in Veracruz, where Brer Rabbit climbs up the cactus that produces them to save himself from Brer Coyote. To appease the starving prairie wolf, the bunny throws cactus pears into his mouth and down his throat. The first and second ones are peeled and thus go down smoothly; the third cactus pear, however, is unpeeled, and the same unpleasant shock for the Coyote ensues as for the Jackal! In these stories where the (generally) reptilian monster is fed a decoy-disguised bomb or a choking wax or a prickly fruit that gets stuck in the throat, its own instinct to feed becomes its undoing, just like when it comes to strong drink for the Orochi.

However, the most striking parallels to the Orochi tale come from Gipuzkoa of all places, where the monster is also a hydra, but this Basque serpent, Herensuge, has one head less (ie seven); but this story also contains the motifs of animal prey and of the decoy bomb (a stuffed young bull, the inside of whose skin is full of gunpowder and phosphorus):

Cerca de Ahuski se encuentra la cueva de Azalegi. Allí vivía antiguamente Herensuge. Era

una serpiente de siete cabezas. Con su hálito atraía al ganado vacuno del monte y lo comía. Después de hartarse bien, bajaba a beber agua al río Aphura, en la comarca de Altzai. Un día, los hombres de la margen derecha de la vega se comprometieron con el señor de Zaro a matar al monstruo. El hijo

del conde de Zaro y de Altzai lo mató. Despellejó un becerro, un toro joven, y llenó de pólvora y fósforo su piel. Lo cosió, disecando al becerro, y tomando un caballo, fue con su piel a la parte superior de la cueva. Y allí se puso a silbar. Y como se dio cuenta de que Herensuge se sacudía y andaba, le arrojó el becerro disecado.

La serpiente atrajo con el hálito el señuelo y se lo tragó. Creyendo que era un becerro de verdad, lo devoró de una bocanada. En cuanto empezó la pólvora a producir su efecto, no pudo apoderarse de

los otros, despedazó a golpes de cola todas las rocas de Sobe, saltó después al mar y allí se ahogó. Entonces el conde puso de vuelta al caballo.

Y vio a Herensuge ardiendo en llamas dirigirse por el aire hacia el mar. Como tuvo que pasar

por encima de un bosque, segaba las ramas de las hayas.  El conde murió del susto. Herensuge

no apareció más (San Sebastián, 1997: 77-78).

If there is nothing called the collective unconscious, chance, or serendipity, then how did the story pass from Izumo in Japan to Gipuzkoa in Iberian Euskadi, or vice versa?

ONCE UPON 24 TIMES: STORY XIX

Story the Nineteenth:

XVIII - The Moon
Sleeping Beauty

The Burning Rose

It happened overnight, one may say. She vanished on her eighteenth birthday to go out with some girl friends (was she telling the truth?), and, wham!, they found her lying unconscious, pale as her blouse, on the cold floor of a ladies' restroom, with a hypodermic needle sunken midway into the blue vein that surfaced on her lilywhite left elbow -- most of the liquid within that syringe had already entered her bloodstream and coursed all the way to her heart and head.
Now she lies still, prostrate on lilywhite covers, in the middle of a hedge of thorns of plastic and steel that pierce both her arms... Eyes so shut, the sparkle quenched and the pupils filling the irises within. Her chest is as white and still and cold as ice, the heartbeat within beginning to flatline. Not merely lolling. It even looks sinister.
"Put out the light, and then, put out the light."
An only child, a lonely child, a sheltered child; her face was the fairest, wit the sharpest, heart the most angelic... Shakespeare, bel canto, ballet, tai chi, the fingers of Ferenc Liszt on the ivories. Everyone, no matter their gender, age, or rank, who set eyes on her, fell in love at first sight; yet she remained innocent and unprepared for her coming of age.
Here she must doze and doze, and never quicken from repose, till they bring her a flower of Burning Rose!
The Burning Rose... one of the few memories she had of her childhood, the story her mum always told... Within the cloud above the sleeper's head, that covered the sleeper's crown --coloured with the red skies of dawn-- from the heat, was a dream, and in that dream grew the garden of Burning Roses, whose fire is unquenchable, and which the plucking of no man's hand can achieve. The nimbus cloud hung motionless between earth and sky like a great opal, like the one on mum's ring, if not like the UFOs in that sci-fi film which Aster and she had loved so much. Through the outer coverings of this mist, one could see balls of fire, and these were the Burning Roses.
"If I quench this flame... where should I find a way to light it?"
The dream was sweet, and it made him laugh and mutter in his sleep:

'O Rose,' he said, 'O sweet Rose, what end is there of thy sweetness? How innumerable is the dance of the Roses of my Rose garden!'

Sweethearts, the two of them? At least that's what they say, what she denies. The stripling bedridden in his own hedge of thorns to her right, like a funeral pall of bride and groom nipped in the bud, doesn't say a word either at first. It's not by chance that Aster and Thornrose were both rushed to the emergency ward at the same time. For a decade and a half, these two had been the best of friends.
As the sun set, as he hurried to Thornrose's place to give her a simple box of chocolates for her birthday, and to explain to all of them what was wrong and what was right, and that both of them merely loved one another as friends or siblings... but, sadly, he could not. As he crossed the rails, Aster could not foresee the heavy push on his back right before the tram train charged against his prostrate form, struggling to get up. The box of chocolates fared far worse than the lad who carried it.
Aster is still, strangely pale, his spine broken, shards of backbone having torn the silver cord within. His breathing is shallow and painful, the piercing ends of ribs stabbing into his left lung. Still, life lingers within, young and strong and full of hope.
Neither he nor his childhood friend know that they are next to one another. Their adjacent pinky fingers tied together by the red string of fate, a tether unseen, yet as hard as steel, braving the hedge of thorns.
When should they awaken?
For they are close to one another at least within the dreamscape as well.
The crown of his head kissing the dawning twilight, the tips of his heels grazing the evening twilight, and over his midriff shone the midday sun... and, fitted upon that bruised head like somewhere in between a hat and a bandage, that ominous cloud hanging motionless like an opal or a great UFO worlds above earth. Casting a friendly shade upon the sleeper, who casts a friendly shade upon her.
Thornrose is not feeling weary at all, she is perfectly serene.
She gazes up into the cloud... space aliens? Through the outer covering, she sees mists, thick as those of London or Lützen, veiling what seem to be balls of fire: within lies the garden of the Burning Rose.
The vorpal blade flung across her back quivers at least slightly.
Though broken sometimes by coughs of blood, the dream was sweet, and it made him laugh and mutter in his sleep:

'O Rose,' he said, 'O sweet Rose, what end is there of thy sweetness? How innumerable is the dance of the Roses of my Rose garden!'

Nimble as a free cat, gritting the pommel of her vorpal rapier between her teeth like she's seen so many times on screen, she takes a leap of faith up towards Aster's outer throat. It surprises her that she can leap as high and will surely land as deftly as any magical girl warrior of those she has always loved. The vocal folds vibrate with those words, "Rose garden," as she nails the landing.

The Larynx was known as the Philosophers' Walk. The river of Trachea divided it between the False Cord Quarters (ventricular ligament) on the left bank and the True Cord (vocal lig.) on the sophisticated right. Lush heavy shades of scarlet and pre-carious rebounding high-wire steps that created melodious echoes graced its sides. Here the light was a prickling glare.

On the True Cord bank, the sinuous laryngeal floor undulated in tympanitic waves that one found surprisingly arousing. 

She sticks, actually, to the right bank, following the right carotid artery as she feels the underground riverbed beneath lilywhite silk throbbing restlessly, at an erratic pace. Oh, if it were steady, she thinks, girding the blade to her right thigh. It feels like fording the Styx, the first rite of passage in the afterlife. But she's as broke as Orpheus... Still, there's no Charon or Urshanabi in sight, and, if there is one, he must dwell beneath the surface. What's it like there? she wonders, the hot Thermidor sun beating down upon her weary limbs as she hastens ahead.
The Realm of Hades... how many times had she fantasized that the underworld was actually the system of its ruler, who had for instance gulped down Persephone and kept her within? That chortle of her only true friend's when she exponded the theory for the first time. The way he choked and coughed after that chortle; to her left, Aster's laryngeal prominence rises like that island in the Seine where Nôtre Dame is... but the memory is only transient, very transient.
Thornrose actually looks ahead, up north; the shade of the Ymir-sized stripling's chin cast half-way down his outer throat. What could have been a lantern jaw within three or four years, and now was rife with cherry-red stitching threads criss-crossing the downy peach-fuzz, in which a few hardy dark blond strands had begun to peek. It all looms like the massive façade of an overlord's fortress, or the prow of his most relevant starship, as if Aster's head were the keep that had to be stormed by this one-maiden army. That erratic throbbing soon is a memory, as she has left the artery behind and prepares for the ascent up the stitching, to his right whiskers. Vorpal sword clenched in her mouth as usual.
In her waking life, she had never been fond of heights, always freezing up a ladder or a climbing gym like a fraidy kitten... but now it feels surprisingly light. Clinging to a few ropes of titian hair with split ends, like a pocket-sized prince up a tower, Thornrose begins the trickier part of the ascent. It's just merely slightly trickier, at least. Still it feels like an endless climb, until she finds herself snugly sitting in the hollow of his right ear; below her, the empty piercing hole that had been her last point of support.
Peering into the dark tunnel ahead, a passage to her as high as a railway tunnel, Thornrose buckles up her sword once more as she decides to advance a little more, a little deeper, where it's dark and foreboding... the sticky wax squishing beneath her feet, but it barely makes her wince. After making only half-way through, she clears her throat and begins to sing, the opening theme of one of those shows they had always watched together. Chaa-la, hecchala... and everything begins to shudder around her: he has heard her in his sleep, and is obviously reacting. The wax, fortunately, anchors her well to the ground. Chaa-la, hecchala... and the sweet singing mixes itself with the sweetness of the Rose in the brain, and he mutters to himself, saying: 'O bee, O sweet bee, O bee in my brain, what nectar wilt thou fetch for me out of the Roses of my Rose-garden?'
Thornrose can hear his self-talk, or whispered thoughts, out loud. When that opening theme is over, she begins to hum that of Doctor Who, followed by the Sailor Stars theme. Makenai! Ashitae, SAILOR YELL! More and more, she sweetens herself until her host passes her into his brain, and into the heart of the dream, even into the garden of the Burning Rose.
It's all a blur of dazzling light and tangles of nerves and throbbing, just like in that spacetime travel sequence at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, or as if she were clutching a portkey. Far down below the folds of the cloud. 'When I have stolen the Rose, I may need swift heels for my flight.' 
The broomstick glides, fast as lightning, in between her thighs as she makes the wish, making Thornrose gasp in amazement as the cruise breaks the barrier of light. Yes, she is a magical girl warrior. In this realm, she is no one's fool.
It came, cleaving the encirclement of clouds like a silver gleam of moonlight, and for a moment, where they parted, Thornrose saw a rift of blue sky, and the light of the outer world clear through their midst.
Right then, perchance enticed by the stabbing headache through his right temple that he feels the whizzing of the broomstick as, Aster turns uneasily in his sleep, and the garden of the Burning Rose rocks to its foundations as the edge of things real pierce into it.
'While I stay here there is danger. Surely I must make haste to possess myself of the Rose and to escape!'
All round is a garden set thick with rose-trees in myriads of blossom, rose behind rose as far as the eye can reach, and the fragrance of them lies like a heavy curtain of sleep upon the senses, so our shero is already beginning to feel drowsy, staggering as if intoxicated through a Cretan labyrinth of rose-bush hedges. Every now and then, a statue. The one at the entrance is Aster himself as a child, so supple that one cannot tell if it's a boy or a girl, in a jester's hat and a gender-fluid oversized Pink Floyd shirt, the first school knapsack, a Yoda-shaped plushie, strapped on narrow shoulders. On the pedestal, it is written THE FOOL.
Gradually overpowered by the intoxicating fragrance of the Burning Roses, her once bold strides turned to heavy steps, she arrives at a fork in the maze; a sculptoric group of Aster and Étienne both half-naked, kissing, locked in an embrace, presides the bifurcation. On the right, to which her friend, her host, her dreamer has his back turned, the roses burn brightly, even crackling, their scent far more reminiscent of gunsmoke. On the left, whereunto his significant other is leaning, there are but small buds with a sweet floral fragrance. Through the fire-coloured haze, Thornrose reads THE LOVERS upon the pedestal. After all, we are all free to love whom we please, some like it hot and some like it cold. Surely, Étienne would be worried about Aster's state right now. It's all right that he's queer and I'm straight: I want him to be happy, and I'm sure he feels the same about me. She thinks these words as her head turns slowly to the left, away from the overpowering heat on the right. Just like in Doctor Who. Turn left. She does so almost by reflex, out of what seems to be more of a whim than a thought.
Soon Thornrose finds herself on a small Japanese-style bridge by a fountain --amazing to find water in this fiery dream, isn't it?--, surrounded by wooden centaurs who feast upon marshmallow pies in the open plaza, or rotunda, at the centre (or is it?) of the rose-maze. 
"As my childish straight lines were forced into curves, my mind began to writhe; it was as if some unseen hand was nudging me, magicking me into a shape that was not my own. Poisonous feelings rushed through me with no warning. Greed, when there was nothing I lacked. Anger, when I had nothing to resent. Despair, when I was the luckiest girl in the world.
Come here, said my mother, I'll tell you a story instead. She bent down and took me on her lap, though my feet almost touched the floor. The only stories were family stories, and they were all the one story. As my mother told it, I could see it unfolding like a dusty tapestry, silted up with memory. How my grandmother had deep blue eyes and married a researcher and had an only child and lived happily ever after. How my mother married my father and had me. I liked to consider this long story and how it led all the way to me, as a path winds all the way up to a peak. It soothed me for a while; it made me feel that I was in the right place, the only place to be. 
But the ennui of discontent had got into my veins somehow. 
There's nothing out there you need to see , said my mother; it's a cruel world full of evil men..."
Here, her eyelids droop and her knees give way at last, but fortunately the splash (the cool, the liquid, the sound, everything) startles her back to consciousness.
For just before her is the fountain, in her own likeness. Not a Versaillesque jet d'eau, and neither one of those deer-scarers that go doink, but a damsel the size of Thornrose herself, with Thornrose's own features, and in her late teens as well... but stark naked, her figure eight and nipples and navel and mons of Venus not even censored with fig or maple leaves. She pours rosy rosewater with the ewer in her right hand back into the pond; with the one in her left, upon the thirsty ground, to water the bushes all around.
The source of keeping the dream alive. 
As Thornrose approaches, she sees that her undressed likeness has kaleidoscope eyes of precious stones that refract the light of the flames into countless rainbows. 

A girl with kaleidoscope eyes... didn't her mum lull her to sleep with a song about that?

But soon the heat dries up all the moisture that has soaked up her dress, and Thornrose, beginning to feel drowsy once more, stretches out a left hand in haste to the nearest flower, lest in a little while she should be no more than a part of the dream. "Starlight... Honeymoon... Therapy... Kiss!" she exclaims, crushing her fingers upon the stem.

The whole bough crackles and springs away at her touch, screaming and spouting fire; a noise like thunder or cannon fills all the air. Every rose in the garden turns and spits flame at where she stands. But her face and her hands are not blistered with the heat. Not even first-degree burns, like when she's red as a lobster thermidor from being too long in the sun in the middle of the day.

Straddling her broomstick, she has seized on a rose, and tugged, but the strong fibres held. Then, she locks herself to her mount with her legs, holding the scabbard of the vorpal blade sheathed at her right thigh and keeping the left hand locked around the thorny, red-hot stem, beseeching it to break free. And, giving but one plunge, the Rose comes away into Thornrose's hand, panting and a prisoner. All blushing it grows and radiant, with a soft inner glow, and an odour of incomparable sweetness. It seems to see a heart beating before her.

But is it her friend's heart... or her own?

What matters is the quibble. No man could pick the Burning Rose, which meant that any maiden was free to pick it. Like Portia and Éowyn, subverting the binary of phallic ones and yonic zeroes.
But now there came a blast of fire from behind, like in one of those sell-out action films she has always sneered at! All is whirling and shaking before her eyes, just like in that spacetime travel sequence at the end of 2001 once more, even more so than when she entered the dream. Like... speeding desperately over earthquake and space and the storming of the Bastille and the exploding Death Star and Magdeburg and Gernika and Dark Side of the Moon and Eddie Izzard as Mr. Kite and the penguins at the Oceanogràfic and Qui-Gon falling off that height and the thrill of Étienne's first kiss immediately after that mutual confession... For the plucking of the Rose has awakened the sleeper from his sleep; and the dream has shrivelled and spun away in a whirl of flame-coloured vapours. Leaping into clear day out of the unravelment of its mists, launching over an edge of precipice for a downward dive into space.
This is not at all like the usual turbulence she has felt on a plane up north to Iceland or the British Isles. 
Rumpled strawberry-blond hair, standing upright from his head in the fevered shock of his awakening, makes a forest ending in his forehead that bowers them to right and to left, at the end of the cape of Widow's Peak. Quitting it they slide ungovernably over the bulge of his brow, then at full spurt for the abyss.
Hi-ho, Silver! Thornrose shouts right before humming the William Tell Overture that will accompany her as the soundtrack of the whole plunge, her own platinum braided hair, cut short, fluttering like a halo around her lovely heart-shaped face. Dextrously the broomstick has steered its descent, catching on the bridge and furrowing the ridge of the fine aquiline nose; nine leagues are the duration of a second.
Thinking some venomous parasite was injuring his flesh, even though the sickbed was fully sterilised, the stripling had just aimed, and a moment too late had thumped his fist upon the place. But already the rider skirting the amazed opening of his mouth (which would sure have sucked a stunned Thornrose down that slippery throat and deep into the dark, pulsating Realm of Hades) has intrenched herself behind the holdfast of the laryngeal prominence. Thence, as it escaped the rummaging of his fingers, it had flown scouring his chest, in between his nipples (as the heart within pounded steadily underneath at last!), and inflicted a flying scratch over the regions of his abdomen, right above the navel. Then, still believing it to be the triumphal procession of a non-existent space flea, he had pursued it to his thigh, and mistaking the shadow for the substance allowed it yet again to escape. After all, he is paralysed from the waist downwards, and the shock of not feeling his feet (or anything between his feet and his waist) is what now overtakes all of his consciousness.
But, preserved whole and alive, she speeds fast and far, bearing the Burning Rose to the heart of her own lifeless form, through the hedge of thorns of plastic and syringes, after having run the gauntlet of Aster's chakras and before heading towards her own frozen bosom.
'I knew what fortune was with you; for when you plucked off the Rose, and bore it out of the heart of the dream, the scent of it filled the world; and I felt the sweetness of youth once more in my blood.' Was it Thornrose's mum or dad who said that? It were both. And Étienne, across the hedge of needles, held Aster by the wrist in a reassuring gesture.
And there lies her own form, in eerie peace, as the astral Thornrose lays the rose in the middle of her own physical chest, in between both little lemons, that her heart might be won back into the world. Then, as the calyx finally rests where the movement of the heart should be; and presently under the white bosom rises the music of its beating, and the cold stillness within turns warm and steady, a series of regular zig-zags disrupting the flatline.
'Ah!' someone sheds tears of happiness, 'now her heart that loved me is come back, and I can listen all day to the sound of it! You have brought love... to her..."
It's not mum or dad or Aster or Étienne, but a deeper yet youthful heroic tenor voice.
Owen?
Owen, tall dark and ominous Owen, the only one who found love with her because she saw for who he was (and not what he was), whom she had become attached to against her parents' wishes?
The same Owen who didn't know Aster's little secret and who had assumed that the two young blonds were something more than lovers? The same Owen who had more recently slapped her in the face, and made her acquainted with Mr. Wright-Hooke and Mr. Upper-Kutt in such a painful fashion, taking her breath away... only because she had lost the handmade bracelet he had given her, and Aster was wearing that same bracelet?
"She warmed and ripened in his embrace, opening upon him the light of her periwinkle eyes; and the greatness and beauty of the reward abashed him and bore him down to earth."
Right before he asked for forgiveness upon being startled by her awakening. Racked until then with storms of guilt and anxiety.
The damsel saw nothing but her lover's face and the happy feasting of his eyes. She bent her head nearer and nearer to his, and the story of what she had done, fending for herself, became a dream that she remembered, and that waking made true.
And then everything was finished, for she had kissed Owen!
(The same, actually, happened simultaneously to a hazel-eyed Aster with Étienne in the bed beside!)
And her parents dried up their tears before they took their leave, and Étienne pushed the wheelchair with Aster sitting in it a little closer to the straight lovebirds (because time stood still for the lovers as the world shifted around them for twenty minutes or half an hour), and then Étienne and Aster themselves exchanged a little peck...
"...and over the walls of their palace, where they had planted it, grew the flower of the Burning Rose." She shuts the storybook, having finally recovered and returned to class herself, having read the tale to her friend in rehab (he's still getting used to living in a wheelchair, but perfectly fine with that, and determined to give his all). A warm smile on her face and the recent events having faded like a painful dream: only Aster's disability betrays the fact that it has been reality. 
Waving goodbye as Étienne enters the sickroom to visit and encourage his chouchou, she places the storybook in Aster's lap, for him to dwell upon those feelings during rehab; the illustration of a bush of Burning Roses on the cover glittering with the same kaleidoscope gleam in her periwinkle eyes.


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Othello mashed up with the Burning Rose in The Bound Princess; basically, Aster is Cassio/the prince and Thornrose is Desdemona/Aurora. Aster is also the dreamer whose dream contains the Burning Rose. Also, it gets a bit esoteric... with a Tarot-themed labyrinth (absent from Housman's tale) and all that. But what matters is that she is a shero... the sleeping beauty saves herself, wakes herself up, she even takes up a vorpal sword, rides a broomstick straddling it, and exploits a quibble in true Portia or Éowyn style ("subverting the binary of phallic ones and yonic zeroes!"). The phallic poison needle (once a spinning spindle) becomes the sword, the means to lull herself to sleep the key to set herself free. One needs to lose oneself to find oneself, at the end of the day. Now the original Sleeping Beauty message is about an only child overprotected by her parents, and that children should be allowed to grow up and take risks. I know what all of this means from personal experience (except illegal drugs)... so I hope you have enjoyed this queered and feminist retelling!

THE CAPTIVE PRINCESS INTRO

This time I bring my online edition of a particularly unsung epic of Victorian Britain, by forgotten poet and tale author Laurence Housman.
The story tells of a crown princess dethroned and plunged into a coma by her wicked stepfamily, skilled in the dark arts. So far, damselling is overrated. And the rescuer who arrives in these dire times of need is, sadly, no action heroine... bur neither a dashing knight. Simply an awkward-looking and naive boy with an unusual name (Who on Earth would name their child Noodle?).
Yet what strikes the reader, young, old, or in between, is the allegorical level of the tale.
A magic ring that makes water feel like good wine, any food taste like sweetmeats, and toil feel easy to carry on: that is Noodle's only resource from the start, a reward for an act of kindness towards complete strangers. This ring I interpret as a symbol of good karma and optimism.
From that moment on, we readers (regardless of gender, orientation, or ideology) embark on a thrilling gotta-catch-them-all quest through the realms of earth, water, fire, and air: taming unusual beasts and befriending waterfolk, entering a living body to get our grip on a fire rose (this is one of the earliest instances of a Fantastic Voyage plot in the history of fiction!), plunging into an icy lake, dark and cold and deep as Hell itself, to get the only bubble exhaled by the lake's resident monster (even though it may involve kissing the serpent's lips!)... Each challenge harder than the previous. But luckily, Noodle has got his ring...
Will this forgotten fairytale end with a "happily ever after"?
Start reading on this blog to find out!

THE CAPTIVE PRINCESS IV

IV

THE PRINCESS MELILOT

When Noodle, carrying the crystal with him, set foot once more upon dry land, straightway he was again upon the back of the Galloping Plough, with the world flying away under him. But now weariness came over him, and his head weighed this way and that, so that earth and sky mixed themselves before his gaze, and he was so drugged with sleep that he had no wits to bid the Plough slacken from its speed. Therefore it happened that as they passed a wood, a hanging bough caught him, and brushed him like a feather from his place, landing him on a green bosom of grass, where he [pg 34]slept the sleep of the weary, nor ever lifted his head to see the Plough fast disappearing over hill and valley and plain, out of sound of his voice or sight of his eye.

When Noodle awoke and found that the Plough was gone, he was bitter against himself for his folly. 'So poor a use to make of so noble a steed!' he cried; 'no wonder it has gone from me to seek for a worthier master! If by good fortune I find it again, needs must I do great things by its aid to be worthy of its service.' So he set out, following the furrow of its course, determined, however far he must seek, to journey on till he found it.

For a whole year he travelled, till at length he came, footsore and weary, to a deserted palace standing in the midst of an overgrown garden. The great gates, which lay wide open, were overrun with creepers, and the paths were green with [pg 35]weeds. That morning he had thought that he saw far away on the hills the gleam of his silver Plough, and now hope rose high, for he could see by its track that the Plough had passed before him into the garden of the palace. 'O my moonbeam,' he thought, 'is it here I shall find you at last?'

Within the garden there was a sound of cross questions and crooked answers, of many talking with loud voices, and of one weeping apart from the rest. When he got quite close, he was struck still with awe, and joy, and wonder. For first there lay the Galloping Plough in the middle of a green lawn, and round it a score of serving-men, tugging at it and trying to make it move on. Near by stood an old woman, wringing her hands and begging them to leave it alone: 'For,' cried she, 'if the Plough touches but the feet of the Princess, she will be uprooted, and will [pg 36]presently wither away and die. Of what use is it to break one, if the other enchantments cannot be broken?'

In the centre of the lawn grew a bower of roses, and beneath the bower stood the loveliest princess that ever eye beheld; but she stood there motionless, and without sign of life. She seemed neither to hear, nor see, nor breathe; her feet were rooted to the ground; though they seemed only to rest lightly under her weight upon the grass, no man, nor a hundred men, could stir her from where she stood. And, as the spell that held her fast bound to the spot, even so was the spell that sealed her senses,—no man might lift it from her. When Noodle set eyes upon her he knew that for the third time his heart had been stolen from him, and that to be happy he must possess her, or die.

He ran quickly to the old woman, who, unregarded by the serving-men, stood [pg 37]weeping and wringing her hands. 'Tell me, said Noodle, 'who is this sleeper who stands enchanted and rooted like a flower to earth? And who are you, and these others who work and cry at cross purposes?'

The old woman cried from a wide mouth: 'It is my mistress, the honey-jewel of my heart, whom you see here so grievously enchanted. All the gifts of the fairies at her christening did not prevent what was foretold of her at her birth. In her seventeenth year, as you see her now, so it was told of her that she should be.'

'Does she live?' asked Noodle; 'is she asleep? She is not dead; when will she wake? Tell me, old woman, her history, and how this fate has come upon her.'

'She was the daughter of the king of this country by his first wife,' said the old woman, 'and heir to the throne after his [pg 38]death; but when her mother died the king married again, and the three daughters he had by his second wife were jealous of the beauty, and charm, and goodness which raised their sister so high above them in the estimation of all men. So they asked their mother to teach them a spell that should rob Melilot of her charms, and make them useless in the eyes of men. And their mother, who was wise in such arts, taught to each of them a spell, so that together they might work their will.

'One day they came running to Melilot, and said, "Come and play with us a new game that our mother has taught us!" Then they began turning themselves into flowers. "I will be a hollyhock!" said one. "And I will be a columbine!" said another; and saying the spell over each other they became each the flower they had named.

'Then they unloosed the spells, and [pg 39]became themselves again. "Oh, it is so nice to be a flower!" they cried, laughing and clapping their hands. But Melilot knew no spell.

At last, seeing how her sisters turned into flowers, and came back safe again, "I will be a rose!" she cried; "turn me into a rose and out again!"

Then her three sisters joined their tongues together, and finished the spell over her. And so soon as she had become a rose-tree, the three sisters turned into three moles, and went down under the earth and gnawed at the roots.

Then they came up, and took their own forms again, and sang,—



"Sister, sister, here you are now,

Till the ploughman come with the Galloping Plough!"



Then they turned into bees, and sucked out the honey from the roses, and coming to themselves again they sang,—
[pg 40]



"Sister, here you must doze and doze,

Till they bring you a flower of the Burning Rose!"



'Then they shook the dewdrops out of her eyes, crying,—



"Sister, your brain lies under our spell,

Till water be brought from the Thirsty Well!"



'Then they took the top blossom of all, and broke it to pieces, and threw the petals away as they cried,—



"Sister, your life goes down for a term,

Till they bring you breath from the Camphor-Worm!"



'And when they had done all this, they turned her back into her true shape, and left her standing even as you see her now, without warmth, or sight, or memory, or motion, dead saving for her beauty, that never changes or dies. And here she must stand till the spells which have been fastened upon her have been unloosed. No long time after, the wickedness of the three sisters and of their cruel mother was [pg 41]discovered to the king, and they were all put to death for the crime. Yet the ill they had done remained; and the king's grief became so great to see his loved daughter standing dead before him that he removed with his court to another place, and left this palace to the care of only a few serving-men, and myself to keep watch and guard over the Princess.

'So now four-fold is the spell that holds her, and to break the lightest of them the water of the Thirsty Well is needed; with two of its drops laid upon her eyes memory will come back to her, and her mind will remember of the things of the past. And for the breaking of the second spell is needed a blossom of the Burning Rose, and the plucking of that no man's hand can achieve; but when the Rose is laid upon her breast, her heart will belong to the world once more, and will beat again under her bosom. And for [pg 42]the breaking of the third spell one must bring the breath of the Camphor-Worm that has lain for a whole year inside its body, and breathe it between her lips; then she will breathe again, and all her five senses will return to her. And for the last spell only the Galloping Plough can uproot her back to life, and free her feet for the ways of earth. Now, here we have the Galloping Plough with no man who can guide it, and what aid can it be? If these fools should be able to make it so much as but touch the feet of my dear mistress, she will be mown down like grass, and die presently for lack of earth; for only the three other charms I have told you of can put whole life back into her.'

'As for the mastery of the Plough,' said Noodle, 'I will fetch that from them in a breath. See, in a moment, how marvellous will be the uplifting of their eyes!' He put to his lips the firestone ring—the [pg 43]Sweetener—and blew but one note through it. Then in a moment the crowd divided hither and thither, with cries of wonder and alarm, for the Plough turned and bounded back to its master quickly, as an Arab mare at the call of her owner.

The old woman, weeping for gladness, cried: 'Thou art master of the Plough! Art thou master of all the other things as well?'

He said: 'Of one thing only. Tell me of the Burning Rose and the Camphor-Worm; what and where are they? For I am the master of the ends of the earth by reason of the speed with which this carries me; and I am lord of the Thirsty Well, and have the Fire-eaters for my friends.'

The old woman clapped her hands, and blessed him for his youth, and his wisdom, and his courage. 'First,' she said, 'restore to the Princess her memory by means of [pg 44]the water of the Thirsty Well; then I will show you the way to the Burning Rose, for the easier thing must be done first.'

Then Noodle drew out the crystal and breathed in it, calling on the Well-folk for the two drops of water to lay on Princess Melilot's eyes. Immediately in the bottom of the cup appeared two blue drops of water, that came climbing up the sides of the glass and stood trembling together on the brim. And Noodle, touching them with the firestone ring to make the memory of things sweet to her, bent back the Princess's face, and let them fall under her closed lids.

'Look!' cried the faithful nurse, 'light trembles within those eyes of hers! In there she begins to remember things; but as yet she sees and hears nothing. Now it is for you to be swift and fetch her the blossom of the Burning Rose. Be wise, and you shall not fail!'