Ellen Datlow - Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

We are the prince’s guard. When she sits in a tower window and sings endless songs to the seabirds, we are at the door. When she roams the hallways at night peering through keyholes, we are the shadows that fly at her shoulder. She dances for us now, and we protect her from prying eyes; and when she is ecstatic and spent, when she is lucid and can find some measure of peace, we take her back to her rooms and talk of the world, of the rainbow-painted roofs of Hunemoth and the way that cheese is made in Shortline. She is safer now; she has us to see her as she is, and love her.

And there is still time for ourselves, to teach, to learn, to gossip with other guards and steal currant buns from our favorite cook. Sometimes the prince sends us off to Lemon City for a day, to collect fallen feathers from the road or strings of desert beads from the market; to bring her descriptions of her beggars and smiths and shopkeepers; to gather travelers’ stories from the inns. Sometimes we carry back a flagon of spicy Marhai wine, and when she sleeps, we drink and trade wild stories until the moon is down. Sometimes we sleep cuddled like puppies in our blankets. Sometimes we fight.

LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI WAS KIN TO JACK-A-LANTERN: A WHIM O’ THE WISP ALLOYED FROM LIGHT AND SHADOW, AIR AND DEW. SUCH CONTRADICTORY BEINGS CANNOT LONG ENDURE; THEIR WARRING ELEMENTS LONG FOR SEPARATION AND THEIR FATED DISSOLUTIONS ARE RARELY QUIET, NEVER WITHOUT PAIN. HOW SHOULD SUCH A BEING LOOK UPON A MAN, SAVE WITH WILD WILD EYES?

La Belle Dame Sans Merci could not stroll upon the mead like any earthbound being for her footfall was far too light, but she had the precious power of touch which earthbound beings take overmuch for granted. She could not be seen by light of noon, but when she did appear—bathed by the baleful moon’s unholiness—there was magic in her image.

Salomé the enchantress knew how to dance, and stir the fire of Hell in the hearts of those who watched, but La Belle Dame Sans Merci knew how to lie as still as still could be, and ignite the fire of Purgatory by sight alone.

La Belle Dame Sans Merci was a daughter of the faery folk, but it is not given to the faery folk to know their fathers and their mothers as humans do. It is easy for faery folk to believe that they owe their conception to the fall of the dew from their father the Sky: from the dew which never reaches Mother Earth but drifts upon the air as wayward mist. That, at least, is the story they tell one another; but what it might mean to them no merely human being could ever understand. Humans are cursed by the twin burdens of belief and unbelief but the faery folk are no more capable of faith than of mass; they have the gift of touch without the leaden heaviness of solidity, and they have the gift of imagination without the parsimonious degradations of accuracy.

The earliest adventures of La Belle Dame Sans Merci were not concerned with warriors or princes but with men unfit for oral or written record—mere passers-by on the rough-hewn roads of myth and history—but she always felt that she was made for the Royal Hunt and for the defiance of chivalry. She always felt that she was made to tempt the very best of the children of the Iron Age, to draw the users of arms and armor from the terrible path of progress. Because she had no human need to transmute her feelings into beliefs she had no human need to ask why she was made that way—or whether she was made at all—so she followed the force of her impulse with all blithe innocence, her eyes as wide as they were wild.

Like the rough-hewn roads of myth and history, the many roads of England were not at this time wont to run straight. The Romans had come but the Romans had gone again; their legacy remained only in a few long marching-path, and it was more than possible that the few would become fewer as time went by and Rome became but a memory.

Made for men a-foot and horses poorly shod, the older roads of England wound around slopes and thickets, ponds and streams, always avoiding places of ill-repute, always preferring the gentle gradient and the comfortable footfall. In poor light such pathways become mazy and treacherous and there is no cause for astonishment in the fact that far more travelers set out in those days than ever arrived at their destinations.

These older ways were the roads that the faery folk loved—not so much for their actual use, but rather as a means of design and definition: a map of the world whose interstices could provide their home and habitat. The faery folk had hated Rome, and they hated echoes of Rome with equal fervor. They hated arms and armor because arms and armor were the mechanics of empire, and they hated knighthood and chivalry because knighthood and chivalry were the ideals of empire.

When the Romans had gone, mere still remained in the population they left behind the idea of a Great Britain and a concomitant cause of fealty and fellowship. The idea that Great Britain was the property of petty kings ambitious to be Once and Future Kings, and the guiding light of counselors ambitious to be Magi. There was more than one Arthur, more than one Merlin and more than one Round Table—but they all became one in the labyrinth of myth and history because they were all bound into one by the idea of empire and the notion that all roads should run straight, cutting through slopes and thickets, filling in ponds and bridging streams, and frankly disregarding matters of ill-repute.

The idea of Great Britain and the dream to which it gave birth would probably have come to nothing, had it not been for the Church, but Rome was replaced by Christendom, and Christendom returned to the England the Romans had abandoned. The actual empire of Rome was replaced by the imaginary empire of God, which was all the more dangerous to the mazy roads of England and myth by virtue of its ingenious abstraction.

Christendom gave the knights of England a Holy Grail which none of them was good enough to touch, and made them mad with virtue as they strove for worthiness. The idea of chivalry had never quite contrived to extinguish lust from their hearts, but the idea of the Grail was all the stronger for its manifest absurdity; it forced the minds of knights and princes into straight and narrow paths, so that their vaulting ambition became ever-more-narrowly focused on broad, straight highways: highways fit for ironclad chariots of vulgar fire.

Because of chivalry and Christendom it was not easy for La Belle Dame Sans Merci to follow the force of her defining impulse, but she was a creature of paradox from the very start: an amalgam of elements at war. For folk such as her there is no end but catastrophe, no medium but hazard.

That evening, a knight whose name was Florian had sent his horse to a well-appointed stable and his servants to sleep in the straw. He could have had a bed for himself, a loaf of bread and a cup of mead, and dreamless sleep—but that was not his way. Sir Florian was a chaste knight oft disposed to prayer, to the rapt contemplation of the heavens, and to the frank disregard of matters of ill-repute. Rather than dispossess a doleful but dutiful host of the only good mattress for miles around he set himself to sleep beneath the stars, at one of those mysterious crossroads where the winding paths of myth and England intersect in a tangled knot. He had been warned of Jack A-Lanterns and their kin, but he considered his stubborn virtue to be proof against all temptation.

There are those who say that men see most and best when blinded, but the principle of pedantry defines such persons as fools and poets. The prosaic accuracy of the matter is that men see most in gentle sunlight, but best when they are no more than half-blinded; it is then that light and shadow have the greatest power of conjuration. The stars shone brightly enough that night, but the autumn air was cold and the mists condensed as soon as the sun had set.