Ellen Datlow - The Beastly Bride

It was as he entered the first mass of the trees, looking up, he saw. Bright-lighted on a shelf of stone above, trotting through from one tree line to another. The silver puma with the little bundle, exactly as he saw it in his head, gripped in by the sparkle of white teeth.

He pulled the horse’s head round so sharply she swerved and almost unseated him. Frozen, he clung there, staring up at his baby in the fangs of death.

Peculiarly none of this had made a sound, or attracted the attention of the cat. The child didn’t cry. Could it be— she had already killed it?

Then the pines reabsorbed them, those two joined figures, and the hex broke from him and he floundered from the horse and left her, and ran, ran up the chunky side of the mountainous forest, with his hunting rifle in his hand.

In any myth, or tale like that, he must have located them. In reality it wasn’t likely. He knew it, and took no notice. Matt was living in a legend. And this was finally proven, when at last he ran to the brink of the cold blue moonlight. And there they were, on the ice-blue grass, Thena and her baby. And they—

They were playing. But not as a human mother and her human infant ever play. For Thena was a mountain lion, and Amy was her cub. No room was ever shined up by a lamp so bright to show Matt, clear as day, the sleek puma mother, rolling and boxing with the energetic cub, it carelessly nipping her, and she gentle and claw-sheathed, while both their dusken pelts gleamed from moon-powder, and their crimson mouths were open, the mother to mimic growls, the infant to spit back and warble as best she could. Openmouthed, they seemed to be both of them, laughing. But when the play ended and the puma lay down to lick the cub for a bath, her hoarse purr was louder in the night than any other sound.

Matt stood by the tree that hid him. He thought after, they should surely have known he was there, only their total involvement with each other and themselves shut out his presence. Hidden as if invisible, he might have ceased to exist.

So he watched them for a while. And when the moon passed over, and the edge of the forest was no longer a flame of light, but a shattered muddle of stripes and angles, he was yet able to watch one further thing. And this was how both creatures changed, quick and easy, back into their human form. Then there she was, Thena. And her baby. And Thena picked up the child, and kissed her, and humanly laughed and held her high, laughing, proud and laughing with joy, and the little child laughed back, waving at the night her little hands which, minutes before, had been the paws of a cat.

She had never been his. Neither of them. Not Thena. Not Thena’s daughter. No, they came of another race. The shape-twisting kind. Him she had used. And could Thena harm her baby? Never. Thena loved her. Knew her. They were to each other all and everything, and needed no one else on earth.

He’d wondered in the before-time, if it was possible to ride all the way up to some mountain pass, and so cross the mountains and get over to the other places, where other people were. Human people. Ordinary.

That night Matt Seaton, with only his horse and his gun, and the clothes he stood in, climbed up the side of the world, and combed the ridges until he did find some way through. He left all behind him. His kinfolk, the Seaton-Proctor alliance and the Families, his property, himself. His marriage and his fatherhood he didn’t leave, they’d been stolen already. Stolen by his jealousy. By his cheated humanness, and his lonely human heart.

TANITH LEE has written nearly 100 books and over 270 short stories, besides radio plays and TV scripts. Her genre-crossing includes fantasy, SF, horror, and young adult, historical, detective, and contemporary fiction. Plus combinations of them all. Her latest publications include the Lionwolf Trilogy: Cast a Bright Shadow, Here in Cold Hell , and No Flame But Mine , and the three Piratica novels for young adults. She has also recently had several short stories and novellas in Asimov’s SF Magazine, Weird Tales , and Realms of Fantasy as well as the anthologies The Ghost Quartet and Wizards .

She lives on the Sussex Weald with her husband, writer/ artist John Kaiine, and two omnipresent cats. More information can be found at www.tanithlee.com.

The Beastly Bride is a very evocative title. From it I got the instant idea of a reverse of the usual “Beauty and the Beast” scenario — this time the reluctant and alarmed young man going uneasily to wed an unknown and supernaturally beastly young woman.

(Of course, sometimes one forgets, in any strictly arranged marriage sight unseen, there may well be severe qualms on both sides.)

Then I needed to decide what kind of beast. I chose the puma (or mountain lion) because though I’ve always loved its beauty, its cry , heard by me in a movie when I was about eleven, seemed terrifying. (Strangely, that cry is the one pumaesque attribute not mentioned in this tale.) With the puma settled on, its natural habitat was also immediately there, less a backdrop than a third main character: a parallel North American Rockies, probably around 1840.

Everyone has secrets. Even me. We carry them with us like contraband, always swaddled in some sort of camouflage we’ve concocted to hide the parts of ourselves the rest of the world is better off not knowing. I’d write what I’m thinking in a diary if I could believe others would stay out of those pages, but in a house like this there’s no such thing as privacy. If you’re going to keep secrets, you have to learn to write them down inside your own heart. And then be sure not to give that away to anyone either. At least not to just anyone at all.

Which is what bothers me about him , the guy my brother is apparently going to marry. Talk about secrets. Off Tommy goes to New York City for college, begging my parents to help him with money for four straight years, then after graduating at the top of his class — in studio art, of all things (not even a degree that will get him a job to help pay off the loans our parents took out for his education) — he comes home to tell us he’s gay, and before we can say anything, good or bad, runs off again and won’t return our calls. And when he does start talking to Mom and Dad again, it’s just short phone conversations and e-mails, asking for help, for more money.

Five years of off-and-on silence and here he is, bringing home some guy named Tristan who plays the piano better than my mother and has never seen a cow except on TV. We’re supposed to treat this casually and not bring up the fact that he ran away without letting us say anything at all four years ago, and to try not to embarrass him. That’s Tommy Terlecki, my big brother, the gay surrealist Americana artist who got semifamous not for the magical creatures and visions he paints but for his horrifically exaggerated family portraits of us dressed up in ridiculous roles: American Gothic , Dad holding a pitchfork, Mom presenting her knitting needles and a ball of yarn to the viewer, as if she’s coaxing you to give them a try, me with my arms folded under my breasts, my face angry within the frame of my bonnet, scowling at Tommy, who’s sitting on the ground beside my legs in the portrait, pulling off the Amish-like clothes. What I don’t like about these paintings is that he’s lied about us in them. The Tommy in the portrait is constrained by his family’s way of life, but it’s Tommy who’s put us in those clothes to begin with. They’re how he sees us, not the way we are, but he gets to dramatize a conflict with us in the paintings anyway, even though it’s a conflict he himself has imagined.