Ellen Datlow - The Beastly Bride

All is revealed at her Web site, www.ellenkushner.com.

We love Greek tales of gods and heroes; but the gods can be cruel, and the greatest tales can be fraught with great injustices.

When I was six, I had just learned to read when my dad took us all to live in France for a year. We had very few books in English, and I was desperate for more. So were my parents, I guess; my father went down to the American Library and bought some old volumes they were clearing off the shelves. I glommed onto a pale blue clothbound volume with a broken spine (published in London before I was born), a retelling of Greek myths mostly taken from the Roman poet Ovid’s collection, Metamorphoses . Checking the title page now, I see it was called Men and Gods , by Rex Warner — but I just thought of it as My Blue Greek Book, and I read it over and over. I loved the tragedies the best.

For The Beastly Bride I have turned back to one of my favorites, the terrible story of Actaeon. Several Ancient Greek writers wrote their own versions of Actaeon’s story, each offering a different rationale for his cruel punishment. In some of them, it’s because he was intentionally spying on the goddess Artemis to see her naked. In Ovid, he is just a poor luckless guy who wanders into the wrong place at the wrong time.

In all of them, the young prince Actaeon is an enthusiastic hunter.

None of them mentions any sister.

If she cannot have the sun, she will have freedom. She jumps through snatching hands and cutting tree branches, blindly. She does not believe she ever slept well. The villagers call her a ghost, accuse her of spooking the hunt. She keeps time with rabbits and egrets, eats flowers, green hostas, and white lilies. Alone, alone, all this time pursued by vain princes. Finally she lies down beside the water, the moon rises, and she becomes herself again. She grabs a bleeding ankle, wanders back to an empty bed, hair tangled and skin scratched by briars, a different princess from before. When the sun rises she will be animal again, she will leap up, wild heart beating against her thin hide. It gets easier every day, having four legs, heeding the morning glory’s old song, the strange warmth of sun on her neck. This is better than a palace, she thinks, to run faster than she’s ever run, to outpace her old fears, the hands that would hold her down. Her feet nothing but flashes, blue eyes still human and shadowy, peering through white pine.

JEANNINE HALL GAILEY is the author of Becoming the Villainess . Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily , and in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror . In 2007, she was awarded a Washington State Artist Trust GAP Grant and a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize. She is currently working on two manuscripts, one about Japanese folktales of animal transformation and another on the inner lives of sleeping princesses. Her Web site is www.webbish6.com.

I’ve always been fascinated by stories of transforming women, from Greek mythology’s Daphne and Ovid’s Philomel to changelings and shape-shifters in folk tales, science fiction, and comic books. It seemed to me these tales connected women to unearthly powers and magical abilities, while also communicating man’s uncertainty and, sometimes, squeamishness toward women’s “otherness.” After all, a lot of the magical transformations — like the dragon-woman Melusine’s — happen around childbirth and other womanly rituals.