I'm not a teller of tales, not like the Rhymer. My voice isn't smooth, nor my tongue quick. I know a few tunes, everyone does, but nothing like his: From me you'll never hear songs of gentle maidens fording seven rivers for their false lover so bittersweet as to make the hardest old soldiers weep; not yet merry ones of rich misers tricked out of their gold, with the twist of a word and a jest so neatly turned that the meanest old uncle that ever pinched a dowry still laughs without offense. Well, it's a power, surely, that music and those words, and I just haven't got it.. Not that I'm sure I'd take it, even if it were offered me.

Gavin, the simple peasant who narrates the first part of the novel, recognizes that "a good song's as honest as a well-made wheel, or a pot," but he would just as soon keep his feet firmly planted in the dirt.

Confronted with a story about Jock who trades his cow for a magic harp that brings him great fortune and even greater pain, Gavin would just as soon hold onto his cow. Yet, Gavin inhabits a world where stories from far-away villages, sometimes turned into the stuff of legend, are what passes for news and a warm song on a cold night can be a great comfort. Gavin trusts little of what he hears: "He could have told us the king's daughter had borne a two-headed calf, and who among us could have disproved it?" Yet he takes great pleasure in listening to a well-forged tale.

For Thomas, words come easily and he plans to use them to make his fortune. Yet, he is also brash with his words, unafraid to sing songs in court which are likely to offend his rich patrons, and willing to speak aloud the forbidden names of the "Good Folk," refusing to recognize that there are things which can be said in song that should never be put into spoken words. Meg warns him, "Someday you'll talk yourself into something you can't get out of."

"With even the illusion that words were weapons against her gone from me, I learned what it was to bear another's choices, and have none myself. It was she who chose the topics and let them go.....The queen's body was a great solace to me; but even the sweetness of her flesh scarcely compensated for the loss of her conversation. It was company I had craved, I knew now, as much as I had craved her bed. Denied true companionship, I took the carnal for what it could offer. In the process I came to know her every mood and need, as a monk knows his letters. With her I could lose myself in a complex tangle of desire and fulfillment, intricate and well shaped as music.....I touched her face, her hair, her lips, letting my hands speak for me. Touching her, my hands grew another sense, a deeper one beyond the daily touch that tells us if something be hot or cold, smooth or rough. Her body had a thousand textures, and each of them spoke to me."

The Elfland sequence, then, involves a complex series of substitutions ˜ blood for words, sensuality for speech, carnality for communication ˜ as people struggle to speak the truths that are trapped within them. Kushner never allows us to forget that words have a value - and a price.

When Thomas returns to the world of the mortals, he is blessed (or cursed) with the "tongue that cannot lie," with the power to see the future and the obligation to speak always the truth. Thomas is frightened by the power this gives others to command truths from him and he comes to resent the questions which force him to speak. Having learned to hold his tongue, the storyteller becomes a gifted listener: "He had learned how to be a quiet companion....so I found myself telling him things I would never have dream of before."

"My legs were dark with what I took to be the stream's water, but as the light grew, I saw its color, a deep and plangent red, dripping onto the dust of the ground....'The earth cannot hold all the blood that's shed on it. And so the stream flows below. We have passed through it now; soon it will be gone from you.' On my legs the blood of battles from that river we had been riding through, running with the blood of births and maidenheads, the finger-pricks of children's blood-brotherhood and the deeper wounds of brothers' strife; the murder of travelers for gold, and the careless scrape of a nettle in summer's fields."

Here, the flood of images suggests a human hunger for stories which might give shape and meaning to the bloodshed.

She depicts a landscape overflowing with stories, a world where narratives speak to us in the sounds of brooks, in the threads of a tapestry, or in the stitches of an old woman's needle point. Her protagonists turn to pre-existing verses and narratives to make sense of their daily lives, as when Elspeth, Thomas's wife, compares her vow never to get angry with him for speaking the truth to the man who promises the Seal Wife that he will never beat her, or when Thomas, a captive of the Elf Queen, translates his memories of Elspeth into the stuff of fairy tales. In such a world, it is often hard to separate the stories we tell from the lives we lead: "My memories of our time together flowed vivid through my mind, clear with the distance of fair legend, of song." Gavin, at another point, describes how Thomas's songs become the stuff of legend, his gifted performances ascribed to "an enchanted harp," his songs attributed to Merlin. And Elspeth speaks of the stories of the Elf folk as something more than fairy tales, having "been brought up in the shadow of the Eildon Hills, that were cleft in three with a blow of the giant's sword."

Kushner tells the story through the voices of four distinctive characters and she thus saves her most vivid descriptions and most flowery language for the passage which Thomas narrates. Through her pen, we learn of the sensations which bind him to the world of mortals even as he is incapable of resisting the Elf Queen's seductive charms:

"She was sliding into my arms in a hissing shiver of silk. I was enveloped in green and gold, while the red of her lips took me into the heart of flame. We lay in the dry sedge, and where it pricked my bare skin I felt only the caresses of the earth; and when rocks and roots dug into me, they were her fingers, the heels of her feet and hands. She was wind and rain, making me safe from all elements forever by making me part of them. When passion exploded in me, I felt my body disintegrate into the numberless jewels under the hills, the stars in darkness....Never had my senses so reveled in the pureness of the air, the tang of grass, the very molding of the earth my body rested on, roots stretching deep into its core. To leave it now would be to tear out the heart of me."

Kushner's writing is appropriately sensuous, capturing the Queen's "enchantment" over him and his discovery that mortal words can never fully express his new experiences: "Words were brittle and unreal, next to the hot blood that sang in my ears."

"No stories, Thomas....Not this time. I know how good you are. But this time you went too far and stayed away too long. I've no stomach for them now. I've stories of my own: of winters on the Ridge, children screaming without peace, dirty pots without end, splinters from rough wood; and a man's weigh every night binding you to the mattress because you made your vow and you've taken his food for your belly and his clothing for your back and his roof for your shelter."

The story of women's experiences may be harder to spin into the rich tapestry of adventure stories, yet Kushner helps us to understand their truths and to feel the call of the hearth as much as we feel the wanderlust that draws the minstrel from his familiar surroundings.

While this novel is clearly Thomas's story, Kushner never allows us to forget the impact his adventures have upon women, who must bear the children he has left behind, who must make a home to await his return. If Thomas, we are told, "knew the truth about everyone but himself," he must depend upon Meg, the farmer's wife, and Elspeth, his own bride, to speak the truth to him and to force him to recognize the consequences of his own words and actions. Elspeth must bear the burden of a man who can speak no lies but who may withhold from her much of what he knows about their future together; she must help him to reconcile himself to his bastard son and to deal with the death that he knows awaits the boy; she must nurse him in his dying moments, never daring to ask when she or her children might join him.

A graduate of Bryn Mawr and Columbia, Kushner has worked as an artist's agent and as a writer of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novels. She started out after college working as a science fiction/fantasy editor in New York City for Ace, and then, Pocket Books, worked as an artist's agent and as a writer of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novels, and then in 1987 found her way to public radio on WGBH 89.7FM in Boston, and has been on the air ever since, hosting programs of classical, world, and folk music.

A number of her stories, including her most recent book, St. Nicholas and the Valley Beyond the World's Edge, are written with a "family audience" in mind. Her most recent fiction is a string of adult fantasy short stories, almost all of which have been reprinted in the anthology series The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling (St. Martin's Press) Her new collaboration, co-written with historical fantasist Delia Sherman, "The Fall of the Kings," appeared in the queer fantasy anthology Bending the Landscape (ed. Griffith/Pagels). Her latest publication is The Horns of Elfland: Original Stories of Music and Magic, edited by Ellen Kushner, Donald G. Keller, and Delia Sherman.

Selected Works
 

--H.J.

   

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