PART
ONE
I don’t think there is such a
thing as a single, solitary story.
Certainly not in the case of this particular tale. Because if you want to know about the
business with the Beanstalk, well, then we have to go far, far back. Back through time, long before Jack was
born. And we have to travel to a
different kingdom as well, a kingdom which doesn’t even exist anymore. We have to discuss people from all walks of
life who are already dead and buried. We
must think about objects at their fashioning, not just at their time of
usefulness. We must discuss those who
fashioned them. And we must travel
backward up family trees, up and up until we find out where peculiarities and
family secrets began. All this just so when I jump into the bit about the
Beanstalk, I won’t be pestered with questions about how everybody and
everything got to where it was.
So settle down. Get comfortable. Wiggle into your chair until it feels just
right, and we can have the tale of Jack, and the Beanstalk, and all the other
things that transpired to get to that place.
Well, perhaps not all of the things, for that would require telling the
tale from the beginning of time. But I
know a good starting-place, at least, and so it is there that we shall begin.
CHAPTER
1
The story starts, as much as a
story can start in any one place, in a kingdom known as Bennan. It was situated between the kingdom of
Castello and the sea, or between the earth and sky, if you prefer to think that
way. Relations between Bennan and
Castello were fine, for the time, and all other nearby kingdoms were too small
to be dangerous. Well, except one, and
there was nothing at all small about it.
The kingdom of the Giants
drifted around the world on clouds, high, high above the kingdoms of men. Though the kingdom itself was held together
by some kind of magic, the Giants had no such power, and it was by magic that
humankind had kept the Giants at bay for time out of mind. But then a ruler rose in Bennan, the greatest
of their kings. King Mercca, High King
of Bennan, saw the Giants as no ancestor of his had; he viewed them as
something beyond beasts. As equals. And because he was able to see the Giants
this way, he managed to parlay with them, to achieve peace of a new kind.
In other words, Mercca cut a
deal with the Giants.
The Giants would stay on their
floating lands, far above the realms of men, leaving the King’s people—indeed,
all of humanity, for that is the deal Mercca made—in peace. In exchange, humans would stop using magic to
attack the Giants.
Ah, I have left out an important
detail. King Mercca had a young advisor,
a powerful magician named Absolom. This
magician had grown, in his enchanted gardens, magical beans. The beans would grow into great Beanstalks that
reached all the way to the Giants’ lands.
By traveling up these Beanstalks, the human magicians could bring
trouble down on the Giants with magic.
So the king of the Giants, who
placed a man’s word of honor above all else, made an oath of peace with the
King of Bennan. And it seemed for a time
that Mercca would bring Bennan generations of peace.
Unfortunately, there were other
forces growing besides Mercca’s peace-making.
But, for a while, peace did
reign supreme in the land, and the story turns to Absolom.
The young magician, who was
really quite prodigious, grew in power as he grew in years. His master and teacher finally retired,
leaving all magical questions and decisions on Absolom’s shoulders. This was a responsibility the young man was
ready for, and he advised King Mercca—now getting rather old—very well.
Absolom married a lovely girl, a
low-ranking noblewoman with whom he had fallen desperately in love. Their marriage was a happy one, for the girl
loved him too, and by and by, she bore him a son. The two rejoiced in the growth of their
family, and all was well with them for some time.
Absolom’s son was named Aelric,
and you will see yet the trouble he caused.
But at this point in the story,
the young boy was just that, a young boy, and there was no way of knowing the
problems he would bring or the evil he would do.
Perhaps it is unfair to speak so
ill of Aelric. He made some terrible
choices, but they were made due to jealousy and fear, and who has not been
touched by those evils? Aelric was never
strong of character, and so when corruption came to him, he crumpled beneath
it. But that is not mine to judge.
Regardless of questions of
morality and judgment, the story continues.
When Aelric was still toddling, King Mercca’s wife, the Queen, bore a
son herself. The kingdom rejoiced at the
arrival of the new heir, and everyone in and out of the castle seemed to be
happy.
The young princeling was a
beautiful child, full of wonder and potential.
His parents named him Arlo, Crown Prince of Bennan. Joy radiated from the whole family.
And then a sad thing
happened. The Queen, with all her
sweetness and wisdom, died from complications from Arlo’s birth.
From rejoicing, the kingdom
turned suddenly to mourning. Black
drapes hung in every window, black clothes from the bodies of the people. The king himself observed a mourning period
of two years, and in those years he aged tragically, until he seemed a man of
many years past his actual age.
When the king finally declared
his mourning period over, he seemed a very old man indeed.
Around the same time, Aelric,
the magician’s son, turned four. He,
too, was a beautiful child, with fair, soft skin and raven-black hair. His eyes were a stunning green, and even at
the age of four, they were brightly intelligent. His lips were red enough to startle, and when
passersby saw him, they sighed with pleasure for the sweetness of his
face. He seemed for all the world to
have everything good coming to him.
It was then that Absolom’s wife,
Aelric’s mother, discovered that she was again with child. But she and her husband were young, and had
hoped for more children, and besides, it would surely be good for Aelric to
have younger brothers and sisters to look after. It never occurred to Absolom or his wife that
Aelric might be too jealous a child to love his siblings for what they were.
That was the most obvious trouble
with Aelric. Every child has such problems
innate in them; I myself spent my childhood paralyzed by nightmares. But I am not in this part of the story;
forgive me. It is of Aelric that I am
speaking. The boy, attractive enough,
was also very selfish. He took other
children’s toys, he screamed when the attention turned from him to another, and
when his parents tried to talk to each other and leave him out, he would burst
into tears.
The castle’s nursemaid, an
elderly woman who knew seemingly everything about raising a child, told Aelric’s
parents not to worry.
“He will outgrow it,” she told
them when they described their concerns to her.
“It stems from his fears; he is afraid of losing what he has. Most of all, he fears the loss of your
love. You need to comfort him, tell him
that nothing will change the way you feel.”
“Of course it won’t,” Aelric’s
mother said. “He is our son.”
“Ah, yes. I know that.
You know that. But to Aelric, the
world is large and overwhelming, and he is afraid. So you must comfort him.”
So Absolom and his wife gave
their son even more attention, told him many more times a day how much they
loved him. And it seemed to work. Until, inevitably, their attention was
diverted to something else. Two
somethings, in fact.
For the child Absolom’s wife
carried turned out to be not one, but two.
Twins, born on the Winter
Solstice. Absolom understood the
significance of their birth, though his wife did not grasp it, not being a
person of magic.
Twins are inherently
magical. Even in a family with no magic
present, twins will almost certainly have power. (This, by the way, is why the family lines
with magic don’t just die out; they are replaced.) In a family which already has magic in its
blood, twins are not only certain to have power, but it is going to be strong,
particularly if they work in concert with each other. And then, when born on a solstice, one is
almost guaranteed a great deal of magic.
If Absolom’s second and third sons had been born as one instead of two,
the one would have had great power. As
it was, with two born at once, born on the night’s day of greatest power over
the world, their power was all but unparalleled. And if they worked in concert, there was
almost nothing beyond their grasp.
Perhaps in exchange for this
great gift to the world, Death struck at almost the same moment the twins were
born. Maybe you have guessed it, for I
have already eluded to the fact that birth was a deadly thing in those
days—even more than it is now.
Absolom’s wife took her leave of
her husband, her young boy, and her younger twin sons. She died, without even seeing her babies.
Absolom’s heart broke. But he made a choice much wiser and braver
than some in this story made in the face of a broken heart. He mourned the loss of his beloved wife, but
let his love for her draw him closer to her greatest gifts to him: his
sons. The three small boys became his
whole world as he tried to be both Mother and Father to them.
Of course, with two new
demanding babies to look after on his own, Aelric’s father let a few things
fall by the wayside. He loved Aelric as
much as ever, but Aelric did not see that.
He saw only that these two new brothers had come, and suddenly he,
Aelric, was not the center—or rather, not the only center—of his father’s life
anymore. Worse still, the boys had taken
Aelric’s mother from him, and though Absolom did not blame his younger sons, Aelric
could not forgive his brothers.
Jealousy, hot and raging, grew
up in Aelric’s already terrified heart.
His fears seemed suddenly to have been realized, and Aelric embraced
that fear, letting it take hold of his whole self. This was, in my opinion, his greatest
mistake. Dread filled him, and his life
became drudgery. Misery was his constant
companion, his only and terrible ally, welcomed into his life at a terrible
cost. For as Aelric’s heart hardened
from fear and pain, he began to hate everything around him.
Now, for a while, we will leave
the heart of Aelric, the magician’s son, alone.
We will turn our focus instead to the magician himself.
Absolom loved his three boys
fiercely. As I have said, he made them
the center of his whole life. But after
a year of mourning had passed, on his younger sons’ birthday, Absolom returned
to his work for the King.
King Mercca was very old now,
older still with grief, and could not stand to be alone with his sad thoughts. He had given Absolom a year to mourn his
wife’s passing, understanding the depth of the man’s grief. Absolom, however, spent the year not dwelling
in despair, but doing what he thought his wife would have wished for him. Part of this, of course, was raising his
boys. But when they were in bed, Absolom
would sit in his chair and think about magic.
So when he returned to work, the
magician was full of ideas for the king.
And when the king said that what he needed was to improve the state of
the treasury before his death, Absolom went to work. He studied alchemy for a time, and, finding
it useless, he returned to magic.
Magic cannot simply generate
gold. There are many things it can do,
but creating objects from thin air is not one of them. Gold is also a particularly difficult thing
to summon, and Absolom knew perfectly well that there was a limit to the number
of things he could simply turn to gold before his magic gave out. What he needed was some way to grow the
metal, to give it just enough life to be generated on its own.
Which is when he thought of a
magic chicken. A chicken, laying golden
eggs, seemed a likely solution to his predicament. He went out to the royal coops to select a
bird for the task. He had just about
chosen one when he was bitten on the ankle by an angry goose.
Absolom turned quickly, spying
the culprit of the attack immediately.
Where most people would have run from an angry goose, Absolom instead
picked her up, stroking her feathers and muttering a charm. The hen (for that is what you call a female
goose) quieted instantly, even snuggling into Absolom’s arms.
“There, now,” he said, as though
he were soothing one of his boys’ nightmares.
“You’re alright. But it occurs to
me that you would lay much larger eggs than one of these chickens. I’ll cast the spell on you, instead.”
So Absolom brought the goose
inside, to his magical study, and set her gently on his worktable. She was fast asleep by this time, the charm
having calmed her that much, and Absolom sneaked out of the study for just a
moment, to find his three sons and bring them in to watch while he worked his
magic.
“You must pay careful attention
to everything I do, boys,” Absolom said when he had gotten his sons
situated. The twins both looked up at
him with wide, brown eyes, fingers dangling from their open mouths
identically. To Aelric Absolom said
nothing, for he knew that Aelric knew what was expected of him.
Aelric, unfortunately, took this
as the sign he had been waiting for.
Clearly, he thought, it was important for his brothers to learn the ways
of magic—but his father had left him out of the instruction! And so, ignoring the fact that his father had
taught him a great deal of magic before this time, Aelric let his heart fill
with the notion that his brothers, and not he, would inherit their father’s
position. And the jealousy took even
tighter hold of Aelric’s heart.
The twins, sitting on either
side of their father, knew nothing of their brother’s fears. They only knew that they were with their
father and brother and, most important, each other. The little boys were each other’s dearest
friends, as might be expected. They had
already begun to work small magics together, but even more important to them,
they played together, ate together, slept side by side. It never entered their young minds that
things might be different.
Absolom was also unaware of Aelric’s
unhappy emotions, distracted as he was by the difficulty of the magic at
hand. He had planned the spell for
months, mapped out exactly how he would do it.
But this meant little; it could go terribly wrong, it could fail to work
at all. Absolom had only hope. But even if he failed, he wanted his sons to
see it and learn from it. That was why
he brought them into his workshop; success or failure, the boys must learn the
ways of magic.
If someone had asked Absolom at
that time what he thought of Aelric’s state of mind, he might have confessed
some concern. Aelric clung to the fear
and envy that had been with him for years, and though he had made some progress
before the twins were born, he seemed much worse now. The nursemaid told Absolom that this was normal,
that older siblings often envied younger ones at first. But still, in the back of his mind, the aging
magician worried.
If he had been asked instead
what would become of his position when he left it, I am not sure how Absolom
might have replied. Certainly he
expected to pass it on, but whether to his older son or to the younger as a
pair, he never said. Perhaps Aelric’s
fears were founded in some fact, no matter how terrible his choices based on
those fears. Perhaps Absolom had not
thought of an answer to this question, for the boys were too young to take his
place, he was too young to retire, and besides, he taught all three boys his
craft equally. Regardless of Absolom’s
mind on the matter, Aelric’s feelings were stone—both in their determination
and in their softness. He was determined
to take his father’s place, no matter what he had to do to gain it.
And here Aelric made another
mistake. For if having cruel feelings is
terrible, one can make allowances for it; a person cannot always choose the way
they feel about something. But Aelric chose
to act on those ungenerous and
unrighteous emotions, turning his thoughts to deeds and, thereby, sealing his
place in the judgments of history.
He would do anything to defend
his place against his brothers.
Aelric completely missed the
magic lesson, which was a shame, because it was one of the greatest
achievements of his father’s life. With
a few herbs made into a potion, a few gestures, a few words of power, Absolom
changed the goose’s very nature. In one
moment she was an ordinary goose. In the
next, her body began to grow eggs of a most unusual variety—eggs made entirely
of gold.
It was not until two days later
that Absolom knew it had worked. The
goose did not lay the first day.
Finally, in the early hours of the second morning, she laid a pair of
eggs, each a bright, shining gold. She
looked down and squawked in surprise; her eggs had never looked that way
before, had they? But she was sure that
she had laid them, so she settled down to keep them warm.
I am assuming some emotions on
the part of the goose. To my knowledge,
she has never told anyone how she felt that day, being, after all, a goose.
Whatever her goosey feelings,
Absolom pulled the warm eggs from under her a short while later, exclaimed in
excitement, and ran to see the king and tell the ruler of the triumph.
King Mercca was pleased with
Absolom, although the king did not share the magician’s wild enthusiasm. Absolom chalked this up to the king’s level
of understanding; the king could simply not understand the work that had gone
into the final product, the hours on days on weeks on months of tormented,
feverish work on the project. So Absolom
accepted the king’s praise and then went home, exhausted.
Perhaps Absolom should have
taken this as a warning sign. But, to be
honest, Absolom did not have any particular gift for recognizing warning
signs. Clearly he had missed them (of a
different sort) in his son. And if there
is one thing that people are more easily blinded about than their children, it
is their own well-being. I think so,
anyway.
So the magician slept, and never
worried that the huge magical working he had performed might have been too much
for him.
For a time, the king was
thrilled. Slowly but surely, his treasury
was being refilled, and it seemed the same trend would continue forever. But then, one night, Mercca woke with a
terrible thought: what if something
happened to the goose? She was only
a bird, after all. Absolom should never
have trusted such a great gift to something that could think on its own. What if the goose died, or stopped laying
because of age, or ran away? It would
never do. King Mercca summoned his chief
magician immediately, calling the man to his bedchamber in the middle of the
night.
“I see the trouble, Sire,”
Absolom said, nodding wisely—if tiredly.
His eyes were rimmed in a vivid pink, and he was peaked. Still, he pushed on with his work, making
allowance for the king’s eccentricities out of fondness for the old man. “What would you have me do?” The magician inquired of his ruler.
“I need something else,
something—more.” The king’s nearly
frantic tone mellowed for a moment as he surveyed his old friend. “You’ve done an incredible thing, Absolom. Performed a miracle. I just need another one. Something to ensure the financial safety of
my kingdom before I die. Do you
understand?”
“My Lord, I do,” Absolom
said. And he did. Absolom’s legacy was his sons. But Mercca, he had to put his kingdom before
even his child; the throne was all. Arlo
was required to be an afterthought. So
Absolom understood the king’s worries and fears, and he sought to soothe them.
“I will find a way to do this,
my lord,” Absolom said. “Your kingdom will be safe, and your reign
will be remembered with gratitude and reverence.” The king, finally satisfied, nodded
gratefully. He dismissed Absolom and
rested against his pillows, at ease once more.
Absolom was anything but at ease. He had before him a challenge greater, even,
than the one he had just met. Somehow,
he had to find a way to create an endless supply of wealth. But how?
The old—and rapidly
aging—magician set to work. He buried
himself in books and scrolls, studying until his eyes would no longer focus
every day, twice a day. He left Aelric
to look after the twins much of the time, though the older boy was barely old
enough to care for himself, and dedicated all of his time to appeasing his
ruler and oldest friend. This was the
period of his life Absolom would come to regret most—but I am getting ahead of
myself. At this point, he did not
realize the foolishness of his choice.
Absolom simply worked.
And aged. He was sick all of the time, constantly under
the weather. And yet he pushed his
fragile body on, exploring magics he had never dreamed he could perform.
It took two years, but Absolom
managed it. He enchanted a simple burlap
sack so that, conceivably to the end of time, it would always be full of
riches.
The magician presented his gift
to the king in the same place it had been commissioned. He burst into the king’s bedchamber as Mercca
was first waking one winter morning.
“Sire,” he said, hefting the
bag—filled to the brim with jewels—and smiling through his exhaustion. “I have done it.”
The two old men danced wildly,
like madmen, like boys, whooping and hollering (and pausing to cough) until the
king’s guard burst into the room to see what all the commotion was about.
Absolom went home shortly thereafter. Aelric was eight years old, and had been all
but raising brothers he hated for two years.
When the boys’ father entered their rooms, Aelric looked up with a sort
of dead pain in his eyes. But then, his
father’s condition shocked him out of thinking about his own misery for maybe
the only time in his life.
Absolom was trembling from head
to foot. His face alternated between
flushing hot red to freezing into white.
He stumbled as he walked as though he were drunk, and his voice was
almost too weak to hear. Aelric brought
his father a chair, watched the old man collapse onto it, thought better of it,
carried his father to his bed. When did Father become so light? Aelric wondered. He remembered his father’s good days—not
well, perhaps, but well enough to know that something was terribly wrong.
The twins watched the whole
scene with a solemn terror in their faces.
Finally, when their father was sleeping a little too quietly, they
approached their older brother. Unable
to form the questions that plagued them into words, they only stared at Aelric
through matching dark eyes until the older boy could no longer stand it. Aelric rushed from the family’s collection of
rooms, slamming the door behind him as he raced off into the castle.
Two horrible things happened at
this point in the story, though the order of them is lost to time. So I’ll tell it as I like, beginning with the
bit that foreshadows trouble in later years, and ending with the part that
foreshadows trouble in the very near future.
Both bends in the path to trouble were littered with alarming markers
that Absolom should have noticed. I am
sorry to say that he did not. Not until
it was too late.
Sometime during his father’s
recovery—if, indeed, it can be called that—Aelric struck up a letter-based
conversation with Crown prince Ivo of Castello, the kingdom to Bennan’s direct
West. A friendship, almost a
brotherhood, grew up out of these letters.
Aelric loved Ivo as he had never loved the twins.
You must be confused. From your perspective, this probably seems a
good thing. At last, Aelric had found
someone whose conversation he could enjoy and connect with. At last, there was a softening in his
heart. All technically true. But you do not yet know the character of the
Crown prince of Castello.
Young prince Ivo was not someone
to spend a great deal of time discussing—his name has even been used, before my
time, as a curse. Unlike Aelric, whose
cruelty can at least be understood to some extend, Ivo’s nastiness had no apparent
root. He was always a little wrong.
Intelligent, yes, although he lacked his friend Aelric’s true
brilliance. Ivo was the sort of boy who
stabbed knives into the castle cat just to see how long it took to die. The kind of child who pinched and punched
babies because he wanted them to cry. He
was a boy who would as soon claw his peers’ eyes out as look at them. He was a brute of the nastiest degree.
Five years Ivo’s junior, Aelric
idolized the prince. Aelric was bright,
very bright, but not good or practiced at relieving his feelings of rage. He needed Ivo’s decisive force. And Ivo, through his letters to Aelric,
recognized the mind that could carry his nasty thoughts into real, executable
plans. They were drawn to the evil in
one another, and they brought out each other’s worst selves.
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