Bull’s-Eye:A Fairy Tale for the Jaundiced and Jaded
By Tamara Boyd
I’m going to tell you a story. You may think you already know how it goes: once upon a time there’s a kindly old king who has a beautiful young daughter who falls in love with the handsome peasant who rescues her from the evil wizard who disappears in a puff of noxious smoke and the echo of eerie incantations. Lots of hugging and kissing and crying, elaborate wedding, everybody lives happily ever after. Except the wizard, of course. Sometimes the daughter’s a son and the peasant lad is actually a wench, but it all wraps up pretty much the same. Well, this story isn’t that story. What you’ve got here is a juvenile delinquent for a king and a klutz of a sorcerer (who really has nothing to do with anything I’m going to tell you about, but I thought you ought to know there is one). The damsel and her savior are middle-aged and homely, to be honest, and furthermore, there is nothing purple whatsoever about either one of them. Oh, and one more caveat: nobody lives happily ever after. Not exactly.
But let me start with something familiar. Once upon a time—of course that’s how it begins. How else? Please don’t interrupt me again. Once upon a time in ye olde land of Cuilinn, there lived a royal punk by the name of Díobhar. Díobhar VI, to be precise, since monarchs are as bad as movie studios when it comes to sequels. Palace rumor had it his mother died of shock within minutes of giving birth to him, mistaking his angry squawks for the shrieks of a demon. Sixteen years later, the kid was a petulant, pustular tyrant who ruled the realm with as tight and heavy a gauntleted fist as those who had ruled before him—his father Díobhar the Fiend, his grandfather Díobhar the Brute, his great-grandfather Mad King Díobhar, his great-great-grandfather Díobhar the Unholy, and his not-so-great–great–great–grandfather Díobhar the Usurping Heathen Lowland Weasel aka the Despoiler of Cuilinn. All of whom, by the way, kicked off the near side of thirty in extremely suspect circumstances… which can happen when your mistresses don’t like you any more than your wife does. The last benevolent king had reigned so long ago, the people of Cuilinn had forgotten he had in fact been a queen. And you may make of that as you will.
History, however, would come to remember Díobhar VI as the Dolt for three reasons. First, there was his tendency to issue decrees on a whim that were frivolous at best—restricting court costume on Tuesday afternoons to the color of red—and often technically unenforceable to boot—forbidding the roasting of chicken, whole or in part, before two o’clock except on every fifth Wednesday of months beginning with K. Second, he regularly disregarded the advice of his council, hastily passing blame when his own strategies failed on the battlefield or at court yet taking full credit for achievements wrought by the council’s clever maneuvering behind his back—not because he was manipulative and deceitful, though he was certainly both, but because he couldn’t always recall from one week to the next who had done what to whom and wherefore it had occurred.
And third? As you may have surmised, the kid wasn’t exactly the brightest flower in the garden. Throughout his entire brief life, for example, he was convinced the world was flat and enclosed by a raggedy tent with a really high ceiling, behind which a humongous torch suspended from a very, very, very tall pole. Inbreeding was largely to blame, to be sure, and fortunately for Cuilinn, he wouldn’t have the opportunity to degrade the royal bloodline any further. But I’ll get to that soon enough. Anyway, being several petals short of a daisy was the least of Díobhar’s problems insofar as his peasant subjects were concerned, for he possessed nary a pinch of compassion for them nor a smidgen of care but for the meager contents of their purses and pockets, so that the poorest and unluckiest among them suffered through short miserable lives starved of hope, dreams—and, yes, food.
One drizzly summer afternoon, the Dolt somehow managed to slip the watch of his royal guards, soldiers, lords-in-waiting, and other assorted sycophants and hangers-on (the specifics, alas, are lost to time) in order to steal off for a joyride in his gaudy carriage. A sixfold team of swift black steeds drew coach and king through the green velvet country west of the castle—where a significant portion of the old-growth forest had been cut down to build huts and to make room for herds of sheep and goats that had nibbled and gnawed at the earth for so many centuries now only grass and the odd thistle would sprout—and into the deep, dark, magical Feireadh Woods. Or what was left of them. Even then they were no longer very deep and not especially dark, either, but minstrels, tinkers, journeymen, bards, artists, and younger sons in search of their fortunes who stopped into taverns after having passed through the woods from one direction or another still traded tales over ciders and stouts of seeing lace-winged fairy princes leaping from fern leaf to fern leaf to loosen a shower of dewdrops for their bathing princesses and of glimpsing silver-bearded gnomes as ancient and gnarled as the forest itself harvesting berries and herbs for mysterious potions and salves a countrywoman could obtain, so the rhyme held, simply by leaving the proper payment outside the back door of her cottage in the hour after midnight:
Cakes ease aches and scones mend bones,
while sweet bread brings to the barren bed an infant’s lusty cries
and fresh fruit pies cure any sickness hidden from the eyes.
Apparently, open sores and fungal infections were the purview of someone else’s magic… and hot-cross buns were altogether useless in trade. In any case, the next morning, the woman would find her baked goods spirited away and the respective medicine left on her doorstep.
Whether the travelers who told these stories were already soused before reaching the taverns is something the legend never makes entirely clear, and as my pharmacy has a 24-hour drive-through, I’ve never put the Gnome Rhyme’s promises to the test. The forest is so far away now besides, I figure the little guy would get run over or mugged or just plain lost long before he made it anywhere near my apartment.
But I digress. My point is that although magic clearly lingered in the Feireadh then, the legend says nothing of what King Díobhar saw there that day. He likely encountered nothing extraordinary because a) despite having been raised on the stories of the forest’s strange denizens told and retold by his nurses, who undoubtedly elevated their yarns to ever more preposterous levels with each successive recount, he unfortunately lacked the ability to see anything there but the trees, scarce though they may have been, and b) galloping through the woods with such gleeful abandon, he frightened even the fierce, bold, yellow-eyed wolves far down into their dens. Certainly no fragile fey folk were going to hang around and risk being churned to pulp. Díobhar’s recklessness finally caused him to bust an axle and lose a wheel in a large and muddy pothole in a clearing a few yards short of the far side of the Feireadh, whereupon His Royal Rear was launched cloudward.
Now, a maiden and her kindly betrothed happened at this time to be strolling through a meadow past a stand of trees that marked the end of the woods, twirling chains of wildflowers, blowing dandelion seeds into the air to buoy their wishes, gazing at each other with limpid eyes, and exchanging the sort of revolting endearments that inevitably cause anyone save the ones for whom they are intended to squirm uncomfortably and possibly engage in a bit of theatrical finger-gagging. The maiden’s name was Leathne, and ravishing by modern standards of cosmetically augmented pulchritude she was not. She had sallow wrinkled skin spotty with precancerous moles and a hip-length cascade of russet hair fuzzy with split ends. Her smile looked like a picket fence in dire need of a whitewash—and some new pickets. And I’d venture the girl smelled a tad sour and had a louse or two or three clinging to her head or nestled in her privates, since bathing did not at that time number among the regular or even slightly irregular habits of the populace regardless of station.
Leathne was a wizened eighteen (about halfway to the grave in those days), and technically she had not been a maiden since the first snowfall of the winter past. But because in Cuilinn in days of yore it was a sin, punishable by involuntary harlotry or exile to the Heathen Lowlands, for a woman to lose her maidenhead before she wed—on the books anyhow, although peasants tended to be more forgiving about such transgressions than other classes were—Leathne was for all intents and purposes a maiden. Her tresses tossed about unbraided, her marginally substantial bosom jiggled unrestrained. She dried red roses from her garden, ground the petals to a fine powder, and dusted her cheeks with it to leave a blush. And she drank nothing stronger than fresh goat’s milk. Hey, don’t ask me. It’s part of the tale.
Beauty, it has oft been quoth, resides merely in the eye of the beholder, and the eye of Leathne’s doting beholder found her surpassingly lovely indeed—perhaps because he had only the one. Gentle Taoilte was twenty, quite advanced in years for a bachelor. He had but a handful of rufous hairs to his head and tended toward the stringy side, and I daresay he was infested and a bit malodorous himself. However, he did possess immense virtue and decency, as you will shortly discover.
From the age of nine, Taoilte had been apprenticed to the master glassblower of Rodhuirachna, the village to which he and Leathne both pledged kinship. One day in his fifteenth year, another apprentice fumbled a bowl in his proximity. It shattered, and a splinter of glass flew up and lodged in Taoilte’s right eye. Despite a hasty removal of the offending sliver, the orb grew increasingly infected and finally had to be burned out lest the boy’s whole head erupt in a fester. The operation was performed by a blacksmith with a glowing poker whilst Taoilte was under sway of several tankards of some medieval moonshine. Thereafter, the lad wore a scrap of crimson cloth tied rakishly about his head with the bulging knot fixed squarely over the ugly scar, and though he looked a perfect rogue, he was in reality no scoundrel but a pensive soul who preferred singing to sword fighting and who strummed the lute down at the Shepherd’s Mistress most evenings to earn a few extra pennies toward an embroidered black velvet tunic for his impending wedding.
After the accident the master allowed Taoilte to stay on at the shop awhile, but the poor chap’s sense of perspective was so diminished by the loss of what proved to be his better eye that all his glassware from then onward was utterly useless—bowls with uneven sides and bases thin as onionskin, cups a mere half-thumb deep, warped plates with phallic or otherwise obscene lumps protruding from their centers. So, urged on through no little prodding from the master, Taoilte’s father granted his only son a plot from his farm, and though Taoilte’s fields always ran a little crooked, his grains grew as thick and high and rich as anyone’s.
In those days, men were not held to the same exacting prenuptial standards that bound women, thus almost everyone in the hamlet was aware passionate Taoilte had graduated to full manhood sometime after the first winter frost and had been exceptionally dedicated to his post-graduate studies in the subject through the succeeding months. Although he was never seen nor even rumored to have been seen—or heard—in the company of any girl but Leathne, respectable or low, no one in Rodhuirachna seemed to acknowledge the discrepancy. In public and in the presence of her father and brothers, Leathne behaved as a maiden was expected to behave, and for anyone who bothered to worry about the matter, her accordant grace alone settled it for them. That was the way things were done before tabloids came along and turned it all so unpleasant, you know.
Taoilte and Leathne could be cheerful this day, or any day, because although they were but country peasants, their land and their bodies were entirely their own. Rodhuirachna was one of only seven villages in the realm that, through a combination of aggressive hoarding and simple good fortune—that is to say, lords possessed of spendthrift wives, zero financial savvy, and a preoccupation with achieving fame on vainglorious crusades in faraway lands with peculiar names—had been able to buy themselves free of the nobility. Taoilte and Leathne were born into only the second generation of Rodhuirachnann farmers that had never known the yoke of serfdom. They were also in love and due to be wed at the end of the summer, twoscore and seven days away. And finally, Leathne whispered to her confidantes and Taoilte murmured to all his comrades, congress between them was nothing short of transcendent… and it is probably safe to assume this facet of their relationship alone would have more than made up for potential deficits in other areas, had there existed any.
Now the lovers interrupted their stroll and their googly-eyed cooing to investigate the terrific racket of howling and crashing that seemed to be coming from beyond the westernmost edge of the Feireadh. As it happened, they burst into the clearing the very moment gravity reasserted itself on King Díobhar. He plummeted earthward and landed face-first in the mud hole below with a loud and messy splash. Country-raised as they had been and being of but common birth, neither sweet Taoilte nor Leathne had laid eyes upon their monarch before in flesh or art, or doubtless they never, ever, ever would have done what they did next. They laughed. And not polite little snickers, either. Nope, they roared. They cackled. They held their stomachs and guffawed until they wept.
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