Sunday Scribblings Post-Prompt "Fairytale"
This is my take on Little Red Riding Hood:
I know how the story has been revised, even now, as removed as I am from the life I used to lead, I still hear things. I find it amusing to a certain extent that they have done their best to eradicate all the blame that they deserve to carry for what happened to me. The wolves they speak of are strangers who lie in wait in the darkness to devour the unwary. They've even concocted a woodsman to save me. It would figure that they would need some imaginary, benevolent man to assuage their consciences.
Parts of the story are true. I was in the forest by myself. I was going to see my grandmother. She had fallen ill and I was taking her some bread and cheese that we had made and some apples that we had picked. They make her sound like some kind of foolish, helpless old woman because they were always scared of her and her knowledge. She was an herb-woman. She might not have been able to read the fancy books that the priests make, but she had a library's worth of recipes and cures stored in her mind. Villagers only needed to tell her their ailments in order for her to know exactly what to make for them to ease their suffering.
Because my mother was her daughter, she was deemed outsider, different from all the other people who lived in the village. Thus, even when she married my father, poor farmer that he was, we were forced to live on the outskirts of the town. My mother taught me that the things her mother taught her were no different than the recipes for making bread or stew. It was not magic or witchery at work, merely knowing that certain plants have value beyond being simple foodstuffs. The stems have different properties than the roots, which have different properties than the leaves, which have different properties than the flowers or the seeds. By learning such things, we learn to help those around us.
So, I was sent with the proper medicine to help my grandmother. My mother had no desire to take her place as the new herb-woman so soon. I enjoy how they claim I wore such a rich, red cloak. Only the wealthy have such things and my family was far from wealthy. Any livestock we could claim had come from barter for the curatives that we made, or for the cooking herbs we grew as well.
The cloak I wore for warmth on that cool, fall day was only plain, dark cloth. I suppose it doesn't make for a very good symbol. Surely, since I deserved what happened to me, I must have been wearing something that would have caught their eyes. Their attention had to have been drawn by something that I had done. The King would never hire soldiers who were less than honorable.
I set out as I had so often done, thinking nothing of traveling alone through the forest on familiar paths I had walked since childhood. The trees grow densely in the forest and there are places where only the weakest patches of sunlight find their way through the leaves. I had walked those paths in all seasons and in all weather. The ingredients necessary to make healing tinctures do not grow only in spring and summer. There are certain plants that must be collected in fall and winter, because they only come into their full potency after they have frozen. Feeling fear in that place was as unknown to me as the ocean. Certainly, I had heard that others were afraid to walk alone in the forest, just as I had heard of the great body of endless water far beyond anywhere I had ever traveled.
The King had hired foreign mercenaries to create an army in the hopes of overtaking the land to the west of us. We had seen a few of them around the village, brief glimpses of ugly, hard men with collections of scars and armor that was battered, but still functional. I knew little of them and had no care to learn more, but what I had heard, in snatches of gossip that fluttered around me in the market, made me determined to stay out of their way.
I do not know why some of them chose to follow me that day, I can only suspect that, because they taunted me with grunts of “witch, witch” that some of the residents of the town had remarked upon me. They seemed to believe that they were fully within their rights as visitors to our land to have what they would of me. They chased me in the forest, and, while I might have outrun them on foot, they had clever horses with sure feet. They encircled me and demanded things of me that I would not give. Since I refused them, they climbed down from their horses and they took. I only screamed once. When I saw how happy my cry made them, I determined that I would give them no further satisfaction and so I held my sobs and endured. At the end of it, they left me in the forest for dead. I was not dead, but I was, most certainly, changed. As I pulled myself up from the forest floor, I vowed that not one more girl or woman of my village would endure the same fate.
I had always believed that the tale of my life would be one of the sort that no one would ever remember, much less repeat. I was certain, beyond all things, that I would learn from my mother and my grandmother all that I would need to know to cure the ailments of our neighbors and that I would live as they did, perhaps taking a husband and raising a daughter of my own, teaching her that station I had been born to. I found, however, that I could not bring myself to go back to the village. There was nothing in me that was willing to see the men who had hurt me laughing and drinking in the small tavern at the square or buying wares on market days. I could not bear to see them carrying on with their ordinary lives as if they had done nothing wrong when they had disrupted my life so brutally.
Still, the story spread. I did tell my grandmother what had happened and she confided in some of the village women, who, of course, told their husbands and warned their daughters. There were occasional swineherds who brought their pigs to feed on acorns who caught glimpses of me. While I would not go back to the village, I stayed in the forest. It was as much home to me as the hut where I was raised. My mother and grandmother made pilgrimages to see me and I collected those herbs and plants they needed for their work.
The King heard of what had happened, eventually. He also realized that he was being blamed for it because he was the one who had hired the men. I may have had a reputation as an outsider, but the villagers knew me well enough to know that I would not have invited what had happened. Rather than apologize or offer compensation, he hired the very best minstrels he could find and sent them to the village. Supposedly, it was an offering to appease the village, by providing entertainment that would keep the mercenaries off the streets and away from any other girls, especially those who might be considered reputable.
Soon, the story had been twisted beyond all recognition. Silver tongues and pretty finger-work had cloaked the warnings into a tale of a much younger and far more innocent child who was tricked by a Big Bad Wolf, that crafty devil in a stranger's clothes. It was told and told and told again, reworked into the kind of tale that parents tell their children all their lives to caution them against the evils of the world. As the children get older, they learn that the Big Bad Wolf is not a wolf at all, but a man dressed all up so that he will appear as frightening as possible. This is because the evil that dwells in the world is always so very easily spotted.
What the tellers of tales have always left out is how the story really ends, what Little Red Riding Hood did after the Big Bad Wolf got her. Oh, they never mention how the village suddenly found itself with a spirit in the woods, one who protects all the other girls who live there. They are certainly safer in that forest than ever before. The minstrels never sing about how the mercenaries who come to town and show themselves to be untrustworthy around the young women of the village have a way of finding themselves out in the forest alone and how they never seem to come back from that journey. It is never mentioned how the ones who show themselves as Big Bad Wolves always disappear so they can't trouble the village any longer. That is fine. I don't need words to tell my story. It is written on the forest floor, in the blood of wolves.
I know how the story has been revised, even now, as removed as I am from the life I used to lead, I still hear things. I find it amusing to a certain extent that they have done their best to eradicate all the blame that they deserve to carry for what happened to me. The wolves they speak of are strangers who lie in wait in the darkness to devour the unwary. They've even concocted a woodsman to save me. It would figure that they would need some imaginary, benevolent man to assuage their consciences.
Parts of the story are true. I was in the forest by myself. I was going to see my grandmother. She had fallen ill and I was taking her some bread and cheese that we had made and some apples that we had picked. They make her sound like some kind of foolish, helpless old woman because they were always scared of her and her knowledge. She was an herb-woman. She might not have been able to read the fancy books that the priests make, but she had a library's worth of recipes and cures stored in her mind. Villagers only needed to tell her their ailments in order for her to know exactly what to make for them to ease their suffering.
Because my mother was her daughter, she was deemed outsider, different from all the other people who lived in the village. Thus, even when she married my father, poor farmer that he was, we were forced to live on the outskirts of the town. My mother taught me that the things her mother taught her were no different than the recipes for making bread or stew. It was not magic or witchery at work, merely knowing that certain plants have value beyond being simple foodstuffs. The stems have different properties than the roots, which have different properties than the leaves, which have different properties than the flowers or the seeds. By learning such things, we learn to help those around us.
So, I was sent with the proper medicine to help my grandmother. My mother had no desire to take her place as the new herb-woman so soon. I enjoy how they claim I wore such a rich, red cloak. Only the wealthy have such things and my family was far from wealthy. Any livestock we could claim had come from barter for the curatives that we made, or for the cooking herbs we grew as well.
The cloak I wore for warmth on that cool, fall day was only plain, dark cloth. I suppose it doesn't make for a very good symbol. Surely, since I deserved what happened to me, I must have been wearing something that would have caught their eyes. Their attention had to have been drawn by something that I had done. The King would never hire soldiers who were less than honorable.
I set out as I had so often done, thinking nothing of traveling alone through the forest on familiar paths I had walked since childhood. The trees grow densely in the forest and there are places where only the weakest patches of sunlight find their way through the leaves. I had walked those paths in all seasons and in all weather. The ingredients necessary to make healing tinctures do not grow only in spring and summer. There are certain plants that must be collected in fall and winter, because they only come into their full potency after they have frozen. Feeling fear in that place was as unknown to me as the ocean. Certainly, I had heard that others were afraid to walk alone in the forest, just as I had heard of the great body of endless water far beyond anywhere I had ever traveled.
The King had hired foreign mercenaries to create an army in the hopes of overtaking the land to the west of us. We had seen a few of them around the village, brief glimpses of ugly, hard men with collections of scars and armor that was battered, but still functional. I knew little of them and had no care to learn more, but what I had heard, in snatches of gossip that fluttered around me in the market, made me determined to stay out of their way.
I do not know why some of them chose to follow me that day, I can only suspect that, because they taunted me with grunts of “witch, witch” that some of the residents of the town had remarked upon me. They seemed to believe that they were fully within their rights as visitors to our land to have what they would of me. They chased me in the forest, and, while I might have outrun them on foot, they had clever horses with sure feet. They encircled me and demanded things of me that I would not give. Since I refused them, they climbed down from their horses and they took. I only screamed once. When I saw how happy my cry made them, I determined that I would give them no further satisfaction and so I held my sobs and endured. At the end of it, they left me in the forest for dead. I was not dead, but I was, most certainly, changed. As I pulled myself up from the forest floor, I vowed that not one more girl or woman of my village would endure the same fate.
I had always believed that the tale of my life would be one of the sort that no one would ever remember, much less repeat. I was certain, beyond all things, that I would learn from my mother and my grandmother all that I would need to know to cure the ailments of our neighbors and that I would live as they did, perhaps taking a husband and raising a daughter of my own, teaching her that station I had been born to. I found, however, that I could not bring myself to go back to the village. There was nothing in me that was willing to see the men who had hurt me laughing and drinking in the small tavern at the square or buying wares on market days. I could not bear to see them carrying on with their ordinary lives as if they had done nothing wrong when they had disrupted my life so brutally.
Still, the story spread. I did tell my grandmother what had happened and she confided in some of the village women, who, of course, told their husbands and warned their daughters. There were occasional swineherds who brought their pigs to feed on acorns who caught glimpses of me. While I would not go back to the village, I stayed in the forest. It was as much home to me as the hut where I was raised. My mother and grandmother made pilgrimages to see me and I collected those herbs and plants they needed for their work.
The King heard of what had happened, eventually. He also realized that he was being blamed for it because he was the one who had hired the men. I may have had a reputation as an outsider, but the villagers knew me well enough to know that I would not have invited what had happened. Rather than apologize or offer compensation, he hired the very best minstrels he could find and sent them to the village. Supposedly, it was an offering to appease the village, by providing entertainment that would keep the mercenaries off the streets and away from any other girls, especially those who might be considered reputable.
Soon, the story had been twisted beyond all recognition. Silver tongues and pretty finger-work had cloaked the warnings into a tale of a much younger and far more innocent child who was tricked by a Big Bad Wolf, that crafty devil in a stranger's clothes. It was told and told and told again, reworked into the kind of tale that parents tell their children all their lives to caution them against the evils of the world. As the children get older, they learn that the Big Bad Wolf is not a wolf at all, but a man dressed all up so that he will appear as frightening as possible. This is because the evil that dwells in the world is always so very easily spotted.
What the tellers of tales have always left out is how the story really ends, what Little Red Riding Hood did after the Big Bad Wolf got her. Oh, they never mention how the village suddenly found itself with a spirit in the woods, one who protects all the other girls who live there. They are certainly safer in that forest than ever before. The minstrels never sing about how the mercenaries who come to town and show themselves to be untrustworthy around the young women of the village have a way of finding themselves out in the forest alone and how they never seem to come back from that journey. It is never mentioned how the ones who show themselves as Big Bad Wolves always disappear so they can't trouble the village any longer. That is fine. I don't need words to tell my story. It is written on the forest floor, in the blood of wolves.