1001 Nights Cast

Worryingly, serendipitously, this request was also for a fairy tale. Worryingly because this was certainly the trend du jour—more requests for tales had come in the last few days than for months. Serendipitously, because she had all the elements at hand, laid out on the scarred wooden trestle, ready for customised assembly. The setting—time and place indeterminate but evocative; the hero—resolute, pure and stalwart; the trickster—changeful, playful, profound—a succubus who can eat its own tail and still come up laughing. A flexible wisp of time/space continuum—perfect for time warps, neat plot twists, coincidence and getting over the line on time. And of course there is a tussle—several choices here: moral, ethical; personal, universal; material, spiritual.

With a small exhalation, not far from a sigh, she set to work.

It was a dark and stormy night, and the golden child lay warm in bed watching the celestial tussle reflected on the rough ceiling of the little cottage. The thunder broke and rumbled, the storm light flashed with precision as the dead centre approached the cottage in the clearing. With one huge effort, thunder and lightning came into synchronisation, and the clearing, the cottage, the ceiling came eerily alive in the electric light and the rafters and the windows rattled in distress. The golden child thrilled to the show, and snuggled deeper into his quilts. As lashes settled on peachy cheek, the Storm, her work done, gathered her trailing cloud, the minor lightning, the last reverberant rumbles—and fled the scene. At dawn the golden child awoke to a fresh-faced world, scrubbed and glowing from the storm. He toddled down the hill, towards the tall forest, where the eucalypts stood white-skinned, gently rustling in the autumnal blue. Overnight the season had changed, the sky more intensely azure, the air a little crisp, the sun lower in the sky and touching the edge of the forest with pinkish golden fingers, penetrating deep amongst the trees. He slipped onto one of those fingers, and found his way to where a little pool lay dark and mute, surrounded by lush ferns and some mossy rocks. The golden child knelt there, and looked into the obscure depths of the water. As he concentrated, the sunlight seeped further into the clearing and suddenly the depths were illuminated. Clear as liquid light, cool as cool can be, the pool came alive with dancing reflections and the freshening autumn breeze. Water-worn pebbles shone creamy, speckled and dark as the golden child lowered his face to the surface. ‘Speak to me, speak’, he breathed on the water. The water sprite responded quickly, the mottled pebbles were her face coming into focus. She laughed, she grinned, she tossed her wanton weedy curls—and for a moment she was in danger of dissolving back into the scatter of pebbles! The golden child shot his hand into the water, grabbing grabbing grabbing like the infant he is. And the sprite grabbed back, and pulled that toddler into the pool which closed over with neat concentric surface rings. Laughing even louder, the sprite cradled the falling body in her arms, and ‘Story, story, tell me a story’ the child begged, overturning on the slippery rocks and grabbing at her floating hair. The two nestled together in the green blue depths.

‘Well’, said the sprite, ‘here is one for you. It was a dark and stormy night and all the little elves were swarming as the lightning brought the pool alive—they swarmed over the pebbles of my face, and under the roots of the she-oak tree, and over and under each other too. Dozens of baby eels—slipping, pushing, twisting in the lightning flash. And they got tangled in my hair, and they slipped between my legs, and they nibbled on my poor soft limbs. And what could I do? The more I tried to shake them off, the more they burrowed into every crevice! So as the thunder passed, and the light grew dimmer, I stilled myself and lay here as you found me, pool and pebble and water and everything. And what do you think? Can you imagine? The mother eel came along, slipped quiet as death from her dark hole beneath the she-oak roots, and she flayed my waters with her beating tail, and she opened wide her ugly mouth, and her sharp teeth glittered as she spoke:

‘It was a dark and stormy night’, said the eel, ‘and the great ocean lay still and deep and dark and calm below her ruffled skin. Up above, the storm tossed the sea into waves and troughs and many a ship went down that night with the people screaming and praying. All the while the crews frantically resisted a certain death, for they fear us sea creatures, they fear the suffocating mother ocean—they are weak and puny in the fluid embrace of their original sin. You must know that people abandoned the sea long ago, and so forever they live in awe and lust and terror of her. And the falling bodies! Hah, they struggle so against the depths, they cry out for salvation, they flail and kick—how foolish they look, land creatures out of their element, they resist. Their resistance is their weakness, their rigidity their curse. They fight the water in their lungs, the soft sucking downward pull. And on that night many faced their deepest fears, there in the tossing seas. And on the land, crunchy rocks and soil beneath their feet, a fire ablaze to guide the lost—they spin a story as the ships go down and the drowning cries are buffeted between the rocks. They tell a tale to stitch together the shattered souls and the broken bodies’, said the eel. ‘And how do you think that tale begins?’ she asked the golden child and the pool sprite. ‘Well’, she said, and her teeth flashed sharp and bright, ‘It was a dark and stormy night…’