Beneath Ceaseless Skies #416, September 19, 2024
“The Thirteenth Dancer” by Leah Cypess
“After We Kill Our Father and Before We Reach the Mainland” by Max Franciscovich
Reviewed by Geoff Houghton
Beneath Ceaseless Skies #416 opens with an adult fairy story: “The Thirteenth Dancer” by Leah Cypess. The female narrator had once been a Fae Princess upon a magical island, one of twelve immortal dancers whose only duties were to dress gorgeously each morning, play prettily each day and dance ravishingly each evening. In recompense, each Princess is waited upon hand and foot by attentive but invisible servants and awakes each morning not only refreshed but renewed and untouched by the passage of time. After ten years as a voluntary exile on the human mainland, our narrator returns to the magical island, still unsure of whether her decision to surrender her immortality had been a wise one.
It might appear self-evident that eternal life as an immortal princess should be superior to spending a single human life, aging and precariously living by trading knowledge of the fae world to seekers after its magic, but the darker side to this magical island is slowly revealed over the course of this carefully-crafted story. The fae never lie and always scrupulously keep the bargains that they strike, but, as Dr. Faust discovered in a different story, it is essential that you know exactly what it is that you wish for.
By the end of this compelling tale, our narrator has chosen what she will accept as her future and what she will pay for it. Each reader is implicitly invited to decide for themselves what might be an acceptable price for eternal life and whether they would make the same choice or some other.
“After We Kill Our Father and Before We Reach the Mainland” by Max Franciscovich is a dark reimagining of a 414 year old story. It opens with three not-quite siblings rowing away from an island only hours after a mighty ship-wrecking storm, leaving the corpse of their not-quite father behind on the shore.
This work utilises the cast of characters from a play that was first shown in South London in the same decade that the colonial town of Jamestown USA was being established in what would one day become the United States of America.
The characters may be over four centuries old, but in this interpretation, the motivations and behaviour of the three rowers, Mir, Ari and Cal, are much more contemporary. The original playwright envisaged a Sorcerer whose noble blood granted him the automatic right to command and manipulate his child, enslave the foreign alien and bind the ugly stranger to his service without any adverse consequence, but our modern interpreter disagrees vehemently. The result is that, instead of the Magician retrieving the throne that he had lost, his own child and servants deliver a fatal penalty for his hubris even before we join the escapees on their small boat.
There is little of the light whimsy of the original in this grim retelling, but it is possible that many readers will consider that justice is better served in this interpretation. However, it is a work of true pathos in that there are no winners, only different levels of loss for all involved. This is not a cheerful and uplifting fairy story, but it is certainly a thought-provoking piece.
Geoff Houghton lives in a leafy village in rural England. He is a retired Healthcare Professional with a love of SF and a jackdaw-like appetite for gibbets of medical, scientific and historical knowledge.