Magic Beans: A Handful of Fairytales From the Storybag Read online

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Authors

  Title Page

  Adèle Geras

  The Six Swan Brothers

  Anne Fine

  The Twelve Dancing Princesses

  Henrietta Branford

  Hansel and Gretel

  Jacqueline Wilson

  Rapunzel

  Malorie Blackman

  Aesop’s Fables

  Philip Pullman

  Mossycoat

  Tony Mitton

  The Seal Hunter

  Alan Garner

  Grey Wolf, Prince Jack and the Firebird

  Berlie Doherty

  The Snow Queen

  Gillian Cross

  The Goose Girl

  Kit Wright

  Rumpelstiltskin

  Michael Morpurgo

  Cockadoodle-doo, Mr Sultana!

  Susan Gates

  The Three Heads in the Well

  Linda Newbery

  The Little Mermaid

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements and Publication Details

  About the Book

  Magic Beans. Sow them. Plant them. Watch them grow.

  Each and every one of the stories in this anthology is a magic bean: a wondrous tale that will capture your imagination. Prepare to be dazzled by Rapunzel’s golden tresses. Prepare to be moved by the suffering of the Little Mermaid. Prepare to laugh yourself silly as ‘Mr Sultana’ struggles to get the better of a little red rooster!

  Stories written by Adèle Geras, Gillian Cross, Henrietta Branford, Jacqueline Wilson, Berlie Doherty, Alan Garner, Kit Wright, Susan Gates, Michael Morpurgo, Malorie Blackman, Philip Pullman, Linda Newbery, Tony Mitton and Anne Fine.

  About the Authors

  MALORIE BLACKMAN’S books have won several awards, including the Children’s Book Award for Noughts and Crosses. She has also won the W. H. Smith Mind-Boggling Books Award and the Young Telegraph/Gimme 5 Award, as well as being shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. Pig-Heart Boy was adapted into a BAFTA-award-winning TV serial. In 2008 Malorie was honoured with an OBE for her services to Children’s Literature.

  HENRIETTA BRANFORD was born in India in 1946 but grew up in a remote part of the New Forest. Her first novel, Royal Blunder, was published in 1990. After that she wrote many different sorts of books, from picture books to teenage novels, including Dimanche Diller (Smarties Prize and the Prix Tam-Tam) and Fire, Bed and Bone (Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize). After her death in 1997 a prize was established to commemorate her and her editor Wendy Boase – the Branford Boase Award for a first novel.

  GILLIAN CROSS was born in 1945. Although she is now a full-time writer, she has had a number of informal jobs, including being an assistant to a Member of Parliament. Her books include Wolf (Carnegie Medal 1990), The Great Elephant Chase (Whitbread Children’s Book Award, Smarties Prize, 1992) and the titles in the ‘Demon Headmaster’ sequence, which was also made into a TV series.

  BERLIE DOHERTY began writing for children in 1982, after teaching and working in radio. She has written more than thirty-five books for children, as well as for the theatre, radio and television. She has won the Carnegie Medal twice: in 1986 for Granny Was a Buffer Girl and in 1991 for Dear Nobody. She has also won the Writer’s Guild Children’s Fiction Award for Daughter of the Sea. Her work is published all over the world, and many of her books have been televised.

  ANNE FINE has been an acknowledged top author in the children’s book world since her first book, The Summer-House Loon, was published in 1978, and has now written more than fifty books and won virtually every major award, including the Carnegie Medal (more than once), the Whitbread Children’s Book Award, the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, the Smarties Prize and others. Anne Fine was the Children’s Laureate from 2001–2003. Her best-known books include Madame Doubtfire (which was made into the film Mrs Doubtfire), Goggle-Eyes and Flour Babies.

  ALAN GARNER OBE (born in Congleton, Cheshire, in 1934) spent his childhood in Alderley Edge, Cheshire. Many of his works, including The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and its sequel The Moon of Gomrath, are drawn from local legends. The Owl Service won both the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize and the Carnegie Medal in 1968. The Stone Book (which received the Phoenix Award in 1996) is poetic in style and inspiration. His collection of essays and public talks, The Voice That Thunders, contains autobiographical material as well as critical reflection upon folklore and language, literature and education, the nature of myth and time.

  SUSAN GATES was born in Grimsby, England. Before she became a full-time writer she lived and worked in Malawi, Africa, then taught in schools in Coventry and County Durham in England. She has written more than 100 books for children, many of which have won prizes. She has been overall winner of the Sheffield Children’s Book Award riz Book Atwice, commended for the Carnegie Medal, and Highly Commended for the Nasen Special Educational Needs Award.

  ADÈLE GERAS was born in Jerusalem and travelled widely as a child. She started writing over thirty years ago and has published more than eighty books for children and young adults. Ithaka was shortlisted for the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize and the Whitbread Children’s Book Award. She lives in Cambridge with her husband, and has two grown-up daughters and two grandchildren.

  TONY MITTON is an award-winning poet, whose delightful verse has proved enormously successful with both adults and children, particularly in picture books. He has written for reading schemes and flip-the-flap books, but is best-known for such series as Rap Rhymes, Amazing Machines and Amazing Animals as well as his own poetry books. He lives in Cambridge with his wife and two children.

  MICHAEL MORPURGO is one of today’s most popular and critically acclaimed children’s writers, author of War Horse (made into an enormously successful stage play) and The Wreck of The Zanzibar amongst many other titles. He has won a multitude of prizes, including the Whitbread Children’s Book Award, the Smarties Prize and the Writer’s Guild Award. Michael Morpurgo’s work is noted for its magical use of storytelling, for characters’ relationships with nature, and for vivid settings.

  LINDA NEWBERY is the author of over twenty-five books for children and young adults, including At the Firefly Gate (nominated for the Carnegie Medal), Catcall (Silver Medal, Nestlé Children’s Book Prize), Set in Stone (Costa Children’s Book Prize), Sisterland (shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal) and The Shell House (shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize). She lives in an Oxfordshire village with her husband.

  PHILIP PULLMAN is one of the most highly acclaimed children’s authors. He has been on the shortlist of just about every major children’s book award in the last few years, and has won the Smarties Prize for The Firework-Maker’s Daughter and the Carnegie Medal for Northern Lights. He was the first children’s author ever to win the overall Whitbread Book Award (for his novel The Amber Spyglass). A film of Northern Lights (titled The Golden Compass) was made in 2008 by New Line Cinema. He lives in Oxford.

  JACQUELINE WILSON is one of the world’s most popular authors for younger readers. She served as Children’s Laureate from 2005–7. The Illustrated Mum was chosen as the British Children’s Book of the Year in 1999 and was winner of the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize in 2000. She has won the Smarties Prize and the Children’s Book Award for Double Act, which was also highly commended for tthefor Carnegie Medal. In 2002 she was given an OBE for services to literacy in schools, and in 2008 was appointed a Dame.

  KIT WRIGHT was born in 1944 and is the author of m
ore than twenty-five books, for both adults and children. His books of poetry include The Bear Looked Over the Mountain (1977), which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award, and Short Afternoons (1989), which won the Hawthornden Prize and was joint winner of the Heinemann Award. His poetry is collected in Hoping It Might Be So: Poems 1974–2000 (2000).

  The Six Swan Brothers

  Retold by Adèle Geras

  Illustrated by Ian Beck

  THERE WAS ONCE a King who had seven children: six strong sons and a daughter whose name was Cora. They lived in a palace on the shores of a lake, and they loved one another greatly. Their mother died on the very day her daughter was born, and the King and his sons mourned her for a long time. Later, when Cora grew up, laughter returned to the palace, and the days were as like one another as beads on a string, all sparkling with happiness.

  Then one day, the King went hunting in the forest. His men rode with him, of course, but he soon left them far, far behind him. He had caught sight of a wild boar, and plunged after it into the places where the trees grew closest together, and branches knotted into one another overhead to make a canopy that kept out the light of the sun.

  All at once he came to a clearing, and there was no sign of the boar. He realized that he was lost and called to his men, but there was no answer. Suddenly a woman stepped out from between the dark columns of the trees. The King knew at once that she was a witch, because her head nodded and nodded, and her yellow eyes were weak and rimmed with scarlet.

  ‘Greetings, good lady,’ he said in as firm a voice as he could manage. ‘Will you show me the best way home? I fear I am lost.’

  ‘I have the power to send you home along straight paths,’ the woman whispered, and her voice was like a rusty blade. ‘But you must do something fv> or me in return, or I will leave you here alone and soon you will be nothing but a complicated arrangement of bones.’

  ‘I will do anything,’ said the King, for there was nothing else that he could say.

  He followed the Witch to her hut, and there beside the fire sat a beautiful young woman.

  ‘This is my daughter.’ The Witch twisted her mouth into something like a smile. ‘You will marry her and make her Queen. That is my condition.’

  ‘It will be my pleasure,’ said the King, and he took the young woman’s hand and set her on his horse. The touch of her fingers filled him with a loathing and disgust he did not understand. She is beautiful, he told himself as they rode together. I should be happy, but her eyes are full of ice and darkness and her red lips seem stained with poison. He made up his mind that she should never know anything about his children, for he was sure that she would harm them if she could. And so, he took the Witch’s Daughter to a house near the palace, and said to her:

  ‘You will stay here only until I make all ready for our wedding, my dear. Everything must be perfect.’

  And she was satisfied.

  That very night, the King took his children to another castle, which was so well hidden in the green heart of the forest that even he could not find it without help. He had in his possession a ball of enchanted yarn, which a wise woman had given him, and if he threw that along the ground a little way, it unrolled all by itself, and showed him the path he had to follow.

  So there they stayed, the King’s six sons and Cora, his little daughter, hidden and safe, while the King and the new Queen celebrated their marriage. After the wedding, the new Queen noticed that he was away from the palace almost every day, and she became suspicious.

  ‘He is hiding something from me,’ she said to herself, ‘and I will discover what it is no matter what I have to do.’

  She summoned the stable-hands, and said to them: ‘My husband leaves my side each day, and goes somewhere. Tell me,’ she whispered, and her voice was like treacle. ‘Tell me where he goes, and I will pay you in gold pieces … more gold pieces than you will ever count.’

  And because gold has the power to bend and twist even the strongest will, the stable-hands told her of the magical yarn, and of what it could do. Then, one day when the King was visiting a neighbouring country, the Witch’s Daughter crept to the Treasury. There she found what she was looking for, and she took it and put it into her pocket.

  She followed the silver thread as it unwound bethet unwoutween the trees, and at last she came to the castle where the King’s children were hidden. She arrived at dusk and saw six handsome young men returning from the hunt.

  ‘Those are my husband’s sons,’ she said to herself. ‘I am certain of it.’

  When she considered how much he must love them, a bright flame of hatred leaped up in her heart. ‘It is fortunate,’ she thought, ‘that my husband is far away, for I have work to do.’

  She looked no further, and so she never found Cora, who was in her chamber, high up in the tower. The magic thread led her back to the palace and rolled itself up behind her as she walked.

  The Witch’s Daughter locked herself up in a small room and cut out six shirts from white silk. Then she began to sew with a long and wicked needle that caught the light as she worked. She sang a spell as she sat there and she sang it six times, once for each garment:

  ‘White as Ice

  silken stitches

  gifts I bring.

  Hearts may yearn

  but flesh will know

  how feathers grow

  from poisoned silk

  smooth as milk.

  Turn and burn

  turn and burn

  turn limb to wing.’

  When the garments were ready, the Witch’s Daughter unlocked her door and went to find the ball of enchanted thread. At the edge of the forest, she spoke these words:

  ‘Your master returns tomorrow, but for now you are mine. Find them again, for the last time.’

  The silver thread slipped away between the trees, and the Witch’s Daughter came to the hidden castle once again. Cora saw her from the high window of her chamber, and immediately she knew that something terrible was going to happen. She hid behind the curtain and peeped out at the stable yard, where her brothers were gathered, back from the day’s hunting.

  ‘Welcome, madam,’ saiddiv’ the eldest. ‘Our house and hospitality await you, as they do every stranger lost in the forest.’

  ‘I am not lost,’ said the Witch’s Daughter. ‘I have brought you gifts from the King, your father. See, here is a shirt for each of you, made from white silk.’

  The young men took the shirts, and before their sister could cry out to warn them, they had thrust their arms into the sleeves.

  ‘You will see,’ said the Witch’s Daughter. ‘They will become like second skins.’ She turned and was gone, swallowed up in the darkness between one tree and another.

  Cora found she could not move. She went on staring down from the window, thinking that perhaps she was mistaken, and perhaps her heart should not be filled with dread and foreboding. But her brothers’ beautiful necks were stretching and stretching and their heads shrinking and shrinking and their brown arms flapping and growing white and soon there was nothing left of men in any of them, and the air was filled with the sound of beating wings, as six swans rose and moved along the soft currents of the evening breeze towards the sunset beyond the forest.

  ‘Wait!’ Cora called after them. ‘Wait for me!’ But they had disappeared and she was left alone.

  After they had gone, she was cold with fear and the sound of her own breathing was as loud in her ears as a sighing wind. She did not know whether to try and make her way to her father’s palace, or to stay where she was and hope that he would find her. In the end, she decided to leave the castle, for the rooms were full of silence, and frightened her. Cora longed to weep for her poor brothers, but she knew that she had to follow them at once, or they would be lost for ever. She filled a basket with bread and hard cheese and took her warmest cloak to cover her, and set out for the forest.

  Cora walked and walked through the night and through the follo
wing day, between bramble bushes thick with thorns like little claws, and over twisted tree roots buried in the earth; with no moon to guide her and the calling of night birds to chill her blood. She put one foot in front of another all through the black hours and at last the dawn came. The young girl looked around her and recognized nothing, so she went on, searching the sky for swans, listening for the music of their moving wings and still, always, putting one foot in front of another. As night was falling, she came upon a hut. Her legs were stiff with weariness and her feet hurt from walking.

  ‘I will see,’ Cora said to herself, ‘whether perhaps some kind woodcutter will let me rest here for a few hours.’

  She knocked at the door of the hut, but it stood wide open. Whoever had once lived there had long ago moved on. She sank on to a bed in the corner and slept.

  And as she slept, she dreamed. In her dream, six swans flew in through the window and stood around the bed.

  Cora cried out: ‘Why are you not the brothers that I love? Where, where are they?’

  ‘We are here,’ said a voice, and Cora thought the voice was speaking in her head, and opened her eyes at once, for surely that was her dear brother speaking? It was then that she saw them all, standing around her in their glorious human shape, gazing down and smiling.

  ‘There is no time for joy,’ said one. ‘We are allowed to return to our human forms for a few minutes only, every evening, and after that we are swans again.’

  ‘Is there nothing I can do?’ Cora wept. ‘I would do anything … anything in the world to break the spell.’

  ‘What you would have to do,’ said her youngest brother, ‘is too much.’