Travel Light (Peapod Classics)
Praise for Travel Light:
“A 78-year-old friend staying at my house picked up Travel Light, and a few hours later she said, ‘Oh, I wish I’d known there were books like this when I was younger!’ So, read it now—think of all those wasted years!”
—Ursula K. Le Guin, author of Gifts
“Travel Light is the story of Halla, a girl born to a king but cast out onto the hills to die. She lives among bears; she lives among dragons. But the time of dragons is passing, and Odin All-Father offers Halla a choice: Will she stay dragonish and hoard wealth and possessions, or will she travel light?”
—Amal El-Mohtar, NPR, You Must Read This
“Disarmingly familiar, like a memory only half-recalled. You will love this book.”
—Holly Black (Doll Bones, The Spiderwick Chronicles)
“The enchantments of Travel Light contain more truth, more straight talking, a grittier, harder-edged view of the world than any of the mundane descriptions of daily life you will find in the science fiction stories.”—SF Site
“Every page is full of magic and wonder. . . . Well worth seeking out.”—Rambles
Praise for Naomi Mitchison:
“Her descriptions of ritual and magic are superb; no less lovely are her accounts of simple, natural things—water-crowfoot flowers, marigolds, and bright-spotted fish. To read her is like looking down into deep warm water, through which the smallest pebble and the most radiant weed shine and are seen most clearly; for her writing is very intimate, almost as a diary, or an autobiography is intimate, and yet it is free from all pose, all straining after effect; she is telling a story so that all may understand, yet it has the still profundity of a nursery rhyme.”
—Hugh Gordon Proteus, New Statesman and Nation
“Mitchison breathes life into such perennial themes as courage, forgiveness, the search for meaning, and self-sacrifice.” —Publishers Weekly
“She writes enviably, with the kind of casual precision which . . . comes by grace.” —Times Literary Supplement
“No one knows better how to spin a fairy tale than Naomi Mitchison.”
—The Observer
Also by Naomi Mitchison
The Conquered
When the Bough Breaks
Cloud Cuckoo Land
The Fairy who Couldn’t Tell a Lie
Black Sparta
The Corn King and the Spring Queen
The Prince of Freedom
The Blood of the Martyrs
The Bull Calves
Men and Herring
Spindrift
Graeme and the Dragon
The Swans’ Road
The Land the Ravens Found
To the Chapel Perilous
Memoirs of a Spacewoman
Return to the Fairy Hill
Don’t Look Back
Small Talk
All Change Here
Solution Three
The Cleansing of the Knife
What Do You Think Yourself?
Not By Bread Alone
Among You Taking Notes
Early in Arcadia
A Girl Must Live: Stories and Poems
The Oath-Takers
Sea Green Ribbons
Travel Light
Naomi Mitchison
Small Beer Press
Easthampton, MA
This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are either fictitious or used fictitiously.
Copyright © 1952 by Naomi Margaret Mitchison. All rights reserved. First published by Faber and Faber in 1952. Reprinted by Virago Press in 1985 and by Penguin Books in 1987. “Introduction copyright © 2005 by Gavin J. Grant. All rights reserved.
Peapod Classics is an imprint of Small Beer Press.
Small Beer Press
150 Pleasant Street, #306
Easthampton, MA 01060
smallbeerpress.com
weightlessbooks.com
bookmoonbooks.com
Distributed to the trade by Consortium.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mitchison, Naomi, 1897-
Travel light / Naomi Mitchison.-- 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-931520-14-3 (alk. paper)
1. Human-animal relationships--Fiction. 2. Abandoned children--Fiction. 3. Feral children--Fiction. 4. Princesses--Fiction. 5. Girls--Fiction. I. Title.
PR6025.I86T7 2005
823’.912--dc22
Paper ISBN: 978-1-931520-14-0
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61873-006-0
Paper edition printed on 55# Enviro 100% recycled natural antique in Canada by Transcontinental.
Text set in Centaur MT. Titles set in Friz Quadrata.
Cover art by Kevin Huizenga: kevinhuizenga.com.
Introduction
With luck—and perhaps the right illustrator—Travel Light could have been one of the last century’s most popular children’s books. It has all the right properties: it is incandescently imaginative, full of delights, and confounds expectations at every turn. Instead, well-read copies have been passed by readers from hand to hand, who give it to friends and say, “Just read the first chapter. You’ll see.”
Naomi Mitchison (1897-1999), author of over seventy books, was fifty-five when Travel Light was first published by Faber and Faber in 1952. Mitchison was born in and lived in Scotland but traveled widely throughout the world. A bestselling novelist and well-known literary figure since the 1920s, during World War II she put up evacuees in her big house in Carradale in Argyll, Scotland. She was famously political and spent a fair amount of time trying to bring the local fishermen into the Labour Party. She was more successful with the plays she recruited them to act in. Later, in the 1960s, she was adopted as adviser and mother of the Bakgatla tribe in Botswana. Her books range from historical fiction to science fiction, nonfiction to autobiography to poetry; the most popular of which are Memoirs of a Spacewoman, The Conquered, and The Corn King and the Spring Queen.
It is hard for today’s reader to imagine how economically depressed Britain was in the post-World War II period. While Mitchison was always political, and even though gender, religious, and national politics play their part in Travel Light, this novel must have been both a welcome escape and a refreshment for the writer and her readers.
Halla, the King’s baby daughter, is turned out of her father’s castle by her new stepmother. Her nurse spirits her away to the forests and transforms into a bear to look after the young princess. This is the first of many magical events in this enchanting novel of a young woman transformed by her journey. Halla lives with the bears, then as a dragon, and eventually (she has been on dragon time), returns to the human world. She has a gift of languages and speaks every tongue, including those of animals. She travels, first to Micklegard (Constantinople) then back north to Holmgard, near where she was born.
Rich and earthy, Travel Light has echoes of Mitchison’s best known novel, The Corn King and The Spring Queen. Mitchison describes a world in flux where the old habits and traditions are being lost or left behind; rarely does anyone look back. From the dark ages to modern times, from the medieval forests to the Middle East, Travel Light is nimble, deep and joyful, and will carry the reader to Halla’s world: where a basilisk might be met in the desert, heroes are taken to Valhalla by Valkyries, and a fortune might be made with a word to the right horse. By the end, Travel Light has become more
than just a story: it is a map for living.
Where did this captivating fairy tale come from? As a child, Mitchison read everything she could get her hands on, including sagas, Balzac, and Heroes of Asgard. She loved Struwelpeter, the Jungle Books, and Flower Fairies. However, in her autobiography, Small Talk: Memories of an Edwardian Childhood (Bodley Head, 1973), she says, “I never much cared for the romantic series of fairy tales edited by Andrew Lang.” In fact, she writes, “when I was eleven or twelve I told him I hadn’t liked them and he didn’t mind at all; those collections had just been a job.” She then cheered him up enormously by telling him how much she treasured his poetry. Lang’s early influence and support were important to her as she grew up. He encouraged her to trust her imagination, something that was uncommon in a family filled with down-to-earth scientists. One of her aunts had invented a ghost—named the gorgonzola!—which haunted a tower room in her uncle’s house in Scotland. When, as an adult Mitchison discussed with her aunt “the dire effect” the ghost had had on her, her aunt said no one else in the family had her “runaway imagination.” Mitchison described her imagination as a “misery then. And indeed it can be still, though without it I would have no wings.” Readers have been benefiting from Lang’s encouragement of that wonderful and sometimes fearsome imagination ever since.
Part One
Chapter 1
The Bears
It is said that when the new Queen saw the old Queen’s baby daughter, she told the King that the brat must be got rid of at once. And the King, who by now had almost forgotten the old Queen and had scarcely looked at the baby, agreed and thought no more about it. And that would have been the end of that baby girl, but that her nurse, Matulli, came to hear of it. Now this nurse was from Finmark, and, like many another from thereabouts, was apt to take on the shape of an animal from time to time. So she turned herself into a black bear then and there and picked up the baby in her mouth, blanket and all, and growled her way out of the Bower at the back of the King’s hall, and padded out through the light spring snow that had melted already near the hall, and through the birch woods and the pine woods into the deep dark woods where the rest of the bears were waking up from their winter sleep.
Now when anyone changes into a bear, it is bearish they become, and the nurse Matulli was the same. Little Halla crawled around with the bear cubs, and many a knock she got from hard claws and many a lick from rough tongues. She learnt to fight the other cubs, and, having the use of her hands, she would get her own back from time to time, pulling ears and scrambling on to black backs, and sometimes she wondered when her claws would grow. She got to know the thought and language of the bears. It was a language that did what it wanted to do well enough, so that there were many ways of showing the difference between one taste and another, the taste of crunched mice, the taste of many different berries and roots and the taste of honey either on the front, back, or sides of the tongue. It did the same for smells, and the forest was always speaking in smells to the bears. It did much for hearing and something for sight, but there was no way, for instance, to think about clouds or the flying of eagles, because the bears did not look up into the sky. And if anyone had wanted to explain to the bears about Halla and her stepmother, they would just not have been able to do it at all.
There were plenty of other wild beasts in the woods, wolves and foxes and martens, reindeer and elks and roe deer and hares. But most of them kept clear of the bears. In summer the woods were full of tangles and hollows and mosses, scented with crushed ferns, rich earth scooped for sweet shoots and young mushrooms, birds’ nests full of warm eggs, and the thick friendly fur of bears. Matulli-bear looked after Halla-baby as well as any bear can be expected to look after any baby. Halla had plenty to eat, a long tongue to wash her and a warm bear to cuddle against all night. But Matulli was a fine figure of a she-bear and the he-bears all wanted her to keep house for them. It came on for winter, and behind rocks and under fallen fir trees were deep and cozy dens waiting for Matulli and her bear husband. The nights got longer and colder and every morning Matulli found it harder and harder to wake up. But Halla woke and fidgeted and pulled Matulli’s whiskers and wanted her breakfast. And it came back to Matulli that one of the queer things about human beings was that they did not sensibly sleep all winter, but instead went to a great deal of trouble to cut fuel and shear sheep and weave blankets and thick cloaks and make themselves hot soup. And Halla, in spite of her excellent upbringing, was going to take after the rest of them. What was a poor bear to do?
And then a very fortunate thing happened. Matulli and her bear husband were walking through the woods, looking for the last of the wild bees’ honey or a late fledgling from a nest, and Matulli’s husband was grumbling away to himself because he could feel that the snow was not far off and it was time to go home to the den and sleep and sleep. But Halla was running around like a crazy butterfly and clearly had no intention of sleeping. Sometimes the he-bear thought it would be both nice and sensible to eat Halla, but he did not dare because of Matulli.
And suddenly a deer came galloping past them, looking back over its shoulder in a terrible fright. And after that a badger which was in a hurry too. But the badger had time to tell the two bears that there was a dragon coming along and they had better get out of the way. The he-bear turned round at once and went galumphing back; never had his den seemed so desirable. But Matulli sat back among the cranberry bushes in the wet moss and pulled Halla down beside her. Sure enough, in a little while the dragon came along, puffing and creaking and rattling. Matulli in the bushes coughed and said: “My Lord.” For she knew in her mind that dragons appreciated politeness from the rest of the world.
This dragon was somewhat startled and blew out a flame which singed the tops of the cranberry bushes and the tips of the fur all along Matulli’s back. But he had meant no harm, and he stopped and listened very graciously to Matulli’s story about Halla Bearsbairn. Matulli was speaking in the language of humans, since the thing could not be explained in bears’ language. But dragons are, within their limits, very intelligent, and most of them understand, not only the language of several kinds of animals, including the birds who have beautiful feelings but few facts, but also the languages of trolls, dwarfs, giants and human beings.
Now, if there is one kind of human being which dragons dislike more than another, it is the kind commonly called kings or heroes. The reason is that they are almost always against dragons. So when the dragon, whose name was Uggi, heard that the poor little pink human had been so badly treated by a king and a queen, he did not hesitate, but said at once that he would adopt Halla Bearsbairn and see that she grew up in all the right principles of dragonhood. “And you will see that she gets regular meals, my lord?” said Matulli.
“Have you ever heard of dragons going hungry?” said Uggi.
“And you will see that she doesn’t fall into the fire, my lord?”
“I will fire-proof her myself,” the dragon said.
“And you will comb her hair every night, my lord?”
“I will comb it with my own claws,” said the dragon, “for I see that the child has hair the colour of gold, which is the only right colour for hair.”
“And you will dry her eyes when she cries, my lord?”
“I will dry her eyes with the silken scarf of the Princess of the Spice Lands who was so thoughtfully offered to my cousin, the Dragon of the Great Waste. For I see that the child has eyes the colour of sapphires, which is the only right colour for eyes.”
“What happened to the Princess of the Spice Lands, my lord?” asked Matulli, for she thought that this princess might be a nice playmate for her Halla.
The dragon coughed behind his claw. “The Princess of the Spice Lands was offered to my cousin by the populace. It was a very suitable and acceptable idea on their part. Unfortunately there was a hero sent to interfere with everybody’s best interests. In the result the princess—and th
e hero—perished. My poor cousin had a nasty jag over one eye. He gave me the scarf in exchange for a duplicate bracelet which I had acquired. Yes, yes.” And Uggi the dragon held out a glittering claw to Halla who caught hold and swung.
“And you’ll see she’s warm at night, my lord?” said Matulli, anxious to do her duty but thinking more and more pleasantly of the comfortable den and the uninterrupted sleep that waited for her.
“She will be quite warm, and what is more,” said the dragon, “she will always have a night-light, because I am proud to say that we dragons always breathe out of our noses while we are asleep.” He then put Halla up on to his back, where she held on by the spikes and shouted with pleasure because now she could see right up into the trees.
Suddenly the thought of her den and her husband and her long sleep was too much for Matulli-bear, and she tried to curtsey to the dragon, but that is too difficult for bears. So she just turned her large black back and went crashing back through the cranberry bushes and into the forest. Uggi the dragon raised his eyebrows and looked over his shoulder at Halla and winked slowly from the side of his eye across, in the same way that a crocodile winks, and then quickly up and down, the same way as an eagle, for he had something of the nature of both.
But Halla was delighted with it all and dug her bare heels into the scaly sides of the dragon, who went slithering and crackling off through the forest, every now and then accidentally setting fire to a bush or a drift of dry birch or oak leaves, or singeing the fur of one of the animals which was too proud or too stupid to get out of the way.