Garry Kilworth lives in Essex, England. Since winning the Gollancz/Sunday Times short story competition in 1974 he has published sixteen novels, over eighty short stories, six children's books, and some poetry. His most recent novels are Archangel, House of Tribes, and A Midsummer's Nightmare. He and Robert Holdstock won the World Fantasy Award in 1992 for their novella, "The Rag-thorn." Kilworth's most recent collection of stories is In the Country of Tattooed Men.

Here Hansel and Gretel are realistically (perhaps too much so for comfort) portrayed as German peasant children who are either the perpetrators or victims of sorcery and greed.

THE TRIAL OF HANSEL AND GRETEL.

by Garry Kilworth.

The oxcart rumbled over the cobbled streets of the town, heading toward the Rathaus on the east corner of the market square. In the back of the cart, dressed in prisoner's shifts, were two children. The large, dull-faced boy with the protruding bottom lip was aged thirteen. The lumpy girl with her squashed features was twelve.

Standing by these two was a bleary-eyed giant of a man in a stained and cracked leather jerkin. The man had bruises on his cheeks, and his nose was swollen. In his right hand he held a smooth truncheon with which he continually tapped his knees, as if itching for an excuse to use it. He was the town constable, and, having just dismissed his men, a band of drunkards and layabouts recruited at the inn the evening before, he was now delivering his prisoners to receive what passed for justice in the hands of the law.

"Don't worry, Gretel," said the boy, "I'm sure the Burgermeister will believe us."

As he spoke, the boy stared stolidly not at his sister, but at the constable.

"I'm not worried, Hansel," said the girl, sniffing a runny nose. "Not if you're with me."

The constable looked up and sneered, his face moving in and out of the shadows of the houses that fell across the cart's path.

"You hear that, Dieter Schultz?" said the constable to the driver of the oxen. "They're innocent."

The driver, a small man with a squint, spat a stream of saliva down onto the slippery cobbles, covered in vegetable peelings.

"I heard. We believe them, don't we Johann Meyer."

Both men tittered coyly, as if they had participated in a joke of supreme excellence, which modesty forbade them to laugh at uproariously.

The cart pulled into the main square and halted, the driver allowing the oxen to drink from a water trough. The low sun was now creeping over the black spires of the Rathaus. Timber-framed houses, with wattle-and-daub walls, were struck by its rays. The Rathaus clock, a device made by a Swiss artisan, was winding itself up, ready to drop its clanging quarter tones upon the cobbles of the square.

In the north corner of the square was something horrible, which the children studiously avoided looking at.

The smell of animal droppings was everywhere. Horse and ox dung filled the cracks between the cobbles, formed the major part of wall daub, was splattered over windows and doors and up the stone legs of the statue of the king, which stood by the trough. It stained the town brown and attracted flies by the thousand.

In the summer heat the smell was so rank it turned the stomachs of strangers to mush.

"Did she sizzle?" asked the constable, quietly, as if wishing to be a confidant. "Did the old woman crackle when she went in the oven?"

"She screamed the place down," said Gretel. "Then she shriveled to crispy fat."

The constable's eyes opened wide, as if his fears had been confirmed.

"Lord save us," he murmured, turning away.

The driver fell asleep, stretched across the seat of his cart. The constable, too, dozed. The children, chained to the side of the cart, stared bleakly at the quiet town. The quartet remained thus for two hours, until finally people began to stir from their dwellings, throwing dirty water from upstairs windows, chucking swill into the streets, releasing their geese out of doors, sending fuzzy-headed children on errands.

When the Rathaus clock struck ten, a fussy-looking little man in blue leggings came out of the Rathaus carrying a small table, which he placed in the square. He went back inside and returned with a chair, then finally a quill, ink bottle, and a large book with a kid-leather cover and a brass clasp. He then sat at the desk and began to write the date on a blank page in the book with a neat, copperplate hand.

This was the Burgermeister's clerk, ready to perform his duty as court recorder.

At ten minutes past ten o'clock, two servants staggered out of the same building, carrying a heavy, oaken throne. They placed this level with and at a short distance from the clerk's small table. Grubby peasants and grimy gentry began to gather now, in various modes of dress, forming a large circle around the triangle consisting of the cart, the small table, and the oaken seat. At last, on the first quarter stroke of the hour, the fat Burgermeister himself, resplendent and sweating in his heavy scarlet robes, took his place upon the vacant throne. Burgermeister was now judge, over life and death.

The constable suddenly became very erect, very alert, swatting the flies away from the sleep dust in the corners of his eyes, and clearing out the entrances to his nostrils with his fingers, prior to nodding respectfully to the judge.

The judge cleared his throat and began.

"These are the children, Hansel and Gretel, accused of murdering the blind old woman?"

"Yes, yer honor," replied the constable.

The judge glanced at the two young serfs, who seemed about as intelligent as a pair of retarded hogs. One of them was picking listlessly at a sore on her forearm. The other was staring vacantly into the middle distance, as if somewhere on the moon. They were dull, sluggish, and dense in appearance.

"Roasted her alive in an oven, so we understand?"

A shudder, like the ripple which goes through a deer herd when a wolf is scented, went through the crowd.

"Yes, yer honor. They don't deny that," said the constable, nervously licking his fingers. "They've admitted to doing that."

The judge leaned back in his throne and gave the constable a gesture of impatience. In these times, when children of nine were executed for stealing a loaf of bread, such pomp and circumstance was a waste of valuable time. The children had admitted guilt. What more was to be said? He wanted no elongated pleas for mercy, nor lengthy mitigating circumstances. He wanted the trial over and the sentence carried out quickly.

There were two reasons for his haste in this matter. Firstly, he found local trials boring. He was a man who believed he had a quick, lively mind, and more often than not these affairs were dull beyond the extreme. He loved a good problem with which to wrestle, and most peasants involved in crimes had either killed their next-door neighbor, bedded his wife, or stolen his pig. These repeated scenarios presented no mysteries, only endlessly dull recriminations.

Secondly, and more importantly, if these children were found guilty and executed, the wealth they had taken from the old woman's cottage would become the property of the town, which in effect, meant it went into the pockets of the Burgermeister, since he controlled the town's coffers.

"Constable, is there any reason why I shouldn't pronounce sentence immediately?"

"Please yer honor," grated the constable, "they said it was in self-defense. The girl . . . "

The judge sighed and shook his head slowly, while interrupting with, "Let the girl speak first."

"Your graciousness," began Gretel, "it was like this . . . " and the young girl told her story.

At first the judge only half listened. He had been up late the night before at a feast, quaffing beer by the jugful, and was in no mood for lugubrious and false protestations of innocence.

Nearby, the clerk scribbled away, trying to keep up with the girl's gabble, looking up once or twice as if to ascertain that he had correctly deduced a word or phrase, but never asking for confirmation. It was true that no one ever read the book, no one even looked in the book, except the clerk himself. He might have been writing in Arabic, or gibberish, for all anyone could care. Yet he did his duty with zeal, because it was his duty. One day someone might read these accounts, if only to extract tales such as the story being told now.

" . . . then we woke up in the forest, covered in wet leaves, and didn't know the way home . . . "

However, as the girl's tale continued, both the judge and the clerk gradually began to take an interest. It was, after all, an extremely colorful story: worth retelling to visiting princes and prelates. They both knew that if she was a witch, the children were entitled to any money or valuables found since witches prey on travelers. But they were fascinated by the inventiveness of the tale.

" . . . she had this big oven, like a small cave at the back of her kitchen," continued Gretel.

"Why so large an oven for so small a cottage?" asked the judge. "Was the woman a baker of bread in large quantities?"

"I never asked her," Gretel replied. "She didn't say. She only kept telling us we were too skinny and she liked fat children to eat. She was horrible and ugly-all warts and running sores, and a nose like a cobbler's awl."

"Unbecoming features do not make a witch," said the judge. "Otherwise, half the people in this square might be accused of participating in the black arts. What happened next?"

"She'd fired up the oven. I could feel the heat on my skin. When she opened the door, I gave her a push, and in she went! It was so hot inside, her body stuck to the wall of the oven. There was a kind of hiss, like all her breath had been sucked out of her body, then she let out a yell."

"What kind of a yell?"

Gretel suddenly opened her mouth and released a high-pitched, piercing scream that chilled the judge's blood. People in the crowd went white. Gretel's face seemed to twist into a demonic mask as she liberated the sound from her throat. It was a shriek which made eyes water with its shrillness. There was something of the actress in Gretel, who, unlike her brother, enjoyed the attention despite the circumstances.

"Thank you," said the judge, his eyes still closed when Gretel paused for breath. "That's enough."

"Then," said Gretel, turning to the crowd, "there was steam coming off her, and her skin blistered, the bubbles making popping noises when they burst. The stink was awful. After a few moments I slammed the door shut. She tried to curse me then, but there was a kind of whumph sound. I think she just went off bang."

By the end of the piece, the judge at least was puzzled and impressed. Surely two peasant children, offspring of an ignorant, unlettered woodcutter, could not have concocted such a strange and wonderful story between them?

"Where's your father now?" asked the judge. "Why isn't he here?"

"Father ran away," replied the boy named Hansel, slowly and carefully, "when he heard the constable's men coming to arrest us."

"Hmmm. And your stepmother? We haven't heard what happened to her."

"Father said she died," Gretel said, "before we got back from the witch's house."

"Convenient. And where is her body?"

"Father must have buried her somewhere in the forest-we don't know where," said Hansel.

"So, we can't inspect the corpse?"

"The what?" Hansel said.

"Never mind," sighed the judge. He began to pursue another line of inquiry. "Can either of you read or write? Is any member of your family able to do so?"

The children shook their heads, dumbly.

"There's only our father and us," said Gretel. "Our stepmother was a fish-gutter when Father met her."

"And your real mother?"

"Dead," replied Hansel. "Died having Gretel."

"No other brothers or sisters?"

"All dead," Gretel said, predictably. "Father said they died of want."

"Now, let me get this straight," he continued. "I can accept the trail of pebbles, the subsequent trail of crumbs-eaten by the birds-but then we come to a house made of sweetmeats."

"You could eat bits of it-it was made of icing and chocolate and toffee," said Hansel, swatting a fly away from his nose. "It was like a big cake with sweets on."

"And how do you account for this?"

Hansel shrugged. "The woman who lived there was a witch."

The clerk said, without looking up, "Your honor, it might be that some sugar was mixed with the mortar sand? There are sugar beet mills in the region. .

This made little sense to the judge, who could not imagine even a dolt like Hansel eating mortar.

"So, you ate pieces of this strange house?"

"'Til the old witch came out and grabbed us," Gretel said.

"This frail, blind old lady managed to grip and hold two lusty young peasant children, one of whom is a sturdy youth who, on being told of his arrest, gave the constable a bloody nose and knocked that gentleman down twice before being subdued?"

The constable in question looked suitably aggrieved, staring into the crowd, obviously hoping for a show of sympathy. He was disappointed. He touched his bruises gingerly with his fingertips and sniffed loudly, before glaring at Hansel.

The two children looked at each other. The judge thought he recognized a kind of ratty sharpness in Gretel's eyes. For the first time he realized there might be more to the woodcutter's brood than first announced itself. It was Gretel who finally answered the question.

"She was quite strong, being a witch of course. She smelled me for a girl, then got me first, then Hansel had to come when she threatened to kill me. Her nails were like claws digging in my wrist, see. . ."

Gretel displayed some small, regular marks on her arm, which might have been caused by the smallpox, or a horseshoe with a protruding set of nails, or a hawk's talons-or anything.

"Let's get to the white bird," said the judge. "You say it led you to the cottage. What was this bird? A stork, an egret, a crane?"

"An enchanted bird," breathed Crete!.

"And it led you to the cottage."

"I think it was the witch's cat, changed into a bird," Gretel said, turning to the crowd. "It was leading us to her, you see, so she could cook and eat us;"

Another shudder went through the rabble. This was a brilliant stroke on the girl's part. The peasants knew about witches' familiars. They hated and feared them. Pets and other animals were often strangled or shot out of hand in the belief they were familiars.

The judge continued. "So then your brother was locked in the stable?-Naturally this slight, blind old woman with a tiny cottage owned a horse . . . "

"It was an old stable," Hansel said quickly, his eyes narrowing with remembrance-or perhaps something else? "It wasn't hers I don't think. Probably belonged to someone else, but built near her house."

"Can we see this stable?" asked the judge, leaning forward in his throne.

"Burned down," Gretel said, regretfully, "when the oven caught fire."

"Quite," said the judge, leaning back again.

Then something occurred to the judge.

"You say you found precious stones and pearls, which you considered yours by right since this, er, witch tried to kill you both. This treasure was inside the cottage. You were able to search the cottage while the fire raged and even reached the stable, some distance from the dwelling, without being so much as singed?"

A murmur went through the crowd, and there was much nodding of heads and exchanges of sage looks. This was all very entertaining. Worth the death of some old biddy living out in the back end of nowhere whom no one cared a button for in the first place. This was better than a puppet show.

Hansel stared directly at the judge in a very disconcerting manner.