Sleight of Hand

by Peter S. Beagle

  In fact, whether or not it was due to his presence, there was time enough. She reclaimed the Buick and drove them first up into the hills, to watch the rest of dawn play itself out over the city as she told him stories of her life there. Then they joined an early morning crowd of parents and preschoolers in the local community playground. She introduced the magician to her too-solicitous friends as a visiting uncle from Alan’s side of the family, and tried to maintain some illusion of the muted grief she knew they expected of her; an illusion that very nearly shattered with laughter when the magician took a ride with some children on a miniature train, his knees almost up to his ears. After that she brought them back down to the bald flatlands near the freeway, to the food bank where she had worked twice a week, and where she was greeted with cranky affection by old black Baptist women who hugged her and warned her that she needn’t be coming round so soon, but if she was up to it, well, tomorrow was likely to be a particularly heavy day, and Lord knows they could use the extra hand. The magician saw the flash of guilt and sorrow in her eyes, but no one else did. She promised not to be late.

  Time enough. They parked the car and took a ferry across the bay to the island where she had met Alan when they were both dragged along on a camping trip, and where she and Alan and Talley had picnicked often after Talley was born. Here she found herself chattering to the magician compulsively, telling him how Alan had cured their daughter of her terror of water by coaxing her to swim sitting up on his back, pretending she was riding a dolphin. “She’s become a wonderful swimmer now, Mouse has, you should see her. I mean, I guess you will see her—anyway you could see her. I won’t, but if you wanted to….” Her voice drifted away, and the magician touched her hand without replying.

  “We have to watch the clock,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to miss my death.” It was meant as a joke, but the magician did not laugh.

  Time enough. Her vigilance had them back at the house well before sunset, after a stop at her family’s favorite ice cream shop for cones: coffee for herself—“Double scoop, what the hell?”—and strawberry, after much deliberation, for the magician. They were still nibbling them when they reached the front door.

  “God, I’ll miss coffee,” she said, almost dreamily; then laughed. “Well, I guess I won’t, will I? I mean, I won’t know if I miss it or not, after all.” She glanced critically up at the magician beside her. “You’ve never eaten an ice-cream cone before, have you?”

  The magician shook his head solemnly. She took his cone from him and licked carefully around the edges, until the remaining ice-cream was more or less even; then handed it back to him, along with her own napkin. “We should finish before we go in. Come on.” She devoted herself to devouring the entire cone, crunching it up with a voracity matching the sun’s descent.

  When she was done she used her key to open the door, and stepped inside. She was halfway down the front hall, almost to the living room, when she realized the magician had not followed.

  “Hey,” she called to him. “Aren’t you coming?”

  “I thank you for the day, but this moment should be yours alone. I will wait outside. You needn’t hurry,” he said, glancing at the sky. “But don’t dawdle, either.”

  With that he closed the door, leaving her to the house and her memories.

  Half an hour later, six blocks away, she stood slightly behind him on the sidewalk and studied the middle of the intersection. He did not offer his hand, but she lifted it in both of hers anyway. “You are very kind.”

  He shook his head ruefully. “Less than you imagine. Far less than I wish.”

  “Don’t give me that.” Her tone was dismissive, but moderated with a chuckle. “You were waiting for me. You said so. I would have bumped into you wherever I drove, wouldn’t I? If I’d gone south to Mexico, or gotten on a plane to Honolulu or Europe, sooner or later, when I was ready to listen to what you had to say, when I was ready to make this deal, I’d have walked into a restaurant with a sign for Dinner Magic. Right?”

  “Not quite. You could only have gone the way you went, and I could only have met you there. Each thing is, and will be, as it always was. I told you that.”

  “I don’t care. I’m still grateful. I’m still saying thanks.”

  The magician said softly, “Stay.”

  She shook her head. “You know I can’t.”

  “This trick…. this misdirection…. I can’t promise you what it will buy. Your husband and daughter will live, but for how long cannot be known by anyone. They might be killed tomorrow by another stupid, sleepy driver—a virus, a plane crash, a madman with a gun. What you are giving up for them could be utterly useless, utterly pointless, by next sunrise. Stay—do not waste this moment of your own choice, your own power. Stay.”

  He reached out for her, but she stepped away, backing into the street so suddenly that a driver honked angrily at her as he sped by. She said, “Everything you say is absolutely true, and none of it matters. If all I could give them was one single extra second, I would.”

  The old man’s face grew gentle. “Ah. You are indeed as I remembered. Very well, then. I had to offer you a choice. You have chosen love, and I have no complaint, nor would it matter if I did. In this moment you are the magician, not I.”

  “All right, then. Let’s do this.”

  The huge red sun was dancing on tiptoe on a green horizon, but she waited until the magician nodded before she started toward the intersection. Traffic had grown so heavy that there was no way for her to reach the stain that was Alan and Talley’s fading memorial. The magician raised his free hand, as though waving to her, and the entire lane opened up, cars and drivers frozen in place, leaving her free passage to where she needed to be. Over her shoulder she said, “Thank you,” and stepped forward.

  ***

  The little girl shook her head and looked around herself. She was confused by what she saw, and if anyone in the park other than the old man had been watching, they would have wondered at the oddly adult way that she stood still and regarded her surroundings.

  “Hello,” the magician said to her.

  “This…. isn’t what I expected.”

  “No. The audience sees a woman cut in half, while the two women folded carefully within separate sections of the magic box experience it quite differently. You’re in the trick now, so of course things are different than you expected. It’s hardly magic if you can guess in advance how it’s done.”

  She looked at her small hands in amazement, then down the short length of her arms and legs. “I really don’t understand. You said I would die.”

  “And so you will, on the given day and at the given time, when you think about asking your husband to take care of your oil change for you and then decide—in a flickering instant, quite without knowing why—that you should do this simple errand yourself, instead.” He looked enormously sad as he spoke. “And you will die now, in a different way, because that one deeply buried flicker is the only hint of memory you may keep. You won’t remember this day, or the gifts I will give you, or me. The trick won’t work, otherwise. Death may not be bright, but he’s not stupid, either—all the cards have to go back in the deck, or he will notice. But if you and I, between us, subtly mark one of the cards…. that should slip by. Just.”

  He stopped speaking; and for a little it seemed to the woman in the girl, staring into the finality of his face as though into a dark wood, that he might never again utter a word. Then he sighed deeply. “I told you I wasn’t kind.”

  She reached up to touch his cheek, her eyes shining. “No one could possibly be kinder. You’ve not only granted my wish, you’re telling me I’ll get to see them again. That I’ll meet Alan again, and fall in love again, and hold my little Mouse in my arms, exactly as before. That is what you are saying, isn’t it?”

  He held both his hands wide, elegant fingers cupped to catch the sun. “You are that child in Central Park, off to see the lions. And I am an old man, half-asleep on a bench…. from this p
oint on the world proceeds just as it ever was, and only one thing, quite a bit ahead of today and really not worth talking about, will be any different. Please look in your pocket, child.”

  She reached into the front of her denim coverall, then, and smiled when she felt her four-year-old hand close around the silver horse. She took it out, and held it up to him as if she were offering a piece of candy.

  “I don’t know who you are, but I know what you are. You’re something good.”

  “Nonsense,” he said, but she could see he looked pleased. “And now….” The magician placed his vast, lined hands around hers, squeezed once, gently, and said “Forget.” When he took his hands away the silver horse was gone.

  The little girl stood on the green grass, looking up at the old man with the closed eyes. He spoke to her. “Where are you off to, if I may ask?”

  “I’m going to see the lions,” she told him. “And the draffs. Draffs are excellent animals.”

  “So they are,” the old man agreed, tilting his head down to look at her. His eyes, when he opened them, were the bluest she had ever seen.

  THE CHILDREN OF THE SHARK GOD

  Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling are remarkable editors with an enviable track record of success in fantasy publishing. This story was written for an original anthology of theirs called The Beastly Bride, which collected tales drawn from the many different legends of humans who marry—knowingly or in ignorance—dragons, were-bears, were-lions, Celtic selchies, or other shape-shifters. All the contributing writers got to claim unique cultures, starting out, and I decided on the South Seas.

  This is, without question, my homage to Robert Louis Stevenson, since I’ve always thought of Stevenson as one of my major storytelling ancestors (especially the Samoan Stevenson of “The Bottle Imp” and “The Beach of Falesá”). I was quite consciously imitating his later folkloric style in “The Children of the Shark God,” and I have absolutely no qualms about saying so. Homage is neither mimicry nor parody, but a way of saying thank you.

  Once there was a village on an island that belonged to the Shark God. Every man in the village was a fisherman, and the women cooked their catch and mended their nets and sails, and painted their little boats. And because that island was sacred to him, the Shark God saw to it that there were always fish to be caught, and seals as well, in the waters beyond the coral reef, and protected the village from the great gray typhoons that came every year to flood other lagoons and blow down the trees and the huts of other islands. Therefore the children of the village grew fat and strong, and the women were beautiful and strong, and the fishermen were strong and high-hearted even when they were old.

  In return for his benevolence the Shark God asked little from his people: only tribute of a single goat at the turn of each year. To the accompaniment of music and prayers, and with a wreath of plaited fresh flowers around its neck, it would be tethered in the lagoon at moonrise. Morning would find it gone, flower petals floating on the water, and the Shark God never seen—never in that form, anyway.

  Now the Shark God could alter his shape as he pleased, like any god, but he never showed himself on land more than once in a generation. When he did, he was most often known to appear as a handsome young man, light-footed and charming. Only one woman ever recognized the divinity hiding behind the human mask. Her name was Mirali, and this tale is what is known about her, and about her children.

  Mirali’s parents were already aging when she was born, and had long since given up the hope of ever having a child—indeed, her name meant “the long-desired one.” Her father had been crippled when the mast of his boat snapped during a storm and crushed his leg, falling on him, and if it had not been for their daughter the old couple’s lives would have been hard indeed. Mirali could not go out with the fishing fleet herself, of course—as she greatly wished to do, having loved the sea from her earliest memory—but she did every kind of work for any number of island families, whether cleaning houses, marketing, minding young children, or even assisting the midwife when a birthing was difficult or there were simply too many babies coming at the same time. She was equally known as a seamstress, and also as a cook for special feasts; nor was there anyone who could mend a pandanus-leaf thatching as quickly as she, though this is generally man’s work. No drop of rain ever penetrated any pandanus roof that came under Mirali’s hands.

  Nor did she complain of her labors, for she was very proud of being able to care for her mother and father as a son would have done. Because of this, she was much admired and respected in the village, and young men came courting just as though she were a great beauty. Which she was not, being small and somewhat square-made, with straight brows—considered unlucky by most—and hips that gave no promise of a large family. But she had kind eyes, deep-set under those regrettable brows, and hair as black and thick as that of any woman on the island. Many, indeed, envied her; but of that Mirali knew nothing. She had no time for envy herself, nor for young men, either.

  Now it happened that Mirali was often chosen by the village priest to sweep out the temple of the Shark God. This was not only a grand honor for a child barely turned seventeen but a serious responsibility as well, for sharks are cleanly in their habits, and to leave his spiritual dwelling disorderly would surely be to dishonor and anger the god himself. So Mirali was particularly attentive when she cleaned after the worshippers, making certain that no prayer whistle or burned stick of incense was left behind. And in this manner did the Shark God become aware of Mirali.

  But he did not actually see her until a day came when, for a wonder, all her work was done, all her tasks out of the way until tomorrow, when they would begin all over again. At such times, rare as they were, Mirali would always wander down to the water, borrow a dugout or an outrigger canoe, and simply let herself drift in the lagoon—or even beyond the reef—reading the clouds for coming weather, or the sea for migrating shoals of fish, or her own young mind for dreams. And if she should chance to see a black or gray or brown dorsal fin cutting the water nearby, she was never frightened, but would drowsily hail the great fish in fellowship, and ask it to convey her most respectful good wishes to the Shark God. For in that time children knew what was expected of them, by parents and gods alike.

  She was actually asleep in an uncle’s outrigger when the Shark God himself came to Mirali—as a mako, of course, since that is the most beautiful and graceful of all sharks. At the first sight of her, he instantly desired to shed his fishy form and climb into the boat to wake and caress her. But he knew that such behavior would terrify her as no shark could; and so, most reluctantly, he swam three times around her boat, which is magic, and then he sounded and disappeared.

  When Mirali woke, it was with equal reluctance, for she had dreamed of a young man who longed for her, and who followed at a respectful distance, just at the edge of her dream, not daring to speak to her. She beached the dugout with a sigh, and went home to make dinner for her parents. But that night, and every night thereafter, the same dream came to her, again and again, until she was almost frantic with curiosity to know what it meant.

  No priest or wisewoman could offer her any useful counsel, although most suspected that an immortal was concerned in the matter in some way. Some advised praying in a certain way at the temple; others directed her to brew tea out of this or that herb or tree bark to assure herself of a deep, untroubled sleep. But Mirali was not at all sure that she wanted to rid herself of that dream and that shy youth; she only wanted to understand them.

  Then one afternoon she heard a man singing in the market, and when she turned to see she knew him immediately as the young man who always followed her in her dream. She went to him, marching straight across the marketplace and facing him boldly to demand, “Who are you? By what right do you come to me as you do?”

  The young man smiled at her. He had black eyes, smooth dark-brown skin—with perhaps a touch of blue in it, when he stood in shadow—and fine white teeth, which seemed to Mirali to be just a trif
le curved in at the tips. He said gently, “You interrupted my song.”

  Mirali started to respond, “So? You interrupt my sleep, night on night”—but she never finished saying what she meant to say, because in that moment she knew the Shark God. She bowed her head and bent her right knee, in the respectful manner of the island folk, and she whispered, “Jalak…. jalak,” which means Lord.

  The young man took her hand and raised her up. “What my own people call me, you could not pronounce,” he said to Mirali. “But to you I am no jalak, but your own faithful olohe,” which is the common word for servant. “You must only call me by that name, and no other. Say it now.”

  Mirali was so frightened, first to be in the presence of the Shark God, and then to be asked to call him her servant, that she had to try the word several times before she could make it come clearly out of her mouth. The Shark God said, “Now, if you wish it, we will go down to the sea and be married. But I promise that I will bear no malice, no vengefulness, against your village or this island if you do not care to marry me. Have no fear, then, but tell me your true desire, Mirali.”

  The market folk were going about their own business, buying and selling, and more chatting than either. Only a few of them looked toward Mirali where she stood talking with the handsome singer; fewer seemed to take any interest in what the two might be saying to each other. Mirali took heart from this and said, more firmly, “I do wish to marry you, dear jalak—I mean, my olohe—but how can I live with you under the sea? I do not think I would even be able to hold my breath through the wedding, unless it was a very short ceremony.”

  Then the Shark God laughed aloud, which he had truly never done in all his long life, and the sound was so full and so joyous that flowers fell from the trees and, unbidden, wove themselves into Mirali’s hair, and into a wreath around her neck. The waves of the sea echoed his laughter, and the Shark God lifted Mirali in his arms and raced down to the shore, where sharks and dolphins, tuna and black marlin and barracuda, and whole schools of shimmering wrasse and clownfish and angelfish that swim as one had crowded into the lagoon together, until the water itself turned golden as the morning and green as sunset. The great deepwater octopus, whom no one ever sees except the sperm whale, came also; and it has been said—by people who were not present, nor even born then—that there were mermaids and merrows as well, and even the terrible Paikea, vast as an island, the Master of All Sea Monsters, though he prudently stayed far outside the reef. And all these were there for the wedding of Mirali and the Shark God.