The Big Book of Modern Fantasy

by The Big Book of Modern Fantasy (retail) (epub)

  I took a long, long look at her wan face. I hope it was genuine concern for her that prompted my next words. I hope it wasn’t envy or the memory of the niggling nagging of Alpha’s voice that put firmness in my voice as I went on. “That’s play-like,” I said. “Just for fun.”

  Her hands jerked protestingly in mine. “Your Anything Box is just for fun. It’s like Davie’s cow pony that he keeps in his desk or Sojie’s jet-plane, or when the big bear chases all of you at recess. It’s fun-for-play, but it’s not for real. You mustn’t think it’s for real. It’s only play.”

  “No!” she denied. “No!” she cried frantically, and hunching herself up on the cot, peering through her tear-swollen eyes, she scrabbled under the pillow and down beneath the rough blanket that covered her.

  “Where is it?” she cried. “Where is it? Give it back to me, Teacher!”

  She flung herself toward me and pulled open both my clenched hands.

  “Where did you put it? Where did you put it?”

  “There is no Anything Box,” I said flatly, trying to hold her to me and feeling my heart breaking along with hers.

  “You took it!” she sobbed. “You took it away from me!” And she wrenched herself out of my arms.

  “Can’t you give it back to her?” whispered the nurse. “If it makes her feel so bad? Whatever it is—”

  “It’s just imagination,” I said, almost sullenly. “I can’t give her back something that doesn’t exist.”

  Too young! I thought bitterly. Too young to learn that heart’s desire is only play-like.

  Of course the doctor found nothing wrong. Her mother dismissed the matter as a fainting spell and Sue-lynn came back to class next day, thin and listless, staring blankly out the window, her hands palm down on the desk. I swore by the pale hollow of her cheek that never, never again would I take any belief from anyone without replacing it with something better. What had I given Sue-lynn? What had she better than I had taken from her? How did I know but that her Anything Box was on purpose to tide her over rough spots in her life like this? And what now, now that I had taken it from her?

  Well, after a time she began to work again, and later, to play. She came back to smiles, but not to laughter. She puttered along quite satisfactorily except that she was a candle blown out. The flame was gone wherever the brightness of belief goes. And she had no more sharing smiles for me, no overflowing love to bring to me. And her shoulder shrugged subtly away from my touch.

  Then one day I suddenly realized that Sue-lynn was searching our classroom. Stealthily, casually, day by day she was searching, covering every inch of the room. She went through every puzzle box, every lump of clay, every shelf and cupboard, every box and bag. Methodically she checked behind every row of books and in every child’s desk until finally, after almost a week, she had been through everything in the place except my desk. Then she began to materialize suddenly at my elbow every time I opened a drawer. And her eyes would prate quickly and sharply before I slid it shut again. But if I tried to intercept her looks, they slid away and she had some legitimate errand that had brought her up to the vicinity of the desk.

  She believes it again, I thought hopefully. She won’t accept the fact that her Anything Box is gone. She wants it again.

  But it is gone, I thought drearily. It’s really-for-true gone.

  My head was heavy from troubled sleep, and sorrow was a weariness in all my movements. Waiting is sometimes a burden almost too heavy to carry. While my children hummed happily over their fun-stuff, I brooded silently out the window until I managed a laugh at myself. It was a shaky laugh that threatened to dissolve into something else, so I brisked back to my desk.

  As good a time as any to throw out useless things, I thought, and to see if I can find that colored chalk I put away so carefully. I plunged my hands into the wilderness of the bottom right-hand drawer of my desk. It was deep with a huge accumulation of anything—just anything that might need a temporary hiding place. I knelt to pull out leftover Jack Frost pictures, and a broken beanshooter, a chewed red ribbon, a roll of cap gun ammunition, one striped sock, six Numbers papers, a rubber dagger, a copy of the Gospel According to St. Luke, a miniature coal shovel, patterns for jack-o’-lanterns and a pink plastic pelican. I retrieved my Irish linen hankie I thought lost forever and Sojie’s report card that he had told me solemnly had blown out of his hand and landed on a jet and broke the sound barrier so loud that it busted all to flitters. Under the welter of miscellany, I felt a squareness. Oh, happy! I thought, this is where I put the colored chalk! I cascaded papers off both sides of my lifting hands and shook the box free.

  We were together again. Outside, the world was an enchanting wilderness of white, the wind shouting softly through the windows, tapping wet, white fingers against the warm light. Inside, all the worry and waiting, the apartness and loneliness were over and forgotten, their hugeness dwindled by the comfort of a shoulder, the warmth of clasping hands—and nowhere, nowhere was the fear of parting; nowhere the need to do without again. This was the happy ending. This was—

  This was Sue-lynn’s Anything Box!

  My racing heart slowed as the dream faded—and rushed again at the realization. I had it here! In my junk drawer! It had been here all the time!

  I stood up shakily, concealing the invisible box in the flare of my skirts. I sat down and put the box carefully in the center of my desk, covering the top of it with my palms lest I should drown again in delight. I looked at Sue-lynn. She was finishing her fun paper, competently but unjoyously. Now would come her patient sitting with quiet hands until told to do something else.

  Alpha would approve. And very possibly, I thought, Alpha would, for once in her limited life, be right. We may need “hallucinations” to keep us going—all of us but the Alphas—but when we go so far as to try to force ourselves, physically, into the never-never land of heart’s desire—

  I remembered Sue-lynn’s thin rigid body toppling doll-like off its chair. Out of her deep need she had found—or created? Who could tell?—something too dangerous for a child. I could so easily bring the brimming happiness back to her eyes—but at what a possible price!

  No, I had a duty to protect Sue-lynn. Only maturity—the maturity born of the sorrow and loneliness that Sue-lynn was only beginning to know—could be trusted to use an Anything Box safely and wisely.

  My heart thudded as I began to move my hands, letting the palms slip down from the top to shape the sides of—

  I had moved them back again before I really saw, and I have now learned almost to forget that glimpse of what heart’s desire is like when won at the cost of another’s heart.

  I sat there at the desk trembling and breathless, my palms moist, feeling as if I had been on a long journey away from the little schoolroom. Perhaps I had. Perhaps I had been shown all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time.

  “Sue-lynn,” I called. “Will you come up here when you’re through?”

  She nodded unsmilingly and snipped off the last paper from the edge of Mistress Mary’s dress. Without another look at her handiwork, she carried the scissors safely to the scissors box, crumpled the scraps of paper in her hand and came up to the wastebasket by the desk.

  “I have something for you, Sue-lynn,” I said, uncovering the box.

  Her eyes dropped to the desk top. She looked indifferently up at me. “I did my fun paper already.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “Yes.” It was a flat lie.

  “Good,” I lied right back. “But look here.” I squared my hands around the Anything Box.

  She took a deep breath and the whole of her little body stiffened.

  “I found it,” I said hastily, fearing anger. “I found it in the bottom drawer.”

  She leaned her chest against my desk, her hands caught tightly between, her eyes intent on the box, her face white with t
he aching want you see on children’s faces pressed to Christmas windows.

  “Can I have it?” she whispered.

  “It’s yours,” I said, holding it out. Still she leaned against her hands, her eyes searching my face.

  “Can I have it?” she asked again.

  “Yes!” I was impatient with this anticlimax. “But—”

  Her eyes flickered. She had sensed my reservation before I had. “But you must never try to get into it again.”

  “Okay,” she said, the word coming out on a long relieved sigh. “Okay, Teacher.”

  She took the box and tucked it lovingly into her small pocket. She turned from the desk and started back to her table. My mouth quirked with a small smile. It seemed to me that everything about her had suddenly turned upwards—even the ends of her straight taffy-colored hair. The subtle flame about her that made her Sue-lynn was there again. She scarcely touched the floor as she walked.

  I sighed heavily and traced on the desk top with my finger a probable size for an Anything Box. What would Sue-lynn choose to see first? How like a drink after a drought it would seem to her.

  I was startled as a small figure materialized at my elbow. It was Sue-lynn, her fingers carefully squared before her.

  “Teacher,” she said softly, all the flat emptiness gone from her voice. “Any time you want to take my Anything Box, you just say so.”

  I groped through my astonishment and incredulity for words. She couldn’t possibly have had time to look into the Box yet.

  “Why, thank you, Sue-lynn,” I managed. “Thanks a lot. I would like very much to borrow it some time.”

  “Would you like it now?” she asked, proffering it.

  “No, thank you,” I said, around the lump in my throat. “I’ve had a turn already. You go ahead.”

  “Okay,” she murmured. Then—“Teacher?”

  “Yes?”

  Shyly she leaned against me, her cheek on my shoulder. She looked up at me with her warm, unshuttered eyes, then both arms were suddenly around my neck in a brief awkward embrace.

  “Watch out!” I whispered, laughing into the collar of her blue dress. “You’ll lose it again!”

  “No I won’t,” she laughed back, patting the flat pocket of her dress. “Not ever, ever again!”

  Fritz Leiber (1910–1992) was an American writer, actor, and chess expert. His parents were actors, and in his early life it seemed that Leiber would emulate them, as when he was not studying philosophy at the University of Chicago, he could be found touring in plays and acting small parts in the occasional film (including the 1936 Greta Garbo classic Camille). By the mid-1930s, though, his studies had petered out, and he began to write short stories, making his first professional sale to John W. Campbell’s influential fantasy magazine Unknown in 1939 with “Two Sought Adventure,” the first story of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, heroes of many later stories that would redefine the possibilities of sword and sorcery tales, paving the way not only for Joanna Russ’s stories of Alyx and Samuel R. Delany’s Nevèrÿon series but also the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. Fafhrd is a large barbarian, a swordsman and a singer, while the Gray Mouser is a little thief with some skill with magic and even more with blades; their world is Nehwon and their adventures often involve the city of Lankhmar. Leiber proved himself a versatile and elegant writer during a career that included five Hugo Awards, three Nebulas, two World Fantasy and British Fantasy Awards, lifetime achievement Bram Stoker and World Fantasy Awards, Grand Master status with the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and posthumous induction into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. “Lean Times in Lankhmar” appeared in Fantastic magazine in 1959 and was reprinted in Leiber’s collection Swords in the Mist (1968) as well as various Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser omnibus collections. It is one of the most humorous stories in the series, but also a serious exploration of the bonds of friendship.

  LEAN TIMES IN LANKHMAR

  Fritz Leiber

  ONCE UPON A TIME IN Lankhmar, City of the Black Toga, in the world of Nehwon, two years after the Year of the Feathered Death, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser parted their ways.

  Exactly what caused the tall brawling barbarian and the slim elusive Prince of Thieves to fall out, and the mighty adventuring partnership to be broken, is uncertainly known and was at the time the subject of much speculation. Some said they had quarreled over a girl. Others maintained, with even greater unlikelihood, that they had disagreed over the proper division of a loot of jewels raped from Muulsh the Moneylender. Srith of the Scrolls suggests that their mutual cooling off was largely the reflection of a supernatural enormity existing at the time between Sheelba of the Eyeless Face, the Mouser’s demonic mentor, and Ningauble of the Seven Eyes, Fafhrd’s alien and multiserpentine patron.

  The likeliest explanation, which runs directly counter to the Muulsh Hypothesis, is simply that times were hard in Lankhmar, adventures few and uninviting, and that the two heroes had reached that point in life when hard-pressed men desire to admix even the rarest quests and pleasurings with certain prudent activities leading either to financial or to spiritual security, though seldom if ever to both.

  This theory—that boredom and insecurity, and a difference of opinion as to how these dismal feelings might best be dealt with, chiefly underlay the estrangement of the twain…this theory may account for and perhaps even subsume the otherwise ridiculous suggestion that the two comrades fell out over the proper spelling of Fafhrd’s name, the Mouser perversely favoring a simple Lankhmarian equivalent of “Faferd” while the name’s owner insisted that only the original mouth-filling agglomeration of consonants could continue to satisfy his ear and eye and his semiliterate, barbarous sense of the fitness of things. Bored and insecure men will loose arrows at dust motes.

  Certain it is that their friendship, though not utterly fractured, grew very cold and that their life-ways, though both continuing in Lankhmar, diverged remarkably.

  Gray Mouser entered the service of one Pulg, a rising racketeer of small religions, a lord of Lankhmar’s dark underworld who levied tribute from the priests of all godlets seeking to become gods—on pain of various unpleasant, disturbing and revolting things happening at future services of the defaulting godlet. If a priest didn’t pay Pulg, his miracles were sure to misfire, his congregation and collection fall off sharply, and it was quite possible that a bruised skin and broken bones would be his lot.

  Accompanied by three or four of Pulg’s buddies and frequently a slim dancing girl or two, the Mouser became a familiar and newly-ominous sight in Lankhmar’s Street of the Gods which leads from the Marsh Gate to the distant docks and the Citadel. He still wore gray, went close-hooded, and carried Cat’s Claw and Scalpel at his side, but the dagger and curving sword kept in their sheaths. Knowing from of old that a threat is generally more effective than its execution, he limited his activities to the handling of conversations and cash. “I speak for Pulg—Pulg with a guh!” was his usual opening. Later, if holy men grew recalcitrant or overly keen in their bargaining and it became necessary to maul saintlets and break up services, he would sign the bullies to take disciplinary measures while he himself stood idly by, generally in slow sardonic converse with the attendant girl or girls and often munching sweetmeats. As the months passed, the Mouser grew fat and the dancing girls successively more slim and submissive-eyed.

  Fafhrd, on the other hand, broke his longsword across his knee (cutting himself badly in the act), tore from his garments the few remaining ornaments (dull and worthless scraps of metal) and bits of ratty fur, forswore strong drink and all allied pleasures (he had been on small beer and womanless for some time), and became the sole acolyte of Bwadres, the sole priest of Issek of the Jug. Fafhrd let his beard grow until it was as long as his shoulder-brushing hair, he became lean and hollow-cheeked and cavern-eyed, and his voice changed from bass to tenor, though not as a result of the distressin
g mutilation which some whispered he had inflicted upon himself—these last knew he had cut himself but lied wildly as to where.

  The gods in Lankhmar (that is, the gods and candidates for divinity who dwell or camp, it may be said, in the Imperishable City, not the gods of Lankhmar—a very different and most secret and dire matter)…the gods in Lankhmar sometimes seem as if they must be as numberless as the grains of sand in the Great Eastern Desert. The vast majority of them began as men, or more strictly the memories of men who led ascetic, vision-haunted lives and died painful, messy deaths. One gets the impression that since the beginning of time an unending horde of their priests and apostles (or even the gods themselves, it makes little difference) have been crippling across that same desert, the Sinking Land, and the Great Salt Marsh to converge on Lankhmar’s low, heavy-arched Marsh Gate—meanwhile suffering by the way various inevitable tortures, castrations, blindings and stonings, impalements, crucifixions, quarterings and so forth at the hands of eastern brigands and Mingol unbelievers who, one is tempted to think, were created solely for the purpose of seeing to the running of that cruel gauntlet. Among the tormented holy throng are a few warlocks and witches seeking infernal immortality for their dark satanic would-be deities and a very few proto-goddesses—generally maidens reputed to have been enslaved for decades by sadistic magicians and ravished by whole tribes of Mingols.

  Lankhmar itself and especially the earlier-mentioned street serves as the theater or more precisely the intellectual and artistic testing-ground of the proto-gods after their more material but no more cruel sifting at the hands of the brigands and Mingols. A new god (his priest or priests, that is) will begin at the Marsh Gate and more or less slowly work his way up the Street of the Gods, renting a temple or preempting a few yards of cobbled pavement here and there, until he has found his proper level. A very few win their way to the region adjoining the Citadel and join the aristocracy of the gods in Lankhmar—transients still, though resident there for centuries and even millennia (the gods of Lankhmar are as jealous as they are secret). Far more godlets, it can justly be said, play a one-night-stand near the Marsh Gate and abruptly disappear, perhaps to seek cities where the audiences are less critical. The majority work their way about halfway up the Street of the Gods and then slowly work their way down again, resisting bitterly every inch and yard, until they once more reach the Marsh Gate and vanish forever from Lankhmar and the memories of men.