“You’ve learned a lot. Who taught you all this? Which books did you read? Which tower are you talking about? Who have you met?”
“I’ve met Love.”
“Who is he? Where is he?”
“He’s lying at your feet.”
* * *
—
One day I will rescue my paintings. I think that somewhere in the world I will find the tower in which they are locked away. I’m not scared of anything, not even the Devil. I’m brave, and my tale has some missing images that are still in the tower. And my dog? How is it possible he followed me? Is it possible that a dog remains faithful even in a drawing? I cup my hands around my mouth: “Love, Love!” I hear his footsteps. I kneel down to say hello to him. The dog is here.
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) was an American writer and teacher born in New York City. After earning a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University (where she took a class taught by Vladimir Nabokov) and an MFA from the Yale School of Drama, she taught at various schools, including Cornell, SUNY Binghamton, the University of Colorado, and the University of Washington in Seattle. Her first professionally published story, “Nor Custom Stale,” appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1959, and her work, both fiction and nonfiction, would become important to the feminist science fiction and fantasy of the 1970s, with the novels And Chaos Died (1970) and The Female Man (1975), and the books How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1983) and To Write Like a Woman (1995) of particular note. In 1967, her first sword and sorcery stories about the adventuress Alyx began appearing. Later, she wrote of these stories, “I had turned from writing love stories about women in which women were losers, and adventure stories about men in which the men were winners, to writing adventure stories about a woman in which the woman won. It was one of the hardest things I did in my life.” All the stories, including the novel Picnic on Paradise (1968), were collected in The Adventures of Alyx (1983), and they had a significant effect on the field, an effect perhaps most clearly seen in her friend Samuel R. Delany’s Nevèrÿon stories. Russ’s other short fiction was collected in The Zanzibar Cat (1983), Extra(ordinary) People (1984), and The Hidden Side of the Moon (1988). “The Barbarian” was first published in Orbit in 1968.
THE BARBARIAN
Joanna Russ
ALYX, THE GRAY-EYED, the silent woman. Wit, arm, kill-quick for hire, she watched the strange man thread his way through the tables and the smoke toward her. This was in Ourdh, where all things are possible. He stopped at the table where she sat alone and with a certain indefinable gallantry, not pleasant but perhaps its exact opposite, he said:
“A woman—here?”
“You’re looking at one,” said Alyx dryly, for she did not like his tone. It occurred to her that she had seen him before—though he was not so fat then, no, not quite so fat—and then it occurred to her that the time of their last meeting had almost certainly been in the hills when she was four or five years old. That was thirty years ago. So she watched him very narrowly as he eased himself onto the seat opposite, watched him as he drummed his fingers in a lively tune on the tabletop, and paid him close attention when he tapped one of the marine decorations that hung from the ceiling (a stuffed blowfish, all spikes and parchment, that moved lazily to and fro in a wandering current of air) and made it bob. He smiled, the flesh around his eyes straining into folds.
“I know you,” he said. “A raw country girl fresh from the hills who betrayed an entire religious delegation to police some ten years ago. You settled down as a picklock. You made a good thing of it. You expanded your profession to include a few more difficult items and you did a few things that turned heads hereabouts. You were not unknown, even then. Then you vanished for a season and reappeared as a fairly rich woman. But that didn’t last, unfortunately.”
“Didn’t have to,” said Alyx.
“Didn’t last,” repeated the fat man imperturbably, with a lazy shake of the head. “No, no, it didn’t last. And now” (he pronounced the “now” with peculiar relish) “you are getting old.”
“Old enough,” said Alyx, amused.
“Old,” said he, “old. Still neat, still tough, still small. But old. You’re thinking of settling down.”
“Not exactly.”
“Children?”
She shrugged, retiring a little into the shadow. The fat man did not appear to notice.
“It’s been done,” she said.
“You may die in childbirth,” said he, “at your age that, too, has been done.”
She stirred a little, and in a moment a short-handled Southern dagger, the kind carried unobtrusively in sleeves or shoes, appeared with its point buried in the tabletop, vibrating ever so gently.
“It is true,” said she, “that I am growing old. My hair is threaded with white. I am developing a chunky look around the waist that does not exactly please me, though I was never a ballet-girl.” She grinned at him in the semidarkness. “Another thing,” she said softly, “that I develop with age is a certain lack of patience. If you do not stop making personal remarks and taking up my time—which is valuable—I shall throw you across the room.”
“I would not, if I were you,” he said.
“You could not.”
The fat man began to heave with laughter. He heaved until he choked. Then he said, gasping, “I beg your pardon.” Tears ran down his face.
“Go on,” said Alyx. He leaned across the table, smiling, his fingers mated tip to tip, his eyes little pits of shadow in his face.
“I come to make you rich,” he said.
“You can do more than that,” said she steadily. A quarrel broke out across the room between a soldier and a girl he had picked up for the night; the fat man talked through it, or rather under it, never taking his eyes off her face.
“Ah!” he said, “you remember when you saw me last and you assume that a man who can live thirty years without growing older must have more to give—if he wishes—than a handful of gold coins. You are right I can make you live long. I can ensure your happiness. I can determine the sex of your children. I can cure all diseases. I can even” (and here he lowered his voice) “turn this table, or this building, or this whole city to pure gold, if I wish it.”
“Can anyone do that?” said Alyx, with the faintest whisper of mockery.
“I can,” he said. “Come outside and let us talk. Let me show you a few of the things I can do. I have some business here in the city that I must attend to myself and I need a guide and an assistant. That will be you.”
“If you can turn the city into gold,” said Alyx just as softly, “can you turn gold into a city?”
“Anyone can do that,” he said, laughing; “come along,” so they rose and made their way into the cold outside air—it was a clear night in early spring—and at a corner of the street where the moon shone down on the walls and the pits in the road, they stopped.
“Watch,” said he.
On his outstretched palm was a small black box. He shook it, turning it this way and that, but it remained wholly featureless. Then he held it out to her and, as she took it in her hand, it began to glow until it became like a piece of glass lit up from the inside. There in the middle of it was her man, with his tough, friendly, young-old face and his hair a little gray, like hers. He smiled at her, his lips moving soundlessly. She threw the cube into the air a few times, held it to the side of her face, shook it, and then dropped it on the ground, grinding it under her heel. It remained unhurt.
She picked it up and held it out to him, thinking:
Not metal, very light. And warm. A toy? Wouldn’t break, though. Must be some sort of small machine, though God knows who made it and of what. It follows thoughts! Marvelous. But magic? Bah! Never believed in it before; why now? Besides, this thing is too sensible; magic is elaborate, undependable, useless. I’ll tell him—but then it occurred to her that someo
ne had gone to a good deal of trouble to impress her when a little bit of credit might have done just as well. And this man walked with an almighty confidence through the streets for someone who was unarmed. And those thirty years—so she said very politely:
“It’s magic.”
He chuckled and pocketed the cube.
“You’re a little savage,” he said, “but your examination of it was most logical. I like you. Look! I am an old magician. There is a spirit in that box and there are more spirits under my control than you can possibly imagine. I am like a man living among monkeys. There are things spirits cannot do—or things I choose to do myself, take it any way you will. So I pick one of the monkeys who seems brighter than the rest and train it. I pick you. What do you say?”
“All right,” said Alyx.
“Calm enough!” he chuckled. “Calm enough. What’s your motive?”
“Curiosity,” said Alyx. “It’s a monkeylike trait.” He chuckled again, his flesh choked it and the noise came out in a high, muffled scream.
“And what if I bite you,” said Alyx, “like a monkey?”
“No, little one,” he answered gaily, “you won’t. You may be sure of that.” He held out his hand, still shaking with mirth. In the palm lay a kind of blunt knife, which he pointed at one of the whitewashed walls that lined the street. The edges of the wall burst into silent smoke, the whole section trembled and slid, and in an instant it had vanished, vanished as completely as if it had never existed, except for a sullen glow at the raw edges of brick and a pervasive smell of burning. Alyx swallowed.
“It’s quiet, for magic,” she said softly. “Have you ever used it on men?”
“On armies, little one.”
* * *
—
So the monkey went to work for him. There seemed as yet to be no harm in it. The little streets admired his generosity and the big ones his good humor; while those too high for money or flattery he won by a catholic ability that was—so the little picklock thought—remarkable in one so stupid. For about his stupidity there could be no doubt. She smelled it. It offended her. It made her twitch in her sleep, like a ferret. There was in this woman—well hidden away—an anomalous streak of quiet humanity that abhorred him, that set her teeth on edge at the thought of him, though she could not have put into words just what was the matter. For stupidity, she thought, hardly—is not exactly—
Four months later they broke into the governor’s villa. She thought she might at last find out what this man was after besides pleasure jaunts around the town. Moreover, breaking and entering always gave her the keenest pleasure; and doing so “for nothing” (as he said) tickled her fancy immensely. The power in gold and silver that attracts thieves was banal, in this thief’s opinion, but to stand in the shadows of a sleeping house, absolutely silent, with no object at all in view and with the knowledge that if you are found you will probably have your throat cut—! She began to think better of him. This dilettante passion for the craft, this reckless silliness seemed to her as worthy as the love of a piece of magnetite for, the North and South poles—the “faithful stone” they call it Ourdh.
“Who’ll come with us?” she asked, wondering for the fiftieth time where the devil he went when he was not with her, whom he knew, where he lived, and what that persistently bland expression on his face could possibly mean.
“No one,” he said calmly.
“What are we looking for?”
“Nothing.”
“Do you ever do anything for a reason?”
“Never.” And he chuckled.
And then, “Why are you so fat?” demanded Alyx, halfway out of her own door, half into the shadows. She had recently settled in a poor quarter of the town, partly out of laziness, partly out of necessity. The shadows playing in the hollows of her face, the expression of her eyes veiled, she said it again, “Why are you so goddamned fat!” He laughed until he wheezed.
“The barbarian mind!” he cried, lumbering after her in high good humor. “Oh—oh my dear! oh, what freshness!” She thought:
That’s it! and then:
The fool doesn’t even know I hate him.
But neither had she known, until that very moment.
* * *
—
They scaled the northeast garden wall of the villa and crept along the top of it without descending, for the governor kept dogs. Alyx, who could walk a taut rope like a circus performer, went quietly. The fat man giggled. She swung herself up to the nearest window and hung there by one arm and a toehold for fifteen mortal minutes while she sawed through the metal hinge of the shutter with a file. Once inside the building (he had to be pulled through the window) she took him by the collar with uncanny accuracy, considering that the inside of the villa was stone dark. “Shut up!” she said, with considerable emphasis.
“Oh?” he whispered.
“I’m in charge here,” she said, releasing him with a jerk, and melted into the blackness not two feet away, moving swiftly along the corridor wall. Her fingers brushed lightly alongside her, like a creeping animal: stone, stone, a gap, warm air rising…In the dark she felt wolfish, her lips skinned back over her teeth; like another species she made her way with hands and ears. Through them the villa sighed and rustled in its sleep. She put the tips of the fingers of her free hand on the back of the fat man’s neck, guiding him with the faintest of touches through the turns of the corridor. They crossed an empty space where two halls met; they retreated noiselessly into a room where a sleeper lay breathing against a dimly lit window, while someone passed in the corridor outside. When the steps faltered for a moment, the fat man gasped and Alyx wrung his wrist, hard. There was a cough from the corridor, the sleeper in the room stirred and murmured, and the steps passed on. They crept back to the hall. Then he told her where he wanted to go.
“What!” She had pulled away, astonished, with a reckless hiss of indrawn breath. Methodically he began poking her in the side and giving her little pushes with his other hand—she moving away, outraged—but all in silence. In the distant reaches of the building something fell—or someone spoke—and without thinking, they waited silently until the sounds had faded away. He resumed his continual prodding. Alyx, her teeth on edge, began to creep forward, passing a cat that sat outlined in the vague light from a window, perfectly unconcerned with them and rubbing its paws against its face, past a door whose cracks shone yellow, past ghostly staircases that opened up in vast wells of darkness, breathing a faint, far updraft, their steps rustling and creaking. They were approaching the governor’s nursery. The fat man watched without any visible horror—or any interest, for that matter—while Alyx disarmed the first guard, stalking him as if he were a sparrow, then the one strong pressure on the blood vessel at the back of the neck (all with no noise except the man’s own breathing; she was quiet as a shadow). Now he was trussed up, conscious and glaring, quite unable to move. The second guard was asleep in his chair. The third Alyx decoyed out the anteroom by a thrown pebble (she had picked up several in the street). She was three motionless feet away from him as he stooped to examine it; he never straightened up. The fourth guard (he was in the anteroom, in a feeble glow that stole through the hangings of the nursery beyond) turned to greet his friend—or so he thought—and then Alyx judged she could risk a little speech. She said thoughtfully, in a low voice, “That’s dangerous, on the back of the head.”
“Don’t let it bother you,” said the fat man. Through the parting of the hangings they could see the nurse, asleep on her couch with her arms bare and their golden circlets gleaming in the lamplight, the black slave in a profound huddle of darkness at the farther door, and a shining, tented basket—the royal baby’s royal house. The baby was asleep. Alyx stepped inside—motioning the fat man away from the lamp—and picked the governor’s daughter out of her gilt cradle. She went round the apartment with the baby in one arm, bolting both doors and
closing the hangings, draping the fat man in a guard’s cloak and turning down the lamp so that a bare glimmer of light reached the farthest walls.
“Now you’ve seen it,” she said, “shall we go?”
He shook his head. He was watching her curiously, his head tilted to one side. He smiled at her. The baby woke up and began to chuckle at finding herself carried about; she grabbed at Alyx’s mouth and jumped up and down, bending in the middle like a sort of pocket-compass or enthusiastic spring. The woman lifted her head to avoid the baby’s fingers and began to soothe her, rocking her in her arms. “Good Lord, she’s cross-eyed,” said Alyx. The nurse and her slave slept on, wrapped in the profoundest unconsciousness. Humming a little, soft tune to the governor’s daughter, Alyx walked her about the room, humming and rocking, rocking and humming, until the baby yawned.
“Better go,” said Alyx.
“No,” said the fat man.
“Better,” said Alyx again. “One cry and the nurse—”
“Kill the nurse,” said the fat man.
“The slave—”
“He’s dead.” Alyx started, rousing the baby. The slave still slept by the door, blacker than the blackness, but under him oozed something darker still in the twilight flame of the lamp. “You did that?” whispered Alyx, hushed. She had not seen him move. He took something dark and hollow, like the shell of a nut, from the palm of his hand and laid it next to the baby’s cradle; with a shiver half of awe and half of distaste Alyx put that richest and most fortunate daughter of Ourdh back into her gilt cradle. Then she said:
“Now we’ll go.”
“But I have not what I came for,” said the fat man.
“And what is that?”
“The baby.”
“Do you mean to steal her?” said Alyx curiously.
“No,” said he, “I mean for you to kill her.”
The Big Book of Modern Fantasy Page 44
