The Big Book of Modern Fantasy

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

  The redhead said: “I have heard that name, Krodar…”

  Within the frayed eyeholes, the night-blue eyes narrowed; Raven glanced at her companion.

  Gorgik said: “There was something about a monastery in the south, called something like the Vygemangx…?”

  The masked woman said: “Yes, I know of the Vygemangx…”

  The redhead glanced back at her friend with a look set between complete blankness and deep knowingness.

  Gorgik said: “And there was something about the balls, the toys we played with as children…or perhaps the rhyme we played to…?”

  Small Sarg said: “When I was a child in the jungles of the south, we would harvest the little nodules of sap that seeped from the scars in certain broad-leafed palms and save them up for the traders who would come every spring for them…”

  Both women looked at each other now, then at the men, and remained silent.

  “It is as though—” Gorgik held up the verdigrised disk with its barbarous chasings—“all these things would come together in a logical pattern, immensely complex and greatly beautiful, tying together slave and empress, commoner and lord—even gods and demons—to show how all are related in a negotiable pattern, like some sailor’s knot, not yet pulled taut, but laid out on the dock in loose loops, so that simply to see it in such form were to comprehend it even when yanked tight. And yet…” He turned the astrolabe over. “…they will not clear in my mind to any such pattern!”

  Raven said: “The lords of this strange and terrible land indeed live lives within such complex and murderous knots. We have all seen them whether we have sieged the castle of one or been seduced by the hospitality of another; we have all had a finger through at least a loop in such a knot. You’ve talked of mirrors, pretty man, and of their strange reversal effect. I’ve wondered if our ignorance isn’t simply a reversed image of their knowledge.”

  “And I’ve wondered—” Gorgik said, “slave, free-commoner, lord—if each isn’t somehow a reflection of the other; or a reflection of a reflection.”

  “They are not,” said Norema with intense conviction. “That is the most horrendous notion I’ve ever heard.” But her beating lids, her astonished expression as she looked about in the moonlight, might have suggested to a sophisticated enough observer a conversation somewhere in her past of which this was a reflection.

  Gorgik observed her, and waited.

  After a while Norema picked up a stick, poked in the ashes with it: a single coal turned up ruby in the silver scatter and blinked.

  After a few moments, Norema said: “Those balls…that the children play with in summer on the streets of Kolhari…Myself, I’ve always wondered where they came from—I mean I know about the orchards in the south. But I mean how do they get to the city every year.”

  “You don’t know that?” Raven turned, quite astonished, to her redheaded companion. “You mean to tell me, island woman, that you and I have traveled together for over a year and a half, seeking fortune and adventure, and you have never asked me this nor have I ever told you?”

  Norema shook her head.

  Again Raven loosed her barking laughter. “Really, what is most strange and terrible about this strange and terrible land is how two women can be blood friends, chattering away for days at each other, saving one another’s lives half a dozen times running and yet somehow never really talk! Let me tell you: the Western Crevasse, from which I hail, has, running along its bottom, a river that leads to the Eastern Ocean. My people live the whole length of the river, and those living at the estuary are fine, seafaring women. It is our boats, crewed by these sailing women of the Western Crevasse who each year have sailed to the south in our red ships and brought back these toys to Kolhari, as indeed they also trade them up and down the river.” A small laugh now, a sort of stifled snorting. “I was twenty and had already left my home before I came to one of your ports and the idea struck me that a man could actually do the work required on a boat.”

  “Ay,” said Gorgik, “I saw those boats in my youth—but we were always scared to talk with anyone working on them. The captain was always a man; and we assumed, I suppose, that he must be a very evil person to have so many women within his power. Some proud, swaggering fellow—as frequently a foreigner as one of your own men—”

  “Yes,” said Norema. “I remember such a boat. The crew was all women and the captain a great, black-skinned fellow who terrified everyone in my island village—”

  “The captain a man?” The masked woman frowned beneath her mask’s ragged hem. “I know there are boats from your Ulvayn islands on which men and women work together. But a man for a captain on a boat of my people…? It is so unlikely that I am quite prepared to dismiss it as an outright imposs—” She stopped; then she barked, “Of course. The man on the boat! Oh, yes, my silly heathen woman, of course there is a man on the boat. There’s always a man on the boat. But he’s certainly not the captain. Believe me, my friend, even though I have seen men fulfill it, captain is a woman’s job: and in our land it is usually the eldest sailor on the boat who takes the job done by your captain.”

  “If he wasn’t the captain, then,” asked Norema, “who was he?”

  “How can I explain it to you…?” Raven said. “There is always a man in a group of laboring women in my country. But he is more like a talisman, or a good-luck piece the women take with them, than a working sailor—much less an officer. He is a figure of prestige, yes, which explains his fancy dress; but he is not a figure of power. Indeed, do you know the wooden women who are so frequently carved on the prow of your man-sailored ships? Well he fulfills a part among our sailors much as that wooden woman does among yours. I suppose to you it seems strange. But in our land, a single woman lives with a harem of men; and in our land, any group of women at work always keeps a single man. Perhaps it is simply another of your reflections? But you, in your strange and terrible land, can see nothing but men at the heads of things. The captain indeed! A pampered pet who does his exercises every morning on the deck, who preens and is praised and shown off at every port—that is what men are for. And, believe me, they love it, no matter what they say. But a man…a man with power and authority and the right to make decisions? You must excuse me, for though I have been in your strange and terrible land for years and know such things exist here, I still cannot think of such things among my own people without laughing.” And here she gave her awkward laugh, while with her palm she beat her bony knee. “Seriously,” she said when her laugh was done, “such a pattern for work seems so natural to me that I cannot really believe you’ve never encountered anything like it before—” she was talking to Norema now—“even here.”

  Norema smiled, a little strangely. “Yes, I…I have heard of something like it before.”

  Gorgik again examined the redhead’s face, as if he might discern, inscribed by eye-curve and cheek-bone and forehead-line and lip-shape, what among her memories reflected this discussion.

  Something covered the moon.

  First masked Raven, then the other three, looked up. Wide wings labored off the light.

  “What is such a mountain beast doing in such a flat and swampy land?” asked Small Sarg.

  “It must be the Suzeraine’s pet,” Norema said. “But why should he have let it go?”

  “So,” said Raven, “once again tonight we are presented with a mysterious sign and no way to know whether it completes a pattern or destroys one.” The laugh this time was something that only went on behind her closed lips. “They cannot fly very far. There is no ledge for her to perch on. And once she lands, in this swampy morass, she won’t be able to regain flight. Her wings will tear in the brambles and she will never fly again.”

  But almost as if presenting the image of some ironic answer, the wings flapped against a sudden, high, unfelt breeze, and the beast, here shorn of all fables, r
ose and rose—for a while—under the night.

  Greg Bear (1951– ) is an American writer and illustrator who was born in California and now lives in Seattle. Bear’s first story appeared in Famous Science Fiction magazine in 1967, but it was not until 1983’s “Blood Music” (which won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards) that his importance to science fiction would become clear. With such popular and acclaimed novels as Eon (1985), The Forge of God (1987), and Queen of Angels (1990), Bear solidified his status as one of the major writers of scientifically informed SF, but he has occasionally written in other modes as well, including in “The White Horse Child,” which was first published in Terry Carr’s anthology Universe 9 (1979) and included in his first collection, The Wind from a Burning Woman (1983). When he was in high school, Bear befriended Ray Bradbury, and their friendship lasted until Bradbury’s death in 2012, Bear calling him “the most influential writer in my life”—a particularly strong influence in this story.

  THE WHITE HORSE CHILD

  Greg Bear

  WHEN I WAS SEVEN YEARS OLD, I met an old man by the side of the dusty road between school and farm. The late afternoon sun had cooled, and he was sitting on a rock, hat off, hands held out to the gentle warmth, whistling a pretty song. He nodded at me as I walked past. I nodded back. I was curious, but I knew better than to get involved with strangers. Nameless evils seemed to attach themselves to strangers, as if they might turn into lions when no one but a little kid was around.

  “Hello, boy,” he said.

  I stopped and shuffled my feet. He looked more like a hawk than a lion. His clothes were brown and gray and russet, and his hands were pink like the flesh of some rabbit a hawk had just plucked up. His face was brown except around the eyes, where he might have worn glasses; around the eyes he was white, and this intensified his gaze. “Hello,” I said.

  “Was a hot day. Must have been hot in school,” he said.

  “They got air conditioning.”

  “So they do, now. How old are you?”

  “Seven,” I said. “Well, almost eight.”

  “Mother told you never to talk to strangers?”

  “And Dad, too.”

  “Good advice. But haven’t you seen me around here?”

  I looked him over. “No.”

  “Closely. Look at my clothes. What color are they?”

  His shirt was gray, like the rock he was sitting on. The cuffs, where they peeped from under a russet jacket, were white. He didn’t smell bad, but he didn’t look particularly clean. He was smooth-shaven, though. His hair was white, and his pants were the color of the dirt below the rock. “All kinds of colors,” I said.

  “But mostly I partake of the landscape, no?”

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “That’s because I’m not here. You’re imagining me, at least part of me. Don’t I look like somebody you might have heard of?”

  “Who are you supposed to look like?” I asked.

  “Well, I’m full of stories,” he said. “Have lots of stories to tell little boys, little girls, even big folk, if they’ll listen.”

  I started to walk away.

  “But only if they’ll listen,” he said. I ran. When I got home, I told my older sister about the man on the road, but she only got a worried look and told me to stay away from strangers. I took her advice. For some time afterward, into my eighth year, I avoided that road and did not speak with strangers more than I had to.

  The house that I lived in, with the five other members of my family and two dogs and one beleaguered cat, was white and square and comfortable. The stairs were rich dark wood overlaid with worn carpet. The walls were dark oak paneling up to a foot above my head, then white plaster, with a white plaster ceiling. The air was full of smells—bacon when I woke up, bread and soup and dinner when I came home from school, dust on weekends when we helped clean.

  Sometimes my parents argued, and not just about money, and those were bad times; but usually we were happy. There was talk about selling the farm and the house and going to Mitchell where Dad could work in a computerized feed-mixing plant, but it was only talk.

  * * *

  —

  It was early summer when I took to the dirt road again. I’d forgotten about the old man. But in almost the same way, when the sun was cooling and the air was haunted by lazy bees, I saw an old woman. Women strangers are less malevolent than men, and rarer. She was sitting on the gray rock, in a long green skirt summer-dusty, with a daisy-colored shawl and a blouse the precise hue of cottonwoods seen in a late hazy day’s muted light. “Hello, boy,” she said.

  “I don’t recognize you, either,” I blurted, and she smiled.

  “Of course not. If you didn’t recognize him, you’d hardly know me.”

  “Do you know him?” I asked. She nodded. “Who was he? Who are you?”

  “We’re both full of stories. Just tell them from different angles. You aren’t afraid of us, are you?”

  I was, but having a woman ask the question made all the difference. “No,” I said. “But what are you doing here? And how do you know—?”

  “Ask for a story,” she said. “One you’ve never heard of before.” Her eyes were the color of baked chestnuts, and she squinted into the sun so that I couldn’t see her whites. When she opened them wider to look at me, she didn’t have any whites.

  “I don’t want to hear stories,” I said softly.

  “Sure you do. Just ask.”

  “It’s late. I got to be home.”

  “I knew a man who became a house,” she said. “He didn’t like it. He stayed quiet for thirty years, and watched all the people inside grow up, and be just like their folks, all nasty and dirty and leaving his walls to flake, and the bathrooms were unbearable. So he spit them out one morning, furniture and all, and shut his doors and locked them.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Upchucked. The poor house was so disgusted he changed back into a man, but he was older and he had a cancer and his heart was bad because of all the abuse he had lived with. He died soon after.”

  I laughed, not because the man had died, but because I knew such things were lies. “That’s silly,” I said.

  “Then here’s another. There was a cat who wanted to eat butterflies. Nothing finer in the world for a cat than to stalk the grass, waiting for black-and-pumpkin butterflies. It crouches down and wriggles its rump to dig in the hind paws, then it jumps. But a butterfly is no sustenance for a cat. It’s practice. There was a little girl about your age—might have been your sister, but she won’t admit it—who saw the cat and decided to teach it a lesson. She hid in the taller grass with two old kites under each arm and waited for the cat to come by stalking. When it got real close, she put on her mother’s dark glasses, to look all bug-eyed, and she jumped up flapping the kites. Well, it was just a little too real, because in a trice she found herself flying, and she was much smaller than she had been, and the cat jumped at her. Almost got her, too. Ask your sister about that sometime. See if she doesn’t deny it.”

  “How’d she get back to be my sister again?”

  “She became too scared to fly. She lit on a flower and found herself crushing it. The glasses broke, too.”

  “My sister did break a pair of Mom’s glasses once.”

  The woman smiled.

  “I got to be going home.”

  “Tomorrow you bring me a story, okay?”

  I ran off without answering. But in my head, monsters were already rising. If she thought I was scared, wait until she heard the story I had to tell! When I got home my oldest sister, Barbara, was fixing lemonade in the kitchen. She was a year older than I but acted as if she were grown-up. She was a good six inches taller, and I could beat her if I got in a lucky punch, but no other way—so her power over me was awesome. But we were usually friendly.

  “Where
you been?” she asked, like a mother.

  “Somebody tattled on you,” I said.

  Her eyes went doe-scared, then wizened down to slits. “What’re you talking about?”

  “Somebody tattled about what you did to Mom’s sunglasses.”

  “I already been whipped for that,” she said nonchalantly. “Not much more to tell.”

  “Oh, but I know more.”

  “Was not playing doctor,” she said. The youngest, Sue-Ann, weakest and most full of guile, had a habit of telling the folks somebody or other was playing doctor. She didn’t know what it meant—I just barely did—but it had been true once, and she held it over everybody as her only vestige of power.

  “No,” I said, “but I know what you were doing. And I won’t tell anybody.”

  “You don’t know nothing,” she said. Then she accidentally poured half a pitcher of lemonade across the side of my head and down my front. When Mom came in I was screaming and swearing like Dad did when he fixed the cars, and I was put away for life plus ninety years in the bedroom I shared with younger brother Michael. Dinner smelled better than usual that evening, but I had none of it. Somehow I wasn’t brokenhearted. It gave me time to think of a scary story for the country-colored woman on the rock.

  * * *

  —

  School was the usual mix of hell and purgatory the next day. Then the hot, dry winds cooled and the bells rang and I was on the dirt road again, across the southern hundred acres, walking in the lees and shadows of the big cottonwoods. I carried my Road-Runner lunch pail and my pencil box and one book—a handwriting manual I hated so much I tore pieces out of it at night, to shorten its lifetime and I walked slowly, to give my story time to gel.

  She was leaning up against a tree, not far from the rock. Looking back, I can see she was not so old as a boy of eight years thought. Now I see her lissome beauty and grace, despite the dominance of gray in her reddish hair, despite the crow’s-feet around her eyes and the smile-haunts around her lips. But to the eight-year-old she was simply a peculiar crone. And he had a story to tell her, he thought, that would age her unto graveside.