The Big Book of Modern Fantasy

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

  He spat to avoid the omen.

  * * *

  —

  Old Nathan sat morosely in the chimney corner, reading with his back to the fire, when his cat came in the next night.

  “Caught a rabbit nigh on up t’ the road,” the cat volunteered cheerfully. “Land sakes didn’t it squeal and thrash.”

  He threw himself down on the puncheon floor, using Old Nathan’s booted foot as a brace while he licked his belly and genitals. “Let it go more times thin I kin count,” the cat went on. “When it wouldn’t run no more, thin I killed it en et it down t’ the head en hide.”

  “I reckon ye did,” said the cunning man. To say otherwise to the cat would be as empty as railing against the sky for what it struck with its thunderbolts. He carefully folded his reading glasses and set them in the crease of his book so that he could stroke the animal’s fur.

  “Hev ye seen thet young feller what wuz here t’ other day?” the cat asked, pawing his master’s hand but not—for a wonder—hooking in his claws.

  “I hev not,” Old Nathan replied flatly. He had ways by which he could have followed Bowsmith’s situation or even anticipated it. It was more than the price such sources of information came with that stayed him; they graved an otherwise fluid future on the stone of reality. He would enter that world of knowledge for others whose perceived need was great enough, but he would not enter it for himself. Old Nathan had experienced no greater horror in his seventy years of life than the certain knowledge of a disaster he could not change.

  “Well,” said the cat, “reckon ye’ll hev a chanct to purty quick, now. Turned down yer trail, he did, ’bout time I licked off them rabbit guts en come home myself.”

  “Halloo the house!” called Eldon Bowsmith from beyond the front door, and the cat bit Old Nathan’s forearm solidly as the cunning man tried to rise from the rocking chair.

  “Bless en save ye, cat!” roared the old man, gripping the animal before the hind legs, feeling the warm distended belly squishing with rabbit meat. “Come in, boy,” he cried, “come in en set,” and he surged upright with the open book in one hand and the cat cursing in the other.

  Bowsmith wore a look of such dejection that he scarcely brightened with surprise at the cunning man’s incongruous appearance. A black iron pointer dangled from the boy’s right hand, and the scrap of bandage had fallen from his left ring finger without being replaced.

  “Ev’nin’ t’ ye, sir,” he said to Old Nathan. “Wisht I could say I’d done ez ye told me, but I don’t reckon I kin.”

  When the cat released Old Nathan’s forearm, the cunning man let him jump to the floor. The animal promptly began to insinuate himself between Bowsmith’s feet and rub the boy’s knees with his tailtip, muttering, “Good t’ see ye, good thet ye’ve come.”

  “Well, you’re alive,” said Old Nathan, “en you’re here, which ain’t a bad start fer fixin’ sich ez needs t’ be fixed. Set yerself en we’ll talk about it.”

  Bowsmith obeyed his host’s gesture and seated himself in the rocker, still warm and clicking with the motion of the cunning man rising from it. He held out the pointer but did not look at his host as he explained, “I wint to the settlemint, and I told the sheriff what ye said. He gathered up mebbe half a dozen uv the men thereabouts, all totin’ their guns like they wuz en army. En I named Jen, like you said, and this nail, hit like t’ pull outen my hand it wuz so fierce t’ find her.”

  Old Nathan examined by firelight the pointer he had taken from the boy. He was frowning, and when he measured the iron against his finger the frown became a thundercloud in which the cunning man’s eyes were flashes of green lightning. The pointer was a quarter inch longer than the one that had left his cabin the morning before.

  “En would ye b’lieve it, but hit took us straight ez straight t’ the Neill place?” continued the boy with genuine wonderment in his voice. He shook his head. “I told the sheriff I reckoned there wuz a mistake, but mebbe the Bar’n had found Jen en he wuz keepin’ her t’ give me whin I next come by.”

  Bowsmith shook his head again. He laced his fingers together on his lap and stared glumly at them as he concluded, “But I be hanged ef thet same ol’ spavined mule warn’t tied t’ the door uv the barn, and the pinter wouldn’t leave afore it touched hit’s hoof.” He sucked in his lips in frustration.

  “Here, I’d admire ef you sleeked my fur,” purred the cat, and he leaped into the boy’s lap. Bowsmith’s hands obeyed as aptly as if he could have understood the words of the request.

  “What is it happened thin, boy?” Old Nathan asked in a voice as soft as the whisper of powder being poured down the barrel of a musket.

  “Well, I’m feared to guess what might hev happened,” explained Bowsmith, “effen the Baron hisself hedn’t come out the cabin and say hit made no matter.”

  He began to nod in agreement with the words in his memory, saying, “The Bar’n, he told the sheriff I wuzn’t right in the head sometimes, en he give thim all a swig outen his jug uv wildcat so’s they wouldn’t hammer me fer runnin’ thim off through the woods like a durned fool. They wuz laughin’ like fiends whin they left, the sheriff and the folk from the settlemint.”

  Bowsmith’s hands paused. The cat waited a moment, then rose and battered his chin against the boy’s chest until the stroking resumed.

  “Reckon I am a durn fool,” the boy said morosely. “Thet en worse.”

  “How long did ye stop over t’ the Neills after ye left here yestiddy?” Old Nathan asked in the same soft voice.

  “Coo,” said Bowsmith, meeting the cunning man’s eyes as wonder drove the gloom from his face. “Well, I niver…Wuzn’t goin’ t’ tell ye thet, seein’s ez ye’d said I oughtn’t t’ stop. But Mar’ Beth, she seed me on the road en hollered me up t’ the cabin t’ set fer a spell. Don’t guess I was there too long, though. The Baron asked me whin I was going t’ clear his newground. And then whin he went out, me en the boys, we passed the jug a time er two.”

  He frowned. “Reckon hit might uv been longer thin I’d recollected.”

  “Hit wuz dark by the time ye passed the Neills, warn’t it?” Old Nathan said. “How’d Mary Beth see down t’ the road?”

  * * *

  —

  “Why, I be,” replied the boy. “Why—” His face brightened. “D’ye reckon she wuz waiting on me t’ come back by? She’s powerful sweet on me, ye know, though I say thet who oughtn’t.”

  “Reckon hit might be she wuz waitin’,” said the cunning man, his voice leaden and implacable. He lifted his eyes from Bowsmith to the end wall opposite the fireplace. The strop that was all the material remains of Spanish King shivered in a breeze that neither man could feel.

  “Pinter must hev lost all hit’s virtue whin I went back on what ye told me,” the boy said miserably. “You bin so good t’ me, en I step on my dick ever’ time I turn around. Reckon I’ll git back t’ my place afore I cause more trouble.”

  “Set, boy,” said Old Nathan. “Ye’ll go whin I say go…and ye’ll do this time what I say ye’ll do.”

  “Yessir,” replied Bowsmith, taken aback. When he tried instinctively to straighten his shoulders, the chair rocked beneath him. He lurched to his feet in response. Instead of spilling the cat, he used the animal as a balancer and then clutched him back to his chest.

  “Yessir,” he repeated, standing upright and looking confused but not frightened. And not, somehow, ridiculous, for all his ragged spray of hair and the grumbling tomcat in his arms.

  Old Nathan set the book he held down on the table, his spectacles still marking his place against the stiff binding which struggled to close the volume. With both hands free, he gripped the table itself and walked over to the fireplace alcove.

  Bowsmith poured the cat back onto the floor as soon as he understood what his host was about, but he paused on realizing that his help was not needed.
The tabletop was forty inches to a side, sawn from thick planks and set on an equally solid framework—all of oak. The cunning man shifted the table without concern for its weight and awkwardness. He had never been a giant for strength, but even now he was no one to trifle with either.

  “Ye kin fetch the straight chair to it,” he said over his shoulder while he fumbled with the lock of one of the chests flanking the fireplace. “I’ll need the light t’ copy out the words ye’ll need.”

  “Sir, I cain’t read,” the boy said in a voice of pale, peeping despair.

  “Hit don’t signify,” replied the cunning man. The lid of the chest creaked open. “Fetch the chair.”

  Old Nathan set a bundle of turkey quills onto the table, then a pot of ink stoppered with a cork. The ink moved sluggishly and could have used a dram of water to thin it, but it was fluid enough for writing as it was.

  Still kneeling before the chest, the cunning man raised a document case and untied the ribbon which closed it. Bowsmith placed the straight chair by the table, moving the rocker aside to make room. Then he watched over the cunning man’s shoulder, finding in the written word a magic as real as anything Old Nathan had woven or forged.

  “Not this one,” the older man said, laying aside the first of the letters he took from the case. It was in a woman’s hand, the paper fine but age-spotted. He could not read the words without his glasses, but he did not need to reread what he had not been able to forget even at this distance in time. “Nor this.”

  “Coo…” Bowsmith murmured as the first document was covered by the second, this one written on parchment with a wax seal and ribbons which the case had kept a red as bright as that of the day they were impressed onto the document.

  Old Nathan smiled despite his mood. “A commendation from General Sevier,” he said in quiet pride as he took another letter from the case.

  “You fit the Redcoats et New Or-Leens like they say, thin?” the younger man asked.

  Old Nathan looked back at him with an expression suddenly as blank as a board. “No, boy,” he said, “hit was et King’s Mountain, en they didn’t wear red coats, the most uv thim.”

  He paused and then added in a kindlier tone, “En I reckon thet when I was yer age en ol’ fools wuz jawin’ about Quebec and Cartagena and all thet like, hit didn’t matter a bean betwixt them t’ me neither. And mebbe there wuz more truth t’ thet thin I’ve thought since.”

  “I don’t rightly foller,” said Bowsmith.

  “Don’t reckon ye need to,” the older man replied. “Throw a stick uv lightwood on the fire.”

  Holding the sheet he had just removed from the case, Old Nathan stood upright and squinted to be sure of what he had. It seemed to be one of his brother’s last letters to him, a decade old but no more important for that. It was written on both sides of the sheet, but the cuttlefish ink had faded to its permanent state of rich brown. The paper would serve as well for the cunning man’s present need as a clean sheet which could not have been found closer than Holden’s store in the settlement—and that dearly.

  He sat down on the chair and donned his spectacles, using the letter as a placeholder in the book in their stead. The turkey quills were held together by a wisp of twine which, with his glasses on, he could see to untie.

  After choosing a likely quill, Old Nathan scowled and said, “Turn yer head, boy.” When he felt the movement of Bowsmith behind him, obedient if uncertain, the cunning man reached out with his eyes closed and brought his hand back holding the jackknife.

  Some of Old Nathan’s magic was done in public to impress visitors and those to whom they might babble in awe. Some things that he might have hidden from others he did before Bowsmith, because he knew that the boy would never attempt to duplicate the acts on his own. But this one trick was the cunning man’s secret of secrets, and he didn’t want to frighten the boy.

  The knife is the most useful of Mankind’s tools, dating from ages before he was even human. But a knife is also a weapon, and the sole reason for storing it—somewhere else—rather than in a pants pocket was that on some future date an enemy might remove a weapon from your pants. Better to plan for a need which never eventuated than to be caught by unexpected disaster.

  “Ye kin turn and help me now, Eldon Bowsmith,” the cunning man said as he trimmed his pen with the wire edge of the smaller blade. “Ye kin hold open the book fer me.”

  “Yessir,” said the boy and obeyed with the clumsy nervousness of a bachelor asked to hold an infant for the first time. He gripped the volume with an effort which an axehelve would have better justified. The shaking of his limbs would make the print even harder to read.

  Old Nathan sighed. “Gently, boy,” he said. “Hit won’t bite ye.”

  Though there was reason to fear this book. It named itself Testamentum Athanasii on a title page which gave no other information regarding its provenance. The volume was old, but it had been printed with movable type and bound or rebound recently enough that the leather hinges showed no sign of cracking.

  The receipt to which the book now opened was one Old Nathan had read frequently in the months since Spanish King had won his last battle and, winning, had died. Not till now had he really considered employing the formula. Not really.

  “Boy,” lied the cunning man, “we cain’t git yer horse back, so I’ll give ye the strength uv a bull thet ye kin plow.”

  Bowsmith’s face found a neutral pattern and held it while his mind worked on the sentence he had just been offered. Usually conversations took standard patterns. “G’day t’ ye, Simp.” “G’day t’ ye Mister/Miz…” “Ev’nin’, Eldon. Come en set.” “Ev’nin’, Mar’ Beth. Don’t mind effen I do.” Patterns like that made a conversation easier, without the confusing precipices which talking to Old Nathan entailed.

  “Druther hev Jen back, sir,” said the boy at last. “Effen you don’t mind.”

  The cunning man raised his left hand. The gesture was not quite a physical threat because the hand held his spectacles, and their lenses refracted spitting orange firelight across the book and the face of the younger man. “Mind, boy?” said Old Nathan. “Mind? You mind me, thet’s the long and the short uv it now, d’ye hear?”

  “Yessir.”

  The cunning man dipped his pen in the ink and wiped it on the bottle’s rim, cursing the fluid’s consistency. “Give ye the strength uv a bull,” he lied again, “en a strong bull et thet.” He began to write, his present strokes crossing those of his brother in the original letter. He held the spectacles a few inches in front of his eyes, squinting and adjusting them as he copied from the page of the book.

  “Ever ketch rabbits, feller?” asked the cat as he leaped to the tabletop and landed without a stir because all four paws touched down together.

  “Good feller,” muttered Bowsmith, holding the book with the thumb and spread fingers of one hand so that the other could stroke the cat. The trembling which had disturbed the pages until then ceased, though the cat occasionally bumped a corner of the volume. “Good feller…”

  The click of clawtips against oak, the scritch of the pen nib leaving crisp black lines across the sepia complaints beneath, and the sputtering pine knot that lighted the cabin wove themselves into a sinister unity that was darker than the nighted forest outside.

  Yet not so dark as the cunning man’s intent.

  When he finished, the boy and the cat were both staring at him, and it was the cat who rumbled, “Bad ez all thet?” smelling the emotions in the old man’s sweat.

  “What’ll be,” Old Nathan rasped through a throat drier than he had realized till he spoke, “will be.” He looked down at the document he had just indited, folded his spectacles one-handed, and then turned to hurl the quill pen into the fire with a violence that only hinted his fury at what he was about to do.

  “Sir?” said Bowsmith.

  “Shut the book, boy,” s
aid Old Nathan wearily. His fingers made a tentative pass toward the paper, to send it the way the quill had gone. A casuist would have said that he was not acting and therefore bore no guilt…but a man who sets a snare for a rabbit cannot claim the throttled rabbit caused its own death by stepping into the noose.

  The cunning man stood and handed the receipt to his visitor, folding it along the creases of the original letter. “Put it in yer pocket fer now, lad,” he said. He took the book, closed now as he had directed, and scooped up the cat gently with a hand beneath the rib cage and the beast’s haunches in the crook of his elbow.

  “Now, carry the table acrosst t’ the other side,” the cunning man continued, motioning Bowsmith with a thrust of his beard because he did not care to point with the leather-covered book. “Fetch me down the strop uv bullhide there. Hit’s got a peg drove through each earhole t’ hold it.”

  “That ol’ bull,” said the cat, turning his head to watch Bowsmith walk across the room balancing the heavy table on one hand. “Ye know, I git t’ missin’ him sometimes?”

  “As do I,” Old Nathan agreed grimly. “But I don’t choose t’ live in a world where I don’t see the prices till the final day.”

  “Sir?” queried the boy, looking down from the table which he had mounted in a flat-footed jump that crashed its legs down on the puncheons.

  “Don’t let it trouble ye, boy,” the cunning man replied. “I talk t’ my cat, sometimes. Fetch me down Spanish King, en I’ll deal with yer problem the way I’ve set myself t’ do.”

  The cat sprang free of the encircling arm, startled by what he heard in his master’s voice.

  * * *

  —

  It was an hour past sunset, and Baron Neill held court on the porch over an entourage of two of his three sons and four of the six grandsons. Inside the cabin, built English-fashion of sawn timber but double sized, the women of the clan cleared off the truck from supper and talked in low voices among themselves. The false crow calls from the look-out tree raucously penetrated the background of cicadas and tree frogs.