Wizards: Magical Tales from the Masters of Modern Fantasy

by Gardner Dozois

  Coming from the south, you may not know very much about shukris and shukri folk? Ah…Well, the first thing to know is that, no matter how docile and domesticated they may seem, no matter if they sleep in your bed or eat from your hand, shukris are always wild, wild in their hearts and bones. The second thing is that when they link with human beings—and not all of them do, far from it—it is not merely for life, but for something rather longer and deeper. A shukri belongs to no one—never, not ever—but if you should connect with a shukri, then you belong to it, simple as that. It is less a thing of the heart—whatever shukris are, one would not call them lovable or demonstrative—than of the soul.

  People who have doings with shukris are usually much like their charges: swift and lean and supple—and fierce, too, until they decide to like you. If they decide otherwise…well. As a group, shukri trainers are amiable enough, but they have no real interest in anyone not of their fraternity, and they volunteer nothing. They will talk shukri as long as you like, happy to brag on this one’s intelligence, that one’s knack for cartwheels or somersaults; they may even pass on a hint, a nibble of their world’s rich folklore—improbable herbal additions to a training diet, favored cures for an animal down with jandak poisoning, the proper tone of voice to employ when addressing a female in season. But the link, the link…no, I doubt they speak of that even to one another.

  Rijo Belnarak was unusual for his trade. Not lean, and not swift, but big, as I have said. He moved heavily, though not without grace, and instead of distance and wariness there was a sweetness in him which he thought unmanly and did his best to deny. But the dozen-odd shukris whom he raised and tended, and taught to play games and carry messages, to tumble on a tightrope, and to dance along his entire body like a crackle of black fire—his shukris knew who he was. Blood-drinking little killers they are, never forget it, but they knew Rijo Belnarak.

  So did Jassi Grod, as she was called at seventeen when she wandered from her particular fold in the red hills into the dusty wrinkle we knew, and came to live with Rijo. There was never a choice for her, once she laid eyes on him: not merely because trade calls to family trade, but because of the sympathy between her quick, clever soul and his grave and gentle one. Marriage, when it did happen, was wholly incidental between those two.

  It was at a hill fair that Rijo and Jassi first encountered the wizard Carcharos. Few imagine that the Barrens lend themselves to such things as markets, let alone fairs, but in fact there are quite a few; how else should such folk survive but by selling things to one another? Rijo and Jassi and their shukris (she had brought him eight from her family—a dowry, if you like) could be found at every one of them, performing on improvised plank stages several times a day, always to larger crowds than any other entertainer, rival trainers included. Part of the attraction lay in their looks, certainly: in the contrast between the big, slow man and the slight, lithe, white-haired woman who moved like a shukri herself. (Jassi was born with white hair—the legend that it turned so on her wedding day is not true. I was there.)

  And I was there also when Rijo Belnarak looked up during a performance (he was demonstrating how Shas, his very favorite shukri, could swing and leap like an acrobat from his earring to Jassi’s and back) to meet the blue eyes of Carcharos. The wizard was sitting his horse in the rear of the crowd, more than half-hidden in the shadow of a tree. But Rijo knew that he was watching the two of them, and not any shukri, and he knew as well that the one Carcharos was studying most closely was his wife, Jassi. He did not know—not then—that Carcharos was a great wizard, but he did not need to. Rijo thought almost as heavily as he moved, but he saw deeper than most.

  And what do you suppose that Carcharos saw, or felt, or thought, at that first sight of Jassi Belnarak? I wonder it still, though I doubt greatly, wicked-wise as he was, whether Carcharos ever spent much time finding exact words for his feelings. At that moment he simply wanted her, and he called her to him, that being at once the most direct means of taking possession and announcing it to the world at the same time. As it happened, I was some distance away, but I was looking at him when he abruptly slipped from his saddle, causing an immediate stir in the crowd, as spectators scurried to get clear of him. He looked around him with his friendly blue eyes, and he smiled just a little, and he began to dance.

  How am I to picture out Carcharos’s dance for you? There was nothing acrobatic or flamboyant about it, not in any way; it was more of a sliding walk, a rhythmic easing to and fro, such as serpents are said to employ to hypnotize their prey. Now and then he wheeled in a sudden circle; now and then he paced swiftly forward or swiftly back; once in a while he cast his arms wide or raised them above his head, or held them straight out before him, at once beckoning and begging. No more than that, never any more than that, to Carcharos’s dancing.

  Often he clasped his hands behind him; and always he gazed only at the ground as he paced this way and that, looking neither like a wizard nor a dancer, but for all the world like a philosopher enmeshed in some profound question. Nor did he once raise his eyes to glance at the handsome couple performing with their little animals. I remember. I was there.

  And Jassi Belnarak…Jassi caught Shas in midspring—how wrathfully the shukri hissed and chittered at her, outraged at the interruption—handed him to her puzzled husband, stepped down from the muddy, swaying plank stage, and walked into the suddenly silent crowd, which parted before her like water before a ship’s bow. She was smiling very slightly, and her dark olive skin seemed lighted from within.

  The wizard Carcharos went on dancing, still never looking up as Jassi drew near, not until she stood before him, waiting his will. Back on the stage, Rijo uttered a kind of soft, dazed bellow, dropped Shas and all the other shukris sporting on his shoulders and in and out of his pockets to the planks, and charged after his wife. His passage was as earnestly hindered by onlookers as Jassi’s had been unchecked, for all were desperate to keep him from the power of the wizard. But he was a strong man in a rage, and he shrugged them aside and lumbered on.

  Carcharos was closing his long, graceful hands on the spellbound Jassi Belnarak, to lift her to his saddle, just as Rijo reached them. The big man struck the wizard’s hands away from her and raised his own fist for a blow that would have shivered an anvil into splinters—but Carcharos turned toward him, and his feet moved in a different dance: quicker, sharper, the steps like knife thrusts now. Indeed, Rijo doubled over, crumpling in silent, openmouthed agony, just as though he had been stabbed. Jassi blinked, shook her head violently, and began to scream enough for the two of them. Spectators were backing away, as a mighty tide sweeps a beach clean, and the wizard Carcharos danced on.

  What would have happened—what vengeance he would have danced into being…well, I can make just enough of a guess at it to be most grateful for the failings of an old man’s imagination. There is, however, nothing wrong with my memory—which is why, all these years later, I yet cherish the look on his face when the shukri sprang up at him from the loose open gorget of Jassi’s dress and bit him on the nose.

  Ah, you laugh now at the image in your mind—the renowned wizard, in the very act of leveling some dreadful curse, staggering backward with a furious little animal clenched to his nose—but you might not have laughed then. No one else did, I can assure you. Beyond a grunt, Carcharos made no sound. He gripped the shukri in both hands, squeezing it mercilessly, wringing it like a dishclout. The fearless creature (Shas’s mate, Killy, it was) opened its jaws in a hiss of pain, and then bit down again, this time sinking its teeth into the wizard’s lower lip. Carcharos tore it free, spitting blood, and hurled it after the retreating crowd, which, by this time, included Rijo Belnarak and his wife. The big man had swept Jassi up in his arms and run for it—with Killy scurrying a jump behind—faster than anyone would ever have thought he could move. His mind may indeed have worked in rather a measured fashion, but his instincts were sound.

  Carcharos did not follow. He had his nose, his lip, and
his pride to nurse, and—far more vital than any of these—his revenge to consider. To want and to have had been the same thing to him all his life; what made this wanting somehow different was that it had been a very long time since anyone had denied him his desire; and, further, that, for no reason he could put a name to, he was now determined that Jassi Belnarak should desire him, that she should come to him of her own choice, utterly uncompelled by magic. Much better than merely destroying her husband, that would be—oh, much, much better. He could already taste Rijo’s shame and dishonor in his bloody mouth.

  Jassi herself was a good while in understanding exactly what had happened to her. When she did finally shake free of Carcharos’s summoning, she became at once infuriated and extremely frightened. I think she had more experience of wizards than Rijo; at all events, she knew better than he how close both of them had come to annihilation. From that moment she was resolved to keep her family—shukris included—as clear of Carcharos as she could, at whatever cost, even if it meant abandoning a performance, or their home itself, at a moment’s warning. She determined that neither she nor Rijo would never, ever again raise their eyes to meet those friendly blue eyes, not ever again. And Rijo already knew, though they had not been married very long, what I have known all my life: that Jassi Belnarak is an extremely determined woman.

  But resolute and cunning as she was, Carcheros had been cunning for longer than she had been alive; and stubborn courage is most often overmatched against malevolent old wisdom. Wanting what he wanted from her, he knew better than to dog her steps or haunt her hours, as she so feared. Rather, he employed all his sly arts and twisty skills to her benefit, bestowing every sort of blessing upon her—if one may use such a word in connection with such a man—without once showing himself. Being the wizard he was, he danced up for her neither money nor jewels nor clothing, nor with anything else that she could have thrown back in his face. No, his offerings were all of sunshine and starlight—Carcharos was always a weathermaster—of perfect days, and the shukris in perfect health, performing for the love and pride of it, and gaping, cheering crowds paying eagerly to see them. It galled him, I am sure of it, to think of Rijo sharing this bounty with her; but he doubtless cheered himself with the thought that, however ignorant of its origin her loutish husband might be, Jassi Belnarak would know. And, of course, he was quite right.

  Jassi woke every morning to the sight of legendary creatures grazing in her garden—itself once a ragged, half-dead shambles for lack of care, now as radiant as a stained-glass window with new color every day—and she knew who had sent them. She drew great wonder—how not?—from the vision of an immortal kailash spreading its thunderous wings in her apple tree to greet her…wonder, but no joy, no more than she felt on the midnight when a blue-gray liramaja looked into her eyes and lowered its horn and its impossibly soft muzzle into her hand. No joy in any of this, no matter how much she may have hungered to take joy, because she knew.

  Carcharos was bad to his toenails, evil to the roots of his hair, but he was not a fool. It is easy enough to follow his reasoning, even from this distance: if glorious miracles could not draw Jassi Belnarak to him—so be it, he would find something that would. And indeed, after a time, a new design awoke in him. He knew even less about women than most men do, but he did understand that they often have surprising difficulty in rejecting ugliness outright (why else have we all those tales of princesses and frogs?), and piteous vulnerability they dare not refuse. Very well: he would approach Jassi, not as the all-conquering master he so obviously was, but as a beggar, a faltering suppliant, lost and helpless without her love. A wise friend might, perhaps, have counseled him otherwise, but Carcharos had no friends.

  So he proceeded to accost Jassi Belnarak regularly, most often in the woods, when she went there in search of blue dalda flowers (not the white, so often poisonous), which, brewed into a decoction, do wonders for a shukri’s coat and digestion. Clad always in his shabbiest, most outworn garments, his eyes so doggedly downcast that he tended to trip over things, Carcharos would mumble his forlorn need of her, careful never to look directly at her, nor ever to move in any threatening way—any dancing way. It was a rare sight, and a curiously moving one.

  Or it would have been moving, if it had been even a little less patently artificial. Of all the human emotions, the one hardest to counterfeit—so I have found, anyway—is humility, and Carcharos had not the smallest acquaintance with it. Jassi Belnarak made every effort, for her life and Rijo’s life, to keep from laughing; but on his fifth such visitation, when Carcharos spoke haltingly of his determination to retire into the mountains, if she would not have him, and become a saleh, a holy hermit, then it was all suddenly too much for her. All fear and caution collapsed within her, and she laughed.

  She always had the most sharing sort of laugh, Jassi Belnarak did. There was never any cruelty in it, only delight and invitation.

  Ah, and here we are once more, back at my own front door that always sticks so in wet weather. Come in, do, I’ll put the kettle on…What? Bide, bide a little. We will come to that.

  No living person had ever laughed at the wizard Carcharos. For a moment he stared at the young woman before him, now stricken with amusement—not even so much at his hypocrisy, but at his utter gracelessness—and his blue eyes burned brighter and brighter, until they were actually white as ashes with fury. Yet he never lifted a hand nor spoke a word to her, nor did he dance a single terrible step toward her destruction. He simply turned and walked away.

  When your life is all taking, what need to learn courtship? Carcharos’s passion for Jassi Belnarak deepened and darkened with every sleepless night, but it did not keep him from understanding that neither beneficence nor meek wistfulness would win her honestly. Power would have to do, after all; and I think that for the only time in that bad life, Carcharos may truly have regretted the necessity of forcing his will on another person. The moment can’t have lasted long, but I think further that it may have been the closest Carcharos ever came to knowing love.

  But what he knew he turned to an ill purpose, as you might imagine. Jassi Belnarak plainly had no more fear of him, not for herself—but for someone who mattered to her more than her own life? If sacrificing herself for her husband’s sake were to prove the last thing that Jassi ever did willingly for her new master…well, then, so be it, however bitter the taste to Carcharos. Pride had always been his substitute for honor, but his pride was so long gone from him that he could barely recall the feel of it. And so be that, too.

  I have known several wizards in my life who would have been capable of doing what Carcharos did to Rijo Belnarak. I have never known another who would have done it. Jassi and Rijo had lain down in long, slow love the night before, and Jassi, reluctant to let herself rouse fully in the morning, only came completely awake when she embraced her husband, welcoming the new day, and immediately realized that his soul was gone in the night. A man might take longer, I think—I could be wrong about this—but although Rijo responded to Jassi’s caress with a smile and a languorous arching of his back, she knew at once, beyond any question, that she might as well have been petting or grooming a shukri. His eyes were peacefully empty, just as a shukri’s eyes go when you scratch its stomach; his tenderly ugly face reflected her not at all; there was no trace of Rijo in a single hair or scar or fingernail of the familiar generous body lying so close beside her.

  I cannot tell you with any sureness that she lay still for a while, still holding the beloved shell of her husband as sweetly as always. But I knew her, and I believe she did. By and by, however, she arose and briskly dressed herself—not in the worn trews and tunic she wore for her daily work with the shukris, but in the dark green hedau-woven gown that Rijo had ordered all the way from Chun for her last birthday. It was the only such garment she had; with it she put on her best shoes—the silver-scaled ones he teasingly called her “queen’s-coming-to-dinner pair”—and her finest shawl, which had belonged to her mother, and was the
color of the restless sea off Cape Dylee. Then she kissed Rijo good-bye—he smiled pleasantly at her again—and she went to say farewell to the shukris, calling each by name and speaking a few words of affectionate memory to each in turn. And then she walked away from her house, down the stone-flagged path into the woods, where she knew the wizard Carcharos would be waiting for her on his black horse, and she never looked back.

  No man was present to hear the words they spoke to one another when they met in a certain clearing, and such…creatures…as did overhear were hardly of a sort to draw their understanding from language. But it was surely a striking confrontation under the trees, for Carcharos was a handsome man, as I said at the beginning, strongly made and of a commanding presence, while little Jassi Belnarak, with her white hair and her deep, dawn gray gaze, carried herself more royally than any queen. They faced each other in silence for a time, before Jassi said, “Give my man back his soul.”

  And Carcharos responded, “Give me back mine,” and waited calmly for the answer—long in coming, surely, but the only one it could have been.

  “When you have restored my husband, I will go away with you.”

  Carcharos knew everything about Jassi Belnarak—everything, at least, except the part that always escapes those possessed by such wanting—and he certainly knew that she was one who kept her word. Nevertheless, he was never a whit more gracious in victory than in defeat, and he bargained with her, even at such a moment. He said, “Up, then—here, in the saddle before me. Only then will I credit your submission, and loose your husband’s soul to him.”

  And Jassi yielded. I know this.

  She came straight to the black horse, never hesitating, and never once looking back at the cherished life she was leaving forever. Had she done so—had she stolen a last glance over her shoulder as she mounted Carcharos’s horse—she would have seen her shukris, every one of them, gathered at the edge of the clearing. They sat watching, all on their hind legs, bracing themselves with their tails—as shukris will do when something catches their curiosity—and their small, jeweled eyes were burning red as wayward stars. The tamest shukri is bone-wild, as I’ve said; and a group of them can be quite frightening, especially when they are completely silent, not hissing or chittering…