by Bill Fawcett
There was a quiet thud on the wooden floor. The wizard looked up, to find the witch king towering over him.
He tensed. But the other just gazed down at him, a strange expression on his face. “You’ve seen her,” the wizard said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes,” the witch king murmured. His eyes seemed to come back from far away. “I’ve never . . .” He trailed off.
“I don’t know what she is, either,” the wizard confessed, answering the other’s unspoken question. “She looks human, but she doesn’t age. She works magic with her food, but she isn’t a mage. She attracts woodland sprites, but inflames none of their usual resentments and calms all their usual rivalries.”
“She attracts sprites?”
The wizard waved a hand around him. “See for yourself.”
The witch king looked up and wove a spell, and a soft blue glow flickered into existence across the beams and wall timbers. A moment later the blue was joined by areas of red, then a few of yellow, and finally several of green. “Unbelievable,” the witch king murmured as he looked around. “They don’t live together this way. They never live so close together without battle.”
“Nowhere but here,” the wizard agreed. “I don’t know why.”
The witch king turned to look at the kitchen door. “They’re protecting her.”
“Or imprisoning her,” the wizard said. “Or perhaps they just like the aromas from her cooking—”
“Imprisoning her?” the witch king interrupted.
“Yes,” the wizard said. “You see, she can’t leave.”
“She can’t leave the village?”
“She can’t leave the tavern,” the wizard said. “If she tries, she’ll die.”
The witch king snorted. “Sprites always make exaggerated claims.”
“This time they mean it,” the wizard said with a sigh. “I’ve tried to find a way. Tried for thirty years.” He felt his lip twist. “Do you think I stay here entirely by choice?”
The witch king looked again at the glowing sprites. “Why here?” he demanded. “Why a worthless tavern in a useless village in an ignored valley?”
“I don’t know,” the wizard said. “Perhaps because this valley wasn’t always ignored. Long ago, it was the only route between Tarnholm and the lowlands and the sea kingdoms. Perhaps when she first came here this village wasn’t so useless. Perhaps from this place she was able to touch and change thousands of lives each year.”
“Ridiculous,” the witch king scoffed. “Those days were centuries ago.”
The wizard nodded. “Yes. I know.”
The witch king paused, apparently digesting that. “And yet she stays?”
“She can’t leave,” the wizard reminded him. “But numbers aren’t important. Not to her.”
The witch king snorted again. “So that’s your plan?” he growled. “To so ensnare me with this food that I become one of those whose lives are changed? That I abandon my plans of conquest and power and meekly surrender to live out my days here?”
The wizard shook his head. “My goal is simply for you to understand why this place is worth protecting,” he said. “I ask only that you instruct your army to leave us in peace.” He dared a small smile. “If only so that the tavern will still be standing when next you pass by, so that you can enter and share another meal.”
“I will eat what I wish,” the witch king bit out. He waved his hand, dissipating the revealing spell, and the flickering lights in the walls and ceiling vanished. “And I don’t share. I take.” He stalked across the tavern and left, slamming the door behind him.
“Do you think it’ll work?” the tanner asked, his voice weak.
“I don’t know,” the wizard said, helping him to a nearby chair. “We’ll find out soon enough. Sit quietly while I get you some food.” He felt his lip twitch in an ironic smile. “This time, I’ll serve you.”
The wizard expected the witch king to come again at sundown for an evening meal. He did, along with his three chief generals and his four chief mages. For nearly two hours they sat around their table, eating and conversing in low tones.
The witch king ate four portions. The mages and generals each ate three.
Night fell, and the witch king and his men returned to the encampments and the cooking and sentry fires that now dotted the valley. The wizard went to bed about midnight, planning to rise at dawn to be ready when the witch king returned for breakfast.
There was to be no breakfast. By dawn, the witch king’s army was once again on the move.
They stood together by the ruined gate, the wizard and the tanner, watching as the army’s rear guard marched toward the rising sun. “I really thought,” the tanner said with an edge of bitterness, “that he would instead choose to give battle to the sprites.”
“He knew better than to try that,” the wizard told him, feeling some of the tanner’s bitterness shading his own voice. He’d suspected this would be the end of it. Had hoped, in fact, that this would be the end of it.
But that foreknowledge didn’t make it any less painful.
“I don’t share,” the tanner murmured the witch king’s last words to them. “I take.”
“And so he did,” the wizard murmured back. Even far away down the valley, lit only by the dim, cloud-filtered light of dawn, he had no trouble seeing the tavern, perched upon the platform the witch king had constructed from the logs of the village wall, now being carried on the backs of the soldiers and the witch king’s own black oxen.
“So he did,” the tanner said. “And we’re left with nothing.”
“We have our lives,” the wizard reminded him. “And the lives of the other villagers.” He gestured to the homes and shops beyond the half-vanished walls. “And most of the village.”
The tanner shook his head. “It won’t be the same.”
“It never is.”
“I suppose.” The tanner nodded toward the glowing sky. “Do you really think she can tame him?”
“Not at first,” the wizard said. “And not the way you’re thinking. He’ll continue on for a while as he always has. But gradually, his priorities will change. He’ll look forward to his meals more than he will to conquering and destroying. If he allows his generals and mages to eat with him, they’ll begin to change in the same way.”
“And if he instead keeps her all to himself?”
“Then a gulf will form between their desires and his,” the wizard said. “Sooner or later, he’ll recognize the madness and ultimate futility of his path. Maybe then he’ll find the contentment he never knew he was searching for.”
He felt the tanner’s eyes on him. “And you?”
“Me?”
“Have you found contentment?” the tanner asked. “Or will you . . . ?” He left the question unfinished.
The wizard smiled. “Will I resume my former path now that she’s gone?” He shook his head. “Have no fears. My days of conquest are far behind me.”
He gazed at the tavern, silhouetted now against the rising sun. How many lives had she changed, he wondered. Hundreds? Thousands? More?
He didn’t know. But it wasn’t important. She’d changed his life, and that was all that mattered.
“Strange, isn’t it?” the tanner murmured. “You conquered with spells. The witch king conquers with spells and steel and armies. She conquers with nothing more than tarragon, basil, and sage.”
The wizard smiled sadly. He would miss her. But he would never forget her. “And,” he added, “a touch of rosemary.”
Timothy Zahn has been writing science fiction for more than thirty years. In that time he has published forty-four novels, more than ninety short stories and novelettes, and four collections of short fiction. Best known for his ten Star Wars novels, he is also the author of the Quadrail series, the Cobra series, the Conquerors trilogy, and the young adult Dragonback series. Recent books include Cobra Gamble, the final book of the Cobra War Trilogy, and Star Wars: Scoundrels. Upcoming books include Cobra Sla
ve, the first of the Cobra Rebellion trilogy, and Pawn, the first of the Sibyl’s War series. You can contact him at www.facebook.com/TimothyZahn.
Ashes
STEVEN SAVILE
On Gene Wolfe: I’m not entirely sure when I first encountered Gene Wolfe’s work— I suspect it was around 1988 when I was in the midst of my Michael Moorcock kick of one Elric book a day to hide from the stresses of my degree. But I do remember the book, and the way it fundamentally changed how I thought about fantasy fiction. Free Live Free, set in the real world, not Donaldson’s the Land or Eddings’ Riva, or Moorcock’s Melniboné, it was here, it was now, and it was every bit as magical as anything these made- up places had to offer. Moreso, probably, because it was all about the Story People. It is Wolfe’s gift— the way he conjures the lives of these people: Stubb, his down-at-the-heels detective, Madame Serpentina, Candy, and of course Benjamin Free himself. They are wonderful, they are rich, and they never once drop out of character or blur. Their voices are unique.
But there’s another ever-present in the book, and that’s the city of Chicago. It’s gritty, it’s dark, and it’s so full of brooding presence everywhere through the narrative you can’t help but think of it as a character in and of itself. That’s what I got from Gene Wolfe as a nineteen- year-old neophyte setting out, and it’s what I still hold dear in everything I do today. I want my Story People to live, and I want my cities to be as real as the places you are sitting in right now.
You can write a story, you can carefully craft a plot, you can join all the dots and all of that, but if you forget the magic of the everyday, well, you’re missing half of the brilliant things around you. It’s the small things. The devil is in the details, as they say, but more than that, so is the compassion. So is the humanity. So is the well that I want to tap when I put pen to paper. “Ashes” could never have been written without all of those subtle things, those little life lessons I picked up from a misspent youth of books.
When I was twenty- seven I tried to imagine what it would be like to be fifty, to have lived through the best part of my life, and the worst, and made it out on the other side. What single piece of advice would this hypothetical time-traveling me impart if he could? It’s a tough question to ask given that you’ve not actually lived your life yet, but I decided on two words: be brave. They felt right. I had them tattooed over my heart.
I like to think it made all the difference.
Life up until then had been pretty much a little bit of this, a little bit of that, same as it is for most people. I’d had my share of missed opportunities, of course, hence the “be brave” motto. There was Sasha, who sat beside me from the autumn of 1980 until the summer of 1983, for one. Miss Bennett’s grand scheme had been no more complicated than boy-girl, boy-girl to keep the class quiet. She hadn’t banked on the poet in twelve-year-old-me’s soul, or my inability to let him out. Then there was Rachel. I fell for her. Down a flight of stairs in a guest house in Scarborough. It wasn’t graceful. I have no idea if it hurt; fear at the sight of this beautiful girl smiling at the top of the staircase wiped out all memory of pain.
Actually, I’ve done the whole falling thing more than once. There was this one girl, back at university, must have been around 1989, I guess. It was snowing. I was wearing cowboy boots. I saw her, she smiled, and I ended up flat on my back between her legs. It wasn’t as glamorous as it sounds. Much laughter ensued, most of it hers at my expense. At lunchtime in the refectory I managed to slip again because someone had dragged the outdoors inside. This time my dinner tray went sailing through the air in an arc that was almost as graceful as the swan dive my body was taking. Who stood directly in the line of fire? You guessed it: the girl. She managed to avoid my pie and mash. I mumbled something about not usually being so clumsy and scuttled away cursing my fancy new cowboy boots. The universe was trying to tell me something. That night I went to a really cramped bar down on the Quayside, the Crown Posada, with a few of the lads. The Crown was a wonderfully narrow galley-style bar, no music, real ale on tap, and packed with pretentious students talking oh-so-earnestly about nothing. When it was my round I took up position at the bar, ordered three pints of whatever was flat, thick, and warm that day, and turned around too quickly, sending those three pints of flat, thick, and warm all over the same decidedly unamused girl. She muttered something along the lines of: “Oh, for fuck’s sake! Watch what you’re doing!” and then saw it was me.
A braver man might have realized it was the universe trying to tell us something. A braver man might have acted upon it, managed a smile, said something witty and stumbled—quite literally—into the preordained relationship.
Not me.
I said, “Oh God, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I swear you’ll never see me again.” And beat a hasty retreat.
See what I mean about being brave?
Then there was Claire, my best friend’s sister, who came with us to watch the ice hockey— though actually it was more like Mortal Kombat to be honest—and made countless excuses to be the one to drive me home an hour out of her way so we could spend time together just chatting and had no idea I was hopelessly lost around her. I didn’t mention, did I? 1983–86 was exclusively male territory, posh private all-boys school. Congratulations to the private education system for turning out yet another dysfunctional sixteen-year- old incapable of looking a girl in the eye . . . never mind talking to her like, oh, I don’t know, a human being. The idea of sitting alone in a car with a girl I fancied for an hour at least two or three times a week was enough to turn me into a babbling wreck of a human being. If she’d once, just once, smiled my way, I think I would have died and gone— like the monkey in the song playing on the car stereo— to heaven. Probably kicking and screaming as my panicked reaction caused her to drive straight off the road and into the cruel sea.
But I wasn’t brave and she didn’t save my soul and somehow I made it to twenty- seven thinking something wonderful was supposed to happen with my life, so why wasn’t it?
I decided to take matters into my own hands. I went to a seedy tattoo parlor on the Westgate Road, halfway up the hill, hidden away between the pawnshops and the secondhand stores, and had a huge shaven-headed brute step straight out of a Tom of Finland calendar ink the words “be brave” over my heart.
It was as I was walking out of that shithole that I first saw Isla Durovich.
She took my breath away.
I’d always thought that was the biggest cliché in the book, but there she was, this woman looking in the window of a pet store at one of the capuchin monkeys hanging upside down by its tail, and I couldn’t breathe.
I put my right hand over the wound where Tom of Finland had inked those words to live by, and thought: It’s now or never. “Be brave,” I told myself, and crossed the street into what was supposed to have been the rest of my life.
And it would have been, if . . .
If wishes were fishes, as my gran used to say, beggars would ride. She never could keep her aphorisms straight.
Instead of being forever it was four years, six months, two days, fifteen hours, and thirty minutes. And then the car hit her and I was robbed of my happily ever after. Sometimes the fairy tales suck. The whole idea that it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all is rubbish. The Isla-shaped hole in the rest of my life was unbearable. I was numb. I drank even though I don’t drink. It didn’t help. I didn’t leave the house. I closed the curtains and hid in the dark. It didn’t help. I looked at the packing list on the table, the last thing she’d written, all the things we were going to need for the honeymoon. It didn’t help. I listened to her voice on the answerphone. Hearing her say “You know what to do” just hurt. I lay on her side of the bed, trying to absorb her essence as though she might have left more than just an impression in the wrinkled sheets. I breathed in her fragrances: the shampoos, perfumes, even the musty old pages of her favorite books, obscure paperbacks she’d picked up at jumble sales and charity shops, all s
econdhand because, she liked to pretend, that meant they’d been loved and loved so much someone had wanted to share them with the world.
We’d mapped out our honeymoon from those old books: Eurostar from London through the tunnel to Paris, just because we’d always wanted to go through the tunnel. The train from Paris to Prague. Prague to Vienna, down through the mountains to Venice. Venice on to Rome, then up to this little place on Lake Garda. We were going to do it properly, four weeks of traveling. A full moon’s worth of exploring, living, and to hell with real life.
And just like that, the whole “be brave” thing became so much harder. Sometimes I think God punishes us by answering our prayers. I remember lying in bed, looking at Isla sleeping beside me, and just thinking I wanted this moment to last forever. I wanted the world to stop and it did, with a knock on the door and two somber- looking policemen with their hats in their hands. It was the hat in the hands that did it. That only ever means one thing. The older of the two asked if I was me, and then if they could come inside. Isla was a schoolteacher. Was. That’s still stupidly hard to say. It’s so . . . past tense. Final. I don’t like finality in words anymore. I like words that are open and that at least allow for some kind of hope, like the word yet. Yet is a powerful word. It’s a good one.
Kids had been playing in the yard during lunch when the ice- cream man drove tantalizingly close to the gates. One of the grade threes had wriggled through the gate and wandered across the road, following the Pied Piper of Ice Cream’s call. Isla had been on playground duty. She’d run into the road to save the girl and taken most of the impact while the girl had walked away with a few bruises. The policeman had called it a small mercy. It wasn’t. Not really. I didn’t get any comfort out of knowing the love of my life had died saving some kid I didn’t know or care about. That wasn’t mercy to me.
The funeral was on the day we were supposed to be married, and all I can remember is thinking it should have been raining.
