The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy

by Mike Ashley

  This story was inspired by the paintings of Chris Mars.

  THE DARK ONE

  A A Attanasio

  Our extreme curve has now reached its apex. The following story may not seem challenging at first but you will later find yourself drawn personally into the story. On his website, at www.aaattanasio.com, Attanasio states: “I’m a novelist obsessed with the power of fiction to impart strangeness, hermetic wisdom and, above all, wonder.”

  All of his books have reflected his fascination with what drives the wheels of history to bring us where we are today and take us beyond. Initially drawn by an interest in Lovecraftian fiction and horror, Alfred Attanasio (b. 1951), sold his first stories in 1972. His first published novel was Radix (1981), the start of what became the Radix Tetrad. Its exploration of a young man’s voyage of self discovery bears some comparison with the following story. His other books include the Arthor series, starting with The Dragon and the Unicorn (1994), which recasts the Arthurian legend on a cosmic scale, and the historical fantasy swashbuckler Wyvern (1988). Attanasio never does things by halves, as you will see.

  Time is thingless,” the old sorcerer told his last disciple. “Yet, you are about to see the source of it.”

  Tall, gaunt and completely bald, the sorcerer stood against the night dressed in straw sandals and a simple white robe. Narrow as a wraith, his raiment glowing gently in the starlight on the steep cliff above the temple city, he seemed about to blow away.

  The disciple, a blue-eyed barbarian boy named Darshan, knelt before him on his bare knees, the hem of his kilt touching the ground. He lowered his face and closed his eyes. Whatever curiosity he had for why his masters, the priests, had awakened and brought him here stilled momentarily in the chill desert air, and he awaited his fate with expectant submission.

  “Look at me!” the old man demanded, his voice resonant among the vacancies of the cliffs.

  Darshan lifted his gaze hesitantly toward the withered figure and saw in the slim light that the sorcerer was smiling. He had a face as hewn as a temple stone, and it was a strange experience for the boy to find a friendly smile in that granite countenance. During the four years that Darshan had served as floor-scrubber and acolyte at the Temple of the Sun, he had seen the sorcerer often in the royal processions and ceremonies – but the haughty old man had always appeared in public garbed in cobra-hood mantle and plumed headdress. Now he was bare-shouldered, his skeletal chest exposed, reptilian flesh hanging like throat frills from his jaw.

  “Why are you here?” the old man asked.

  “The priests of Amon-Re sent me, lord.”

  “Yes – they sent you. Because I ordered them to. Do you know who I am?” He peered at the boy, the whole immense dark sky glistening in his eyes.

  “Lord, you are the supreme vizier. The man of the high places.”

  “Yes. That is who I am.” He stood taller, stretched out his bony arms, and spoke in a flat voice: “Supreme vizier of the People, counsel to kings, master sorcerer.” Without warning, he sat down in the dust, and Darshan’s shock at the sight of the holy man squat-legged on the ground almost toppled him. He had to touch the earth with one hand to stay on his knees. The sorcerer’s sagacious grin thickened. “And you are Darshan. I know, for I am the one who sent the ships to seek you.”

  Darshan leaned back under the weight of his puzzlement.

  “Well, not you specifically,” the sorcerer added, hunching his frail body under the night. He looked tiny. “Just a child, boy or girl, any child, as long as the tyke was wild and not of the People. The child had to belong to no one. You are the one they found.”

  Darshan thought back, remembering the few fleeting memories and scraps of idle speculation an old priest had once offered him of the boy’s young, insignificant life. He had been born on a heath in a northern land, in a bracken hovel with many mouths for the wind to sing through. His birth mother had been an outcast from her clan, exiled for madness but sane enough in the way of animals to survive on the wind-trampled moorlands.

  His first memory was of her scent – a bog musk, creaturely, hot. Even now, he was fond of the fragrance of rain-wet fur. His second memory was of her telling him that she had never known a man. She had told him this many times, her simple speech gusty with fervor, saying it over and over again until she had become as redundant as the lamentations of the wind. To the day she died trying to cross an iced river, she had moved and talked in a frenzied rush. Ranting about never knowing a man, about beast eyes in the sky, about the smell of darkness in the sun-glare, and the thunder of hooves when the wind stilled, clearly she had been mad. He had realized this only years later, living among the People, though at the time, when he had first begun to reflect on his life, he knew nothing of madness, only that his mother had been true in her devotion to him, and he to her.

  In his seventh winter, she fell into the river and vanished under the ice, all in an instant, right before his eyes. Standing three feet behind her, he had been attentive only to the twine net where she carried their next meal, a dead badger, the blood not yet frozen on its head where she had stoned it. That was the last he saw of her, the dead creature caught for an instant at the broken edge of the ice. He remembered clutching for it and it jumping from him, sliding into the black water as though it were yet alive.

  After she was gone, he had survived only because he had pretended she was still with him, instructing him what to do. With the thaw, he had followed the river, looking for her body. He never found her. The corpses of animals still frozen or caught in the floods kept him alive. Moving with the river, he never went back.

  He had stayed in the wilderness, avoiding contact with all people, and he had moved south to escape the winter that had killed his mother. For two years, he had stayed hidden, and then on a rocky coast by a sun-brassed sea, he spied his first boats. He didn’t know what they were. He had thought them to be great floating beasts. He could not see that they were carrying men until they had spotted him also. He had fled, but the men had horses and cunning, and eventually they found him hiding in a tide cave.

  Taken as a slave and brought to this great kingdom of the south, at first he had behaved like a caught animal – but his ferocity had been matched by the awe he felt for his captors. Their kingdom was a fabulous river valley of boats, armies, slave-hordes, and immense stone temples.

  Many of the slaves were driven to labor like beasts, yet the boy himself was never beaten. He was employed by the priests as a floor-scrubber, and in return he was fed well, clothed, and bunked with the young students of the temple. They had given him a name, and eventually he had learned their language and their ways.

  And now, four years later and a lifetime wiser, here he was under the smoldering stars with the kingdoms supreme vizier – a man too holy to stare at directly, too divine to touch earth – an old man sitting in the dust beside him and telling him not only that he was aware of the boy’s lowly presence but that in fact he had ordered his capture! The thought filled Darshan with dread, for he had delighted in his anonymity. Being chosen implied a mission, and he had neither the desire nor the belief in himself to think he was capable of doing anything heroic for these great people.

  “Do you know why I sent for you?” the sorcerer asked with a glimmering intensity.

  “No, lord,” the boy replied, peering at him from the sides of his eyes.

  “You are to take my place.” Another smile tautened the waxy flesh across the old man’s skull-face, and he hissed with small, tight laughter when he saw the boy’s look of utter incredulity. “Believe me, I am not toying with you. Nor am I mad. You will have plenty of time to get used to being a sorcerer. Time, that thingless word – there is plenty of that.”

  The boy’s hands opened futilely before him. “I am but a slave…

  “So it seems to the present generation. But you shall outlive them and their grandchildren and their grandchildren’s great-grandchildren.”

  At the boy’s gasp, another of the old ma
n’s smiles flickered in the darkness. “I am not speaking symbolically, Darshan. I do not mean your works shall outlive them – for you shall do no works.” His voice assumed a ritual cadence. “Symbols are a substitute for works. Works are a substitute for power. Power resides in stillness. That is the secret of the universe.”

  Truly, Darshan thought, the vizier is mad! He dared not voice that doubt. Rather, he mustered his courage to say, “I do not understand, lord.”

  The sorcerer moved closer and put a dry hand on the boy’s shoulder. A coldness flowed from it. “Speak to me about what you do not understand.”

  Darshan shivered. Words came quickly into his head but moved slowly to his mouth. “Lord, I am but a barbarian. I am a child, and from the Outside. I am nothing.”

  “And so power resides in you.” The sorcerer’s hand squeezed the boy’s shoulder with a firm gentleness, and the cold sharpened. “Speak.”

  “Lord, I do not understand what power would reside in a worthless outsider.”

  “The power you are made empty to receive.” The hand on Darshan’s shoulder became ice, and when it lifted away blue fire sheathed it.

  A scream balked in the boy’s throat, hindered by the benignity of the sorcerer’s expression.

  “You see?” the old man chuckled. “The power is already leaving me and going to you.”

  Rainbow light flowed like smoke from the upheld hand and coiled toward Darshan’s face. He pulled away, horrified, and the spectral vapor shot at him like a viper, striking him between the eyes.

  Cold fire paralyzed the boy, and his vision burst into a tunnel of infalling flames and shadows. The rush stalled abruptly, and, in an instant, the desert skyline vanished and the span of night deepened. Sun feathers lashed the darkness, ribbons of starsmoke furling into the reaches of the night.

  “This is the raith,” the sorcerer’s voice lit up within him. “This is the Land of the Gods!”

  Together, wordlessly, they advanced among rivers of light that poured like bright fumes into a golden sphere of billowy energy. A dissolving sun, the sphere radiated pollen sparks in a slow flux against the blackness. Each spark was the surface of a mirror, the other side of which opened into a biological form.

  “Touch one,” the sorcerer commanded, and when the boy did as he was told, he found himself inside the grooved sight of an antelope bounding through white grass. Touching another, he was among swerving schools of fish.

  “Life. All of it.” The sorcerer’s voice pulled Darshan away from touching another spark. “I am not taking you there. But once you establish yourself where we are going, all of this is yours.” The weltering surface of the gold sphere spun serenely before them in the haze of its rendings.

  They drifted away from it, across spans of darkness vapory with fire. Alternating ice-winds and desert-blasts looped over their raith-senses. For a long time, they soared, pummeled by brutal gusts, until they burst into a darkness set at the back of the stars.

  Darshan’s flight stopped abruptly, and stillness seized him. He floated, alertly poised at the crystalcut center of clarity, so still that empty space itself seemed to writhe like a jammed swarming of eels. Flamboyant bliss saturated him. The was the top of the eagles arc, the salmons leap, the peak of midnight extending forever.

  Immovable as the darkness of space, Darshan exulted. His life had suddenly become too minuscule to remember. The life of the People, too, had become the fleetest thought. Even the stones of their temples and tombs were breathing, their packed atoms shivering and blowing against the gelatinous vibrations of dark space.

  Awe pierced the boy with the abrupt realization that the tumult of life, of existence itself, was far apart from him. He had become absolutely motionless.

  Yet, with that very thought, the spell ended, and he found himself immediately back in his body on his knees before the aged sorcerer. With painful reluctance, Darshan peered about. The clamor of stars and the stink of dust nauseated him. He closed his eyes and groped inside himself for the eagle’s poise.

  “That stillness is your power,” the sorcerer said in an urgent voice that made Darshan open his eyes. The old man’s face glittered with tears. “It lies at the heart of everything.” He gestured at the temples’ torchlights and the lanterns and lamps of the city that shone in the dark valley like spilled jewels. Then, he looked up at the dangling stars. “Even the gods.”

  The barbarian boy gazed at the old man with unabashed amazement. “Then why is this stillness no longer yours?”

  The sorcerer swelled closer, expansive in his joy, and he took Darshan’s chilled hands in his icy ones and shook them with the emphasis of his words: “It chose me – as it now chooses you!” His voice hushed confidentially. “Ten thousand years ago, in a region that we presently call Cush, I too was an orphan, as you are, a savage, alone with the wilderness. Wholly by chance, as happened with you, I was led to the master of stillness who had come before me. He was thousands of years old then, as I am now. He had found his fulfillment after millennia of grounding the stillness in time. That thingless word. Thingless for those such as we who have know the stillness. It is only the combat of the gods that makes time a thing for everyone else. Time is the dimension of the gods’ battlefield. Their clashes for dominance stir people’s hearts with dreams. Those dreams, in turn, frenzy into ideas: tools are discovered, animals domesticated, royalty invented, religion, sacrifices, war. Now, even cities are called into being.”

  Tears gleamed silverly in the creases of his broad grinning. “Who cares? I certainly don’t. My time is up. I have lived the stillness – right here in the middle of the battlefield! I have seen the gods aspire. I have seen generations sacrificed to their grand schemes. A great empire has risen from the red dust. The People think their empire will endure forever. But I tell you, you will see all this as dust again and all the People forgotten. Only the gods will go on. The dreaming will continue.

  “Other empires will appear and disappear among the battling gods. You alone, alone as you have always been, will live the stillness – an enemy to the gods. For you alone, time will be thingless, for you will know the source of it. You will have been inside the mother of the gods. You will have the power to live the stillness.”

  Darshan was thirteen-years-old that night when the sorcerer, sitting in the dust, spoke to him. Nothing in his four years of scouring temple floors had prepared him for it. The priests who had sent him to the sorcerer had wondered about that meeting. Some had leered, suspecting lewdness. The sorcerer himself soon disappeared mysteriously. Yet, the boy went on scrubbing floors. And the raith went on dreaming him.

  After that night, however, the work became immeasurably easier. Body dazzling with a vigor he mistook for approaching manhood, Darshan excelled at athletics. And he astonished even the arrogant lector-scribes with his mental stamina as he absorbed everything they dared teach him.

  Several years later, the raith’s dream shifted, and Darshan became a certifiable wonder, the countenance of the gods, the boy who never aged. The priests worshipped him. Warlords offered tribute. Every difficulty in the region required his assuaging presence.

  For a long time, Darshan prayed to the gods to restore his former life. But his prayers had no wings. The king learned of him, and he was removed from the temple and taken upriver to the royal city. There, he became a child-divinity sent by the gods to affirm the ancestral sorcery of the kings.

  Life became a ceremony of walled gardens, incense-tattered rooms and banquets. Twice a year, he was portaged into the green of the fields to release a falcon that carried the prayers of the People to the sun god. Well-being clouded about him like an electric charge, and he was revered by the aristocracy even as the court aged and their tombs rose on the desert floor.

  The years flowed by, and he grew wise on the dying of others. He took wives who bore his children, and he loved them all with sentimental delirium. His family shared riverboat mansions and superficialities, all of life’s caprices, as they aged beyon
d him and shriveled away. He took younger wives and had more children. And all the while, he blessed the People and the riverland, and the kingdom prospered. He himself did not know how. He had forgotten the words of the sorcerer. He thought he was a child-god.

  Three kings and a century later, with his first grandchildren’s grandchildren older than he, he had aged a year. His body was fourteen-years-old.

  Not until he was seventeen and two dynasties had risen and collapsed did he begin to remember. Dreams were ephemera. Families, kings, dynasties were ghosts, incidental to the emptiness in which they teemed. Another six hundred years of orchard gardens and ripening families and he saw through to this truth.

  He gave up family life. Rubbed smooth like a river stone after spawning forty generations of sons and daughters, children who grew up to be wives, warriors, queens, merchants, priestesses, all fossils now, and even their children fossils, he felt carnal desire slide away from him. He wanted no more lovers or children, and the machinations of power bored him.

  For the next thousand years, he retreated into anonymity, seeking unity with the People. In various guises, he wandered the earth questing experience and knowledge. Eventually, the dreams themselves began to wear thin for Darshan. Experience turned out to be suffering. Knowledge was boundaries.

  After long centuries of striving, Darshan finally accepted that he was no godling. He was a ghost. He returned to the river kingdom where the cursed gift had come to him. He searched for the sorcerer and after many years found him – not in the world but in his dreaming.