“I am,” she said; she glanced up at him. “Maybe…”
“Don’t be silly,” he said. “You’ll be fine once you’re away from here. And—” he cocked his eye toward the declining sun “—you should be pushing along. You don’t want to be hanging about the mouth when it’s dark. I doubt anything would harm you, but since you’re no longer part of Griaule’s plan … well, better safe than sorry.” He gave her a push. “Get along with you, now.”
“You’re not coming with me?”
“Me?” Mauldry chuckled. “What would I do out there? I’m an old man, set in my ways. No, I’m far better off staying with the feelies. I’ve become half a feely myself after all these years. But you’re young, you’ve got a whole world of life ahead of you.” He nudged her forward. “Do what I say, girl. There’s no use in your hanging about any longer.”
She went a couple of steps toward the lip, paused, feeling sentimental about leaving the old man; though they had never been close, he had been like a father to her … and thinking this, remembering her real father, whom she had scarcely thought of these last years, with whom she’d had the same lack of closeness, that made her aware of all the things she had to look forward to, all the lost things she might now regain. She moved into the thickets with a firmer step, and behind her, old Mauldry called to her for a last time.
“That’s my girl!” he sang out. “You just keep going, and you’ll start to feel at rights soon enough! There’s nothing to be afraid of … nothing you can avoid, in any case! Goodbye, goodbye!”
She glanced back, waved, saw him shaking his cane in a gesture of farewell, and laughed at his eccentric appearance: a funny little man in satin rags hopping up and down in that great shadow between the fangs. Out from beneath that shadow herself, the rich light warmed her, seeming to penetrate and dissolve all the coldness that had been lodged in her bones and thoughts.
“Goodbye!” cried Mauldry. “Goodbye! Don’t be sad! You’re not leaving anything important behind, and you’re taking the best parts with you. Just walk fast and think about what you’re going to tell everyone. They’ll be amazed by all you’ve done! Flabbergasted! Tell them about Griaule! Tell them what he’s like, tell them all you’ve seen and all you’ve learned. Tell them what a grand adventure you’ve had!”
8
Returning to Hangtown was in some ways a more unsettling experience than had been Catherine’s flight into the dragon. She had expected the place to have changed, and while there had been minor changes, she had assumed that it would be as different from its old self as was she. But standing at the edge of the village, looking out at the gray weathered shacks ringing the fouled shallows of the lake, thin smokes issuing from tin chimneys, the cliff of the fronto-parietal plate casting its gloomy shadow, the chokecherry thickets, the hawthornes, the dark brown dirt of the streets, three elderly men sitting on cane chairs in front of one of the shacks, smoking their pipes and staring back at her with unabashed curiosity … superficially it was no different than it had been ten years before, and this seemed to imply that her years of imprisonment, her death and rebirth had been of small importance. She did not demand that they be important to anyone else, yet it galled her that the world had passed through those years of ordeal without significant scars, and it also imbued her with the irrational fear that if she were to enter the village, she might suffer some magical slippage back through time and reinhabit her old life. At last, with a hesitant step, she walked over to the men and wished them a good morning.
“Mornin’,” said a paunchy fellow with a mottled bald scalp and a fringe of gray beard, whom she recognized as Tim Weedlon. “What can I do for you, ma’am? Got some nice bits of scale inside.”
“That place over there—” she pointed to an abandoned shack down the street, its roof holed and missing the door “—where can I find the owner?”
The other man, Mardo Koren, thin as a mantis, his face seamed and blotched, said, “Can’t nobody say for sure. Ol’ Riall died … must be goin’ on nine, ten years back.”
“He’s dead?” She felt weak inside, dazed.
“Yep,” said Tim Weedlon, studying her face, his brow furrowed, his expression bewildered. “His daughter run away, killed a village man name of Willen and vanished into nowhere … or so ever’body figured. Then when Willen’s brothers turned up missin’, people thought ol’ Riall must done ’em. He didn’t deny it. Acted like he didn’t care whether he lived or died.”
“What happened?”
“They had a trial, found Riall guilty.” He leaned forward, squinting at her. “Catherine … is that you?”
She nodded, struggling for control. “What did they do with him?”
“How can it be you?” he said. “Where you been?”
“What happened to my father?”
“God, Catherine. You know what happens to them that’s found guilty of murder. If it’s any comfort, the truth come out finally.”
“They took him in under the wing … they left him under the wing?” Her fists clenched, nails pricking hard into her palm. “Is that what they did?” He lowered his eyes, picked at a fray on his trouserleg.
Her eyes filled, and she turned away, facing the mossy overhang of the frontoparietal plate. “You said the truth came out.”
“That’s right. A girl confessed to having seen the whole thing. Said the Willens chased you into Griaule’s mouth. She woulda come forward sooner, but ol’ man Willen had her feared for her life. Said he’d kill her if she told. You probably remember her. Friend of yours, if I recall. Brianne.” She whirled around, repeated the name with venom.
“Wasn’t she your friend?” Weedlon asked.
“What happened to her?”
“Why … nothing,” said Weedlon. “She’s married, got hitched to Zev Mallison. Got herself a batch of children. I ’spect she’s home now if you wanna see her. You know the Mallison place, don’tcha?”
“Yes.”
“You want to know more about it, you oughta drop by there and talk to Brianne.”
“I guess … I will, I’ll do that.”
“Now tell us where you been, Catherine. Ten years! Musta been something important to keep you from home for so long.”
Coldness was spreading through her, turning her to ice. “I was thinking, Tim … I was thinking I might like to do some scaling while I’m here. Just for old time’s sake, you know.” She could hear the shakiness in her voice and tried to smooth it out; she forced a smile. “I wonder if I could borrow some hooks.”
“Hooks?” He scratched his head, still regarding her with confusion. “Sure, I suppose you can. But aren’t you going to tell us where you’ve been? We thought you were dead.”
“I will, I promise. Before I leave … I’ll come back and tell you all about it. All right?”
“Well, all right.” He heaved up from his chair. “But it’s a cruel thing you’re doing, Catherine.”
“No crueler than what’s been done to me,” she said distractedly. “Not half so cruel.”
“Pardon,” said Tim. “How’s that?”
“What?”
He gave her a searching look and said, “I was telling you it was a cruel thing, keeping an old man in suspense about where you’ve been. Why you’re going to make the choicest bit of gossip we’ve had in years. And you came back with…”
“Oh! I’m sorry,” she said. “I was thinking about something else.”
* * *
The Mallison place was among the larger shanties in Hangtown, half a dozen rooms, most of which had been added on over the years since Catherine had left; but its size was no evidence of wealth or status, only of a more expansive poverty. Next to the steps leading to a badly hung door was a litter of bones and mango skins and other garbage. Fruit flies hovered above a watermelon rind; a gray dog with its ribs showing slunk off around the corner, and there was a stink of fried onions and boiled greens. From inside came the squalling of a child. The shanty looked false to Catherine, an unassuming f
açade behind which lay a monstrous reality—the woman who had betrayed her, killed her father—and yet its drabness was sufficient to disarm her anger somewhat. But as she mounted the steps there was a thud as of something heavy falling, and a woman shouted. The voice was harsh, deeper than Catherine remembered, but she knew it must belong to Brianne, and that restored her vengeful mood. She knocked on the door with one of Tim Weedlon’s scaling hooks, and a second later it was flung open and she was confronted by an olive-skinned woman in torn gray skirts—almost the same color as the weathered boards, as if she were the quintessential product of the environment—and gray streaks in her dark brown hair. She looked Catherine up and down, her face hard with displeasure, and said, “What do you want?”
It was Brianne, but Brianne warped, melted, disfigured as a waxwork might be disfigured by heat. Her waist gone, features thickened, cheeks sagging into jowls. Shock washed away Catherine’s anger, and shock, too, materialized in Brianne’s face. “No,” she said, giving the word an abstracted value, as if denying an inconsequential accusation; then she shouted it: “No!” She slammed the door, and Catherine pounded on it, crying, “Damn you! Brianne!”
The child screamed, but Brianne made no reply.
Enraged, Catherine swung the hook at the door; the point sank deep into the wood, and when she tried to pull it out, one of the boards came partially loose; she pried at it, managed to rip it away, the nails coming free with a shriek of tortured metal. Through the gap she saw Brianne cowering against the rear wall of a dilapidated room, her arms around a little boy in shorts. Using the hook as a lever, she pulled loose another board, reached in and undid the latch. Brianne pushed the child behind her and grabbed a broom as Catherine stepped inside.
“Get out of here!” she said, holding the broom like a spear.
The gray poverty of the shanty made Catherine feel huge in her anger, too bright for the place, like a sun shining in a cave, and although her attention was fixed on Brianne, the peripheral details of the room imprinted themselves on her: the wood stove upon which a covered pot was steaming; an overturned wooden chair with a hole in the seat; cobwebs spanning the corners, rat turds along the wall; a rickety table set with cracked dishes and dust thick as fur beneath it. These things didn’t arouse her pity or mute her anger; instead, they seemed extensions of Brianne, new targets for hatred. She moved closer, and Brianne jabbed the broom at her. “Go away,” she said weakly. “Please … leave us alone!”
Catherine swung the hook, snagging the twine that bound the broom straws and knocking it from Brianne’s hands. Brianne retreated to the corner where the wood stove stood, hauling the child along. She held up her hand to ward off another blow and said, “Don’t hurt us.”
“Why not? Because you’ve got children, because you’ve had an unhappy life?” Catherine spat at Brianne. “You killed my father!”
“I was afraid! Key’s father…”
“I don’t care,” said Catherine coldly. “I don’t care why you did it. I don’t care how good your reasons were for betraying me in the first place.”
“That’s right! You never cared about anything!” Brianne clawed at her breast. “You killed my heart! You didn’t care about Glynn, you just wanted him because he wasn’t yours!”
It took Catherine a few seconds to dredge that name up from memory, to connect it with Brianne’s old lover and recall that it was her callousness and self-absorption that had set the events of the past ten years in motion. But although this roused her guilt, it did not abolish her anger. She couldn’t equate Brianne’s crimes with her excesses. Still, she was confused about what to do, uncomfortable now with the very concept of justice, and she wondered if she should leave, just throw down the hook and leave vengeance to whatever ordering principle governed the fates in Hangtown. Then Brianne shifted her feet, made a noise in her throat and Catherine felt rage boiling up inside her.
“Don’t throw that up to me,” she said with flat menace. “Nothing I’ve done to you merited what you did to me. You don’t even know what you did!” She raised the hook, and Brianne shrank back into the corner. The child twisted its head to look at Catherine, fixing her with brimming eyes, and she held back.
“Send the child away,” she told Brianne.
Brianne leaned down to the child. “Go to your father,” she said.
“No, wait,” said Catherine, fearing that the child might bring Zev Mallison.
“Must you kill us both?” said Brianne, her voice hoarse with emotion. Hearing this, the child once more began to cry.
“Stop it,” Catherine said to him, and when he continued to cry, she shouted it.
Brianne muffled the child’s wails in her skirts. “Go ahead!” she said, her face twisted with fear. “Just do it!” She broke down into sobs, ducked her head and waited for the blow. Catherine stepped close to Brianne, yanked her head back by the hair, exposing her throat, and set the point of the hook against the big vein there. Brianne’s eyes rolled down, trying to see the hook; her breath came in gaspy shrieks, and the child, caught between the two women, squirmed and wailed. Catherine’s hand was trembling, and that slight motion pricked Brianne’s skin, drawing a bead of blood. She stiffened, her eyelids fluttered down, her mouth fell open—an expression, at least so it seemed to Catherine, of ecstatic expectation. Catherine studied the face, feeling as if her emotions were being purified, drawn into a fine wire; she had an almost aesthetic appreciation of the stillness gathering around her, the hard poise of Brianne’s musculature, the sensitive pulse in the throat that transmitted its frail rhythm along the hook, and she restrained herself from pressing the point deeper, wanting to prolong Brianne’s suffering.
But then the hook grew heavy in Catherine’s hands, and she understood that the moment had passed, that her need for vengeance had lost the immediacy and thrust of passion. She imagined herself skewering Brianne, and then imagined dragging her out to confront a village tribunal, forcing her to confess her lies, having her sentenced to be tied up and left for whatever creatures foraged beneath Griaule’s wing. But while it provided her a measure of satisfaction to picture Brianne dead or dying, she saw now that anticipation was the peak of vengeance, that carrying out the necessary actions would only harm her. It frustrated her that all these years and the deaths would have no resolution, and she thought that she must have changed more than she had assumed to put aside vengeance so easily; this caused her to wonder again about the nature of the change, to question whether she was truly herself or merely an arcane likeness. But then she realized that the change had been her resolution, and that vengeance was an artifact of her old life, nothing more, and that her new life, whatever its secret character, must find other concerns to fuel it apart from old griefs and unworthy passions. This struck her with the force of a revelation, and she let out a long sighing breath that seemed to carry away with it all the sad vibrations of the past, all the residues of hates and loves, and she could finally believe that she was no longer the dragon’s prisoner. She felt new in her whole being, subject to new compulsions, as alive as tears, as strong as wheat, far too strong and alive for this pallid environment, and she could hardly recall now why she had come.
She looked at Brianne and her son, feeling only the ghost of hatred, seeing them not as objects of pity or wrath, but as unfamiliar, irrelevant, lives trapped in the prison of their own self-regard, and without a word she turned and walked to the steps, slamming the hook deep into the boards of the wall, a gesture of fierce resignation, the closing of a door opening onto anger and the opening of one that led to uncharted climes, and went down out of the village, leaving old Tim Weedlon’s thirst for gossip unquenched, passing along Griaule’s back, pushing through thickets and fording streams, and not noticing for quite some time that she had crossed onto another hill and left the dragon far behind. Three weeks later she came to Cabrecavela, a small town at the opposite end of the Carbonales Valley, and there, using the gems provided her by Mauldry, she bought a house and settled in a
nd began to write about Griaule, creating not a personal memoir but a reference work containing an afterword dealing with certain metaphysical speculations, for she did not wish her adventures published, considering them banal by comparison to her primary subjects, the dragon’s physiology and ecology. After the publication of her book, which she entitled The Heart’s Millennium, she experienced a brief celebrity; but she shunned most of the opportunities for travel and lecture and lionization that came her way, and satisfied her desire to impart the knowledge she had gained by teaching in the local school and speaking privately with those scientists from Port Chantay who came to interview her. Some of these visitors had been colleagues of John Colmacos, yet she never mentioned their relationship, believing that her memories of the man needed no modification; but perhaps this was less than an honest self-appraisal, perhaps she had not come to terms with that portion of her past, for in the spring five years after she had returned to the world she married one of these scientists, a man named Brian Ocoi, who in his calm demeanor and modest easiness of speech appeared cast from the same mold as Colmacos. From that point on little is known of her other than the fact that she bore two sons and confined her writing to a journal that has gone unpublished. However, it is said of her—as is said of all those who perform similar acts of faith in the shadows of other dragons yet unearthed from beneath their hills of ordinary-seeming earth and grass, believing that their bond serves through gentle constancy to enhance and not further delimit the boundaries of this prison world—from that day forward she lived happily ever after. Except for the dying at the end. And the heartbreak in-between.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
1988
Brian W. Aldiss, “Traveler, Traveler, Seek Your Wife in the Forests of This Life,” F & SF, Nov.
Ray Aldridge, “The Touch of the Hook,” F & SF, Apr.
Poul Anderson, “The Comrade,” Analog, Jun.
———, “The Deserter,” New Destinies, Summer.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection Page 85
