The Wildside Book of Fantasy: 20 Great Tales of Fantasy
Page 2
I shudder deep and long. Webs of foreign feelings drape my thoughts, feelings not my own, feelings that force me to feel them. Thoughts I don’t want to own flicker through my brain.
I stare at my kitchen with stark clarity, see the careless stains on the cupboard doors, dustmice under the outthrust cabinets, spiderwebs in the corners, scratches in the dishes, all the things I don’t mind because I don’t wear my glasses in the house. There is that smell of orange peels rotting in the bag under the sink. I never notice that; I don’t mind mold; things are only doing what they are supposed to do, everything changing into other things across time. But now this odor affronts me.
“Ell? That spell wasn’t supposed to hurt you! Ell?” Jessamine grips my shoulder.
I try to cast the invasion out of my mind, but it is knitted and knotted too tightly to me. I struggle to reclaim myself. Everywhere in me are shards of someone else.
I feel my age. I let out a long breath and stop fighting, and all of Jessamine snaps into place within me. I feel...brisk. I sit upright. I gulp tea. Its smoky taste no longer pleases me, but I know I don’t want chamomile either.
“Are you all right?” Jessamine asks for the fiftieth time, perhaps. Why should I pay attention to her when she is already inside me?
“Leave me alone,” I say. I rise and go to the cupboard, find a tea called Plantation Mint that I usually share with my neighbor James when we play gin rummy on Sunday night and watch 60 Minutes.
That’ll do. I drop a teabag into a new mug. I put the kettle on the stove and turn on the burner. (Where’s the microwave? Oh. I don’t have one. Tomorrow I’ll get one.) I run water into the sink until it’s hot. I dump soap and sponges in, and then I begin to scrub.
It is odd. I wear glasses for distance, and Jessamine doesn’t. I never knew what she saw when she looked at my house, and I never tell her what I think about her chrome and glass furniture or her love of plastic fabrics. A guest doesn’t criticize the host’s house no matter how long they have known each other.
“Ell?” Jessamine shakes my shoulder. “Stop it. What are you doing?”
There is dust everywhere. Housekeeping has never been my strong point. I scrub a film of ancient cat vomit off the linoleum and fight with myself. To care, or not to care? Well, says Jessamine in my head, simplest if we spell it away, and that way both of us can relax.
I sit back, drop the sponge on the floor. My hands flash through a series of mudras. I feel the dust and dirt shifting away to somewhere it can be more comfortable, and my house becomes a strange sacred space outside of the normal world where things will not stain it. Jessamine is happy here.
I, Ellowyn, feel as though I’ve sliced off my roots.
From the living room come the screams of three different cats. I jump up and run there and see that the couch where they usually lie in a furry heap is repelling them. They scramble in air, trying to swim to safety, but the table repels them, and the carpet. They float, claws extended, an inch above the ground. Their cries become more frantic.
“What did I do? What did you do?” I cry, snatching at my frantic cats, who cling and claw and screech.
“Damn, I forgot about cats. This is a people-only house now,” my internal Jessamine says with my mouth.
“Well, stop it! Change it back! Stop it!” I am talking to myself.
“You’ll have to free the hands.” My second voice is an approximation of Jessamine’s, higher and more forceful than my own.
I am supporting Sprite’s hind legs with my right hand. Fleet clings to my shoulders, and Dobro stands on my left forearm, his paws wrapped around my upper arm. They all moan, an eerie, ascending sound like the end of the world.
“What happened?” Jessamine asks from behind me. Her voice is thin with fright.
I turn and force Sprite and Fleet into her arms. “Your silly spell,” I say in my own voice, “your silly banish-dust, repel-pests, eternal-stainfree spell has turned my house into a tomb.” Hands freed, I shape the mudras again in reverse order, stumbling a little because this is not my usual spell method. The Jessamine overlay in my mind prompts me, sighing all the while. She craves cleanliness that is close to hermetic, and now I know why all the way down to my bones. I can remember the apartment where Jessamine lived before we met, filth and cockroaches and rotting food, her mother’s older sister spreading pestilence and chaos everywhere around her in a way that Jessamine did not learn until later was magical.
Such stains, set deep into her image of her childself. Such a compulsion to escape them.
I shape my hands around the final mudra, and my roots regrow; the house is connected to the everyday world once again. The cats, still moaning, drop to the floor and vanish into their safest hiding places.
Jessamine is crying. We both go to the bathroom to put Neosporin on our bleeding scratches and to spell for healing. “Ellowyn, what happened?” Jessamine says.
“You should know,” I say. “It was your spell.”
“It wasn’t supposed to work this way!”
“What did you imagine it would do?” Now, from my view of the inside of her mind, I know what the spell was: a spell of total understanding. I can even ferret out her thinking about it, why she devised it: she is lonely in her passions, and she only wanted me to appreciate them more than I do. We have been getting together for years. We are best friends. Yet, there has been this film between us, areas we have kept separate from each other where we might clash, and finally her frustration about this place where she is still and always alone built to the bursting point.
And, in her straightforward Jessamine way that sometimes frightens me, she reached for what looked like the best solution. Make me understand.
“I thought maybe you’d listen to me,” she says.
I stare at a particularly long cat scratch on my arm and listen to the conflict in my head. My body needs protection. I dab some antibiotic ointment on my index finger and look at the red edges of my wound. My Ellowyn self has sympathy for the microorganisms that have found this entrance into blood heaven, the ones I am about to kill. My Jessamine self is appalled that I even hesitate. I smooth the ointment along the scratch and sigh.
“How can I hear you now?” I ask. “I have voices in my head.”
Her nose is pink with stifled tears. “I’ll uncast it. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know it would work like this.”
“You can’t uncast it,” I say, because I know how carefully she built it , and which of the ingredients are permanent. I stare at my face in the mirror, and two people look out of my eyes. I fear that once the Jessamine inside me has time to look around and analyze things, she will gradually send more and more of my true self to sleep and happy dreams until she is all that is conscious in me.
I hate this thought. Fighting has never been my strength, though.
I get the Band-Aids down from the cupboard, and, moving with uncharacteristic determination, slap them onto myself and Jessamine where they will do the most good. Jessamine’s pathological hatred of infection spells out of me as I work. I don’t even think as I mouth these words. I know they have been a mantra for her over the years.
Cats, part of me thinks with disgust. Horrible messy things. No more events like this! We have to get rid of them!
Horror curls through me. The cats are my companions, my friends. They greet me when I return from anywhere. We all live our separate lives in this shared space, and intercept each other for caresses. I love them.
In my head, Jessamine apologizes for her thought, but I know she still thinks it. Finally I understand why the cats never come into the kitchen while Jessamine is visiting me. She has a repel spell for all animals. She cannot rid herself of the conviction that they carry disease.
No. I can’t live like this.
We head back to the kitchen. I make yet another cup of tea, this time English Breakfast, fully loaded with caffeine. While the water heats, I take Jessamine’s little computer, tap the screen with the stylus to find the spell-proce
ssing program, scroll through the spell she constructed. It is just as I remembered: Jessamine exact, Jessamine elegant, all parts interlocking so tightly that I can’t get a fingernail in to split it apart. What about transmission errors? I check the data-sent log, and it says SENT OK. Frowning, I set the computer on the table and discover Jessamine staring at me, her face pale.
“What?” I say.
“You know how to use it,” she murmurs, and then I feel the backlash, the Jessamine in my head reflecting the other Jessamine’s outrage at someone even touching this computer, her precious friend, making it do tricks without asking.
“Oh, this makes me tired,” I say. I make my tea and slam the kettle down on the burner, denting its edge, full of rage and fatigue from fighting this self forced on me.
I sit.
I see the egg-shaped spell, golden as earth, that I found in the hills, and a sweet taste touches my tongue.
Before my interior Jessamine can stop me -- I had no idea that she had these shudders under her skin all the time, worries always that edges are not clean, that touch is not safe -- I cradle the spell in my hands. Comfort seeps into me. This spell’s history isn’t entirely clear to me. I only know someone cast it a long time ago, and that it worked beautifully, so beautifully that the Earth reached up and made it into treasure in memory of its power. No spell that hurts anyone ever gets pearled like this.
Part of me wants to fling the ugly, dirty thing from me, banish it from the house. The other part turns the spell over and traces the glyph of welcome on the grainy sandstone surface. Answering warmth wakes under my fingertip. The spell is joyous with its own power. I cup my hands around it and taste its flavor, waiting for the spell to tell me what it does. Juicy sourgrass stems, cinnamon, wheatbread, green grapes -- a harvest spell, of sorts.
Harvest.
What would I plant? What reap?
This experience of having the Other inside me. Already planted. Already grown and flowered. Fruit, unbearable fruit. Can I harvest it now and lay it away?
I stroke the spell, trace some glyphs of inquiry into it. The Jessamine in my head watches, quiet, not protesting.
The red warmth of wine answers my touch. The spell accepts my alterations.
“Will you go quietly?” I ask.
“Oh, yes,” she says with my mouth. And past all her fears and worries, I feel the great flood of love she feels for me, the gratitude and exasperation and choked delight and longing, the leaves of so many shared memories, laughter and starlight and wonder, times we pushed each other away but came back, times we asked hard questions and stayed for hard answers, times we surprised each other.
For a moment I think, I can live with this.
Then she says, “Let’s go, Ell. You can’t live with me. You know it and I know it.”
It is her hand in my hand that lifts the stone to my mouth, her lips in my lips that press the opening glyph into the spell’s skin.
The rock melts. The spell opens. Shimmering gold and green light weaves around me, and I see orchards flowering with spring rain, leafing out green with summer’s sun, sturdy and strong from earth, air, water, sunfire, all mixed with each fruit’s own signature. Jessamine grows strong and ripe inside me. For a little while I am afraid that I will be cast into dreams indeed, leaving Jessamine alone in my head.
She grows more, basking in the light, too big now to be contained. I cry aloud as pain flashes through me, and then she is reft from me.
When my eyes clear, I hold a perfect black plum in my hands, and Jessamine is gone from my head.
She stares across the table at me. “What happened?” she whispers, pale and frightened.
“It’s all right,” I say. The spell is gone and I send gratitude after it. I set the plum on the table. I look at the cookies on the plate and sigh with happiness, blessing my singular state. “Don’t ever do that again.”
She picks up her computer, turns it so I can see the spell on the screen. She selects the entire document and hits the delete button. The spell vanishes.
“Take it off the flashcard too,” I say.
Her eyes widen, but she opens the memory storage card and removes the spell from that as well.
It doesn’t matter. If she really wants to, she can reconstruct the spell from scratch. I know better than ever how her mind works now. Anything she spent so much time crafting is etched into her brain.
“I love you,” I say. “But I don’t want to be you.”
She shakes her head. “I understand.”
“You don’t,” I say. “You don’t want to.” I push the plum and it rolls all the way across the table to stop in front of her. “But if you want to know what it was like to be you inside of me, taste this.”
She picks up the plum and stares at me. I remember two girls sitting on a front stoop in Brooklyn. I remember us walking along a seaside street on a misty evening, things silvered with street light and damp, the only warmth her hand in mine.
Sometimes I want never to see her again.
Sometimes I’m so angry with her I want to scream.
She’s my best friend in all the world.
She raises the plum to her mouth and takes a bite.
THE DOLPHIN AND THE DEEP, by Thomas Burnett Swann
I: THE TRITON
From the time I was a small child I have liked to wander. Once, at the age of five, I ran away from my parents’ villa in Caere and followed the road to the necropolis. But the burial mounds frightened me. Carved out of red tufa stone and heaped with soil, they crouched like demons from Avernus. I peered through their narrow entrances and thought of Tuchuicha, the monster with the face of a vulture and the ears of a donkey. Wild roses scratched my legs and a blue-eyed owl cried eerily from a cypress tree. I hid in a nest of cyclamen and fell asleep. My father came in his chariot to find me. “You wander furiously,” he said, “then, like a cub, fall asleep. I will call you Bear.”
In spite of the mishap I soon ran away again, and my coming to manhood served only to legitimize what, for a child, was forbidden. I visited Veil with its cyclopean walls, and proud, drab little Rome, where Tarquin the Proud was ruling a restless people. I visited the Sybarites, who cover their highways with canvas to shade their delicate complexions. I studied the Mysteries at Borsippa, near Babylon, and navigation at Carthage. But wherever I went I dreamed of somewhere else, another city, another sea, and being a young man of wealth and leisure, with parents who humored if not encouraged me, I was able to go where I chose.
Thus it was that I began the last of all my voyages, the longest and by far the most perilous, in search of love. It began, like the other voyages, with a simple wish to explore. My people, the Etruscans, had founded a colony at Adria, on the eastern coast of Hesperia. It was young; it piqued my sense of adventure. I bought passage on a small merchantman, the Turan, and skirting the hostile cities of Magna Graecia, sailed up the coast of Adria. Three days sufficed to show me the town, a mere hamlet of sickly cattle and plain women, with never a sign of Gauls. The real adventure began when I returned south with the Turan. A sudden shore wind swept us away from land and, dead in our path, a jagged island stabbed from the sea. A palace in the style of the old Cretan sea-kings, with white walls, blue pediments, and red columns swelling into bulbous capitals, descended in rooms and courtyards toward the water, and stairways circled down to the lapping waves. Feathery tamarisk trees leaned against the walls and a forest of cedars flanked the lowest stairs.
“I would like to go ashore,” I said. Vel, the captain, looked doubtful.
“These are still Greek waters,” he muttered, fingering his pointed beard. Greeks and Etruscans, I knew, raided each other’s shipping without scruple and then raised cries of piracy.
“If a ship comes, leave me.” I brandished a leather pouch of asses, or gold and silver coins.
“You want the dinghy?” He pointed to the small boat attached to our stern.
“No, I’ll swim.” Already I was stripping off my tunic.
I shuddered. Only a fool ignores an omen. Was the goddess protesting my notorious indifference to love by striking her own statue, as if to say, “The next bolt will not strike wood!”? Unmarried at twenty-five, I was not such a man as Turan took to her heart.
Nonsense, I told myself. The captain has offended her—such a greedy man!—or one of the crew has forsaken a girl in a port. I dove in the water and, skirting a school of dolphins which brazenly barred my path, drew myself into the stairs at the foot of the palace. Turquoise lizards, bright as Egyptian scarabs, scurried over my feet. Sand lay heavy on stone. There were no human footprints; only the tracks of an animal, a deer’s perhaps. I climbed the stairs, my bare feet crunching the sand, and entered the palace beneath a lintel of blue gypsum. At once I stepped into an audience chamber dominated by a tall throne of porphyry. On the painted walls leaped dolphins, bluer than skies after storm, and anemones flowered in submarine meadows. Sunlight from clerestory windows lit motes of dust into tiny embers and kindled the red tile floor into burning coals. The hooves of an animal echoed in a distant corridor.
True to my nickname, Bear, I like to prowl, and room by room I explored the palace. In the highest chamber, swallows had built a nest from mud and leaves. A couch with the feet of a lion hunched in the rear. Vials of brilliant glass—amethyst red, and amber—littered the floor like a burst of mushrooms in a temple garden. On one wall, a slim-waisted athlete vaulted a charging bull; on another, a bare-breasted woman, with coiling black curls, sang to a warrior as he boarded his ship. Her eyes were loving and very sad.
Her sadness—indeed, that of the entire palace, with its air of age and neglect—depressed me. I hurried from the room and the palace and down the great stairway to the sea. I paused on the lowest step to feel the sun on my body and catch its rays in the serpent ring I wore. But shadows, not sun, still held me. I lowered myself in the water and swam for the figurehead of the Lady Turan, whose wooden arms looked warm and hospitable. This time the dolphins, one of them a rare albino, parted to let me pass.