The Wildside Book of Fantasy: 20 Great Tales of Fantasy

by Gene Wolfe

On and on Cororuc’s guide led him. And at last they emerged and the Briton saw the starlit sky above him.

  “In that way is a village of your tribesmen,” said the Pict, pointing, “where you will find a welcome until you wish to take up your journey anew.”

  And he pressed gifts on the Celt; gifts of garments of cloth and finely worked deerskin, beaded belts, a fine horn bow with arrows skillfully tipped with obsidian. Gifts of food. His own weapons were returned to him.

  “But an instant,” said the Briton, as the Pict turned to go. “I followed your tracks in the forest. They vanished.” There was a question in his voice.

  The Pict laughed softly. “I leaped into the branches of the tree. Had you looked up, you would have seen me. If ever you wish a friend, you will ever find one in Berula, chief among the Alban Picts.”

  He turned and vanished. And Cororuc strode through the moon­light toward the Celtic village.

  RINGARD AND DENDRA, by Brian McNaughton

  The most extravagant rumors of the stranger’s ugliness had been nothing but plain truth. A further rumor had yet to be investigated, that he was a fiend whose mother had made a fool of herself with a snake. I dismounted and walked towards him, my hand resting on the hilt of the manqueller that hung by my saddle.

  As if we had been chatting all day, he asked, “This used to be the slope of a hill, didn’t it?”

  That was obvious. The Sons of Cludd had sheered it right off, leaving the cliff of bare earth that towered above us. I assumed they had planned to build a retaining wall, for destabilizing gullies already scored the cliff, but they had abandoned the picks and shovels that lay rusting about us and run off to hunt witches.

  I tried to restart our conversation on a formal basis: “I am Lord Fariel.”

  “Of the House of Sleith,” he stated, and I managed not to flinch when he swung his eyes at me. “You didn’t lay your own land waste, did you?”

  Except for their extraordinary sadness, his eyes were those of an ordinary old man. It was their setting that had upset everyone, tattoos like the patterned skin of a reptile. Not even his eyelids and his lips had escaped the needle. The scaly effect was accidental, because the details depicted nothing more sinister than exotic flowers and fungi.

  However odd, a human garden was pleasanter than a human snake, and I answered him less stiffly: “The Empress wanted the Cluddites out of her hair, so she sent them to fortify the border. They tell me this will be a supply road.”

  He nodded absently as he scanned the pines at the top of the cliff, then turned and pondered the hardwood forest on the interrupted slope. He seemed to be looking for lost landmarks.

  I said, “You don’t come from here, do you?”

  “I do. My wife may have been your kinswoman. Dendra Sleith?”

  I gaped as I would at a confessed elf, for he was a creature found only in fireside tales and songs. My Aunt Dendra had long ago been kidnapped on her wedding-night by a woodcutter’s son named: “Ringard?”

  “The same.”

  My father would have killed him on the spot. Less impetuous relatives would have deferred his death, the better to savor it, but I felt only curiosity about a man whose stature in our provincial gossip was mythic. Disfigurement aside, he was bald and bent and ordinary as an old boot. He looked hard and lean, but so does the oaf who slops out my stables, and nobody would ever sing rousing ballads about him.

  He stared at me with the dignity of a hound too weary to fawn or cringe. If I’d struck him, I don’t think he would have been impressed. He had been struck before.

  Contrary to his expectations, I was concerned for his safety. “You had better come with me,” I said. “The Cluddites are in the grip of a witch-craze, they’ve misused some of my people already, and your appearance....”

  His smile was an angry twitch. “Like many others who served with Lord Azaxiel, I was shipwrecked on the coast of Tampoontam, where the savages gave me the choice of joining their tribe by either adoption or ingestion. You might say that I earned these decorations in the service of our late Emperor.”

  The Cluddites wouldn’t say that. They would assume that old Ringard had dined and worshipped in the fashion of his adoptive brothers. Burning an idolatrous cannibal might strike them as a diverting respite from burning witches. While I considered how to warn him tactfully, he asked, “What set them off?”

  “One of their preachers, of course. An owl hooted, a wolf howled, the wind sighed among the trees—they don’t like any of that. They’re mostly from Zaxann, this bunch, swineherds and ploughboys, but they seem afraid of the woods.”

  “The gulf between a woodsman and a farmer is as great as that between a grand lord like yourself and a common sailor.” He gestured at the raw gap the Holy Soldiers had cut through the hill. “Farmers hate trees.”

  While we talked he had led me toward a pile of felled trees, tall as the cliff, that the Cluddites had pushed aside. He circled the heap, climbed it easily as a monkey, peered into it as if searching. Once or twice he called softly, though I could not hear the words.

  “Have you lost a dog?”

  “No.” He gave no explanation, but he caught the hint that his behavior was odd. He scrambled down and accepted my offer of food and shelter.

  * * * *

  My household had cheered me for riding forth alone to confront the infamous Snake Man who had scared them even more than the witch-hunt. Their enthusiasm cooled when I brought him home for dinner. My wife and sisters absented themselves from the table and banished the children to the nursery.

  The servants who attended him at trembling arm’s length averted their eyes from his fantastic decoration, so I was kept hopping to spare him from being scalded or carved. He was, after all, my long-lost uncle, for kidnapping is an acceptable form of marriage in our part of the world. The social gulf in the couple and Aunt Dendra’s status as someone else’s bride suggested quibbles, but I was no lawyer. He hardly noticed my efforts as he attacked his food in the style of a woodcutter turned sailor and adopted by cannibals. Some of my more legitimate uncles had worse manners.

  Finished, unselfconsciously stuffing bread and imperfectly stripped bones into his pockets, he asked, “Do you remember Dendra?”

  I had often asked myself that. I think my memory of the fair-haired girl with the sly smile who had joined me in romping with the hounds or making mud-castles, when she should have been practicing the lute or counting her jewels, derived from stories I had been told, and from a portrait I found in a storeroom. I did remember a sudden lack in my life, a moment beyond which my childhood no longer seemed so happy. That, I think, was my only true memory of Dendra.

  I wanted to let him talk, so I said merely, “I don’t think so.”

  “If you remembered her, you would know,” he stated. “She was ... entirely herself. Her hair was the color of rain when the sun shines.”

  While his eyes turned inward, I noticed that the children had defied their mother’s order and were peeking at my fabulous guest from a shadowed gallery. I pretended not to see them. Later, when I should have chased them to bed with assurances that he was only telling a story, I had forgotten them, so I was blamed for their nightmares; and for their fear, not yet overcome, of the woods around our home.

  When his silence had continued for some time, I prompted, “Was?”

  “Oh, yes. I assume she’s dead. I certainly hope so, for the alternatives are unthinkable.” He treated me again to that angry twitch he used for a smile. “I searched in Crotalorn, but the palace of Dwelphorn Thooz has been eradicated. Even Amorartis Street is gone, buried under the mosaic paving of a spacious new square.”

  I called for more wine and suggested, to my everlasting regret, that he begin his story at the beginning.

  * * * *

  Even as a child (Ringard said), I loved trees and grieved that my father chopped them down so that louts like us could suck hot soup. I would often sneak outdoors at night to avoid sharing the fire. In the hisses and crac
kles so comforting to everyone else, I heard tiny shrieks of agony.

  Each tree was different, even each oak or larm or hemlock from the others of its kind, and I believed that certain trees spoke to me. I followed my father to work each day: not as other small boys would, to play at woodcutter, but to watch with grave disapproval and make sure he left my special friends standing.

  It was no use beating this nonsense out of my head, though he tried often enough. He was finally persuaded by one of our neighbors, a woman whose wisdom was ordinarily viewed with suspicion, that I was favored by the godlings who lived in trees. Even my stolid father used charms to fend off the snits of dryads his work might discommode, so the wise woman’s explanation, though not welcome, was accepted. My mother imagined I would grow up to be a priest, and I encouraged her delusion.

  As it does to us all, time callused my finer senses. I grew deaf to the voices of trees. I couldn’t bring myself to chop one down, but I would guide the oxen that hauled it out of the forest. I even overcame my qualms about splitting and stacking wood, although that would once have been as distasteful to me as cording human corpses.

  One day I was chopping kindling in our yard when I noticed a piece that looked like a wolf—no, not exactly: as if a wolf were trapped in the wood, and I could free it by knocking off the irrelevant parts. It was a very poor likeness that I carved, but my father recognized it. My mother displayed it over the hearth, refusing my pleas to replace it with any of the better figures I was soon making.

  In every stick I saw hidden shapes, and I became obsessed with revealing them. My father fretted that I meant to ruin him by turning his valuable firewood into whimsies. I perversely maintained that my carvings had more worth than kindling, that they even justified the sacrifice of living trees. Those captive owls and trout were really there. Why would the gods let me see them, if not to set me the challenge of liberating them?

  No one ever thought of selling the results, and my parents began to suspect that my lunacy had returned in a new form. I tried to explain, but talk of freeing wooden captives dismayed them. My mother removed the wolf from its place of honor on the mantel.

  I discovered an abandoned hut in the forest where I could steal away to work in peace. Before long the figures had crowded me out, but I squatted at the entrance and liberated still more birds and beasts, demons and men. I was mustering an army to protect me from the demands of the world, and I felt an urgent need to make it ever larger as those demands grew clamorous. A plan was afoot to send me to the Pollian monks in year or so. Loving shapes and patterns as I did, no future held less appeal than adoring the Sun God until he should blind me.

  Totally absorbed in my work one day, I was startled out of my wits by a girl’s voice: “Oh, ugh! Why are you making such a filthy beast?”

  The wood that came to hand was full of turtles lately, not filthy beasts but well-armored philosophers. I tried to tell her that my subjects chose me, but I was unused to wedging my thoughts into words. As I mumbled and stammered, she roamed through my array of defenders, gawking and disarranging.

  “What grotesque rubbish!” she said. “You ought to make only nice things, like this bird, this horse. What’s this?”

  “It’s a troll.”

  “I thought it was my brother. If you painted them, it might be easier to tell. Wouldn’t they all look nicer if they were painted?”

  “No,” I said automatically, but it was an idea that had never entered my head.

  “I’ll bring paints tomorrow. You’ll see.”

  And she was gone, before I had determined who or quite what she was, apart from one more intolerable intrusion of the world. I thought of gathering my friends together and moving on to a less frequented part of the forest, but that would have taken enormous effort. I should have chased her away, and I angrily honed the sharp words I would speak tomorrow.

  She wouldn’t be back, though. She was a mooncalf who had slipped her leash. Paints, indeed! Priests and lords might have paints to splash on their toys, but the people I knew, scrabbling for wood or hides, were lucky to get whitewash for their hovels.

  Why should I regret that she was crazy, or that I probably wouldn’t see her again? Because, I told myself, I would never be able to throw insults and rocks at her. Nevertheless I entertained visions of my friends dressed up in pretty paints. I saw her working beside me with her brush, pausing to gaze admiringly at my carving. She would admire me even more when a bear or a wolf came upon us and I scared it off. A girl, I had thought, was only an inferior sort of boy, but now I grew bemused with the differences. The biggest difference was her ability to ruin a whole day’s work with so little effort. No boy had ever done that.

  She spoiled my next morning, too, by failing to return. I could only whittle aimlessly. Some of the pieces I found held her face, but I had no talent for exact likenesses of individuals. Her memory changed more the closer I examined it, until I hardly remembered her face at all.

  Convinced at last that she wouldn’t come, I had just submerged into my work when she dropped beside me from nowhere. I could have carved myself a more eloquent tongue than the one knotted behind my teeth, but she chattered for both of us as she painted the troll that had recalled her brother: yes, painted, to my astonishment, in the yellow and blue livery of the House of Sleith. The colors of that Tribe were repeated in her untidy clothes and the ribbons of her braids. I guessed she was a thieving servant from the castle.

  Some days later she told me a story in which her distracted nurse called for her as “Lady Dendra,” but I shrugged that off. One of the few things I knew about great ladies was that they didn’t run loose in the woods with bare feet and dirty faces. She was even queerer than I was thought to be, but I didn’t hold it against her, for she was my first non-wooden friend.

  I carved, she painted my carvings and gave them life. She brought me books with pictures of tigers, griffins, men with black skins and suchlike mythical creatures, all of which I later found hiding in my wood. We made up histories for the figures and played elaborate games with them whose rules evolved daily. She gave me a set of knives that glimmered like the morning star, that cut the toughest oak as if it were fungus. She talked about our living together in the castle of the Sleiths when we were married, where we should have more than enough room to keep my creations out of the rain.

  To part with my friends pained me, but I could work such magic in her face with a simple gift that I would often give her figures she liked. When she let it drop that her fourteenth birthday was near, I labored in secret on a family of gnomes I had detected in the stump of a festiron. I freed them perfectly, and when I presented them to her on the eve of her birthday, she was transported. She gave me in return a hug and a kiss, two wonders entirely new. My cheeks burned, my brain floated away like a cloud, to specify only two of the bizarre effects, but she was so dazzled by her gift that she failed to see that I was fatally stricken. She ran off and left me to perish of fever and delirium.

  She didn’t appear the next day, nor the next. Her absences had always hurt, but this one was torture. I had so much to tell her, so much to ask her, so much to learn. Would she kiss me again?

  On the evening of the third day I was returning home from the forest when I saw that men in leather and iron were roaring in my father’s face while buffeting him about the head, kicking him in the behind and dunking him in the horse trough. Their trappings were yellow and blue, and their questions concerned me and Lady Dendra.

  Bawling with outrage, blind with tears, I dashed forth to patter bare fists and feet against iron backs. To my astonishment it was my father who met my attack, and who practiced on me the interviewing techniques he had just learned. My mother ran screaming from the hut—not to rescue me, as my leaping heart believed, but to add the weight of her big red fists to the beating. She screamed questions, alternately incomprehensible or shocking, while the laughter of the castle bullies rattled in my ringing ears.

  After the men rode off, my moth
er said that I would one day thank her for the beating, as it had probably spared me from gelding and garroting, the punishment for “mongrels who sniff at fancy bitches,” but I never did.

  When I felt well enough to walk to my private place, it seemed pointless. Lady Dendra wouldn’t be there, only a rabble of dummies. They could all rot, the captives could stay locked in the wood, nothing mattered. But my beautiful knives were there, her gift, and I might fittingly use one to cut my throat. That would certainly show everybody.

  When I returned by night she was, incredibly, waiting. She’d run here every time she could elude her new keepers. The gnomes had been our undoing. She had prized them above all her birthday gifts of stallions and silver and silk, and innocently praised my artistry to men who would bellow for their battleaxes when anyone spoke of art. We talked, we wept, we embraced, and this led us to the secrets we had suffered in advance for discovering. My friends stood guard around us in a haze of moonlight that grew brighter than any noon.

  We two fools assumed that life would go on as before, and we promised to meet the next day; but when I came home at dawn, soldiers from the castle clattered around our cottage like wasps. Unable to find me, they were inflicting the prescribed punishment on my father, while my mother called down curses on my head. This time I declined to intervene.

  I crept back to my hut by a devious route, but the soldiers had stormed straight to it. The grass where I had lain with Dendra was a scorched waste, trampled by hoofs and boots. My faithful friends had stood their ground and diverted the enemy’s wrath. Not one of them remained, no fragment could I recognize in the ashes.

  I ran where the woods were too thick and the crags too steep for horses, the legends too frightful for men. I renewed my conversations with the trees, although I did all the talking. With no one to teach me shaving or sewing, my beard sprouted and my clothing burst its seams. The simple folk who glimpsed me screamed and ran away.

  The creatures I freed now were weird. I would sometimes leave carvings in exchange when I slithered near the homes of men to steal a pig or a chicken, for Dendra had told me my work had value, but my gifts were mistaken for fetishes of dreadful virulence. At the farms where I left my works, tributes of food and wine would thereafter be placed outside the tightly secured gates with scrawled pleas that I spare the household from further tokens of demonic wrath.