The Mammoth Book of New Comic Fantasy

by Mike Ashley

A woman appeared in the distance. He wondered if that was her. But then he saw that it couldn’t be, the woman’s walk was strange and her body was misshapen. She’s pregnant, he realised. It was a common thing in the days of over-population, but he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a pregnant woman back home – it must have been years. She looked at him questioningly as she waddled up the steps balancing two paper bags. Alan thought the woman looked familiar; he knew that face. He reached out to help her.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “I’m looking for Cecily Walker.”

  “My name’s Walker,” the woman told him. “But I don’t know any Cecily.”

  Matrix, what a moron, Alan thought, wanting to kick himself. Of course he knew the woman; it was Cecily’s mother, and if she was pregnant, it had to be 1948. “My mistake,” he told her. “It’s been a long day.”

  The smell of roses had vanished, along with the leaves on the trees. There was snow on the ground and a strong north-easterly wind. Alan set the thermostat on his jumpsuit accordingly and jumped off the bike.

  “So it’s you again,” Cecily said ironically. “Another case of perfect timing.” She was twenty pounds heavier and there were lines around her mouth and her eyes. She wore a heavy wool cardigan sweater over an oversized T-shirt, jeans, and a pair of fuzzy slippers. She looked him up and down. “You don’t age at all, do you?”

  “Please can I come in? It’s freezing.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Come in. You like a cup of coffee?”

  “You mean liquid caffeine? That’d be great.”

  He followed her into the living room and his mouth dropped open. The red sofa was gone, replaced by something that looked like a giant banana. The television was four times bigger and had lost the rabbit-ears. The floral wallpaper had been replaced by plain white walls not very different from those of his apartment. “Sit,” she told him. She left the room for a moment and returned with two mugs, one of which she slammed down in front of him, causing a miniature brown tidal wave to splash across his legs.

  “Cecily, are you upset about something?”

  “That’s a good one! He comes back after fifteen years and asks me if I’m upset.”

  “Fifteen years!” Alan sputtered.

  “That’s right. It’s 1994, you bozo.”

  “Oh, darling, and you’ve been waiting all this time . . .”

  “Like hell I have,” she interrupted. “When I met you, back in 1979, I realised that I couldn’t stay in that sham of a marriage for another minute. So I must have set some kind of a record for quickie marriage and divorce, by Danville standards, anyway. So I was a thirty-year-old divorcee whose marriage had fallen apart in less than two months, and I was back to washing my hair alone on Saturday nights. And people talked. Lord, how they talked. But I didn’t care, because I’d finally met my soul-mate and everything was going to be all right. He told me he’d fix it. He’d be back. So I waited. I waited for a year. Then I waited two years. Then I waited three. After ten, I got tired of waiting. And if you think I’m going through another divorce, you’re crazy.”

  “You mean you’re married again?”

  “What else was I supposed to do? A man wants you when you’re forty, you jump at it. As far as I knew, you were gone forever.”

  “I’ve never been away, Cecily. I’ve been here all along, but never at the right time. It’s that drebbing machine; I can’t figure out the controls.”

  “Maybe Arnie can have a look at it when he gets in, he’s pretty good at that sort of thing – what am I saying?”

  “Tell me, did you ever write the story?”

  “What’s to write about? Anyway, what difference does it make? Woman’s Secrets went bankrupt years ago.”

  “Matrix! If you never wrote the story, then I shouldn’t even know about you. So how can I be here? Dammit, it’s a paradox. And I wasn’t supposed to cause any of those. Plus, I think I may have started an Indian war. Have you noticed any change in local history?”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind. Look, I have an idea. When exactly did you get divorced?”

  “I don’t know; late ’79. October, November, something like that.”

  “All right, that’s what I’ll aim for. November, 1979. Be waiting for me.”

  “How?”

  “Good point. Okay, just take my word for it, you and me are going to be sitting in this room right here, right now, with one big difference: we’ll have been married for fifteen years, okay?”

  “But what about Arnie?”

  “Arnie won’t know the difference. You’ll never have married him in the first place.” He kissed her on the cheek. “I’ll be back in a minute. Well, in 1979. You know what I mean.” He headed for the door.

  “Hold on,” she said. “You’re like the guy who goes out for a pack of cigarettes and doesn’t come back for thirty years.”

  “What guy?”

  “Never mind. I wanna make sure you don’t turn up anywhere else. Bring the machine in here.”

  “Is that it?” she said one minute later.

  “That’s it.”

  “But it looks like a goddamn bicycle.”

  “Where do you want me to put it?”

  She led him upstairs. “Here,” she said. Alan unfolded the bike next to the bed. “I don’t want you getting away from me next time,” she told him.

  “I don’t have to get away from you now.”

  “You do. I’m married and I’m at least fifteen years older than you.”

  “Your age doesn’t matter to me,” Alan told her. “When I first fell in love with you, you’d been dead three hundred years.”

  “You really know how to flatter a girl, don’t you? Anyway, don’t aim for ’79. I don’t understand paradoxes, but I know I don’t like them. If we’re ever gonna get this thing straightened out, you must arrive before 1973, when the story is meant to be published. Try for ’71 or ’72. Now that I think about it, those were a strange couple of years for me. Nothing seemed real to me then. Nothing seemed worth bothering about, nothing mattered; I always felt like I was waiting for something. Day after day I waited, though I never knew what for.”

  She stepped back and watched him slowly turn a dial until he vanished. Then she remembered something.

  How could she have ever have forgotten such a thing? She was eleven and she was combing her hair in front of her bedroom mirror. She screamed. When both her parents burst into the room and demanded to know what was wrong, she told them she’d seen a man on a bicycle. They nearly sent her to a child psychiatrist.

  Damn that Alan, she thought. He’s screwed up again.

  The same room, different decor, different time of day. Alan blinked several times; his eyes had difficulty adjusting to the darkness. He could barely make out the shape on the bed, but he could see all he needed to. The shape was alone, and it was adult size. He leaned close to her ear. “Cecily,” he whispered. “It’s me.”

  He touched her shoulder and shook her slightly. He felt for a pulse. He switched on the bedside lamp, gazed down at a withered face framed by silver hair, and sighed. “Sorry, love,” he said. He covered her head with a sheet, and sighed again.

  He sat down on the bike and unfolded the printout. He’d get it right eventually.

  SWEET, SAVAGE SORCERER

  Esther Friesner

  Arrows whizzed past her as Narielle drummed slender heels into the heaving sides of her faithful unicorn, Thunderwind. Her bosom rose and fell in perfect cadence with the noble steed’s movements as the Black Tower of Burning Doom thrust its massive structure into view. Behind her, the sun was setting in a fiery ball, quenching its flames slowly, achingly, in the moist depths of the Lesser Sea of Northern Alraziah-le-Fethynauri’in-ebu-Korfiamminettash.

  Bitterly, Narielle reflected that if her father’s men had not stopped to ask directions to the sea, they would never have been caught with their lances down by Lord Eyargh’s mercenaries.

  Another thick shaft, flying closer than the res
t, cut off her meditations and the pointed tip of her left ear. The elfin princess lifted her chin defiantly and raised herself in the stirrups to turn and shout bold yet elegant insults at her pursuers. Then Thunderwind carried her over the threshold of the Black Tower and she was safe . . . for the moment.

  Lord Eyargh’s mercenaries, cheated of their prey, milled about under the lone window of the Black Tower of Burning Doom and made a collective nuisance of themselves. Narielle leaned out from the unglazed casement and regarded them with haughty disdain. They shot more arrows at her, one of which lodged in the headboard of the large, comfortable bed behind her. Her bold heart stifled the urge to scream her courageous head off. Instead, she seized the handy velvet bell rope on the wall and pulled with firm resolve.

  A dark-robed shadow detached itself from the depths of the tower room, strode past the startled elfin princess, paused only to sweep her from her feet in powerfully muscled arms and pitch her onto the large, comfortable bed where she narrowly missed squashing a sleeping cat.

  A word of unknown and ecstatic sorcery was spoken out the window. From below, the vile shouts of Lord Eyargh’s mercenaries abruptly changed to the peeping of downy baby chicks. The figure at the window smiled with grim amusement. He paused only long enough to release a tethered chicken hawk before turning his attention to his still-rebounding guest.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “You are the sorcerer of the Black Tower?” Narielle’s throat contracted with an emotion she would long deny as anything more than astonishment, dubiety, and the need for a cool drink.

  “Does that surprise you?” His voice was low, thrilling, more powerful than any she had ever heard, twisting her ever-more rapidly palpitating heart into a tight knot of unnamable confusion. His azure eyes probed the very depths of her soul with a bold disregard for the empty charade of elfin High Court etiquette. But there was a deep strain of irony in his words, as if his past life contained some unknown secret wound of which no one save himself knew, and whose carefully concealed pain had, if not poisoned, at least tainted the life of one outwardly so strong and unassailable.

  “No,” she lied. She got off the bed fast.

  He laughed; once, shortly. But in that single syllable of supposed merriment, Narielle read many unspoken sorrows. She could not lie to him. He had suffered enough.

  “That is . . . I mean . . . you’re so young.”

  Now his eyes, bluer than the magic sword Narielle concealed beneath her voluminous green velvet skirts sewn with pearls and trimmed with gold lace, narrowed. “I am,” he replied. It was a challenge.

  The elfin princess was not one to let any man ramp all over her. Hers was a proud spirit. She lifted her chin defiantly and took command of the conversation. “The name of Brandon of the Black Tower has reached my father, Lord Vertig of the Silver Unicorn, king of the elves of the Green Woodlands. Even as we speak, he is besieged in the White Castle of the Golden Arches by his mortal enemy, Lord Eyargh of the Red Sword. By a ruse, I and one hundred fifty of my father’s men managed to slip through the enemy lines, dispatched in search of you, hoping to enlist the already legendary aid of your sorcerous powers in our cause.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “Do you?” She could not conceal her astonishment.

  “I am a sorcerer. Perhaps you have heard of crystal balls?” His finely formed yet generous mouth contorted itself into an expression at once fascinating and unreadable. His hand strayed upward to touch her injured extremity. “You’ve been wounded.” A strange catch wrenched all sarcasm from his voice.

  Startled as much by the unexpected concern in the young wizard’s words as by the almost electrical shock that coursed through her every fiber at this lightest contact of his flesh to her flesh, Narielle replied, “It’s nothing.”

  “Nothing?” Behind his simple repetition of her very word, she thought she detected a new sense of respect for herself as a person in her own right.

  His breath burned hot and fierce across the nape of her neck as he murmured a healing spell over her ear. Confusion fluttered in her breast like a caged gryphon. She stepped away from him, saying, “While you waste your magic on what is no more than a scratch, elves perish!”

  As she spoke of her people’s distress, she could not forbid her eyes from straying the length of the young enchanter’s person. Dark, unruly hair fell in a shock of thick, black waves just above his cerulean eyes. When he smiled, the perfect whiteness of his teeth showed in even more startling contrast to his sunbronzed skin. His nose hinted at past hurts borne with nobility and forbearance. The neck of his necromancer’s robe was open, revealing the smooth, enticing expanse of his broad chest. The thin material could not effectively conceal the incredible size, the almost terrifying bulk, the barely restrained thrust and untamed, overwhelming power of his shoulders.

  Fortunately, there was a full-length mirror on the wall opposite Narielle, which allowed her the leisure to contemplate her own fiery red hair, emerald green eyes, and lithe, slender, graceful yet self-assured form.

  Brandon of the Black Tower chuckled deep in his throat. How did he dare to mock her? She hated him! She would always hate him! Then he spoke: “Such fire. And what will you give me in exchange for my help . . . my lady?” There was no mistaking the scorn in his voice. She hated him still more wildly, yet more passionately! “Gold?” She couldn’t stand him!

  Narielle’s reply was as cold and formal as wounded pride and the narrowly repressed desire to slap the sorcerer’s grinning face could make it: “No.”

  “No?” His craggy eyebrows rose.

  “On my honor as a highborn elfin princess and virgin. My father’s men carried the gold for your fee. When Lord Eyargh’s men attacked my father’s men, the chest fell over a cliff into the sea, and the men of the Vegas Sands made off with it.”

  “So you have no chest.” Now he no longer smiled. “You speak much of men, my lady . . . for one who calls herself a virgin.”

  She would kick him in the shins and tell her noble father on him! “Do you doubt the evidence of your eyes, my lord Brandon? I rode into your tower on a unicorn.”

  “It is well known by the lowest village idiot that elfin women can fake their unicorns.” The ancient pain rose ever nearer to the surface of the young sorcerer’s emotions and threatened to pierce through. In that instant, with a lurch of her own heart, Narielle understood the long-past but never forgotten betrayal that had embittered Brandon’s proud soul. Who had she been, that other elf-maiden who had so cruelly deceived him? Why had she done it? What wouldn’t Narielle give to get her hands on the little point-eared bitch and teach her some manners?

  Compassion for Brandon welled up in Narielle’s bosom, inflating it nicely. It was only her own fierce, overweening, foolish pride that prevented her from taking him into her arms at once and soothing away all his past hurts as if he were no more than a little boy, or a wrongfully whipped puppy. Yet even as she snapped harsh words at him, her heart swelled with the dreadful ache of longing to cuddle him.

  “Then perhaps you had better hire a consulting village idiot!” She tossed her glorious mane of hair, her nostrils flaring, and pawed the ground with grand bravado. “Even he would be able to tell you that the virtue of the ladies of the royal house of Lord Vertig of the Silver Unicorn of the White Castle of the Golden Arches of the Green Woodlands is one that we protect with steel!” So saying, she drew the full, aweinspiring length of the impossibly hard enchanted blade from the clinging embrace of the soft scabbard beneath her skirts. With a wild, untrammeled exultation to feel her hand close around the imposing diameter of that wondrous hilt once more, Narielle realized just how deeply she loved her sword.

  Brandon looked mildly amused. He made a gesture whose mystic significance was known to few wizards. Narielle watched with mounting horror as her blade shuddered, then drooped like sunstruck celery. The enchanter took it from her nerveless hand and flung it across the room where it bounced off the large, comfortable bed and scar
ed the cat.

  “You have no gold, yet you would have my services,” he said. “Very well, you shall have them. And in exchange, I shall have –”

  “What?” The elfin princess’ bosom lifted defiantly.

  “– you.”

  With a hoarse ejaculation he crushed her to his chest. She felt his wizardhood pressing against her thigh and could not tell whether the emotions also now rising within her were so much fear as hesitantly joyous anticipation of what was to come. Roughly, he tore aside her golden lace, stripping the lush green velvet from her heaving shoulders in one masterful motion. Pearls popped and caromed off everything in sight. The cat yelped and leaped off the large, comfortable bed.

  After he returned from burying the unicorn, he knelt like the meanest supplicant beside the pile of new-mown hay which had housed so much recent passion. “Can you ever forgive me . . . Narielle?”

  Her eyes brimmed with the ebbing tide of complete fulfillment and a tender fondness for the repentant sorcerer. “Forgive you, Brandon? For making a real elf of me? Oh, you are more magician than any of those wand-waving charlatans!” Playfully, he plucked fragrant straws from her tousled hair and threw them at the cat who was back on the large, comfortable, conventional, unromantic, deliberately overlooked bed.

  “Forgive me for doubting you, my love. And about the unicorn –”

  She laughed the rich, full-throated laugh of newly, sweetly acquired wisdom. “Thunderwind was a loyal beast, but in his heart he understood that this day would come. I think he was glad it came quickly and painlessly.”

  But Brandon was not assuaged. Unaccustomed anguish filled his sapphire eyes. With a harsh sob he buried his face between the soft, welcoming curves of her two hands and implored her pardon for ever having doubted her. “It is you who are the enchanter, Narielle!” he gasped. “You have taken a blind, headstrong fool and made a man of him!”

  “Did I? Good. Now, about Daddy . . .”

  Brandon of the Black Tower raised his large yet sensitive hands to a sky no less blue than his eyes and turned Lord Vertig’s foes into frogs. The siege was lifted, although the transformed Lord Eyargh hung around the moat defiantly. He was finally routed when Lord Vertig dispatched a contingent of net-wielding victualers to scoop up those of the enemy they could catch. That night there was great feasting and rejoicing in the White Castle of the Golden Arches.