Modern Classics of Science Fiction

by Gardner Dozois

  The mask’s expression was unreadable, but Angmark’s voice was triumphant. “I trapped you very easily.”

  “So you did,” said Thissell. The slave finished knotting his wrists together. A clatter of Angmark’s hymerkin sent him away. “Get to your feet,” said Angmark. “Sit in that chair.”

  “What are we waiting for?” inquired Thissell.

  “Two of our fellows still remain out on the water. We won’t need them for what I have in mind.”

  “Which is?”

  “You’ll learn in due course,” said Angmark. “We have an hour or so on our hands.”

  Thissell tested his bonds. They were undoubtedly secure.

  Angmark seated himself. “How did you fix on me? I admit to being curious.… Come, come,” he chided as Thissell sat silently. “Can’t you recognize that I have defeated you? Don’t make affairs unpleasant for youself.”

  Thissell shrugged. “I operated on a basic principle. A man can mask his face, but he can’t mask his personality.”

  “Aha,” said Angmark. “Interesting. Proceed.”

  “I borrowed a slave from you and the other two out-worlders, and I questioned them carefully. What masks had their masters worn during the month before your arrival? I prepared a chart and plotted their responses. Rolver wore the Tarn Bird about eighty percent of the time, the remaining twenty percent divided between the Sophist Abstraction and the Black Intricate. Welibus had a taste for the heroes of Kan Dachan Cycle. He wore the Chalekun, the Prince Intrepid, the Seavain most of the time: six days out of eight. The other two days he wore his South Wind or his Gay Companion. Kershaul, more conservative, preferred the Cave Owl, the Star Wanderer, and two or three other masks he wore at odd intervals.

  “As I say, I acquired this information from possibly its most accurate source, the slaves. My next step was to keep watch upon the three of you. Every day I noted what masks you wore and compared it with my chart. Rolver wore his Tarn Bird six times, his Black Intricate twice. Kershaul wore his Cave Owl five times, his Star Wanderer once, his Quincunx once and his Ideal of Perfection once. Welibus wore the Emerald Mountain twice, the Triple Phoenix three times, the Prince Intrepid once and the Shark God twice.”

  Angmark nodded thoughtfully. “I see my error. I selected from Welibus’ masks, but to my own taste – and as you point out, I revealed myself. But only to you.” He rose and went to the window. “Kershaul and Rolver are now coming ashore; they’ll soon be past and about their business – though I doubt if they’d interfere in any case; they’ve both become good Sirenese.”

  Thissell waited in silence. Ten minutes passed. Then Angmark reached to a shelf and picked up a knife. He looked at Thissell. “Stand up.”

  Thissell slowly rose to his feet. Angmark approached from the side, reached out, lifted the Moon Moth from Thissell’s head. Thissell gasped and made a vain attempt to seize it. Too late; his face was bare and naked.

  Angmark turned away, removed his own mask, donned the Moon Moth. He struck a call on his hymerkin. Two slaves entered, stopped in shock at the sight of Thissell.

  Angmark played a brisk tattoo, sang, “Carry this man up to the dock.”

  “Angmark!” cried Thissell. “I’m maskless!”

  The slaves seized him and in spite of Thissell’s desperate struggles, conveyed him out on the dock, along the float and up on the dock.

  Angmark fixed a rope around Thissell’s neck. He said, “You are now Haxo Angmark, and I am Edwer Thissell. Welibus is dead, you shall soon be dead. I can handle your job without difficulty. I’ll play musical instruments like a Night-man and sing like a crow. I’ll wear the Moon Moth till it rots and then I’ll get another. The report will go to Polypolis, Haxo Angmark is dead. Everything will be serene.”

  Thissell barely heard. “You can’t do this,” he whispered. “My mask, my face.…” A large woman in a blue and pink flower mask walked down the dock. She saw Thissell and emitted a piercing shriek, flung herself prone on the dock.

  “Come along,” said Angmark brightly. He tugged at the rope, and so pulled Thissell down the dock. A man in a Pirate Captain mask coming up from his houseboat stood rigid in amazement.

  Angmark played the zachinko and sang, “Behold the notorious criminal Haxo Angmark. Through all the outer-worlds his name is reviled; now he is captured and led in shame to his death. Behold Haxo Angmark!”

  They turned into the esplanade. A child screamed in fright; a man called hoarsely. Thissell stumbled; tears tumbled from his eyes; he could see only disorganized shapes and colors. Angmark’s voice belled out richly: “Everyone behold, the criminal of the out-worlds, Haxo Angmark! Approach and observe his execution!”

  Thissell feebly cried out, “I’m not Angmark; I’m Edwer Thissell; he’s Angmark.” But no one listened to him; there were only cries of dismay, shock, disgust at the sight of his face. He called to Angmark, “Give me my mask, a slave-cloth…”

  Angmark sang jubilantly, “In shame he lived, in maskless shame he dies.”

  A Forest Goblin stood before Angmark. “Moon Moth, we meet once more.”

  Angmark sang, “Stand aside, friend Goblin; I must execute this criminal. In shame he lived, in shame he dies!”

  A crowd had formed around the group; masks stared in morbid titillation at Thissell.

  The Forest Goblin jerked the rope from Angmark’s hand, threw it to the ground. The crowd roared. Voices cried, “No duel, no duel! Execute the monster!”

  A cloth was thrown over Thissell’s head. Thissell awaited the thrust of a blade. But instead his bonds were cut. Hastily he adjusted the cloth, hiding his face, peering between the folds.

  Four men clutched Haxo Angmark. The Forest Goblin confronted him, playing the skaranyi. “A week ago you reached to divest me of my mask; you have now achieved your perverse aim!”

  “But he is a criminal,” cried Angmark. “He is notorious, infamous!”

  “What are his misdeeds?” sang the Forest Goblin.

  “He has murdered, betrayed; he has wrecked ships; he has tortured, blackmailed, robbed, sold children into slavery; he has –”

  The Forest Goblin stopped him. “Your religious differences are of no importance. We can vouch however for your present crimes!”

  The hostler stepped forward. He sang fiercely, “This insolent Moon Moth nine days ago sought to preempt my choicest mount!”

  Another man pushed close. He wore a Universal Expert, and sang, “I am a Master Mask-maker; I recognize this Moon Moth out-worlder! Only recently he entered my shop and derided my skill. He deserves death!”

  “Death to the out-world monster!” cried the crowd. A wave of men surged forward. Steel blades rose and fell, the deed was done.

  Thissell watched, unable to move. The Forest Goblin approached, and playing the stimic sang sternly, “For you we have pity, but also contempt. A true man would never suffer such indignities!”

  Thissell took a deep breath. He reached to his belt and found his zachinko. He sang, “My friend, you malign me! Can you not appreciate true courage? Would you prefer to die in combat or walk maskless along the esplanade?”

  The Forest Goblin sang, “There is only one answer. First I would die in combat; I could not bear such shame.”

  Thissell sang, “I had such a choice. I could fight with my hands tied, and so die – or I could suffer shame, and through this shame conquer my enemy. You admit that you lack sufficient strakh to achieve this deed. I have proved myself a hero of bravery! I ask, who here has courage to do what I have done?”

  “Courage?” demanded the Forest Goblin. “I fear nothing, up to and beyond death at the hands of the Night-men!”

  “Then answer.”

  The Forest Goblin stood back. He played his double-kamanthil. “Bravery indeed, if such were your motives.”

  The hostler struck a series of subdued gomapard chords and sang, “Not a man among us would dare what this maskless man has done.”

  The crowd muttered approval.

 
The mask-maker approached Thissell, obsequiously stroking his double-kamanthil. “Pray Lord Hero, step into my nearby shop, exchange this vile rag for a mask befitting your quality.”

  Another mask-maker sang, “Before you choose, Lord Hero, examine my magnificent creations!”

  A man in a Bright Sky Bird mask approached Thissell reverently.

  “I have only just completed a sumptuous houseboat; seventeen years of toil have gone into its fabrication. Grant me the good fortune of accepting and using this splendid craft; aboard waiting to serve you are alert slaves and pleasant maidens; there is ample wine in storage and soft silken carpets on the decks.”

  “Thank you,” said Thissell, striking the zachinko with vigor and confidence. “I accept with pleasure. But first a mask.”

  The mask-maker struck an interrogative trill on the gomapard. “Would the Lord Hero consider a Sea Dragon Conqueror beneath his dignity?”

  “By no means,” said Thissell. “I consider it suitable and satisfactory. We shall go now to examine it.”

  EDGAR PANGBORN

  The Golden Horn

  The late Edgar Pangborn is almost forgotten these days, and is rarely ever mentioned even in historical surveys of the ’50s and ’60s … which is a pity, since he had a depth and breadth of humanity that have rarely been matched inside the field or out. Although he was never a particularly prolific writer (five SF novels, one or two mainstream novels, and a baker’s dozen or so of short pieces), he was nevertheless one of that select crew of underappreciated authors (one thinks of Cordwainer Smith, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, Avram Davidson, Richard McKenna) who have had an enormous underground effect on the field simply by impressing the hell out of other writers, and numerous authors-in-the-egg. Pangborn wrote about “little people” for the most part, only rarely focusing on the famous and powerful. He was one of only a handful of SF writers capable of writing about small-town or rural people with insight and sympathy (most SF is urban in orientation, written by city people about city people – or, when it is written by people from small towns, they are frequently kids who couldn’t wait to get out of those small towns and off to the bright lights of the big city … which often amounts to the same thing, as far as sympathies are concerned), and he was also one of the few who could get inside the minds of both the very young and the very old with equal ease and compassion.

  Pangborn’s materpiece was Davy, which, in spite of a somewhat weak ending (or, at least, a final third that doesn’t quite live up to the two-thirds that came before it), may well be the finest postholocaust novel ever written – in my opinion, it is seriously rivaled only by Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz and John Wyndham’s Re-birth. In any fair world, Davy alone ought to be enough to guarantee Pangborn a distinguished place in the history of the genre, but there were also novels like A Mirror for Observers – his International Fantasy Award winner, somewhat dated now, but still powerful, in which alien observers from two opposing philosophical camps vie for the soul of a brilliant human boy – and West of the Sun, an underrated novel about the efforts of human castaways to survive on an alien world, as well as beautifuly crafted short work such as “A Master of Babylon,” “Longtooth,” “The World Is a Sphere,” and “Angel’s Egg.”

  The story that follows, “The Golden Horn,” was probably Pangborn’s best short work. Although it was later melded into the novel Davy, it stands well on its own, and its intelligence and wit, its eloquence and power and compassion, its evocation of moments of both raw beauty and raw horror, as well as its slyly satirical touches, make it as good a handling of its theme as has ever been seen in the genre.

  Edgar Pangborn’s other works include The Judgment of Eve and The Company of Glory, the mainstream novel The Trial of Castilla Blake, the collection Good Neighbors and Other Strangers, and the posthumously published collection Still I Persist in Wondering. After many years out of print. Davy was reissued this year, by Collier – go out and buy it at once, while you still have the chance.

  Moha, where I was born, is mainly a nation of farms, grouped around their stockade village throughout the hill and lake and forest country. I grew up in Skoar, one of Moha’s three cities, which lies in a cup of the hills near the Katskil border. Even there things moved with the seasons and the Corn Market trade; wilderness whispers at the city’s borders, except where the two roads, the Northwest and the East, carry their double stream of men, mule-wagons, soldiers, tinkers, wanderers.

  Farming’s heartbreak work in Moha, same as everywhere. The stock give birth to as many mues as anywhere else, the labor’s long sweat and toil and disappointment wearing a man down to old age in the thirties, few farmers ever able to afford a slave. But the people scrape along, as I’ve seen human beings do in places worse than Moha. I’m older, I’ve traveled, I’ve learned to write and read in spite of that mystery’s being reserved to the priests. Looking back, I sometimes wonder if Moha wasn’t the happiest land I ever knew.

  The other cities – I’ve never visited them – are Moha City and Kanhar, both in the northwest on Moha Water. Their harbors can take big vessels up to thirty tons, the ships that trade with Levannon and the Katskil ports on the Hudson Sea. Moha City is the capital and Kanhar is the largest, twenty thousand population not counting slaves. Fifty miles south of Kanhar is Skoar, and there I was born squalling and redheaded in one of those houses that are licensed but still supposed not to exist. In such places they don’t have time for kids, but since I was a well-formed chunk of humanity and not a mue, the policers took me from my mother, whoever she was, when I was weaned, and dumped me in the Skoar orphanage, where I stayed until I was nine, old enough to earn a living.

  I’m thinking now of a day in middle March when I was past fourteen, and slipped away before dawn from the Bull and Iron where I worked as yardboy, bondservant of course, two dollars a week and board. I was merely goofing off. We’d gone through a tough winter with smallpox and flu, near-about everything except the lumpy plague, and a real snow in January almost an inch deep – I’ve never seen such a heavy fall of it before or since. There was even a frost in February; people called it unusual. In the stable loft where I slept I just thought it was damn cold. I remember looking out the loft window one January morning and seeing icicles on the sign over the inn door – a noble sign, painted for Old Jon Robson by some journeyman artist who likely got bed and a meal out of it along with the poverty talk that Old Jon saved for such occasions. A fine red bull with tremendous horns, tremendous everything, and for the iron there was a long spear sticking out of his neck and he not minding it a bit.

  The wolves sharpnosed in close that winter. Mostly grays but a pack of blacks wiped out an entire farm family in Wilton Village near Skoar. Old Jon Robson would tell every new guest the particulars of the massacre, and he’s probably doing it yet, along with tales about a crazy redheaded yardboy he had once. Well, Old Jon had connections in Wilton Village, knew the family the wolves killed and had to make a thing of it, clickety-yak. I never knew him to keep his mouth shut more than two minutes – one day when he was sick with a sore throat. He wouldn’t shut it when he slept, either. He and Mam Robson had their bedroom across the wagonyard from my loft, and in midwinter with the windows shut tight I could still hear him sleep, like an ungreased wagonwheel.

  Before sunup that March day I fed the mules and horses. I reasoned that somebody else ought to get his character strengthened by doing the shoveling. It was a Friday anyhow, so all work was sinful, unless you want to claim that shoveling is a work of necessity or piety, and I disagree. I crept into the main kitchen of the inn, where a yardboy wasn’t supposed to appear. Safe enough. Everybody would be fasting before church – the comfortable way, in bed. The slave-man Judd who was boss of the kitchen wasn’t up yet, and the worst he’d have done would have been to flap a rag and chase me ten steps on his gimp leg. I found a peach pie and surrounded it for breakfast. You see, I’d skipped fasting and church a good deal already – easy because who cares about a
yardboy? – and the lightning hadn’t located me yet. In the store room I collected a chunk of bacon and a loaf of oat bread, and started thinking. Why not run away for good?

  Who’d be bothered? Maybe Jon Robson’s daughter Emmia would, a little. Cry, and wish she’d been nicer to me. I worked on that as I stole out of the inn and down the long emptiness of Kurin Street, dawn still half an hour away. I worked on it hard. I had myself killed by black wolf, changed that to bandits, because black wolf wouldn’t leave any bones. There ought to be bones for somebody to bring back. Somebody who’d say to Emmia: “Here’s all that’s left of poor redheaded Davy, except his Katskil knife. He did say he wanted for you to have that if anything happened to him.” But bandits wouldn’t have left the knife, rot them. I had a problem there.

  Emmia was older than me, sixteen, big and soft like her papa only on her it looked good. How I did cherish and play with that rosy softness in the night – all in my fancy, dumb-virgin as a baby cockerel, alone in my loft.

  I was gulping by the time I passed the town green, but as I neared the Corn Market, in North District and not far from the place where I knew I could climb the city stockade with no guard seeing me, most of that flapdoodle drained out of my head. I was thinking sharp and practical about running away for real, not just goofing off the way I’d done other times.

  A bondservant, one grade better than a slave, I’d be breaking the law if I ran, and could be made a true slave for it, likely with a ten-year term. I told myself that morning what they could do with the law. I had the bacon and bread in a sack strapped across my shoulder. My Katskil knife hung in a sheath under my shirt, and all the money I’d saved during the winter, five dollars in silver, was knotted into my loin rag. Up in the woods on North Mountain where I’d found a cave in my lone wanderings the year before, other things lay hidden – ten dollars safely buried, an ash bow I’d made myself, brass-tipped arrows, fishlines with a couple of real steel hooks. Maybe I’d really do it, I thought. Maybe today.