Mash Up

by Gardner Dozois

  “He’s… he’s already there. The real one! In history! You named him just a minute ago—”

  “But this won’t be history,” Violet said. “This will be a story – your story. A blank page. You were always nervous around a blank page, weren’t you? Now you won’t have to be. Just copy out the plays in whatever order you like, and ignore all the fuss about who actually wrote them. It would help if you could look enigmatic. Do you think you could practice that?”

  “No, but—”

  “Too bad. But you’ll be fine. It’s your story now, Rob.”

  Violet leaned across the sandwich crumbs on the kitchen counter and looked at Rob steadily. The look became a gaze, the gaze became a lance, piercing right into Rob’s skull. It went on and on, and he couldn’t look away. His legs tried to run and his hands to clench, but all he could do was clutch more tightly the book and the bag of clothing.

  “Oh,” she said just before the kitchen vanished, “don’t forget to bury the plastic bag. That’s the kind of anachronism that bounces a reader right out of the story.”

  * * *

  He lay beside a deserted dirt road, at dusk, under a sky of towering black clouds. It was hot. He sat up.

  Ruts in the road: wagon wheel tracks. On either side stretched fields of blowing grain bordered by wildflowers, most of which he couldn’t name.

  Rob put his head in his hands and groaned. How could he do this? There must be a way out, he must be able to go back… But he couldn’t see how.

  A stunted imagination, she’d said.

  But… some imagination. A little. Even if she’d pronounced the word like a disease.

  He stood and emptied the plastic bag onto a patch of daisies. He wasn’t even sure what the items were called – was that velvet thing a doublet? A jerkin? A bodkin? Whatever they were, he stripped and put them on. In the pocket of the silly balloon pants he found a small bag of gold nuggets. Violet had probably gotten the clothing from a costume store or theater back room, but late-sixteenth-century coins were another matter. Gold was good anywhere.

  Rob started to dig a hole to bury the plastic bag. All at once he stopped.

  “Don’t forget to bury the plastic bag. That’s the kind of anachronism that bounces a reader right out of the story.”

  Would it bounce him out, too?

  Rob’s mood lifted. He had a possible escape hatch, a plot twist that Violet had not foreseen. Well, she was a painter. Rob was the writer. The plastic bag might not wreck his story, but it was something he could try.

  He could also try pretending he wrote the plays. “Interesting,” she’d said – no arguing with that. And if he really was composing this piece, if he really had control of motivation and plot and all, if he really was free of writer’s block…

  Well.

  In the distance, pale smoke drifted across the darker sky. The cloud rumbled. He would have to reach that cottage, or whatever it was, before full dark.

  Rain spattered his head. Hastily, Rob wrapped the little book in the plastic bag and tucked it inside his doublet/jerkin/bodkin. More thunder, and then lightning forked from sky to ground and rain pelted down. Rob began to run. The road rose and a light gleamed ahead, where the smoke had been. He ran faster.

  It was a dark and stormy night.

  JACK CAMPBELL

  HIGHLAND REEL

  I’m best known these days for my Lost Fleet series of books. The story I wanted to tell here is set in Scotland, involves supernatural elements, and requires someone to decide what they would do to have what they want. Or, rather, to have what they may think they want. That made it pretty easy to decide on Macbeth as the source for my opening line. I have been wanting to write about the real Highlands for some time, especially since reading the fine books written by John Prebble about Glencoe, Culloden, and the Highland Clearances. We tend to think of history and fantasy as two very different things. History is supposed to be a single, factual narrative, whereas different peoples have different forms of fantasy, and different supernatural things they believe in. Yet the history many people think they know may have far more of fantasy to it than they realize, and those fantasies may have all the power of reality when it comes to the actions of men and women. I hope you enjoy “Highland Reel.”

  HIGHLAND REEL

  BY JACK CAMPBELL

  “When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning, or in rain?”

  Those were the final words I heard my mother say, as storm lashed the rocky coast of Strathglass after we had buried my young brother, he barely ten years of age and now gone from us.

  My name is Mary Chisholm, and I am the last. Where my people once lived there is now naught amid the great empty Highlands but the bare stone lines marking where the walls of our homes stood. The lands are empty of people, but not of life, for everywhere stray the sheep our lairds valued more than the people of their clans.

  Born in Strathglass north of Loch Ness in the Year of Our Lord seventeen ninety-seven, I lived my first years there in the small stone-walled and turf-roofed home my family shared with our cattle. Springs were fair, summers well and winters ordeals, but we had our small plot held in lease to the laird, whose factor still lived among us even though the laird himself had taken his family to a Lowland city. An unbroken line of twenty-three chiefs of our clan had held Strathglass for the Chisholms, and now the twenty-fourth and his heirs would betray them to bitter exile.

  For the sheep came, with the Lowlanders driving them, and our laird took their money in rent for the land where we lived. One day the laird’s factor came with agents of the law and told us we must all leave, and before nightfall we stood outside the remnants of our home as the old roof timbers burned from the fires set by the agents. We had heard of other clan lairds expelling their own people but had never believed ours would do us so ill, for by long-held belief the laird was the father, ceann-cinnidh, and we the children. What father would treat his children so?

  The laird was merciful, my mother said, for though almost all the Chisholms forced from their land were transported to the Americas, we were allowed to lease a couple of acres on the stony coast of Strathglass, the laird’s agents bidding us learn to fish and try to grow crops in the thin, tiny patches of soil among the outcrops where salt spray usually killed whatever green managed to sprout. Mother had been strong and clever, but grief for our old home and the awful toil of trying to survive on the coast broke her spirit. She would labor all through the light of days and then sit with empty eyes in the darkness, only repeating that it was the laird’s right and God’s will and we must obey.

  Father, exhausted from working through the days to provide what little he could for us, would slump sipping on illegal whiskey near the small fire in the rude hut we had managed to pile together. He said little, except the one night when I upbraided my mother, demanding to know by what right any man or woman could tear us from the land our ancestors had held.

  “Hush, lass,” he ordered me, his eyes on the fire. “The Highlanders have always been hated by the Lowlanders. Mi-run mor nan Gall we have called that hate since men first walked this land. In the Forty-five, God, too, turned his face from us on the field of Culloden, and since then the Highlanders have been doomed. None can fight the will of God, girl, and His will was made plain at Culloden, that our race pass from this land.”

  How to argue with God? Within a month of that my father was swept from the rocks while fishing, drowned and his body lost to the sea. My young brother died that winter, cold, hunger and sickness taking him, and the next day I woke to find my mother gone. A neighbor said he had seen her walking toward the water in the dimness before dawn, but no trace of her ever did I find.

  I managed to live through the winter, but as a harsh spring came I faced truth. What hope for a lone girl on the rocky coast? At nearly eighteen years of age I would already have been married but for the lack of suitable men nearby. Perhaps it came from the stubborn independence which had been the despair of both my parents, but I
would not now give myself to any man just to survive. I had no future here, and so resolved that I would see my old home again even though we had been ordered not to return. What greater terrors than I had already endured could imprisonment or forced transportation hold for me? So I left the rocks of the coast and walked inland, retracing steps I had never forgotten. I passed a fine new inn built for Lowland visitors and walked a smooth road made to improve the land, the better to serve the trade in wool and mutton.

  The Highlanders had beaten back invaders for generations, leaving only graves to mark where the likes of the Norse and more recently the Lowlanders and English had entered the hills at their peril. But the bleating Lowlander Cheviot sheep had defeated the Highlanders. I walked through glens empty but for the flocks of sheep and the rare sight of a distant Lowland shepherd. Of Chisholms, my kin, I saw none.

  Finally I reached my goal near the setting of the sun and sank to the ground, my hand touching the line of stones which marked the foundation of a vanished wall. We Highlanders are simple folk, and aside from a blind loyalty to our lairds our greatest weakness may be a love of the land we and our ancestors have known. The cord binding a child to its mother is cut early, but the cord binding a Highlander to the land long endures. Now home, family and the land itself had been taken from me.

  Perhaps I swooned. I know not, but as the sun began to flare red near the line of the hills a man’s call brought me to my senses. “Lass, are you well?”

  He sounded like a Lowlander, but as I rose to my feet I saw a man dressed like no Lowlander, nor like any Highlander. He wore a white shirt of fine fabric and a wondrous garment in place of trousers, something like unto a kilt, but the tartan on it was intricate and finely woven in a pattern I’d never seen. Where the pouch for bullets should have rested in front a great purse of leather hung, trimmed with fur. A gleaming broadsword swung on one hip, the elaborately engraved handle of a dirk rose from a scabbard, and on his head he wore a bonnet as glorious as the rest of his outfit. The man stood tall, his face unlined by sun or weather and his back unbent from labor. To my astonishment the badge on his bonnet bore the hard fern, the sign of my own clan Chisholm.

  “Are you well, lass?” the man repeated. With him I saw a young woman, her garments more like those of women I knew but far grander. Though she must have seen more than a score of birthdays, her skin was as fair as that of a newborn and unmarred by worry or work.

  This must be a laird and his lady. I looked in vain for the henchman, piper, bard, and gillies I’d been told accompanied such worthies, and curtsied as best I could so they would know my mother had raised me properly. “Thank you, laird, I am well.”

  Only then did I know who this grand man wearing the badge of my clan must be. He could only be the laird who had betrayed us all to exile.

  But before my anger could show itself, the man smiled, revealing teeth so white and straight I wondered at them as well. “Laird? No, lass, not me. I’m but a young man of the Highlands.”

  A man of the Highlands. “I had not known any young men remained in these parts of the Highlands, except for some of the Lowlander shepherds.”

  The young woman laughed merrily. “You haven’t been in the Highlands, then!”

  “Not for years,” I admitted.

  “And what brings you here now?” the man asked.

  “I lived here once.” I turned to show him the line of stones, but none were there. All about, the land lay unmarked by any signs that the hand of man had ever rested here. “It’s gone,” I said, unable to understand.

  “Here?” The man laughed in a broad and easy way that held no sting. “Lass, there’s no homes here. Down in the village, you mean.”

  He gestured and I saw such a village as I had only imagined in dreams.

  Along wide paths stood houses of stone, some two stories high, and all roofed not with turf but with slate. Lights glimmered in windows of glass such as I had rarely seen, and the lights were those of good candles, not the feeble guttering of lamps fed by poor oil. “No,” I whispered. “Such a place is too grand for the likes of me.”

  “You’re obviously sore in need and tired, lass,” the lady spoke soothingly. “Come with us, and we will see you fed and rested.”

  This I understood, for in the Highlands, hospitality is a rule never broken, except for the terrible massacre at Glencoe generations gone. But those were Campbells, and naught good can ever be expected of that clan. These two claimed to be Chisholms like me, and, looking at them, I could not believe them capable of deceit.

  I came with them, down to the wondrous village. They took me to a house with stone walls mortared and plastered so no wind came through, windows of rippled glass, finely fitted wooden doors and floors of wood or stone. It was a manse such as I had never set foot within. A great fire warmed the main room, and I sat with the family at a table ringed with chairs. I began eating with my knife and fingers, which was all my family had known, but instead of scorning me those fine people smiled kindly and showed me the use of fork and spoon. We ate mutton, and beef, and oats and barley, such a meal as my memories had dwelt on but far better. The wife brought out pastries, wine, whiskey and ale, and at the end one of the family took up pipes and played.

  They gave me afterwards a bed to sleep in with warm blankets. In the gentle dark of night I began to wonder if my swoon at my old home had been the swoon of death. Surely this could only be the heaven of which I had heard. I fell asleep well content if it were so, wondering if my brother and my mother and father would walk over the hill to join me.

  Day followed day, each so much like the one before that they ran one into the next. Everyone worked, but not for long and no one seemed fatigued by their labors, yet there was always plenty to be had. I saw no sickness or want. The young men competed at arms and at sports, their brawny muscles rippling in the sun. Some of those handsome young men sought me out. I had little experience with such things and shied from their attentions, but none took it ill. The maidens were equally cheerful, and if any woman among the village had ever suffered in child-birth, it could not be told. Often a story-teller would recite the old tales, of Fionn MacCumhail, also known as Fingal, and his followers the Feinn, still sleeping on every mountain in Scotland, and of the great battle fought by Fingal and the Feinn with the Norse by Laroch, from which but two of the forty Viking ships escaped and they sinking before reaching home. Tales of Ossian the great poet, of King Fergus of Dalriada, and of Columba and Mundus at Loch Leven. Every day seemed a party and a feast, the dancing and the pipes always beckoning.

  Truly, if this was not heaven, I knew not what it lacked to be that place.

  And yet, as the days passed, unease grew within me. Though they called themselves kin of mine, the people of the village were too strong, too handsome, too merry. I felt crude and ill-matched among them. They used phrases from the Gaelic, but none seemed to speak more than that. I knew the English only because my mother had taught me so, saying that those doomed to serve must know the language of their masters, but here all used the English for common speech. And their dress remained a thing of wonder.

  “You call these kilts?” I asked one day of the clothing worn by the men.

  “And what else would they be?” The girls with me laughed in the way I was beginning to find too ready and lacking in real feeling.

  “A kilt,” I explained, “is but a long piece of cloth, wrapped about the man’s waist, brought over the shoulder and fastened with a pin. ’Tis well-known that the Highlanders wore the kilt not just by choice but also the necessity of poverty, for we could not afford the trousers of the Lowlanders. Only since the kilt was banned by the English in the Forty-five have rude trousers been seen in the Highlands.”

  Instead of recent history known to the most ill-learned, I might have recited a fairy tale. They laughed again. “The kilt banned? Not in the Highlands!”

  “Yes, in the Highlands since Culloden! Where else? They wear no kilts in the Lowlands, for it would affront the
ir pride.”

  “Culloden?” The young man I had first met had been listening and now shook his head with a smile. “I know not that name.”

  “But the Forty-five,” I protested. “Bonnie Prince Charlie and the clans! You cannot have forgotten Culloden, where the swords of the clans failed!”

  “The clans endure, as do the Highlands,” the young man said. “Our swords will never see defeat. You have been prey to nightmares, lass, and confused their dark visions with the world of light.”

  I began to wonder if my memories were fancies, for there seemed no place for them here. Yet the longer I stayed, the less I felt at home. I felt as I if had wandered into a tale of Fingal and now lived among the Feinn, yet I wondered if Fingal himself would have felt at home here, or as troubled as I by those like but unlike myself.

  Finally one day I went back up the slope to where my home had been and searched in vain for any sign of the stones which had made it. My heart faltered as I again found no trace. If all I thought true was born of dark fancies, then what of my family? Were my memories of them awry as well? They lived now only in me. If those memories were false, what was left of them?

  As I stood there irresolute, I became aware of a man on horseback riding up. Why I had not seen him sooner I cannot tell, for his red uniform gleamed, as did the leather of his saddle and tack, and his horse was a fine steed. He wore a sword, too, a long straight blade. I saw the gleam of metal on his collar and knew this must be an officer, for my parents had warned me of such when I was but small.

  The officer rode up, dismounted, and inclined his head politely to me. I stared back in wonder, for I had seen but few uniforms in my life.

  “I am Lieutenant Calvert of the 21st Foot,” the officer stated politely.

  “Mary Chisholm, sir,” I answered with a curtsey.

  “Is that your home?” he asked, pointing to the village.

  “Nay, sir. I’ve been staying there a short while, but my old home is gone. I left my new home along the coast west of Kessock and will not return.”