Sisters in Fantasy

by Edited by Susan Shwartz

  Tired in mind and soul, but in body he was so full of angry energy that he covered the ten-minute walk home in six minutes.

  He opened the door and heard his two oldest in the dining room having a teenage squabble about singing stars as they slammed silverware on the table. Shutting his eyes, he shouted, “I’m home!” in some faint hope of sidetracking the argument before it finished the ruination of his nerves.

  “Daddy! Daddy!” That was Terry, his youngest, pattering out to meet him on her first-grader’s legs.

  He stooped to sweep her up in his arms. Her little fists hit the back of his neck with a stabbing, searing pain.

  He jerked, stifling a scream, desperate to keep his grip on the child. Something hit the floor with more of a crunch than a crash. The little girl gave a wail that brought the rest of the family.

  “Uh-oh,” said Solly, picking up the pieces. “You’re gonna catch it now, Terry. The Christ Child from Pop’s old manger set. How often do we have to tell you, don’t run around with breakables in your hands!”

  Oh. For a few confused seconds, Clement had wondered how his child could run around with anything that hot in her bare fingers.

  One of the last, most precious mementos they had of his parents…

  “Forget it, Solly,” the vampire told his son. “Let Terry alone. The key figure of a manger set is as much a holy symbol as a crucifix is, and your father has had a very hassling day. Don’t make it any worse.”

  “He never punished me for it,” Amarantha remembered softly. “Mother wasn’t able to mend it, so we had to heap a handkerchief up over a tiny little cloth doll in the manger to make it look as if the Christ Child was all covered up. And we never found a replacement—we checked every antique shop, secondhand store, and yard sale for years. But he never punished me.”

  Mendoza remarked, “When he could get people to accept him as a vampire, they wouldn’t accept him as a human being. I doubt that very many at all, outside his own family and closest friends, could ever accept him as both at once.”

  “I’ve just understood something,” Amarantha went on. “Losing that figurine must have cost him more than it cost me. But he never even scolded me about it. I think he took all the blame on himself.” She rose. “May I use your—”

  “Down the hall and across from the bedroom.”

  When she came back to the combination living-dining room, she observed, “You have a very nice mirror in there.”

  “I’d have said a very ordinary one. It serves its purpose.”

  “I was beginning to suspect… You may call this silly!… only, when I didn’t see mirrors anywhere else in your home…”

  “Not everyone hangs them everywhere. People expect one above the bathroom sink, however. You always had one in each of your bathrooms, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” she admitted, “but we had four plain, ordinary people in the house. You live alone.”

  He smiled. “I have guests from time to time. More cherry cordial?”

  “No, thank you. My glass is still half-full.” She sat and sipped a moment in silence, lowering the level of cordial by a millimeter or two, before speaking again. “M. Mendoza, is my father’s theory correct?”

  “Most of it, I believe,” he answered in a matter-of-fact voice. “Possibly all of it.”

  “Then vampirism really is a state of heightened sensitivity to holiness?” She felt that her eyes were shining.

  “Well, I never suffered quite as much inconvenience with religious symbols as your father did on his worst days. But then, I never developed conscience to such a fine, gnat-straining art.”

  “But you’ve spent your life being heroically good!” she protested. “Working for Greenpeace, Amnesty, all those movements for human and animal and planetary rights—”

  “Only because I lacked the courage to do what my son and your father did—come out of the closet and live openly and honestly. It isn’t that I lack a conscience, Amarantha. It’s that I lacked whatever it takes to live life in its little, everyday, Babbitt fulfillments and frustrations. ”Heroism‘ has simply been my way of coping on a grand scale, quieting my conscience by overpaying for any petty little peccadillos I may commit.“

  “Your son…”

  “In a manner of speaking. My foster son, if you prefer.”

  “Did he ever know it was you?”

  “Not so far as I can tell. Anyway, I never confessed it to him. I’ve sometimes wondered if he ever had his secret suspicions, the way I used to step in and guardian-angel him from time to time. Never with advice about our condition, of course. He was my teacher there, whether or not he ever guessed that his theories might apply to me personally.”

  “He liked to think,” Amarantha said slowly, “that whoever made him a vampire did it to save his life.”

  Her host shook his head. “I was just a teenager myself at the time, still experimenting, prowling around hospitals in search of meals I could sneak from comatose patients when nobody else was in the room.

  Your father’s blood had a good, fresh tang. I don’t know if it was my drinking that almost pushed him over the edge, or if it was just coincidence, but when I noticed what the monitors were doing, I had an instant remorse attack. I jabbed my wrist vein and stuffed it in his mouth as an emergency measure to repair the damage I guessed I’d done.“

  She asked, “Then it was a complete accident, his being a vampire?”

  “Oh, I’d probably already come across the idea that it’s the sharing of blood between vampire and victim that does the trick, but I doubt I remembered it at the crucial moment. I think that giving him my vein to suck was simply the first way that occurred to my green brain to pour back some of the blood I’d just taken out of him. Crucifixes bothered me for several days afterward, especially when I heard that he’d gone vampire, too.” Mendoza smiled. “My conscience may not be as fussy as your father’s, but it’s kept me out of any really serious evildoing ever since.”

  She finally admitted, “His got a little less fussy after the midlife crisis years. Enough to stop nagging him about having been pushed to the limit by other people. Still, to have a built-in alarm system… That’s all I ever wanted from him. To be forced to hold myself in check. Lord knows I don’t like flying off the handle, saying hurtful things, weltering in angry thoughts… Why wouldn’t he ever trust me with the gift?”

  Instead of repeating arguments, Mendoza asked, “After living with him, can you really think it makes it that easy?”

  “M. Mendoza, you’re as much my grandfather as his father. If it hadn’t been for you, I’d never have been born.”

  “If it hadn’t been for an infinity of circumstances, none of us would have been born, and a totally different set of people would be inhabiting the universe.”

  She had appropriated some of the old medical blood test lancets her father used to carry for soliciting drops from people’s thumbs. She had a few in her pocket now. Pulling one out, she jabbed it into her thumb and squeezed half a dozen drops into her cherry cordial, then got up to set both glass and lancet on the table beside her host.

  He looked at her. “Determined, aren’t you?”

  “It’s what I’ve wanted ever since I was a little girl. If my father’s theory is correct, this should work as well as any actual biting and body-to-body sucking.”

  “All that is needed is sharing the blood. The possible origin of all blood-brotherhood and sisterhood rituals… almost sacramental in its pure simplicity.” He picked up her glass and frowned into it for several seconds, twirling it slowly by the stem. Setting it down at last, he ignored the lancet, got a case of needles from his pocket, extracted one, and used it on his thumb. He squeezed three or four drops into his own half-drunk cordial, laid the needle crosswise over the lancet, and touched the rim of his glass lightly to hers. The crystal ping sounded clear in the silent moment.

  He lifted the glass with Amarantha’s blood to his lips and drained it, wiped his lips on his handkerchief, and returned he
r gaze. After another moment, he nodded and gestured at her glass seasoned with his blood. “In my foster-grandfatherly way, I’m going to leave you alone five minutes with that and your father’s memory. If you think that, wherever he is, he would be ready to trust you with ‘the gift’ now… the choice belongs to you.”

  Remedia Amoris

  Judith Tarr

  Readers know Judith Tarr as the author of meticulously researched and gorgeously crafted historical fantasies like Alamut and The Dagger and the Cross. More recently, she has moved into Macedon and Egypt with Lord of the Two Lands and Throne of Isis, about Alexander the Great and his equally charismatic descendant, Cleopatra.

  Like Katharine Kerr, Judith is a writer who is usually so busy with novels that we don’t get enough of her short fiction.

  Fortunately, in her nonexistent spare time, she has remedied this situation to some degree; and readers are finding in short stories by Judith Tarr a wry, ribald, and even gonzo streak—nowhere more than here. I think that Ovid, her inspiration, would understand… if he wasn’t laughing too hard.

  I stumbled onto it. Staggered. Cock first and no mistake, skin full of the old Falernian, and Whatsername shrieking and whacking me with her thyrsus just hard enough to keep me good and hard, which was all in the game, and the old bitch-goddess should have known it.

  Dear Mother Three-Face Hecate wouldn’t know a good game if it tupped her from behind.

  So there we were, tumbling on the grass, mooncup swelled and brimming over, me-cup getting near it, and Lalage, or was it Phyllis, paying top-of-the-lungs tribute to her Bacchante’s vows. She was just about through the Third Twist-and-Shriek, and she’d winked at me once when the moon caught her eye. And the silence crashed down on us.

  They ran up to thirteen in full coven. Tonight they were down to three, but three were enough when they were Threefold Hecate. Maiden was ripe-fig sweet and dripping honey, and when I was done with Phyllis I’d make a run for her. Mother was a little off the peak and bellyful of baby. Crone was Crone incarnate.

  Maiden was horrified. Mother was indignant. Crone was in midcurse and not pleased to be interrupted. Maiden swept in and rescued Phyllis, or maybe Lalage, and fine thanks she got: Lalage, or maybe Phyllis, crowned her neatly with the thyrsus, told her what she could do with her maidenhead, and cut for the deep cover. Mother made a leap for the altar and raised a pitchy smoke. Crone stood over me—no will in me to move, even if I’d been able, and every bit of me as limp as the old hag’s dugs. She reached out her staff and tested it. I couldn’t even flinch.

  Maiden came up behind her. “Faun,” she said in the sweet severe way they have before they know a man. “Faun, you were mad to have come here.”

  My tongue was my own; just about all of me that was. “Fauns are mad by nature,” I said. I tried to grin. Insouciance, old Silenus always told us, drives the ladies wild.

  I don’t think he meant this kind of wild.

  Mother was chanting through her smokes and lighting them with bits of fire. The purple was particularly fine. It made me think of once-dyed Tyrian.

  I told her so. She paid no attention to me. Crone prodded me again with her staff. No more life there than before. Maiden said, “You are a very shallow creature. Drunk as a sponge, raping anything that moves—have you no more use in life but that?”

  “I eat,” I said helpfully. “Lots. I play the pipes. I herd sheep for old Mopsus, up by Volaterrae, and I leave the ewes alone. Nymphs are better. And Bacchantes.” I showed her my best smile. “And witches?”

  She shuddered. “He is dreadful,” she said.

  Crone nodded with too much satisfaction. “And he profaned our rite.” She stopped prodding my jewels, for which I was properly grateful, but her expression was nothing to comfort a poor lonely Faun. She turned round toward the altar. In a moment, so did Maiden.

  They had their backs to me. I thought of crawling away. The best I managed was a flop onto my face and a scrabble in the grass. My tail hurt. My head hurt worse.

  The three weird women raised their voices. Most of it was nonsense, and some was no language I ever knew, but enough was decent speech that I knew I’d not been forgotten. They were cursing me, as Mopsus would say, right proper. Starting with the tip of my left horn and working down to the point of my right hoof, with stops between. Somehow I was standing upright, and that meant all of me. Pipes in hand, too. Just about ready to play.

  The marching-drums in my head had stopped. So had the throb in my tail. I felt… cool. And smooth. And chiseled clean. Marmoreal, for a fact.

  “So mote it be,” said Crone. She stood in front of me. She was smiling. I would have closed my eyes if I could. That was nothing I’d be doing, for a while.

  “Be so,” Crone said. “Be bound forever as the stonebrain that you are.”

  “It’s only just,” said Mother, “for a ravisher of maidens.”

  Maidens! I would have howled, if they’d left me with a voice. Those were good lusty Bacchantes, and fine chases they led, too, and all the Rites in order, and if a lad was new to it, then they’d help him along.

  But Mother never heard me. “Stand for all of time as you stand now, with your phallus for a luck piece.”

  “Perhaps we should have made him a fountain,” mused Crone. “He might have been more entertaining.”

  “Oh,” said Maiden, and her voice could melt my heart, even turned to stone. “Oh, the poor thing. Were we too severe, do you think? Shouldn’t we just let him stay for a while, and then let him go? He only did what Fauns are born to do.”

  “And who was first to curse him for it?” Mother inquired.

  Maiden blushed and hung her head. “I let my temper get the better of it. I confess it. You helped me,” she said. “Don’t say you didn’t.”

  “Very well,” said Crone, and she was impatient, but even she was hardly proof against Maiden. “A witch who weakens her curse with codicils is a fool, but we are all born fools. You, Faun! For this Maiden’s sake—and do remember it, if you are capable of such refinement—I offer you one escape. Marble you are, and marble you shall be, and your fate shall be to watch unsleeping, until two mortals shall come before you, and show themselves true lovers.”

  “None of this reckless ravishment,” Mother said, “or she-wolf with her flesh for hire. True love, and true lovers, and goodwill toward you who watch.”

  “This is excessive!” Maiden protested. “Love comes, and comes true, but goodwill for a marble Faun?”

  “There’s no changing it now,” said Crone. “It’s spoken and it’s done. When true love comes, he shall be free.”

  Maiden sighed, but she had no more objections. I had a worldful, and a tongue as hopeless-heavy as only stone can be.

  “Iron’s worse,” said Crone. She rubbed my best man—for luck, what else? And I felt it, no doubt about that, and not a whit of good it did me.

  The moon was down. Dawn was coming. They went about their business, all three. Only Maiden looked back. She sighed. So would I have done, if I could. All those might-have-beens.

  II

  It was against nature. A Faun was never loot; a Faun did the looting. But a Faun was never marble, either, and here was I, and there were they, big flapping man-shaped vultures with a lust for statuary. Never a whisper of True Love, not that I’d seen any in my grove—Fauns stopped going there, once it got about that I’d chased my last sweet Bacchante, and witches didn’t bring their lovers, except to give them to the goddess. I was a rack for their cloaks and a prop for their spells, and they rubbed me for luck when they left.

  Then the men in armor came, and it was true, what Crone said. Marble was a cold still way to spend one’s years, but iron was worse. They loaded me in a wagon and carried me away. Rubbing me, of course, for luck, and making comparisons. The sculpture was a jester, they said. Nobody was hung like that.

  I could have shown them something, if they’d happened into the deep cover when there was a bacchanal.

  The wagon c
reaked and rattled and came skinned-teeth close to chipping a piece off my left horn, but in the end it brought me whole into the City.

  That was what they called it. The City. Roma Dea, Roma Mater—Old Rome she wasn’t yet, and to listen to them you’d swear she’d never be. They set me up in the middle of her, in a garden as wide as half Campania, and I had my own glade in it, my own oak tree for shade, my own fountain to stand over. So Crone had her wish after all. I didn’t piddle forever into a pool, but I stood in the middle of one. If the air was still, I could glimpse my reflection.

  It stopped people rubbing me, which I was glad of. The few who tried, had to wade through the pool to do it, and they were too drunk to go halfway before they slipped and fell in.

  A philosopher had a school for a while in my tree’s shade. Most of what he said was arrant nonsense, but it made good chewing over. Two separate sets of assassins plotted under my nose. I never did learn whether they got their man. There were always poets yelling at the Muse, and mothers yelling at their children, and children yelling for the joy of it.

  And lovers. Lovers in scores. Every one swore undying love, and every one left me as mutely marble as before. One hanged herself from a branch of my tree. That was a pity. She’d been a tender young thing till her father found out she’d been tumbling with his secretary. Since the secretary was supposed to be a eunuch, it was a scandal to put it mildly. He was a eunuch sure when they killed him. She told me all about it before she knotted up her mantle and threw it over the convenient branch; and not a word I could say to stop her. They buried her with the proper rites, but her ghost hung about still, not saying anything, just sitting by my pool and keeping me company.

  While I was the witches’ marble Faun, I’d soaked up enough sorcery to make me glow like the moon, and enough over that to damp me down again. Not that I could do much with it with no tongue to say the spells and no hands to make the gestures, but the sight it gave never left me. I could see the cords that bound the world. They ruled the moon in its course. They stirred the wind, and made my tree grow, and wove as rich as Arachne’s web round the mortals who passed me by. Even I was part of it. On me it was like chains and light—chains for the curse, light for the magic I was steeped in. Nobody but witches, and I, could see it.