Sisters in Fantasy

by Edited by Susan Shwartz

  She couldn’t hang herself. There was no oak to offer a branch. But hanging wasn’t the only way to take a life. She’d tear herself to pieces in front of me, and never a thing I could do to stop her.

  Never.

  I didn’t know what it was that swelled inside of me. It felt like fire, but with edges like a sword, and it was black, and red, and gray, gray, gray. My freedom had been in front of me. One day, one more day, and I would have known it, and give it its name.

  Death had taken it from me. Death and Chance, and Fate with her Crone’s face, laughing at the poor ensorcelled fool. I’d be marble forever, and no hope of breaking free.

  And to what? the wind seemed to ask. It was small and cold, nosing about in corners. This was no world for a goatfoot monster out of a long-discredited myth. I wasn’t even authentic. I should have had a horse’s tail and horse’s ears, and spoken country Greek.

  Great Pan is dead, the wind moaned. Mocking me. No more Bacchae, no more choruses. No more love-games in the deep coverts. They were gone, all gone, and I was marble, and mad.

  The web was black, shot with lightnings. Jove was dead, too, and Pluto in his Underworld, and Hecate of the three faces, whose servants had laid the curse on me. Signor Cavalli was dead, who had had three months’ true love before he died, and that was more than I would ever have.

  Oh, Faun, the wind said, and now it aped the Maiden’s voice, and now the Crone’s. How you have changed!

  Years out of count, and a marble heart, and no hope, no hope ever, of everything else. I’d been stone-simple. Stone-stupid, too. I’d paid, and paid, and paid. I’d never stop paying.

  Cornelia had stopped pummeling me. She was still crying. Still holding tight, arms around my knees as if I’d been a king and she a suppliant. Begging me to change the world. To bring back the dead.

  The witches had done that, but it was a grim thing, and the dead were never glad to be called back. The web hated it; turned black and rotted where the un-dead were.

  And did I care for that? I was a cursed thing. I should have been long dead myself. Let him come back. Let Cornelia be happy. I’d give my life and substance for him—life stretched out of all natural measure, substance as cold as Hades’ heart.

  The web was thrumming. She didn’t know. Couldn’t. I didn’t care. It was full of magic. I poured it all out of me. All. Every drop. While she clung to me and wept, and the wind fled shrieking, and the web caught fire.

  I tore it from top to bottom. “Giuliano!” I thundered in a voice I’d never known I had. “Giuliano Cavalli!”

  He came out of the shadows, moving slowly. His shape was firm still, only a little blurred around the edges. He didn’t have the terrible blood-hunger. Not yet. Though when he saw Cornelia, his nostrils flared at the blood-warm scent of her. He licked his lips. And cried out in horror.

  “No! No, I am dead, let me be!”

  I was merciless. “She mourns for you. Come back to this life. Take this flesh. Live.”

  He looked at me. He was dead. He could measure the depth of my meaning. As opposed to Meaning, which the dead understand completely, and reckon absolute idiocy.

  “No.”

  That was Cornelia. Her voice was rough with tears, but there was no yielding in it. “I’m not that selfish. Let him go.”

  “You are damnably independent,” said Signor Cavalli, and he sounded so much like his old self that she gasped.

  But she wouldn’t weaken even for that. “Go,” she said. “Have peace. I’ll be with you soon enough, as the world goes. Then we’ll have all of time to be together.”

  “If by then you want it,” he said.

  She let go of me and planted her fists on her hips. “Giuliano Cavalli, if you think I’m going to forget you for one moment of this life or the next, then you’re a worse idiot than I ever took you for.”

  “But you are young,” he said, “and beautiful still, with a heart that needs so much to love, and a body that pays all tribute to it. God forbid that you live your life a widow, and die a withered and shriveled thing.”

  “What, you won’t want me then?” She was wonderfully angry. “Now that’s a pity, because you’ll have me—whether I turn into a nun or take a dozen lovers a year. You’re the one I want to spend my death with.”

  “Alive still, and you know that?”

  “I know it.” She clapped her hands together. “Now go. Rest. Wait for me.”

  He hovered. His substance was thinning for all that I could do, shredding like a fog in a sudden wind. He held out his arms. “Wait,” he said like an echo. “Wait for me.”

  She wouldn’t touch him. Wouldn’t reach, wouldn’t soften. “Go,” she said.

  He went.

  The web was still, gray shading to silver. Its shadows were black. Its knots were almost smooth.

  I fell off my plinth.

  Marble shattered. Flesh bruised. It hurt. It hurt like blessed Hades.

  Cornelia stood over me. Her face blurred and shifted and broke into threes. Maiden Mother Crone, every face of woman, and who but me had said that Hecate was dead?

  She helped me up. She was too stunned, I think, to notice the horns or the goatfeet, or the marble dust that sifted and fell when I moved. My cock wasn’t crowing, by the dead gods’ mercy. He hid in his dusty thicket and hoped we’d all forget him—such trouble as he’d got us into.

  She pinked herself on a horn, brushing dust out of my hair. That brought her to herself. She stared at me.

  I’d worn a grin so long, I’d forgotten how to start one. I backed away instead. I still had my pipes in my hand. I let them fall. They dangled by the string around my neck, bumping my flanks. My tail was clamped tight.

  “There,” she said as if I’d been one of the million Roman cats. “There.”

  I stopped. She came toward me slowly. Her face had a blank look, as if it didn’t quite know what to do with itself. She touched me. I started. My back went flat against a wall I’d forgotten was there.

  “It was you,” she said. “Calling up the dead.”

  I couldn’t duck. I’d have gored her: she was that close. Her hands were on my shoulders, holding me as fast as any curse.

  “I think I’m supposed to do something,” she said. Her brow wrinkled, as if she strained to catch a voice she couldn’t quite hear. All at once her face cleared. She nodded. “Yes. Yes, I can do that.”

  She looked at me and my puzzlement, and smiled. It was dazzling. “Look,” she said gently. She pulled me around. I came as meek as a ram to the altar. She held me so that I couldn’t help but see.

  Web. Light. Gate. Pillars and lintel, and on the other side…

  “There,” she said. Her voice was Cornelia’s, it always had been. It was Maiden’s, too, and Mother’s, and Crone’s. “There they all went, all your people. Shallow silly things, the lot of them, but they had their charm. Even you. They’re waiting for you.”

  My voice found itself. It was rusty. “Oh, they are? There aren’t any more bacchanals, then? Or grapes to grow and press into wine? Or sheep to herd? Or woods to run through with the barefooted Bacchae?”

  “All of those remain,” said Cornelia-goddess. “They’re just not in this earth any longer. Any more than Giuliano is.” She caught on that, but she rallied in an eye blink. “The gate’s open. Go on.”

  She let me go. I scampered toward the shining gate.

  Just outside of it, I stopped. I don’t know what it was, A sparrow twittering. A cloud across the sun. Cornelia being a goddess and being a woman with marble dust on her hands, watching me go.

  I turned around and went back to her. Past her. Climbed up on the plinth I’d stood on for so long, and said, “I don’t think so.”

  We Fauns used to boast that we could knock even a goddess off her stride. I did it then, no doubt about it. She was speechless.

  “Look here,” I said. “I’ve been a piece of statuary for longer than some of us got to be gods. I’m used to it. I’d be the odd Faun out, out ther
e. I’m the one who got trapped. I’m the one who changed.”

  “We can undo that,” Cornelia said. She sounded like Maiden-remorseful.

  I shook my head. “Even you can’t put the lid back on that box. I’m not simple anymore. The next time I tried to chase a Bacchante, I’d stop to wonder about it, and then I’d wander off course, and before I knew it, I’d be teaching philosophy to the sheep.”

  “They would be your sheep,” she said.

  I swept my arm around. “So is this my place, and those my sparrows.” I took a deep breath. Air felt good, so good, in lungs that weren’t airless marble. “Put the curse back.”

  She wouldn’t move.

  “All right then,” I said. I was getting angry. I picked up my pipes. I knew the notes that would shift the web. This, and this, and this. One-two-three, up-down-swoop, slow, slow, sudden trill like a sparrow’s twitter. Then slow again. And slower. And slower yet. As the cool smooth stillness spread over me. As the air died from my lungs, and my lungs set into stone. This eon I wouldn’t be a grinning idiot. I’d be a dancing Faun, piping down the long years. And maybe, when the moon was full, and the web was all a shimmer and a shadow, someone would have ears to hear; and I’d fill the night with music.

  Cornelia put her arms around my marble middle. Her eyes were full of tears. And not for herself, or for Giuliano. For me.

  I couldn’t tell her not to cry. She stopped after a while. And kissed me just about there, and if I could have blushed, I would have. She did it for me, a splendid, scarlet blaze of it. “I won’t forget,” she said. “What you tried to do for me. Because—because you loved me.”

  That was Threefold Goddess, and Woman, too. Stating the obvious as if she’d just invented it. I couldn’t shrug, or tell her not to be silly. So I waited till she went away, and then I played a run on my pipe. The wind was pleased to help me with it. The sparrows were back, squabbling over a crust someone had dropped. The world rode in its web, wobbling and tottering but never quite falling over. My world, when it came to it, and my choice, too. What’s a Faun if he can’t pick the story he wants to be in?

  The Bargain

  Katharine Kerr

  Katharine Kerr, best known for her Deverry series, rarely writes short fiction. “The Bargain” is thus a very rare event and a very special story. And even now, I’m wondering if Kit has managed to get out of committing short fiction yet again—I’ve got my suspicion that “The Bargain,” a story of Deverry, is a ballad written in the form of prose. Certainly, it has the wry Celtic wisdom on which Kit has built her reputation.

  A long time ago, when Deverry men first sailed west to the province they called Elditina, but which we know today as Eldidd, there lived a man named Paran of Aberwyn. Half scribe and half hunter, he was the son of a merchant house but a restless soul who preferred to explore new territory rather than haggle in the marketplace. All alone he traveled wild places and lived out of his pack like a peddler, but he carried dry chunks of ink, a stone for grinding them with water, bunches of river reeds that he could cut into pens, and strips of parchment. Since in those days there were no lodestones and astrolabes, his maps were rough, of course. He squinted out the directions from the sun and estimated the distances from how far and fast he’d been walking, but he always put in plenty of landmarks—watercourses and suchlike—so that others could follow him. Both the merchant guilds and the noble lords paid high for those maps and the stories he told to go with them.

  On one of his trips west, however, Paran ended up with a fair bit more than he’d bargained for. After about a week’s walk on foot to the west of Aberwyn, he came to a place where, through a tangle of sapling hazels and fern, he saw a river flowing silently, clear water over white sand. The path he’d been following, a deer trail or so he assumed then, turned to skirt the water and lead deeper into the trees. At the bank itself, he found a clearing, a sunny luxury after days in the wild forest. He swung his heavy pack off his shoulders and laid it down for a good stretch of his sore back. To either hand the river ran through a tunnel of trees that promised hard walking ahead. Nearby, the pock pock pock loud in the drowsy summer day, a woodpecker hammered an oak.

  “Good morrow, little carpenter,” Paran remarked.

  The bird ignored the sound of his voice—puzzling, that. He sat down by his pack, unlaced the leather sack at the top of the wooden frame, and took out a long roll of parchment, scratched and spotted with his map and his notes. He was just having a look at how far he’d come when he heard the barest trace of a sound behind him. He was on his feet and turning in an instant, his hand reaching for the hilt of his sword, but he drew it only to find himself facing an archer, his horn bow drawn, an arrow nocked and ready, out of reach at the forest edge. When Paran let his sword fall and raised his hands in the air, the archer smiled. He was a pale young man, with a long tangle of hair so blond it was nearly white, and boyish-slender with long, narrow fingers. Barefoot, he wore a knee-length tunic of fine pale buckskin, belted in with the quiver of arrows slung at his hip. Around his neck on thongs hung a collection of tiny leather pouches and what seemed to be carved bone charms or decorations. When he spoke quickly in a melodious, lilting, and utterly unknown language, Paran gave a helpless sort of shrug. “My apologies, lad, but I don’t understand.” The archer cocked his head in surprise, looked Paran over for a moment, then whistled three sharp notes. From a far distance they heard first one answering whistle, then another. Two more archers stepped out of the forest, and when the three of them strolled over to inspect their prize, Paran was in for the shock of his life. Their eyes were dark purple, and the enormous irises were slit vertically with pupils like those of cats. Their ears were abnormally long, too, and curled to delicate points like seashells. They in their turn were pointing out his eyes and ears to each other and chattering away about them, too, from the sound of it. “Uh, I mean you no harm. Truly I don’t.” The three of them smiled in a rather unpleasant way. “And what have we here?”

  The voice seemed to speak in Paran’s language, but the young men called out a greeting in their own. As she materialized between two trees, the woman looked as blonde and boyish as her companions, dressed much like them, too, but when Paran tried to look at her face, her image swam and flickered, as if he’d drunk himself blind. She seemed to age, her tunic changing back and forth from blue to green to gray; then she suddenly was young again. The archers, however, stayed as visible and substantial as himself as they stared at the woman in awe, lips half-parted.

  “This is a strange deer you’ve caught in my forest,” she said to them, then turned to Paran. “Who are you?”

  “Paran of Aberwyn, my lady. Do you know the place? It’s a little town down by the sea.”

  “I don’t, and the sea means naught to me. What are you doing here?”

  “Just seeing what I can see. I’m a curious man, my lady, and no man of my race has ever been here.”

  “I’m well aware of that, my thanks.”

  She studied him with narrow eyes, cold now and yellow as a snake’s, and her lips were tight, too, perhaps in rage, perhaps in contempt—it was hard to tell with her constant shape-shifting—yet of one thing he was sure, that he’d never seen a woman so beautiful or so dangerous. If she gave the word, the archers would fill him with arrows like a leather target at a festival.

  “I swear it, my lady. I mean you not the slightest harm.”

  “No doubt, but harm can come without a meaning behind it. Your people are the ones who are taking slaves from the river villages, aren’t you?”

  “Are those your vassals? I’ll swear to you on the gods of my people that I’ve naught to do with that. My kind of clan doesn’t need bondmen. We don’t have any lands.”

  “They’re not mine, but they’re gentle souls who do no harm and make their tools out of stones. Your people stink of blood and iron.” She turned old, very old, old beyond belief yet still beautiful, and her heavy cloak was gray with mourning. “How much have you killed in my
woods?”

  “Some squirrels, some hares, and some fish from the river. Forgive me: I didn’t know I was poaching. I didn’t know anyone lived out here.”

  “And what will you give me in return?”

  “Anything of mine you desire.” Paran pointed at his pack. “Look through it, or take it all if you want.”

  Suddenly she was young again, with a smile as disdainful as any highborn lady’s in Elditina. Her beauty seemed to hang around her like a cloud of scent or crackle in the air like heat lightning: he found himself struggling for words, and him a man who’d always been able to talk his way out of anything before.

  “Keep your greasy trinkets,” she said. “I want the truth for my dues. What truly made you come here?”

  “A change from the merchants of Aberwyn. They wish to find out what lies in this country because they wish to trade. Naught more—only to caravan goods back and forth in peace.”

  “But who comes behind them? Those blood-soaked men who build the ugly stone towers and take slaves?”

  Paran could only nod in agreement. Like most common-born men in Eldidd, he had never approved of making bondmen out of people who were neither criminals nor debtors. It infuriated him that he was on the edge of paying for the arrogance of lords.

  “If I have you killed,” she said in a musing sort of voice. “No doubt someone else will come, sooner or later. I have no desire to be as cruel as your folk, Paran of Aberwyn. You walk out of my forest alive if you leave today.”

  “I will, then. I’ll even walk hungry to spare your game.”

  “No need of that, as long as you take only what you truly need to feed yourself.”

  With a smile she laid a slender hand on his cheek, her fingers oddly cool and smooth; she even allowed him to turn his head and kiss her fingers. Then she was gone; they were all gone; there was only the clearing, the sunlight, his pack and his sword lying in grass. Something else had been there, not but a moment before—Paran couldn’t remember what. Deer, perhaps? Birds? A badger? He shrugged the wondering away. Whatever it was, he’d gone far enough into this useless forest, and it was time to head back to Aberwyn.