by Paula Guran
“I have no home,” he said. “Just now it seems to me I’ll never have a home again.”
He waited for Madra to call him a pitiful squinter or prescribe a pint or a song to clear his mind. But Madra just plodded down the street, head down and tail adroop, as tired and discouraged as Liam himself.
Being immortal, Folk do not commonly find time hanging heavy on their hands. A day is but an eyeblink in their lives; a month can pass in the drawing of a breath. The Pooka had never imagined being as aware of the arc of the sun across the sky or the length of time separating one meal from the next as he had been since his life had been linked to Liam’s.
Today had been a weary length indeed.
At first, the Pooka had simply been glad to be alive and reasonably well. Maeve’s charm itched, but it was a healing itch, and he felt some strength return to his limbs. He kept running up to railings and barrels and iron-shod wheels just to touch them and sniff them and prove once again that they had no power to hurt him.
The encounter with Ebenezer Green shook him. Had he been on his game, the Pooka would have nosed out what manner of man Green was before they’d even crossed the threshold.
But the Pooka was not on his game. A whole day on the town, and he hadn’t tricked so much as the price of a drink out of a living soul. The fear grew on him that Maeve’s charm had cured his iron-sickness at the expense of his magic. What he needed was something to knock him loose from the limited round of mortal concerns he’d been treading since Liam had freed him from the poacher’s trap. He needed a bet or a challenge or a trick. Something tried and true, for preference not too dangerous, that would put him on his mettle and bring Liam a bit of silver.
“Liam,” he said. “I have an idea. Tomorrow, as soon as it’s light, we’ll take ourselves up out of this sty to wherever it is the rich folk live. You shall sell me as a ratter for the best price you can get.”
“Shall I so?” asked Liam wearily. “And what if no man needs a ratter or will not buy an Irish one?”
“There’s always a man wants to buy a dog,” the Pooka said confidently.
Liam shook his head. “I will not, and there’s an end. What kind of man do you take me for, to sell a friend for silver money?”
“Oh, I’d not stay sold,” the Pooka assured him. “I’d run away and meet you at Maeve’s before the cat can lick her ear.”
“And if you can’t escape? What then? Will I steal you back again? It’s stark mad you are, Madra. The city’s gone to your head.”
The Pooka was charmed with his plan and argued it with cunning and passion. Yet Liam would not be moved. It was illegal, he said, immoral, and dangerous, and that was an end on it. All of which confirmed the Pooka in his opinion that Liam was no more suited for city life than a wild deer. Were the Pooka not there to look after him, he’d surely have been stripped of his savings and left to starve in a ditch before he’d so much as fully exhaled the ship’s air from his lungs.
West, the Pooka thought. He’d like it out west. Tomorrow I’ll think about getting him on a train.
A furious squeal interrupted the Pooka’s planning. Hackles rising, he turned to find himself nose to bristly snout with a big, ugly, foul-breathed sow.
A fight’s as good as a trick for clearing the mind.
The Pooka bared his teeth and growled. The sow’s amber eye glittered madly, and she wheeled and trotted back for the charge. The Pooka spared a glance at Liam, saw him surrounded by a handful of half-grown shoats, squealing and shoving at his legs. Liam was laying about him with his knapsack, cursing and trying to keep his feet in the mired street. If he were to fall, they’d trample him sure as taxes, and possibly eat him where he lay.
Fury rose in the Pooka’s breast, then, pure and mighty. Ducking the sow’s charge, he leaped into the melee around Liam, landing square on the largest of the shoats. The pig threw him off, but not before the Pooka had nipped a chunk out of its ear. Spitting that out, he fastened his teeth into the nearest ham. The shoat it belonged to squealed and bolted, leaving only four and their dam for the Pooka to fight.
He’d not endured a battle so furious since St. Patrick drove the snakes into the sea and the Fair Folk under hill. This fight he intended to win.
At home on his own turf, the Pooka would have made short work of the pigs. At home, even in his dog shape there, he was faster than a bee, mighty as a bull, and tireless as the tide. But weeks of iron-sickness and short commons, stuck in one shape like a chick in its shell, had sapped his strength.
The Pooka slipped in the slurry of mud and dung; a sharp trotter caught him a glancing blow. He felt the bright blood run burning down his flank, and a wave of pain and terror washed through and through him. Immortals cannot die, but they can be killed.
Instinct told the Pooka that he must shift to save himself. Fear whispered that he could not shift, that he’d lost the knack, that he’d been a dog so long, he’d forgotten what it felt like to have hooves or horns or two legs and a coat he could take off.
Seeing her enemy falter, the sow took heart and charged, squealing like a rusty hinge, her tusks aimed like twin spears straight at the Pooka’s soft belly.
Instinct triumphed.
Tossing his streaming mane, the Pooka screamed and aimed his heavy, unshod hooves at the sow’s spine. Quick as he was, she was quicker yet, scrambling out from under his feet at the last instant. The Pooka turned upon the shoats around Liam like an angry sea, striking with hoof and tooth.
The sow, seeing her shoats threatened, charged again, barreling toward the Pooka like a storm full of lightning. Wheeling, the Pooka reared again. This time, his hooves crushed the sow into the mud.
The Pooka stood over the bodies of his enemies and trumpeted his victory into the evening air.
An arm snaked across his withers and clung there. Liam’s voice, shaky with relief, breathed in his ear. “Oh, my heart, my beauty, my champion of champions. That was a battle to be put in songs, and I shall do so. Just as soon as my legs will bear me and my heart climbs down from my throat.”
The Pooka arched his neck proudly and pawed at the corpses piled at his feet. A shoat, recovering from its swoon, heaved up on its trotters and staggered away down the street, straight into the path of a bay gelding harnessed to a shiny black buggy driven by a man in a stovepipe hat.
Bruised and shaken as he was, Liam was no more able to leave a horse in difficulties than swim home to Eire. No sooner did he see the shoat run between the bay’s feet and the bay shy and startle and kick its traces, than he ran to its head and grabbed its harness.
The bay tossed him to and fro like a terrier with a rat, but Liam hung on, murmuring soothing inanities in Irish and English, until the gelding’s terror calmed and it stood silent and shivering.
Liam stroked the bay’s nose and looked around him.
The street was a shambles, with the corpses of his late assailants bleeding into the mud. A crowd of day laborers stood all around, goggling with their mouths at half cock. Off to one side, Madra the hound was licking the blood from a gash on his flank.
The gelding’s driver climbed down from the buggy, his cheeks as white as his snowy shirtfront.
“Thank you.” His voice, though flatly American, was kind. “That was bravely done. I take it you know something about horses?”
Liam touched his forehead with his knuckle. “I do so, sir.”
“Ostler?” the gentleman asked.
“Back in my own country, I was a trainer. Racehorses.”
The gentleman looked startled. “A horse trainer? I’ll be blowed! Do you mind if I ask your name?”
“It’s Liam O’Casey, if it please your honor.”
The gentleman laughed, showing strong teeth. “Honor me no honors, Mr. O’Casey. I’m plain William Graves, and I breed horses.” Mr. Graves produced a pasteboard card. “Here’s my card. I’ve a little farm up past the orphan asylum—Eighty-fifth Street, more or less. If you care to come there tomorrow, it may be that we’ll fin
d something to talk about.”
Mr. Graves shook Liam’s nerveless hand, climbed back up into his buggy, collected the reins, and drove off.
“Well, that was a piece of luck and no mistake.”
It was Madra’s voice, but when Liam turned, he saw no dog beside him but a tall man in a black-skirted coat as filthy as it was out of fashion. His skin was pale, his crow-black hair was tied with a strip of leather, and his narrow eyes were set on an upward tilt, with his black brows flying above them like wings.
“You can be shutting your jaw now, Liam O’Casey,” the Pooka said. “I’m not such a sore sight as that, surely.”
“Madra?”
“For shame, and me standing before you on my two legs as fine a figure of a man as you are yourself.” The Pooka linked his arm through Liam’s and propelled him down the street. “Come away to Maeve McDonough’s and stand yourself a whiskey for a good day’s work well done. You may stand me to one as well.”
Looking back over his shoulder, Liam saw a pair of cart horses in thick collars pulling a piano in a wagon over the broken bodies of the swine. “My knapsack,” he said sadly. “My tin whistle.”
“The works of the late lamented J. J. Callanan were beyond saving,” the Pooka said. “The tin whistle, on the other hand … ” He held it out to Liam, dented, but whole. “I saved your purse, too.”
“And my life.” Liam stopped in the street and offered the Pooka his hand. “I’m forever in your debt.”
The Pooka looked alarmed. “What are you after saying, Liam O’Casey? There’s no question of debt between us. Favor for favor. Life for life. We’re quits now.”
“Will you be leaving me, then?” asked Liam, and the Pooka could not for the life of him tell whether it was with hope or dread he asked it.
“Not before I’ve had my drink,” he said, and was ridiculously pleased to feel the arm in his relax its tension. “I’ll see you safe up to Mr. Graves’s farm first.”
“Do you think he’s prepared to employ me?”
“Of a certainty. And give you his daughter’s hand in marriage, I shouldn’t wonder.”
Liam laughed aloud. “He’s not much older than I, Madra. His daughter would be an infant, presuming he had one at all. This is the real world we’re in, after all, not a fairy tale.”
“Are we not?” They’d reached Maeve McDonough’s by now and descended into the hot and noisy saloon. “And here am I, thinking there’s room enough for both in a city the size of this. New York’s got life in it, my friend. I’m minded to stay awhile. As long as you come down from the country from time to time and give us a tune. There’s no joy in a city where you cannot hear ‘Whiskey Before Breakfast.’ ”
Now, a quick journey to near-future Manhattan where a certain actor wakes up to find a griffin made of shining metal perched at the end of his bed.
… AND THE ANGEL WITH TELEVISION EYES
JOHN SHIRLEY
One gray April morning, Max Whitman woke in his midtown Manhattan apartment to find a living, breathing griffin perched on the righthand post at the foot of his antique four-poster bed.
Max watched with sleep-fuzzed pleasure as the griffin—a griffin made of shining metal—began to preen its mirror-bright feathers with a hooked beak of polished cadmium. It creaked a little as it moved.
Max assumed at first that he was still dreaming; he’d had a series of oddly related Technicolor-vivid dreams recently. Apparently one of these dreams had spilled over onto his waking reality. He remembered the griffin from a dream of the night previous. It had been a dream bristling with sharp contrasts: of hard-edged shafts of white light—a light that never warms—breaking through clouds the color of suicidal melancholy. And weaving in and out of those shafts of light, the griffin came flying toward him ablaze with silvery glints. And then the clouds coming together, closing out the light, and letting go sheets of rain. Red rain. Thick, glutinous rain. A rain of blood. Blood running down the sheer wall of a high-towered, gargoyle-studded castle carved of transparent glass. Supported by nothing at all: a crystalline castle still and steady as Mount Everest, hanging in mid-air. And laying siege to the sky-castle was a flying army of wretched things led by a man with a barbed-wire head—
Just a bad dream.
Now, Max gazed at the griffin and shivered, hoping the rest of the dream wouldn’t come along with the griffin. He hadn’t liked the rain of blood at all.
Max blinked, expecting the griffin to vanish. It remained, gleaming. Fulsome. Something hungry …
The griffin noticed Max watching. It straightened, fluttered its two-meter wingspread, wingtips flashing in the morning light slanting through the broad picture window, and said, “Well, what do you want of me?” It had a strangely musical, male voice.
“Whuh?” said Max blearily. “Me? Want with you?” Was it a holograph? But it looked so solid … and he could hear its claws rasping the bedpost.
“I heard your call,” the griffin went on. “It was too loud, and then it was too soft. You really haven’t got the hang of mindsending yet. But I heard and I came. Who are you and why did you call me?”
“Look, I didn’t—” He stopped, and smiled. “Sandra. Sandra Klein in special effects, right? This is her little cuteness.” He yawned and sat up. “She outdid herself with you, I must admit. You’re a marvel of engineering. Damn.” The griffin was about a meter high. It gripped the bedpost with metallic eagle’s claws; it sat on its haunches, and its lion’s forepaws—from a lion of some polished argent alloy—rested on its pin-feathered knees. The pinfeathers looked like sweepings from a machine shop. The griffin had a lion’s head, but an eagle’s beak replaced a muzzle. Its feathered chest rose and fell.
“A machine that breathes …” Max murmured.
“Machine?” The griffin’s opalescent eyes glittered warningly. Its wire-tufted lion’s tail swished. “It’s true my semblance is all alloys and plastics and circuitry. But I assure you I am not an example of what you people presume to call ‘artificial intelligence’.”
“Ah.” Max felt cold, and pulled the bedclothes up to cover his goose-pimpled shoulders. “Sorry.” Don’t make it mad. “Sandra didn’t send you?”
It snorted. “Sandra! Good Lord, no.”
“I …” Max’s throat was dry. “I saw you in a dream.” He felt odd. Like he’d taken a drug that couldn’t make up its mind if it were a tranquilizer or a psychedelic.
“You saw me in a dream?” The griffin cocked its head attentively. “Who else was in this dream?”
“Oh there were—things. A rain of blood. A castle that was there and wasn’t there. A man—it looked like he was made of … of hot metal. And his head was all of wire. I had a series of dreams that were … Well, things like that.”
“If you dreamed those things, then my coming here is ordained. You act as if you honestly don’t know why I’m here.” It blinked, tiny metal shutters closing with a faint clink. “But you’re not much surprised by me. Most humans would have run shrieking from the room by now. You accept me.
Max shrugged. “Maybe. But you haven’t told me why you’re here. You said it was—ordained?”
“Planned might be a better word, I can tell you that I am Flare, and I am a Conservative Protectionist, a High Functionary in the Fiefdom of Lord Viridian. And you—if you’re human—must be wild talent. At least. You transmitted the mindsend in your sleep, unknown to your conscious mind. I should have guessed from the confused signal. Well, well, well. Such things are outside the realm of my expertise. You might be one of the Concealed. We’ll see, at the meeting. First, I’ve got to have something to eat. You people keep food in ‘the kitchen,’ I think. That would be through that hallway …”
The griffin of shining metal fluttered from the bedpost, alighted on the floor with a light clattering, and hopped into the kitchen, out of sight.
Max got out of bed, thinking: He’s right. I should be at least disoriented. But I’m not. I have been expecting him.
Especially sin
ce the dreams started. And the dreams began a week after he’d taken on the role of Prince Red Mark. He’d named the character himself—there’d been last moment misgivings about the original name chosen by the scripters, and he’d blurted, “How about ‘Prince Red Mark’?” And the producer went for it, one of the whims that shape show business. Four tapings for the first two episodes, and then the dreams commenced. Sometimes he’d dream he was Prince Red Mark; other times a flash of heat lightning; or a ripple of wind, a breeze that could think and feel, swishing through unseeable gardens of invisible blooms … And then the dreams became darker, fiercer, so that he awoke with his fists balled, his eyes wild, sweat cold on his chin. Dreams about griffins and rains of blood and sieges by wretched things. The things that flew, the things with claws.
He’d played Prince Red Mark for seven episodes now. He’d been picked for his athletic build, his thick black hair, and his air of what the PR people called “aristocratic detachment.” Other people called it arrogance.
Max Whitman had found, to his surprise, he hadn’t had to act the role. When he played Prince Red Mark, he was Prince Red Mark. Pure and simple … The set-hands would make fun of him, when they thought he couldn’t hear, because he’d forget to step out of the character between shootings. He’d swagger about the set with his hand on the pommel of his sword, emanating Royal Authority.
This morning he didn’t feel much like Prince Red Mark. He felt sleepy and confused and mildly threatened. He stretched, then turned toward the kitchen, worried by certain sinister noises: claws on glass. Splashings. Wet, slapping sounds. He burst out, “Damn, it got into my aquarium!” He hurried to the kitchen. “Hey—oh, hell. My fish.” The griffin was perched beside the ten-gallon aquarium on the breakfast bar. Three palm-sized damsel fish were gasping, dying on the wet blue-tile floor. The griffin fluttered to the floor, snipped the fish neatly into sections with its beak, and gobbled them just as an eagle would have. The blue tile puddled with red. Max turned away, saddened but not really angry. “Was that necessary?”
