The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 5

by Jonathan Strahan

  Mariska had learned meditation as part of her spacer training, and her doctors kept urging her to try it now, find a silence in herself that would give her peace. But what had happened still roared through her mind. The Shining Legend’s shipbrain had captured the crew’s last moments. Glint and Didit had died in each other’s arms in the wardroom, but Richard, the strongest of them, had muscled his way to her even as the oxygen levels in his blood crashed. He had died changing her last bottle. She couldn’t imagine being that brave. She knew she hadn’t earned that kind of devotion.

  To escape these dark thoughts, she called up a feed she had been working on.

  A dusty dirt road cut across a grassy field. The sky above was the deep blue of the oceans as seen from space. It had a delicious weight, as if it had been filled with more air than any sky had ever been. Mariska stood on the side of the road as a parade of animals passed: cows and polar bears and elephants and two zebras wearing top hats and a whale with squat legs. Didit, Glint and Richard drove up in a bathtub filled with water. Didit waved.

  =We set up a tent.=

  Mariska looked up.=Nice sky.=

  Glint smiled. =Not too blue?=

  =Perfect.=

  Richard leaned out of the bathtub reaching for Mariska. She stepped back.

  =Coming?=

  She shook her head. =Not yet.=

  =Want us to wait?=

  She shook her head again. Richard pulled his arm back into the bathtub and tapped Didit on the shoulder.

  Mariska watched them go. In the distance she could hear the tootle of a pipe organ.

  THE MAN WITH THE KNIVES

  ELLEN KUSHNER

  Ellen Kushner was born in Washington, DC, and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. She attended Bryn Mawr College and graduated from Barnard College. Her first novel, Swordspoint: A Melodrama of Manners, introduced the fantasy world to Riverside, to which she has since returned in The Fall of the Kings (written with Delia Sherman), The Privilege of the Sword, and several short stories, including the one that follows.Her second novel, Thomas the Rhymer, won the Mythopoeic Award and the World Fantasy Award. Kushner is also the editor of Basilisk and The Horns of Elfland (co-edited with Don Keller and Delia Sherman), and has taught writing at the Clarion and Odyssey workshops. Upcoming is anthology Welcome to Bordertown (co-edited with Holly Black) and the audio drama The Witches of Lublin (co-written with Yale Strom and Elizabeth Schwartz). Kushner lives in Manhattan, on Riverside Drive, with her partner, the author and editor Delia Sherman.

  Her father had told her a story about a sailor who fell out of love with the sea, so he put his oar up on his shoulder and walked inland far and far, until he finally met someone who looked at the oar and said, “What’s that thing you’re carrying, friend?” and there he stayed. Her father told her he had done much the same thing himself: crossed from the mainland to the island, and then walked inland through the hills and forests until he found a place where no one could read a book, and settled there with his little daughter. He gave the villagers what he could in the way of physick, and taught Sofia to read and to do the same. Her father was gone, now, and here she was, alone with them all, with her goats and her garden at the edge of a village full of people who had never read a book.

  And so she remained, not getting any younger, until the man with the knives appeared.

  He was going to die here, he was going to cough up his lungs and shiver away to nothingness in a place where no one knew his name. When he fled the house by the sea he had taken his rings with him. They told the story of who he was, but here they were a book no one could read. He kept them in a pouch inside his shirt, along with his surgical knives and two books on anatomy, plus a hunk of dry cheese he was too weak to chew. He was going to die here in the forest of someone else’s land, like an old crow or an abandoned dog. Then he saw the light and thought, “Under a roof, at least.”

  The man on the doorstep could barely breathe, let alone talk. She was used to sick villagers turning up at odd hours, but this one she didn’t recognize. He was not young. His face was gray, and he was soaked and shivering. He couldn’t hurt her.

  “Come in,” she said.

  For a moment he took his hands away from his mouth and his chest, held them open to her in an odd gesture that seemed to say, “I have nothing.” Then he doubled over onto his knees, hacking and gasping for breath. She practically dragged him to the fire, where water was always boiling. “Take your clothes off,” she said, and he laughed, pounding his chest for air. She handed him a dry blanket and turned pointedly away from him, rummaging for syrups and compounds. What she gave him to drink made him fall asleep right there by the hearth, clutching her old gray wool blanket, the one Eudoxa had given her for saving her baby, who was now a mother herself.

  He was in the earth he was in the earth someone was trying to bury him and pouring earth strange earth into his lungs he couldn’t breathe and Shhh, said the sea washing over him, Shushh, it’s all right, sleep now…. It was only sleep, not death.

  She touched his head. His hair grew thick, but was all patchy and uneven on his head. She checked to see if he had mange, but that wasn’t it. Someone had cut chunks of it off, with a knife, maybe?

  They brought his lover up from the sea, from the rocks under their window. He had heard nothing, would never know if he had cried out as he slipped from the rocks. The sea roared too loudly there. It had been their bedtime music for years, the sea at night, and by day, the bees in the wild red thyme in the mountains above the house.

  They told him, He’s dead, lord, and he said, No, never. He is not friend to death. Death fears him. They told him he could look, and he moved through the colonnaded porch and suddenly Marina, the housekeeper, stood in the way saying, Lord, don’t look, but he looked past her and saw, no blood, no blood no blood, just something very very broken, and no blood at all so he took the nearest sharp thing and ran it down his arm, and they bound his arm saying it was too much, too much too soon, time enough for that at the burial and he started shouting, What? What? Are you insane? but he was using the wrong words; their faces showed they did not understand him.

  Usually she touched her patients only enough to diagnose and treat them, leaving the nursing to the women of the family. But here, alone, she was all there was. And so she bathed his body, like a mother, or a wife. He was modest; he’d tried to stop her. But he stank, and she wasn’t having that. She told him he’d like being clean, and she put wild red thyme in the hot water for him, to help clear his chest. He wept as the scent rose.

  Everyone let out their few drops of blood, and clipped a bit of hair to lay on— to lay on the— He’d let his blood already; he took the knife and hacked at his hair, the hair that had lain across his lover’s breast, tangled in his hands and covered his eyes—

  “Do you like it?” he’d asked, when they came in sight of the island for the very first time.

  “I can see colors, some. It’s beautiful.”

  “Where do you come from?” she asked the sleeping man, who coughed as he slept. To her alarm, he turned his head to her, opened his eyes, and said clearly: “I have knives.” But that was all; he’d been dreaming her and her question. His eyes closed again, his head turned away.

  The knives were not to sever him from his past, or even to separate him from other people They were to go deeper, see more, know more. He didn’t want to hurt anyone, not even himself, anymore. Not here. Not on an island where honey ran sweet in the comb, where the bees sang one kind of song in sweet-smelling thyme, and the sea sang another against black rocks below the white house they made together, a long porch to shade them from the sun, and windows open at night for the crash and hiss of the waves, to remind them that they were on an island, that it would take a ship with sails to find them, or to take them away.

  It was strange to find she did not ask his name. She thought he would not willingly give it to her. Maybe she simply didn’t need it, since there were only two of them, alone there in her house away from
the village. It was a quiet month, with no babies born, no sudden fevers or falls from rocks. After his storm, the weather was benign.

  If he could have torn out his own eyes to stop the visions coming, he would have done it. But he saw more sharply with his eyes closed: his lover under the earth, in it, part of it, defenseless and undefended. With nothing else to see, that’s what he saw.

  She saw: The day he breathed most deeply. The night he slept without waking. The night he slept without screaming. The morning he hauled himself up onto his feet, the blanket wrapped around himself, and silently took the bucket from her hand. The night he moved his bedding out to the shed, by the goats.

  The day he found the soup was burning, and cleaned out the pot, and made soup fresh.

  No one else knew that she actually burned soup, though she was sure they all suspected it.

  He staggered away from the place where the vision was the sharpest, stumbling over rocks, through the brush that grew along the sea and away from it, up into hills with forests where no one would find him, through villages where no one knew his name. He ate what they gave him. His useless body he gave to the wind and the rain. But they spat it back at him. And so he took it along to the next farmstead, the next village, where people asked who he was and what he wanted, and he had no words for them.

  The night she touched his chest, to see if the lungs were clear, and touched his brow to see if the fever was gone, and touched his throat to see if the breath was strong.

  It had been night. Night, and the wind. He had not heard his lover leave the bed, had not even felt his weight shift away. His lover often went for walks at night; it was not much darker to him than day. He liked to fight the wind along the cliffs above the waves.

  The night she touched his brow to see if the skin was cool, and touched his lips to see if he felt her there, and touched his face to see how he held her gaze.

  The waves stopped roaring when she touched him. The world grew very small. There was nothing inside him but what she was looking for.

  When she gazed at him, she saw no one he knew.

  Already she knew his body well, and so she was not astonished, when she lay in his arms at last, at the whiteness of his skin where the sun had never been. She was barely astonished to be there at all; it was as if his body had been calling her from the start, glowing like candleflame even beneath his rags, and she the moth drawn to the heat of his skin, his white, fine-grained skin, his long and supple hands, his sharp and delicate bones, his harsh and fallen face with its green eyes, a green like nothing else she’d ever seen in a living being.

  He let her explore him, let her discover herself through him. It was as if she was reading a book, soaking up learning , following letters with her finger, spelling out new words with her mouth.

  She said, “What is your name?” He was silent. He didn’t want to hear those sounds again.

  “Your name?” she asked gently, again. “Can you tell me?”

  He shook his head.

  “What shall I call you, then?”

  He made the sound “Camp-ee-un.”

  “Campione? Is that good?”

  He laughed and shook his head again. “No. Not good. Me.”

  “My name is Sofia.”

  “So-fya.”

  “Yes. I’m a physician. I can read. Can you read, Campione?”

  “Yes. I have reading things.”

  “Reading things? You mean, you have read things?”

  “No, no!” Again the shaking of the head, and this time he used his hands as well, spreading the fingers as if he’d dropped something he couldn’t find. “Reading—to read—small-from-trees—what word?”

  “‘Small-from-trees’—do you mean books? You have books to read?”

  He nodded. “I show you.” So that was what was in the bundle tied up with rags, the bundle he brought that she had left alone, partly to honor his privacy, and partly, though she hated to admit it, because it was so disgusting. Inside was cleaner cloth, and then… the books.

  Anatomy. Drawings of the insides of people—truths she’d glimpsed the ragged, colorful facts of more than once as she worked to save someone, but here they were, laid out in black and white like a map. Dispassionate and true. And also in black and white, patterned unrecognizable, were letters making words she did not know. His language, his words.

  She could barely speak. “Who made these? Where did you get them?”

  He shook his head.

  She spoke. He listened. He found words at need. When he was alone, he thought only in the words that she would understand. To look, to feel, needed no words. What she wanted, and what she gave. What he could give her now.

  “I am not young,” he would murmur regretfully into her hair. His speech was broken, oddly accented and missing words, but that phrase he knew. “Sorry. I am not beautiful now.”

  She wanted to tell him men were not supposed to be beautiful, but “You are to me,” she’d say, speaking the truth.

  He spread his hands open, lacking the words to argue, just laughing ruefully, as though that were refutation enough.

  “You see me,” she explained doggedly, wanting to convince him. “And I see you.”

  He stiffened against her embrace, as though she’d angered or insulted him; but she waited, and he relaxed again, melting against her bones.

  “You not know me,” he muttered.

  “True. It’s funny that you make me happy.”

  “Funny laughing?”

  “No.” She chuckled. “Well, a little. Funny—” She tickled him, and delighted to feel him squirm like a child— “Funny like strange.”

  “I am stranger.”

  “Yes,” she said; “you are that.”

  He knew that she had brought him back to life. When he felt the sun on his arms, when he smelt sage and lavender and rosemary as he turned the earth in her garden, when he smiled because she called to him across the yard, he knew he owed her everything. She remade the world.

  When he gave her joy, sometimes in his own release he’d howl like a woman in childbirth. She had witnessed that sort of pain enough that it scared her. But she learned that it was over a moment later. Herself, in joy, she sang: long, loud summer and midwinter carols she hadn’t known her throat was capable of.

  “Why don’t you sing?” she asked him bravely once, her face buried in the fold between his armpit and his chest. It took him a long time to understand her—and then he answered, “Most men don’t.”

  Once, though, he shouted out a word—screamed it, pleading with his body and the night before he fell down onto her, dense and heavy as clay. She tried to hold him, but he rolled away from her, shielding himself with palms outturned, warding off something only he could see.

  She said, “My love?” and he gasped, “Yes, words—words to me, please—”and, baffled, she started to sing, a silly children’s song about a goat on a hillside. He drew in deep breaths, asked her a question about what a line meant, and was himself again.

  The word he’d kept shouting out was his own language. Was it a name, perhaps? As sometimes she cried out his in her pleasure?

  The next day, while she swept out the cottage and pounded herbs into paste at her workbench, she thought about the fact that there had been others. Others before her. Did she mind that she was not his first love, though he was hers? Did she care? She cared a little, she decided. She did not like to think of him loving someone else. But it was entirely unreasonable to mind.

  “My hair, so white—”

  “I like it. Was it darker once?”

  “Yes. More darker, yes. Old, now. Bad.”

  “You are not bad. The goats like you. You take very good care of them.”

  “Goats….”

  “Say it. Say, ‘I am good.’”

  “I am goat.”

  “No, good.”

  “You. Are. Good.”

  It couldn’t last, and she knew it couldn’t last. It was her life, after all, to be woken at all hours,
to be summoned urgently to human horrors and discomforts; even he couldn’t change that. When the knocking and shouting outside the door began, smashing their bubble of dark and cozy sleep, she rolled over, untangled and pushed him away, fumbling for her nightgown and a blanket to go to the door.

  “Come quick!” Markos, his face flushed in the lantern light. “Oh come quick, please come, we’ve found him—”

  She hadn’t even known a man was missing. No one had told her, or asked her to join the search.

  Sofia dressed in a blur, by the light of a lamp her lover must have lit. She found her bag of bandages and salves by rote, and was out the door with Markos. A second man came behind them, the tall stranger. He followed them to a house, where old Stephan was laid out on the floor, moaning like the wind.

  Sofia knelt. They brought her light. They kept trying to tell her what had happened. She shut out the sounds and only looked and felt. It was the leg, the left leg. Around the knee was horribly swollen. Broken? Stephan shouted when she tried to move it.

  Sofia closed her eyes. Behind them she saw, clear and black and white, the diagram in Campione’s books. The knee, and the threads that connected the joints under the muscles. And then she knew.