New Worlds 4

by Edited By David Garnett

  After that there was no hope left. None at all.

  ~ * ~

  Brendan was sitting on a boulder just outside the forest. In his trench coat and trilby he seemed like a denser concentration of the shadows cast by the first rank of trees. The biker’s visor eclipsed most of his long, ivory face, but the visible skin seemed preternaturally bright amid the gloom which lurked in the valley that afternoon.

  We marched up the side of the valley towards him, all of us silent. Russel’s rag-tag army of vengeance. Our weapons didn’t seem to bother Brendan terribly. If anything he was condescending. The corners of his mouth turned up in what I took for a smile.

  Russel stopped level with him, hesitant in the face of such urbanity. ‘We’re going to get Kathy back from the elven,’ he said. ‘Do you want to help?’

  ‘It looks to me like you have it all under control.’

  ‘It could be one of your girls next.’

  The derisive smile broadened. ‘I doubt that. I doubt that very much indeed.’

  ‘Thanks for nothing.’

  ‘Your fault for trusting them.’

  ‘Come on,’ Russel commanded us; he started off towards the forest. Most of the Black Spitfires hurried to keep up. I lingered.

  Brendan gave me a wolfish grin, like he already had the world sewn up. If I could just have seen his eyes then, I might have known what he was about, but all I could see was a little image of myself bouncing back off the shiny black mirror surface of his biker’s visor.

  I admit it, Brendan’s innate freakishness spooked me. I went off after the others before he could start that demented laugh again.

  ~ * ~

  The news of our obscenity spread out from the fairy glade, a distortion in the forest’s quiddity, racing on ahead of us like the rippling air of a heat shimmer. Forest folk were fleeing from our marching boots. The grass rustled beside the path, alive with small fast bodies outpacing the hares. Russel would let off a shot every now and then; I don’t think he hit anything.

  It was our own enmity that corrupted the forest’s song. Sendiryki had taught me to listen to the harmony, the way the wind slid through the branches, the sigh of flowers, blending together in concord. Now we intruded on the flow, an unsavoury dissonance. I could hear the trees shivering from the chill of our passage. Yet we were still on paths familiar from early childhood. Our territory.

  Russel marched on down the path, heedless of any subtleties. Of the two forces, he was still the easiest for us to follow.

  The tufty grass at our feet became darker; choked with tough twines of sorrel and clumps of nightshade. Solemn ash trees gave way to lighter birches clad in long, dusty braids of ivy. Their girth was enormous, tops hidden behind huge boughs; starsparks of mellow sunlight filtered through the slowly shifting leaves.

  I knew the path we walked down was taking us in the right direction, even though I couldn’t quite recognize it. Sendiryki once said there are many paths through the forest, and the straightest are often longest of all. I think he was right.

  ~ * ~

  I’d always found the elven camp a gorgeous place to behold, echoing the finery of medieval pageantry. It was set in a grove of copper beech trees, their vast boughs swaying overhead. The prince’s entourage had pitched their blue and green tents in a circle where they were dappled by topaz sunbeams. Cooking fires used to burn in the middle, adding to the festival atmosphere.

  But now the fires were out, and the elven stood in a protective semicircle, bows in hand, except for Prince Yannareth. He stood at their apex, clad in silver armour inlaid with golden arabesque symbols that shone of their own accord.

  I found Sendiryki’s eyes on me. All we could do was stare hopelessly at each other across the camp.

  Kathy stood behind Prince Yannareth, dressed in a long, flowing gown of green and white, lovely and remote, like one of the women in the Stompers dance fantasy. She was on the verge of tears.

  ‘Come on, girl,’ Russel said. ‘You’re coming back with us.’

  ‘Lady Katherine makes her own choices,’ Prince Yannareth said equably.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Russel took a step forward.

  There was a sharp ringing sound as the prince drew his sword.

  ‘Stop it,’ Kathy said. ‘Russel, there’s nothing left for us. Go home. All of you, go home, please.’

  ‘Nothing, eh?’ Russel said. ‘We’ll see, Lady Katherine. Now you come with me.’

  ‘I think not, Russel,’ Prince Yannareth said. T am truly sorry this has happened, for your company is one I treasure. But Lady Katherine is not your chattel.

  Russel looked round at us, sneering cockily. ‘Go get ‘em lads.’ He aimed his Sony straight at Prince Yannareth, and fired. So brazen and ignoble, forcing the issue.

  Prince Yannareth was already bringing his shield up. The plasma bolt hit the mirror surface and broke apart, static tendrils shivering across the heraldic crest.

  Targeting-lasers stabbed out, and that deadly barrage of plasma pulses strobed across the short distance between us, finger-sized darts of purple-white lightning. I heard the Enfields humming as they slung their harpoons. The elven answered with a flight of arrows.

  Anton cried out beside me, stumbling, an arrow shaft protruding from his thigh. His thigh! I’ve seen elven pierce a bird’s eye in mid-flight.

  I aimed my pistol a metre over Sendiryki’s head and squeezed the trigger hard. Three elven had fallen, tunics smouldering from the holes blasted by plasma bolts. One had been hit by a harpoon, his right arm hanging in tatters, blood splattering his chest. Five of the tents were ablaze, horses screamed in panic, pulling against their tethers.

  We were suddenly running at each other, yelling wordlessly. Someone somewhere was blowing a hunting horn, its brassy notes reverberating around the grove.

  Sendiryki and I charged into each other, the impact throwing us to the ground. I felt his long arms tighten around me, and hugged him back. We rolled about listlessly in the grass. Breath burnt against my constricted throat.

  ‘They duel,’ Sendiryki whispered. And I looked up.

  Russel and Prince Yannareth advanced towards each other, heedless of the wrestling couples thrashing around at their feet. Russel’s visor was down; sharp emerald laserlight flared from a cylindrical module on the side of his helmet, sweeping across Prince Yannareth’s helmet. Brain-raper photobytes, designed to tapeworm into a mind and rip rationality to a bleeding husk, to lovingly smother you in your own insanity. I know, I wrote them for Russel.

  Prince Yannareth swayed backwards as if buffeted by a squall. He clasped his sword in front of him with both hands, aligning its tip on Russel. His voice screamed out, strange twisted words, wretched with pain.

  Russel was laughing, his pistol directing a barrage of pulses towards the prince. They hit the silver armour, sending out small fierce sprays of molten metal. Tiny black craters bloomed across the prince’s breastplate, each blow punching him back. But still he held the sword steady.

  And then he finished his agonized chant. The blade of his sword ignited with a searing iridescence. A cyclone of diamond blue light lashed out from the tip, engulfing Russel in a lurid clawing nimbus.

  Russel shuddered violently, arms and legs spasming. He let loose an animal groan, livid with suffering. I could see his armour’s hexagonal dissipater web burning a radiant crimson. He lurched across the grove towards the prince, a tormented fire elemental, footprints scorching the verdant grass to withered ash, pistol spitting its condensed lightning bolts.

  They met head on, their battle cries merging into a single incoherent howl. Sword and pistol clattered aside. Over and over they tumbled, thrashing like beasts. Russel’s thermo blade chewing long gouges on Prince Yannareth’s armour. The prince’s bejewelled dagger prising at the neck seal below Russel’s helmet.

  Then the forest wailed, a hideous wounded keening that went on and on. It was us, I knew it, our violation was too great. Our fault. Our guilt. Our shame.

  A wind ros
e from nowhere, hurtling through the grove. Those of us standing mutely around our battling captains were forced to our knees by its vehemence. The copper beeches quailed before it, their boughs creaking with distress.

  ‘The paths,’ Sendiryki shouted above the clamour. ‘The paths are sundering.’

  Russel and Prince Yannareth abandoned their fight as the ground quaked.

  ‘Ride,’ the prince called. ‘We must ride back.’ He staggered to his feet. Scarlet blood was seeping out of his armour. ‘Katherine!’ The anguish in his voice pierced my heart.

  She moved towards him.

  ‘You bitch!’ Russel yelled. He was on his knees, clutching at one arm where the anti-impact armour had blistered.

  ‘Don’t go,’ I called after her. Useless, I know, but love is never kind. ‘Can’t you see, Kathy, they alter nothing. Nothing! In ten thousand years everything in their land will be exactly as it is now. That’s not living, not for us. We change, we have a life.’

  ‘We have pain,’ Kathy said. She reached the prince, and clung to him, the two of them stumbling back towards the horses.

  ‘Kathy!’ Russel screamed. But she never looked round. Not once.

  The elven were rushing about, chasing and gentling their skittish horses as the nightmare wind churned around us. The wounded were helped up into their saddles; the dead were turning transparent, becoming glass effigies. A multicoloured jewel glowed within each of them, throwing out prismatic light. Then they began to fade away, as ephemeral as dewdrops.

  ‘Go,’ I told Sendiryki. I took a holowafer from my jeans pocket. It was the one I’d loaded with a catalogue of bug eyes. I thrust it into his hands. He stared at it numbly, his youthfully ancient face wet with tears. ‘Go on. Go!’

  A rose gold light was rising behind the camp. A sun broader than ours, yet lacking the harshness, reaching bravely for the dawn, sending phosphorescent beams streaking through the first forest.

  Sendiryki embraced me, whispering in my ear. Then he was gone, racing feet carrying him across the grove to his comrades with a speed to rival the birds.

  They galloped off into the first forest, down a broad avenue of ancient gnarled oaks whose thick buttressed roots and arching branches formed a tunnel that stretched out for ever. I shielded my eyes against the tangerine corona shining so strongly above the misty treetops. That was the last time I saw them; a line of eerie black silhouettes poised on the crest of the world. One with his hand held high in a wave.

  ~ * ~

  I often return to the forest by myself, walking the familiar paths and animal tracks, visiting the glades and brooks I know so well. The wind still steals through the branches and leaves with the stealth of a questing lover, but it kindles no song, and the glades lie empty apart from the butterflies and the squirrels.

  There are no Black Spitfires either, not any more. The police took our guns away when we came out of the forest, but our brotherhood had died before that, laid to rest beside fair Fuchsia.

  I have a girlfriend now, most of us do. I suppose it’s an improvement.

  The Shadowhawks prosper at our expense. There are more of them these days, Russel foremost amongst them. And I’m afraid to walk down Balford’s streets after dark. They gave Anton a savage beating last week; he’s still in hospital.

  So I come up here to the forest where they have yet to venture. Sometimes I will catch a glimpse of phantasm figures through the trunks, or imagine I do. A girl with flaxen hair, wearing a green and white dress, her prince standing proud beside her, his arm around her shoulder as she cradles their infant child.

  Sendiryki’s final words live on in my mind. ‘The night void and the sea merge beyond the horizon,’ he said. ‘I will look for you there.’

  I don’t think so. Not any more.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  Free States

  Michael Moorcock

  Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,

  Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,

  Sylvan historian, who canst thus express

  A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme;

  What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape

  Of deities or mortals or of both,

  In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?

  What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?

  What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

  What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

  Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn

  ~ * ~

  1. LLAMADA DE LAS LEJANAS COLINOS

  ‘YOU’RE LOOKING BETTER, Jack.’ Sam Oakenhurst has recovered from the machinoix torments. ‘Your old self.’

  Jack Karaquazian deals seven hands of poker. His skin reflects a million cultures given up to the pit long before their time; his green eyes reveal a new kind of courtesy. Coolly amiable in his black silk and white linen, his raven hair hanging straight to his shoulders, his back set firmly against that howling triumph of Satan, he is content.

  ‘I’m feeling it, Sam,’ he says.

  ~ * ~

  Mr Oakenhurst picks up his bags. All around him the outlines and shadows of the Terminal Café shift and caper while Boudreaux Ramsadeen practises a graceful figure with Fathima Panosh, the tiny dancer currently favoured by the Terminal’s regulars who come to hear real old-fashioned zee and witness the purity of the high games. Only at Biloxi, where the Fault yells and ululates, can enough colour be tapped to push new limits. And for those who lose too much, there is always the Fault itself, restless and demanding, greedy for energy and offering, perhaps, an ultimate wisdom.

  ‘On your way, Sam?’ Jack Karaquazian sits back from his game. His fellow players know him as Al-Q’areen. They are shades, men and women ready to risk everything to win nothing but the approval of their peers. They have the dedicated, ascetic appearance of a strict order. The Egyptian smiles, a kindly jackal.

  ‘On my way.’ Mr Oakenhurst sets his broad-brimmed pale Panama, dusts at his fine cord travelling coat, his buckskin riding boots, his blue cotton shirt and breeches. ‘So long.’

  ‘Nobody knows what’s going on up there now,’ says Boudreaux Ramsadeen from the dance floor, his brutish face clouded with concern. ‘They say it’s nothing but vapour up in the Frees. Turned all to steam, mon ami. You be better off staying here.’

  Mr Oakenhurst lifts a hand to show appreciation. ‘Estrella errante, vieux pard. You know how it is.’

  But Boudreaux Ramsadeen will never know how that is. He brought his Café on the train from Meridian to take advantage of the tourist trade. Now he and the Terminal are married to the Fault until the end of time.

  (We are all echoes of some lost original, she would tell him. But we are not diminished by this knowledge. Rather, we are strengthened by it.)

  ~ * ~

  2. SE ERES RAPIDO DISPARA

  WHEN MR SAM Oakenhurst took off for the Free States he had it in mind to heal the memories and still the cravings of his last six seasons at the mercy of New Orleans’ infamous machinoix, whose final act of trust was to introduce him to the long, complex mutilation rituals they believed to be the guarantee of continuing existence in the afterlife.

  Ending his stopover at the Terminal Café, where Jack Karaquazian still wagered the highest psychic stakes from what had become known as the Dead King’s Chair, his stoic back against the whirling patterns of Chaos ceaselessly forming and reforming, Mr Oakenhurst was at last able to ask his old friend how things went for him.

  ‘Not so bad now, Sam, pretty good.’

  ‘You’re looking better, Jack. Your old self.’

  ~ * ~

  ‘I’m feeling it, Sam.’ Jack Karaquazian’s fingers moved abstractedly around the dormant dimensions of a waiting flat game. The other players were unhappy with this interruption but unwilling to risk the Egyptian’s displeasure. He toyed with the dealing plates, himself anxious to begin the next hand. And his eyes looked upon so many simultaneous memories.

  Before he walked to th
e door, Sam Oakenhurst said: ‘Come up there with me, Jack. They got some famous spots in Texas and New Mexico. They’re finding colour every day in California. Don’t you want to visit San Diego while she’s still burning? They say you can walk in and out of those flames and feel no heat at all. There’s people still living in the city, completely unhurt. That’s something to see, Jack.’

  Mr Karaquazian wished his friend luck in the West but reckoned he had a game or two left to play at the Terminal. In answer to Sam Oakenhurst’s glare of honest surprise, he recalled the old intimacy of their friendship and said, in words only Mr Oakenhurst heard, ‘I can’t go yet.’ He was not ready to speak of his reasons but if his friend were to ride by again at a later time he promised he would tell what happened after they had parted in the Quarter, when the Egyptian had gone upriver on the Memphis boat.