Truth.
I believed in truth, even when it hurt.
“He is lost to us,” said the telepath with the mocking name of Cross.
Lukyan’s smile faded. “Oh, really? I had hoped you would be one of us, Damien. You seemed ready.”
I was suddenly afraid, and I considered sprinting up the stairs to Sister Judith. Lukyan had told me so very much, and now I had rejected them.
The telepath felt my fear. “You cannot hurt us, Damien,” it said. “Go in peace. Lukyan has told you nothing.”
Lukyan was frowning. “I told him a good deal, Jon,” he said.
“Yes. But can he trust the words of such a Liar as you?” The small misshapen mouth of the thing in the vat twitched in a smile, and its great eyes closed, and Lukyan Judasson sighed and led me up the stairs.
It was not until some years later that I realized it was Jon Azure Cross who was lying, and the victim of his lie was Lukyan. I could hurt them. I did.
It was almost simple. The Bishop had friends in government and media. With some money in the right places, I made some friends of my own. Then I exposed Cross in his cellar, charging that he had used his psionic powers to tamper with the minds of Lukyan’s followers. My friends were receptive to the charges. The guardians conducted a raid, took the telepath Cross into custody, and later tried him.
He was innocent, of course. My charge was nonsense; human telepaths can read minds in close proximity, but seldom anything more. But they are rare, and much feared, and Cross was hideous enough so that it was easy to make him a victim of superstition. In the end, he was acquitted, but he left the city Ammadon and perhaps Arion itself, bound for regions unknown.
But it had never been my intention to convict him. The charge was enough. The cracks began to show in the lie that he and Lukyan had built together. Faith is hard to come by, and easy to lose. The merest doubt can begin to erode even the strongest foundation of belief.
The Bishop and I labored together to sow further doubts. It was not as easy as I might have thought. The Liars had done their work well. Ammadon, like most civilized cities, had a great pool of knowledge, a computer system that linked the schools and universities and libraries together, and made their combined wisdom available to any who needed it.
But when I checked, I soon discovered that the histories of Rome and Babylon had been subtly reshaped, and there were three listings for Judas Iscariot—one for the betrayer, one for the saint, and one for the conqueror-king of Babylon. His name was also mentioned in connection with the Hanging Gardens, and there is an entry for a so-called “Codex Judas.”
And according to the Ammadon library, dragons became extinct on Old Earth around the time of Christ.
We finally purged all those lies, wiped them from the memories of the computers, though we had to cite authorities on a half-dozen non-Christian worlds before the librarians and academics would credit that the differences were anything more than a question of religious preference. By then the Order of Saint Judas had withered in the glare of exposure. Lukyan Judasson had grown gaunt and angry, and at least half of his churches had closed.
The heresy never died completely, of course. There are always those who believe no matter what. And so to this day The Way of Cross and Dragon is read on Arion, in the porcelain city Ammadon, amid murmuring whisperwinds.
Arla-k-Bau and the Truth of Christ carried me back to Vess a year after my departure, and Archbishop Torgathon finally gave me the rest I had asked for, before sending me out to fight still other heresies. So I had my victory, and the Church continued on much as before, and the Order of Saint Judas Iscariot was crushed and diminished. The telepath Jon Azure Cross had been wrong, I thought then. He had sadly underestimated the power of a Knight Inquisitor.
Later, though, I remembered his words.
You cannot hurt us, Damien.
Us?
The Order of Saint Judas? Or the Liars?
He lied, I think, deliberately, knowing I would go forth and destroy the way of cross and dragon, knowing too that I could not touch the Liars, would not even dare mention them. How could I? Who would believe it? A grand star-spanning conspiracy as old as history? It reeks of paranoia, and I had no proof at all.
The telepath lied for Lukyan’s benefit, so that he would let me go. I am certain of that now. Cross risked much to snare me. Failing, he was willing to sacrifice Lukyan Judasson and his lie, pawns in some greater game.
So I left, and carried within me the knowledge that I was empty of faith but for a blind faith in truth, a truth I could no longer find in my Church. I grew certain of that in my year of rest, which I spent reading and studying on Vess and Cathaday and Celia’s World. Finally I returned to the Archbishop’s receiving room, and stood again before Torgathon Nine-Klariis Tûn in my very worst pair of boots. “My Lord Commander,” I said to him, “I can accept no further assignments. I ask that I be retired from active service.”
“For what cause?” Torgathon rumbled, splashing feebly.
“I have lost the faith,” I said to him, simply.
He regarded me for a long time, his pupilless eyes blinking. At last he said, “Your faith is a matter between you and your confessor. I care only about your results. You have done good work, Damien. You may not retire, and we will not allow you to resign.”
The truth will set us free.
But freedom is cold and empty and frightening, and lies can often be warm and beautiful.
Last year the Church finally granted me a new and better ship. I named this one Dragon.
FOUR
THE HEIRS OF TURTLE CASTLE
Me and fantasy go way back.
Let’s get that straight right from the start, because there seem to be some strange misconceptions floating around. On one hand, I have readers who never heard of me until they picked up A Game of Thrones, who seem convinced that I’ve never written anything but epic fantasy. On the other hand, I have the folks who have read all my older stuff, yet persist in the delusion that I’m a science fiction writer who “turned to fantasy,” for nefarious reasons.
The truth is, I’ve been reading and writing fantasy (and horror, for that matter) since my boyhood in Bayonne. My first sale may have been a science fiction story, but my second was a ghost story, and never mind those damned hovertrucks whooshing by.
“The Exit to San Breta” was by no means the first fantasy I ever wrote, either. Even before Jarn of Mars and his band of alien space pirates, I was wont to fill my idle hours by making up stories about a great castle and the brave knights and kings who dwelled there. The only thing was, all of them were turtles.
The projects did not permit tenants to keep dogs or cats. You could have smaller pets, though. I had guppies, I had parakeets, and I had turtles. Lots and lots of turtles. They were the sort you bought in the five-and-ten, and they came with little plastic bowls divided down the center, one side for water, one for gravel. In the middle of the bowl was a fake plastic palm tree.
I also owned a toy castle that had come with my toy knights (a Marx tin litho castle, though I don’t recall which model). It sat on top of the table that served me for a desk, and had just enough room inside its yard to fit two dimestore turtle bowls side by side. So that was where my turtles lived … and since they lived inside a castle, they must be kings and knights and princes. (I owned Marx’s Fort Apache as well, but cowboy turtles would just have been wrong.)
The first turtle king was Big Fellow, who must have been a different species, since he was brown instead of green and twice as large as any of the little red-eared guys. One day I found Big Fellow dead, however, no doubt the victim of some sinister plot by the horned toads and chameleons who lived in the adjoining kingdoms. The turtle who followed Big Fellow to the throne was well meaning but hapless, and he soon died as well, but just when things were looking bleakest, Frisky and Peppy swore eternal friendship and started a turtle round table. Peppy the First turned out to be the greatest of the turtle kings, but when he was o
ld …
Turtle Castle had no beginning and no end, but lots of middle. Only parts of it were ever written down, but I acted out all the best bits in my head, the sword-fights and battles and betrayals. I went through at least a dozen turtle kings. My mighty monarchs had a disconcerting habit of escaping the Marx castle and turning up dead beneath the refrigerator, the turtle equivalent of Mordor.
So there you are. I have always been a fantasy writer.
I cannot say that I was always a fantasy reader, though, for the simple reason that there was not a lot of fantasy around to be read back in the ’50s and ’60s. The spinner racks of my childhood were ruled by science fiction, murder mysteries, westerns, gothics, and historical novels; you could look high and low and not find a fantasy anywhere. I had signed up for the Science Fiction Book Club (three hardcovers for a dime, couldn’t beat that), but they were the science fiction book club in those days, and fantasy need not apply.
It was five years after Have Space Suit, Will Travel that I stumbled across the book that would give me my first real taste of fantasy: a slim Pyramid anthology entitled Swords & Sorcery, edited by L. Sprague de Camp and published in December of 1963. And quite a tasty taste it was. Inside were stories by Poul Anderson, Henry Kuttner, Clark Ashton Smith, Lord Dunsany, and H. P. Lovecraft. There was a Jirel of Joiry story by C. L. Moore and a tale of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser by Fritz Leiber … and there was a story titled “Shadows in the Moonlight,” by Robert E. Howard.
“Know, O prince,” it opened, “that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the sons of the Aryas, there was an age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars—Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirths, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet.”
Howard had me at “Zamora.” The “towers of spider-haunted mystery” would have done it all by themselves, though by 1963 I was fifteen, and those “dark-haired women” stirred some interest up as well. Fifteen is a fine age to make the acquaintance of Conan of Cimmeria. If Swords & Sorcery did not start me buying heroic fantasy right and left, the way Have Space Suit, Will Travel had started me buying science fiction, it was only because you could hardly find any fantasy, heroic or otherwise.
In the ’60s and ’70s, fantasy and science fiction were often considered one field, although the field usually went by the name “science fiction.” It was commonplace for the same writers to work in both genres. Robert A. Heinlein, Andre Norton, and Eric Frank Russell, three of my boyhood favorites, were all strongly identified with science fiction, but they all wrote fantasy as well. Poul Anderson was writing The Broken Sword and Three Hearts and Three Lions in between his tales of Nicholas van Rijn and Dominic Flandry. Jack Vance created Big Planet and the Dying Earth. Fritz Leiber’s Spiders and Snakes fought their Time War even as Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser were fighting the Lords of Quarmall.
And yet, though all the top writers wrote fantasy, they did not write much of it, not if they wanted to pay their rent and eat. Science fiction was far more popular, far more commercial. The SF magazines wanted only SF, and would not publish fantasy no matter how well done. From time to time, fantasy magazines were launched, but few lasted long. Astounding spanned years and decades to become Analog, but Unknown did not survive the paper shortages of World War II. The publishers of Galaxy and If tried Worlds of Fantasy, and as quickly killed it. Fantastic endured for decades, but Amazing was the prize horse in that stable. And when Boucher and McComas launched The Magazine of Fantasy, it took them only one issue before they renamed it The Magazine of Fantasy and Science-Fiction.
These things often go in cycles, of course. As it happened, huge changes were looming just around the corner. In 1965, Ace Books would take advantage of a loophole in the copyright laws to release an unauthorized paperback reprint of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. They would sell hundreds of thousands of copies before Tolkien and Ballantine Books, moving hurriedly, could answer with an authorized edition. In 1966, Lancer Books, perhaps inspired by the success that Ace and Ballantine had been having with Tolkien, would begin reprinting all of the Conan tales in a series of matched paperbacks with Frank Frazetta covers. Come 1969, Lin Carter (a dreadful writer but a fine editor) would launch the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series and bring dozens of classic fantasies back into print. But all that lay well in the future in 1963, when I finished de Camp’s Swords & Sorcery and looked about for more fantasy to read.
I found some in a most unlikely place: a comics fanzine.
Early comics fandom grew out of science fiction fandom, but after a few years it had become so much a world unto itself that most new fans were not even aware of the existance of the earlier, parent fandom. At the same time, all those high school boys were growing older, and their interests were broadening to include things other than superhero comics. Things like music, cars, girls … and books without pictures. Inevitably the scope of their fanzines began to broaden as well. The wheel was duly reinvented, and before long specialized ’zines began to pop up, devoted not to superheroes but to secret agents, or private eyes, or the old pulps, or the Barsoom stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs … or to heroic fantasy.
Cortana was the name of the Swords & Sorcery fanzine. Edited “on a tri-monthly schedule” (hah) by Clint Bigglestone, who would later go on to be one of the founders of the Society for Creative Anachronism, it came out of the San Francisco Bay Area in 1964. Printed in the usual faded purple ditto, Cortana was nothing special to look at, but it was great fun to read, full of articles and news items about Conan and his competitors, and original heroic fantasies by some of the top writers of ’60s comics fandom: Paul Moslander and Victor Baron (who were the same person), my penpal Howard Waldrop (who wasn’t), Steve Perrin, and Bigglestone himself. Waldrop’s stories starred an adventurer known only as the Wanderer, whose exploits were recorded in the “Canticles of Chimwazle.” Howard also drew the covers of Cortana, and provided some of the interior art.
In Star Studded Comics and most other comics fanzines, prose fiction was the homely sister; pride of place went to comic strips. Not here. In Cortana the text stories ruled. I wrote a gushing letter of comment at once, but I wanted to be a bigger part of this great new fanzine than that. So I put Manta Ray and Dr. Weird aside, and sat down to write my first fantasy since Turtle Castle.
“Dark Gods of Kor-Yuban,” I called it, and yes, my version of Mordor sounds like a brand of coffee. My heroes were the usual pair of mismatched adventurers, the melancholy exile prince R’hllor of Raugg and his boisterous, swaggering companion, Argilac the Arrogant. “Dark Gods of Kor-Yuban” was the longest story I’d ever attempted (maybe five thousand words), and had a tragic ending where Argilac got eaten by the titular dark gods. I had been reading Shakespeare at Marist and learning about tragedy, so I gave Argilac the tragic flaw of arrogance, which caused his downfall. R’hllor escaped to tell the tale … and to fight another day, I hoped. When the story was done, I shipped it off to San Francisco, where Clint Bigglestone promptly accepted it for publication in Cortana.
Cortana never published another issue.
By my senior year of high school I did know how to use carbon paper, honest. I was just too lazy to bother with it. “Dark Gods of Kor-Yuban” became another of my lost stories. (It was the last, though. In college, I made carbon copies of every story I wrote.) Before folding up its purple ditto tent, Cortana did me one more favor. In his third issue, Bigglestone ran an article called “Don’t Make a Hobbit of I
t,” wherein, for the first time, I learned of J.R.R. Tolkien and his fantasy trilogy, Lord of the Rings. The story sounded intriguing enough so that I did not hesitate a few months later, when I chanced to see the pirated Ace paperback of The Fellowship of the Ring on a newsstand.
Dipping into the fat red paperback during my bus ride home, I began to wonder if I had not made a mistake. Fellowship did not seem like proper heroic fantasy at all. What the hell was all this stuff about pipe-weed? Robert E. Howard’s stories usually opened with a giant serpent slithering by or an axe cleaving someone’s head in two. Tolkien opened his with a birthday party. And these hobbits with their hairy feet and love of ’taters seemed to have escaped from a Peter Rabbit book. Conan would hack a bloody path right through the Shire, end to end, I remembered thinking. Where are the gigantic melancholies and the gigantic mirths?
Yet I kept on reading. I almost gave up at Tom Bombadil, when people started going “Hey! Come derry dol! Tom Bombadillo!” Things got more interesting in the barrow downs, though, and even more so in Bree, where Strider strode onto the scene. By the time we got to Weathertop, Tolkien had me. “Gil-Galad was an elven king,” Sam Gamgee recited, “of him the harpers sadly sing.” A chill went through me, such as Conan and Kull had never evoked.
Almost forty years later, I find myself in the middle of my own high fantasy, A Song of Ice and Fire. The books are huge, and hugely complex, and take me years to write. Within days of each volume being published, I begin to get emails asking when the next is coming out. “You do not know how hard it is to wait,” some of my readers cry plaintively. I do, I want to tell them, I know just how hard it is. I waited too. When I finished The Fellowship of the Ring, it was the only volume out in paperback. I had to wait for Ace to bring out The Two Towers, and again for The Return of the King. Not a long wait, admittedly, yet somehow it seemed like decades. The moment I got my hands on the next volume I put everything else aside so I could read it … but halfway through The Return of the King, I slowed down. Only a few hundred pages remained, and once they were done, I would never be able to read Lord of the Rings for the first time again. As much as I wanted to know how it all came out, I did not want the experience to be over.
Dreamsongs 2-Book Bundle Page 40
