The Guiding Nose of Ulfant Banderoz

by Dan Simmons

  “What are you suggesting?” asked the war maven with a smile. “Peasants of the world, unite?”

  Shrue shook his head and smiled ruefully, embarrassed by his speech.

  “But no matter what comes, you want to wait and see it all,” said Derwe Coreme. “Everything. Including the end.”

  “Of course,” said Shrue the diabolist. “Don’t you?”

  There came several weeks as the galleon and people were being repaired when life was easy and merry—even self-indulgent—and then, too suddenly (as all such departing times always seem to be) it was over and time for everyone to go. Ulfänt Banderōz announced that he had to go visit himself—his dead stone other self—at the First Library and to repair that oversight of death.

  “How can you do that?” asked Derwe Coreme. “When you need the stone nose and there was only one of those and Shrue here used it on you already?”

  The old Librarian smiled distractedly. “I’ll think of something along the way,” he said. He gave Derwe Coreme a hug—an overlong and far too enthusiastic hug, to Shrue’s way of thinking—and then she handed the Librarian the half-full tube of epoxy and he winked out of existence.

  “I’m not sure,” mused Shrue, stroking his long chin, “how instantaneous travel allows one to figure anything out along the way.”

  “Is that how you’re going home?” asked Derwe Coreme. “Instantaneous travel?”

  “I haven’t decided yet,” Shrue said brusquely.

  Captain Shiolko and his passengers had voted and had decided—not quite unanimously, but overwhelmingly—that they would return home the long way, continuing to travel east around the Dying Earth.

  “Think of it,” called down Captain Shiolko as the gangplank was being drawn up. “Steresa’s Dream may be the first sky galleon of the modern era to circumnavigate the globe—if globe it really is. My dear wife Steresa would have been so proud of the boys and me. We might be back at Mothmane Junction in a month—or two or three months—or perhaps four—six at the most.”

  Or you might all be eaten by a dragon larger than the one I conjured, thought Shrue. Aloud, he shouted his wishes for a safe and happy voyage.

  Then there were only the eight of them, nine of them counting KirdriK, and before Shrue could say farewell to the Myrmazons, the daihak cleared his throat—a sound only slightly softer than a major boulder avalanche—and said, “Master Magus, binder, foul human scum, I humbly ask that I might stay.”

  “What?” said Shrue. For the first time in a very, very long time, he was truly and totally nonplussed. “What are you talking about? Stay where? You can’t stay anywhere. You’re bound.”

  “Yes, Master,” rumbled KirdriK. The daihak’s hands were clenching and unclenching, but more as if he were running the brim of an invisible hat through them than as if he were rehearsing a strangulation. “But Master Ulfänt Banderōz has asked me to stay and be his apprentice here at the Library, and if you would release me—or loan me to him, at least temporarily—I would like to do that…Master.”

  Shrue stared for a long minute and then threw his head back and laughed. “KirdriK, KirdriK…you know, do you not, that this will mean that you will be double-bound. By me and then by Ulfänt Banderōz, whose binding spells are probably stronger than mine.”

  “Yes,” rumbled KirdriK. The rumble had the sullen but hopeful undertones of a child’s pleading.

  “Oh, for the sake of All Gods,” sputtered Shrue. “Very well then. Stay here at this Library at the east ass-end of nowhere. Shelve books…a daihak shelving books and learning basic conjuring spells. What a waste.”

  “Thank you, Master Magus.”

  “I’ll reclaim you in a century or less,” snapped Shrue.

  “Yes, Master Magus.”

  Shrue gave one last whispered command to the daihak and then strolled over to where the Myrmazons had finished collapsing their tents and packing them onto the megillas. He squinted at the disagreeable, spitting, venomous, treacherous reptiles and their high, small, infinitely uncomfortable-looking saddles set ahead of the packs and weapons. To Derwe Coreme, who was tightening the last of what looked to be a thousand straps, he said, “You’re really serious about this epic seven-riding-home nonsense.”

  She looked at him coldly.

  “You do remember,” he said equally as coldly, “those seas and oceans we crossed coming here?”

  “Yes,” she said, hitching a final strap so tightly that the huge megilla gasped out its breath in a foul-smelling whoosh. “And perhaps you remember, in all your centuries of bookish studies—or maybe just because you brag about having a cottage there—that there are land bridges around the Greater and Lesser Polar Seas. That’s why they’re called seas, Shrue, instead of oceans.”

  “Hmmm,” said Shrue noncommittally, still frowning up at the restless, wriggling, spitting megillas.

  Derwe Coreme stood before him. She was wearing her highest riding boots and held a riding shock-crop which she slapped against her calloused palm from time to time. Shrue the diabolist admitted to himself that he found something about that vaguely exciting.

  “Make up your mind if you want to come with us,” she said harshly. “We don’t have an extra megilla or extra saddle, but you’re skinny and light enough that you could ride behind me. If you hang on to me tight enough, you won’t fall off too many times.”

  “That will be the day,” said Shrue the diabolist.

  Derwe Coreme started to say something else, stopped herself, grabbed a loose scale, and swung herself easily up over the packs and scabbarded crossbows and swords to the tiny saddle. She kicked her boots into the stirrups with the absent ease of infinite experience, waved her hand to the Myrmazons, and the seven megillas leapt away toward the west.

  Shrue watched them go until they were less than a dust cloud on the furthest ridge to the west. “The chances of any of you surviving this voyage,” he said to the distant dust cloud, “are nil minus one. The Dying Earth simply has too many sharp teeth.”

  KirdriK came out of the Library carrying the things Shrue had requested. He laid the carpet out on the pine needles first—a good size, Shrue thought as he sat crosslegged in its center, five feet wide by nine feet long. Enough room to stretch out and take a nap on. Or to do other things on.

  Then KirdriK set out the wicker hamper with Shrue’s warm lunch, a bucket holding three bottles of good wine set to chill, a sweater-cape should the day turn chilly, a book, and a larger chest. “It would have been a mixed metaphor of the worst sort,” said Shrue to no one in particular.

  “Yes, Master Magus,” said KirdriK.

  Shrue shook his head ruefully. “KirdriK,” he said softly. “I am a fool’s fool.”

  “Yes, Master Magus,” said the daihak.

  Without another word, Shrue extended his fingers, jinkered the old carpet’s flight threads into life, lifted it eight feet off the ground in a hover, turned to look sideways directly into the daihak’s disinterested—or at least noncommittal—yellow eyes, shook his head a final time, and commanded the carpet west, rising quickly over the trees, pursuing the disappearing dust cloud.

  KirdriK watched the speck dwindle for a moment and then shambled bowleggedly into the Library to find something to do—or at least something interesting to read—until his new Master, Ulfänt Banderōz, returned, either alone or with his other self.

  · · ·

  AFTERWORD:

  The summer of 1960—I was 12 years old and visiting my much-older brother Ted and my Uncle Wally in Wally’s third-floor apartment on North Kildare Avenue just off Madison Street in Chicago. Most of the daylight was spent taking the El to museums or the Loop or North Avenue beach or to the beach near the planetarium or to movies, but some days—and many of the evenings—were spent with me sprawled on the daybed in Wally’s little dining room, under the open windows with the heat and street noises of Chicago coming in, reading Jack Vance.

  Actually, I was reading a tall stack of my brother’s Ace Double Novels, o
ld issues of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and other paperbacks, but it was the Jack Vance that I remember most vividly. I remember the expansive, odyssiad power of Big Planet and the the narrative energy of The Rapparee (later known as Five Gold Bands) and my introduction to semantics through The Languages of Pao and the brooding fantasy brilliance of Marizian the Magician (later to be The Dying Earth) and the literary style that saturated To Live Forever.

  Mostly, it was the style. My reading even then had already moved beyond a steady diet of SF and other genres, but as my tastes sharpened and my appetite for literature grew—as I encountered not just the stylistic power of the best in genre but also that of Proust and Hemingway and Faulkner and Steinbeck and Fitzgerald and Malcolm Lowry and all the others—what stayed with me was the memory of Jack Vance’s expansive, easy, powerful, dry, generous style, the cascades of indelible images leavened by the drollest of dialogue, all combined with the sure and certain lilt of language used to the limits of its imaginative powers.

  When I finally returned to SF in the mid-1980’s, not only as a reader but as a writer working on my first SF novel Hyperion, it was to celebrate SF styles old and new, from space opera to cyberpunk, but most of all to acknowledge my love of SF and fantasy in an homage to Jack Vance’s work. Please note that I didn’t say in an attempt to imitate the style of Jack Vance; it’s no more possible to imitate the unique Vancean style than it is to reproduce the voice of his friend Poul Anderson or of my friend Harlan Ellison or any of the other true stylistic giants in our field or from literature in general.

  Reading Jack Vance’s work today, I am transported back forty-eight years to the sounds and smells of Chicago coming in through that third-floor window on Kildare Avenue and I remember what it is like to be truly and totally and indelibly transported into a master magician’s mind and world.

  —Dan Simmons