Best of British Fantasy 2018

by Jared Shurin

  I wiped my mouth with the back of my good hand and squinted through the blazing sun, at her face – her tanned cheeks padded and criss-crossed with wrinkles. Rayne is nearly eighty, but woe betide anyone who considers her old. Vertical lines of concern bunched up between her brows – her eyes full of disapproval and alarm.

  Immediately above us, people packed the curved seats of the Sphendone. Every row, from ringside up to the colonnade, and more spectators were pushing along the bleachers to join them, staring down at us. Lads were craning over the barrier like human tassels, pointing in awe at the enormous mess of tangled hooves, shaft, tack, haft and chariot embedded in the end of its ten-metre furrow of deep-ploughed sand.

  You pay more for seats in the Sphendone. They give the best view of the carnage, but being ringside puts you close to danger. A couple of men were collecting pieces of my left wheel that had landed among them, and were chucking them over the boundary wall, down to the track.

  The impact had killed my right pair of horses. Abishai was kneeling by the other two, sawing through their throats with his sword. Blood spattered their velveteen muzzles, and the sand-dusted domes of their eyes began to glaze.

  Rayne snapped, “Why did you race Gyr?”

  I groaned.

  “You knew he’d try to break your neck!”

  My leg didn’t hurt. I couldn’t tell why.

  Her aides dragged me onto the stretcher. As they raised it, I saw down the straight and, through the gap between the turn post and the bronze mermaid, I glimpsed another stretcher team carrying away the limp body of the Blue driver, whose chariot adhered in a mangled mess to the central spina.

  Gyr had murdered him.

  The stretcher lifted, and its rough canvas obscured my view. Rayne walked alongside, her hand on my chest. “The mortals are packed with envy,” she said. “And Gyr’s no different! ...We immortals confuse them. Five years is enough for everyone to see we haven’t aged. That immortality wasn’t a hoax on San’s part. They know they’ve aged! We should look different too, but we don’t! So of course they hate us! Maybe that hate will turn to awe... given enough time. But for now Gyr thinks you’re still his little brother!”

  “My leg...”

  “You might lose it! Then what, Lightning? If I have to amputate, chances are you’ll lose your next Challenge, and you’ll lose your immortality. Well! It’s been nice knowing you!”

  “But Martyn...”

  “Sh! Not here.”

  We entered the tunnel. The dazzling sky became the masonry of the archway ceiling. Peaceful shade, then out again into the striking sun, and we continued to the palace.

  “We don’t belong in the mortals’ world any more,” she said. “Stick with the Emperor, at the Front or in his Castle. Not in Teale’s court, where Gyr can bait you.”

  “But honour...”

  “Stuff honour! Lightning, you have to live! For the good of the world. Gyr will be thrilled he’s hurt you so badly that you might lose your immortality.”

  “I’ll shoot him!” I said.

  Rayne sighed. “You won’t, because you’re eternal now and you’ve sworn to protect them. It’s going to be a harder task than I thought.”

  The stretcher bearers jolted me up the steps fronting the palace. Their sandal soles slapped on the hot, dusty mosaic. Then there was a sudden cool dimness, and the smell of pale, waxed oak. We had passed into the hall, under a flash of vine-green frescoed ceiling, and reached my bedroom, on the ground floor.

  They raised me high, laid me on the bed. I had spent a year here, recuperating after Bitterdale, and the battle tumulted through my mind, as the sapphire-silk canopy filled my gaze – and the pain came on.

  My whole leg was raw fire, a solid blaze – but it must still be attached, because I felt the fragments of bone scraping against each other, and the smuts of racetrack dirt floating on the surface of my skin, against the hairs. I was running with sweat, the dust washing off me and, with the blood, it was soaking into my back. My white silk shirt, pulled out between its straps to billow, now clung sopping-wet to me, like a second skin.

  I struggled to see my leg, but Rayne pressed my chest and pushed me down. All I could see was her brown, age-withered hand, and my pectoral muscles hard beneath the translucent-wet silk.

  She began unbuckling the straps crossed over them.

  “Martyn!” I cried.

  “She knows,” Rayne said, soothingly. “She saw it. When you crashed, her hands flew to her mouth. Besra laughed, and she slapped him.” Rayne bent to tighten a tourniquet below my knee. “It’s a poor way to keep your love a secret.”

  But everyone knows! I thought, in a fever. Who can keep a secret in the palace?

  “She tried to run to you. She’d have dashed between the chariots. She would have tried to lift it on her own! But Peregrine grabbed her.” The Doctor began sponging the blood from my leg. “She struggled, but he calmed her. Your mother was watching, and so was hers – watching very closely indeed. So she composed herself, and left with Peregrine, though she looked very pale.”

  A great heartache started pulling, like a hook in my chest. How thick is its rope and how broad is the point! The searing agony in my leg was nothing compared to the intensity of my desire for Martyn.

  “It smashed your bone to smithereens,” Rayne said. She ran her expert hands over my calf. Tears were trickling from the corners of my eyes, I kicked and spread my wings, shivering them. I would not scream in front of mortals.

  Dirt mottled my arms, thickening every hair, turning my skin brown. Rayne sponged the dust, blood and stinging salt away from my eyes, and my hair, running wet, suddenly stretched freezing cold on the pillow. I raised my hand with its dislocated fingers, trying to comprehend how the reins had twisted them.

  The door opened and closed.

  “At last!” said Rayne. “Well done!”

  A servant had come in, bearing a golden cup. Her head was bowed, and covered with a scarf. She came up to the bedside, raised her face and smiled at me mischievously. It was Martyn.

  She said, “It was the only way we could think of, to get me past your brothers and the Queen.”

  At the sound of her voice my heart swelled, and courage sprang up within me. Martyn’s green eyes glittered. She clasped my hand and squeezed it. “I love you,” she said. “We’ll make Gyr pay.” She helped me curl my hand around the cup. My fingers sank into the hollows between the embossed figures – I tilted it to my lips and watched the wine elongate towards me, glistening like a ruby in an arch of gold. It tasted of port and liquorice. It seemed to coat my throat, and I began to feel warm inside, high up, within the chevron of my ribs.

  Martyn took the cup. “It’s opium, my love. Sleep now. Don’t fight it. Rayne will set your leg and I’ll be here, all the time. I won’t move from your side.”

  The Doctor nodded approvingly and busied herself, cutting my white boot away from my skin. I could feel her tugging my leg, gently tussling, and the fragments of bone jostled and scraped within the muscle, my calf rubbing this way and that on the bed. The pain had become just numb discomfort, but my mind was churning.

  Why wouldn’t Martyn marry me? What was wrong with me? What was wrong with her, with the whole situation? I struggled inside my mind, writhing and kicking. How could she not understand? Or what was I missing? It was simple: I came to take her to the Castle, so we could marry and the Emperor could make her immortal. I’d assumed she would rush to be with me, and I could carry her away, overwhelmed with excitement, bursting with pleasure.

  But she declined me. Why? I sank like a stone into waves of confusion and dread. She mustn’t really love me, but she says she does, and she’s here now. So she must! And, even if she didn’t, what sort of person would decline the chance to become immortal? I don’t know why! I thrashed, terrified of losing her: ripped from my chest.

  How could she be so mistaken? What was going on in her mind? It must be different from mine. Too different. I thought I knew how she thin
ks, but she was forcing me to admit I had no idea. All I’d ever thought was wrong. I thought I’d known her well – but I didn’t, really. Did I? Anguish rose inside me, and chariot wheels sped by, knifing the sand.

  I let loose a tortured howl.

  She pressed my hand.

  I groaned and sweated, under the waves of torment, the dark red colour you see with your eyes closed. I can’t face the centuries without you, Martyn. Without you, I can’t be complete. I’ll be only half a man, forever. I tried to be calm. She must be testing me. I can feel her hand. She must love me in return. I struggled behind squeezed eyelids, trying to recapture the last time we’d been together. Searching for any signs of hidden meaning. I’d read our intimacy rightly, hadn’t I? I must have! There is so much love!

  The last moment we had snatched together: away from my mother’s spies, I had stolen away to the belvedere. Martyn found my note and rode out beyond the woods. She opened the glass door and came in, exhilarated from the ride, her shirt of lemon silk half-unbuttoned and the straps beneath showing. I lay on the couch, growing harder while she caressed me.

  And no, we shouldn’t do this, but no-one else seems alive but us. How we love our senses! We love to fuck and ride, we love each other’s bodies, we feast and drink. We embrace life!

  How else can we Awians laugh in the face of death?

  Oh, my love!

  And then her face became Gyr’s face, floating below the sapphire canopy and sneering at me, and turned into Insect mandibles, gaping. We are in the starting box, I have the reins in hand, and I turn to look at Gyr poised in the chariot beside me – and he has an Insect’s head. His sculpted body and his head is that of a giant Insect, chitin shining, compound eyes staring, antennae brushing the rafters, and his jeering mandibles open wide, and he strikes and bites my hip.

  My arm is itching. I glance down and scratch it. The skin peels open under my fingernails, and underneath, shining black, is smooth Insect chitin. I can’t stop scratching, it peels away further, revealing more chitin, my skin sloughs off, tough bristles emerge here and there – my skin falls away, my whole arm is a spindly Insect’s leg. I look at my hands holding the reins and they are Insect’s claws.

  Martyn drops the handkerchief, the gates spring wide, we burst away. Now I’m human again and hurtling with a human Gyr down the straight. He speeds ahead, I’m whipping and yelling, and the reins start to vibrate in my hand. The chariot is shaking and juddering. There shouldn’t be this much movement! The bit rings fly apart – out of the horses’ mouths – the reins snake into the air, thick white straps with gold bosses, they fall to the streaking ground, trailing, wrap around the wheels. The horses’ heads are free, they charge out of control! The rings linking their harnesses to the shaft begin to widen, opening up, sabotaged cut metal shining. They fly off! The horses charge away. The shaft bites into the sand. Its joint on the front of my chariot buckles, my chariot halts abruptly and I am flung into the air, onto the freezing mud of Bitterdale. My body mangled and broken. The Blue chariot driven by a corpse drives over me, bowling me over, my body crushed and spilling. My mouth is full of sand, I taste it, acrid, grinding on my molars. I moan and spit but my neck and back is broken, I can’t crawl. I lie under the black Bitterdale sky, in the seeping mud of the battlefield, surrounded by the screams of the dying. I run out of strength, lay staring glassy at the piled night clouds, and I die. The moon, larger than normal, drifts out from their silver edge. My gaze sets. I see it, but I do not know, for I am dead.

  My two soldier brothers, Lanner and Amur, are crouching beside me, peering into my face, but I do not see them, for I am dead. They pick me up, my nose and vision to the horse hair, and gallop me back to the palace. I am lowered on a bier, on silken ropes, into the tomb, smelling of myrrh and wood amber, but I do not know, for I am dead.

  Martyn stands above me at the mouth of the tomb. She is crying into the handkerchief that starts the races, and above and beyond her bowed head is the pink coral marble ceiling of the family mausoleum. Martyn draws back, weeping, and the great tomb slab crashes into place, and all is black, and I begin to rot.

  I leap up, through the tombstone, across the room, and plunge my face in the washbowl. I grab the pitcher and pour water over my head. Its chill strikes my scalp. Agony blazes in my leg and I drop to my knees, clutching the stand. My pulse is racing! I’m panting!

  My heart is hammering so hard it’s standing out from my chest!

  “Saker!” Martyn appeared beside me, took my arm and led me back to the bed. “Broken leg, remember?”

  “The race!” I cried.

  My leg was hard and heavy. It was in a plaster cast. I lay on the bed and it locked out straight, with atrocious pain.

  “Sh! Sh! Nobody could have pulled out of that curve. Nobody. Gyr slammed you into the wall – we all saw it.”

  The sunrise, behind her, was backlighting her stacks of gold-red hair. It shone like marvellous bronze; her whole outline was singing.

  “I had a bad dream,” I said. “The hippodrome...”

  “Oh.” She bent and kissed my cheek. She smelt soft, of black pepper and nectarine, and her lips brushed the folds of my ear as she whispered, “It’ll fade.”

  “Ah... I don’t know...”

  “Gyr is a scourge on the earth. Let me kiss you properly.” She wriggled onto the bed and kissed me, palm holding my cheek, entwined my tongue with hers. I held her soft breasts. The great strength of my love for her seemed to lift my body, and my pain began to ebb away.

  She pulled at my lip with her cupid’s bow mouth, bit my lip gently, kissed them and drew away. “Saker,” she told me. “Rayne is right. You don’t belong here any more.”

  She was looking into my eyes so tenderly I saw her very soul, and I knew, that behind all her propaganda of energy and excitement, she was just as afraid as everyone else, of what I had become. “You must be really angry with Gyr.”

  “No...” Strangely enough, I wasn’t.

  “Do you remember the crash?”

  “Yes.”

  “...What do you remember?”

  “Martyn!” I laughed. “Everything went dark.”

  She nodded, thoughtfully. “After he did it, he was waving at the crowd. He even slowed down. He was grinning like mad, and they were cheering back – as if he’d done something clever. He let the Blue catch up,” she said. “And he drove him straight into the Spina. Did you hear the crowd howling?”

  My stomach knotted. Was this monster really my brother?

  “But why do they love him so much?” I said. “And why do they hate me?”

  “You had your accolade after Bitterdale,” she said. “That was a year ago. It’s over.” Her fingers, as light as feathers, thoughtfully traced the edge of the plaster cast, and then began creeping up my thigh.

  I said, “But if it wasn’t for me, none of this would exist. By now, everyone in the crowd would be dead or fled to Hacilith. The whole of Awia would be the Insects’ nest. The town and the hippodrome would be buried deep inside it.”

  “I know,” she nodded. “I know, you saved us, but their gratitude fades very quickly. It ebbs away. You’re the Archer. Just like Rayne keeps saying, they’re envious of you, Lightning. Their envy erodes their gratitude even more – and what have you done for them since?”

  “I’ve been recovering from being savaged by an Insect!”

  “Ha! People are hungry for entertainment. Especially since they’ve had such a narrow escape, they want a blow-out party.”

  “But they’re still at risk,” I said, bewildered. The Insects hadn’t gone away. They were seething like a solid tide, the edge of their mass at Oscen, a hundred miles north of here. We had to stop them before they swarmed back across the river.

  Martyn stroked my hip, the opposite side from my Bitterdale scars. “The Insects are out of sight and out of mind. You pushed them out of Micawater, Saker. You did it, but people will never stop and think. As soon as the crisis is over, they return to life as
normal, as if nothing’s changed... with an emphasis on partying, while they still can.”

  “But we have to prepare!”

  “Oh, Saker. People want light relief and Gyr’s ready to give them the thrills they crave. He indulges them with cake and circuses, and they love him. So it’s his manor now.”

  We were quiet for a while.

  She had opened the balcony windows wide, and a gentle breeze was billowing their gauze drapes into the room. For a long time we held each other, motionless, with the sheets rucked around us, and the sun splintered pale gold rose over the horizon.

  Martyn stretched her auburn wings. She was the only worthwhile thing in the world.

  “Please marry me,” I begged. “Come with me to the Castle, and I’ll make you immortal.”

  “Marrying your first cousin...” she murmured. “What an example that would be, for all time...” She reached out and touched my throat. “Lightning, it’s against the law. The Queen would be furious. It’s the last thing the Emperor wants... And what would the public say...? You must be above all reproach. You must be immaculate, to deflect the jealous talk, the people who would undermine you. You must give them no ammunition.” She laughed with soft bitterness. “Set yourself above, and apart from everyone, like a star... at the zenith. Shining without the faintest stain of blame, for evermore... Ha. I wish you understood what a tough task ‘evermore’ will be...”

  She kissed me. “Look at you, all broken already! Five years and your body’s already ruined. Clinging to a position never works, my love. Where will you end? In what year? How far will you make it, into the future, before the Insects get you? Will you live to be a hundred? Two hundred, even? ...Oh, my love. Why did you have to become immortal? It’s wrecked everything.”

  I loved her so passionately it hurt. I could wait for her, but we were changing in different ways, growing apart. The racing tempo of time was tearing me away from her – with ever-increasing velocity. She didn’t know how little time she had. She shouldn’t tarry and waste it... but like every mortal, she does.

  I kissed her, and lost myself in the soft silk of her sparkling hair, the taste of her lips. She suddenly pulled away and yelped.