The Avram Davidson Treasury (37 page)

They had one drink for formality, a second drink for friendship, and a third drink to show that they did not deny the Trinity.

Stevan wiped his mustache between his index finger and thumb, thrust in a cigarette, lit it, and smiled contentedly.

“A good thing, matches,” he said. “When I was a boy we had to use tinderboxes. How the world does change! You came for a charm?”

The young man seemed relieved now that the preliminaries of his visit were over. “I did,” he said.

“Your name?”

“Gavrillo.”

Old Stevan repeated it, nodding, blowing out smoke. “I am, of course, well-known for my charms,” he said complacently. “I refer to those I make, not those with which Providence endowed me—although there was a time… Well, well. My hair was black in those days. I can make quite a number of charms, although some of them are not in demand any longer. I don’t remember the last time I supplied one to keep a woman safe from Turks. Before you were born, I’m sure. On the other hand, charms to help barren women conceive are as much called for as ever.”

Gavrillo said, scowling, that he was not married.

“My charges are really quite reasonable, too. I can guarantee you perfect protection against ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and the evil spirits of the hills and forests—their cloven hoofs and blood-red nails—”

“I am not afraid of those. I have my crucifix.” His hand went to the neck of his open shirt.

“Very well,” Old Stevan said equitably. “I’ve nothing to say against that. I also prepare an excellent charm for success in the hunt …”

“Ah.”

“And an equally excellent one for success in love.”

“Yes.”

Old Stevan nodded benignly. “That’s it, then, is it? The love charm?”

Gavrillo hesitated, then scowled again.

“Which one means more to you? Or, putting it another way, at which are you more proficient? Take the charm for the other.”

The young man threw out his hands. “I am good at neither! And it is important to me that I must excel in one of them.”

Stevan lit another cigarette. “Why only one? Take both. The price—”

But Gavrillo shook his head. “It’s not the price.” He looked out on the wide-spread scene, the deep and dark-green valleys with their forest of oak and beech and pine, the mountains blue with distance, the silvery river. “It’s not the price,” he repeated.

“As far as you can see on all sides,” the old man said quietly; “in fact, farther, my reputation is known. People have come to me from across the frontier. If it is not the price, take both.” He saw Gavrillo shake his head, but continued to speak. “The hunt. A day like today. You take your gun and go off in the woods with a few friends. The road is dusty, but in the woods, in the shade, it is cool. Your friends want to go to the right, but you, you have the charm, you know that the way to turn is to the left. They may protest, but you are so confident that they follow. Presently you see something out of the corner of your eye. The others have not noticed it at all, or perhaps assume it is the branch of a dead tree. But you know better. Your eye is clear, you turn swiftly, your arm and hand are quick as never before, the bird flushes, you fire! There it is, at your feet—a fine woodcock. Eh?”

Gavrillo nodded, eyes gleaming.

“Or it might be a red doe, or a roebuck. A fine stag! You can hardly count all the points! Everyone admires you… Perhaps in the winter the peasants come to you. ‘Master, a wolf. No one is such a hunter as you are. Come, save our flocks.’ They have not even seen the beast when your shot brings it down. You wait while they fetch it. They drag the creature along, shouting your praise: ‘Only one shot, and at that distance, too!’ they cry, and kiss your hand. ‘Brave one, hero,’ they call you.

A dreamy smile played on Gavrillo’s face, and he slowly, slowly nodded.

Old Stevan waited a few moments; but when his visitor said no word, he went on. “Then there is love. What can compare to that? A man who does not enjoy the love of women is only half alive—if even so much. No doubt there is a young woman on whom you have looked, often, with longing, but who never returns that look. She has long black hair. How it glistens, how it gleams! Her lips are soft and red, and sometimes she wets them with her red little tongue. Inside her bodice the young breasts grow, ripe and sweet as fruit …”

The young man’s eyes seemed glazed. He did not stop the slow nodding of his head.

“You return, the love charm is in your pocket, against your heart,
here
. There is a dance, you join in, so does she. Presently you come face to face. She looks at you—as if she has never seen you before. How wide her eyes grow! Her mouth opens. Her teeth are small and white. You smile at her and instantly she smiles back, then looks away, shyly—but only for an instant—and you dance together.

“Soon the stars come out and the moon rises. The old women are drowsing, the old men are drunk. You take her hand in yours and the two of you slip away. The moment you stop, she throws her arms around you and puts her mouth up to be kissed. The night is warm, the grass is soft. The night is dark and deep, and love is sweet.”

Gavrillo made a sound between a sigh and a groan. Slowly he reached into his pocket, took out his purse, and began to slide its contents into his hand.

“You have made up your mind?” the old man asked. “Which is it to be, then?” There was no answer. Something caught the old man’s eye. “This one is a foreign coin,” he said, touching it with his finger. “But never mind, I will take it: it is gold.”

Gavrillo’s eyes fell to his hand. He picked up the coin, and an odd look came at once over his face. The dreamy, undecided expression vanished immediately. His eyelids became slits, his lips turned down in an ugly fashion, something like a sneer.

After a moment the old man said, “You have made up your mind?”

“Yes,” Gavrillo said. “I have made up my mind.” …

There was only an old woman before him at the ticket window. He had crossed the river just a few minutes before. The contents of his small suitcase had not engaged the attention of the customs officials for long; and from there it was only a short walk to the railroad station.

The old woman went away, and Gavrillo stepped up to the window. On the wall of the tiny office, facing him, were two framed photographs, side by side. The likeness of the older man was the same one that had been on the coin which had caught Old Stevan’s attention; but Gavrillo knew the younger man’s face, too—knew it very well, indeed. Once again the odd, ugly, strangely determined expression crossed his face.

The station agent looked up. “Yes, sir,” he said. “Where to?”

“One ticket, one way.” Gavrillo kept looking at the faces in the photographs.

“Very well, sir, a one-way ticket—but where to? Trieste, Vienna?” He was a self-important little man, and his tone grew a trifle sarcastic. “Paris? Berlin? St. Petersburg?”

Slowly Gavrillo’s eyes left the picture. He did not seem to have noticed the sarcasm.

“No,” he said. “Just to Sarajevo.”

I
NTRODUCTION BY
S
PIDER
R
OBINSON

I discovered Avram Davidson the summer I invented masturbation.

(That’s right: I invented masturbation. It was 1963; I must ask you to take my word that absolutely the only hints offered to even inquisitive Catholic teenagers in that era were that a behavior called “touching oneself impurely” existed and that those who practiced it were both depraved and doomed. Armed solely with these clues, I intuited the region of the body that must be involved, constructed experiments, and in due time invented the wheel. What matter if I was not the first? Elisha Gray’s invention of the telephone is no less admirable merely because A. G. Bell beat him to the Patent Office by twenty-four hours. I was quite proud of my invention, and all my memories of the summer of 1963 are [vividly] colored by it.)

A week later, in fact, when I brought home the Ace paperback edition of
The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction: 14th Series
and read its first story—“Sacheverell”—I was feeling so (I won’t even pretend to apologize for this one) cocky that for a glorious moment or two I actually believed I had invented Avram, too. Like the stoned character in John Brunner’s
Stand on Zanzibar,
gaping at the TV news and saying, “Christ, what an imagination I’ve got!” I had the solipsistic sensation that I had somehow caused Avram to appear in the Universe, out of an artistic necessity. Please, laugh with me at this youthful arrogance of mine, that I thought I bad the power to invent an Avram Davidson. Even God only managed that once.

Fortunately, it was not necessary to invent him, only to discover him. And then to bicycle to the public library, ask why there were no Davidson titles on the shelves, and correct that condition. (I was vaguely aware that there were magazines that published sf, but they weren’t offered for sale anywhere within bike range of my house.)

That particular anthology was truly excellent—I mean, it included Zelazny’s “A Rose for Ecclesiastes,” alright? Yet to this day, the story that lingers longest and deepest in my mind from that book is the first one: “Sacheverell.” The second thing I asked the librarian was to order anything she could get with “Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction” in the title, and in time I hunted down all the worthy predecessors of and successors to that volume…but out of all that excellent sf, it’s “Sacheverell” I can still quote large portions of from memory.

I marveled at it, at the time. I had just reached the age at which I was beginning to see how writers worked at least some of their magic, to spot a few of the more common professional tricks—but “Sacheverell” defeated me. I understood why my mother liked it, when I showed it to her—but I couldn’t quite figure out why I found it so memorable. I tried, that summer, to understand the source of the story’s power, to explain to myself its impact on me…with such poor success that I’m still at it thirty-three years later, sitting here typing this. Avram worked that trick often: effortlessly pushed buttons nobody else has been able to locate. A very hard writer to reverse-engineer…and therefore an immortal.

Here’s my current best take on the source of “Sacheverell” ’s intense, layered emotional impact: maybe Avram captured, in an absolute minimum of words, what it is like to be a youth bright enough to read science fiction for pleasure.

Even masturbation doesn’t help…enough. You need friends.

SACHEVERELL

T
HE FRONT WINDOWS OF
the room were boarded up, and inside it was dark and cold and smelled very bad. There was a stained mattress on which a man wrapped in a blanket lay snoring, a chair with no back, a table which held the remains of a bag of hamburgers, several punched beer cans, and a penny candle which cast shadows all around.

There was a scuffling sound in the shadows, then a tiny rattling chattering noise, then a thin and tiny voice said, tentatively, “You must be very
cold,
George …” No reply. “Because I know
I’m
very cold …” the voice faded out. After a moment it said, “He’s still asleep. A man needs his rest. It’s very
hard …
” The voice seemed to be listening for something, seemed not to hear it; after an instant, in a different tone, said, “All right.”

“Hmm?”
it asked the silence. The chattering broke out again for just a second, then the voice said, “Good afternoon, Princess. Good afternoon, Madame. And General—how very nice to see
you
. I wish to invite you to a tea-party. We will use the best set of doll dishes and if anyone wishes to partake of something
strong
er, I believe the Professor—” the voice faltered, continued, “—has a drop of the oh-be-joyful in a bottle on the sideboard. And now pray take seats.”

The wind sounded outside; when it died away, leaving the candleflame dancing, there was a humming noise which rose and fell like a moan, then ended abruptly on a sort of click. The voice resumed, wavering at first, “Coko and Moko? No—I’m very sorry, I really can’t invite them, they’re very stupid, they don’t know how to behave and they can’t even talk …”

The man on the stained mattress woke in a convulsive movement that brought him sitting up with a cry. He threw his head to the right and left and grimaced and struck at the air.

“Did you have a bad
dream,
George?” the voice asked, uncertainly.

George said,
“Uhn!”
thrusting at his eyes with the cushions of his palms. He dropped his hands, cleared his throat and spat, thickly. Then he reached out and grabbed the slack of a chain lying on the floor, one end fastened to a tableleg, and began to pull it in. The chain resisted, he tugged, something fell and squeaked, and George, continuing to pull, hauled in his prize and seized it.

“Sacheverell—”

“I hope you didn’t have a bad
dream
, George—”

“Sacheverell—was anybody here? You lie to me and—”

“No, George, honest! Nobody was here, George!”

“You lie to me and I’ll kill you!”

“I wouldn’t lie to you, George. I know it’s wicked to lie.”

George glared at him out of his reddened eyes, took a firmer grip with both hands, and squeezed. Sacheverell cried out, thrust his face at George’s wrist. His teeth clicked on air, George released him, abruptly, and he scuttled away. George smeared at his trouser-leg with his sleeve, made a noise of disgust. “Look what you done, you filthy little ape!” he shouted.

Sacheverell whimpered in the shadows. “I can’t help it, George. I haven’t got any sphincter muscle, and you
scared
me, you
hurt
me …”

George groaned, huddled in under his blanket. “A million dollars on the end of this chain,” he said; “and Om living in this hole, here. Like a wino, like a smokey, like a
bum!
” He struck the floor with his fist. “It don’t make sense!” he cried, shifting around till he was on all fours, then pushing himself erect. Wrapping the blanket around his shoulders, he shambled quickly to the door, checked the bolt, then examined in turn the boarded-up front windows and the catch on the barred and frost-rimmed back window. Then he did something in a corner, cursing and sighing.