The Third Bear (53 page)

But he wasn't a fool. He'd brought three miraculous things with him, in a chest banded with gold: an ancient book from Siberia made of broad, thick leaves, written in a secret language none alive knew; a healing tincture from the Yucatan that smelled like honeysuckle and chocolate; and a shiny green stone that tribesmen in the Amazon had told him was a god's eyeball that had fallen from the sky one night. At least he wasn't returning empty-handed. With any luck the king would reward his efforts, or at least forgive his trespasses.

Word must have spread about his return, for a royal pavilion awaited him on the far side of the river.

But it was not the king who greeted him there. Instead, it was a woman and her retinue. At first he did not recognize her. Then he realized it was the king's daughter, five years older. She had wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. She had let her hair grow long. It hung free to her shoulders, framing a face that seemed too wistful, too sad, for one still so young.

"Where is the king?" he asked.

"He died a year ago," she said, and he could feel her gaze upon him, lingering over every scar and bruise on his stubbled face. "I rule Smaragdine now."

"I didn't find the Tablet, but I brought back a chest of treasures," he said. It was somewhere behind him, but he couldn't stop looking at her.

"I don't give a damn about any of that," she said, and leaned up and kissed him on the lips.

Vivisepulture

And the Turk came down upon Smaragdine like a storm of plagues and breached the city gates and slew the defenders on the walls with arrows and their horsemen, led by their captain Baryut Aquelus, outstripped their infantry and so came unto the great Lyceum where the priests had hidden the Green Tablet, and Baryut took the heart of Smaragdine from that place, leaving the priests dead upon the steps as they rode out again.

And in the streets beyond they came upon the din of fierce battle, for the Smaragdineans had recovered from their surprise and now fought like demons for their city and men fell in great numbers on both sides as the city began to burn.

Raising his sword, Baryut led the way for the Turk, cutting down any who opposed them.

But when he rode under the shadow of the city gates and looked back, Baryut saw that the Smaragdinean prince Farid, upon a black charger, had come up behind and slain his riders and would soon overtake him.

Safety lay at the semaphore tower by the river, but Farid outstripped the Turk and forced him up into the hills and ravines and the coffeehouse beyond.

Farid was only a few paces behind him, driven by righteous conviction.

The Tablet became heavier and heavier in the Turk's hands and the prince shouted at him now, sword slicing the sky into jagged pieces.

"Bring it back or I'll feed you to my dogs!" Farid shouted. "You are very brave, although I don't know if you understand that!"

"And here I took you for a bit of a sycophant, Farid," Baryut shouted back. "A bit of a hanger-on."

"Not in the least. You believe too little and know too much."

Soon Baryut was trapped at the edge of a ravine. In a coffeehouse. A ravine. The prince would kill him now and the Tablet would go back to Smaragdine and he would never write another book. Or perhaps even another sentence.

Baryut wheeled around and drew his sword to make his stand at the edge of the ravine.

"Sacrilege!" Farid screamed, galloping forward. Their horses came together and they were now so close that he could smell the betel nut on Farid's breath, could see the design on the green T-shirt he wore under the blazer.

The force of their swords clashing shuddered up and down his arm and the ground beneath their horses' hooves caved away and they fell headlong into the ravine, still in their stirrups.

The horses were dead by the time they reached the bottom, necks snapped. The tablet had cracked into a hundred pieces.

Baryut and Farid were buried alive under the pebbles and rocks and boulders dislodged by their descent. Their mouths filled with dirt. Their bones broke.

Then, because Farid could not reach his sword, he shot Baryut in the stomach.

Baryut looked up at the ceiling fan and could hear a slow pounding that he knew was his blood abandoning his body.

As Baryut died, he had the satisfaction of knowing Farid would die, too, soon enough.

Within a month, the flesh decayed from the bodies of the two men, leaving only bones. In four months, the shifting of earth confused the collapsed skeletons of the horses and the men until there was no difference between the two.

That spring, the rains came and water trickled through the ravine, loosening the stones, picking through the bones and the pieces of the Green Tablet. Every year, the water dislodged more and more fragments until over time the Tablet became not a hundred pieces but two hundred and then a thousand, until no one piece was any larger than a Smaragdine coin.

Beyond the ravine, more wars were fought. Some the Turk won, some the Smaragdineans won. Men died searching for the Tablet. Smaragdine became a backwater held together by the weight of dead ritual and then, eventually, broken by a mad dictator who fancied himself an architect on a grand scale.

Pieces of the Tablet were carried away by the rainwater and entered the river. Fish ate them and became strange with the knowledge, uttering sentences in a language no one understood. Herons ate the fish and fishermen noticed how mournful and heavy their eyes became.

In a hundred ways, the Green Tablet re-entered the world, but like the men, it had been buried alive and its knowledge with it. Reborn, it became a hidden thing, seen in glimpses from the corner of the eye. Sometimes things happened because of the Tablet that no one could understand because no one knew what the Tablet said anymore. Perhaps they never had.

And still people searched for it, never realizing that they could search their whole lives, die because of it, and yet it was there all the time, in front of them, even in the pattern of green mold across a dirty floor in a Tashkent coffeehouse or somewhere in the blood leaking from my body or in the patient whir of the ceiling fan overhead or in anything in the world that received love or hate or some lingering attention or ... anything always forever.

AFTERWORD

Jeff VanderMeer

Sometimes you run out of words. Much of what I might have to say about these stories is inconsequential next to the evidence itself. This hasn't always been so. For my last major collection, Secret Life, I provided extensive story notes, using the opportunity to lay bare process, inspiration, frustrations, perceived triumphs, and other insight that I thought might be of use to other writers.

I'm reluctant to do the same here for a number of reasons, but in part because the stories in The Third Bear are so often about the search for, or encounter with, the inexplicable. What can I add that Seether or Savant or Sensio hasn't already said for me? These stories are also meant to reveal more and more of themselves, and the connections between the stories, over the course of multiple readings. They are, hopefully, the kinds of stories that change every time the reader experiences them. My thoughts on that process would just undermine the effect.

Perhaps, too, I'm not interested in my perception of the stories any more - I am interested in yours. My interpretation is on the page, encoded with the personal experience that makes almost every story, no matter how surreal, a secret diary entry. How you personalize them now is the most important thing.

In that context, let me end with one last story.

The Magician

There was a magician, of course. I say "of course" because we had no right to expect a magician, or anyone else. At first, he didn't seem that good. The cards were still visible when the doves appeared from his hands. The sleeves of his shirt seemed loose, suspect. He smelled, inexplicably, of lime. His coattails were muddy. Only gradually did we realize that the magician was doing things we hadn't noticed. He turned Kotie's shirt from gray to a melange of orange, red, and green. He gave Sewel a lisp and a moustache. The stupid sad tricks that dripped from his hands with a loose insolence, the limp shuffling of the cards, the way he flexed the singing saw before he cut his lackluster assistant (a sad-eyed terrier) in half- these were just the decoys to distract us as we began to tell him things we didn't want to, things we'd never told the guards, even when they were interrogating us. Details about our families, about our pasts, about our very blood. And so: our ID tags changed. Our opinions on a myriad of topics changed. We realized we were standing in the snow in our boots, chained together, with just a tent roof to protect us. The horizon was an engulfing yellow-black line and in front of it there was nothing but the camp and the dogs and the fence. None of that changed, but we changed. And kept changing. In the cold. Under the gray sky. During his entire routine, the magician did not speak, his arms and hands, in their deceptive motions, speaking for him. At the end of his performance, he stood there for a moment, waiting for the applause frozen in our minds. He nudged us with, "It's your turn now." But there was no turn for us. Why should there be? We had not asked for a magician. We wanted our tongues back. We wanted our words. Our lives. After awhile, the guards took him away, leaving us as we had been before, only a little more so. The doves lived for a day, but only because we waited until then to kill and eat them. The doves were all that remained of the magician, and our need to preserve that memory had been stronger than our hunger. For a time. And so we waited. Waited for the next. And the next.

- Jeff VanderMeer, March 3, 2010, Tallahassee, Florida

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to my first readers: Kelly Barnhill, Laird Barron, Tessa Kum, Alistair Rennie, Jonathan K. Stephens, and Ann VanderMeer. Thanks to all of the editors who have championed my short fiction over the years. Finally, many thanks to Jacob McMurray for the design of this book, as well as Jill Roberts and Jacob Weisman from Tachyon, and Marty Halpern, for their many kindnesses.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR