The Very Best of F & SF v1 (63 page)

I didn’t cry.
Molly didn’t cry. Schmendrick did. He said, “No, Majesty. No, you do not need
bathing, truly.”

King Lír looked
puzzled. “But I smell bad, Lisene. I think I must have wet myself.” He reached
for my hand and held it so hard. “Little one,” he said. “Little one, I know you.
Do not be ashamed of me because I am old.”

I squeezed his
hand back, as hard as I could. “Hello, Your Majesty,” I said. “Hello.” I didn’t
know what else to say.

Then his face
was suddenly young and happy and wonderful, and he was gazing far past me, reaching
toward something with his eyes. I felt a breath on my shoulder, and I turned my
head and saw the unicorn. It was bleeding from a lot of deep scratches and
bites, especially around its neck, but all you could see in its dark eyes was
King Lír. I moved aside so it could get to him, but when I turned back, the
king was gone. I’m nine, almost ten. I know when people are gone.

The unicorn
stood over King Lír’s body for a long time. I went off after a while to sit
beside Malka, and Molly came and sat with me. But Schmendrick stayed kneeling
by King Lír, and he was talking to the unicorn. I couldn’t hear what he was
saying, but I could tell from his face that he was asking for something, a
favor. My mother says she can always tell before I open my mouth. The unicorn
wasn’t answering, of course—they can’t talk either, I’m almost sure—but
Schmendrick kept at it until the unicorn turned its head and looked at him.
Then he stopped, and he stood up and walked away by himself. The unicorn stayed
where she was.

Molly was saying
how brave Malka had been, and telling me that she’d never known another dog who
attacked a griffin. She asked if Malka had ever had pups, and I said, yes, but
none of them was Malka. It was very strange. She was trying hard to make me
feel better, and I was trying to comfort her because she couldn’t. But all the
while I felt so cold, almost as far away from everything as Malka had gone. I
closed her eyes, the way you do with people, and I sat there and I stroked her
side, over and over.

I didn’t notice
the unicorn. Molly must have, but she didn’t say anything. I went on petting
Malka, and I didn’t look up until the horn came slanting over my shoulder.
Close to, you could see blood drying in the shining spirals, but I wasn’t
afraid. I wasn’t anything. Then the horn touched Malka, very lightly, right
where I was stroking her, and Malka opened her eyes.

It took her a
while to understand that she was alive. It took me longer. She ran her tongue
out first, panting and panting, looking so
thirsty.
We could hear a stream trickling
somewhere close, and Molly went and found it, and brought water back in her
cupped hands. Malka lapped it all up, and then she tried to stand and fell
down, like a puppy. But she kept trying, and at last she was properly on her feet,
and she tried to lick my face, but she missed it the first few times. I only
started crying when she finally managed it.

When she saw the
unicorn, she did a funny thing. She stared at it for a moment, and then she
bowed or curtseyed, in a dog way, stretching out her front legs and putting her
head down on the ground between them. The unicorn nosed at her, very gently, so
as not to knock her over again. It looked at me for the first time... or maybe
I really looked at
it
for the first time, past the horn and the hooves
and the magical whiteness, all the way into those endless eyes. And what they
did, somehow, the unicorn’s eyes, was to free me from the griffin’s eyes.
Because the awfulness of what I’d seen there didn’t go away when the griffin
died, not even when Malka came alive again. But the unicorn had all the world
in her eyes, all the world I’m never going to see, but it doesn’t matter,
because now I
have
seen it, and it’s beautiful, and I was in there too. And when I
think of Jehane, and Louli, and my Felicitas who could only talk with her eyes,
just like the unicorn, I’ll think of them, and not the griffin. That’s how it
was when the unicorn and I looked at each other.

I didn’t see if
the unicorn said good-bye to Molly and Schmendrick, and I didn’t see when it
went away. I didn’t want to. I did hear Schmendrick saying, “A dog. I nearly
kill myself singing her to Lír, calling her as no other has
ever
called a unicorn—and
she brings back, not him, but the dog. And here I’d always thought she had no sense
of humor.”

But Molly said, “She
loved him too. That’s why she let him go. Keep your voice down.” I was going to
tell her it didn’t matter, that I knew Schmendrick was saying that because he
was so sad, but she came over and petted Malka with me, and I didn’t have to.
She said, “We will escort you and Malka home now, as befits two great ladies.
Then we will take the king home too.”

“And I’ll never
see you again,’ I said. “No more than I’ll see him.”

Molly asked me, “How
old are you, Sooz?”

“Nine,” I said. “Almost
ten. You know that.”

“You can
whistle?” I nodded. Molly looked around quickly, as though she were going to
steal something. She bent close to me, and she whispered, “I will give you a
present, Sooz, but you are not to open it until the day when you turn
seventeen. On that day you must walk out away from your village, walk out all
alone into some quiet place that is special to you, and you must whistle like
this.” And she whistled a little ripple of music for me to whistle back to her,
repeating and repeating it until she was satisfied that I had it exactly. “Don’t
whistle it anymore,” she told me. “Don’t whistle it aloud again, not once,
until your seventeenth birthday, but keep whistling it inside you. Do you
understand the difference, Sooz?”

“I’m not a baby,”
I said. “I understand. What will happen when I do whistle it?”

Molly smiled at
me. She said, “Someone will come to you. Maybe the greatest magician in the
world, maybe only an old lady with a soft spot for valiant, impudent children.”
She cupped my cheek in her hand. “And just maybe even a unicorn. Because
beautiful things will always want to see you again, Sooz, and be listening for
you. Take an old lady’s word for it. Someone will come.”

They put King
Lír on his own horse, and I rode with Schmendrick, and they came all the way
home with me, right to the door, to tell my mother and father that the griffin
was dead, and that I had helped, and you should have seen Wilfrid’s face when
they said
that!
Then they both hugged me, and Molly said in my ear, “Remember—not
till you’re seventeen!” and they rode away, taking the king back to his castle
to be buried among his own folk. And I had a cup of cold milk and went out with
Malka and my father to pen the flock for the night.

So that’s what
happened to me. I practice the music Molly taught me in my head, all the time,
I even dream it some nights, but I don’t ever whistle it aloud. I talk to Malka
about our adventure, because I have to talk to
someone.
And I promise her
that when the time comes she’ll be there with me, in the special place I’ve
already picked out. She’ll be an old dog lady then, of course, but it doesn’t
matter. Someone will come to us both.

I hope it’s
them, those two. A unicorn is very nice, but they’re my friends. I want to feel
Molly holding me again, and hear the stories she didn’t have time to tell me,
and I want to hear Schmendrick singing that silly song:

Soozli, Soozli,

speaking loozli,

you disturb my oozli-goozli.

Soozli, Soozli

would you choozli

to become my squoozli-squoozli...?

I can wait.

Return to Table of
Contents

Mary Rickert discovered
F&SF
through an anthology much like this one— it was one of our earlier
Best from F&SF
anthologies, and when she read the book, she thought she’d found a
home for the sorts of stories she likes to write. She was right. Over the past
decade, she has become one of our most popular—and most
provocative—contributors, providing us each year with two or three stories that
open readers’ minds with their elegant and heartfelt storytelling. “Journey
into the Kingdom” is one of her best.

The
first painting
was of an egg, the pale ovoid
produced with faint strokes of pink, blue, and violet to create the illusion of
white. After that there were two apples, a pear, an avocado, and finally, an
empty plate on a white tablecloth before a window covered with gauzy curtains,
a single fly nestled in a fold at the top right corner. The series was titled “Journey
into the Kingdom.”

On a small table
beneath the avocado there was a black binder, an unevenly cut rectangle of
white paper with the words “Artist’s Statement” in neat, square, handwritten
letters taped to the front. Balancing the porcelain cup and saucer with one
hand, Alex picked up the binder and took it with him to a small table against
the wall toward the back of the coffee shop, where he opened it, thinking it
might be interesting to read something besides the newspaper for once, though
he almost abandoned the idea when he saw that the page before him was
handwritten in the same neat letters as on the cover. But the title intrigued
him.

AN IMITATION LIFE

Though I always
enjoyed my crayons and watercolors, I was not a particularly artistic child. I
produced the usual assortment of stick figures and houses with
dripping
yellow suns. I was an avid collector of seashells and sea glass and much
preferred to be outdoors, throwing stones at seagulls (please, no haranguing
from animal rights activists, I have long since outgrown this) or playing with
my imaginary friends to sitting quietly in the salt rooms of the keeper’s
house, making pictures at the big wooden kitchen table while my mother, in her
black dress, kneaded bread and sang the old French songs between her duties as
lighthouse keeper, watcher over the waves, beacon for the lost, governess of
the dead.

The first ghost
to come to my mother was my own father who had set out the day previous in the
small boat heading to the mainland for supplies such as string and rice, and
also bags of soil, which, in years past, we emptied into crevices between the
rocks and planted with seeds, a makeshift garden and a “brave attempt,” as my
father called it, referring to the barren stone we lived on.

We did not
expect him for several days so my mother was surprised when he returned in a
storm, dripping wet icicles from his mustache and behaving strangely, repeating
over and over again, “It is lost, my dear Maggie, the garden is at the bottom
of the sea.”

My mother fixed
him hot tea but he refused it, she begged him to take off the wet clothes and
retire with her, to their feather bed piled with quilts, but he said, “Tend the
light, don’t waste your time with me.” So my mother, a worried expression on
her face, left our little keeper’s house and walked against the gale to the
lighthouse, not realizing that she left me with a ghost, melting before the
fire into a great puddle, which was all that was left of him upon her return.
She searched frantically while I kept pointing at the puddle and insisting it
was he. Eventually she tied on her cape and went out into the storm, calling
his name. I thought that, surely, I would become orphaned that night.

But my mother
lived, though she took to her bed and left me to tend the lamp and receive the
news of the discovery of my father’s wrecked boat, found on the rocky shoals,
still clutching in his frozen hand a bag of soil, which was given to me, and
which I brought to my mother though she would not take the offering.

For one so
young, my chores were immense. I tended the lamp, and kept our own hearth fire
going too. I made broth and tea for my mother, which she only gradually took,
and I planted that small bag of soil by the door to our little house, savoring
the rich scent, wondering if those who lived with it all the time appreciated
its perfume or not.

I did not really
expect anything to grow, though I hoped that the seagulls might drop some seeds
or the ocean deposit some small thing. I was surprised when, only weeks later,
I discovered the tiniest shoots of green, which I told my mother about. She was
not impressed. By that point, she would spend part of the day sitting up in
bed, mending my father’s socks and moaning, “Agatha, whatever are we going to
do?” I did not wish to worry her, so I told her lies about women from the
mainland coming to help, men taking turns with the light. “But they are so
quiet. I never hear anyone.”

“No one wants to
disturb you,” I said. “They whisper and walk on tiptoe.”

It was only when
I opened the keeper’s door so many uncounted weeks later, and saw, spread
before me, embedded throughout the rock (even in crevices where I had planted
no soil) tiny pink, purple, and white flowers, their stems shuddering in the
salty wind, that I insisted my mother get out of bed.

She was
resistant at first. But I begged and cajoled, promised her it would be worth
her effort. “The fairies have planted flowers for us,” I said, this being the
only explanation or description I could think of for the infinitesimal blossoms
everywhere.

Reluctantly, she
followed me through the small living room and kitchen, observing that, “the
ladies have done a fairly good job of keeping the place neat.” She hesitated
before the open door. The bright sun and salty scent of the sea, as well as the
loud sound of waves washing all around us, seemed to astound her, but then she
squinted, glanced at me, and stepped through the door to observe the miracle of
the fairies’ flowers.

Never had the
rock seen such color, never had it known such bloom! My mother walked out,
barefoot, and said, “Forget-me-nots, these are forget-me-nots. But where... ?”

I told her that
I didn’t understand it myself, how I had planted the small bag of soil found
clutched in my father’s hand but had not really expected it to come to much,
and certainly not to all of this, waving my arm over the expanse, the flowers
having grown in soilless crevices and cracks, covering our entire little island
of stone.

My mother turned
to me and said, “These are not from the fairies, they are from him.” Then she
started crying, a reaction I had not expected and tried to talk her out of, but
she said, “No, Agatha, leave me alone.”

She stood out
there for quite a while, weeping as she walked amongst the flowers. Later,
after she came inside and said, “Where are all the helpers today?” I shrugged
and avoided more questions by going outside myself, where I discovered scarlet
spots amongst the bloom. My mother had been bedridden for so long, her feet had
gone soft again. For days she left tiny teardrop shapes of blood in her step,
which I surreptitiously wiped up, not wanting to draw any attention to the
fact, for fear it would dismay her. She picked several of the forget-me-not
blossoms and pressed them between the heavy pages of her book of myths and
folklore. Not long after that, a terrible storm blew in, rocking our little
house, challenging our resolve, and taking with it all the flowers. Once again
our rock was barren. I worried what effect this would have on my mother but she
merely sighed, shrugged, and said, “They were beautiful, weren’t they, Agatha?”

So passed my
childhood: a great deal of solitude, the occasional life-threatening adventure,
the drudgery of work, and all around me the great wide sea with its myriad
secrets and reasons, the lost we saved, those we didn’t. And the ghosts,
brought to us by my father, though we never understood clearly his purpose, as
they only stood before the fire, dripping and melting like something made of
wax, bemoaning what was lost (a fine boat, a lady love, a dream of the sea, a
pocketful of jewels, a wife and children, a carving on bone, a song, its lyrics
forgotten). We tried to provide what comfort we could, listening, nodding,
there was little else we could do, they refused tea or blankets, they seemed
only to want to stand by the fire, mourning their death, as my father stood
sentry beside them, melting into salty puddles that we mopped up with clean
rags, wrung out into the ocean, saying what we fashioned as prayer, or reciting
lines of Irish poetry.

Though I know
now that this is not a usual childhood, it was usual for me, and it did not
veer from this course until my mother’s hair had gone quite gray and I was a
young woman, when my father brought us a different sort of ghost entirely, a
handsome young man, his eyes the same blue-green as summer. His hair was of
indeterminate color, wet curls that hung to his shoulders. Dressed simply, like
any dead sailor, he carried about him an air of being educated more by art than
by water, a suspicion soon confirmed for me when he refused an offering of tea
by saying, “No, I will not, cannot drink your liquid offered without first
asking for a kiss, ah a kiss is all the liquid I desire, come succor me with
your lips.”

Naturally, I
blushed and, just as naturally, when my mother went to check on the lamp, and
my father had melted into a mustached puddle, I kissed him.

Though I should
have been warned by the icy chill, as certainly I should have been warned by
the fact of my own father, a mere puddle at the hearth, it was my first kiss
and it did not feel deadly to me at all, not dangerous, not spectral, most
certainly not spectral, though I did experience a certain pleasant floating
sensation in its wake.

My mother was
surprised, upon her return, to find the lad still standing, as vigorous as any
living man, beside my father’s puddle. We were both surprised that he remained
throughout the night, regaling us with stories of the wild sea populated by
whales, mermaids, and sharks; mesmerizing us with descriptions of the “bottom
of the world” as he called it, embedded with strange purple rocks, pink shells
spewing pearls, and the seaweed tendrils of sea witches’ hair. We were both
surprised that, when the black of night turned to the gray hue of morning, he
bowed to each of us (turned fully toward me, so that I could receive his wink),
promised he would return, and then left, walking out the door like any regular
fellow. So convincing was he that my mother and I opened the door to see where
he had gone, scanning the rock and the inky sea before we accepted that, as odd
as it seemed, as vigorous his demeanor, he was a ghost most certainly.

“Or something of
that nature,” said my mother. “Strange that he didn’t melt like the others.” She
squinted at me and I turned away from her before she could see my blush. “We
shouldn’t have let him keep us up all night,” she said. “We aren’t dead. We
need our sleep.”

Sleep? Sleep? I
could not sleep, feeling as I did his cool lips on mine, the power of his kiss,
as though he breathed out of me some dark aspect that had weighed inside me. I
told my mother that she could sleep. I would take care of everything. She
protested, but using the past as reassurance (she had long since discovered
that I had run the place while she convalesced after my father’s death),
finally agreed.

I was happy to
have her tucked safely in bed. I was happy to know that her curious eyes were
closed. I did all the tasks necessary to keep the place in good order. Not even
then, in all my girlish giddiness, did I forget the lamp. I am embarrassed to
admit, however, it was well past four o’clock before I remembered my father’s
puddle, which by that time had been much dissipated. I wiped up the small
amount of water and wrung him out over the sea, saying only as prayer, “Father,
forgive me. Oh, bring him back to me.” (Meaning, alas for me, a foolish girl,
the boy who kissed me and not my own dear father. )

And that night,
he did come back, knocking on the door like any living man, carrying in his wet
hands a bouquet of pink coral which he presented to me, and a small white
stone, shaped like a star, which he gave to my mother.

“Is there no one
else with you?” she asked.

“I’m sorry,
there is not,” he said.

My mother began
to busy herself in the kitchen, leaving the two of us alone. I could hear her
in there, moving things about, opening cupboards, sweeping the already swept
floor. It was my own carelessness that had caused my father’s absence, I was
sure of that; had I sponged him up sooner, had I prayed for him more sincerely,
and not just for the satisfaction of my own desire, he would be here this
night. I felt terrible about this, but then I looked into his eyes, those
beautiful sea-colored eyes, and I could not help it, my body thrilled at his
look. Is this love? I thought. Will he kiss me twice? When it seemed as if,
without even wasting time with words, he was about to do so, leaning toward me
with parted lips from which exhaled the scent of salt water, my mother stepped
into the room, clearing her throat, holding the broom before her, as if
thinking she might use it as a weapon.