The Wildside Book of Fantasy: 20 Great Tales of Fantasy (28 page)

Beyond the Crimson City, did the curdling echo of the groan strike out even there, like a cold fist beating on the surface of a cold metal gong, and the reverberation unfurling, on and on? Probably so. For in all the land about, in the towns and villages, in the farthest places, still there were only the differing types of men, male men and female men, or men of both persuasions, and young men, and old men, and dead men in graves with death-stones over them like white fallen pieces of the lonely masculine moon.

And even the hags maybe heard the sigh, the groan. Even the dead women in their own graves that bore each the symbol of the barren blazing sun, the dead women burned away by bearing only men.

While outside the borders of this land, the other lands. All the same. All, all, the same.

For some years ago, about the time that the mother of Leopard and Copper Coin had herself died, the very last of all the women yet able to conceive a child, had perished.

With the last of such deaths, all chance of change died too.

And now there were only the men and the hags. And the female sun. And She. The Woman in the Palace.

* * * *

When Copper tore down the stair, Prince Ninety-Two deserted above in the upper rooms, it was Tomorrow who ran quickly and caught hold of him.

“Stay, Copper—stay, stay—look there. Do you see?” And Copper halted, and his pale face went more pale and his eyes widened.

For there Leopard was, held in the arms of an unknown newcomer to the house, a man neither old nor young, but handsome and well-dressed, perhaps a philosopher, and with an actor’s voice. Leopard was weeping his heart out as, since returning here, he had not wept. And the philosopher raised his face and glancing at Copper said, softly, “Don’t fear it. I am his brother too, his brother in this most bleak of miseries. For I also, long before, was a finalist in the Crimson City. I also won The Woman, lay with her, lost her, failed at the Ultimate Test. A man who wandered in an earthly hell some while. But sense came back to me, and that hell faded. I lived. As Leopard may live. There is more to life than love. I am the proof, am I not, that not all men die who fail with her.”

Copper felt his heart clutch, as if a dagger had gone into it. For he sensed that here at last might be the single other man in all the world who could give back to Leopard a reason for existence. And passionate hope had stabbed at Copper’s heart, and bitter envy had cloven it.

“Do what you must,” said Copper. And offered the stranger his most beautiful and generous smile.

Then he kissed his brother on one temple, and left him in the keeping of the unknown man. And in the hands of the gods too, where all things may lie, whether they wish it or not.

4 - The Woman

High above the terraced streets, the squares and courtyards and gardens, The Woman stood in a long room without a single window, lit only by tall lamps in the shape of flowers. She wore a plain garment, her hair tied back in a knot. She was barefoot on the cool painted floor. Once pink birds had sung here. But one day she had opened a door and let them go free. They had never entirely forsaken her. They still flew about the upper arches and nested in the roofs. How wonderful, she had always thought, The Woman, their magical power of flight.

* * * *

How old was she when first they brought her here? Quite young, she believed. Five, seven?

She had never been certain of her age.

She was the first and last daughter of a peasant woman called This Fern.

This Fern had birthed The Woman, and been made the heroine of her village, for only recently that year the oth­erwise last known female child, a girl of eleven years, had died in the far north, of stomach trouble.

But This Fern also soon died, after a bear attacked her at the edge of the forest. Everyone hunted the bear, to kill it, but it was gone, and so of course was This Fern. The Woman had only been two years old then. She could not remember her mother, though they had given her her mother’s possessions; her festival robe and her festival shoes, her wooden comb and earrings of tin, and one of her teeth, which had been knocked from her mouth ages before and preserved in a small black box.

These artefacts The Woman still possessed. Now she kept them in a chest of carved and perfumed cedar-wood inlaid with silver, and with a ruby on its clasp.

Men in authority had brought The Woman to the Crimson City. In the Palace she was trained, vigorously and often unkindly, to be a woman. That is. an important woman. That is, The Only Woman.

When, at the age of fifteen, she had fallen in love, of fancied she had done so. with one of her malely inclined tut­ors, he was beaten almost to death and exiled from the city.

His own feelings she never learned.

Probably he was as crazily infatuated as she.

But she was never sure, nor if he recovered from the beating and the exile.

At sixteen she began to be shown in the city.

Then, seeing young men sometimes of extraordinary attractions, gazing at, or fainting at the sight of her, she herself often lost her heart.

But she had been thoroughly lessoned by then in her role, and theirs. Since seemingly—and soon irrevocably and definitely—she was the last young human of her gender—only those with the highest qualities of looks and skills would ever be allowed to approach her.

During this era. The Woman still had one female attend­ant, a hag who had been almost seventy when The Woman first met her.

The hag, Ochre, was never very polite and never pleas­ant to her charge, let alone affectionate. The Woman supposed Ochre had been selected for her unappealing acidity because, after all, Ochre was ancient, all of her kind were by then, and must soon die. Bereavement of her would therefore be less distressing.

But the hag was presently caught anyway mixing ground glass into The Woman’s food.

Taken off to be stoned somewhere or other below the Palace. Ochre screeched that The Woman was a demoness, a curse not a blessing on the city. After this, inevitably, no further hags served in the Palace.

Later, when the first waves of lovers, having passed spectacularly well in the examiniations, began to approach The Woman and she, as instructed, made love with them—init­ially loathing the act, which hurt her and also seemed grot­esque—another unfortunate thing was discovered. The Woman did not ever conceive. Since tests had been made as well on the semen of all the young male lovers, and it was both whole­some and fertile, the fault must lie with The Woman’s body. But as she was The Woman, and the last woman of all women, it was concluded it could not be her fault, even after several quite horrible procedures to which she was subjected in order to ‘awake’ her womb, proved useless. A general decision asserted that the wicked hag Ochre, prior to the episode with the glass, had already succeeded in somehow poisoning The Woman and so negating her reproductive knack.

With maturity The Woman learned to enjoy the sexual act.

In the beginning, she herself read manuals of love—she had been taught to read—and practiced such arts with the waves of lovers. But their frenzies of joy and gratitude frightened her.

She ceased to be active during sex, even restricting her cries at climax, for a similar reason.

At the start she had continued to fall in love and to wish to make a permanent union with this man or that.

But in the Palace the men in authority, who by that time grew old themselves, male hags who frequently went absent in death, had told her she might never choose any man above another. To choose one over all the rest would doubtless see him murdered. At best the city would riot and lose its collec­tive mind.

Originally it seemed, the rite of the examinations to find the best, and the making of love between that best and herself, had been organized in the hope of children. Some of which, if the gods were tender, might be daughters.

But of course Ochre, or something or other, had fore­stalled that plan.

Now therefore the Woman’s only value was in her female presence, which must at intervals be revealed, offered and given to occasional males.

Until her own demise, this was all The Woman was to be for.

A vision, a goal, a sop. And a method of the most vicious rejection.

Partly she was to represent hope, still, and partly she was to teach that all women were worthless, evil, thus unregrettable. While the dying out of the human race, which now almost without a doubt was unavoidable, could be blamed on the female kind. Also too, perhaps, she was to demonstrate that death, and the death of humanity, might be no bad thing.

In these elements she was like a goddess.

For gods were cruel. They made hells as well as heavens, and all the earthly ills.

* * * *

Having walked about for a while in the restful windowless room, The Woman sat down on an ivory bench.

She drank a little apricot wine.

She ate a sugar biscuit.

The enormous and never ending depression that now informed most of her days, and usually sleepless nights, came crouching up the floor and rubbed its flank against her con­sciousness.

Listlessly, resistlessly, she greeted it.

She did not want the riches of the Palace, nor the extreme—unreal—power she had been given. She did not really even want sex any more, let alone the intermittant torrents of young men who came to her, singing poetry, caress­ing and coaxing, their delicious kisses less than the moment­ary sweetness of a biscuit.

She might love none. She loved none.

She might choose none. She chose none.

She sent them away, and they threw themselves in the river and drowned, or slit open their veins or swallowed venom.

Oh, she did not dare give her heart now to any man. She would be loving a ghost. A thousand ghosts. Death itself.

So. The Woman did not want wealth or sex or ecstasy or worship or love.

Was there anything then that she wanted, longed for?

Yes. Yes.

The Woman wanted her mother. Sometimes even The Wom­an would daydream that This Fern, fresh up from her grave, would walk into the room. She would not be phantom, nor skel­eton. She would not even be old. No, no, This Fern would be about The Woman’s own age. Whatever age that was.

But it was more than that, of course. Not only that she wanted the mother she had never known. It was women—Woman—The Woman wanted. Not for sexual love, never that. But... to talk to. To laugh with. To be with. Oh gods, women about her, easy and familiar, different and the same. Desire? Entirely. The desire of the lonely one for its other self. Here in the Palace high above the Crimson City and the world, The Woman sat on her bench of bone, pining, lamenting, slowly dying—for her own kind.

Gods who see me

When her I see,

See I have become

As a seeing god.

—Translated from the poem by
Leopard

DREAMTIME IN ADJAPHON, by John Gregory Betancourt

Dreamtime came quickly in the last days of Adjaphon, for then we did not know the end approached, and we were drunk from our power and our success. Abroad, our armies marched again, this year in war against the Heron King to the far East, and the priests of our god-patron, Tokos-Dien, predicted nothing but success.

If the days seemed golden, perhaps they truly were. The wealth from a dozen newly conquered lands flowed through Adjaphon’s gates, and the thousand eyes of Tokos-Dien painted on the roof of every building looked down and seemed to bless us all.

I was the son of a cobbler. Jad, my mother called me, but my father called me Jadred, which was a man’s name, for I was thirteen that summer and could have joined the Emperor’s army had I chosen, like so many of my childhood friends had already chosen. In battle there is glory, they had said, and they had gone to win that glory, along with a share of the Heron King’s treasure.

But I did not go, for I was thin and slight, and most took me for a boy of eight, though I was indeed thirteen and a man. I knew my weakness: in battle I would have been slain by the first enemy soldier I faced, just as I had been beaten up by every boy my own age I’d ever fought. Perhaps I was a coward, but I do not think so. I was being realistic. My death could not possibly have served the Emperor’s purposes.

Once I had prayed to Tokos-Dien for a man’s body, strong and tall, promising to serve in his army if he would help me, but I received no answer. Perhaps it was just as well. I was not meant to be a soldier.

The beginning thing, in the dreamtime, was the dream. It came to me one night. In the dream I had wings like a bird but was not a bird myself. I soared over a ravaged land, with crops long-trampled into the ground by feet and hooves, with farmhouses tumbled to ruins, with mills and barns and outbuildings razed to the ground. People were running everywhere, panicked, shouting and screaming, but I could not hear their voices. Then I looked up and saw fires burning across the whole of the horizon, even on empty ground where there was nothing to burn, and running before the flames came the greatest troops of our Emperor, throwing down their weapons, casting off their armor. The men’s faces blurred in the heat, rippling like paper-hangings on a windy day, but I thought I glimpsed my best friend, Savil, who had gone to join the fight against the Heron King three months before.

“Savil!” I called, but he did not pause. Then the flames were upon him, and I could not bear to see more.

I woke, gasping, the bitter taste of smoke still in my lungs. My brother Aghen stirred beside me, but did not wake. I forced myself to silence.

Bright images of those dream-fires still lingered in my eyesight, as though I had been there, as though I had actually seen Savil die. I shuddered at the thought, then denied it. It had only been a nightmare, I told myself, and made signs of aversion to keep away evil.

After that I could not rest, could not lie still. I rose and went to the window in only my nightgown, threw open the wooden shutters, and gazed down into the street.

In those days it was said Adjaphon never slept: merchant caravans moved through the city’s gates like an endless serpent, bringing all manner of fabulous animals and weavings and trinkets and slaves to the marketplace at every hour of the day and night. But at this moment,oddly, there was only a single man in a hooded cloak standing there. He leaned on his staff and seemed to peer up at me, and where his face should’ve been I saw only blackness.

“Jadred,” I thought I heard him say, “you are called.”

Quickly I shuttered the window and barred it. Had the man truly spoken, or was it another part of my dream? He seemed to have been waiting for me. I could not rid myself of that thought. And the moon was bright enough; why hadn’t I seen his face?

I stood there beside the window for a long time, feeling the cold of the floor beneath my feet, feeling my heart beating in my throat.

That was the start of the end, in the dreamtime of Adjaphon, though I did not know it yet.

* * * *

My father’s shop consisted of three rooms. The largest of these was the workroom, where flat sheets of leather lay bundled up against the two largest walls and the sweet, musty smell of tanning-cream was so thick you could almost see it. Here my younger brothers and sisters and I cut leather strips and thongs from patterns every morning. In the afternoon my mother and father sewed them into sandals and boots—mostly boots these days, boots for the Emperor’s army, since the purchasing agents always came to my father’s shop first.

The second room was for storage, mostly of leather but also of finished goods not yet on display. It was small and dark.

The third room opened out onto the street. Finished boots and sandals of every design and size imaginable filled it. They hung in strings from the rafters, from pegs in the walls, from intricately carved wooden racks in the center of the room. Here my mother and father sat during the morning hours, speaking with those who came in to buy or to gossip, laughing and joking, or just watching the parade of passers-by in their few idle moments.

Early that afternoon I heard many feet enter the shop at once, and my father’s welcoming call cut short.

“Where is Jadred, your son?” a loud voice cried. “Tokos-Dien has called him.”

My mother screamed. I stood, shoving back my chair, looking at my two brothers, at my four sisters. None of them said a word; none of them moved. They stared at me, their eyes wide.

Abruptly the curtain to the workroom swept aside. A middle-aged man in the gold robes of a priest of Tokos-Dien ducked through the doorway. He was tall and his features had a proud, chiseled look to them, almost as though he were made of stone. Behind him moved a tide of underpriests in blue robes, and all manner of other servants of the god-patron.

Only the priest’s eyes moved as he surveyed the room. When his gaze fell on me, he knelt. “It is you,” he said. “You are the dreaming one.” He said it with such awe and reverence that I did not know how to begin to reply. And yet as he said it I also knew what he meant: my dream the night before had been more than a dream. It had been a vision sent by Tokos-Dien for purposes only the god-patron or the god-patron’s priests could ever fathom.

“Please,” I said. I licked my lips. I didn’t want to leave, didn’t want to abandon my parents or the safety of their home. “Please,” I said again. “What do you want of me?”

“I want nothing,” the priest said. “It is Tokos-Dien who calls you.”

He rose, and at his gesture, the underpriests came in around him, as though a floodgate had been let loose. They ushered my brothers and sisters from the room and blocked the way so my parents could not enter nor see. Then their servants stripped my clothes away and I stood there naked and shivering while they chanted over me.

“You are called,” the priest kept telling me. “You are called.”

I tried to run as an underpriest began to shave my head, and his knife opened a shallow gash beside my ear so that blood ran quickly. The priest grabbed me and hugged me to him, talking like a farmer soothing a frightened beast. His robes were smothering, full of odd spicy smells. I struggled, but his grip was too strong, and his voice had begun to lull me. In moments everything became a blur of sight and sound. Distantly I felt myself being shaved all over, then dressed in gold robes like the priest’s. Finally I felt myself being carried out into the street.

I am called.

My parents were huddled in the corner of the display room, my brothers and sisters clutched tight. They dared not protest, I knew.

I am called.

The underpriests trundled me into a golden carriage. The prist climbed in beside me, still whispering his soothing, mind-numbing words. Someone clicked to the horses and we were off in a mad rush down the street. The servants were running ahead, clearing the way for us, and I felt a cold, sick fear at the thought of what was to come.

How could Tokos-Dien have called me? Surely I was unworthy. I didn’t want to go. I longed for release, wished I were dead, wished I had never been born. The god-patron seemed to have singled me out for particular punishment or persecution. In that moment I learned what it was to hate—to hate the god-patron’s priests, and to hate Tokos-Dien himself. Mostly I hated Tokos-Dien; young as I was, I knew the priests were only servants doing their master’s will.

Once, long before, I had prayed to Tokos-Dien for help, for a man’s body, when I was a child and everyone my age had beaten me. He had not answered then. Why had he sent a vision to me now?

That, too, was part of the beginning of the end.

* * * *

My first days in the Temple of Tokos-Dien were the most painful of my life. I refused to speak of my vision; rather, I denied it, said I had seen nothing, heard nothing, done nothing. They should let me go, I said. They should let me return to my mother and my father and my life as a cobbler’s son.

To their credit, they did not believe me. Finally, on the eighth day, they locked me in a small room, and priest after priest came in to question me, to prod and probe my mind. They did not let me sleep or rest or eat or drink.

On the second day of their questioning I croaked my confession: “Yes!” I cried. “I saw a vision!” And, after I had drunk and eaten, I babbled of all that I had seen.

The priests transcribed my every word and went away to study what I had said. They left me by myself, in a locked room, with a soft bed and as much food and drink as I could possibly want. I should have been happy, I know, but instead I cursed Tokos-Dien. I did not expect a reply,and there came none.

That night I dreamt a second time, and in this dream I was floating down a river on my back. It was dark here, but somehow I could see. A mountain loomed ahead, and the river ended in a vast whirlpool. I knew without a doubt that I would enter the whirlpool and be sucked down into the underworld, where Tokos-Dien rules. Somehow the god-patron was bringing me to him.

There were hundreds—thousands—of soldiers’ corpses floating down the river around me. Turning my head, I noticed Savil bobbing to my left. I almost failed to recognize him. His skin was white as a slug’s belly, his body bloated by the corrosion of death to nearly twice its normal size. But there was a smile on his face, and though he was dead,he seemed happy. Tokos-Dien had called him, too, but in a different way.

Standing alongside the river were men with staffs. These, I knew,were the servants of the god-patron. They used their staffs to keep the corpses from coming to rest against the river’s banks.

One of them reached out and hooked my shoulder, pulling me over to him. I found I could move, suddenly, and stood. The water ran from my shaved head and priestly robes in rivulets. I walked to the bank.

The man—if man he was—had no face. There was only blackness inside the folds of his hood. He leaned on his staff and said, “You are called, Jadred. Will you serve the god-patron?”

“Why does he want me?” I whispered.

“He is a god. His reasons are beyond your comprehension, or any mortal’s. It is merely enough that he wants you.”

“Why does he not just take me?”

“You must go of your own free will. Enter the river and it will bear you to him.”

“I don’t want to go.”

“Do you realize what you are saying? The anger of a god is a fearsome thing. Do you wish to anger him?”

“I want to go home,” I said. “I want Savil alive. I want everything back the way it was!”

“So be it,” he said, with a cold finality…and, I thought, with a touch of a sorrow.

* * * *

I awoke in my bed, beside my brother Aghen, in our little room over our father’s shop. I was dressed in my nightgown, and when I touched my head, I felt my hair once more, thick and long. But there was also a scar beside my ear: the place where the underpriest had cut me.

It was early, but the street was eerily silent. I felt too much joy at being home, at being safe, to worry about anything, though.

Finally I heard a crier approaching, shouting the news.

“Defeat at Solcena!”
he cried.
“Two thousand dead! The Heron King is marching on Foltrene!

I sat up, startled, bewildered. Foltrene was scarcely a day’s journey away. How could the Heron-King have reached it so quickly? How had the Adjaphon’s great armies ever been defeated?

A shiver went through me. Roughly, I shook my brother awake. “Aghen! Tell me the news! How did the Heron King defeat our army?”

He stirred and mumbled, but finally he sat up. “Idiot,” he mumbled, rubbing his eyes. “Lemme alone.”

I demanded the history of the war, and when he finally saw I wouldn’t let him sleep until I knew, he told me. Told me how the Heron King had gathered thirty thousand men in a time of peace and attacked our furthest borders. Told me how the Heron King’s soldiers had swept into Adjaphon’s outlying cities like an unstoppable tidal wave. Told me how the Heron King’s god-patron, Tokos-Dien, promised nothing but victory while the priests in our temples, the temples of Condja-Dien, the god of the fields and harvest, predicted nothing but death.

And as he spoke I remembered all these things; but I also remembered another time, another place, when Tokos-Dien had blessed Adjaphon and nothing could hold back our Emperor’s armies.

I tried not to sleep that night for fear of dreams, but when I finally dozed off, I saw only blackness. Tokos-Dien had truly abandoned me.

* * * *

The next morning the news was worse. Foltrene had fallen in a matter of hours. My mother wept and my father tried to comfort her, but could not. My younger brothers and sisters huddled in their beds. Only I moved through the house almost untouched by the news. It had such an air of unreality about it that I hadn’t yet grasped all it meant.

Outside, panic ruled Adjaphon’s streets, as a last few people fought their way to the one open gate. There was a rumor of safety to the South; they would follow that rumor, though they would most likely be overtaken by the Heron King’s army along the way. There was surely no safety in Adjaphon, they said, or anywhere nearby.