Complete Short Fiction, page 46
“Tell me the story, and I will.”
“Fischer hired me, that damn gabby oldster next door. The water bothered him, the water of the lake. It kept seeping onto his land. Flooding, all the time. He wanted me to block it off, remind it of its proper place, its proper limits. I was to set up a line of steles to set the line of division.”
“What did you charge?” Ferre sat back on his haunches. This was what he wanted, an honest account of a powerful magician’s business dealings. It was the sort of thing they had not taught him at school.
“Knowledge, Ferre. What other price is worth charging? It’s the damn back-door conjurors who charge food and gold. Those are easily enough obtained elsewhere. I got Fischer to teach me how he communicated with the water creatures in the lake. He could talk to them, a family skill. He used it to make his living. That was what had him so annoyed, really. He talked to them about the lake swelling up and they claimed they had nothing to do with it. Nothing at all, they said. A natural process. Fischer didn’t believe them, so they were having a tiff. It took a lot of persuading, but he finally taught me. So, before I set up the boundary stones, I went down to the water and talked to the biggest fish in the lake, a huge pike, must be a hundred years old, more, those things live forever and never stop growing—”
“You wanted to make a bet with it.” Ferre was astounded. To learn the language of the fish in order to make a wager—it was an act of magnificent tiny-mindedness.
“Well, of course.” One Horned Serpent seemed surprised. “What other pleasures does life have to offer? He and his servants swirled the water around my boat. Pike claimed that they had lifted boats out of the water with their snouts. They’d even tossed Fischer out, without even noticing the weight. He was boastful. I laughed. Ridiculous, I said. Fish can’t do that. So they bet me—find the heaviest thing you can find, and throw it in. We’ll lift it back out again. And we bet ourselves against it, our own flesh. Fish have nothing else to offer. Useless things, really. They didn’t know me. I ripped a tree out by the roots. A huge tree, Ferre, an oak, it must have weighed—”
“Never mind the muscle-flexing,” Ferre said impatiently. “What happened?”
“I threw the tree, roots and all, into the lake, and went to bed, laughing. Those damn minnows wouldn’t be able to do a thing. It was too damn heavy. And they couldn’t! I could see them bumping their useless snouts against it. They had to cheat, the damn gape-mouths. They had to get help!”
“From whom?”
“That old bastard, the Celestial Sub-Administrator of Rains and Storms! They were operating under some arrangement . . . one of Heaven’s damn power rearrangements, I can never figure them out. Plus he’s had it in for me . . . well, you know. I went to bed, knowing that the next morning I would fry up a nice pan of pike for breakfast. During the night it rained, harder than I’d ever heard it. Floods, torrents. By morning, the lake had flooded, and the tree had floated back up to where I had torn it out. I saw it resting there, by morning light, and knew I was doomed. The bastards! Fischer was furious. Wasn’t that what he had hired me to deal with, the damn water covering his land? He was patron-insolent. Right, right you are sir, I said. Here’s a little something to make up for it. His teeth were bad, so I made him a set of dentures. Then I grabbed a pliers and ripped out one of my own to set in it. It was my only chance, to wait for someone like you to come along. I set up the boundary stones and waded into the water. I’m a man of my world, Ferre. Every magician has to be. Remember that.”
“And they took your leg off.” Ferre was still feeling the sympathetic pain of a tooth ripped from his jaw. Was that the strength necessary to become a true magician? Was he really up to it?
“Have you ever seen the teeth on a pike? Hundreds and hundreds of them, in the jaw, on the lips, even covering the tongue. He ripped that leg right off at the hip. I don’t think it even slowed him down. Then the rest of them pulled me down under the water, all of them piling up on me, their mouths all over my skin. . . .”
That was why the ideogram made Ferre sick. The only way the fish had had enough power to change it was by taking the life of a magician. It was the energy of death that vibrated in that ideogram.
“And why should I help you?” Ferre said. It was a vicious decision, to potentially leave a fellow magician behind in post-mortem bondage, but it would have violated the ethics of the profession to release him without cost, for magic without cost led to Chaos.
“Because if you don’t, they’ll put you in here with me! They’ll use your miserable death to move those damn steles.”
The door suddenly rattled behind Ferre and knocked over a wagon wheel. After a moment’s hesitation, a greater force began to pound on it. While One Homed Serpent had been spinning his tale, the palace had noticed Ferre’s absence and become aroused. Ferre had thought he was winning something from Serpent, but really it had turned out the other way around: Serpent’s narrative delay had resulted in a compulsion, a compulsion Ferre could not ignore.
“You were always well known for your charm, Serpent.” Ferre reached into his gear and put on a ring. He held it, casually, over the brazier, ignoring the searing of his finger.
Out in the courtyard Ferre heard loud voices, the clatter of armaments. “Ferre!” Pike shouted. “Don’t listen to that madman. He’s dead, anyway.”
“He has a point,” Ferre said.
“Word save us from laymen,” One Horned Serpent muttered. “Ferre. You know what you have to do. It’s your life now too.”
Ferre sighed. “True enough.” He reversed the ring on his finger, wincing with its hot agony. Magicians, he reminded himself, were magicians because they were willing to pay the cost. The pain made him want to scream. His seared flesh stank.
He climbed up the pedestal, tearing his sleeve, to his annoyance, and getting himself covered with dust. He took hold of the massive central stroke of the ideogram Riskeltarn. He looked over his shoulder. Swords thrust through the doorway. Pike brushed them aside and stormed in. He saw Ferre and smiled insincerely. “Ah, there you are, dear boy, I was just—no!” He swung the teeth of his pike at Ferre’s back.
With a desperate effort, Ferre yanked the central stroke out of the ideogram. One Horned Serpent’s yellow, waxy femur pulled out of the crumbling clay. Ferre toppled backward, holding it tightly, ring pressed against it. The ideogram above him was now Riskel Tarn, a mountain lake. He prepared to slap the ground and roll, but instead of hard earth, he splashed into water. Dirty, stinking water, but water.
“Give me my leg, Ferre!” One Horned Serpent laughed, his voice suddenly confident and full. “And let me be on my way.”
“Wait, Serpent,” Ferre shouted. “You can’t just leave me here.”
“It’s a useful lesson to an apprentice,” One Horned Serpent said with another laugh. “You have to know how to survive the consequences of your own magic. Whatever are they teaching you at the Redwood Grove these days?” The femur was wrenched from Ferre’s hands and water closed over his head, as the shrine sank into the water toward its natural and ordained place at the bottom of the mountain lake.
Ferre swam up through the rushing water, pulled down by the weight of his silk roll of magical instruments. His head finally broke the surface and he stroked desperately to shore. Several times his feet were seized from below and he was pulled back under the water, but each time he managed to break free and make it back to air. Enraged fish boiled around his body. He could see them, dimly, in the moonlight, the crayfish, the huge bass with a dozen fisherman’s hooks through its lower lip, and the vast, furious, many-toothed pike. Finally, he struggled to shore, pulled himself completely out of the water, and collapsed.
The sun woke him by prying under his eyelids. He stretched, and rammed his head against rock. Turning over, he saw that he was lying at the base of one of the steles. Beyond the boundary line, where Riskeltarn Hill had loomed, was now a mountain lake. The air was clear and sunny. Mountains reflected in the still water. The mountain stream had regained its energy, and plunged into the lake in a cascade.
Ferre struggled to his feet, examining his clothing. The silk of his robes had been destroyed by the water. They hung on him, wrinkled and pathetic. It wasn’t even worth wringing them out.
He was alive, but his clothes were ruined, and that bastard One Horned Serpent had used his assistance and vanished. Of course, Serpent now had, pressed into the bone of his femur by a red-hot signet ring, one half of the ideogram Completion, in Flying Crane calligraphy. Skarnath Ferre had retained the other half. When they met again, it should prove useful.
“Good morning, young magician!” a voice called cheerily. It was Urne Fischer, striding toward him through the high grass. “I’m glad you finally corrected this unfortunate situation.”
“Oh,” said Ferre, shrugging out of his blue vest and drooping it over the stele. The thing was cotton. It might yet be saved. “It was nothing. An overdue cartographic correction.”
“Ah, yes. Well, one good thing. Pike’s been eating well these past few years. He’s big now, and hungry. A fatal combination, for a fish.” Fischer came out to the shore. In his hands he carried a fishing rod.
Ferre smiled at him, forgetting his ruined clothes. “A beautiful day, isn’t it?”
“That it is,” Fischer said. He reached back and with a practiced, graceful motion, cast the hook out into the water. “A perfect day for fishing.”
Above Ancient Seas
The paperback edition of Jablokov’s first novel, Carve the Sky, was released by AvoNova last spring, and his second book, A Deeper Sea, has just been published in hardcover by William Morrow. The latter novel is based on a story that first appeared in the October 1989 issue of Asimov’s. Mr. Jablokov is currently at work on a third book, and he plans to write a series of tales about his engaging character, Tessa, who makes her first appearance . . .
Tessa Wolholme stood in the shadow of the twisted-trunked banyan that had forced its way through the cracked wooden foundation of the Calrick Bend railway station and watched the distant black speck of the hawk as it soared the updrafts over Angel’s Butte. For an instant she felt almost embarrassed to be standing with two feet on solid ground. The hawk could look down into the endless canyons of Koola’s Western Shield with wide-aspect eyes, taking in with a glance journeys that took the canyon inhabitants days and weeks. If it wished it could see Tessa’s sun-hatted figure, heavy suitcases resting to either side, and then, with just a slide of its eyes, examine the cascading roofs of Hammerswick School in its peaceful box canyon above Perala. The bird, a native of Koola, probably ignored it all, as it did the rest of the inscrutable activities of those alien intruders on its world, human beings.
It had taken Tessa two days to make that hawk’s-eye-flick journey from Hammerswick to middle Cooperset Canyon. As she stood by the hanging rail, which still vibrated with the train’s departure up-canyon, waiting for her brother Dom to pick her up, she realized she would never rest with a book in Hammers wick’s quiet study garden again. That part of her life was over. Her mother was dead from a sudden, wasting fever. Tessa had returned to bury her, and, returning, would not leave. She felt as if her own life had just ended as well.
The hawk slid directly sideways, scratching its belly on the wind, and vanished behind the rocky plates that made up Dragon’s Back. It did not reappear, and with the disappearance of its eyes, Hammerswick and Perala became definitively part of another world.
“Tessa!” a voice called. She hesitated, as if moving was giving something up, then left her bags and ran toward it.
Dom caught her up and swung her. Everything blurred but her brother’s sturdy face, its tightly curled black hair quite unlike Tessa’s looser brown. He put her down and they looked at each other appraisingly, challenge already beginning.
“Town life agrees with you.” His tone concealed a hint of accusation, as if she had deserted them all. “You’ve filled out.”
“Filled out” was one of those terms older people used to younger ones that Tessa never failed to find annoying. Dom was only eighteen. If he’d already started talking that way, he was doomed.
“I learned a lot there.” She strove to relax.
“Oh? Anything at all useful?”
She tightened her jaw. “That remains to be seen.” Not two minutes with him and she wanted to fight. It must be something about the way older brothers smell. Pheromones. That was it.
“So when will you be going back? You do want to go back, don’t you?” Trust him to hit her most sensitive spot right off. It wasn’t pheromones, it was just plain meanness.
She was too tired to fight. “I’m not going back, Dom. That’s what Poppa told me.” She looked out across the dense plantings of the twentykilometer wide Calrick Bend. The green-and-gold growth lapped against the sheer pink canyon walls, which, in turn, marched grandly off in either direction. This was her home and it had reclaimed her. “He needs me here. Now that Momma’s gone—”
“Now that Momma’s gone we don’t need anyone else. You can just go back and study ancient interplanetary history or whatever you want.”
“Now, Dom Wolholme, there’s no reason to get nasty with me. I just got off the train. I haven’t slept all night. And Momma’s dead.” To her dismay she found herself fighting back tears. It didn’t make it any easier to see that he was doing the same thing. “Give me a chance.”
“Sorry.” Dom apologized the same way he washed dishes, a quick swipe and done.
“Fine. Please pick up my bags.”
Without waiting to watch him, she hopped on the cart. The low-slung mule glanced back at her, erecting its vertebral spines, and flicked out a split tongue. It then returned to its contemplation of a grass clump. “If you don’t decide to eat soon, it’ll be too late.” The mule ignored her. She was clearly a prophet without honor in her own canyon.
“God,” Dom grunted behind her. “Everything I own doesn’t weigh this much.”
“A lady has special needs. For example, I own more than one pair of underwear.”
Dom was too demoralized to come back at her and she was immediately sorry. Momma was dead. She could feel her family loosening around her. And God knew they needed to be tied together. Life on Koola demanded it.
Dom yanked at the mule’s reins. It immediately decided that the grass clump was the most delicious thing it had ever seen, but had time for only one mouthful before it was forced, resentfully, to move off.
Calrick Bend was a wide elbow of Cooperset Canyon. The hanging rail ran above the high talus slopes that covered the base of the eastern wall, so Dom and Tessa had a wide, sweeping view as they descended from the station. The canyon walls were broken here and there by the terraces of tributary canyons, their outpourings marked by giant boulders. Hundreds of kilometers beyond were the frowning giants of the Boss. One could climb toward them for weeks and find them no nearer. Kardom, the northernmost visible peak, trailed a fine line of snow into a high wind, glowing in the morning light. Despite herself, Tessa thought it had to be one of the most beautiful places on Koola.
They dropped into the vine-laced stillness of the fields and were closed in by plants. The lush, aromatic air here was not that of the high canyons and mountains. Tessa sniffed at it, trying to decide if she liked it. Unlike the thick air above the salt pans of the Great Valleys, deeper in Koola’s atmosphere, this was an air made by human beings.
The mule maneuvered through the kinked lanes with the ease of long familiarity. Tessa found herself craning forward and, after a while, was rewarded by glimpses of the house through the fronds overhead. The Wolholme house hung from the cliff face, growing larger the higher up it went, like all farmer’s houses unwilling to take up valuable growing land for the mere business of protecting humans from the elements. The morning sun reflected in its windows. It was a beautiful house, designed by her father, who should have been an architect rather than a farmer. As the wagon approached it, the plants grew lower, becoming the kitchen garden, until the entire house was visible at once, as well as the sturdy tower of the Wolholme family ward that rose beside it.
The rest of the family waited at the door. Benjamin, three years younger than Tessa’s sixteen standard, stood and cried. He’d probably been crying for days. He always overdid everything. Standing next to Benjamin, one small hand on the doorway to keep himself steady, was Kevin, the youngest. He gazed up at Tessa with grave eyes. Looming over them both was Perin Wolholme, Poppa, a vast, balding man who stood blinking at her as if he had expected someone entirely else.
She regarded them with trepidation, for they all looked at her as if she was supposed to do something to make it all work. Then she jumped from the cart and put her arms around her father’s huge chest.
Dom and Benjamin squabbled over who should carry Tessa’s bags into the house. Dom, previously resentful of the task, won. Kevin trotted along behind, assisting with one hand under a corner of a suitcase, until he tripped in the doorway. He found something interesting in the pattern of the cut stone and sat there in fascination, completely in everyone’s way.
The others went up the stairs to her room but Tessa stopped in the second-floor living room. Momma had been dead less than three days. The room was already a mess. Not blatantly, but Tessa knew Momma would never have left a clump of tree-training wire hanging by the door, or allowed anyone to set sprouting pots down on the rug. And who had dared to use one of Momma’s large trilobite fossils as a doorstop? Tessa pulled it away. The door swung loose, obviously needing to be rehung.
Holding the heavy fossil, she walked to the window. Leafy trees with white blossoms and spiky calyx plants filled the view. On the canyon wall’s next spur hung the great house of the Dalhousies with its many roof terraces. A figure strolled across one, serene in its dominion, but she couldn’t recognize who it was. The Dalhousies were a large family. She held the trilobite up to the light. Segments gleaming black, its back was twisted, seemingly with the pain of its passing. When she had been younger Tessa had seen the random marks on the rock substrate as the traces of the legs’ last frantic scrabbling. Now she wasn’t sure.
