Year's Best Fantasy 5, page 38
“Er…pardon?” What metaphor was this? Was she offering me a joint, or a folder of her illustrations?
“I mean it literally.” She wasn’t smiling now. “It’s not far away. Like I said, you have to know where to look.”
“Where is it?” I asked, still mystified.
“Beyond the river. We can walk there.”
The full moon cast delicate shadows from the trees outside Susanne’s house. At the end of the road, a footpath led between two tall hedges. She led me through a gap in a steel fence, and down a precarious slope to the river bank. It was the kind of route I imagined a cat might follow.
“I found the way when I was seven,” she said. “I’ve been coming here ever since. But I think it might not be here much longer. I want to share it with someone while I still can.” The bank was overgrown, and I could see a factory wall on the other side. Susanne paused.
“Look.”
She was pointing down to the water’s edge. The river was a dark skinless muscle with threads of moonlight. Just where the grass ended and the river-mud began, I could see two stone steps. The water smelled brackish. Susanne gripped my hand and pulled me forward. I felt a sudden, overwhelming sense of strangeness, as when you develop a fever or get caught between sleep and waking. I didn’t think about my clothes, or my inability to swim. I just followed.
The steps led down under the water. It didn’t feel cold, just a little more dense than the night air. Even breathing wasn’t difficult: my chest just seemed to fill with air and exhale thin white plumes through the dark water. Fish or eels slid around my ankles. I walked for some time, holding Susanne’s thin hand. It was much darker down here. Then she paused, reaching forward. Her drifting hair touched my face. She moved on, and we began to climb another flight of stone steps.
The moon’s reflection shimmered on the water surface just above our heads. My foot slipped on river-weed, but Susanne drew me on. The surface broke, then healed below us. We stood dripping on the mossy bank. And there, just a few yards in front of us, was the Forest of Scriffle. The trees were silhouetted in the moonlight, their twigs as intricately patterned as medieval carvings. Drifts of dead leaves rustled in the night breeze.
I stepped forward, open-mouthed with wonder. My nostrils filled with scents of wood and leaf-mold, ferns and decay. But Susanne didn’t move. I glanced at her and saw the growing terror in her face. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. It’s not the same. This time of year, the leaves should all be on the trees.” She walked slowly forward. I followed her. Close up, I could see that the trunks were streaked with decay. The branches looked gray and brittle. “What’s happened to it?” Susanne said. “The trees are all dead. And I can’t hear the birds. At night there should be owls hooting, doves calling. It’s silent.”
Then something came toward us out of the dark undergrowth. It reached a clearing and stood in the moonlight, uncertain. A black cat. It was sniffing the air, but didn’t seem to see us. Susanne walked slowly toward it, reaching out a hand. “Hello, little one. How are you? Where are your friends?” Then she stopped. “Oh, no.”
The cat was blind. Its eyes were blank sockets. Its fur was patchy, and its ribs were visible through the taut skin. Susanne dropped to her knees and stroked the cat’s neck. “My God, what’s wrong with you? What’s happened here—” Then she screamed. I saw her rise to her feet and beat her hand violently against the trunk of the nearest tree. Some of the dead bark flaked away at her touch.
I went to comfort Susanne, but she backed away from me. The cat was lying on its side, no longer moving. I knelt to examine it. In the moonlight, I could see things moving through its fur. Crawling rounded shapes, like bugs or lice. Each one had a raised marking that glowed faintly with a terrible light of its own. A shape like a twisted letter N, red on black.
Now that I had seen them, I became aware that they were on the trees also. And on the dead leaves beneath my feet. And on a dead owl that was lying within my reach, its beak stretched open to receive the night. They were everywhere in the forest, infesting every living thing, leaving nothing but gray brittle remains and silence. The rustling I could hear was the lice, hunting restlessly through the dead vegetation in search of something further to eat.
Then another sound reached me. A living sound. It was Susanne, weeping. I couldn’t see her at first, wondered if the forest had claimed her for its own. Then I found her crouched behind the dead hair of a willow tree. In one hand she was holding the clean-picked skeleton of a leaf. I pulled her to her feet, held her until she stopped shaking. Her tears were cold against my cheek.
“We have to get out of here,” I said. She didn’t respond. “Come on. There’s nothing to stay for.”
“There’s nothing to go back to either.”
“You know that’s not true.” I gripped her hand and led her back toward the river. Behind us, I could hear the sound of dead trees creaking, breaking, and falling into the mounds of dead leaves. But something was calling to us through the night, from beyond the river. A heron.
Somehow we made it back the way we had come. The moon was lower in the sky, and it was colder than before. As we reached the house, Susanne began to shiver violently. She was pulling at her sleeves, checking them for signs of infection. I held both her hands, made her look at my face. “Come on. Let’s go inside.”
As I’d expected, Susanne seemed calmer indoors. She poured us both a large brandy, drank hers in a slow painful gulp. Then she walked up to the bathroom and closed the door behind her. I sat on the couch, drank my brandy, and reflected that I hadn’t asked Susanne to sign my copy of The Secret Dance. It didn’t seem appropriate just now.
To my relief, Susanne emerged after a while. She was wearing a dark green dressing-gown, and her hair was wet. I poured her another brandy. She sat on the couch for a while, lost in thought. Then she said: “I have to go back there.”
“What for? You can’t save the cats.”
“No, but I can burn them. Like a cremation. The wind will scatter the ashes in the river.”
I shook my head. “There’s no point, Susanne. If you go back, the forest will trap you. You’ll die there. Your life is here.”
She looked at me then, and her eyes were full of ashes. “What makes you so sure?”
“Because when things die, they don’t stay the same. They rot. They become less than they were.” I could feel a bitterness in my throat like nausea as I spoke. “You can’t go back like that. No one can.”
Susanne didn’t say anything more. She finished her glass, then pointed to mine. I shook my head. She spread a thin duvet and a few cushions over the couch, then went upstairs. I turned off the light and spent a sleepless night on the couch, imagining that I could feel dead leaves dropping onto my face.
In the morning Susanne was brisk and efficient, making breakfast and filling a flask with coffee to help me get through the long drive home. We didn’t talk about the midnight trip. I never did get that book signed.
The feature article came out a week later. I’d glossed over most of the Neotechnic business, focusing on Susanne’s earlier career and the enduring magic of the Forest of Scriffle. She sent me a card at my work address. On the front was an original sketch, showing two cats walking along a river bank by the light of a full moon. Inside was the message: To Julie, a moon cat who keeps her feet on the ground. With love from Susanne. Soon after that, Neotechnic dropped the lawsuit and stopped reprinting her books.
We’ve been in touch occasionally since then—phone calls, an exchange of Christmas cards—but she hasn’t invited me to go back. I like to think that she’s able to keep the river between herself and the ruin of her dreams. Sometimes I remember her smile, and it warms me. But sometimes I wake up shaking in the night, clawing at my skin, and nothing can take away the image in my head: an army of sleek black and red lice, working efficiently to pick the bones of a cat.
Out of the Woods
Patricia A. McKillip
Patricia A. McKillip (tribute site: www.evan.org/McKillip. html) lives with her husband, David Lunde, in Bend, Oregon. She is one of the most famous living fantasy writers, the author of the classic Riddlemaster of Hed trilogy. She won the first World Fantasy award for best novel for The Forgotten Beasts of Eld. She is also one of the finest writers of short fiction in the F&SF field, and of them, perhaps the most underrated. Her stories in recent years present the work of a first-rate talent at the height of her powers. Her recent novels include Ombria in Shadow (2002), In the Forests of Serre (2003), Something Rich and Strange: A Tale of Brian Froud’s Faerielands (2004), and Alphabet of Thorn (2004). Odd Magic is her 2005 novel. Her work is often understated yet filled with subdued passion, and with exact and precise observations. A collection of her short stories is seriously overdue.
“Out of the Woods” appeared in Flights. Here a good woman goes to work for a sorcerer at the instigation of her husband; magical things happen, but the protagonist is much more receptive to them than either her husband or the sorcerer. It is tempting to read this as a feminist parable, but with a very delicate touch. Perhaps it is about fantasy. It is interesting to compare and contrast it to Bruce McAllister’s story, earlier.
The scholar came to live in the old cottage in the woods one spring. Leta didn’t know he was there until Dylan told her of the man’s request. Dylan, who worked with wood, cut and sold it, mended it, built with it, whittled it into toothpicks when he had nothing better to do, found the scholar under a bush, digging up henbane. From which, Dylan concluded, the young man was possibly dotty, possibly magical, but, from the look of him, basically harmless.
“He wants a housekeeper,” he told Leta. “Someone to look after him during the day. Cook, wash, sew, dust, straighten. Buy his food, talk to peddlers, that sort of thing. You’d go there in the mornings, come back after his supper.”
Leta rolled her eyes at her brawny, comely husband over the washtub as she pummeled dirt out of his shirts. She was a tall, wiry young woman with her yellow hair in a braid. Not as pretty or as bright as some, but strong and steady as a good horse, was how her mother had put it when Dylan came courting her.
“Then who’s to do it around here?” she asked mildly, being of placid disposition.
Dylan shrugged, wood chips from a stick of kindling curling under his knife edge, for he had no more pressing work. “It’ll get done,” he said. He sent a couple more feathery chips floating to his feet, then added, “Earn a little money for us. Buy some finery for yourself. Ribbon for your cap. Shoe buckle.”
She glanced down at her scuffed, work-worn clogs. Shoes, she thought with sudden longing. And so the next day she went to the river’s edge and then took the path downriver to the scholar’s cottage.
She’d known the ancient woman who had died there the year before. The cottage needed care; flowers and moss sprouted from its thatch; the old garden was a tangle of vegetables, herbs and weeds. The cottage stood in a little clearing surrounded by great oak and ash, near the river and not far from the road that ran from one end of the wood to the other. The scholar met her at the door as though he expected her.
He was a slight, bony young man with pale thinning hair and gray eyes that seemed to look at her, through her and beyond her, all at the same time. He reminded Leta of something newly hatched, awkward, its down still damp and all askew. He smiled vaguely, opened the door wider, inviting her in even before she explained herself, as though he already knew.
“Dylan sent me,” she said, then gazed with astonishment at the pillars and piles of books, scrolls, papers everywhere, even in the rafters. The cauldron hanging over the cold grate was filthy. She could see a half-eaten loaf on a shelf in the open cupboard; a mouse was busily dealing with the other half. There were cobwebs everywhere, and unwashed cups, odd implements she could not name tossed on the colorful, wrinkled puddles of clothes on the floor. As she stood gaping, an old, wizened sausage tumbled out of the rafters, fell at her feet.
She jumped. The scholar picked up the sausage. “I was wondering what to have for breakfast.” He put it into his pocket. “You’d be Leta, then?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You can call me Ansley. My great-grandmother left me this cottage when she died. Did you know her?”
“Oh, yes. Everyone did.”
“I’ve been away in the city, studying. I decided to bring my studies here, where I can think without distractions. I want to be a great mage.”
“Oh?”
“It is an arduous endeavor, which is why I’ll have no time for—” He gestured.
She nodded. “I suppose when you’ve become a mage, all you’ll have to do is snap your fingers or something.”
His brows rose; clearly, he had never considered the use of magic for housework. “Or something,” he agreed doubtfully. “You can see for yourself what I need you for.”
“Oh, yes.”
He indicated the vast, beautifully carved table in a corner under a circular window from which the sunny river could be seen. Or could have been seen, but for the teetering pile of books blocking the view. Ansley must have brought the table with him. She wondered how he had gotten the massive thing through the door. Magic, maybe; it must be good for something.
“You can clear up any clutter in the place but that,” he told her. “That must never be disturbed.”
“What about the moldy rind of cheese on top of the books?”
He drew breath, held it. “No,” he said finally, decisively. “Nothing on the table must be touched. I expect to be there most of the time anyway, learning spells and translating the ancient secrets in manuscripts. When,” he asked a trifle anxiously, “can you start?”
She considered the various needs of her own husband and house, then yielded to his pleading eyes. “Now,” she said. “I suppose you want some food in the place.”
He nodded eagerly, reaching for his purse. “All I ask,” he told her, shaking coins into her hand, “is not to be bothered. I’ll pay whatever you ask for that. My father did well with the tavern he owned; I did even better when I sold it after he died. Just come and go and do whatever needs to be done. Can you manage that?”
“Of course,” she said stolidly, pocketing the coins for a trip to the market in the village at the edge of the woods. “I do it all the time.”
She spent long days at the cottage, for the scholar paid scant attention to time and often kept his nose in his books past sunset despite the wonderful smells coming out of his pots. Dylan grumbled, but the scholar paid very well, and didn’t mind Leta taking leave in the late afternoons to fix Dylan’s supper and tend for an hour to her own house before she went back to work. She cooked, scrubbed, weeded and washed, got a cat for the mice and fed it too, swept and mended, and even wiped the grime off the windows, though the scholar never bothered looking out. Dylan worked hard, as well, building cupboards and bedsteads for the villagers, chopping trees into cartloads of wood to sell in the market for winter. Some days, she heard his ax from dawn to dusk. On market days, when he lingered in the village tavern, she rarely saw his face until one or the other of them crawled wearily into bed late at night.
“We never talk anymore,” she murmured once, surprisedly, to the dark when the warm, sweaty, grunting shape that was Dylan pushed under the bedclothes beside her. “We just work and sleep, work and sleep.”
He mumbled something that sounded like “What else is there?” Then he rolled away from her and began to snore.
One day when Ansley had gone down to the river to hunt for the details of some spell, Leta made a few furtive passes with her broom at the dust under his worktable. Her eye fell upon a spiral of gold on a page in an open book. She stopped sweeping, studied it. A golden letter, it looked like, surrounded by swirls of gold in a frame of crimson. All that richness, she marveled, for a letter. All that beauty. How could a simple letter, this undistinguished one that also began her name, be so cherished, given such loving attention?
“One little letter,” she whispered, and her thoughts strayed to earlier times, when Dylan gave her wildflowers and sweets from the market. She sighed. They were always so tired now, and she was growing thinner from so much work. They had more money, it was true. But she had no time to spend it, even on shoes, and Dylan never thought of bringing her home a ribbon or a bit of lace when he went to the village. And here was this letter, doing nothing more than being the first in a line of them, adorned in red and gold for no other reason than that it was itself—
She touched her eyes, laughed ruefully at herself, thinking, I’m jealous of a letter.
Someone knocked at the door.
She opened it, expecting Dylan, or a neighbor, or a tinker—anyone except the man who stood there.
She felt herself gaping, but could not stop. She could only think crazily of the letter again: how this man too must have come from some place where people as well as words carried such beauty about them. The young man wore a tunic of shimmering links of pure silver over black leather trousers and a pair of fine, supple boots. His cloak was deep blue black, the color of his eyes. His crisp dark curls shone like blackbirds’ wings. He was young, but something, perhaps the long, jeweled sword he wore, made both Dylan and Ansley seem much younger. His lean, grave face hinted of a world beyond the wood that not even the scholar had seen.
“I beg your pardon,” he said gently, “for troubling you.” Leta closed her mouth. “I’m looking for a certain palace of which I’ve heard rumors all my life. It is surrounded by a deadly ring of thorns, and many men have lost their lives attempting to break through that ensorceled circle to rescue the sleeping princess within. Have you heard of it?”
“I—,” Leta said, and stuck there, slack-jawed again. “I—I—”
