Modern Classics of Fantasy, page 84
There was CATS on Saturday and a gallery opening Sunday morning after brunch at the Plaza. A hansom cab was waiting to convey her all the way home from the office on Monday afternoon. Her bedroom blazed lunatic with flowers. There were no more ovine incidents.
He supported Public Television. He preferred Ebert to Siskel, and had no use under God’s great sky for Pauline Kael, unless his sourdough recipe needed an extra shot of calcium some time. He had season tickets to the opera, though he only went for Verdi and Peter Grimes. Wagner upset him. Fafnir and the frost giants, you know.
She sympathized. Prejudice was so fifties.
He didn’t like zydeco, but for her sake he tried to understand it. While Springsteen left him cold, Steeleye Span was all right, and Clam Chower, and any old Joni Mitchell. He couldn’t dance at all. He subscribed to The New Yorker, though only for the cartoons. Desconstructionist criticism gave him the quinsy. He couldn’t find shoes that both fit him and made a fashion statement. He wore the poorly tanned skins of those few Central Park carriage horses in their declining years that he had been able to purchase. He had absolutely no taste in neckties.
He insisted that she pick all the restaurants they patronized, and relied on her judgment when it came to ordering the wine.
He was past filthy with money, all liquid assets, mostly gold and priceless gems that he had come by in the course of his European career. He didn’t really get her joke about how he’d staged unfriendly takeovers of dragon-guarded hoards, but he laughed anyway. He offered to show her the skull of the last dragon he’d killed. That had been on Orkney, and the puny size of the Worm had been what decided him to move across the sea to a fresher, more vital world. A man likes a challenge. Things were better in the Catskills.
His voice in person slowly acquired the beguilement of that same voice over the phone. At her gentle prodding, Hoffritz provided the proper tools for him to trim toenails and nose bristles. He was never late for a date. He let her pay the tab on occasion, without turning it into a favor or patronage. Three hundred years and then some could give a man a certain high octane pickup rate in mastering the social graces, if he so wished. For her sake, he so wished, and he wasn’t shy about letting her know as much. Vulnerability did not terrify him.
And she knew that he needed her.
The first time they made love, she had her qualms. She was haunted by the old chestnut about how the size of a man’s nose may give the inquisitive some hint as to the relative proportion of an analogously shaped nether organ. The giant’s nose was—well—gigantic, voyons! A sight too much so to leave the lady entirely comfortable in her mind.
Still, needs must. She wanted to. She felt a certain obligation, though through no deed or word of his. His few good-night kisses were not taken from her as if by right of conquest, or even secured as reparation for his having bought her dinner. He never treated her like a feedbag whore. All the marks of tenderness that passed between them were granted on her initiative alone. One kiss from him dewed fully half her face, left her skin atingle with moisture and mint residue from his hastily munched rolls of Breath-Savers. It was an unusual and exhilarating experience. Perverse curiosity needled her on to further experimental delvings.
Were she honest with herself, she would have admitted too that, since Ian, she was hornier than hell.
He was not so eager to accept her offer as she had imagined. “What’s wrong?” she demanded. Angry gooseflesh rose beneath the peach satin of her lace-trimmed teddy. The dressing room at Victoria’s Secret had been much warmer. Chills and rejection coupled together to nettle her deeply.
The giant’s jowls drooped, laden with rue. “Ar, it’s not you, dearie. Sweet as fresh plums you be, and welcome as spring. All as you’ve done for me up to this—” he fingered the charming regimental-stripe tie she’d had custom-made for him at Brooks Brothers “—that’s been more’n I ever hoped for. I be content wi’ that.”
She crossed her arms, being unable to cross her legs. There was nothing in the room for her to sit on. Furniture had been displaced by futons, in deference to accommodating his needs. “You don’t find me attractive!” she accused.
He tried to convince her otherwise, but she knew lies when she heard them. She’d lunched with enough salesfolk for that. By bullying and pouting and sniveling dangerously near the precipice of tears, she cudgeled out the truth.
“I ain’t—I ain’t so much—I don’t got too big a—I has me lackings.” He showed her proof.
Well, yes, he was right. What he said was true. If you were comparing him to other giants, that is.
She forced herself to look very solemn. She told him that size was not everything, but love conquers all. If he could lie, so could she.
They were very happy together.
Three weeks later, while she was at work, Ian called. “I’ve found myself,” he told her. “I was right there, all along. I’m a better person now. I’m sensitive to a woman’s needs. I can give you the support you want and the space you require. I’m ready to nurture. We can complete each other. I’m not afraid of commitment. Isn’t that swell?”
“Drop dead,” she said.
“But I need you.”
Well, and what harm was there in meeting him for a drink after work, after all was said and done, after what they’d once meant to each other? She couldn’t show herself to be afraid of seeing him again. They could talk about old times, catharsis over cocktails and a mouthwatering assortment of high-fiber, low-cholesterol veggies. She could handle that. She was strong. She was capable.
She was a fool for blonds with black eyebrows.
The giant’s brows were black enough to satisfy, but as for hair, blond or otherwise, his pate gleamed smooth as a crystal goblet. Some things a woman doesn’t miss until someone else points out that she does not have them. This holds as true for textured pantyhose as for men. In the bar with Ian, she found herself recalling how she used to run her fingers through his golden curls. Said fingers began to drum an antsy anthem on the sides of her lowball glass. Odd pulsings disturbed her body’s chosen serenity. She really should be getting home.
“I like what you’ve done with the place,” Ian said, kicking off his shoes, tossing his tie onto the futon. “So tell me about your new roommate.”
“She minds her own business,” she said. “She doesn’t ask questions, she doesn’t get ideas.” She brought the drinks from the living room, even though he knew where everything was kept and had offered to do it. The giant’s mug was in the liquor cabinet now. Ian might not mistake it for an oversized, spoutless martini pitcher. Few of those had BLUNDERBORE handpainted around their circumference, or an etched pattern of grinning skulls. Damn few.
Ian was essentially naked when she returned. A sheet counts for little in the strategies of such impromptu dalliances. He took his drink and raised it in her honor. “To your health,” he said. He sipped while she stripped and slipped between the sheets beside him. He paused. A thought had touched him.
“Speaking of which….” He made a pointed inquiry into her social life since last they’d shared bed linens.
Her eyes narrowed, her mouth screwed itself into a tight little macadamia nut of pique. “I’ve only seen one other man since you ran out. I’m still seeing him.” She laced barbs to this last sentence but he remained unstung.
“And, uh, how well do you know him? I mean, what was he doing before he met you? Personal habits? Companions? Lifestyle of choice? You know.”
“He killed dragons. He ground men’s bones to make his bread. He never read any Garrison Keillor.”
“Men’s bones?” Ian’s lovesome brows rose a moiety. “Urn, did he ever give you any particular reason for, that is, in a manner of speaking, such exclusive tastes?”
“Put up,” she told him, “or shut up. In fact, shut up whether you put up or no.”
Ian steepled his fingers. “We are very hostile,” he said, and tsk‘d audibly.
“Blunderbore doesn’t think so,” she shot back. “Blunderbore isn’t intimidated by a strong woman.”
“Blunderbore?” Ian echoed. The steeple toppled. “Blunderbore?”
“It’s a perfectly good name for a giant,” she said, folding her arms.
Somewhere beyond the bedroom door—the apartment door, to be exact—a key jiggled in a lock.
“Your roommate?” Ian whispered.
“SURPRISE, ME DARLING!”
Oh, it was very sad, very sad indeed. A giant is like other men, only with a bigger heart to break. No vows had been uttered, and Blunderbore agreed in principle about mature adult persons in a modern relationship needing their own space, but still—
Temper, temper.
The bread was warm from the oven. “Have a piece, love. I’ll butter it for you.”
“I’m not that peckish now,” said Blunderbore. He leaned his face on one hand and gazed morosely at the steaming slab, very white where it was not yellow with melting butter. “Like to clog me arteries sommat fierce, that be. Take it away.”
“Tsk. You’re just being difficult. You’ve eaten butter by the hogshead before this. And after all my trouble, following that silly old family recipe of yours. No appreciation. None whatsoever.”
“Ar, all right, all right, cease yer cackling.” The giant raised the slice to his lips and bit. He chewed. “Gritty,” he said.
“You don’t like my cooking.” Ian pouted.
“Na, then, I never did say—It’s my fault, ‘tis, for not having a more careful eye at the handmill. I’ll see to it as I grind ‘em finer next time. Oh, it’s as grand a baking as ever I’ve tasted, lad, and that’s taking in some three hundred years. Don’t take on so, there’s me dearie. Come, sit you down on old Blunderbore’s knee and tell us how them wicked, wicked futures traders has treated our Ian today.”
Ian dimpled and dropped the sulks. Obediently he climbed the giant’s knee.
Blunderbore smiled indulgently at his manling. Maybe this one would last. In a certain light, the lad looked just like Jack.
Maybe this one wouldn’t kiss and tell.
* * * *
JUDITH TARR
Death and the Lady
One of the most popular and respected fantasists of the 1980s, Judith Tarr is also a medieval scholar with a Ph.D. in medieval studies from Yale University, which background has served her well in creating the richly detailed milieus of her critically acclaimed novels. She has published more than seventeen books, including the World Fantasy Award nominee Lord of the Two Lands, The Lie of Glass, The Golden Horn., The Hounds of God, The Hall of the Mountain King, The Lady of Han-Gilen, A Fall of Princes, A Wind in Cairo, Ars Magica, Alamut, and The Dagger and the Cross: A Novel of the Crusades, as well as historical novels such as Throne of Isis, The Eagle’s Daughter, and Pillar of Fire. Born in Augusta, Maine, she now lives in Tucson, Arizona.
In the compelling, compassionate, and tough-minded story that follows, she takes us to a time when the Old World of Europe is dying and a New World is being painfully born from its ashes, and shows us how both Old World and New must of necessity deal with a still older World, the dark enchanted World that lies Beyond the Wood, and with the creatures who sometimes come out of it…and who sometimes want to go back …
* * * *
I
The year after the Great Death, the harvest was the best that anyone could remember. The best, and the worst, because there were so few of us to get it in; and the men who had lived through the plague all gone, even to the fledgling boys, in the high ones’ endless wars. The few that were left were the old and the lame and the witless, and the women. We made a joke of it that year, how the Angel of Death took his share of our men, and Sire and Comte the rest.
We did what we could, we in Sency-la-Forêt. I had lost a baby that summer, and almost myself, and I was weak a little still; even so I would have been reaping barley with my sisters, if Mère Adele had not caught me coming out with the scythe in my hand. She had a tongue on her, did Mère Adele, and Saint Benedict’s black habit did nothing to curb it. She took the scythe and kilted up her habit and went to work down the long rows, and I went where she told me, to mind the children.
There were more maybe than some had, if travelers’ tales told the truth. Every house had lost its share to the black sickness, and in the manor by the little river the dark angel had taken everyone but the few who had the wits to run. So we were a lordless demesne as well as a manless one, a city of women, one of the nuns from the priory called us; she read books, and not all of them were scripture.
If I looked from where I sat under the May tree, I could see her in the field, binding sheaves where the reapers passed. There were children with her; my own Celine, just big enough to work, had her own sheaf to gather and bind. I had the littlest ones, the babies in their pen like odd sheep, and the weanlings for the moment in my lap and in a circle round me, while I told them a story. It was a very old story; I hardly needed to pay attention to it, but let my tongue run on and watched the reapers, and decided that I was going to claim my scythe back. Let Mère Adele look after the babies. I was bigger than she, and stronger, too.
I was growing quite angry inside myself, while I smiled at the children and made them laugh. Even Francha, who never made a sound, nor had since her family died around her, had a glint of laughter in her eye, though she looked down quickly. I reached to draw her into my lap. She was stiff, all bones and tremblings like a wild thing, but she did not run away as she would have once. After a while she laid her head on my breast.
That quieted my temper. I finished the story I was telling. As I opened my mouth to begin another, Francha went rigid in my arms. I tried to soothe her with hands and voice. She clawed her way about, not to escape, but to see what came behind me.
Sency is Sency-la-Forêt not for that it was woodland once, though that is true enough; nor for that wood surrounds it, closing in on the road to Sency-les-Champs and away beyond it into Normandy; but because of the trees that are its westward wall. People pass through Sency from north to south and back again. Sometimes, from north or south, they go eastward into Maine or Anjou. West they never go. East and south and north is wood, in part the Sire de Sency’s if the Death had left any to claim that title, in part common ground for hunting and woodcutting and pig-grazing. West is Wood. Cursed, the priest said before he took fright at the Death and fled to Avranches. Bewitched, said the old women by the fire in the evenings. Enchanted, the young men used to say before they went away. Sometimes a young man would swear that he would go hunting in the Wood, or a young woman would say that she meant to scry out a lover in the well by the broken chapel. If any of them ever did it, he never talked of it, nor she; nor did people ask. The Wood was best not spoken of.
I sat with Francha stiff as a stick in my arms, and stared where she was staring, into the green gloom that was the Wood. There was someone on the edge of it. It could almost have been a traveler from south or east, worked round westward by a turning of the road or by the lure of the trees. We were a formidable enough town by then, with the palisade that Messire Arnaud had built before he died, and no gate open but on the northward side.
Francha broke out of my arms. My Perrin, always the first to leap on anything that was new, bolted gleefully in Francha’s wake. Half a breath more and they were all gone, the babies in their pen beginning to howl, and the reapers nearest pausing, some straightening to stare.
If I thought anything, I thought it later. That the Death was not so long gone. That the roads were full of wolves, two-legged nearly all of them, and deadly dangerous. That the Wood held things more deadly than any wolf, if even a tithe of the tales were true.
As I ran I thought of Perrin, and of Francha. I could have caught them easily, a season ago. Now the stitch caught me before I had run a furlong, doubled me up and made me curse. I ran in spite of it, but hobbling. I could see well enough. There was only one figure on the Wood’s edge, standing very still before the onslaught of children. It was a woman. I did not know how I knew that. It was all in shapeless brown, hooded and faceless. It did not frighten our young at all. They had seen the Death. This was but a curiosity, a traveler on the road that no one traveled, a new thing to run after and shrill at and squabble over.
As the children parted like a flock of sheep and streamed around it, the figure bent. It straightened with one of the children in its arms. Francha, white and silent Francha who never spoke, who fled even from those she knew, clinging to this stranger as if she would never let go.
The reapers were leaving their reaping. Some moved slowly, weary or wary. Others came as fast as they were able. We trusted nothing in these days, but Sency had been quiet since the spring, when the Comte’s man came to take our men away. Our woods protected us, and our prayers, too.
Still I was the first but for the children to come to the stranger. Her hood was deep but the light was on her. I saw a pale face, and big eyes in it, staring at me.
