Complete Short Fiction, page 64
A bleached face appeared between the curtains In the doorway. It was Loukas, the young Greek from whom I had acquired the agate for my spell. In spite of his inclinations, he looked at me as if he expected further payment for the stone. (A woman of the world is never allowed to forget her indiscretions.)
“There’s someone looking for you. Says he used to be your minion. Skinny fellow, not one of those big country fellows you told me about.”
“He’s lost weight from unrequited love,” I snapped. I excused myself from Marcus, dismissed Loukas, and surged on deck with more eagerness than I cared to show.
Andreas was seated on a capstan. I ought to say, he had wilted onto a capstan. He would probably not have moved if the sailors had started to unwind the rope. Poor dear, he was grieving over the departure of his mistress!
“Andreas, you’ve come to see me off!”
“Bear is sick,” he said. I had never seen him look quite so wan and forlorn. His big eyes—brown, imploring, reproachful—haunted his face.
“Nonsense. He’s just sleeping. The potion I gave him always has that effect.”
“Sick. Think he’s dying.”
“But I only gave him a few grains!”
“Woke up this morning and couldn’t see any change. Tail wasn’t gone. Came down from the loft and took some more.”
“How much more?”
“All of it.”
I felt as cold as if I had plunged into the lake of the beavers. But now there was no lodge in sight.
Marcus had followed me out of the cabin. “Time to go ashore, Andreas. We have to sail before the tide comes in. You know how the Sabrina backs up then. Like a moving wall. You can’t sail against it.”
“Bear is sick,” I said. “I have to go back to my house.”
“There isn’t time.”
“Can’t we sail tomorrow?”
“No,” he said, polite but adamant He was no longer the red-faced buffoon, drunkard, lecher. He was a Roman, born to conquer and trained to rule. People who saw the Romans at night sometimes forgot that during the days they had conquered every country between Parthia and Britain. At least he condescended to an explanation. “Saxon curraghs have been sighted down the coast. Too many for our patrol boats. They’ll be here in a few hours. We don’t want to be caught in the river.”
“Very well,” I said. “I’ll join you in the cabin. I want to say a few more words to Andreas.”
“You won’t be long.” It was not a question.
“No.” It was not an answer.
He went into the cabin. I went ashore with Andreas.
The house looked sad and diminished. Somehow the radiance had ebbed from its blue walls and red-framed windows and its jauntily precarious perch on the shoulders of the forest god. It looked crestfallen, like a birdhouse whose birds had flown to Libya for the winter. But the real change lay in the animals. The goat stared at me, hapless and helpless, as if I had forgotten to milk her. The pig moved nervously between his trough and his pool and the partridges were hard-pressed to keep out from under his hooves. The five small beavers whom Bear had taught in his lodge were crouched at the foot of the ladder. They were too small to negotiate its rungs and looked as if they hoped that I would carry them in my arms. But there was no time.
I shook my head. “Later.”
Andreas and I climbed the ladder and entered a room which was dappled with morning sunlight but hushed with a stillness of dusk. After emptying the vial of aconite, Bear had crawled to my couch. The pinkness of his cheeks at first encouraged me; he looked like a child who was flushed from a game of knucklebones. But he opened his eyes and I saw the soul looking out of them for the last time.
“Have I begun to change?” His voice seemed to come from the deep hold of a ship.
“I think your fingers are longer. Yes, I’m sure they are.”
He tried to lift a hand but lacked the strength. “I didn’t know it would hurt so much.”
“It has to hurt. There’s so much to change.”
“So much to change.” He closed his eyes.
Andreas, seated on the floor beside the couch, began to sob. He did not want Bear to hear him and he tried to stifle the sounds in his throat.
I patted him on the shoulder. “That’s all right.” I walked to the Venus Cabinet and opened the casket of lapis lazuli and removed the Ultimate Amulet I held it in the light of a window and thought that the greatest magic is not a matter of size or complexity but simply a measure of the magician’s heart. It was a seashore imprisoned in amber. Tiny, tiny beyond belief, yet bright of eye, it looked too frail to cross a pond, yet somehow indomitable enough to cross an ocean or a sky. You felt it could evade die storms and the monsters which it dared not confront, that it would persevere and prevail. It had belonged to my great-grandmother. It was her greatest possession and her greatest gift to me. I had always meant to use it for myself, when I was old and tired and Death was scratching at the door like an imperious cat.
I knelt beside Bear’s couch and took his hand, with its plump, two-jointed fingers; the hand he had hated but I had come to love.
“Go, little soul, up the dark meadowlands of sleep. Climb the impossible hill, swim the impassable sea, leap the imponderable sky. And you, little sea horse, companion him on his journey. Guide him and guard him until he is home again. Let no demons affright him, neither of death nor pain. Death, you must scratch at another door, he is not for you. Pain, you must loose him once he has reached his port.”
“Bear is dead.”
“Is he, Andreas?”
“Yes. I wish I was too.”
“Guide him and guard him until be is home again, and home shall be . . . here . . . We.”
Andreas’s Journal
Mistress is with child.
“You’ll think the father is Marcus,” she said. “But it isn’t.”
Hadn’t thought it was. There’ve been so many.
“You might say ifs a kind of virgin birth. No, Tm afraid Tm disqualified for the adjective. An Immaculate Conception then?”
“That’s what the Christians said about Mary. Bear told me.”
“Never mind, even the Christians have their moments. After all, Bear thought so. The child, by the way, will be a boy. With long, beautiful fingers. You’ll love him very much.”
“I loved Bear.”
“I know. I know, Andreas. And you’ll love him just as much. Now we must . . . wait. Milk the goat, will you? I’ll feed the beavers. Sly little fellows, they’ll eat us out of our garden if they stay much longer. But I haven’t the heart to send them back to their lodge.”
“Mistress?”
“Yes, Andreas?”
“Will it be long to wait?”
“No, my dear. We shall pass the time together.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to express a large debt of gratitude to the following books: From Caesar to Arthur, by Geoffrey Ashe; Everyday Life in Roman and Anglo-Saxon Times, by Marjorie and C. H. B. Quennell; Dictionary of Aphrodisiacs, by Harry E. Wedeck The Celtic Realms, by Myles Dillon and Nora Chadwick; Pagan Celtic Britain, by Anne Ross; and especially, The World of the Beaver, by Leonard Lee Rue III.
The Goat Without Horns
Thomas Burnett Swann was recognized as one of the fields superior fantasists with the publication of “Where Is the Bird of Fire,” a novelet which “I expected to please no one except my Muse, since it mixed history with mythology and humans with demigods and introduced a heroine who had green hair and pointed ears. But it found a publisher in England and encouraged me to write further historical hybrids,” (including “The Manor of Roses,” F&SF, November 1966). Dr. Swann’s latest story has a more contemporary, though no less colorful, background, a dolphin for narrator, and, in the words of that narrator, “the story is monstrous at times, chilling as a confrontation with a tiger shark, and the ending—well, you shall judge for yourselves . . .”
(FIRST OF TWO PARTS)
Publisher’s Introduction to the Second Edition
THE following history contains events so incredible, so seemingly manufactured by an over-imaginative if not a downright melodramatic novelist, that the publisher feels called upon to remind the public of several significant facts:
First, that verbal communication was established with the dolphin—more specifically that species of dolphin known as Tursiops truncatus—within the last year. Sounds which for centuries had appeared to human ears to be no more than a series of squeaks and snorts from a playful animal were in truth a highly developed language with a syntax comparable to that of Japanese and a vocabulary as rich and often as confusing as Etruscan. Furthermore, the dolphin—that is, the brighter members of the species—had been understanding the conversation of men since the time of Aristotle and, with the good-humored tolerance of their race, waiting patiently for him to return the compliment.
Second, once communication was achieved, dolphins not only conversed with men but revealed what many marine biologists had long suspected, that they possessed a literature—oral, to be sure, since flippers and flukes do not lend themselves to wielding pens—as fluid in style as their own motions in the water.
Third, that this literature, which was passed from generation to generation by infinite repetitions, generally took the form not of epics, nor of plays, nor of poems, but of histories. One might expect so playful a race to write comedies crackling with epigrams in the manner of Oscar Wilde. Such was not the case. Except for two monumental histories, one of the entire dolphin race since their mass migration from the land to the sea forty-five million years ago, the other of the human race since men began to build boats, it was the custom of each dolphin clan to compose, singly or in concert, an account of an episode or episodes concerning their own particular history. The account was intimate and personal—not a broad record of the entire clan, written with the sweep and grandeur of a Gibbon—but events involving a few or perhaps a single individual, seen, recorded, and evaluated through the microscope rather than the telescope; microcosms, not macrocosms.
Fourth, when we presented such a history from the 1870’s in our first edition last year, soberly labeling its nature on the cover and in our introduction, we were instantly accused of attempting to perpetrate yet another Gothic novel on a credulous public. Our Victorian dolphin narrator was variously identified with Mary Dewart, Victoria Bolt, and Daphne Duvalier. The ladies heatedly proclaimed that even if they had chosen to conceal their identities under pen names (and why should such salable names be concealed?), they would hardly have masqueraded as a fish—well, a mammal, but a fishy-looking mammal all the same.
However, the authenticity of the book was attested by the renowned linguist, Julius Whipple-john, who himself had anonymously transcribed the tale from the great-grandson of the dolphin narrator; and by author Thomas Burnett Swann, who had edited and attempted to clarify the roughnesses inevitable in a communication between a mammal that lived in the sea and spoke largely through his blowhole and a mammal that lived on the land and, assisted by tongue, teeth, and lips, spoke through his mouth. In a word, last year’s “Gothic novel” is now widely recognized as a legitimate history of certain extraordinary events transpiring on a Caribbean island in the Nineteenth Century. Gothic perhaps in the sense of grotesque, macabre, inexplicable, but fully as historical as those larger grotesqueries, the Inquisition and the Salem witch hunts.
A word of caution. The island in question, though bearing superficial resemblances to both Tobago and Saba, has not been identified and, according to the great-grandson of the narrator, was totally submerged by the volcanic eruption of Soufriere in 1902.
I
I ADDRESS my history not to my fellow dolphins, even though, following the custom of my race, I will repeat the words to my first son until he has learned them by rote and passed them in turn to his own first son. My history? Charlie’s history, I ought to say, for he is the subject and the hero, and it is to him and for him that I write, with the admiration of a warrior for a comrade-in-arms, and the adoration of one who swims but would like to walk, for one who walks like a god.
There was a time, earlier than our earliest recorded history, when dolphins lived on the shore, and walked on limbs which only later became flippers and dwelled like rabbits in warrens or beavers in branch-built lodges. Our race eventually undertook a gradual migration into the sea, first becoming amphibians like frogs, then entirely sea-dwelling but still airbreathing. Perhaps our lives on shore had grown too difficult and too dangerous. Perhaps there were creatures which pierced our tender skin with giant claws or savage beaks, descended from trees to make a breakfast of us or emerged from the earth to drag us to their cackling young. Or perhaps we simply became restless and wished to explore a color different from green, a texture unlike dirt, a motion smoother than walking. For as you know we are the most adventurous of creatures, following the Gulf Stream north to Newfoundland every year and risking abrupt drops in temperature and bouts with sharks for the sheer joy of change, surprise, unpredictability.
I, for one, however, lamented my ancestors’ decision to forsake the land for the damp, enveloping cleanliness of the sea. Now, if I could reconvert my flippers, I would instantly clamber back onto the shore and revel among the fields of cacao and the forests of mahogany, quite satisfied to walk or climb instead of swim. What did the sea ever bring me except the loss of my mother to a giant hammerhead? Men go into the sea to cleanse themselves of dirt, but how I would love to clamber ashore and roll on a sandy beach! My friends called me Gloomer because I would rather brood in a sea cave than gambol and frolic like most of my lighthearted race.
Until the death of my mother, at least I managed an occasional somersault and a halfhearted nip of a shapely pubescent female.
But Mama saw through my pretense. “Son, you don’t take after your family at all. As you well know, my lovers—and I have enjoyed more than any dolphin south of the Bahamas—call me Merry Mama, and your own dear father, the Great Triton rest his soul, could jolly a sea turtle out of a hundred-year gloom. Where have we failed you, dear?”
I deliberated. I was not one to make a quick answer. “You haven’t failed me, Mama. I expect it’s because I’m waiting.”
“For a comely young cow?”
“I don’t really know. Something. Someone. A difference.”
The first difference was the death of my mother, and I thought: This accounts for my gloom. The shadow of her death, like an inky cloud exuded by a squid, stretched backwards as well as forwards.
The second difference was Charlie.
Obviously I did not witness all of his adventures on the island of Oleandra, since many took place on the land instead of in the water. But Charlie told me much of what I could not see, and the rest I surmised—his thoughts, some of his actions, the facets of a character which seemed to me saintly and human at the same time; though being as modest as he was lovable, he saw himself as rather an ordinary fellow and blamed himself for some of the horrors which overtook his friends. You see, the story is monstrous at times, as chilling as a confrontation with a tiger shark, as unlikely as an octopus or a narwhal, and the ending—well, you shall judge for yourselves.
The shark which had killed my mother had not survived her, if that was any consolation. The leader of our herd, the Old Bull, had finished him with lethal blows to his underside, and afterwards the herd had been very solicitous of me. Not that I was a calf. I was five years old—in human terms, about eighteen. I was old enough to fend for myself, and when the herd skirted Oleandra, I decided to leave their company and linger near the little volcanic island which looked like an upright pine cone. My intuition—and a dolphin without intuition is like a man without reason; we call it our third ear—had not yet warned me.
They were greatly concerned at my decision. Dolphins are affectionate, familial creatures. Most of them are happiest in a herd. They considered my youth, my sorrow, and my inexperience, and they all but insisted that I follow the Gulf Stream north with them.
The Old Bull, a practical fellow of thirty ripe years, had the last word. It was worth heeding.
“Sharks. Too many around the island. Must be something in the water they like to eat.”
“Well,” I said gloomily, “now there will be two somethings. I would make a tasty morsel for a hammerhead.”
“Indeed you would,” said the Old Cow. “You’ve been gorging yourself out of grief.”
“I may be plump,” I pouted, “and irresistible to hammerheads. But I’m still staying. Give me a little more length and a little less girth, and let the sharks beware!” Suppose I battled and lost. What had I to lose except my life and my gloom?
When the herd reluctantly left me to my whims, I drifted, grieved, and ate, catching unwary mullets by the thousand because I felt less alone when my four stomachs were occupied; following a ship for a few miles out of habit without even noticing if the sailors were waving and throwing me fish.
Oleandra was a curious island: a big volcanic cone, long since dead, its outer slopes sere from the beating of winds or gnarled with stunted, twisted sea grapes, its protected crater lush with oleanders and frangipani and cupping a lagoon as green as a mermaid’s hair. The Old Bull had shown me an underground passage which led from the sea into the lagoon.
“If the sharks get too troublesome,” he had said, “you can always nip into the lagoon and hope they won’t follow your scent. The entrance from the sea is hidden by rocks, and sharks, remember, have notoriously bad eyes.”
The days passed, perhaps a week, perhaps a month, with no dimming of sorrow and no sharpening of any appetite except for food. And then, in the mist of days, I saw a ship, and time resumed for me . . .
She had anchored a few hundred yards from the shore, and she was not one of those island-hopping schooners with barnacled hulls and crusty captains. She was a schooner, it is true, but bright and red and slim of line, with sails as gossamer as the wings of a flying fish. She belonged to Elizabeth Meynell, the English lady who owned the island and lived in a large red house inside the crater. Once a month, the Old Bull had said, this schooner brought her mail and supplies from Martinique.
