The Big Book of Classic Fantasy

by The Big Book of Classic Fantasy (retail) (epub)

  “What advantage do you derive from that, Joiwind?”

  “The advantage of not being cruel and selfish, dear Maskull.”

  He threw the fruit away and flushed again.

  Joiwind looked into his swarthy, bearded face without embarrassment and slowly smiled. “Have I said too much? Have I been too familiar? Do you know why you think so? It’s because you are still impure. By and by you will listen to all language without shame.”

  Before he realised what she was about to do, she threw her tentacle round his neck, like another arm. He offered no resistance to its cool pressure. The contact of her soft flesh with his own was so moist and sensitive that it resembled another kind of kiss. He saw who it was that embraced him—a pale, beautiful girl. Yet, oddly enough, he experienced neither voluptuousness nor sexual pride. The love expressed by the caress was rich, glowing, and personal, but there was not the least trace of sex in it—and so he received it.

  She removed her tentacle, placed her two arms on his shoulders and penetrated with her eyes right into his very soul.

  “Yes, I wish to be pure,” he muttered. “Without that what can I ever be but a weak, squirming devil?”

  Joiwind released him. “This we call the ‘magn,’ ” she said, indicating her tentacle. “By means of it what we love already we love more, and what we don’t love at all we begin to love.”

  “A godlike organ!”

  “It is the one we guard most jealously,” said Joiwind.

  The shade of the trees afforded a timely screen from the now almost insufferable rays of Branchspell, which was climbing steadily upward to the zenith. On descending the other side of the little hills, Maskull looked anxiously for traces of Nightspore and Krag, but without result. After staring about him for a few minutes he shrugged his shoulders; but suspicions had already begun to gather in his mind.

  A small, natural amphitheatre lay at their feet, completely circled by the tree-clad heights. The centre was of red sand. In the very middle shot up a tall, stately tree, with a black trunk and branches, and transparent, crystal leaves. At the foot of this tree was a natural, circular well, containing dark green water.

  When they had reached the bottom, Joiwind took him straight over to the well.

  Maskull gazed at it intently. “Is this the shrine you talked about?”

  “Yes. It is called Shaping’s Well. The man or woman who wishes to invoke Shaping must take up some of the gnawl water, and drink it.”

  “Pray for me,” said Maskull. “Your unspotted prayer will carry more weight.”

  “What do you wish for?”

  “For purity,” answered Maskull, in a troubled voice.

  Joiwind made a cup of her hand, and drank a little of the water. She held it up to Maskull’s mouth. “You must drink too.” He obeyed. She then stood erect, closed her eyes, and, in a voice like the soft murmurings of spring, prayed aloud.

  “Shaping, my father, I am hoping you can hear me. A strange man has come to us weighed down with heavy blood. He wishes to be pure. Let him know the meaning of love, let him live for others. Don’t spare him pain, dear Shaping, but let him seek his own pain. Breathe into him a noble soul.”

  Maskull listened with tears in his heart.

  As Joiwind finished speaking, a blurred mist came over his eyes, and, half buried in the scarlet sand, appeared a large circle of dazzlingly white pillars. For some minutes they flickered to and fro between distinctness and indistinctness, like an object being focused. Then they faded out of sight again.

  “Is that a sign from Shaping?” asked Maskull, in a low, awed tone.

  “Perhaps it is. It is a time mirage.”

  “What can that be, Joiwind?”

  “You see, dear Maskull, the temple does not yet exist but it will do so, because it must. What you and I are now doing in simplicity, wise men will do hereafter in full knowledge.”

  “It is right for man to pray,” said Maskull. “Good and evil in the world don’t originate from nothing. God and Devil must exist. And we should pray to the one, and fight the other.”

  “Yes, we must fight Krag.”

  “What name did you say?” asked Maskull in amazement.

  “Krag—the author of evil and misery—whom you call Devil.”

  He immediately concealed his thoughts. To prevent Joiwind from learning his relationship to this being, he made his mind a blank.

  “Why do you hide your mind from me?” she demanded, looking at him strangely and changing colour.

  “In this bright, pure, radiant world, evil seems so remote, one can scarcely grasp its meaning.” But he lied.

  Joiwind continued gazing at him, straight out of her clean soul. “The world is good and pure, but many men are corrupt. Panawe, my husband, has travelled, and he has told me things I would almost rather have not heard. One person he met believed the universe to be, from top to bottom, a conjurer’s cave.”

  “I should like to meet your husband.”

  “Well, we are going home now.”

  Maskull was on the point of inquiring whether she had any children, but was afraid of offending her, and checked himself.

  She read the mental question. “What need is there? Is not the whole world full of lovely children? Why should I want selfish possessions?”

  An extraordinary creature flew past, uttering a plaintive cry of five distinct notes. It was not a bird, but had a balloon-shaped body, paddled by five webbed feet. It disappeared among the trees.

  Joiwind pointed to it, as it went by. “I love that beast, grotesque as it is—perhaps all the more for its grotesqueness. But if I had children of my own, would I still love it? Which is best—to love two or three, or to love all?”

  “Every woman can’t be like you, Joiwind, but it is good to have a few like you. Wouldn’t it be as well,” he went on, “since we’ve got to walk through that sun-baked wilderness, to make turbans for our heads out of some of those long leaves?”

  She smiled rather pathetically. “You will think me foolish, but every tearing off of a leaf would be a wound in my heart. We have only to throw our robes over our heads.”

  “No doubt that will answer the same purpose, but tell me—weren’t these very robes once part of a living creature?”

  “Oh, no—no, they are the webs of a certain animal, but they have never been in themselves alive.”

  “You reduce life to extreme simplicity,” remarked Maskull meditatively, “but it is very beautiful.”

  Climbing back over the hills, they now without further ceremony began their march across the desert.

  They walked side by side. Joiwind directed their course straight toward Poolingdred. From the position of the sun, Maskull judged their way to lie due north. The sand was soft and powdery, very tiring to his naked feet. The red glare dazed his eyes, and made him semi-blind. He was hot, parched, and tormented with the craving to drink; his undertone of pain emerged into full consciousness.

  “I see my friends nowhere, and it is very queer.”

  “Yes, it is queer—if it is accidental,” said Joiwind, with a peculiar intonation.

  “Exactly!” agreed Maskull. “If they had met with a mishap, their bodies would still be there. It begins to look like a piece of bad work to me. They must have gone on, and left me….Well, I am here, and I must make the best of it. I will trouble no more about them.”

  “I don’t wish to speak ill of anyone,” said Joiwind, “but my instinct tells me that you are better away from those men. They did not come here for your sake, but for their own.”

  They walked on for a long time. Maskull was beginning to feel faint. She twined her magn lovingly around his waist, and a strong current of confidence and well-being instantly coursed through his veins.

  “Thanks, Joiwind! But am I not weakening you?”

  “Yes,” she replied
, with a quick, thrilling glance. “But not much—and it gives me great happiness.”

  Presently they met a fantastic little creature, the size of a new-born lamb, waltzing along on three legs. Each leg in turn moved to the front, and so the little monstrosity proceeded by means of a series of complete rotations. It was vividly coloured, as though it had been dipped into pots of bright blue and yellow paint. It looked up with small, shining eyes, as they passed.

  Joiwind nodded and smiled to it. “That’s a personal friend of mine, Maskull. Whenever I come this way, I see it. It’s always waltzing, and always in a hurry, but it never seems to get anywhere.”

  “It seems to me that life is so self-sufficient here that there is no need for anyone to get anywhere. What I don’t quite understand is how you manage to pass your days without ennui.”

  “That’s a strange word. It means, does it not, craving for excitement?”

  “Something of the kind,” said Maskull.

  “That must be a disease brought on by rich food.”

  “But are you never dull?”

  “How could we be? Our blood is quick and light and free, our flesh is clean and unclogged, inside and out….Before long I hope you will understand what sort of question you have asked.”

  Farther on they encountered a strange phenomenon. In the heart of the desert a fountain rose perpendicularly fifty feet into the air, with a cool and pleasant hissing sound. It differed, however, from a fountain in this respect—that the water of which it was composed did not return to the ground but was absorbed by the atmosphere at the summit. It was in fact a tall, graceful column of dark green fluid, with a capital of coiling and twisting vapours.

  When they came closer, Maskull perceived that this water column was the continuation and termination of a flowing brook, which came down from the direction of the mountains. The explanation of the phenomenon was evidently that the water at this spot found chemical affinities in the upper air, and consequently forsook the ground.

  “Now let us drink,” said Joiwind.

  She threw herself unaffectedly at full length on the sand, face downward, by the side of the brook, and Maskull was not long in following her example. She refused to quench her thirst until she had seen him drink. He found the water heavy, but bubbling with gas. He drank copiously. It affected his palate in a new way—with the purity and cleanness of water was combined the exhilaration of a sparkling wine, raising his spirits—but somehow the intoxication brought out his better nature, and not his lower.

  “We call it ‘gnawl water,’ ” said Joiwind. “This is not quite pure, as you can see by the colour. At Poolingdred it is crystal clear. But we would be ungrateful if we complained. After this you’ll find we’ll get along much better.”

  Maskull now began to realise his environment, as it were for the first time. All his sense organs started to show him beauties and wonders that he had not hitherto suspected. The uniform glaring scarlet of the sands became separated into a score of clearly distinguished shades of red. The sky was similarly split up into different blues. The radiant heat of Branchspell he found to affect every part of his body with unequal intensities. His ears awakened; the atmosphere was full of murmurs, the sands hummed, even the sun’s rays had a sound of their own—a kind of faint Aeolian harp. Subtle, puzzling perfumes assailed his nostrils. His palate lingered over the memory of the gnawl water. All the pores of his skin were tickled and soothed by hitherto unperceived currents of air. His poigns explored actively the inward nature of everything in his immediate vicinity. His magn touched Joiwind, and drew from her person a stream of love and joy. And lastly by means of his breve he exchanged thoughts with her in silence. This mighty sense symphony stirred him to the depths, and throughout the walk of that endless morning he felt no more fatigue.

  When it was drawing near to Blodsombre, they approached the sedgy margin of a dark green lake, which lay underneath Poolingdred.

  Panawe was sitting on a dark rock, waiting for them.

  Maurice Renard (1875–1939) was a French writer who served as a soldier during World War I. It was during his military service that he discovered the work of H. G. Wells and soon began crafting his own science fiction and horror stories. Renard’s literary career began with his collection Phantoms and Puppets (1905). His first novel, Doctor Lerne (1908), although clearly inspired by Wells, was also evidence of a unique voice. It melds the fantastic with horror and set the tone for many of Renard’s later work. In 1920, he published The Hands of Orlac, a cautionary tale about receiving organ transplants from strangers. Now considered a classic, the novel has been adapted to film three times. Renard also published a novel that was banned by many libraries and seen as sacrilegious by the church: The Monkey (1925), cowritten with Albert-Jean, that explored cloning. The somewhat mystical and mysterious story reprinted here is among his most enduring.

  Sound in the Mountain

  Maurice Renard

  Translated by Gio Clairval

  ONLY ON THE SECOND DAY did Florent Max hear the sound. The morning before, as he passed by, he hadn’t paid attention: the whispering blended with the mountain’s uncountable murmurs. In the evening, when he was going home, he recalled the vague memory of something like buzzing flies, or a subterranean torrent.

  The second day, he stopped to listen.

  Florent Max had left his mountain cabin before dawn. Paint-box flung around his neck, folding easel tucked under his arm, he ascended the mule path toward his favorite spot, and the unfinished work that awaited him.

  The landscape painter advanced slowly. Morning doled out her first rays of light. The surrounding splendors revealed themselves in the imperceptible growth of clarity. Florent Max, doubling over, studied his ankle boots’ progression on the stones.

  He moved forward with no enthusiasm, out of necessity and habit. Art? Beauty? Nature? A childish waste of time!…He was forty-five. That worried him. Old! he thought. Old! It had happened all of a sudden. He’d catcalled this beautiful girl, and she’d thrown that word in his face just by sizing him up, her cursory glance full of contempt. Old. And right there, as if the girl’s eye had cast a spell on him, he’d pictured himself crowned with salt and pepper, hidden behind a wrinkled mask, smothered in fat, laden to the bones with arthritis and ice—in other words, all that he actually was.

  Old? Who, him? He’d accomplished nothing. He hadn’t done anything, loved anyone, arrived anywhere!

  Lost in the horror of his recent discovery, he darkly considered every angle. Knees that bent with telling stiffness. Kidneys of perceptible size, weighing him down—particularly on the left, and he was aware of his early-hour face needing, as he would say, “a little ironing out.”

  Ah, if only I’d done something of consequence, he thought. No dice! Love? No dice! Blame the war. They say it lasted five years. Yeah, right. It’s like Rip’s night. A one-century-long night.

  We left young, but a day lasted thrice, no, four times as long, and we came back old. Old!

  A rebellious thought stopped him, eyes transfixed. It was morning, speckled with gold, and it was springtime. Spring. Youth. The rising sun stretched its beams, bold, conquering. Over there rosy peaks, blurred with dawny mists, shimmered like a virgin’s cheeks. Everything was new and fresh.

  I’m at odds with all this now. How come?…I’ve tasted nothing…What’s it all about? Two halves, one made of projects and the other of regrets? Are we here to transition, without realizing it, from the shame of being too young to the shame of being too old? If only I were famous. Glory compensates for many disappointments…A famous man has no age…

  The corners of his lips turned downward, like an antique drama mask.

  I’m a loser. Painting, I still care about painting. Not that much, though…Oh, well. But the rest…I’m alone. My masters are gone. My successors, absent. And love! I’ve wasted my time with Marie. Twenty-five years to
gether. We’re of an age. For a woman, it’s too late for anything new. To me, she’s the nightmarish relic of a lost idyll…

  Then:

  Will I live looking back in regret? My youth, my youth is eating me from the inside like a glittering cancer. And this. I traveled fantastic landscapes as a blind man. And now. What am I now? There are vegetable people, people like fruits, people like flowers. If it is so, I’m over.

  Then:

  Still, still…

  And then:

  Be honest, old man. You’ve been sleeping in the train. Ancient? Not yet. But “old” to young women, yes. A childless, penniless man without a name. And this organic dissolution beginning with the first gray hair…Death is just a sudden acceleration.

  Florent Max followed the path among brambles and bushes. To his left, the ravine dropped from a vertiginous height, and, at the bottom of the precipice, the slope opposite rebounded with magnificent élan, projecting the forest above like a screen of blue greenery.

  Wallowing in his melancholy mood, the painter drifted along a different trail that slanted upward in a sea of boulders and brushes.

  “Too much soul, sir, too much soul.”

  Proud of this four-pence Shakespearean line, he listened. Stillness enhanced the silence. A deaf man would have known there was nothing to hear. Not a screeching grasshopper, not a fly buzzing over a flower.

  The painter strained to listen, turning his head from side to side.

  “How strange! I’m sure it wasn’t tinnitus. The thing made the noise of a clover field in the sun.”

  And he began ferreting everywhere.

  The ravine opposed him with obsidian blackness blended of vines and shrubs.

  He decided to go back to the spot where he’d heard the sound distinctly.

  After some fumbling and groping, Florent Max found the noise: it was audible from a very small patch of ground. If he moved half a step in any direction, the stubborn thing vanished from his hearing range. Had he lowered his head as he passed the spot, he would have missed the murmuring. It was so peculiar he compared it to a buzzing object placed behind several obstacles pierced by a hair-thin interstice. This comparison falls short, but it doesn’t really matter.