The Big Book of Classic Fantasy

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

  Instead of apologizing, the wife burst into laughter.

  “Shut up yourself. If it was up to you and your ridiculous honesty, we would have nothing to put on the table in this dog-eat-dog world.” With these words, she silenced him.

  The following day, as agreed, that poor hick of a Gonsuké showed up with the clerk. Maybe because he was reporting to his employers for the first time, Gonsuké wore over his hakama a haori covered in coats of arms, even though all his efforts to look his best failed to make him appear any different from an ordinary peasant. And the servant’s appearance was extremely disappointing to the physician, who had been expecting someone more unusual and now, in his surprise, stared wide-eyed at the wannabe sennin, as if he’d been gazing at some exotic deer from India.

  “Well, I’m told you wish at all costs to become a sennin. How did this wish come about?” he asked warily.

  “There is no precise reason. Well, seeing the Osaka castle it came to me that the powerful man dwelling inside it, surely a much-revered man, will have to die sooner or later, as we all do, even the mighty and glorious, because we are fragile and ephemeral, we are nothing in this world.”

  “So you’re willing to do anything to become a sennin,” cut in the physician’s sly wife, without wasting time.

  “Precisely, ma’am. I’m willing to do anything to become a sennin.”

  “Then you’ll enter into our service this same day, and you will work for twenty years. After this period, we will teach you the way of the immortal.”

  “Really? It’s the greatest favor you can do me.”

  “In exchange for that, we shall not pay you any money for twenty years.”

  “That’s all right. That’s all right. I accept everything. I have no objection.”

  And so Gonsuké worked as a servant in the physician’s house for twenty years. He drew water, cut wood, cooked, cleaned. The medicine box balancing on his shoulder, he also accompanied the doctor on his rounds. And given that he never asked for coin, he was the best servant in Japan, a true prodigy.

  Twenty years passed. Gonsuké, again decked out in haori complete with coats of arms, stood before his masters. Dignified, he expressed his deep gratitude for being looked after during all these years.

  “We have reached the point where, as you promised, you are about to reveal to me how to become a sennin, capable to defeat old age and death.”

  The physician, hearing these words, was ill at ease. That poor man had served him and his wife for twenty years without pay, and now it seemed disloyal to disclose to him that they knew nothing about the teachings allowing someone to become an immortal.

  Finding no solution, the doctor looked away and quickly said: “My wife, she’s the expert, and she will teach you.”

  The Old Fox, however, remained confident and composed.

  “I shall teach you to become immortal, but you must promise that you will do everything I tell you to do, no matter how difficult it may seem. Even the impossible. Otherwise, you will not become a sennin, and you shall have to work for us for twenty more years, without a salary, if you wish to avoid the gods’ punishment that will reduce you to ashes on the spot.”

  “I understand. I am ready to do anything, even the impossible.”

  Happy and content, he waited for the instructions.

  The woman ordered, “Climb up the pine tree in the garden.”

  Since the Old Fox had not the slightest idea of what the teachings to become immortal entailed, she intended to order him to accomplish tasks he would invariably fail, which would entitle her to have an unpaid servant at her disposal for twenty more years.

  Gonsuké, hearing her command, did not hesitate to climb up the pine.

  “Higher, you must climb higher.”

  The woman, standing on the edge of the porch, craned her neck to gaze at Gonsuké dangling in the tree. Still he climbed. His haori flapped in the wind over the highest branches.

  “Now release the right hand.”

  Gonsuké clung to a sturdy branch with his left hand and slowly released his right hand.

  “The other hand, too!”

  “Hey! He will fall to the ground,” said her husband the doctor, joining her at the porch railing. “It’s full of stones under the tree,” he protested, anxious. “He won’t survive his fall.”

  “It’s not the moment to make a scene. Trust me, for once…” To her servant, she cried, “Come on now, release your grip entirely!”

  Gonsuké hesitated. Up there, without clinging to anything, he could only fall to his death. But then he let go. In no time, he and his haori broke off the pine tree.

  And then, and then, instead of plummeting down, he remained mysteriously suspended in midair, stock-still, like a marionette in the morning sky.

  “Oh, thank you, thank you so much! I’m a real sennin now.”

  He bowed ceremoniously, floating in the blue sky wrapped in silence, and then, taking gentle steps, he rose higher until he disappeared behind the clouds.

  Strangely enough, no one heard about the physician and his wife ever again. The pine tree remained in their garden for a long time, up to the day when one Yodoya Tatsugoro, who wished to enjoy the sight of the branches covered in snow, had the tree uprooted and transported into his own garden, and by that time the pine had grown very, very tall.

  Eric Rücker Eddison (1882–1945), who wrote fantasy as E. R. Eddison, was an English author. He is best known for his creation of secondary worlds, such as Zimiamvia, the setting for his Zimiamvian trilogy. His work was admired by J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, and he often joined them as a visitor to the Inklings group, an informal gathering of writers who enjoyed talking about fantasy literature. Later writers, such as Michael Moorcock and Ursula K. Le Guin, would also claim his work as a source of inspiration. Eddison was fascinated by Icelandic sagas and had translated many stories. This is an excerpt from his most famous novel, The Worm Ouroboros.

  Koshtra Pivrarcha

  (EXCERPT FROM THE WORM OUROBOROS)

  E. R. Eddison

  OF THE COMING OF THE Lords of Demonland to Morna Moruna, whence they beheld the Zimiamvian Mountains, seen also by Gro in years gone by; and of the wonders seen by them and perils undergone and deeds done in their attempt on Koshtra Pivrarcha, the which alone of all Earth’s mountains looketh down upon Koshtra Belorn; and none shall ascend up into Koshtra Belorn that hath not first looked down upon her.

  * * *

  —

  Now it is to be said of Lord Juss and Lord Brandoch Daha that they, finding themselves parted from their people in the fog, and utterly unable to find them, when the last sound of battle had died away wiped and put up their bloody swords and set forth at a great pace eastward. Only Mivarsh fared with them of all their following. His lips were drawn back a little, showing his teeth, but he carried himself proudly as one who being resolved to die walks with a quiet mind to his destruction. Day after day they journeyed, sometimes in clear weather, sometimes in mist or sleet, over the changeless desert, without a landmark, save here a little sluggish river, or here a piece of rising ground, or a pond, or a clump of rocks: small things which faded from sight amid the waste ere they were passed by a half-mile’s distance. So was each day like yesterday, drawing to a morrow like to it again. And always fear walked at their heel and sat beside them sleeping: clanking of wings heard above the wind, a brooding hush of menace in the sunshine, and noises out of the void of darkness as of teeth chattering. So came they on the twentieth day to Morna Moruna, and stood at even in the sorrowful twilight by the little round castle, silent on Omprenne Edge.

  From their feet the cliffs dropped sheer. Strange it was, standing on that frozen lip of the Moruna, as on the limit of the world, to gaze southward on a land of summer, and to breathe faint summer airs blowing up from blossoming trees and flower-clad alps. In the depths a carpet
of huge tree-tops clothed a vast stretch of country, through the midst of which, seen here and there in a bend of silver among the woods, the Bhavinan bore the waters of a thousand secret mountain solitudes down to an unknown sea. Beyond the river the deep woods, blue with distance, swelled to feathery hilltops with some sharper-featured loftier heights bodying cloudily beyond them. The Demons strained their eyes searching the curtain of mystery behind and above those foot-hills; but the great peaks, like great ladies, shrouded themselves against their curious gaze, and no glimpse was shown them of the snows.

  Surely to be in Morna Moruna was to be in the death chamber of some once lovely presence. Stains of fire were on the walls. The fair gallery of open wood-work that ran above the main hall was burnt through and partly fallen in ruin, the blackened ends of the beams that held it jutting blindly in the gap. Among the wreck of carved chairs and benches, broken and worm-eaten, some shreds of figured tapestries rotted, the home now of beetles and spiders. Patches of colour, faded lines, mildewed and damp with the corruption of two hundred years, lingered to be the memorials, like the mummied skeleton of a king’s daughter long ago untimely dead, of sweet gracious paintings on the walls. Five nights and five days the Demons and Mivarsh dwelt in Morna Moruna, inured to portents till they marked them as little as men mark swallows at their window. In the still night were flames seen, and flying forms dim in the moonlit air; and in moonless nights unstarred, moans heard and gibbering accents: prodigies beside their beds, and ridings in the sky, and fleshless fingers plucking at Juss unseen when he went forth to make question of the night.

  Cloud and mist abode ever in the south, and only the foot-hills showed of the great ranges beyond Bhavinan. But on the evening of the sixth day before Yule, it being the nineteenth of December when Betelgeuze stands at midnight on the meridian, a wind blew out of the northwest with changing fits of sleet and sunshine. Day was fading as they stood above the cliff. All the forest land was blue with shades of approaching night: the river was dull silver: the wooded heights afar mingled their outlines with the towers and banks of turbulent deep blue vapour that hurtled in ceaseless passage through the upper air. Suddenly a window opened in the clouds to a space of clean wan wind-swept sky high above the shaggy hills. Surely Juss caught his breath in that moment, to see those deathless ones where they shone pavilioned in the pellucid air, far, vast, and lonely, most like to creatures of unascended heaven, of wind and of fire all compact, too pure to have aught of the gross elements of earth or water. It was as if the rose-red light of sundown had been frozen to crystal and these hewn from it to abide to everlasting, strong and unchangeable amid the welter of earthborn mists below and tumultuous sky above them. The rift ran wider, eastward and westward, opening on more peaks and sunset-kindled snows. And a rainbow leaning to the south was like a sword of glory across the vision.

  Motionless, like hawks staring from that high place of prospect, Juss and Brandoch Daha looked on the mountains of their desire.

  Juss spake, haltingly as one talking in a dream. “The sweet smell, this gusty wind, the very stone thy foot standeth on: I know them all before. There’s not a night since we sailed out of Lookinghaven that I have not beheld in sleep these mountains and known their names.”

  “Who told thee their names?” asked Lord Brandoch Daha.

  “My dream,” Juss answered. “And first I dreamed it in mine own bed in Galing when I came home from guesting with thee last June. And they be true dreams that are dreamed there.” And he said, “Seest thou where the foothills part to a dark valley that runneth deep into the chain, and the mountains are bare to view from crown to foot? Mark where, beyond the nearer range, bleak-visaged precipices, cobweb-streaked with huge snow corridors, rise to a rampart where the rock towers stand against the sky. This is the great ridge of Koshtra Pivrarcha, and the loftiest of those spires his secret mountaintop.”

  As he spoke, his eye followed the line of the eastern ridge, where the towers, like dark gods going down from heaven, plunge to a parapet which runs level above a curtain of avalanche-fluted snow. He fell silent as his gaze rested on the sister peak that east of the gap flamed skyward in wild cliffs to an airy snowy summit, soft-lined as a maiden’s cheek, purer than dew, lovelier than a dream.

  While they looked the sunset fires died out upon the mountains, leaving only pale hues of death and silence. “If thy dream,” said Lord Brandoch Daha, “conducted thee down this Edge, over the Bhavinan, through yonder woods and hills, up through the leagues of ice and frozen rock that stand betwixt us and the main ridge, up by the right road to the topmost snows of Koshtra Belorn: that were a dream indeed.”

  “All this it showed me,” said Juss, “up to the lowest rocks of the great north buttress of Koshtra Pivrarcha, that must first be scaled by him that would go up to Koshtra Belorn. But beyond those rocks not even a dream hath ever climbed. Ere the light fades, I’ll show thee our pass over the nearer range.” He pointed where a glacier crawled betwixt shadowy walls down from a torn snow-field that rose steeply to a saddle. East of it stood two white peaks, and west of it a sheer-faced and long-backed mountain like a citadel, squat and dark beneath the wild sky-line of Koshtra Pivrarcha that hung in air beyond it.

  “The Zia valley,” said Juss, “that runneth into Bhavinan. There lieth our way: under that dark bastion called by the Gods Tetrachnampf.”

  On the morrow Lord Brandoch Daha came to Mivarsh Faz and said, “It is needful that this day we go down from Omprenne Edge. I would for no sake leave thee on the Moruna, but ’tis no walking matter to descend this wall. Art thou a cragsman?”

  “I was born,” answered he, “in the high valley of Perarshyn by the upper waters of the Beirun in Impland. There boys scarce toddle ere they can climb a rock. This climb affrights me not, nor those mountains. But the land is unknown and terrible, and many loathly ones inhabit it, ghosts and eaters of men. O devils transmarine, and my friends, is it not enough? Let us turn again, and if the Gods save our lives we shall be famous for ever, that came unto Morna Moruna and returned alive.”

  But Juss answered and said, “O Mivarsh Faz, know that not for fame are we come on this journey. Our greatness already shadoweth all the world, as a great cedar tree spreading his shadow in a garden; and this enterprise, mighty though it be, shall add to our glory only so much as thou mightest add to these forests of the Bhavinan by planting of one more tree. But so it is, that the great King of Witchiand, practising in darkness in his royal palace of Carcë such arts of grammarie and sendings magical as the world hath not been grieved with until now, sent an ill thing to take my brother, the Lord Goldry Bluszco, who is dear to me as mine own soul. And They that dwell in secret sent me word in a dream, bidding me, if I would have tidings of my dear brother, inquire in Koshtra Belorn. Therefore, O Mivarsh, go with us if thou wilt, but if thou wilt not, why, fare thee well. For nought but my death shall stay me from going thither.”

  And Mivarsh, bethinking him that if the mantichores of the mountains should devour him along with those two lords, that were yet a kindlier fate than all alone to abide those things he wist of on the Moruna, put on the rope, and after commending himself to the protection of his gods followed Lord Brandoch Daha down the rotten slopes of rock and frozen earth at the head of a gully leading down the cliff.

  For all that they were early afoot, yet was it high noon ere they were off the rocks. For the peril of falling stones drove them out from the gully’s bed first on to the eastern buttress and after, when that grew too sheer, back to the western wall. And in an hour or twain the gully’s bed grew shallow and it narrowed to an end, whence Brandoch Daha gazed between his feet to where, a few spear’s lengths below, the smooth slabs curved downward out of sight and the eye leapt straight from their clean-cut edge to shimmering tree-tops that showed tiny as mosses beyond the unseen gulf of air. So they rested awhile; then returning a little up the gully forced a way out on to the face and made a hazardous traverse to a me
w gully westward of the first, and so at last plunged down a long fan of scree and rested on soft fine turf at the foot of the cliffs.

  Little mountain gentians grew at their feet; the pathless forest lay like the sea below them; before them the mountains of the Zia stood supreme: the white gables of Islargyn, the lean dark finger of Tetrachnampf nan Tshark lying back above the Zia Pass pointing to the sky, and west of it, jutting above the valley, the square bastion of Tetrachnampf nan Tsurm. The greater mountains were for the most part sunk behind this nearer range, but Koshtra Belorn still towered above the Pass. As a queen looking down from her high window, so she overlooked those green woods sleeping in the noon-day; and on her forehead was beauty like a star. Behind them where they sat, the escarpment reared back in cramped perspective, a pile of massive buttresses cleft with ravines leading upward from that land of leaves and waters to the hidden wintry flats of the Moruna.

  That night they slept on the fell under the stars, and next day, going down into the woods, came at dusk to an open glade by the waters of the broad-bosomed Bhavinan. The turf was like a cushion, a place for elves to dance in. The far bank full half a mile away was wooded to the water with silver birches, dainty as mountain nymphs, their limbs gleaming through the twilight, their reflections quivering in the depths of the mighty river. In the high air day lingered yet, a faint warmth tingeing the great outlines of the mountains, and westward up the river the young moon stooped above the trees. East of the glade a little wooded eminence, no higher than a house, ran back from the river bank, and in its shoulder a hollow cave.

  “How smiles it to thee?” said Juss. “Be sure we shall find no better place than this thou seest to dwell in until the snows melt and we may on. For though it be summer all the year round in this fortunate valley, it is winter on the great hills, and until the spring we were mad to essay our enterprise.”