Fantasy The Best of 2001

by Robert Silverberg

  “What news, man?” I asked him.

  “News! Why the best news there ever was! Have you not heard?”

  “Heard what?” I asked, bewildered. I had been seduced into oblivion by my vices, for so long that I no longer followed the daily doings of the Young Protector, Cromwell’s son.

  “The King has come again! The King has come again!”

  It was not to Christ that this pagan reveler referred, but to Charles: the son of the Old King had returned from his French exile to lord it anew over his father’s subjects. And every man who had seen the Old King out with such delight now cheered with equal delight for the return of the son, or so it seemed that morning. The doughty old yeoman I had hailed was journeying to London to see the king, having sold up his holding to do it. He urged me to drink a toast to the king’s health, and I knew that to be less than eager would earn me a sound thrashing. And so I drank the health of that chiefest member of the band of gilded youth that was my nemesis in strong English ale, and went numbly on my way, as he did upon his. I did not need to see this new royal court to know that it had in it no place for me.

  So I walked once more without destination, this time against the throng, heading to what circumstance I knew not. As the road filled with more and more Englishmen converging antlike upon London, the journey began to take on (for them) a carnival air, and (for me) the dress of nightmare. I did not lack for food—bread and even meat were pressed by the pilgrims upon their fellows—and surely I did not lack for drink, for the king’s heath was drunk in wine, in gin, in ale, and in brandy with every passing mile. The same spirit of hectic jubilation seemed to possess my fellows as had possessed me in certain nights at the tables, a sense of soaring above the surface of the Earth, unfettered by its limits. But on this day I was as cast down as they were exalted, for the people’s joy at the king’s return seemed to me to be the final betrayal of the certainties of my brief existence. My head reeling with emotion and strong drink, I staggered at dusk from the road into the new-plowed fields to find what shelter I could in the night. It was spring, but I did not fear the night dews nor the other misfortunes that could befall one who slept far from bedstead and rooftree. Neither moon-madness nor the malice of the faeries had power over one whose heart had been burned away to ash.

  So I thought then, and so I do still think, for I have never yet taken harm of the faeries, and indeed I account many of them to be my great friends. It is only mortal boys who yet have the power to wound me, and I hold all that race my implacable enemy. So I lay down that night with a bleak and carefree heart and slept, cushioned on a bounteous tide of drink. And as I slept, all the world changed.

  I awoke in the depths of night, with the full moon just stepping down from midheaven, and got slowly to my feet, wondering what had summoned me from my only refuge. All around me was stillness and the sleeping English countryside, but there was no darkness while Diana, that witches’ goddess, bleached the sky to paleness with her silver mirror. I felt alert and clearheaded, as lively as though someone had called my name, and in fact something had. In the distance a steeple clock rolled the hour, and went on tolling, madly, through two dozen strokes, then three. For a moment fury filled me, for I thought it must be tolling for the king, and waited hopefully for the angry verger to flog the sexton from his untimely celebration. But the bell tolled on, until I was certain that all within its sound must be deaf, or dead, or slumbering too deeply for it to waken them.

  And then I saw that from which I would have run shrieking only days before, whether as staunch Puritan or hopeful scholar. But both scholar and divine have a stake in the world as it is, and to fling aside the laws of God and Nature for uncertain gain would seem to be very madness. But both God and Man had rejected me—for the king’s return must surely be such a sign of Divine partisanship as to form a dire omen—and so I stood as still as if I had been elf-shot, watching the ship come on with a distant sense of wonder.

  For ship it was, sailing grandly above the tilled springtime fields as serenely as any vessel ever sailedupon the sea. She was a full-rigged galleon, her hull bleached to moonlight silver and her lanterns burning with the red fire of hell itself. Only the faint creak of rigging and sails could be heard over the monotonous tolling of that distant bell, and I saw no sailors upon her deck or aloft. Whatever force sailed this ship, it sailed her as silently and as mysteriously as a cloud upon the wind. Her sails were black, a darker shadow against the sky, and I remember thinking at the time that this was the most profligate wonder of all, to spend such costly adornment upon that part of the ship which so often was carried to the bottom of the ocean by a storm. Though if a storm came here to trouble this vessel, and strip her of her gauds, would not the parts be cast merely to the ground, and lie there simple of recovery?

  I have said that the White Ship was in every way like a ship of water, and so she was, save in one. When the ship reached me, she stopped as neatly as a carriage might stop at the coachman’s command, and hovered above me in the sky. I had stood my ground all the time she had glided toward me in that unearthly silence, thinking, in so much as I thought at all, that the White Ship would pass me by and sail undisturbed upon her secret errand, leaving no proof of her presence behind.

  But then she stopped, hanging perfectly motionless in the air above me, rocking as gently as a ship at anchor in calm harbor. I had thought her entirely a craft of moonlight and shadows, but now that she was upon me I could see her mermaid figurehead thickly crusted in silver leaf, and the letters that burned like fire along her carven bow. “Revenge” was what they spelled, and in that entranced, dazzled moment I realized I longed for her above all things: revenge, sweet revenge, to slake the guilt-filled burnings of my wounded heart. The land was closed to me—I would go to sea, turn pirate, drench the world in blood and sorrow until I had washed away all record of weakness and folly and the laughing faces of golden boys.

  “Ahoy to the land below!” a voice called from above me. I looked up, and beheld, leaning over the edge of the railing, the most extraordinary personage I had ever seen, a tall man in a long gray velvet coat and smalls of silver satin that were no more bright than the silvery peruke upon his head. Around him stood his crew—small dark men the size of children, wearing nothing that I could see save paint and gold collars. I knew then that I had fallen among the Midnight Folk who sail upon the Sea of Dreams, and that the tolling of that bell which I had marked was but the striking of the hour of midnight, impossibly extended. When it had struck its full measure of twelve times twelve the ship would be gone, to sail other seas than this.

  “Ahoy the ship!” I called in return. “Take you passengers?”

  From my place upon the ground I saw the captain smile. “Nay, sirrah! We are no fat merchantman to cosset the frail bellies of landlubbers. We are honest workingmen, pirates all!” He smiled at me, with teeth as long and white as a wolf’s, and in that moment any sane man would have turned away, would have run until he reached the nearest church and there thanked God on bended knee for his deliverance.

  I did not.

  “Then take me for a pirate!” I cried, in that moment making my decision. A scrap of schoolboy Latin came back to me. Alea iacta est: the die is cast. “Take me with you, and if it please you, I’ll have no more of the land!”

  The captain turned to shout an order, and to my horror and despair, the Revenge began to move slowly away. But at the same time, a ladder was flung down to me, dangling down far below the keel, though yet a yard above my head. I ran after the White Ship, leaping up recklessly and grabbing for the sanctuary she offered. The rough hemp burned my hands where I clutched it, and it seemed to me that the ship was moving faster now, for I could feel a cold wind on my face. It is not too late to jump, I told myself, but I had no real desire to fling myself back into the world of men that had so betrayed me and itself. And so I climbed, into an unknown world that was yet friendlier to me than the one I was leaving.

  The rope ladder swung and twist
ed, a pendulum with me its hapless weight, suspended between earth and air. At last I gained the relative stability of the ship’s hull, and my ascent became swifter. I did not look down, but with some distant part of my mind I registered that the infernal tolling of the church bell had ceased. The only sound now was the creaking of the ropes, the wind whipping past my face.

  At last I gained the rail, where there were hands waiting to pull me up, and after a seeming eternity, I had solidity beneath my feet once more. At last I could confront my rescuer face-to-face.

  The captain was a tall man, as unearthly fair as starlight. I could see now what I had not seen before, that his eyes glowed with the lambent beastfire of one who has no soul. Such is the mark that God Himself has placed upon the brute creation, that it might be distinguished from the sons of Adam, and if I had not known before the nature of those into whose hands I had commended myself, I must in all justice know it now.

  “Welcome to Revenge,” the faerie captain said, and held out his hand to me. “Captain Goodfellow bids you greeting.”

  I took his hand right willingly, and a shock of cold at that touch thrilled through me to my very bones. It was, paradoxically, a warming thing to one numbed beyond sensation by the myriad blows of Fate, and in that spirit I welcomed it. I, who had set my foot upon so many paths to fortune, had found the last road I was to tread.

  “Come, come,” he said. “You will be weary from your journey, and there is much for us to discuss.”

  He turned, leading the way to the master’s cabin, and it was as if in looking away from me he at last freed my attention to inspect my surroundings. The crew were busy at their tasks as I had not seen them before—trimming the black sails, retrieving the ladder that had borne me aloft, performing the thousand tasks that must be enacted in every moment of a ship’s life. Above me the stars were unwinking, the moon a bright coin burning as refulgently as the sun in this eternal midnight. Beyond the ship’s rail, all that could be seen was cloud, blotting out the land below as we sailed to a destination outside my philosophies.

  The painted men of the crew watched me with avid glowing eyes, but I felt no fear of them. Mortal man had dealt me all the sharpest blows of my life, and I did not fear those who were otherwise. At last, having gazed my fill upon this eldritch vessel, I followed my new master below.

  I had never before been aboard a ship of any sort, so I knew not what to expect. But the captain’s cabin was oddly familiar, bearing a more than passing kinship to the closets of the wealthy and powerful men whom I had visited in my life. There was a fine Turkey carpet laid upon the deck, and linen-fold paneling upon the walls, and the room itself was brave with candles. Their honest yellow light did much to reassure me, though had they been the blue and sulferous lamps of hell I would not have been deterred from the course I had set myself to follow, for all beneath my eye was in the first style of excess, and excess was like cool water to my fevered spirit. There was a wealth of bright silver plate upon the sideboard, and with his own hands Captain Goodfellow poured me a rich measure of a fine oporto, thick and red as blood. I drank it off at a gulp and felt its warmth race through my veins, steadying my nerves. Without a word from me, he poured another, and I drank that as well, at last feeling the cold of his handclasp fade from my bones.

  “Well, now, Master Scholar. What think you of our company?” he asked.

  “It matters not what I think, if you will have me,” I blurted out with clumsy truthfulness. “For there is no place left on Earth for me.”

  “Bravely spoken,” he answered. “And in truth, we welcome few as we have welcomed you. But as I have said, Revenge takes no passengers. Are you willing to become fully one of us, to enter into all our sport and amusement? For we sail the Sea of Dreams, and voyage to lands that few of the mortalkind have known. Before you I spread a table of riches and hardship, privation and glory.”

  He gestured, and I saw a table laid out in the center of the cabin. I had not seen it when I entered, and I would have been willing to swear, should any such oath have been asked of me, that it had not been there a moment before. It was dressed all in white damask, in the fashion of the table at the Lord’s Supper, and upon its surface there were two tall silver candlesticks with tall white tapers aflame, an inkwell, and a book laying open before them.

  “All who sail with us must sign articles,” Captain Goodfellow said. “Loyalty to your fellows, confusion to your enemies, obedience to me, and no regret for what you have left behind.”

  “I can promise all these things,” I said, and he clapped me jovially upon the shoulder.

  I stepped up to the table then and gazed down upon my fortune. The Great Book was before me, its pages thick with signatures, but all the names indighted there were blurred, and I could not read them. When I touched the page, it was as cold beneath my fingers as black iron on Christmas Day, and there was a space at the bottom ready for my name.

  Captain Goodfellow held the silver pen out to me. “Put down your name, Master Scholar, and you shall be one of us.”

  I clasped the pen between my fingers and dipped it into the captain’s silver inkwell. I wrote my first name—James—in bold flowing letters, but then I hesitated. Not for weakness’ sake, but for a notion that had come into my head. This was my birth into a new life, and I vowed that in it I would be the foolish and villainous Cruikshank no loner. Among this gallant company I would take a new name.

  Something stronger.

  Something sharper.

  And so I signed. “James Hook” in a bold sweeping style, and sealed my destiny among the Midnight Folk.

  The form is all that matters.

  ETERNITY AND

  AFTERWARD

  LUCIUS SHEPARD

  PUNCTUALITY HAD COME TO be something of a curse for Viktor Chemayev. Though toward most of his affairs he displayed the typical nonchalance of a young man with a taste for the good life and the money to indulge it, he maintained an entirely different attitude toward his business appointments. Often he would begin to prepare himself hours in advance, inspecting his mirror image for flaws, running a hand over his shaved scalp, trying on a variety of smiles, none of which fit well on his narrow Baltic face, and critiquing the hang of his suit (his tailor had not yet mastered the secret of cutting cloth for someone with broad shoulders and a thin chest). Once satisfied with his appearance he would pace the length and breadth of his apartment, worrying over details, tactical nuances, planning every word, every expression, every gesture. Finally, having no better use for the time remaining, he would drive to the meeting place and there continue to pace and worry and plan. On occasion this compulsiveness caused him problems. He would drink too much while waiting in a bar, or catch cold from standing in the open air, or simply grow bored and lose his mental sharpness. But no matter how hard he tried to change his ways he remained a slave to the practice. And so it was that one night toward the end of October he found himself sitting in the parking lot of Eternity, watching solitary snow-flakes spin down from a starless sky, fretting over his appointment with Yuri Lebedev, the owner of the club and its chief architect, from whom he intended to purchase the freedom of the woman he loved.

  For once it seemed that Chemayev’s anxiety was not misplaced. The prospect of meeting Lebedev, less a man than a creature of legend whom few claimed to have ever seen, was daunting of itself; and though Chemayev was a frequent visitor to Eternity and thus acquainted with many of its eccentricities, it occurred to him now that Lebedev and his establishment were one and the same, an inscrutable value shining forth from the dingy chaos of Moscow, a radiant character whose meaning no one had been able to determine and whose menace, albeit palpable, was impossible to define. The appoint­ment had been characterized as a mere formality, but Chemayev suspected that Lebedev’s notion of formality was quite different from his own, and while he waited he went over in his mind the several communications he had received from Eternity’s agents, wondering if he might have overlooked some devious turn of phra
se designed to mislead him.

  The club was located half an hour to the north and west of the city center amidst a block of krushovas, crumbling apartment projects that sprouted from the frozen, rubble-strewn waste like huge gray headstones memorializing the Kruschev era—the graveyard of the Soviet state, home to generations of cabbage-eating drunks and party drones. Buildings so cheaply constructed that if you pressed your hand to their cement walls, your palm would come away coated with sand. No sign, neon or otherwise, announced the club’s presence. None was needed. Eternity’s patrons were members of the various mafiyas and they required no lure apart from that of its fabulous reputation and exclusivity. All that was visible of the place was a low windowless structure resembling a bunker—the rest of the complex lay deep underground; but the lot that surrounded it was packed with Mercedes and Ferraris and Rolls Royces. As Chemayev gazed blankly, unseeingly, through the windshield of his ten-year-old Lada, shabby as a mule among thoroughbreds, his attention was caught by a group of men and women hurrying toward the entrance. The men walked with a brisk gait, talking and laughing, and the women followed silently in their wake, their furs and jewelry in sharp contrast to the men’s conservative attire, holding their collars shut against the wind or putting a hand to their head to keep an extravagant coiffure in place, tottering in their high heels, their breath venting in little white puffs.

  “Viktor!” Someone tapped on the driver side window. Chemayev cleared away condensation from the glass and saw the flushed, bloated features of his boss, Lev Polutin, peering in at him. Several feet away stood a pale man in a leather trenchcoat, with dark hair falling to his shoulders and a seamed, sorrowful face. “What are you doing out in the cold?” Polutin asked as Chemayev rolled down the window. “Come inside and drink with us!” His 100-proof breath produced a moist warmth on Chemayev’s cheeks.