Fantasy The Best of 2001

by Robert Silverberg

  Deghred stopped. “Go on,” Cappen urged.

  “Well, uh—O barefaced brazen robber! Ten zirgats? If this withered and moldy lot went for two in the ba­zaar, I would be astounded. Yet, since I too am prepared to take a loss for the sake of our relationship, I will offer three—”

  “Uh, could you give me something else?” Cappen in­terrupted. “Speech not so, m-m, commercial?”

  “What can it be? My dealings with Xandrans are all commercial.”

  “Oh, surely not all. Doing business in itself involves sociability, the cultivation of friendly feelings, does it not? Tell me what might be said at a shared meal over a cup of wine.”

  Deghred pondered before he tried: “How did your sea voyage go? I hope you’re not troubled by the heat. It is seldom so hot here at this time of year.”

  “Nothing more—more intimate? Don’t men like these ever talk of their families? Of love and marriage?”

  “Not much. I can’t converse with them easily, you know. Women, yes.”

  “Say on.”

  “Well, I remember telling one fellow, when he asked, that the best whorehouse in the city is the Purple Lotus. Especially if you can get Zerasa. By Kalat’s cloven hoof, what a wench! Plump and sweet as a juicy plum, sizzling as a spitted rump roast, and the tricks she knows—” Deghred reminisced in considerable detail.

  It wasn’t quite what Cappen had meant. Still, asso­ciation evoked words also amorous, but apparently dec­orous. His pen flew, scrawling, scratching out, spattering the paper and his tunic. When Degredh ended with a gusty sigh, Cappen had enough.

  “Good,” he said. “My thanks—albeit this is toward the end of saving your own well-being and prosperity too. You may go now. Five percent, remember.”

  The merchant rose and stretched himself as well as the roof allowed. “If naught else, that was a small respite from reality. Ah, well. You do have hopes? Are you coming along?”

  “No,” said Cappen. “My labors are just beginning.”

  Day broke still and cloudless but cruelly cold. Breath smoked white, feet crunched ice. When he emerged at mid-morning, Cappen found very few folk outdoors. Those stared at him out of their own frozen silence. The rest were huddled inside, keeping warm while they waited to learn their fate. It was as if the whole gigantic land held its breath.

  He felt no weariness, he could not. He seemed almost detached from himself, his head light but sky-clear. His left arm cradled the harp. Tucked into his belt was a folded sheet of paper, but he didn’t expect any need to refer to it. The words thereon were graven into him, together with their music. They certainly should be. The gods of minstrelsy knew—or would have known, if they weren’t so remote from this wild highland—how he had toiled over the lyrics, searching about, throwing away effort after effort, inch by inch finding his way to a translation that fitted the notes and was not grossly false to the original, and at last, not satisfied but with time on his heels, had rehearsed over and over and over for his audience of turnips and sheepskins.

  Now he must see how well it played for a more crit­ical listener.

  If it succeeded, if he survived, the first part of the reward he’d claim was to be let to sleep undisturbed until next sunrise. How remotely that bliss glimmered!

  He trudged onward, scarcely thinking about anything, until he came to the altar. There he took stance, gazed across the abyss to peaks sword-sharp against heaven, and said, “My lady, here I am in obedience to your command.”

  It sounded unnaturally loud. No echo responded, no wings soared overhead, he stood alone in the middle of aloneness.

  After a while, he said, “I repeat, begging my lady’s pardon, that here I am with that which I promised you.”

  The least of breezes stirred. It went like liquid across his face and into his nostrils. In so vast a silence, he heard it whisper.

  “I humbly hope my offering will please you and all the gods,” he said.

  And there she was, awesome and beautiful before him. A phantom wind tossed her hair and whirled snow-sparkles around her whiteness. “Well?” she snapped.

  Could she too, even she, have been under strain? He doffed his cap and bowed low. “If my lady will deign to heed, I’ve created an epithalamium such as she desires, and have the incomparable honor of rendering it unto her, to be known forever after as her unique gift at the turning of the winter.”

  “That was quick, after you protested you could not.”

  “The thought of you inspired me as never erenow have I been inspired.”

  “To make it out of nothing?”

  “Oh, no, my lady. Out of experience, and whatever talent is mine, and, above all else, as I confessed, the shining vision of my lady. I swear, and take for granted you can immediately verify, that neither melody nor lyr­ics were ever heard in this world, Heaven or Earth or the Elsewhere, before I prepared them for you.”

  He doubted that she could in fact scan space and time at once, so thoroughly. But no matter. He did not doubt that Nerigo kept his half-illicit arcanum and whatever came to it through his mirror that was not a mirror well sealed against observation human and nonhuman. Whatever gods had the scope and power to spy on him must also have much better things to do.

  Aiala’s glance lingered more than it pierced. “I do not really wish to destroy you, Cappen Varra,” she told him slowly. “You have a rather charming way about you. But—should you disappoint me—you will understand that one does have one’s position to maintain.”

  “Oh, absolutely. And how better could a man perish than in striving to serve such a lady? Yet I dare suggest that you will find my ditty acceptable.”

  The glorious eyes widened. The slight mercurial shiv­ers almost ceased. “Sing, then,” she said low.

  “Allow me first to lay forth what the purpose is. Un­less I am grievously mistaken, it is to provide an ode to nuptial joy. Now, my thought was that this is best expressed in the voice of the bride. The groom is inevitably impatient for nightfall. She, though, however happy, may at the same time be a little fearful, certain of loving kindness yet, in her purity, unsure what to await and what she can do toward making the union rapturous. Khaiantai is otherwise. She is a goddess, and here is an annual renewal. My song expresses her rapture in tones of unbounded gladness.”

  Aiala nodded. “That’s not a bad theme,” she said, perhaps a trifle wistfully.

  “Therefore, my lady, pray bear with my conceit, in the poetic sense, that she sings with restrained abandon, in colloquial terms of revelry, not always classically cor­rect. For we have nothing to go on about that save the writings of the learned, do we? There must have been more familiar speech among lesser folk, commoners, farmers, herders, artisans, lowly but still the majority, the backbone of the nation and the salt of the earth. To them too, to the Life Force that is in them, should the paean appeal.”

  “You may be right,” said Aiala with a tinge of ex­asperation. “Let me hear.”

  While he talked, Cappen Varra, in the presence of one who fully knew the language, mentally made revi­sions. Translating, he had chosen phrasings that lent themselves to it.

  The moment was upon him. He took off his gloves, gripped the harp, strummed it, and cleared his throat.

  “We begin with a chorus,” he said. Therewith he launched into song.

  “Bridegroom and bride!

  Knot that’s insoluble,

  Voices all voluble,

  Hail it with pride.—”

  She hearkened. Her bosom rose and fell.

  “Now the bride herself sings.

  “When a merry maiden marries,

  Sorrow goes and pleasure tarries;

  Every sound becomes a song,

  All is right, and nothing’s wrong!—”

  He saw he had captured her, and continued to the bacchanalian end.

  “Sullen night is laughing day—

  All the year is merry May!”

  The chords rang into stillness. Cappen waited. But he knew. A huge, warm eas
ing rose in him like a tide.

  “That is wonderful,” Aiala breathed. “Nothing of the kind, ever before—”

  “It is my lady’s,” he said with another bow, while he resumed his cap and gloves.

  She straightened into majesty. “You have earned what you shall have. Henceforward until the proper win­ter, the weather shall smile, the dwellers shall prosper, and you and your comrades shall cross my mountains free of all hindrance.”

  “My lady overwhelms me,” he thought it expedient to reply.

  For a heartbeat, her grandeur gave way, ever so slightly. “I could almost wish that you—But no. Farewell, funny mortal.”

  She leaned over. Her lips brushed his. He felt as if struck by soft lightning. Then she was gone. It seemed to him that already the air grew more mild.

  For a short while before starting back with his news he stood silent beneath the sky, suddenly dazed. His free hand strayed to the paper at his belt. Doubtless he would never know more about this than he now did. Yet he wished that someday, somehow, if only in another the­atrical performance, he could see the gracefully gliding boats of the Venetian gondoliers.

  AVE DE PASO

  CATHERINE ASARO

  MY COUSIN MANUEL WALKED alone in the twi­light, out of sight, while I sat in the back of the pickup truck. We each needed privacy for our grief. The hillside under our truck hunched out of the desert like the shoulder of a giant. Perhaps that shoulder belonged to one of the Four-Corner Gods who carried the cube of the world on his back. When too many of the Zinacantec Maya existed, the gods grew tired and shifted the weight of their burden, stirring an earthquake.

  I slipped my hand into my pocket, where I had hidden my offerings: white candles, pine needles, rum. They weren’t enough. I had no copal incense to burn, no resin balls and wood chips to appease the ancestral gods for the improper manner of my mother’s burial.

  Manuel and I were far now from Zinacantn, our home in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. Years ago my mother had brought us here, to New Mexico. Later we had moved to Los Angeles, the city of fallen angels. But for this one night, Manuel and I had returned to New Mexico, a desert named after the country of our birth, yet not of that country.

  An in-between place.

  Dusk feathered across the land, brushing away a pepper-red sunset. Eventually I stirred myself enough to set out our sleeping bags in the bed of the truck. It wouldn’t be as comfortable as if we slept on the ground, but we wouldn’t wake up with bandolero scorpions or rattlesnakes in our bags either.

  “Akushtina?” Manuel’s voice drifted through the dry evening like a hawk.

  I sat down against the wall of the pickup and pulled my denim jacket tight against the night’s chill.

  Manuel walked into view from around the front of the truck. “Tina, why didn’t you answer?”

  “It didn’t feel right.”

  He climbed into the truck and dropped his Uzi at my feet. “You okay?”

  I shuddered. “Take it away.”

  Sitting next to me, he folded his arms against the cold. “Take what away?”

  I pushed the Uzi with my toe. “That.”

  “You see a rattler, you yell for me, what am I going to do? Spit at it?”

  “You don’t need a submachine gun to protect us from snakes.”

  He withdrew from me then, not with his body but with his spirit, into the shrouded places of his mind. I had hoped that coming here, away from the cold angles and broken lines of Los Angeles, would bring back the closeness we had shared as children. Though many peo­ple still considered us children.

  “I don’t want to fight,” I said.

  His look softened. “I know, hija.”

  “I miss her.”

  He put his arms around me and I leaned into him, this cousin of mine who at nineteen, three years older than me, was the only guardian I had now. Sliding my arms under his leather jacket, I laid my head against the rough cloth of his flannel shirt. And I cried, slight sounds that blended into the night. The crickets stopped chirping, filling the twilight with their silence.

  Manuel murmured in Tzotzil Mayan, our first lan­guage, the only one he had ever felt was his, far more than the English we spoke now, or the Spanish we had learned as a second language. But he would never show his tears: not to me; not to the social workers in L.A. who had tried to reach him when he was younger and now feared they had failed; not to Los Halcones, the gang the Anglos called The Falcons, the barrio warriors Manuel considered the only family we had left.

  Eventually I stopped crying. Crickets began to saw the night again, and an owl hooted, its call wavering like a ghost. Sounds came from the edge of the world: a truck growling on the horizon, the whispering rumble of pronghorn antelope as they loped across the land, the howl of a coyote. No city groans muddied the night.

  I pulled away from Manuel, wiping my cheek with my hand. Then I got up and went to stand at the cab of the truck, leaning with my arms folded on its roof. We had parked on the top of a flat hill. The desert rolled out in all directions, from here to the horizon, an endless plain darkening with shadows beneath a forever sky. This land belonged less to humans than to the giant furry tarantulas that crept across the parched soil; or to the tarantula hawks, those huge wasps that dived out of the air to grab their eight-legged prey; or to the javeli­nas, the wild, grunting pigs.

  We had come here from the Chiapas village called Naben Chauk, the Lake of the Lightning. My mother had been outcast there, an unmarried woman with a child and almost no clan. After the death of Manuel’s parents, my aunt and uncle, she had no one. So eight years ago she brought Manuel and me here, to New Mexico, where a friend had a job for her. But she dreamed of the City of Angels, convinced it could give us a better life. So later we had moved to Los Angeles, a sprawling giant that could swallow this hill like a snake swallowing a mouse.

  “The city killed her,” I said. “If we had stayed in Na­ben Chauk she would still be alive.”

  Manuel’s jeans rustled when he stood up. His boots thudded as he crossed the truck bed. He leaned on the cab next to me. “I wish it. You wish it. But Los Angeles didn’t give her cancer. That sickness, it would have eaten her no matter where we went.”

  “The city sucked out pieces of her soul.”

  He drew me closer, until I was standing between him and the cab, my back against his front, his arms around me, his hands resting on the cab. “You got to let go, Tina. You got to say good-bye.”

  “I can’t.” It was like giving up, just like we had given up our home. I missed the limestone hills of the Chiapas highlands, where clouds hid the peaks and mist cloaked the sweet stands of pine. As a small girl, I had herded our sheep there, our only wealth, woolly animals we sheared with scissors bought in San Cristóbal de las Ca­sas. Until an earthquake killed the flock.

  As it had killed Manuel’s parents.

  I wished I could see my mother one last time, cook­ing over a fire at dawn, smoke rising around her, spi­raling up and around until it escaped out the spaces where the roof met the walls. She would kneel in front of her comal, a round metal plate propped up on two pots and a rock, patting her maize dough back and forth, making tortillas.

  “It’s good we came here to tell her goody-bye,” I said. “It was wrong the way she died, in that hospital. In L.A.”

  “We did the best we could.” Manuel kissed the top of my head. “She couldn’t have gotten medicine in Na­ben Chauk, not what she needed.”

  “Her spirit won’t rest now.”

  “Tina, you got to stop all this, about spirits and things.” Manuel let go of me. I turned around in time to see him pick up the Uzi. He held it like a staff. “This is how you ‘protect your spirit.’ By making sure no one takes what’s yours.”

  “How can you come to mourn her and bring this.” I jerked the gun out of his hand and threw it over the side of the truck. “She would hate it. Hate it.”

  “Goddamn it, Tina.” Holding the side of the pickup, he vaulted over it
to the ground. He picked up the Uzi, his anger hanging around him like smoke. Had I been anyone else, grabbing his gun that way could have gotten me shot.

  I climbed out of the truck and jumped down next to him. He towered over me, tall by any standard, huge for a man of the Zinacantec Maya, over six feet. His hooknosed profile was silhouetted against the stars like an ancient Maya king, a warrior out of place and time, his face much like those carved into the stellae, the stones standing in the ruins of our ancestors. Proud. He was so proud. And in so much pain.

  Faint music rippled out of the night, drifting on the air like a bird, strange and yet familiar, the sweet notes of a Chiapas guitar.

  “Someone is here,” I said.

  Manuel lifted his gun as he scanned the area. “You see someone?”

  “Hear someone.” The music came closer now, sting­ing, bittersweet. “A guitar. On the other side of the hill.”

  He lowered the gun. “I don’t hear squat.”

  “It’s there.” I hesitated. “Let’s not stay here tonight. If we went back into town, they would probably let us stay at the house—”

  “No! We didn’t come all this way to stay where she was a maid.” Manuel motioned at the desert. “This is what she loved. The land.”

  I knew he was right. But the night made me uneasy. “Something is wrong.”

  “Oh, hell, Tina.” He took my arm. “I’ll show you. No one is here.”

  I pulled away. “Don’t go.”

  “Why not?” Manuel walked away, to the edge of the hilltop. He stood there, a tall figure in the ghosting moonlight. Then he disappeared, gone down the other side, vanished into the whispering night.

  “Manuel, wait.” I started after him.

  The guitar kept playing, its notes wavering, receding, coming closer. Then it stopped, and the desert waited in silence. No music, no crickets, no coyotes.

  Nothing.

  “Manuel?” I called. “Did you find anyone?”

  Gunshots cracked, splintering the night into pieces.

  “No!” I broke into a run, sprinting to the edge where he had disappeared. Then I stopped. The slope fell away from my feet, mottled by mesquite and spidery ocotillo bushes, until it met the desert floor several hundred yards below.