by Ellen Datlow
“Maurice,” his father called. “Let’s go home. You’ve done all you can do to help here.”
They sat on the steps of the ruined pottery and pulled off their slimy socks. “Just throw them away,” his father said. “No one would want to wash them.”
They rubbed their feet on the grass, then pulled on their shoes. Maurice had to turn his head so blood wouldn’t drip onto his shoes while he tied them. He found the bloody rags he had thrown away days before and stuffed them back up his nose. He could see more slugs in the grass making their way slowly toward the mounds.
“The pagodas were helping me, Papa. They were healing me.”
His papa considered that for a moment. “I’m sure they were,” he said. “We all want to help you. Your grandmother tries with her priests. Your mother gives you good food, rest, and quiet. I would do anything for you too, Maurice. I’ve tried. I’m sure the pagodas did what they could.”
He took his son’s hand and led him away. When they came to the road, he had to carry Maurice.
But Maurice decided he had not done everything he could to help the pagodas. He lay feverish in his bed and listened to his parents talk quietly at the table. His father was trying to convince his mother to go back to Paris in a week or so. He knew what would happen there. Never mind Dr. Perrault and the bleeding. He knew what would happen to him without the pagodas.
And the pagodas themselves needed help. He could not let the slugs eat them whether they helped him or not. No one would believe him about the pagodas, of course. They thought he had made it all up.
After his parents and his grandmother had gone to bed, and after he had listened to his father snore for some time, Maurice crept out from under the covers. He had kept on his clothes and covered up before his mother had come to tuck him in, so no one had guessed that he was still dressed. He pulled on a sweater. He picked up his shoes, opened the bedroom door, and looked around the main room. No one was up. He walked barefoot to the kitchen and set a chair carefully by the cupboard. He stood on the chair and opened the top cupboard. He took out his grandmother’s sack of salt. He would give her some of his money later to pay for it. Slugs hated salt. He’d use it to drive them away from the pagodas.
He closed the front door quietly behind him and set out down the road. There was a bright moon, and the road shined clearly ahead. He had to rest by the river, but soon he was at the ruined pottery.
It was darker there among the trees. The wind sighed in the branches. It felt different being among the trees at night. Maybe the slugs had changed the feeling of the forest, Maurice thought. He hurried up to the mounds. The slugs had breached the wall again and had covered half of the second mound. He looked frantically about for the pagodas, but saw none. He looked for the pieces of Ti Ti Ting, but they had been moved from where he had set them. The pagodas he had lain Ti Ti Ting next to had all moved somewhere else, too.
He looked around for the pagodas. “Don’t be afraid,” he called. “It’s Maurice. I’ve come to help you fight!”
He started scattering salt onto the slugs at his feet. They curled up quickly into little balls at the slightest touch of salt. He took a handful of salt and threw it onto a mass of heaped slugs higher up the mound by the opening of what Maurice had thought was a pagoda mine. The slugs writhed and rolled around when the salt touched them. They would pull back into their segmented shells, then stick all the way out, then pull back inside. How the salt must hurt them, Maurice thought, but he had to try to help the pagodas. There was no stopping now.
“Where are you?” Maurice called to the pagodas. “I have only one bag of salt. Show me how best to help you before it’s all gone.”
Then he saw a pagoda, one of the white ones—the white one with the piece of blue glass. It was standing just around the edge of the second mound. It held up the piece of glass as if in salute. But then Maurice saw that it was pointing. He looked and saw a huge mass of slugs slowly crawling over the wall and swarming over the depression between the second and third mounds.
Maurice had an idea what they were swarming over—what they were eating there!
“I’m coming!” Maurice called.
He surprised the slugs from behind. He scattered salt over the slugs massed at the wall and left them writhing there. He started scattering salt on the huge heap of slugs in the depression, but there were so many. He picked up handful after handful and threw them into the river, then he scattered more salt.
He saw more pagodas, the pink ones and the white ones and all the multicolored ones. They were standing in a defensive line at the base of the third mound—and they did carry crystal swords! Maurice saw them glitter in the moonlight. The swords were as thin as needles. He watched them stab the slugs in the mouth with them. They would wait till a slug loomed over them, its mouth gaping open, then they would strike with their swords and pull back quickly. The slugs would snap about and try to bite them, but some fell over and did not move again.
The pagodas were stabbing through the mouth into the brain, Maurice realized.
He did not see Ti Ti Ting.
“Ti Ti Ting!” Maurice called. “Ti Ti Ting!”
But he could not see him.
“Did the slugs kill him?” he asked the other pagodas, but they did not have time to sing answers to his questions.
Maurice kept scattering salt and throwing slugs into the river. He started to conserve the salt. He threw only slugs he hadn’t salted into the river. The pagodas advanced on the slugs he had salted, and they could easily dispatch them with their swords as they writhed about in salty agony. Maurice threw unsalted slugs until he had to rest. He sat down on a part of the third mound free of slugs and free of pagodas and changed the rags in his nose. His nose was bleeding steadily. He tried to stopper it up tight, though he knew the blood would soak through the rags and start dripping onto his clothes again.
He wanted to sleep. He was tired. He was feverish. But there were more and more slugs.
Then he saw Ti Ti Ting. He was drooping in a depression of the third mound. Maurice stood up to look down into that area. There were other drooped pagodas there, and some just lying on the ground. Three intact pagodas were singing to the hurt ones—he could hear the music softly. They were trying to heal their friends.
“Get well Ti Ti Ting!” Maurice said. “I know what it feels like to be sick. Get well!”
Ti Ti Ting stood a little straighter and looked at Maurice. He seemed to be trying to tell him something, but Maurice could not hear what it was. Maurice reached out and touched Ti Ti Ting softly, then he hurried off to scatter more salt.
When he ran out of salt, he filled the bag with slugs and emptied it into the river then went back for more. He dropped unsalted slugs onto the salted ones, trying to get twice the use for the salt. He worked for hours it seemed. The night grew darker, as it does before dawn. All the wind hushed. Maurice and the pagodas had cleared the slugs from the depression between the second and third mounds. Pagodas were manning their wall again. Others were securing the second mound and the wall there, and some were advancing even on the first mound.
Maurice could do no more. His arms ached, and his legs ached so badly that he had to sit down. He lay back for a moment to slow the blood dripping from his nose.
He watched the pagodas. They were still fighting hard to save themselves, but Maurice thought they had the advantage now. He and his grandmother’s salt had changed the outcome of the battle.
He knew he should be getting back before someone missed him. “Good-bye pagodas!” he said. “Good-bye Ti Ti Ting. I’ll try to come back before we leave for Paris.”
None of them noticed him now. They were all too busy. Maurice was tired and cold, but he decided to lie there just a little longer till maybe his legs felt a little better. He was not sure he could walk all the way home just then.
He woke with a start. Pagodas stood all around him, singing. There were more pagodas around him than he had ever seen. Ti Ti Ting stood right by hi
s head.
The battle was over.
Maurice felt so at peace surrounded by the music he did not move. His head felt different somehow, clearer, not feverish, His nose had stopped bleeding.
A soft morning light burnished the glen and the mounds. A gentle breeze blew east off the bay. Yet it was so quiet he could hear the pagodas’ music clearly.
They were singing for him.
Maurice closed his eyes. His legs did not ache. His nose throbbed, but it was not bleeding. He felt certain his body was healed. “Thank you,” he whispered.
It seemed that Ti Ti Ting was singing thank you in return.
He woke again when he heard his mother and father calling his name. It was full light now. The pagodas had moved away. He could see them on all the mounds, even the first. He saw only dead slugs. He stepped carefully away from the mounds and walked steadily up to the pottery steps. He lay there waiting for his parents.
“Maurice!” he heard his mother call. “Maurice?”
“I’m here, Mother,” he called.
He saw her running up the path. Soon he was in her arms, and Papa and Grandmother were there, too.
“I’m better now,” Maurice said. “The pagodas sang to me last night. I went to sleep hearing them sing after we defeated the slugs, and I feel better now. They helped me.”
“Oh, Maurice,” his mother said.
But Maurice was right. He was still weak, and he had to work to regain his strength, but his nose did not bleed again. His legs did not bruise abnormally again. The fevers did not return. His grandmother thought her priests and their blessings had done it. His mother thought it had been all their tender care, and maybe a miracle. His father did not care how it had happened, just that his son was well again.
On their last day in Ciboure before returning to Paris, they all picnicked by the river. They let Maurice walk alone up to the old pottery.
He went straight to the mounds. The pagodas were there. None of them sank down at his approach. He looked around for Ti Ti Ting and found him standing guard on the repaired wall. Maurice knelt in front of him. He opened his tin soldier pouch and scattered the broken pieces of a dish his grandmother had dropped the day before. “I brought you presents,” he said.
The pagodas all gathered around. He set down a big bag of salt in front of them. “You know how to use this,” he said. “I’ll bring you more next summer when we visit Grandmother.”
The pagodas started singing. Maurice listened. He tried to catch a melody he could remember and hum, but it was all too different. The music seemed so foreign to him then. But Ti Ti Ting seemed insistent about something. Maurice leaned down to listen to what he might be saying. Maurice listened and listened—and suddenly he understood. Ti Ti Ting was telling Maurice that he would understand their music in time, that Maurice would write down some of it and present it to the world. They knew this about him: that Maurice would become a composer who would give beautiful music to a world that needed beauty.
Maurice sat up and laughed. “Oh, I hope so!” he said. “That would be such fun.”
They said their good-byes, and Maurice made his way up the path. He met his father standing in shadows under the trees at the edge of the glen. He had an odd look on his face. Maurice just smiled and took his father’s hand as they walked back to the others.
In the coming years, Maurice always took salt and bits of broken china to the pagodas when they visited his grandmother. His illness never returned, and he grew into a strong young man. In time, all the world knew the name “Maurice Ravel” because of the beautiful music he wrote. He remembered what Ti Ti Ting had told him, and when he could finally make sense of it, he used some of the pagoda music in his Mother Goose Suite and a ballet before that and a set of piano pieces before that. The music delights audiences to this day. Maurice hoped it might heal some of them.
One day, a letter arrived from his grandmother. She told him that a corporation had bought the ruined pottery with plans of establishing a shoe factory on the site. Maurice rushed to Ciboure. The men loading his trunks onto the train wondered why he took so many empty trunks, but when he returned they were not so empty. Maurice bought a house in the forest of Rambouillet outside Paris, and over time he purchased all the land around it. The neighbors wondered at the many happy parties the Ravel family held among the trees there, at all the tinkling lights and the Chinese-sounding music.
Maurice always donated to charities helping children with leukemia. From time to time he let his friends bring their children to his estate, if they were sick. They’d take them home well again weeks later.
The Ravels keep that forest estate to this day. It is a wild, brambly place with secret, flowered glens. No one will ever build on that land.
Other things have built there.
M. Shayne Bell has published short fiction in Asimov’s, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Interzone, Amazing Stories, Tomorrow, Science Fiction Age, Gothic.Net, SCI FICTION, and Realms of Fantasy, plus numerous anthologies, including The Year’s Best Science Fiction, The Year’s Best SF #6, Starlight 2, Future Earths: Under African Skies, The Best of Writers of the Future, and Vanishing Acts. His short fiction is collected in How We Play the Game in Salt Lake and Other Stories.
Bell is author of the novel Nicoji, and editor of the anthology Washed by a Wave of Wind: Science Fiction from the Corridor, for which he received an AML award for editorial excellence.
M. Shayne Bell lives in Salt Lake City. His Web site address is: www.mshaynebell.com.
Author’s Note:
This story began for me when the local classical radio station played something I had never heard: Maurice Ravel’s suite Ma Mère l’Oye. The announcer explained that even though the piece in the suite titled “Laideronnette, Empress of the Pagodas” sounds Chinese, it actually has nothing to do with China: it’s about pagodas, creatures of crystal, porcelain, and jewels that inhabit the forests of France.
When I heard that, I knew I had a story.
Finding details about the pagodas and Ravel’s early life both proved difficult. The French writer Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy first wrote about pagodas in the seventeenth century, but little more about them has been translated from the French. So little is known about pagodas outside France, in fact, that they are not even listed in most of the world s encyclopedias of mythical creatures.
Most biographers of Ravel gloss over his early life and start with his years at the Paris Conservatory. He is sometimes mentioned as having been sickly and frail as a boy. His father was Swiss and his mother came from a Basque village sharing a border with Spain. That both his mother and his father loved and supported him in every way possible is unquestioned.
So I built my romance on the life of Ravel from those few details. I tried to bring the love he knew as a boy into the story. I tried to bring some of his music. And I brought the pagodas, lovely creatures that they are, out of their ancient forests.
Although most of the story fictionalizes the early life of the musician, the Ravel family really does still own Maurice’s estate in the Rambouillet Forest outside Paris.
Green Men
Bill Lewis
Green men grin and gum
from blackened beams
that creak and groan
as ancient houses dream
and are swayed by
wind in branches
long since snapped.
Foliate faces flower and the
memory of an antique hour
unwinds beneath
a carpenter’s craft;
masons, too, saw their shape
sleeping in the stone.
So all is forest then,
vegetable, mineral, flesh, bone.
The world tree becomes
the column of my spine;
eyelids leaves of oak;
fingers ash and pine.
I am lost within a wood
that is lost within me.
Green men grin and gurn,
for
no one knows more than they
what is and is not tree.
Bill lewis is a poet, storyteller, and performance artist from a rural working-class background in Kent, England. His collections to date include Rage without Anger, The Wine of Connecting, The Intellect of the Heart, Shattered English, Leaving the Autoroute, and Beauty Is the Beast. He is a founding member of the Medway Poets group and the international “Stuckists” art movement, and has traveled extensively through Europe, North America, and South America giving performances and readings. In America, his poems have appeared in various journals and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror volumes. He also teaches in adult education centers, schools, and prisons, committed to bringing poetry and art to people from all walks of life. Bill Lewis lives in Chatham, Kent.
Author’s Note:
Many of my poems are mythic in nature, and the Green Man is an image I’ve always found compelling. This particular poem was inspired by carved wood figures and faces on the buildings of Canterbury. I’ve often wondered what parts of these buildings, which are largely Elizabethan, might have been made of recycled materials originally belonging to much older dwellings. The village where I grew up in Kent had a medieval church containing bits of wood and decoration dating back to Roman times. My father used to point this out: the pagan past propping up the Christian present.
The Green Word
Jeffrey Ford
On the day that Moren Kairn was to be executed, a crow appeared at the barred window of his tower cell. He lay huddled in the corner on a bed of foul straw, his body covered with bruises and wounds inflicted by order of the king. They had demanded that he pray to their God, but each time they pressed him, he spat. They applied the hot iron, the knife, the club, and he gave vent to his agony by cursing. The only thing that had prevented them from killing him was that he was to be kept alive for his execution.