And because even the anguished gurgle that followed bespoke a hideous music, he sent a thread of fire down her gullet to scald her voice away. There would not be so much as a sigh in this place. He would wait out his exile in blessed silence.
He cast her, broken, betrayed, to the ground, and did not look at her again.
Play a tune for us, child,” said Jheraz, the god of music, his voice sliding through the scintillating air of the chamber like molasses.
The child lifted the flute to her mouth automatically upon demand — a child bred to play music, trained from infancy, accustomed to entertaining in the richest human precincts. The motion of wood to lips smacked of puppetry, and he almost laughed in scorn —
But then the first note floated out, and he saw the child transformed. The music issued from her humanness, warmed with mortal breath, articulated by hands and tongue of flesh, and upon contact with the air became ethereal. It was of no world he knew, from some realm of neither man nor god. The notes were almost visible, tumbling over each other in their eagerness to be free, then executing complex patterns of delight and wickedness — aural spirals, loops, curlicues, symbols of the infinite.
And the child seemed to feed on them. Without diminishing them, without slowing the pace of her own playing, she quaffed them like a draught of divinity. Her pores radiated light, straining the limits of her tiny frame of bone and skin. She became something completely Other: a slight girl-child of no more than five years who could make gods shiver.
With his own divine perception, he sensed the magic in her song. He did not know what spell it cast; whatever the effects, they were not evident here. But that this was enchantment he had no doubt.
He steeled himself against its influence. Its beauty was anathema to him. He would silence this abomination at the first opportunity.
She had fashioned a flute from the reeds that grew by the trickle of dirty water that was their stream, and taught herself to play it without benefit of tonguing — she stopped the notes with quick flicks of her fingers on the holes, as if she were a piper, and her small fingers, which had grown long and sinewy during the period when she could not sing, perfected the invention with strength and agility. She had practiced silently, in secret, knowing that only masterly execution would be sufficient to sway him.
He had been sitting on the hillside, as was his custom, surveying his inhospitable domain, shoulders set in bitterness. She had walked up behind him and given breath for the first time to her handmade instrument. The tune that had come out — lushly ornamented, punctuated by husky puffs of air, rising on a crescendo of hope only to peak with a sob of heartache — was of her own composition, a musical poem of forgiveness, of expectation, of longing.
He had snapped her finger bones as he snapped the flute. The eleven small pops had hung in the air like dewdrops, clustered in a mist of pain and loss.
She had gone out into the wilds, away from the shack where they slept on their cold pallets. She had set her fingers with her teeth, wrapped them tight with tough vines, and when she could make some use of them again she had sharpened stones to make an axe to cut wood to make the lyre’s frame.
She ate hard berries and rock grubs she dug from the mud in the crevices, drank mountain runoff tangy with minerals, slept on flat stone, until it felt as if her body were fashioned more of this rocky wilderness than of her original flesh. She found dead animals and, after mourning their brief lives, wound their innards, their musculature, their vocal cords into strings.
And she made music — halting at first, as gnarled as her ruined fingers, then more fluid as she learned to compensate for her disability, coax the sweetest sound from the patchwork instrument she had made with spit and guesswork.
In the interval, her hair had grown down her back, her arms and legs had become ungainly, her chest had rounded to a hint of fullness.
But now she was whole again, herself though changed, and the world around her slowed to her tempo, took up her mortal heartbeat, extended the vibration of the strings she had made from its creatures.
Her music echoed from the mountains, from the glassy dome of sky. And it summoned her god to her.
She is a mortal prodigy, the pride of this court, of our palace,” said Vanash, god of justice. “She embodies in her human mind and flesh the best of our art, the most heartrending of our music. Each time you look on her sweet face, you will remember what you have lost. Each note she plays will recall for you the power and luxury you are denied. Each word she says to you will be further evidence of your isolation. And each bitter reminder will be one strike of the lash of our punishment. As long as her heart beats — for the span of one mortal life — you will be gone from us, condemned to contemplation of your transgressions.”
The instrument of their vengeance stood quietly, eyes downcast, giving no indication of distress. As the gods spoke, he began to feel more than hear the sound that emanated from her — a gentle humming, perhaps a lullaby, a soft melody to soothe her own fears. And he knew that she would never be alone, even in exile: she would always be able to comfort herself, her music her companion.
He was already preparing to kill her.
He smashed the lyre to bits against the rockface and with her own axe cut off her fingers—slowly, as gods are wont to do, allowing time in between for regret, for atonement, for the lesson to sink in. That would put an end on it. There would be no more making of instruments now, there would be no more playing of songs, there would be no more razor-sweet notes to shred his sanity.
With the music stopped, he noticed that the sun — which had not moved from its position in all the time it had taken him to track her, but had hung over the horizon like a gold platter on a wall — resumed its descent into the sea. His worst suspicions were confirmed: when she played her music, she created a shield of time. The notes carried a certain distance and held the hours beyond at bay; within the sphere thus created the things of nature moved, but did not age.
It was with vast relief that he watched her adolescent form stagger toward the waves, perhaps in a futile attempt at drowning, perhaps in the hope of stanching the ten founts of blood he had uncapped. He had narrowly avoided eternal exile. When he returned, he would not let the others trick him so again.
This time salt tears flowed freely from her eyes, streaming into the frothy, icy surf as she plunged the stumps of her hands through the water, into the sand. She swayed with soporific pain, her lids heavy, but she had no fear of the water engulfing her on the heels of unconsciousness.
Instead, her mind, seared by agony, was freed to work in secret, already planning, already building, already working. She would imagine new instruments, she would create them, and she would learn to play them — with toes, with teeth, with stumps. In the intervals, she would grow larger, stronger, older, smarter. And he would have to surrender; he would have to melt at her determination, thaw to her at last, open his heart to her melodies and clasp whatever was left of her to him.
She would not conceive of a god who had no love for her at all. She would find the tune, she would send it into him like a questing tendril, she would touch the core of him, and her music would be a conduit through which his soul would pour, free at last, and make this wilderness and their exile bloom.
*
A thanaïs rose from her throne to loom over him where he knelt. “And lest you plan to kill her — ah, I see it in your eyes already, the schemes, the loathing, the desperation — I here proclaim the last condition of your exile: This child has been bathed in our divine protection, and will suffer no killing blow from you, will admit no mortal wound — to lungs, or organs, or head, or heart.”
Insufferable child, to listen to such grisly pronouncements unperturbed. A heart that would not stop beating until its mortal years were past, packaged prettily to gall him, wrapped in a protective weaving to thwart him. The last nail in the ornate coffin of his sentence.
But he was nothing if not resourceful. There had never been a trap that
could hold him. He would find the way out of this one.
She grew slowly into womanhood, in fits and starts.
She fashioned an autoharp to play with her toes, and he relieved her of them. She made a device of bark and twigs that, when worked with her mouth, made a melody of the cricket’s chirp; it took him two days to yank out the last of the teeth, preventing her from playing the contraption it had taken her two years to build. She pounded drumbeats on the sides of the shack with the stubs of her limbs, she made whistles and pops and clicks with lips and cheeks, she rustled the grass with head and spine . . . and all of it was music, whatever she touched was music, if she blinked her accursed eyes it would be music, if she moved her bowels or blushed or breathed it would still, still, still come out music . . .
At last, half mad with rage, with frustration, he stood over the maimed, unrecognizable monstrosity, looked into the yearning eyes that still, impossibly, conveyed forgiveness and some incomprehensible kind of hope; he appraised the limbless trunk, and, careful to avoid the shielded lungs and organs, he plunged in his hand and plucked out the heart that would not stop beating, the heart he could not destroy.
He cast it with all his strength down the well she had frequented as a child. If he had left her there, singing, she would have stayed a child forever, sweet and whole and innocent. He cast a last look at the vile shell he had made of her, at the fading light in the harrowed eyes, at the mouth that had no lips with which to smile, yet smiled at him nonetheless.
And then he turned, and left her to die.
In the deeps of the night, he started from the half-sleep he allowed himself in order to pass the time. The wind whistled shrilly in the cracks between the boards, but there was some sound beyond it, an underlying sound that he could not hear aright but that caused him profound unease.
He emerged slowly from the shack. Thorn trees stood stark against the dull sky, rattling in the gusts. The bag of flesh was starting to stink; he disliked the thought of tossing it over the precipice, for that meant he would have to pick it up, but he refused to give it burial.
Where was the sound coming from? Everywhere, nowhere; the whole hilltop was drenched in the low, fluty emanation. Its tones shifted as the wind did, from almost subliminal lament to a keening so sharp it might pierce iron. He could begin to hear intention in it, message; it was no human crooning, but it had taken on human inflection. It was a tune — eerie, enchanted, but unmistakably melodic.
Dull rage grew within him, banked like coals in a brazier, igniting as the wind fanned them with its song. He turned partway, turned again, cocked his head. He climbed the hilltop slowly, and step by step the strains grew louder, until at its apex he found their source.
The well into which he had cast her heart. Like breath across the lip of a bottle, the wind played over the circle of stone, surging and fading, angling itself so that the tones might rise and fall in pitch. He moved to touch the stone, to hold his hand in the stream of air, perhaps to damp it, but his interference had no effect. Instead he felt the muted echo of her heartbeat, rising up the shaft of the well, beat after beat rolling up the stone cylinder, reverberating in the rock. The stone throbbed under his hand, pulsing with every swell of that cursed organ.
The God of Exile screamed. The scream of a god tormented past enduring is so tremendous that not even godly flesh can withstand it, and his throat was raked raw, the mucus and skin torn away; blood sprayed across the well’s mouth. The rock fragmented, shearing with the stress of his buffeting roar; the well crumbled in upon itself under the force of the only answer to music he could make. The earth below the shack cracked open to swallow the rickety planks; the faraway mountains trembled, the sea surged in protest.
“Let cold earth be your heart now!” he hissed — the first words he had ever said to her, the last utterance his fractured larynx would ever produce.
The hill rumbled beneath him, then was still. A mad, bloody smile gashed his face at this first moment of relief. The heart was buried, its last instrument collapsed. It would not take long to die, trapped and despairing without its music. It had fought hard, but he was a god, and he had won.
Then he felt the pulse beneath his feet. It stuttered once, twice, and found its rhythm. The earth became the living beat.
The first notes of the song began again. He looked around wildly, realized it was the dry rustling of the grasses on the hillside. He scorched the land with the last of his godsfire, and it sang in the trees. He felled the trees, and it sang in the crevices in the bare rock. In every aspect of its singing was her soul.
His final curse upon her had damned him. He had made the land her body, made the wind her music. He had freed her spirit: her soft, husky voice, sweet once more with childhood, in the tumbled stone, in the unconquerable wind, in the blistered ground, was full of joy, because she was no longer the mutilated, ruined thing he had made of her, but a creature of air and earth, and her voice would have no bounds.
The earth was her heart, and as long as her heart beat he could not leave this place, and as long as her voice sang this place would live outside of time.
And still the lilting melody forgave him. Still it whispered, Sing with me, be my god, my father, my lover, and we will make this realm a paradise.
He set his jaw, unyielding; he shut his ears to it. He gazed into the unfathomable distance, imagined he could scent spice and incense, the acrid smoke of war fires and boiled blood, the heart-melting perfume of jasmine, the sweat and rot of human eons passing. He was a god; he could endure even eternity. He would never submit, never — not even to the unconditional love of an impossible child.
God of his own timeless exile, he sat in the wasteland he had made, solitary, cold, undefeated.
And the wind sang forever.
We finish with a story by Ken Scholes from issue #22, the same issue containing James Van Pelt’s story that started the anthology. Ken likes to say I’m his literary dad (he took my writing class and he says I taught him a few things). Well, I did eventually buy what was his very first story sale. Now he’s writing a five-book series for Tor books and receiving great acclaim. Good work, my friend. This story, his second for Talebones, features a take on that famous literary “bear of little brain,” and it’s now been reprinted a number of times. Here it is again for those of you who somehow managed to miss it. Keep the Kleenex handy.
EDWARD BEAR AND THE VERY LONG WALK
KEN SCHOLES
He was a bear, and his name was Edward, and he lay twitching in the corner of a room that smelled of death.
He didn’t exactly know what Death smelled like, but he knew that’s what he smelled. Because Something Very Bad had happened here. He just couldn’t remember what.
A small boy in short pants flickered over him, smiling. “Hello Bear. It’s about time you woke up.”
Edward sniffed and stirred. “Hello. Are you —?”
“No. I’m not. I am the Funplay Holographic Nursery Brain.”
“Oh.” Edward stood. “It’s just that you look like, I mean I thought you might be, well, you know . . .”
“No. I’m not.”
Edward reached out a paw to touch the boy’s arm. It passed through. “Oh. I see.”
“Do you know what’s happened to the children?”
Edward swallowed. Suddenly, he wanted to cry. “Yes. They’re . . . sleeping?” He hoped and hoped and hoped and hoped, grimacing as he did. He looked around.
Makeshift beds lined the room. Small hands gripped blankets, small eyes stared at the ceiling.
“No.” The boy frowned. “They’ve died.”
“Because of Something Very Bad?”
“Yes. And I need you to be a Very Brave Bear. Can you do that?”
Edward nodded once, twice, three times, and blinked.
“Good. I need you to leave the Nursery and find Someone. Tell them about the children.”
Edward heard a squeaking sound and knew he made it. He felt a Tremendous Fear growing in him. �
�Why can’t you go? I can’t leave the Nursery . . . I’ve never left the Nursery alone.”
The boy hissed and his image warbled, then came back into focus. “Yes, you can. You must. I can’t leave. I’m not real. You must go, Bear. But first you have to open the door.”
Edward shuffled out of the corner. The room was stifling, heavy with rottenness and a buzzing dance of flies. He tried to remember the last time he’d played with the children, but couldn’t. He squinted, trying to conjure up any memories of the Something Very Bad.
He faintly remembered his birthday, waking up surrounded by laughter, in the midst of the Nursery. And distorted tales from the children about traveling Very Far to Find a New Home. They had such bright and shining faces, and they were all so smart. Whenever he couldn’t understand what they told him, they called him “Silly Old Bear” and “Bear of Little Brain.”
He also carried vague recollections of the grown-ups, pausing in the Nursery door or sitting with their children. They were even smarter than the children. And they never talked to the toys.
He was a bear, and his name was Edward, and he was a toy. He remembered being told this on his birthday when he woke up after a Very Long Sleep. It was as if he’d gone to sleep in his comfortable house in the Wood (under the name of Sanders) and woke up here. He had hoped for cakes and cream and possibly honey and candles to blow out when he first opened his eyes. Instead, he led the children in a song and then a dance.
A few weeks later there was no one left to play with.
Edward simply went to sleep.
“Over here, Bear,” the boy said. The boy stood by the door, pointing to a flat button in the wall. “Push this.” With a static pop, the boy disappeared.
The Best of Talebones Page 43