by Mike Ashley
Something different about one of them caught her eye as it fell and she plucked it up from the ground. It was a small brown ovoid shape, an incongruity in the crowded midst of all the capped acorns. She held it up to her eye. Even in the moonlight she could see what it was.
A hazelnut.
Salmon wisdom locked in a seed.
Had she regained her memories, memories returned to her now from a place where the Summer Stars always shone, or had she just had a dream in the Mondream Wood where as a child she’d thought that the trees dreamed they were people?
Smiling, she pocketed the nut, then slowly made her way back into the house.
THE DRAGON LINE
MICHAEL SWANWICK
With this story we reach the present. Michael Swanwick (b. 1950) is a multi-award winning author of many science fiction and fantasy novels and stories including Vacuum Flowers (1987), Stations of the Tide (1991), The Iron Dragon’s Daughter (1994) and Tales of Old Earth (2000). He has long been fascinated with revisiting legends and ancient tales, reworking them for the modern day and in the process not only testing their significance but exploring and comparing our values with the old. He told me that this story was “a particular favourite”.
Driving by the mall in King of Prussia that night, I noticed that between the sky and earth where the horizon used to be is now a jagged-edged region, spangled with bright industrial lights. For a long yearning instant, before the car topped the rise and I had to switch lanes or else be shunted onto the expressway, I wished I could enter that dark zone, dissolve into its airless mystery and cold ethereal beauty. But of course that was impossible: Faerie is no more. It can be glimpsed, but no longer grasped.
At the light, Shikra shoved the mirror up under my nose, and held the cut-down fraction of a McDonald’s straw while I did up a line. A winter flurry of tinkling white powder stung through my head to freeze up at the base of the skull, and the light changed, and off we went. “Burn that rubber, Boss-man,” Shikra laughed. She drew up her knees, balancing the mirror before her chin, and snorted the rest for herself.
There was an opening to the left, and I switched lanes, injecting the Jaguar like a virus into the stream of traffic, looped around, and was headed back toward Germantown. A swirling white pattern of flat crystals grew in my left eye, until it filled my vision. I was only seeing out of the right now. I closed the left and rubbed it, bringing tears, but still the hallucination hovered, floating within the orb of vision. I sniffed, bringing up my mouth to one side. Beside me, Shikra had her butterfly knife out and was chopping more coke.
“Hey, enough of that, okay? We’ve got work to do.”
Shikra turned an angry face my way. Then she hit the window controls and threw the mirror, powder and all, into the wind. Three grams of purest Peruvian offered to the Goddess.
“Happy now, shithead?” Her eyes and teeth flashed, all sinister smile in mulatto skin, and for a second she was beautiful, this petite teenaged monstrosity, in the same way that a copperhead can be beautiful, or a wasp, even as it injects the poison under your skin. I felt a flash of desire and of tender, paternal love, and then we were at the Chemical Road turnoff, and I drifted the Jag through three lanes of traffic to make the turn. Shikra was laughing and excited, and I was too.
It was going to be a dangerous night.
Applied Standard Technologies stood away from the road, a compound of low, sprawling buildings afloat on oceanic lawns. The guard waved us through and I drove up to the Lab B lot. There were few cars there; one had British plates. I looked at that one for a long moment, then stepped out onto the tarmac desert. The sky was close, stained a dull red by reflected halogen lights. Suspended between vastnesses, I was touched by a cool breeze, and shivered. How fine, I thought, to be alive.
I followed Shikra in. She was dressed all in denim, jeans faded to white in little crescents at the creases of her buttocks, trade beads clicking softly in her cornrowed hair. The guards at the desk rose in alarm at the sight of her, eased back down as they saw she was mine.
Miss Lytton was waiting. She stubbed out a half-smoked cigarette, strode briskly forward. “He speaks modern English?” I asked as she handed us our visitors’ badges. “You’ve brought him completely up to date on our history and technology?” I didn’t want to have to deal with culture shock. I’d been present when my people had dug him, groggy and corpse-blue, sticky with white chrysalid fluids, from his cave almost a year ago. Since then, I’d been travelling, hoping I could somehow pull it all together without him.
“You’ll be pleased.” Miss Lytton was a lean, nervous woman, all tweed and elbows. She glanced curiously at Shikra, but was too disciplined to ask questions. “He was a quick study – especially keen on the sciences.” She led us down a long corridor to an unmanned security station, slid a plastic card into the lockslot.
“You showed him around Britain? The slums, the mines, the factories?”
“Yes.” Anticipating me, she said, “He didn’t seem at all perturbed. He asked quite intelligent questions.”
I nodded, not listening. The first set of doors sighed open, and we stepped forward. Surveillance cameras telemetered our images to the front desk for reconfirmation. The doors behind us closed, and those before us began to cycle open. “Well, let’s go see.”
The airlock opened into the secure lab, a vast, overlit room filled with white enamelled fermentation tanks, incubators, autoclaves, refrigerators, workbenches and enough glass plumbing for any four dairies. An ultrafuge whined softly. I had no clear idea what they did here. To me AST was just another blind cell in the maze of interlocking directorships that sheltered me from public view. The corporate labyrinth was my home now, a secure medium in which to change documentation, shift money and create new cover personalities on need. Perhaps other ancient survivals lurked within the catacombs, mermen and skinchangers, prodigies of all sorts, old Grendel himself; there was no way of telling.
“Wait here,” I told Shikra. The lab manager’s office was set halfway up the far wall, with wide glass windows overlooking the floor. Miss Lytton and I climbed the concrete and metal stairs. I opened the door.
He sat, flanked by two very expensive private security operatives, in a chrome swivel chair, and the air itself felt warped out of shape by the force of his presence. The trim white beard and charcoal grey Savile Row pinstripe were petty distractions from a face as wide and solemn and cruel as the moon. I shut my eyes and still it floated before me, wise with corruption. There was a metallic taste on my tongue.
“Get out,” I said to Miss Lytton, the guards.
“Sir, I—”
I shot her a look, and she backed away. Then the old man spoke, and once again I heard that wonderful voice of his, like a subway train rumbling underfoot. “Yes, Amy, allow us to talk in privacy, please.”
When we were alone, the old man and I looked at each other for a long time, unblinking. Finally, I rocked back on my heels. “Well,” I said. After all these centuries, I was at a loss for words. “Well, well, well.”
He said nothing.
“Merlin,” I said, putting a name to it.
“Mordred,” he replied, and the silence closed around us again.
The silence could have gone on forever for all of me; I wanted to see how the old wizard would handle it. Eventually he realized this, and slowly stood, like a thunderhead rising up in the western sky. Bushy, expressive eyebrows clashed together. “Arthur dead, and you alive! Alas, who can trust this world?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ve read Malory too.”
Suddenly his left hand gripped my wrist and squeezed. Merlin leaned forward, and his face loomed up in my sight, ruthless grey eyes growing enormous as the pain washed up my arm. He seemed a natural force then, like the sun or wind, and I tumbled away before it.
I was on a nightswept field, leaning on my sword, surrounded by my dead. The veins in my forehead hammered. My ears ached with the confusion of noises, of dying horses and men. It had been butchery,
a battle in the modern style in which both sides had fought until all were dead. This was the end of all causes: I stood empty on Salisbury Plain, too disheartened even to weep.
Then I saw Arthur mounted on a black horse. His face all horror and madness, he lowered his spear and charged. I raised my sword and ran to meet him.
He caught me below the shield and drove his spear through my body. The world tilted and I was thrown up into a sky as black as well water. Choking, I fell deep between the stars where the shadows were aswim with all manner of serpents, dragons and wild beasts. The creatures struggled forward to seize my limbs in their talons and claws. In wonder I realized I was about to die.
Then the wheel turned and set me down again. I forced myself up the spear, unmindful of pain. Two-handed, I swung my sword through the side of Arthur’s helmet and felt it bite through bone into the brain beneath.
My sword fell from nerveless fingers, and Arthur dropped his spear. His horse reared and we fell apart. In that last instant our eyes met and in his wondering hurt and innocence I saw, as if staring into an obsidian mirror, the perfect image of myself.
“So,” Merlin said, and released my hand. “He is truly dead, then. Even Arthur could not have survived the breaching of his skull.”
I was horrified and elated: he could still wield power, even in this dim and disenchanted age. The danger he might have killed me out of hand was small price to pay for such knowledge. But I masked my feelings.
“That’s just about enough!” I cried. “You forget yourself, old man. I am still the Pen-dragon, Dux Bellorum Britanniarum and King of all Britain and Amorica and as such your liege lord!”
That got to him. These medieval types were all heavy on rightful authority. He lowered his head on those bullish shoulders and grumbled, “I had no right, perhaps. And yet how was I to know that? The histories all said Arthur might yet live. Were it so, my duty lay with him, and the restoration of Camelot.” There was still a look, a humour, in his eye I did not trust, as if he found our confrontation essentially comic.
“You and your damned Camelot! Your bloody holy and ideal court!” The memories were unexpectedly fresh, and they hurt as only betrayed love can. For I really had loved Camelot when I first came to court, an adolescent true believer in the new myth of the Round Table, of Christian chivalry and glorious quests. Arthur could have sent me after the Grail itself, I was that innocent.
But a castle is too narrow and straight a space for illusions. It holds no secrets. The queen, praised for her virtue by one and all, was a harlot. The king’s best friend, a public paragon of chastity, was betraying him. And everyone knew! There was the heart and exemplar of it all. Those same poetasters who wrote sonnets to the purity of Lodegreaunce’s daughter smirked and gossiped behind their hands. It was Hypocrisy Hall, ruled over by the smiling and genial Good King Cuckold. He knew all, but so long as no one dared speak it aloud, he did not care. And those few who were neither fools nor lackeys, those who spoke openly of what all knew, were exiled or killed. For telling the truth! That was Merlin’s holy and Christian court of Camelot.
Down below, Shikra prowled the crooked aisles dividing the workbenches, prying open a fermenter to take a peek, rifling through desk drawers, elaborately bored. She had that kind of rough, destructive energy that demands she be doing something at all times.
The king’s bastard is like his jester, powerless but immune from criticism. I trafficked with the high and low of the land, tinsmiths and river-gods alike, and I knew their minds. Arthur was hated by his own people. He kept the land in ruin with his constant wars. Taxes went to support the extravagant adventures of his knights. He was expanding his rule, croft by shire, a kingdom here, a chunk of Normandy there, questing after Merlin’s dream of a Paneuropean Empire. All built on the blood of the peasantry; they were just war fodder to him.
I was all but screaming in Merlin’s face. Below, Shikra drifted closer, straining to hear. “That’s why I seized the throne while he was off warring in France – to give the land a taste of peace; as a novelty, if nothing else. To clear away the hypocrisy and cant, to open the windows and let a little fresh air in. The people had prayed for release. When Arthur returned, it was my banner they rallied around. And do you know what the real beauty of it was? It was over a year before he learned he’d been overthrown.”
Merlin shook his head. “You are so like your father! He too was an idealist – I know you find that hard to appreciate – a man who burned for the Right. We should have acknowledged your claim to succession.”
“You haven’t been listening!”
“You have a complaint against us. No one denies that. But, Mordred, you must understand that we didn’t know you were the king’s son. Arthur was . . . not very fertile. He had slept with your mother only once. We thought she was trying to blackmail him.” He sighed piously. “Had we only known, it all could have been different.”
I was suddenly embarrassed for him. What he called my complaint was the old and ugly story of my birth. Fearing the proof of his adultery – Morgawse was nominally his sister, and incest had both religious and dynastic consequences – Arthur had ordered all noble babies born that feast of Beltaine brought to court, and then had them placed in an unmanned boat and set adrift. Days later, a peasant had found the boat run aground with six small corpses. Only I, with my unhuman vigour, survived. But, typical of him, Merlin missed the horror of the story – that six innocents were sacrificed to hide the nature of Arthur’s crime – and saw it only as a denial of my rights of kinship. The sense of futility and resignation that is my curse descended once again. Without understanding between us, we could never make common cause.
“Forget it,” I said. “Let’s go get a drink.”
I picked up 476 to the Schuylkill. Shikra hung over the back seat, fascinated, confused, and aroused by the near-subliminal scent of murder and magic that clung to us both. “You haven’t introduced me to your young friend.” Merlin turned and offered his hand. She didn’t take it.
“Shikra, this is Merlin of the Order of Ambrose, enchanter and master politician.” I found an opening to the right, went up on the shoulder to take advantage of it, and slammed back all the way left, leaving half a dozen citizens leaning on their horns. “I want you to be ready to kill him at an instant’s notice. If I act strange – dazed or in any way unlike myself – slit his throat immediately. He’s capable of seizing control of my mind, and yours too if you hesitate.”
“How ’bout that,” Shikra said.
Merlin scoffed genially. “What lies are you telling this child?”
“The first time I met her, I asked Shikra to cut off one of my fingers.” I held up my little finger for him to see, fresh and pink, not quite grown to full size. “She knows there are strange things astir, and they don’t impress her.”
“Hum.” Merlin stared out at the car lights whipping toward us. We were on the expressway now, concrete crashguards close enough to brush fingertips against. He tried again. “In my first life, I greatly wished to speak with an African, but I had duties that kept me from travelling. It was one of the delights of the modern world to find I could meet your people everywhere, and learn from them.” Shikra made that bug-eyed face the young make when the old condescend; I saw it in the rear-view mirror.
“I don’t have to ask what you’ve been doing while I was . . . asleep,” Merlin said after a while. That wild undercurrent of humour was back in his voice. “You’ve been fighting the same old battles, eh?”
My mind wasn’t wholly on our conversation. I was thinking of the bons hommes of Languedoc, the gentle people today remembered (by those few who do remember) as the Albegensians. In the heart of the thirteenth century, they had reinvented Christianity, leading lives of poverty and chastity. They offered me hope, at a time when I had none. We told no lies, held no wealth, hurt neither man nor animal – we did not even eat cheese. We did not resist our enemies, nor obey them either, we had no leaders and we thought ourselves safe in ou
r poverty. But Innocent III sent his dogs to level our cities, and on their ashes raised the Inquisition. My sweet, harmless comrades were tortured, mutilated, burnt alive. History is a laboratory in which we learn that nothing works, or ever can. “Yes.”
“Why?” Merlin asked. And chuckled to himself when I did not answer.
The Top of Centre Square was your typical bar with a view, a narrow box of a room with mirrored walls and gold foil insets in the ceiling to illusion it larger, and flacid jazz oozing from hidden speakers. “The stools in the centre, by the window,” I told the hostess, and tipped her accordingly. She cleared some businessmen out of our seats and dispatched a waitress to take our orders.
“Boodles martini, very dry, straight up with a twist,” I said.
“Single malt Scotch. Warm.”
“I’d like a Shirley Temple, please.” Shikra smiled so sweetly that the waitress frowned, then raised one cheek from her stool and scratched. If the woman hadn’t fled it might have gotten ugly.
Our drinks arrived. “Here’s to progress,” Merlin said, toasting the urban landscape. Silent traffic clogged the far below streets with red and white beads of light. Over City Hall the buildings sprawled electric-bright from Queen Village up to the Northern Liberties. Tugs and barges crawled slowly upriver. Beyond, Camden crowded light upon light. Floating above the terrestrial galaxy, I felt the old urge to throw myself down. If only there were angels to bear me up.
“I had a hand in the founding of this city.”
“Did you?”
“Yes, the City of Brotherly Love. Will Penn was a Quaker, see, and they believed religious toleration would lead to secular harmony. Very radical for the times. I forget how many times he was thrown in jail for such beliefs before he came into money and had the chance to put them into practice. The Society of Friends not only brought their own people in from England and Wales, but also Episcopalians, Baptists, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, all kinds of crazy German sects – the city became a haven for the outcasts of all the other religious colonies.” How had I gotten started on this? I was suddenly cold with dread. “The Friends formed the social elite. Their idea was that by example and by civil works, they could create a pacifistic society, one in which all men followed their best impulses. All their grand ideals were grounded in a pragmatic set of laws, too; they didn’t rely on goodwill alone. And you know, for a Utopian scheme it was pretty successful. Most of them don’t last a decade. But . . .” I was rambling, wandering further and further away from the point. I felt helpless. How could I make him understand how thoroughly the facts had betrayed the dream? “Shikra was born here.”