When I then stepped out on to the outside step—and I can tell you that I did it hesitantly, almost unwillingly—I can confirm that a fair number of people were standing in front of the opposite block, too, but that there too silence prevailed. I do not think I have yet mentioned that the boulevard on which I now live runs from east to west. When, this morning, I eyed it from my front door, it looked as if the entire city had gathered along this long, wide street and had been standing there silently—that was my impression—perhaps from the middle of the night onward. The din that, with such numbers of people, generally rises like puffs of smoke, is impressive, but the rage or joy of the crowd could not have dumbfounded me as completely as its silence.
Since autumn is already approaching here, the sun was hanging, at this time in the morning, fairly low at the eastern end of the street, but as far as I could see every single citizen was staring in the opposite direction, at the point in the distance where the boulevard shrinks to a small yellow flower: where the linden trees stand in their autumn glory.
The street was empty. I have often examined its surface, skillfully patterned in stone, but now, as it spread, deserted, before me, when not a single walker was crossing it and no vehicle was rolling along it, I hardly noticed its unique beauty. In the pure dawn of the new day the tramway rails sparkled as if they were made of silver.
Then it occurred to me that perhaps some national day was being celebrated in the city, and that the boulevard was closed to traffic for a great festival parade. It might be that we should soon see the prince himself—if he is still alive—driving past us, perhaps acknowledging us with a slender hand…Or were we expecting a state visit to the city? Would a procession of closed carriages glide past us, taking noble guests to a luncheon reception at the city hall?
But I was soon forced to abandon such thoughts. For nothing about the appearance of the Tainaronians suggested great festivities. There were no bunches of flowers, no balloons or masks. Not a single child was blowing the kind of whistle which, whining shrilly, unwinds from a roll to a long staff, and no one was flying a miniature Tainaron flag, a white pennant printed with a spiral (or perhaps a nautilus; I have never been quite sure which).
Yes, they went on standing silently, and the eastern sun infused the strong heat of copper into their back-armour.
Despite the disapproving glances which were cast at me, I pushed right through to the front row and found myself balancing on a narrow kerbstone of the pavement.
Beside me stood a gleaming black shape that reminded me of a diver. I knocked echoingly on his polished surface and said: “Excuse me, but please would you tell me what day today is?”
He glanced at me, disturbed, and after making the rapid and sullen reply, “The nineteenth,” he turned back at once toward the west.
I was none the wiser, but I had only myself to blame—the timing and phrasing of my question had been badly chosen.
Then, my dear, there was a sudden gust of wind, and the Tainaronians suddenly began to crowd around me, so that I had to stand with one foot in the gutter. That did not matter, since I had managed to secure a lookout spot for myself. For something was now happening at the point where the boulevard dived into a dusky tunnel under the linden trees. From that direction, some kind of procession was approaching, something very long and pale; but however much I screwed up my eyes I could not make out any details.
It progressed slowly, and our moments stretched with it, but inch by inch it approached our building; and the better I could make it out, the more astonished I was.
What a parade it was! I could see no glittering carriages or brass bands. Quite the reverse: as it approached, the silence deepened still further, for on the broad boulevard of Tainaron silence combined with silence; the silence of the procession merged with the stillness of the crowd. No flags or streamers, no songs, shots or slogans. But neither did this procession have any of the solemn brilliance of a funeral cortège; not a single flower or wreath gave it colour, and there were no candle flames to flutter and smoke.
When the head of the endlessly long ribbon, which took up almost the entire width of the street, reached us, new battalions rolled forth far away from under the trees. Battalions, I call them, but even today I still do not know whether these were in any sense military. I shall now try to describe to you what I saw before me this morning.
The procession was so uniform that it recalled a snake, but in fact it was made up of countless individuals. Its speed was leisurely, so that I had plenty of time to examine the beginning, which broadened like a reptile’s head and which—apparently like the entire procession—was covered by a transparent, slightly shiny membrane, like an elastic cellophane bag. Inside this membrane, in rows and fronts, marched small creatures; as far as I could see from where I stood they were like grubs, almost colourless and about as thick as my middle finger, but a little longer. I shuddered slightly as I watched them as one shivers when one comes inside from the cold.
The procession was made up of two or even three layers: those below carried the surface layer, which moved more slowly than the lower layer along a living carpet. I think what happened was that when those on top reached the head of the procession, they joined the bottom layer and, in turn, carried the others. It was impossible to estimate the number of members of the procession, but I should imagine that it was a question of millions rather than hundreds of thousands of individuals.
As I gazed at the torrent that surged before me, I remembered that a few nights previously I had dreamed a dream in which this same street had become a river. Now I was, of course, tempted to see it as a prophetic dream, although I do not habitually do that.
I tell you, I would like to understand the nature of the silence with which the city greeted the march-past of this mass. Was it respect? fear? menace? Now, when I remember our morning, I am inclined to think that it included all those emotions, plus something else, which I shall never understand, for I am in the end a stranger here.
I—like the others who stood around me—saw at the same time that a small figure had appeared in the middle of the roadway, some kind of weevil, which stared dispiritedly at the approaching flattish serpent’s head. There was nothing that was open to interpretation about its motionlessness: it was pure terror and catalepsy. The great head, which glistened unctuously in the sun, by now shining from high above, and which was made up—as I have already said—of hundreds of smaller heads, drew ineluctably nearer to the point on the cobblestones where the poor creature stood. At that petrified moment it did not even occur to me that I could have dashed into the roadway and dragged the creature to safety. For my part, I was convinced that the weevil would become food for that living rope; or, if not, that it would at least be an unwilling part of that strange procession.
But what happened was this: when the slowly undulating river reached the creature—which looked as if it was benumbed into a hypnosis-like state—its head split in two and left a space for the weevil without even brushing its unbudging form.
There was a sigh—it was unanimous—and the front part of the snake merged once more, but in the middle of the broad flow the little creature stood like an island, while the masses that seethed around it flowed, glistening, onward.
I do not know whether you will find this description strange. Have you ever, on your travels, encountered anything comparable? You have told me so little about the time when we did not yet know each other…
For my part, I am still bewildered by my morning experience. I do not know how long I stood on the spot, one foot on the pavement, the other in the gutter, as new battalions, divisions, regiments, rolled past us. I should like to say, too, that (with the exception of the case of the weevil) nothing about the procession suggested that anyone in it might have seen or noticed us, that we, the citizens of Tainaron (I am, after all, in a sense one of them) existed in any way for them, let alone that this great march was orga
nised with us in mind.
If you were to ask, I would answer that I do not know. No, I really have not been able to find out what it was and why it went through Tainaron, where it came from and whether it had a destination. It could be that it was searching for something; it could be that it was fleeing something. If the others know something, if you receive any information about this matter, then tell me; do not hide anything!
When the tail of the procession, so thin that its tip was formed of just a few individuals—and they themselves were unusually slender and transparent—had finally slipped out of sight beyond the square where the boulevard terminates to the east, the crowds dispersed incredibly quickly. I looked around me and stood there, alone on the kerbstone, and the sun was at its highest. Everything bustled around me as before; the shops opened again and vehicles rolled both eastward and westward. Some dashed to banks and offices and secret assignations and others to meetings or to prepare the day’s dinner. But in the middle of the street—as far as the eye could see, in either direction—ran a moist, slimy trail.
This afternoon, when I walked across the boulevard, I could no longer see it. It had dried up and was covered in the same sand and dust that dances before winter in each of the streets of Tainaron.
Karen Joy Fowler (1950– ) was born in Indiana but has lived most of her life in California. She gained immediate attention when her first stories appeared in 1985 and her first collection, Artificial Things, was published by Bantam Spectra the following year. She won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the first of many awards throughout her career, including two Nebula Awards, three World Fantasy Awards, a Shirley Jackson Award, and the PEN/Faulkner Award for her sixth novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2013), which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. After the huge success of this novel, she was told that the literary community forgives her for writing genre fiction earlier. Her response was unapologetically, “I never asked for their forgiveness.” In 1991, she was a founder, with Pat Murphy, of the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award (recently renamed the Otherwise Award), for which she has also served as a judge. Fowler’s stories and novels are renowned for their playful and often subversive toying with genre boundaries, requiring readers to make their own decisions about where reality ends and fantasy begins. “Wild Boys: Variations on a Theme” originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1986 and was included in Artificial Things.
WILD BOYS: VARIATIONS ON A THEME
Karen Joy Fowler
THE VILLAGE OF BRENLEAH was surrounded on three sides by forest, like the shadow of a great hand, cupped and trying to close. It could be warded off with steel in the spring and fire in the fall, but it always returned, sending its roots into the fields, its branches against the fences. The villagers called it the king’s forest, but this was a hubris about which the forest itself knew nothing.
The fourth side of Brenleah was open to the road. My father said that the road began at the capital, carved into the very stone of the earth. By the time it reached Brenleah it was merely dirt. We were, after all, only a little ending and one of many. “The road,” my father told me once, “is a great story,” but all great stories have small branchings which seem important and complete to those that live them. One man’s ending is another’s beginning, and this is always true. This is what my father taught me. Of all the men in Brenleah only my father, given two enemies, the forest and the road, feared the road more.
* * *
—
The sign on the freeway exit said, “You are now entering Villanueva, a planned community.” Wystan had been five years old when his family first moved in. Then there had been two adjoining vacant lots on his own street and a large, untilled field a little more than a block away. But the plan had called for the lots to become townhouses and the field a park with a drinking fountain, a blue port-a-potty, and two slightly shaded picnic tables made of concrete instead of wood. There was nowhere left to play, except for the creek which was on private property even if Wystan had someone to play with, which he generally didn’t.
He was down at the bike path after a spring rain looking for toads. You hardly had to look, they bloomed in such profusion. No matter how parched the summer, how frozen the winter, they popped from the mud in the thousands after the first rains. Wystan loved the toads, wet brown jewels the size of human fingernails. You could cup your left hand over them like a roof, tickle them with your right, and they would leap into your raised palm.
Their season was brief. They ate no one’s plants and bit no one’s arm, so the Villanueva planners ignored them, unlike the moon-green caterpillars and summer mosquitoes, each of which had individual abatement programs, subplans of the master plan, devoted only to them. The boys who lived in Wystan’s neighborhood had their own plans for the toads. They were motivated by the sheer volume; you don’t value something so abundant. The boys were experiencing a toad-glut.
They built pyramids out of toads and tried to run them over with their bicycles. A single toad was hard to hit; a pile of toads improved the cyclist’s odds. The corpses of a dozen successful runs were already smashed into the asphalt. Wystan’s heart flattened in sympathy. He became a toad-rescuer, scooping up uninjured toads, transporting them to the safety of the grass. He did this with such stealth and cunning he had completed five successful missions before he was noticed.
He was kneeling, cupping his hand around the sixth toad when Enrique’s tire skidded into his wrist. Enrique was eleven, Wystan’s own age, but better at sports. “Get out of my way, Wissy,” he said angrily, taking a quick offense in case Wystan was hurt and would start to cry. Wystan wasn’t. He closed his hand around his toad and stood up.
“Wussy,” said Jason. He was two years older and the sort of boy who would go for your head in dodge ball even if only a hit below the waist counted. Jason was stringing toads together into a toad necklace. He had seven so far. He held his work against his little brother Matthew’s chest and stood back to examine it critically. Fourteen long back legs twitched over the words “E.T. Welcome Him.” “More,” Jason decided. “Give me yours.” He didn’t even glance in Wystan’s direction, but Wystan knew the sentence was directed at him.
“I don’t have any,” he said, his voice high and unconvincing. He cupped his hand tighter to minimize the size of his fist.
Jason’s face expressed surprise. “Sure you do, Wuss.” He was all friendliness, too much older, too much bigger than Wystan to need to resort to a threatening tone. “Open up your hand.”
Wystan didn’t move. The toad squirmed inside his fist. Jason took a step toward him. “Open your hand,” he repeated quietly. Wystan decided to die for his toad. His feet made the decision, taking his head completely by surprise. His feet turned and pounded away in the direction of the creek; he ducked through the wire fence which separated the bike path from the large lots and houses behind it, estates which predated Villanueva and were owned by doctors. He felt the toad’s heart beating inside his palm. It would be safe in the water he thought. Now, where was he going to be safe?
* * *
—
Then there came a time when I lived in the king’s forests and ate what I could steal from the bushes and the streams like an outlaw. I suppose that I was often cold, often hungry. I remember these things as facts, but they are faded, soft in my memory; like an old tapestry seen in firelight. My father led me into this life, a life for which he, himself, was particularly ill-suited. But my father had always seemed ill-suited to ordinary life as well.
My mother raised poultry, gardened, cooked, and sewed. We lived in her village. My father had come to Brenleah as a stranger the year I was born, and although his life in the village never struck me as anything remarkable or extraordinary, being one of the unchanging facts of my own life, still I believe that, even as a child, in some way I always saw how little he belonged. His daily routine consisted o
f a singular path to and from the alehouse. He had his own table there and read or wrote for those who needed it enough to pay. It was well-known that, although he would initially insist upon a payment of cash, he could be persuaded to accept drink instead. If no one came with contracts or letters, then he would find a way to drink anyway. He was an educated man, a civilized man, who took no interest in educating or improving me. He avoided strangers and sweated like a horse, himself, at the sound of horse’s hooves on the road. These were things I knew though I thought about them no more than another child might notice that his father’s hair was red or that he sometimes shouted in his sleep. He was just my father and generally I saw very little of him until dusk when, his cup having been refilled many times, my mother would send me to lead him home. Holding my shoulder in a pretense of intimacy but in fact, to hide his unsteady feet, I could feel the long yellow nails of his hand catch in the cloth of my shirt. Then he might tell me, in a voice he wrongfully believed to be quiet and private, that the king was mad.
His words carried into the open doorway of our home. “What does it matter?” my mother might or might not answer; “The sun rises, the sun sets.”
“Stupid woman!” I can see my father throw his arm out in a wide arc. “His forest, his road, his fields. Right outside our door.”
My mother continues her work. Her hand dips and rises. She is mending a shirt, she is ladling soup, she pulls on the rope to raise water from our well, she brushes my sister’s hair into braids for bedtime. We left the women behind the day we fled into the forest and my father never seemed to care if we saw them again.
Eodmund, the trader, arriving home told my father he had met a party of King Halric’s hunters who were coming to chase boar in the king’s forest. We could already see their dust down the road, hear the hooves of their horses. My father’s face shone with sweat. The horses were approaching fast, too fast to suggest that they were nearing the end of a long ride.
The Big Book of Modern Fantasy Page 84