The Big Book of Modern Fantasy

by The Big Book of Modern Fantasy (retail) (epub)

  “There are six moons tonight,” said the turtle with Tabasco’s face.

  “Yes, there are six moons tonight,” agreed the other turtles.

  The snake, lifting up its head, its eyes glittering at the firmament, said:

  “There are seven moons tonight.”

  The turtles were silent. The snake moved on towards the river. The turtle with Tabasco’s face picked up a little rock and threw it at the snake. The other turtles laughed.

  “There are no snakes tonight,” said the turtle with Tabasco’s face.

  As if it were a cue, the other turtles set upon the snake. Tabasco the turtle grabbed it by the neck and began to strangle it with the stethoscope. The other turtles beat its head with rocks. The snake lashed out with its tail. Tabasco and the snake rolled over and fell into the borehole. Noises were heard below. After a while Tabasco the turtle emerged without his glasses and stethoscope. He took up his place amongst the others. They broke another kola nut. Then Tabasco the turtle began to prepare a pipe. Instead of tobacco, he used alligator pepper seeds. He lit the pipe and motioned to the tapster to come closer. The tapster went and sat amongst the turtles on the edge of the borehole. Tabasco the turtle blew black ticklish smoke into the tapster’s face and said:

  “You have been dead for six days.”

  The tapster didn’t understand. The turtles gravely resumed their discussions on the numbers of heavenly bodies in the sky.

  * * *

  —

  After some time the smoke had the effect of making the tapster float into a familiar world. A tickling sensation began in his nose. He floated to a moment in his childhood, when his mother carried him on her back on the day of the Masquerades. It was a hot day. The Masquerades thundered past, billowing plumes of red smoke everywhere so that ordinary mortals would be confused about their awesome ritual aspects. All through that day his nose was on fire. And that night he dreamt that all sorts of mythical figures competed as to who could keep his nose on his face. He relived the dream. The mythical figures included the famous blacksmith, who could turn water into metal; the notorious tortoise, with his simple madness for complex situations; and the witch doctors, who did not have the key to mysteries. As they competed his mother came along, drove them away by scattering a plate full of ground hot pepper, worsening the problem of his nose.

  And while the tapster floated in that familiar world the voice came and bore down on him. Another voice said:

  “It’s getting too late. Wake up.”

  Invisible knocks fell on him. It was the most unusual moment of the sun, when it changed from purple to the darkness of the inward eye. After the knocks had stopped the tapster relieved himself of the mighty sneeze which had been gathering. When he sneezed the monstrous eggs exploded, the snake lost its opal eyes, and the voice fissioned into the sounds of several mosquitoes dying for a conversation. Green liquids spewed out from the borehole and blew away the snake, the signboard, and the turtles. When the tapster recovered from the upheaval he looked around. A blue cloud passed before his eyes. Tabasco the herbalist stood over him waving a crude censer, from which issued the most irritating smoke. As soon as their eyes met, Tabasco gave a cry of joy and went to pour a libation on the soapstone image of his shrine. The image had two green glass eyes. At the foot of the shrine there were two turtles in a green basin.

  “Where am I?” asked the tapster.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t pay attention to your dream in the first place,” said the herbalist.

  “But where am I?”

  “You fell from a palm tree and you have been dead for seven days. We were going to bury you in the morning. I have been trying to reach you all this time. I won’t charge you for my services; in fact I’d rather pay you, because all these years as a herbalist I have never had a more interesting case, nor a better conversation.”

  David Drake (1945– ) is an American writer whose bestselling Hammer’s Slammers series helped create the category of military science fiction. Though Drake may be best known for that series, he has written substantial work in many genres of the fantastic. His first story, “Denkirch,” was published by August Derleth in the Arkham House anthology Travellers by Night. Drake studied law at Duke University in the late 1960s, though military service in the Vietnam War interrupted his degree, which he later returned to finish. While at Duke, he sought out the renowned fantasy writer Manly Wade Wellman, who lived in the area. They became friends, and Drake frequently visited Wellman in the hospital during his painful final illness from 1985 to 1986, when Wellman died. “I wouldn’t wish anyone go through the pain that Manly did during that time,” Drake later wrote, “but if he’d died quickly and peacefully I wouldn’t really have known him despite the previous fifteen years and the enormous influence his writing had on me. If it had to happen, I’m glad I was there; and Manly was glad to have me. So long as I live, so does a little bit of Manly Wade Hampton Wellman.” To pay homage to his friend, Drake began writing stories of a wizard in Tennessee in the 1830s, Old Nathan, modeled on Wellman’s character of John the Balladeer. “The Fool” is the second of those stories, first published in Whispers VI (1987) and eventually collected in Old Nathan (1991).

  THE FOOL

  David Drake

  * * *

  “Now jest ignore him,” said the buck to the doe as Old Nathan turned in the furrow he was hoeing twenty yards ahead of them.

  “But he’s looking at us,” whispered the doe from the side of her mouth. She stood frozen, but a rapidly pulsing artery made shadows quiver across her throat in the evening sun.

  “G’wan away!” called Old Nathan, but his voice sounded halfhearted even in his own ears. He lifted the hoe and shook it. A hot afternoon cultivating was the best medicine the cunning man knew for his aches…but the work did not become less tiring because it did him good. “Git, deer!”

  “See, it’s all right,” said the buck as he lowered his head for another mouthful of turnip greens.

  Old Nathan stooped for a clod to hurl at them. As he straightened with it the deer turned in unison and fled in great floating bounds, their heads thrust forward.

  “Consarn it,” muttered the cunning man, crumbling the clod between his long, knobby fingers as he watched the animals disappear into the woods beyond his plowland.

  “Hi, there,” called a voice from behind him, beside his cabin back across the creek.

  Old Nathan turned, brushing his hand against his pants leg of coarse homespun. His distance sight was as good as it ever had been, so even at the length of a decent rifleshot he had no trouble in identifying his visitor as Eldon Bowsmith. Simp Bowsmith, they called the boy down to the settlement…and they had reason, though the boy was more an innocent than a natural in the usual sense.

  “Hi!” Bowsmith repeated, waving with one hand while the other shaded his eyes from the low sun. “There wuz two deer in the field jist now!”

  They had reason, that was sure as the sunrise.

  “Hold there,” Old Nathan called as the boy started down the path to the creek and the field beyond. “I’m headed back myself.” Shouldering his hoe, he suited his action to his words.

  Bowsmith nodded and plucked a long grass stem. He began to chew on the soft white base of it while he leaned on the fence of the pasture which had once held a bull and two milk cows…and now held the cows alone. The animals, startled at first into watchfulness, returned to chewing their cud when they realized that the stranger’s personality was at least as placid as their own.

  Old Nathan crossed the creek on the puncheon that served as a bridge—a log of red oak, adzed flat on the top side. A fancier structure would have been pointless, because spring freshets were sure to carry any practicable bridge downstream once or twice a year. The simplest form of crossing was both easily replaced and adequate to the cunning man’s needs.

  As he climbed the sloping path
to his cabin with long, slow strides, Old Nathan studied his visitor. Bowsmith was tall, as tall as the cunning man himself, and perhaps as gangling. Age had shrunk Old Nathan’s flesh over its framework of bone and sinew to accentuate angles, but there was little real difference in build between the two men save for the visitor’s greater juiciness.

  Bowsmith’s most distinguishing characteristic—the factor that permitted Old Nathan to recognize him from 200 yards away—was his hair. It was a nondescript brown in color, but the way it stood out in patches of varying length was unmistakable; the boy had cut it himself, using a knife.

  The cunning man realized he must have been staring when Bowsmith said with an apologetic grin, “There hain’t a mirror et my place, ye see. I do what I kin with a bucket uv water.”

  “Makes no matter with me,” Old Nathan muttered. Nor should it have, and he was embarrassed that his thoughts were so transparent. He’d been late to the line hisself when they gave out good looks. “Come in ’n set, and you kin tell me what brought ye here.”

  Bowsmith tossed to the ground his grass stem—chewed all the way to the harsh green blades—and hesitated as if to pluck another before entering the cabin. “ ’Bliged t’ye,” he said and, in the event, followed Old Nathan without anything to occupy his hands.

  The doors, front and back, of the four-square cabin were open when the visitor arrived, but he had walked around instead of through the structure on his way to find the cunning man. Now he stared at the interior, his look of anticipation giving way to disappointment at the lack of exotic trappings.

  There were two chairs, a stool, and a table, all solidly fitted but shaped by a broadaxe and spokeshave rather than a lathe. The bed was of similar workmanship, with a rope frame and corn-shuck mattress. The quilted coverlet was decorated with a Tree-of-Life applique of exceptional quality, but there were women in the county who could at least brag that they could stitch its equal.

  A shelf set into the wall above the bed held six books, and two chests flanked the fireplace. The chests, covered in age-blackened leather and iron-bound, could bear dark imaginings—but they surely did not require such. Five china cups and a plate stood on the fireboard where every cabin but the poorest displayed similar knick-knacks; and the rifle pegged to the wall above them would have been unusual only by its absence.

  “Well…” Bowsmith murmured, turning his head slowly in his survey. He had expected to feel awe, and lacking that, he did not, his tongue did not know quite how to proceed. Then, on the wall facing the fireplace, he finally found something worthy of amazed comment. “Well…” he said, pointing to the strop of black bullhide. The bull’s tail touched the floor, while the nose lifted far past the rafters to brush the roof peak. “What en tarnation’s thet?”

  “Bull I onct hed,” Old Nathan said gruffly, answering the boy as he might not have done with anyone who was less obviously an open-eyed innocent.

  “Well,” the boy repeated, this time in a tone of agreement. But his brow furrowed again and he asked, “But how come ye keep hit?”

  Old Nathan grimaced and, seating himself in the rocker, pointed Bowsmith to the upright chair. “Set,” he ordered.

  But there was no harm in the lad, so the older man explained, “I could bring him back, I could. Don’t choose to, is all, cuz hit’d cost too much. There’s a price for ever’thing, and I reckon that ’un’s more thin the gain.”

  “Well,” said the boy, beaming now that he was sure Old Nathan wasn’t angry with him after all.

  He sat down on the chair as directed and ran a hand through his hair while he paused to collect his thoughts. Bowsmith must be twenty-five or near it, but the cunning man was sure that he would halve his visitor’s age if he had nothing to go by except voice and diction.

  “Ma used t’ barber me ’fore she passed on last year,” the boy said in embarrassment renewed by the touch of his ragged scalp. “Mar’ Beth Neill, she tried the onct, but hit wuz worser’n what I done.”

  He smiled wanly at the memory, tracing his fingers down the center of his scalp. “Cut me bare, right along here,” he said. “Land but people laughed. She hed t’ laugh herself.”

  “Yer land lies hard by the Neill clan’s, I b’lieve?” the cunning man said with his eyes narrowing.

  “Thet’s so,” agreed Bowsmith, bobbing his head happily. “We’re great friends, thim en me, since Ma passed on.” He looked down at the floor, grinning fiercely, and combed the fingers of both hands through his hair as if to shield the memories that were dancing through his skull. “ ’Specially Mar’ Beth, I reckon.”

  “First I heard,” said Old Nathan, “thet any uv Baron Neill’s clan wuz a friend to ary soul but kin by blood er by marriage…and I’d heard they kept marriage pretty much in the clan besides.”

  Bowsmith looked up expectantly, though he said nothing. Perhaps he hadn’t understood the cunning man’s words, though they’d been blunt enough in all truth.

  Old Nathan sighed and leaned back in his rocker. “No matter, boy, no matter,” he said. “Tell me what it is ez brings ye here.”

  The younger man grimaced and blinked as he considered the request, which he apparently expected to be confusing. His brow cleared again in beaming delight and he said, “Why, I’m missin’ my plowhorse, and I heard ye could find sich things. Horses what strayed.”

  Lives next to the Neill clan and thinks his horse strayed, the cunning man thought. Strayed right through the wall of a locked barn, no doubt. He frowned like thunder as he considered the ramifications, for the boy and for himself, if he provided the help requested.

  “The Bar’n tried t’ hep me find Jen,” volunteered Bowsmith. “Thet’s my horse. He knows about findin’ and sichlike, too, from old books….” He turned, uncomfortably, to glance at the volumes on the shelf there.

  “I’d heard thet about the Baron,” said Old Nathan grimly.

  “But it wuzn’t no good,” the boy continued. “He says, the Bar’n does, must hev been a painter et Jen.” He shrugged and scrunched his face up under pressure of an emotion the cunning man could not identify from the expression alone. “So I reckon thet’s so…but she wuz a good ol’ horse, Jen wuz, and it don’t seem right somehows t’ leave her bones out in the woods thet way. I thought maybe…?”

  Well, by God if there was one, and by Satan who was as surely loose in the world as the Neill clan—and the Neills’ good evidence for the Devil—Old Nathan wasn’t going to pass this by. Though finding the horse would be dangerous, and there was no need for that….

  “All right, boy,” said the cunning man as he stood up. The motion of his muscles helped him find the right words, sometimes, so he walked toward the fireplace alcove. “Don’t ye be buryin’ yer Jen till she’s dead, now. I reckon I kin bring her home fer ye.”

  A pot of vegetables had been stewing all afternoon on the banked fire. Old Nathan pivoted to the side of the prong holding the pot and set a knot of pitchy lightwood on the coals. “Now,” he continued, stepping away from the fire so that when the pine knot flared up its sparks would not spatter him, “you fetch me hair from Jen, her mane and her tail partikalarly. Ye kin find thet, cain’t ye, clingin’ in yer barn and yer fences?”

  Bowsmith leaped up happily. “Why, sure I kin,” he said. “Thet’s all ye need?”

  His face darkened. “There’s one thing, though,” he said, then swallowed to prime his voice for what he had to admit next. “I’ve a right strong back, and I reckon there hain’t much ye kin put me to around yer fields here ez I cain’t do fer ye. But I hain’t got money t’ pay ye, and since Ma passed on”—he swallowed again—“seems like ever’ durn thing we owned, I cain’t find whur I put it. So effen my labor’s not enough fer ye, I don’t know what I could give.”

  The boy met Old Nathan’s eyes squarely and there weren’t many folk who would do that, for fear that the cunning man would draw out the very secre
ts of their hearts. Well, Simp Bowsmith didn’t seem to have any secrets; and perhaps there were worse ways to be.

  “Don’t trouble yerself with thet,” said Old Nathan aloud, “until we fetch yer horse back.”

  The cunning man watched the boy tramping cheerfully back up the trail, unconcerned by the darkness and without even a stick against the threat of bears and cougars which would keep his neighbors from travelling at night. Hard to believe, sometimes, that the same world held that boy and the Neill clan besides.

  A thought struck him. “Hoy!” he called, striding to the edge of his porch to shout up the trail. “Eldon Bowsmith!”

  “Sir?” wound the boy’s reply from the dark. He must already be to the top of the knob, among the old beeches that were its crown.

  “Ye bring me a nail from a shoe Jen’s cast besides,” Old Nathan called back. “D’ye hear me?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Still, we’ll make a fetch from the hair first, and thet hed ought t’do the job,” the cunning man muttered; but his brow was furrowing as he considered consequences, things that would happen despite him and things that he—needs must—would initiate.

  * * *

  —

  “I brung ye what ye called fer,” said Bowsmith, sweating and cheerful from his midday hike. His whistling had announced him as soon as he topped the knob, the happiest rendition of “Bonny Barbry Allen” Old Nathan had heard in all his born days.

  The boy held out a gob of gray-white horsehair in one hand and a tapered horseshoe nail in the other. Then his eyes lighted on movement in a corner of the room, the cat slinking under the bedstead.