I don’t know what stunned me more—that a picture I was to paint someday would have that power, or that I would have great-great-grandchildren. I mean—I was only fifteen after all; who could think that far?
“But why me? And why Masha? Why Eva?”
He glanced over his shoulder at where Masha was sitting, now surrounded by a group of children her own age. She seemed to be playing, all that lost innocence returned to her in a single moment. Eva stood with her back to the wall, watching carefully, already Masha’s guardian, her angel, her mother. Elijah turned back and cocked his head to one side. “Surely you have figured it out by now.”
I looked at Masha again. She looked over at me and smiled. It was my sister’s smile. How could I have not known—except Masha had never smiled before. Not in the camp, where there was nothing to smile at. Of course. My sister had been named after our great-grandmother, Mashanna.
“If she’d died in the camp, you would never have been born,” Elijah said, even as he started to fade. “The picture never would have been painted. The great renaissance never to happen.”
“But I was born…” I began.
“Born to paint,” he said, before grabbing my hand and dragging us both sideways into the future and home.
The Stranger’s Hands
TAD WILLIAMS
Tad Williams became an international bestseller with his very first novel, Tailchaser’s Song, and the high quality of his output and the devotion of his readers has kept him on the top of the charts ever since. His other novels include the Memory, Sorrow and Thorn series (The Dragonbone Chair, Stone of Farewell, To Green Angel Tower), the Otherland series (City of Golden Shadow, River of Blue Fire, Mountain of Black Glass, Sea of Silver Light), Caliban’s Hour, Child of an Ancient City (with Nina Kiriki Hoffman), and The War of The Flowers. He is currently finishing the Shadowmarch series (Shadowmarch, Shadowplay, and Shadowrise). In addition to his novels, Williams writes comic books for DC Comics (Aquaman, The Next, Factory) as well as film and television scripts. He lives with his family in the San Francisco Bay Area.
In the ingenious story that follows, he suggests that the problem with using magic to get your Heart’s Desire is that you might actually get it…
PEOPLE in the village had been whispering for days about the two vagabonds in Squire’s Wood, but the boy Tobias was the first to speak to them.
Tobias was a somewhat wayward lad, and the fact that he should have been grazing his father’s sheep on the hill above the forest at that hour more or less assured the sheep in question would be wandering along the shady edges of the wood instead, with Tobias wandering right behind them.
It was not until he saw a drift of smoke twining like a gray scarf through the trees that the boy remembered that strangers had been seen in the wood. He felt a moment of fear: why would anyone live out of doors in the cold nights and flurries of autumn rain if they were God-fearing folk? Only robbers and dangerous madmen dwelt under the unsheltered sky. Everyone knew that.
If he had been a fraction less headstrong, Tobias would have turned around then and hurried back to the hillside, perhaps even remembering to take his father’s sheep with him, but there was a part of him, a strong part, that hated not knowing things worse than anything. It was the part that had once caused him to pull the leg off a frog, just to find out what it would do. (It did very little, and died soon after with what Tobias felt guiltily certain was an accusatory look in its bulging eyes.) It was also the reason he had dented his father’s best scythe when he had used it to try to cut down a tree, and why he had dumped the contents of his mother’s precious sewing basket all over the ground—a search for knowledge that ended with Tobias spending all afternoon in the fading light on his hands and knees, locating every last needle and pin he had spilled. Once this rebel voice had even led him several miles out of the village, on a quest for the town of Eader’s Church, which he had heard was so big that the streets actually had names. His father and two other men had caught up to him an hour after sunset as he sat exhausted and hungry by the side of the road. He had got a whipping for it, of course, but for young Tobias whippings were part of the cost of doing business.
So now, instead of turning and leaving the woods and its perilous inhabitants behind (for the sake of his father’s livestock if nothing else), he followed the trail of smoke back to its source, a small cookfire in a clearing. A small man with a ratlike face was tending the flames, his wrinkles made so deep and dark by grime he looked like an apple-doll. His large companion, who sat on a stone beside the fire and did not look up even when Tobias stepped on a twig and made the little man jump, was so odd to look at that the boy could not help shivering. The large man’s head was shaved, albeit poorly in some places, and the skull beneath the skin bulged in places that it should not. His bony jaw hung slack, the tongue visible in the space between top and bottom teeth, and although he did not seem blind, the eyes in the deep sockets were dull as dirty stones.
If the big man was paying no attention, the little man was. He stared at Tobias like a dog trying to decide whether to bark or run.
“Your wood’s too wet,” the boy told him.
“What?”
“You’ll get mostly smoke and little fire from that. Do you want smoke?”
The small man frowned, but in dismay, not anger. “I want to cook this fish.” He had the sound of a southerner, the words stretched and misshapen. Tobias wondered why they couldn’t learn to speak properly. He squinted at the man’s supper with the eye of an experienced angler. “It’s small.”
“It’s better than starving,” the man pointed out.
“Well, then, I’ll show you.” Tobias quickly found enough dry wood to rebuild the fire and within a short time the little man was cooking the fish over it on a long stick. His large companion still had not moved or spoken, had not even seemed to notice the newcomer in their camp.
“Thanks for your kindness,” the small man said. “I am Feliks. We are new to this.”
“My name’s Tobias,” the boy said, basking in the glow of his own helpfulness. “What does that mean, ‘new’?”
“We have been living somewhere there was food.” Feliks shrugged. “The food ran out.”
Tobias stared at the other man, who still gazed at nothing, only the slow movement of his chest behind his dark, travel-worn robe showing that he was something other than a statue. “What’s his name?”
Feliks hesitated for a moment. “Eli.” He said it in the southern way, the last syllable rising like a shorebird’s cry—Eh-lee. “He was my master, but he…something happened to him. He lost his wits.”
Tobias now examined the big man with unhidden interest—if he had no wits, it couldn’t be rude to stare, could it? “What happened?”
“The roof fell on him.” Feliks took the fish from the stick, burning his fingers so that he almost dropped it—Tobias was amused by how many things the man didn’t know how to do—and then cut it into two pieces with a knife, handing the larger piece to the silent giant. Eli moved for the first time; he took the fish without looking at it, put it in his mouth, and chewed with bovine patience. Feliks began to eat the other piece, then turned shamefacedly to Tobias. “I should offer some to you, for your kindness.”
Tobias was old enough to understand this would not be a small sacrifice for Feliks. “No, I’ll eat at home. And I’d better go now or Father will have the strap out.” He looked through the trees to the angle of the sun, which was definitely lower than he would have liked. “He’ll have the strap out, anyway.” The boy stood. “I’ll come back tomorrow, though. I can help you catch better fish than that one.” He hesitated. “Have you been to other places? Other villages, even towns?”
Feliks nodded slowly. “Many places. Many cities all over the Middle Lands.”
“Cities!” Tobias swayed a little, faint-headed at the thought. “Real cities? I’ll be back!”
The tall man named Eli suddenly put out his hand, a gesture so startling after
his hour of near immobility that Tobias recoiled as though from a snake.
“He…I think he wants to thank you,” Feliks said. “Go ahead, boy—take his hand. He was a great man once.”
Tobias slowly extended his own small hand, wondering if this might be the beginning of some cruel or even murderous trick—if he had been too trusting after all. Eli’s hand was big, knob-knuckled, and smudged with dirt, and it closed on the boy’s slim fingers like a church door swinging closed.
Then Tobias vanished.
WHEN two days had passed with no sign of the boy, suspicion of course fell on the two strangers living in Squire’s Wood. When the man named Feliks admitted that they had seen the child and spoken to him, the shireward and several local fellows dragged them out of the forest and chained them in wooden stocks beside the well in the center of the village, where everyone could see them and marvel at their infamy. Feliks tearfully continued to insist that they had done nothing to harm the boy, that they did not know where he had gone—both things true, as it turned out—but even if the two men had not been strangers and thus naturally suspect, the villagers could see that the big one was plainly touched, perhaps even demon-possessed, and almost no one felt anything for them but horror and disgust.
The lone exception was Father Bannity, the village priest, who felt that it was a troubling thing to imprison people simply because they were strangers, although he dared not say so aloud. He himself had been a stranger to the village when he had first arrived twenty years earlier (in fact, older villagers still referred to him as “the new priest”), and so he had a certain empathy for those who might find themselves judged harshly simply because their grandfathers and great-grandfathers were not buried in the local churchyard. Also, since in his middle life he had experienced a crisis of faith, leading him to doubt many of the most famous and popular tenets of his own religion, he was doubly unwilling to assume the guilt of someone else simply because they were not part of the familiar herd. So Father Bannity took it on himself to make sure the two prisoners had enough food and water to survive. It would be a long wait for the King’s Prosecutor General to arrive—his circuit covered at least a dozen villages and lasted a full cycle of the moon—and even if the two were guilty of killing the poor child and hiding his body, Father Bannity did not want them to die before this could be discovered for certain.
As the small man, Feliks, grew to trust him, he at last told Bannity what he swore was the true story of what had happened that day, that the boy had touched big Eli’s hand and then disappeared like a soap bubble popping. Father Bannity was not quite certain what to think, whether this was a true mystery or only the precursor to a confession, a man easing gradually into a guilty admission as into a scalding bath, but he stuck by his resolution to treat them as innocent until they told him otherwise, or events proved the worst to have happened.
One day, as he was holding a ladle of water to Eli’s dry lips, the big man suddenly looked at him almost as if seeing him for the first time, a flash of life in the dull, bestial eyes that Bannity had not seen before. Startled, the priest dropped the ladle. The big man lifted his hand as far as he could with his wrist restrained by the stocks and spread his long fingers like some strange flower blooming.
“Don’t,” whispered Feliks. “That’s what the boy did.”
Father Bannity hesitated for only a moment. Something in the big man’s strange gaze, something solemn and distant but not unkind, convinced him. He reached out and allowed Eli’s hand to fold around his.
For a startling moment Bannity thought he had become a fish, jerked thrashing out of the river and up into the daylight, blinded by the sun and its prismatic colors, dazzled by the burning air. Then, a half instant later, he realized it was as though he had been out of the water for years, and now had suddenly been plunged back into it: everything that had withered in him suddenly sprang back to life, all the small losses of the passing days and months—color, feeling, ecstasy. The feeling was so strong, so overwhelming, that he could not even answer Feliks’s worried questions as he staggered away.
Bannity knew again. He had forgotten what it felt like, but now he remembered, and the thunderous force of belief returning betrayed how much he had lost. God had sent him a miracle in the person of the silent giant, and with that single touch, a world that had slowly turned gray around him over the years had been kindled back into flaming life.
God was in everything again, just as He had been when Bannity was a child, when he had been able to imagine nothing better than to serve Him.
God was alive inside him. He had experienced a miracle.
It was only when the first surge of ecstatic happiness had become a little more ordinary, if no less pleasurable, that Father Bannity realized nothing tangible had actually changed. It wasn’t so much that God had shown him a miracle, a sign, it was more as if touching the giant’s hand had reawakened him to the love of God he had once had, but which had slipped away from him.
It was Eli, he realized, although undoubtedly acting as God’s messenger, who had given him back his love of the Lord, his belief in a living Creation, and most of all, his certainty that what was was meant to be.
The silent, damaged man had given Bannity his heart’s desire, even though the priest himself had not known what it was.
Grateful, renewed, the priest resolved to speak on behalf of the two prisoners when the Prosecutor General returned to the village, to tell the truth even if it meant admitting that he had, for a time, lost his own faith. Father Bannity would undoubtedly have been their only defender, except that on the day before the traveling lawspeaker rode into town, the boy named Tobias came back.
He had been, the boy told the villagers (and very gleefully too) in the town of Eader’s Church, and it was just as big and wonderful as he had imagined. “They have lots of dogs!” he said, his eyes still bright with the spectacle he had seen. “And houses that go up and up! And people!” He seemed to feel that the whipping his father had just given him—on general principles, since the actual mechanics of the boy’s disappearance were still a mystery—was a small price to pay for all he’d seen.
Tobias knew nothing about how he had got from the village to the far-off town—it had happened in an instant, he said, from clasping Eli’s hand to finding himself in the middle of the Eader’s Church marketplace—but unfortunately there had been no equally magical way of returning. It had taken him all the days since he’d been gone to walk home.
When the Prosecutor General arrived the next day, there was no longer a case for murder to be tried, although several of the villagers were talking darkly of witchcraft. The Prosecutor General, a small, round, self-important fellow with a beard on his chin as small and sharp as an arrowhead, insisted on being taken to see the two former prisoners, who had been released to their campsite in Squire’s Wood, if not to their previous state of anonymity.
Holding out his rod of office, the lawspeaker approached Eli and said, “In the name of the State and its gracious Sovereign, His Majesty the King, you must tell me how you sent the boy to Eader’s Church.”
The big man only looked at him, unbothered. Then he extended his hand. The Prosecutor General, after a moment’s hesitation, extended his own small plump hand and allowed it to be grasped.
When Father Bannity and the other men watching had finished blinking their eyes, they saw that instead of his prosecutor’s tunic, the Prosecutor General was now unquestionably wearing a judge’s robes, cowl, and wreath, and that a judge’s huge, round, golden emblem of office now hung on a chain around his neck. (Some also suggested that he had a stronger chin as well, and more penetrating eyes than he had heretofore possessed.) The ex–Prosecutor General, now a full-fledged Adjudicator, blinked, ran his fingers over the leafy wreath on his head, then fell down on his knees and uttered a happy prayer.
“Twelve years I’ve waited!” he said, over and over. “Thank you, Lord! Passed over and passed over—but no more!”
He then rose
, and, with fitting jurisprudential gravity, proclaimed, “These men have not practiced any unlicensed witchcraft. I rule that they are true messengers of God and should be treated with respect.”
Finding that his pockets were now richer by several gold coins—the difference between his old salary and new—the new-minted Adjudicator promptly sold his cart and donkey to Pender the village blacksmith and left town in a covered carriage, with a newly hired driver and two new horses. Later rumors said that he arrived home to find he had been awarded the King’s Fourteenth Judicial Circuit.
In the wake of the Prosecutor General’s astonishing transformation, Squire’s Wood began to fill with people from the village and even some of the surrounding villages—for news travels fast in these rural areas—turning the two men’s camp into a site of pilgrimage. The size of the gathering grew so quickly that Father Bannity and some of the wood’s nearer and soberer neighbors worried that the entire forest soon would be trampled flat, but the squireward could not turn the newcomers away any more than he could have held back the tide at Lands End.
Although none of this swarm of postulants was turned away, not all received their heart’s desire, either—Eli’s hand opened only to one in perhaps three or four, and it was impossible to force the issue. One man, a jar maker named Keely, tried to pry the big man’s fingers apart and shove his own hand in, and although he succeeded, nothing magical happened to him except that he developed a painful boil in the middle of his forehead the following day.
Some of the pilgrims’ wishes turned out to be surprisingly small and domestic: a man whose sick cow suddenly recovered, a woman whose youngest son abruptly discovered he could hear as well as he had before the fever. Others were more predictable, like the man who after clasping Eli’s hand discovered a pot of old coins buried under an ancient wall he was rebuilding.
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