“I’m sorry!” I cried. “I had to do it. I had to!”
He hit me then, and I fell to the grass, sobbing. I waited for him to hit me again, to kill me. Instead the widow and Wheatstraw were kneeling beside me, stroking my hair and murmuring words I did not understand. Farethewell was walking jerkily across the yard, like a scarecrow would walk. He fell to his knees in the rosebushes and scrabbled in the dirt for his flask, the thorns tearing his face.
I stayed in bed a few days, snug beneath layers of goose down. The widow left the room only to fetch and carry for me. Mr. Dellafave settled into a corner of the ceiling and never left the room at all.
When she felt I was able, the widow showed me the note Mr. Farethewell had left.
I never should have hit you, Little Britches, and I am sorry for it, but you never should have got between me and the Devil. Many women and children in Virginia got between the armies and died. Hear me. Farethewell.
“His fist didn’t hurt you,” the widow said.
“I know,” I said. “Doing what I did with the boot, that’s what hurt me. I need to find out what I did and how to do it right. Mrs. Winchester?”
“Yes, child.”
“When I am better, I believe I shall take a trip.”
“Where, child?”
“All over,” I said. “It was Mr. Dellafave’s idea, in a way. I need to see some of the other things in the diorama, and I need to meet some other wizards. As many as I can. I have a lot to learn from all of them.”
She pulled a handkerchief out of her sleeve and dabbed her eyes. “I can’t go with you,” she said.
“But I’ll always come back,” I said. “And you mustn’t worry about me. I won’t be alone.”
I considered walking back through the ballroom window, but I had been there before. I ran my finger over the pebbled face of the stained-glass girl to say good-bye.
When I walked out the front gate of Flatland House, toting an overstuffed carpetbag, I half expected to find myself walking in at the back, like Mr. Dellafave. But no, there were the orchards, and the lane leading over the hill to San Jose, and Petey Wheatstraw sitting cross-legged on a tall stump like a Hindu fakir.
I waved. He waved and jumped down. He was dressed like a vagabond, in rough cloth breeches and a coarse shirt, and his belongings were tied up in a kerchief on the end of a stick.
“You’re a sight,” I said.
“In the future,” he replied, “they’ll call it slumming. Which way?”
“That way, to the top of the hill, then sideways.”
We set off.
“Also, Mr. Wheatstraw, I have some answers for you.”
“Are you prepared to sing them? Anything worth saying is worth singing.”
“I am.”
“You’re so agreeable this morning. It can’t last.” He sang:
Oh, you must answer my questions nine
Sing ninety-nine and ninety
Or you’re not God’s, you’re one of mine
And you are the weaver’s bonny.
I sang back:
Snow is whiter than the milk
Sing ninety-nine and ninety
And down is softer than the silk
And I am the weaver’s bonny.
Heaven’s higher than a tree
Sing ninety-nine and ninety
And Hell is deeper than the sea
And I am the weaver’s bonny
Thunder’s louder than a horn
Sing ninety-nine and ninety
And death is sharper than a thorn
And I am the weaver’s bonny
A babe’s more innocent than a lamb
Sing ninety-nine and ninety
And the Devil is meaner than womankind
—“And MANkind, too,” I said, interrupting myself—
And I am the weaver’s bonny.
Wheatstraw gave me a half-mocking salute and sang:
You have answered my questions nine
Sing ninety-nine and ninety
And you are God’s, you’re none of mine
And you are the weaver’s bonny.
Then I asked him the ninth question, and he agreed that it was the right question to ask, so right that he did not know the answer, and together we reached the top of the hill and walked sideways, right off the edge of the world.
JUST this year I made it back to Chattanooga. The town was so changed I hardly recognized it, except for the bend in the river and the tracks through the tunnel and Lookout Mountain over everything.
The new bridge is still hanging on, though it’s no longer new and carries no proper traffic anymore, just visitors who stroll along it and admire the view and take photographs. Can you call them photographs anymore? They need no plates and no paper, and you hardly have to stand still any time to make one.
At the end of my visit I spent a good hour on the bridge, looking at the river and at the people, and enjoying walking my home city on older, stronger legs and seeing it with better eyes and feeling more myself than I had as a girl—though I’m still not as old-looking as you’d expect, thanks to my travels and the talents I’ve picked up along the way.
How you’d expect me to look at my age, I reckon, is dead, but I am not that, not by a long shot.
I wondered how many of these young-old people creeping along with the help of canes, and candy-faced children ripping and roaring past me, and men and women rushing along in short pants, my goodness, their stuck-out elbows going up and down like pistons—how many of them dreamed of the world that I knew. But what had I known myself of the invisible country all around, before I passed into the Infernal Regions?
Up ahead, sitting on one of the benches along the bridge, was a girl who put me in mind of my old Chattanooga friend Sally Ann Rummage, with her red hair and her long neck and her high forehead like a thinker. Probably about sixteen, this girl was, though it’s hard to tell; they stay younger so much longer now, thank goodness. She didn’t look very happy to be sixteen, or to be anything. A boy was standing over her, with one big foot on the bench like he was planting a flag, and he was pointing his finger in her face like Petey Wheatstraw was known to do, and his other hand was twisting her pretty brown jacket and twisting her shoulder, too, inside it, and she looked cried-out and miserable. He was telling her about herself, or presuming to, and when he glanced my way—no more seeing me than he would a post or a bird or a food wrapper blowing past—I saw that he was Farethewell. He was high-cheeked and eighteen and muscled, where Farethewell was old and jowly, and had a sharp nose unlike Farethewell, and had nothing of Farethewell’s shape or face or complexion, but I recognized him just the same. I would recognize Farethewell anywhere.
I stood behind him, looking at her, until she looked up and met my gaze. This is a good trick, and one that even nonwizards can accomplish.
The boy said to me something foul that I will not lower myself to repeat, and I said, “Hush,” and he hushed. Of all the talents I’ve learned since I left Flatland House, that may be the handiest.
The girl frowned, puzzled, her arms crossed tight to hold herself in like a girl I once knew in a California parlor long ago. I smiled at her and put in her head the Devil’s ninth question:
Who am I?
And while I was in there, in a thousand places, I strewed an answer like mustard seeds: I am the weaver’s bonny.
Then I walked on down the bridge. The sun was low, the breeze was sharp, and a mist was forming at the river bend, a mist only I could see. The mist thickened and began to swirl. The surface of the water roiled. In the center of the oncoming cloud, twin smokestacks cleaved the water, then the wheelhouse, then the upper deck. The entire riverboat surfaced, water sluicing down the bulkheads, paddle wheel churning. I could read the boat’s bright red markings. It was the Sultana, which blew up in 1865 just north of Memphis, at the islands called the Hen and Chickens, with the loss of seventeen hundred men. And my, did she look grand!
At the head of the steps to the riverfront,
I looked back—for wizards always look back. Have I not been looking back since I began this story, and have you not been looking back with me, to learn the ways of a wizard? I saw the girl striding away from the boy, head held high. He just stood there, like one of Professor Van Der Ast’s blockheads with a railroad spike up his nose. The girl whirled once, to shout something at him. The wind snatched away all but one word: “—ever!” Then she kept on walking. The mustard was beginning to sprout. I laughed as loudly as the widow Winchester, and I ran down the slick steps to the river, as giddy as a girl of ninety-nine and ninety.
Barrens Dance
PETER S. BEAGLE
Peter S. Beagle was born in New York City in 1939. Although not prolific by genre standards, he has published a number of well-received fantasy novels, at least two of which, A Fine and Private Place and The Last Unicorn, were widely influential and are now considered to be classics of the genre. In fact, Beagle may be the most successful writer of lyrical and evocative modern fantasy since Bradbury, and is the winner of many Mythopoeic Fantasy Awards and Locus Awards, as well as having often been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award, and a Hugo Award winner for his story “Two Hearts,” a coda to The Last Unicorn. Beagle’s other books include the novels The Folk of the Air, The Innkeeper’s Song, The Unicorn Sonata, and Tamsin. His short fiction has appeared in places as varied as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Atlantic Monthly, Seventeen, and The Ladies’ Home Journal, and has been collected in The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche and Other Odd Acquaintances, The Magician of Karakosk, and The Line Between. He has written the screenplay for several movies, including the animated versions of The Lord of the Rings and The Last Unicorn; the libretto for an opera, The Midnight Angel, based on his story “Come Lady Death;” and a popular autobiographical travel book, I See By My Outfit. Scheduled for release in the next year are three new novels: Summerlong, I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons, and Sweet Lightning, a 1950s baseball fantasy.
In the tense and compelling story that follows, he takes us deep into the wastelands of the Barrens in winter, to witness an intricate pavane of love and lust, obsession and devotion, magic both evil and good, and the kind of loyalty that persists beyond the skin…
IT is a curious thing, our companionship, when you think about it. Here we are, once again taking our customary turn together in these green, green hills of your kindly west country—as always, I thank you for keeping an old man company, young as you are—and we talk and ponder and laugh, and tell our stories; and all you truly know of me, as long as you have known me, is that I come from the Northern Barrens. No, think about it, before you answer. Is it not so? Think about it.
Now. If you recall the old saying, strange as a tale out of the Barrens? Very good. This is one, and you will have to decide in your own mind how much of it you choose to believe. I believe it all—but then, I have reasons.
This story begins with a wizard named Carcharos. Whatever you may have been told, most wizards are neither good nor bad. They are as they are, and they do as they do; and such words have no more meaning for them than they would to a sheknath. Only another wizard has the slightest notion of how a wizard thinks or feels. For myself, I cannot call to mind a single one who could be considered altogether benign—no, not even Kirisinja herself. But by the same token, there is almost no such thing as a purely evil wizard. Almost.
Carcharos. One tends to think of wizards either as bearded and severe, bearded and bumblingly kind, or bearded and dark and vaguely sinister. Carcharos was none of these things. There were broad blond planes to his friendly face, and if his blue eyes were a bit small, they were yet as candid as they could have been. His hair was red-gold in any light, as though the sun were always behind him. When he spoke, there was a deep thrum to his voice, like the singing of a giant cicada. There was no one living in the Barrens who was not afraid of Carcharos.
Yes, there was. One person. But that comes later in the story.
Should Carcharos wander by a farmer’s cottage of an evening and ask quite politely—always politely—for the last bit of food in the house, or the last bottle of wine, or even the piglet fattening for Thieves’ Day, the entire family would scuttle to do his bidding. That you can envisage, surely—but what would you have thought afterwards, Carcharos gone, had you then seen them all hurry out to peer at the red earth of the threshold and the sad little front garden, to see if the wizard’s dusty footprints turned in such a way, fell into such a pattern, as to suggest that he might have been dancing? And if they had…oh, if by chance they had, then what would you have thought to see those farmers running, the lot of them, on the instant, as fast and as far as ever they could? Taking nothing—nothing—and never returning? I think you might have stared at those tracks for a while, yes?
Carcharos was the only wizard I have ever known, or heard of, whose power expressed itself entirely through dance. Most people imagine wizards as working their will by way of magical gestures, incantations—even song, like Am-Nemil, or Savisu himself, whose speech, from his infancy, was so distorted that he could not make himself understood in any other manner. But dance…as far as I have ever determined, there was no one but Carcharos. I could be wrong. I am not nearly as learned in these matters as I may sound. Lanak, the magician of Karakosk, whom I still visit when I can, for his company and his black beer, has always been of the opinion that Carcharos had discovered a means of somehow aligning his body with the universal lines of force, thus tapping that endless power by means of movement alone. Here again, I have no opinion, this way or that, but it could be so.
The Northern Barrens is a patchwork land, its rolling red desolation broken miles apart by scraps of arable land, farmed by solitary family groups who rarely see each other. Yet somehow all stories travel—almost overnight, it often seems—from the stony eastern edge I know best to the endless clay hills traversed only by a few wild wanderers who yet refuse to believe that there is no such thing as a drast mine. Even they told of Carcharos when I was yet of that country, and I am sure they still do. Stories linger for a long time in the Barrens.
I have heard at more than one fire, for instance, the tale of Carcharos’s annihilation of an entire family and their farm, for no other reason but that he disliked the taste of the well water they had eagerly offered him when he appeared at their door one evening. The story says that he summoned against them creatures such as no one had ever seen before, that the few surviving witnesses prayed never to see again, and never flushed out of their dreams. And there was a man, a lordling’s revenue collector, who refused to yield up a splendid black stallion that the wizard fancied. To be fair, Carcharos asked him twice—gently and courteously, by all accounts—before he called down lightning, lightning out of a cloudless sky, that lifted the bailiff into the air, tracing his outline in fire, whirling him this way and that, like a dry leaf crumbling in the wind. What it spilled to the ground, when it finally grew bored with playing with him, was a handful of gray-and-black ashes. No more than that.
I see the usual questions in your eyes: why was Carcharos what he was? What can his dance possibly have been like? Why did a wizard of his stature remain in such a backwater as the Northern Barrens, with so little scope for his desires? To begin with the easiest one, Carcharos was not to be found in the Barrens at all times; indeed, he traveled widely, and there are accounts of appearances as far south as Bitava, and as far to the west as Grannach Harbor and Leishai, on the coast itself. Yet he always, always came back to that stark wild, fled by so many from the day it was made. Sooner or later, he always returned to the Barrens.
Now I believe the reason for this lies in the question of Carcharos’s nature. Unlike some wizards, he was not an especially ambitious man: he had no vast vision of dominance, no limitless dreams of world conquest. You might say he was more like an immensely strong and cruel highwayman, riding the great red hills with power swinging at his side, instead of a rapier. What he saw and wanted he took, and most likely had more pleasur
e in the act than from the thing itself. But exercising his power over that one family, that one poor man, even…that suited him just as well as mastering a dozen kingdoms. Quite restrained, in a way, when you think about it.
Although I know nothing of his upbringing or his studies, the fact that he was as unequivocally evil as he was still surprises me more than it shocks me. I have always believed that magic has its own immutable nature, and in some way resists being practiced contrariwise, to this use or that. But Carcharos was Carcharos, and if he was able to defy the very spirit and essence of magic…well, he paid dearly enough for it, in the end.
Now, much of what follows is clumsily stitched together from things that are presumed to be general knowledge—which does not mean for a minute that they are even half-true—and a deal of rumored rubbish which yet might mean something to a wise listener. But what may make this tale a bit different is that I was there when Carcharos—terrible, heartless Carcharos—fell in love with the wife of the shukri trainer.
Not that you would have called it love, I am sure, nor would almost anyone who imagines that he knows what the word means. Since I never have, I can only say that Jassi Belnarak, daughter of generations of shukri trainers and wife to another—big young Rijo Belnarak—was pretty enough, and good-hearted with it; but why the wizard Carcharos should have been so instantly besotted with her is more than I can tell you. But so it was.
Wizards: Magical Tales from the Masters of Modern Fantasy Page 28