Zinder
TANITH LEE
Here’s a strange and lyrical story about an Ugly Duckling who turns out to be very much more than just a swan…
Tanith Lee is one of the best-known and most prolific of modern fantasists, with more than a hundred books to her credit, including (among many others) The Birthgrave, Drinking Sapphire Wine, Biting the Sun, Night’s Master, The Storm Lord, Sung in Shadow, Volkhavaar, Anackire, Night’s Sorceries, The Black Unicorn, Days of Grass, The Blood of Roses, Vivia, Reigning Cats and Dogs, When the Lights Go Out, Elephantasm, The Gods Are Thirsty, Cast a Bright Shadow, Here in Cold Hell, Faces Under Water, White As Snow, Mortal Suns, Death of the Day, and Piratica: Being a Daring Tale of a Singular Girl’s Adventure Upon the High Seas, and the collections Red As Blood, Tamastara, The Gorgon, Dreams of Dark and Light, Nightshades, and Forests of the Night. Her short story “The Gorgon” won her a World Fantasy Award in 1983, and her short story “Elle Est Trois (La Mort)” won her another World Fantasy Award in 1984. Her most recent books are Metallic Love and a sequel to Piratica called Piratica II: Return to Parrot Island. Soon to be published is another new novel, No Flame But Mine. She lives in the south of England.
A clod of earth, hard, ugly, and brown, flew through the air. It went high enough that it caught the sinking rays of the large hot sun, and for a moment it gleamed too, the clod, become a smooth shape of purest gold, spangled with rubies. Then the light left it. It was only a chunk of common earth as it smacked home on the thing it had been thrown at.
The thing, hit on the head, lost its balance at the impact of the blow, and fell.
The young men standing in the village street doubled over, grunting and hooting with laughter.
An old woman, hobbling by with her goat led on a string, mouthed curses at the louts under her breath.
“Cheer up, Granny! It’s only Quacker we’ve knocked down.”
“God sees all,” said Granny. “You’ll fry in Hell.”
The young men frowned, slightly scared by the mention of the furious and vengeful God in the village church, whose Eye, apparently, was everywhere. But the old woman had already padded off. She cared nothing for any of them, and certainly not for Quacker. And anyway, Quacker was already hauling himself up on to his short, bloated legs. He hadn’t been hurt.
“Look at it!” said the son of the village’s overseer. (“It” meant Quacker.) They looked. Though they had seen Quacker often enough before.
Quacker was aged about fifteen or sixteen. Who could be sure? Either way, the age of a man. He was the son of a loose woman despised by everyone, even the men who occasionally liked to get drunk with her. Quacker, however, had never been human. Anyone could see that. Even as a baby, it had been revoltingly obvious that he wasn’t, and the overseer, and other important men of the village, had been for having him smothered at once—or, since winter was coming on, left on a hill for hungry wolves. For some reason, this wasn’t done. No one could really say why not. Though they believed by now, one and all, that it was due to their sentimental kindness and godliness that they had spared the life of this misshapen idiot who, as he grew and began to talk, sounded more like a duck than even the village ducks did.
Quacker’s head was round and too big. Thin hair was plastered over it in dark greasy streaks. His eyes, also too big, bulged, pale and cloudy. He had a nose and mouth and teeth. That was all you could say for them. The rest of his body was a sort of fat, almost formless, mass, out of which stuck two short fat arms with hands that were too small, and two trunklike bowed legs with feet that were, like head and eyes, also too big.
He was dressed, more or less, as all the males were in the village, except that he had no knife in his belt for hunting or cutting up food.
He didn’t seem upset at being knocked over. He never did seem upset, not even that time early last winter, when two or three witty jokers had thrown him in the duck pond, on which ice was already forming. Quacker, rather than freeze or drown—which was probably what had been wanted—simply bobbed up to the surface, cracked the thinner ice with his horrible head, and somehow lurched to the shore. Here he got out and shambled away.
The young men had grown tired of watching Quacker, so they rambled off to the tavern.
By now the sun was on the very edge of the fields, turning their late-summer richness to the same wonderful gold and scarlet.
In this light, Quacker also took himself up the street, and next over a low wall, into a little crowd of woodland. His mother’s hovel lay there, just outside the village.
It was a grim sight, sagging walls and broken roof, the patch of garden, where some might have grown beans and onions, all spiked with rank bristly weeds, and dominated by a dead fruit tree.
Quacker paused a moment at the door, hearing his mother singing in her dull voice a miserable song of lost love. He could hear too the pot of Life-Water clinking in her hand against the cup, once, twice, an interval, and then again, and again.
The sky beyond the dark wood had flushed to deep blood and purple.
“Zinder?” called the mother quaveringly, “is that you?”
“Yes, Mother,” said Quacker—or actually Zinder, for Zinder was his given name. The noise he made could have been mistaken for quacking, but the woman had got used to it, it seemed, and knew what he said.
So she cursed him. “May the sky fall on you, you filthy beast. Why is it you? I hope and hope every day that you’ll lose yourself—or break your neck—or a bear will eat you—and you never will come back! But there you are again. Hurry and get in then. I expect a visit from the Great Hunter. If he sees you, he’ll be off—can’t stand to look at you, no more than can I! What a life I might have had if it hadn’t been for you.”
The Great Hunter was one of the village’s most important men, as his nickname suggested. It was really quite unlikely he would be stopping by, but you never knew.
Quacker entered the hovel and lurched to his hidden place behind the stove.
An old piece of wolfskin hung down here, and logs were piled up. At all hours, thick shadow fell there, beyond the glimmer of the stove, or any sunshine that might show in the doorway or the one window. Once Quacker—Zinder—was inside the “cave” the skin and the logs made, providing he kept completely still and quiet, no one else need ever know he was there at all.
There was nothing to eat. She had forgotten, as she usually did, to place a crust or bit of rind for him on the floor, by the dirty, flea-filled mat that was his bed.
A large yellow candle was available to give light in the main part of the hovel. But not much of that light either ever crept into Zinder’s bedroom. He had no means to make light for himself. Nor was there anything in the “cave” to amuse him. He had no possessions, unless you counted the mat.
He seated himself quietly on the ground.
Outside, in the outer world of the hovel, the village, the earth, all afterglow had vanished. Cool blueness came, then violet, then gray, then black. Through a tiny chink in the logs, Zinder could see a blink of silver stars flowering in the sky.
Tonight, Mother didn’t light the candle, not even to welcome the hoped-for Great Hunter. She drank and sighed, sighed and drank, and sang her angry sad songs. Until at last she fell asleep, snoring too with an angry sad sound. Zinder lay down then on the mat.
And as he did, he laughed.
THE whole village, apart from the men up the track in the tavern, and the odd wakeful baby, is asleep soon after moonrise.
But this is always when Zinder properly wakes up.
He looks forward to it, though even the days here are quite interesting to him, as he goes roaming about and seeing what needs to be done. The assaults, and the tricks the villagers play on him, let alone their curses, don’t upset him. Not even those of his mother. They don’t hurt, they run off him like water—off the back of a duck. You can’t hurt Zinder.
But night is the best time of all.
First, very gently—and with the skill of much
practice, since he has consciously done this from four years of age—Zinder carefully extracts himself from his own outer body.
If anyone could see—no one does or ever has—it would look as if his ghost or soul has risen straight up out of his chest. Zinder then stands upright on the Zinder who still lies down, with cloudy eyes shut and mouth curved in a smile. The second Zinder is a man of sixteen. He is tall, strong, and slim of build. His hair, black as night, pours back from his face and cascades like a waterfall over his shoulders to his waist. He has a strong face also, and his eyes are a somber and serious blue. He wears the finest clothes, dusk color and moon-and-night color, like the rest of him.
Stepping off his outer Zinder-shell, he bends down and gives it a friendly caress, brushing the thin hair from its forehead. (At once the bruise the flung clod had made begins to disappear. It was healing fast anyway, he has simply hurried the repair along.) Then Zinder walks out into the room, where his mother lies snoring in her chair with her mouth open.
He smooths her face with one finger, painstakingly removing some of the stress and nastiness, as if he were washing it away with a cloth. She sighs in her sleep and stops snoring, breathing now more easily. Then he taps the empty Life-Water pot with his knuckles. It refills at once with clean water—but this water is magic. Though it tastes of alcohol and brings cheerfulness, it causes no harm to whoever drinks it. After that, Zinder opens the cupboard and stares in at the unfilled space until a small loaf appears, a slab of cheese, and a slice of meat. He closes the cupboard.
Going out of the door, he looks around and sees that the vicious weeds in the garden are beginning secretly to change, as he has commanded them to do. Berries are starting to appear under the spiny leaves. The dead apple tree is also coming back to life.
Just then a wild rabbit runs out of the trees and pauses at the edge of the garden, startled, gazing up at Zinder. Zinder whistles softly. The rabbit bolts right over to him and, with complete confidence, lets him pick it up. He smooths its fur, rather as he had smoothed his mother’s face. This time he is giving it protection from the night and the predatory things of the night. The rabbit’s fur is dusty gray, smelling of mushrooms and long grass.
After the rabbit bounds away again, Zinder goes up on the roof of the hovel. He doesn’t climb up there, of course. He flies. The wings that spring from his back are black like his hair, but have the velvety, barbed feathers of a giant crow. They flap slowly, rhythmically, behind him, as he sits on the roof, shifting, by thought, broken tiles and matted straw, until generally everything is better than it was—though not so much better that anyone will suspect something uncanny has been at work. The very last thing his poor, useless, silly mother needs is to be accused of witchcraft.
She isn’t in any fit state now to receive a visit from the Great Hunter, which is a real pity, because from up here, Zinder can clearly see the man going home with his catches and kills, along the path between the fields. Zinder sends him a thought, however, just a mild one…Maybe the Hunter would like to call tomorrow? Zinder knows it will cheer his mother up and do neither of them any harm. The only true reason the Hunter ever does visit is because he vaguely scents something magic all over the hovel. Without understanding that he does, the Hunter has come to believe that the mother is, in some inexplicable way, magical. And so he thinks that perhaps he loves her, just a bit. Besides, the spelled Life-Water does him good. There’s nothing so nice at the tavern, he knows that.
The moon tonight is lovely, round, and ivory white. But it isn’t yet time to travel on into the higher sky. This is Zinder’s village, and he still has a few things to do here.
First he flies lightly over to the house of the old woman with the goat. When they trudged by this evening, he could see the goat wasn’t too well, and the woman depends on the goat for milk, also on its shed hair, which she combs off, spins, and weaves into blankets.
She is asleep indoors. He sends a shaft of healing in through the smoke hole of the stovepipe, to deal with her bad back. The goat meanwhile is standing outside drearily, looking at the moon with its slot-pupiled eyes. Zinder dives down out of the moon, and the goat bleats in alarm, but the next minute Zinder’s spell covers the goat like a cool, firm, drenching wave. The slot eyes fix, then the goat begins to feel better than it has for some time. Zinder, studying it watchfully, sees it seem to light up softly inside. That’s done then. Fine.
He mends and rearranges the other things he needs to quite swiftly. The fields, checked by him every few nights, are blooming and will give this year an especially lavish harvest. The well needs unblocking—again—but that only takes two seconds. The baby with the cough is better. The woman with rheumatism, and the man with the itch, are recovering and need no further help. (The woodcutter’s son, who severed his finger last month, still hasn’t realized that it is growing back as good as new. The idea Zinder sent into his mind, which was to pray for such a miracle, will cover the event nicely and make the little priest in the church happy too.)
As Zinder finally drifts away from the village, still flying low, he sees three or four of his clod-slinging tormentors gathered outside the tavern. Unlike the life-giving Life-Water Zinder can supply by magic at home, the stuff in the tavern is both unpleasant and gut-rotting, and also causes aggression. The young men are getting ready for a fight.
They can’t see Zinder hovering over their heads, only about ten feet up in the air and in the full blaze of the moonlight. No human ever does see him unless he allows it, but animals do. The wolf and fox, the bear, even the guard dogs of men, are always lifting their heads to watch him go by.
Zinder observes the fight, which is too blundering and clumsy to cause much injury.
But these youths are the ones who attack him the most. Now surely is the time for revenge—what will Zinder, the unknown magician, do?
He laughs, silent, and casts a bolt like lightning at them, which knocks all four over on their backs. None of them is harmed or bruised. They feel, landing, as if they fell on deep feather mattresses. The blow itself has in fact made them feel wonderful, far more effectively than the alcohol. They lie there, looking up at Zinder (whom they can’t see) and the moon and the sparkles of the stars. He sends new ideas among them.
“It’s a beautiful night,” says one. “I could make up a song…”
“Too beautiful to fight,” says one. “I could woo a girl…”
“I wish I hadn’t stolen that coin, perhaps I’ll pay it back…” says one.
“I wish I had a bed as soft as this,” says the last.
Zinder flies away and heads up, up into the enormous open dome of the night.
An owl passes below him, white-winged as if floating on two sails, its face like a cat’s with two golden eyes.
He flies towards the north, the young man, on his own black wings. A city is there, something the village talks about disbelievingly, as if it can’t possibly be real.
Below, fields and forests, hills and gullies pass. Far, far off, a wall of impressive mountains rises, and marches north where Zinder flies, its dim sugary tops moon-outlined. There is a wide, smooth-flowing river, on which the moon paints Zinder’s shadow. (For he has one. This second body of his isn’t a ghost, but made of flesh, just like the outer body he wears in the village.) A salmon leaps in the river, eager to catch some of the sorcerous shadow in its mouth. Even fish know, apparently, that Zinder is good news.
The city gradually begins to pay out its own light across a long plain, where blond grain grows thick. A road leads cityward, and on the road, even by night, traffic moves—carts and wagons, riders, patrols of city soldiers, and the carriages of the rich.
Then the city seems to stand up from the plain as the mountains had done. It too shows a circle of high walls—high as the mountain wall they seem. They have towers on them like sharp teeth, but the towers are pierced, like the eyes of needles, by fierce threads of light. On the great gateways, torches flare. While inside, where the massive buildings are, ev
erything looks like black paper or lace held up in front of candleflames, because of the thousands of lit doors and windows.
At the very center of the city is a high hill, and here perches the fortress-palace. So much of it is tiled or gilded, and its windows and doors are so large, that it seems to be made entirely of fire.
Zinder flies slow and steady in over the city, over its traffic and its people, its sentry towers, churches, houses and gardens, over a night market roped in a necklace of lamps.
Yet the flight is often interrupted.
Seeing something, or sensing it, Zinder now and then swoops down. He breaks the ladder of a murderous-looking robber in an alleyway, catches the man, and drops him in a puddle of very good beer. He picks up a fallen child, heals its grazes. He makes a slow pot boil and one that boils too fast calm down. A man beating a dog he pushes flat, and stands on him, so that the man howls in terror at this unseen weight pinning him to the ground, while the dog runs to safety. He holds the hand of someone who is dying, whispering hope into their ears. The journey across the city, which need only take him a clutch of minutes, lasts two hours and more.
One ultimate special treat he allows himself. An old man is praying in a small church under the palace hill. His fingers are crippled to claws from rheumatism. Shifty as any thief, Zinder slides through a window, grips the hands of the old man in gloves of cool warmth, and heals him sharp as a smack. And this time, Zinder allows his patient to glimpse the hint of the shadow of one black wing. Perfect. Listen to him! The old man believes he has been cured by an angel.
But by now, is Zinder late? Oh, no.
The city, and the palace particularly, are the exact opposite of a village that wakes at sunrise and falls asleep when the sun goes down. The palace gets up regularly at noon and is awake all night long. Night is day. Dawn is sunset.
Wizards: Magical Tales from the Masters of Modern Fantasy Page 34