“Dried mushroom are excellent,” said Bosk, “but as you yourself so recently observed, the fresh are superior. They will command a premium, but are unlikely to diminish sales of the dried significantly, if they are only available in a limited supply, let us say, once a month.”
“I was thinking more of your magical tunnel,” said Dandanflores. “Magic has its dangers and is generally best avoided.”
“I have come to no harm,” said Bosk.
“You are a sorcerer.”
Bosk thought of the spells written on his arms, covered by his loose sleeves. “I am a mere apprentice. If there were danger, it would have found me.” When Dandanflores made no reply, Bosk pushed harder. “I thought the chieftain of the Twk would be wise and brave in the service of his people. Would you deny them such profit as would enhance their lives?”
Dandanflores crossed his arms and looked past Bosk. The children had climbed to the platform below and were listening to the conversation. One of them shouted, “Take me along, Da!”
His father glared at him. “Boys,” he muttered, and shifted the glare to Bosk. “You are all alike.”
Bosk shrugged. “Someone has to dare.”
“Very well,” said the Twk chieftain. “Show me this Eye, and I’ll judge for myself.”
They mounted the dragonfly and returned to the smoky ring floating among the branches. Bosk dismounted first, stepping into the tunnel. He braced his back against one side and held a hand out to the Twk-man. Dandanflores did not take it but rather ran his own hands around the ring until he seemed satisfied with its solidity. Only then did he test it with one foot. Bosk eased back to allow him into the tunnel.
“Once inside the ring, you became a wraith of thinnest smoke,” said the Twk chieftain. “I suppose the same has happened to me.”
“It only appears so from the outside,” said Bosk.
“Obviously,” said Dandanflores. “Let us continue this adventure.”
They reached the opposite end of the Eye and emerged into Bosk’s bedchamber.
“The tunnel can be shifted until its two ends are anywhere I choose,” said Bosk.
The Twk-man flexed his hands and looked down at his body. “I am unharmed,” he said, “and therefore we have a bargain. When does our commerce begin?”
“As soon as I make the arrangements with my father. And may I suggest that your payment will be due after the first consignment of mushrooms is sold in Kaiin.”
“That seems satisfactory.”
Bosk conducted him back to the Twk town.
Bosk’s father and Fluvio were at supper when Bosk descended the main stairway at Boreal Verge. Fluvio occupied the chair that once had been Bosk’s, and he had been listening to some fatherly declamation before his father stopped speaking in mid-sentence. They both stared as Bosk approached the table.
“Good evening, Father, Fluvio.” He pulled out a chair for himself. “I hope I find you well. Ah, I see the evening meal is based upon mushrooms again.”
His father found voice first. “Shall I order some for you?”
“No need, Father. I’ll sup at Miir.” He nodded. “Yes, I travel in magical fashion these days. I have spent a most productive time at Miir and expect to learn more in years to come.”
His father cleared his throat. “Master Turjan sent us word. He has been pleased with your progress. I still disapprove, but you do seem to have an aptitude for it.”
“True as that may be,” said Bosk, and he laced his fingers together upon the table, “I have not forgotten what I learned at your side.” He outlined his plan to employ the Twk, citing unspecified sorcery as the means rather than giving any details of the Eye. “The family will profit from this. All we need to begin the operation is a small amount of silver for rental of a modest shop in the heart of the city and a sufficient supply of the commodity for our first consignment, which will be limited but choice. Once the wealthy of Kaiin sample our wares, they will not hesitate to purchase. Possibly we will gift the Prince with a selection, given his penchant for setting the fashion. Does this appeal to you, Father?”
“The price must be high,” said his father. “Commensurate with the complexity of the transport.”
“Exactly my thinking.”
His father regarded him with narrowed eyes. “I did not expect you to use sorcery to profit the family.”
Bosk met his gaze. “I am a Septentrion.”
His father nodded. “This is a good plan. We will implement it.” He turned to Fluvio. “You will help your brother as necessary. I will fetch the silver.”
Fluvio watched their father leave. “We should talk,” he said. “Shall we walk out on the grounds where we cannot be overheard?”
“As you wish,” said Bosk.
Outside, Fluvio spoke in a low voice. “We have two new servants. What you have said already will fly back to the mines, and the miners will want higher pay for their goods. Father should have thought of that. Perhaps his age is beginning to tell on him.”
“Father is hardly old. And there is no reason why the miners should not share in this new source of income.”
Fluvio shook his head. “For doing nothing more than they have always done? I think not.”
Bosk shrugged. “Father will decide.”
“We should unite in our opinion. Then he will listen.”
“Perhaps,” Bosk said, though he doubted it.
“We are the new generation of Septentrions,” said Fluvio. “The family commerce will be ours.”
Bosk laughed softly. “Yours,” he said. “I have made another choice.”
“Then why have you come back? Why have you brought this proposal?”
“I have my reasons.”
They walked in silence for a time, Fluvio looking down at the grass, Bosk waiting for him to speak again, for he was sure there would be more speaking.
Instead, Fluvio turned and struck him, and the blow was so hard that Bosk did not even feel himself fall. When he came to his senses, head spinning and sour bile filling his nose and throat, he found himself slung over something that moved, and for a moment he thought the Deodand had him once more. He coughed the bitterness away and clutched at his captor’s back. It seemed to be covered with cloth, and he was certain that was wrong; the Deodand’s back should be naked. Then reality returned, and he knew Fluvio was carrying him.
He had written the Spell of the Omnipotent Sphere on his arm in indelible ink, but he was too dizzy to read it. Dozens of repetitions, however, had engraved themselves on his memory. He began to murmur the spell, and by the time Fluvio did as he expected, the Sphere was springing into being around him, and instead of falling, he floated into the gorge of the Derna light as dandelion fluff, rebounding gently from the near wall as the Sphere repelled anything that might harm him. For the first few seconds, he could see Fluvio standing at the verge, staring, and then all he could see was rock and sky.
The dizziness had passed by the time he settled beside the river. By then his jaw had begun to ache fiercely, and he had been forced to press his sleeve into his mouth to stop the bleeding of his bitten tongue. He opened the Sphere and knelt to scoop up some water to rinse his mouth. There was no easy returning to Boreal Verge from this location. Upriver, though, at the mines, at least one of the green serpentine trails extended all the way to the bottom. It would take him two days of walking to reach it.
He was tired and hungry when he arrived at the mines, so hungry that he was glad to eat mushrooms. A few days later, three miners escorted him back to Boreal Verge, where he told his father only that he had decided to visit them before returning to Miir. He made no reference to the unpleasantness with Fluvio, nor to the bruise so evident on his jaw. For his part, Fluvio stayed well away from his brother and spoke little, though Bosk fancied he saw fear in Fluvio’s eyes every time their gazes met. That seemed like a very good thing to Bosk.
His father had the silver ready, as well as a suggestion for a good location in Kaiin. As expected, Maziri
an’s spells worked as well on the coins as they had on Bosk, and he returned to Miir wealthier than he had left. No one asked where he had been, though Rianna did look long at the bruise, nor did they question his new enterprise.
“I thought you might find some simpler bargain,” said Turjan, “but you are, after all, a Septentrion. Does this mean your apprenticeship has ended?”
“That is not my intention,” said Bosk.
“So we speak of compromise. You will serve both your father and me.”
“As I hope.”
Turjan shook his head. “She does not deserve all of this.”
“I am doing it for myself and my family, not for her.”
Turjan’s expression was enough to show his doubt.
Once the shop was secured, a dozen Twk-men became mushroom haulers. Bosk had already dispatched a gaudily wrapped packet of fresh mushrooms to the Prince, and now he posted a notice on the shop door that the goods would be available on a certain date. That morning, when he restored himself to his proper size on the premises, a crowd of satisfying proportions was already waiting outside the door. Many coins changed hands before the stock was exhausted, and Bosk noted all in a small account book. He closed the empty shop at noon, and after locking the door, he went back to Miir and shared the midday meal with Turjan, Rianna, and T’sain.
The next morning, the mushrooms haulers carried one silver coin each through the Eye, and Bosk helped Dandanflores unwind the golden thread from his hammock.
“I understand you have no intention of visiting her,” said the Twik chieftain, “but you might find it interesting that Lith has established herself in Thamber Meadow.” Casually, he suggested a route to the place.
“It is unlikely that she and I will ever meet again,” Bosk agreed. He coiled the golden thread and slung it over his shoulder. It was quite heavy. He considered using Mazirian’s spell to shrink it, but decided that he would not chance the effect on its intrinsic magic.
Back at Miir, he regained his true size, and the rope became a glittering thread. He looped it about his neck and tucked it under his shirt.
His horse was saddled and waiting at the gate. A brief sortie, he had told his master’s family, though he had known from their faces that he was not deceiving them. He had left a sealed envelope on his pillow, with instructions for his father, for Fluvio, for Turjan, to continue the commerce with the Twk in his absence. As he rode away, he looked back more than once and saw Rianna watching from the tower garden. The last time, distance made her seem small enough to visit her own doll house, and he almost went back to thank her because everything he had accomplished would have been impossible without her. But he did not.
He found Thamber Meadow easily enough, on the second day of travel, near dusk. The house was small, with a thatched roof and ivy-covered walls, and it stood close beside a brook. Lith was in the water, her gown gathered up around her knees, and as he approached, she scooped up a fish, which struggled vigorously until she gave it a quietus with her fist.
She looked up as he dismounted, and her beauty was all that he remembered and more. “The boy from the north,” she observed.
“I brought you gifts.” He drew a sack of mushrooms from one of his panniers. “The finest the north has to offer. And bread fresh from the kitchens of Castle Miir.” Another sack.
“You are kind. With such additions, I would be inhospitable if I did not share my supper with you. Bosk, was it not?”
He nodded, and his heart quickened at the sound of his name in her mouth.
As he helped her prepare the fish and the mushrooms, they exchanged scant information—he had begun his apprenticeship, and she had traveled a trifle, but nowhere that mattered. When their meal was finished, he did not wait for the dishes to be cleared away to show his other gift.
At the sight of the thread, her hand went to her mouth, and her cheeks paled. Her fingers trembled as she accepted it. “How?” she whispered.
“Too long a tale,” he said. “Let it be enough that you have it back.”
She bowed her head then, and her shoulders shook with weeping.
He reached across the table and touched her arm gently. “This should be a happy time for you.”
She covered her face with her hands. “You don’t understand. Leave me, please. Please.”
Uncertainly, he stood, not knowing what to say. She did not look up at him. Finally, he went outside, led his horse some distance from the house, and tied it where the grass was plentiful. With the saddle for a pillow, he curled up in his blanket and watched the stars until he fell asleep.
In the morning, the hut still stood in Thamber Meadow, but when he called her name, she did not answer. He tried the door. It was not locked, and so he went in. The supper dishes were still on the table, and he took them to the brook to wash, dried them with a cloth from the cupboard, and put them away. He saw that the golden tapestry was complete, and he leaned close to peer at the village, the mountains, the river. From one angle, the golden sunlight seemed to glint on the water as if the current were actually moving within the weave.
At the couch, he stacked all the cushions atop one another, pushing them hard against the tapestry, and they reached as high as a tiny path just visible in the gold. He knelt on them and spoke the First Evolution of Mazirian’s Diminution, but doll-size he was still too large and had to use the spell a second time. This time, the cushion was a vast plain stretching behind him, and he could leap from its edge to the path, through a membrane thin as a soap bubble.
Ariventa surrounded him, bathing him in golden light. The village was farther off than he expected, but he reached it at last and marveled at its dwellings, every one as small as Lith’s own but made of precious metal, reflecting the golden light with dazzling intensity.
Among the closed doors and shuttered windows was not a single sign of life.
He found Lith in the village square, sitting on a golden bench, her hands folded on her knee. He sat down beside her.
“They are all gone,” she said. “Everyone I knew, everyone who called me family. Everyone who lived here. Gone.” She was staring down at her hands.
“Perhaps they are farther down the river. Or in the mountains.”
She shook her head.
“How can you be certain?”
“This is my land. I am very certain.”
“Then Lady Lith…come back to my world.”
Slowly, she turned her head and looked at him with her great golden eyes. She seemed older suddenly, fine lines showing at the corners of those eyes and dark smudges beneath. Or perhaps, he thought, that was only because she had been awake all night. “Ariventa is mine,” she said. “I will not abandon it.”
“But if no one is here—”
“I will not abandon it!” she shouted, and she slapped him full across the face, her nails raking his cheek like so many talons. “Go away! Ariventa is mine!”
He leaped up, one hand pressed against the starting blood. “I only meant to help you.”
“Go away, boy!”
Without another word, he began to back down the golden path, and at the edge of the village, he turned and ran. By the time he burst through the tapestry, his lungs were afire, and he fell to his knees, gasping, on the plain that was the cushion. Two repetitions of the Second Evolution restored his full height, and he rolled to the floor. When he looked up at the tapestry, it had already dwindled to the size of his thumb, and a moment later, it disappeared entirely. Around him, the house began to shake as in a high wind, and he was barely able to stumble out the door before the entire place collapsed into a pile of rubble.
Two nights later, he was at Miir, and this time Rianna was waiting for him at the gate.
“Is it over?” she asked as he handed his reins to the groom.
“Yes,” he murmured.
“Truly over?”
He nodded.
“Good. Now you can begin to wait for me.”
“To wait for you?”
She tucked her hand into the bend of his elbow. “To grow up, of course.” She smiled with just a corner of her mouth. “Come along now. We’ve saved some supper for you. With no mushrooms at all.”
He took a deep breath and answered her smile with his own. Together, they walked into Castle Miir.
Afterword:
I first read Jack Vance’s fiction when I was around ten years old. I was working my way through my older brother’s science fiction collection, picking up whatever looked interesting, when I reached his cache of pulp magazines: a handful of coverless copies of Planet, Space, and Startling. The stories sucked me right in, especially three of them: a Brackett, a Williamson…and Vance’s “Planet of the Damned,” a kind of mean-streets space opera featuring one of his trademark enigmatic imperious women. I realized I wanted to read a lot more stories like this one. However, back then Vance books seemed hard to come by. By the time I was a junior in high school, I’d read only a couple more of his novels and a scattering of his shorter fiction. And then I found The Dying Earth.
In spite of the fact that it was a legendary book, known to every dyed-in-the-wool fantasy fan, I had never heard of it. But the byline alone was enough to make me dig up 75 cents for that Lancer paperback with the odd leathery cover. Only many years later did I learn that this was its first printing since the scarce 1950 Hillman edition. I can’t say I read it; rather, I inhaled it. It was fantasy, it was science fiction; it was a wonderful amalgam of the two. I was sixteen, already collecting rejection slips from the magazines, and I realized I’d found the target I should aim at. I couldn’t duplicate Vance, of course. But when I finally wrote my first Alaric story half a dozen years later, my mantra was “Think Jack Vance,” and so it has remained throughout that series. Echoes of The Dying Earth also crop up elsewhere in my fiction. Sometimes I’m surprised to recognize them, years later, and I’m reminded once more of how much Vance has influenced my writing.
So, when I was invited to join this voyage back to the Dying Earth, it wasn’t possible for me to say no. And not because I thought it would be easy: you don’t assume the cape of The Master without trepidation. It’s been a special challenge to revisit the esoteric sunset world that Jack Vance minted half a century ago, but in the end, an exceedingly rewarding one. For this is a world—of danger, wonder, and delight—that has been impressed on our imaginations as few others have.
Songs of the Dying Earth Page 33