Songs of the Dying Earth

by Gardner Dozois

  “Of course, you are relea—”

  The entity disappeared.

  “—sed.”

  Dringo’s encystment was gone but the hollow in the earth created by its removal was barely large enough to turn his shoulders. Cugel’s encystment was as before. The features of his father were easier discernable now. He reached out and touched its surface. Though his hand could not penetrate it, neither could he feel it. Was Cugel aware? He was soon to be very surprised if he was not. Dringo rehearsed the required six lines to expel himself to the surface. It was increasingly more difficult to breath and the heat was unbearable. He confidently recited the words.

  Dringo was ousted like a living magma. He lay on wet grass too weak to move other than to suck in the cool air. It was night; or had the sun gone out? At the moment it did not concern him. Eventually, he stood on his unstable legs and slowly paced in the darkness. Before he lost his nerve, he uttered the identical pervulsions with the addition of three critical words.

  The ground shivered, then quaked, then erupted as Cugel was ejected to a spot not three feet away from where Dringo stood. Cugel lay motionless for a disheartening length of time. In the gloom Dringo could see that his chest did rise and fall; but was there a sane man in the body?

  Abruptly, Cugel sat up. “I’m thirsty,” were the first words Dringo heard spoken by his father.

  “Can you stand?” asked Dringo. “We will have to go in search of water.”

  Cugel tried to lift himself using an arm to lever himself up but failed. “A moment, first. I think my time beneath the earth is longer than I supposed.” He lifted his head towards the sky. “Is it night or has the sun cast its last shadow on the dying earth?”

  Dringo looked heavenward also. “I think it is night only. We have twilight enough to dimly see each other and the ground beneath us, but we will know in a few hours.”

  Cugel laughed. “Just so!” He squinted at Dringo. “Are you a cruel joke played on me by Iucounu? You appear to be a replica of me, though not so dashing.” Without waiting for an answer, he slowly turned on his side and rolled to a crouch, then rose up to a standing position. “Well, if you are a demon sent to mimic me and raise false hope, at least lead me to some water before you inter me again.”

  Dringo answered, “I assure you I am of flesh and blood. But you are astute in suspecting the malicious frolic of Iucounu. More than you can imagine, Cugel.”

  “You know me by name! More reason to suspect a foul hand at play.”

  Dringo ignored the comment and turned to face the downward slope of the hillock upon which they had found themselves expelled. “Come, let us seek some water. We have much to talk about.”

  They stumbled down the small hill in the darkness. Twice Cugel stopped and sat, the second time saying, “I will wait here while you search. You seem more sprightly than I. You may even find a suitable container for returning the refreshment, thus eliminating the need for both of us to traverse these difficult slopes.” Dringo disregarded Cugel’s complaints and continued on. The terrain kept leading lower to eventually funnel them into a line of fragrant Myrhadian trees that flanked a small arroyo from which they could hear the gurgle of a brook. Both of them cupped hand after hand of the sweet water until their stomachs were distended gourds.

  They sat together on a broad, flat rock above the water line.

  Cugel, in a much improved humor, smiled and said to Dringo, “Your resemblance to my own is remarkable. Who are you, if not a minion of Iucounu?”

  Dringo shook his head at Cugel’s opacity. “You can’t fathom another possibility?”

  Cugel sat mutely with thin, pursed lips.

  Dringo realized that his impatience with his father was more a matter of anxiety than frustration. “I am your son!” he blurted.

  He watched Cugel’s face closely for a reaction. It was not what he expected.

  Cugel laughed uncontrollably. “That is an impossibility. You are too close to my own age. Iucounu, show yourself. Your trickery lacks coherency.” He leaned forward to study Dringo’s features. Suddenly, he raged: “Clarity has reasserted itself. Iucounu, you have robbed me of more years than I ever imagined! The Spell of Forlorn Encystment has maddened me! I thought myself buried a year or perhaps two, but this? It is too much. The Law of Equipoise has been tilted to an extreme that demands equally severe punition.”

  Finally he calmed. He looked again towards Dringo. “So I have a son. Who is your mother? Perhaps you can refresh my memory?”

  “My mother’s name was Ammadine. Sadly, she is gone now.”

  Cugel shook is head. “No, I don’t remember. However, it is an appealing name. Was she pretty?”

  “She was one of the Seventeen Virgins of Symnathis. They are chosen for their beauty and purity, and their arrival at the Grand Pageant is the signal event of the gala. The caravan that was to deliver the young virgins was one year guarded by a young man calling himself Cugel the Clever. Only two arrived as maidens. My mother was not one of them.”

  A smile or a smirk crossed Cugel’s face. Dringo couldn’t tell in the faint light. “Yes, I remember. A misunderstanding of responsibility. I was not given an opportunity to enlighten the Grand Thearch. The caravan arrived without incident, and I would rate my conduct at a value well above the remuneration agreed upon, which I might add was never forthcoming.” He paused and reflected. “Was your mother light of hair with amber-grey eyes?”

  Dringo answered, “No.”

  “Ahh. Was she short with dark hair and breasts that swelled—”

  “My mother,” Dringo interrupted, “was a young girl who lost her high station and gave birth to a bastard son who grew up without a father…” His voice faltered.

  Cugel nodded. “This I regret. You should consider that during this time Iucounu was exacting harsh punishments upon me for motives both unreasonable in their pettiness, and lack of proportionality, considering the absence of ill will on my part.” His tone lost its flippancy. “I had thought myself finally free of Iucounu, but he found a way to return from his dissolution. Whether from the Overworld, the Underworld or the Demon-world, I know not. But that fact remains. And his revenge was the Spell of Forlorn Encystment.”

  Dringo couldn’t help but look at his father somewhat differently, “I too, know first-hand the brutality of Iucounu, father.”

  Cugel relaxed back on the rock. “Tell me your story.”

  When Dringo had finished, Cugel said to him, “We have much more to tell each other, and I think you have a great deal to teach me of magic. It is settled then. We will join forces to plan the ultimate prank on the Laughing Magician.”

  They clasped hands in their oath. The dawn light had brightened the sky and the red orb crested the very hill they had earlier descended.

  “I see the sun still rises,” said Cugel to his son. “It appears that this tired old earth has one more day in it. Let us get started.”

  THE END

  Afterword:

  I discovered Jack Vance at the very beginning of my love affair with fantasy and science fiction. His Vandals of the Void, published by the John C. Winston Company, was either the second or the third hardcover book I ever bought; but it was primarily through the Ace Doubles, with their unique branding element of two novels published back-to-back and their imaginative cover art by such greats as Jack Gaughan, Ed Emshwiller, and Ed Valigursky, that I started developing a true appreciation of Jack’s remarkable skills. Having already worked my way through the Winston juveniles and the Robert Heinlein young adult novels at the local library, I hungered for more sophisticated reading. The Ace Doubles at thirty-five cents each were the perfect affordable next step. Big Planet and Slaves of the Klau; The Dragon Masters and The Five Gold Bands—now that was more what I was looking for!

  For a young teen boy, though, his books were a challenge. I found myself using the dictionary much more often than normal. It took a couple of his books for me to realize that he even made up words, for cripes sake! His characters
had weird names and often they were not very admirable. I was a DC comic guy and I was used to my Superheroes being, well, Superheroes. Still, there was something about this Jack Vance that appealed to me. It was the publication of The Eyes of the Overworld that made Jack Vance one of my favorite authors. It is the second of the four Dying Earth novels, and the first that introduces the character, Cugel the Clever. I mark that moment as the first time I read a book and actually savored the words that made up the story. Jack Vance’s novels had always transported me to strange worlds full of colors and languages and customs, but now for the first time I realized how he did it. There was a reason I had to occasionally look up a word. There was a purpose in Jack Vance making up a word.

  Mark Twain wrote: “The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter—it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

  Jack Vance was asked once at a SF convention how he came up with the name “Cugel,” or, for that matter, any of his character’s names. He answered, “I come up with a name and roll it around on my tongue to see how it sounds.” Jack Vance has been called the Shakespeare of science fiction. I roll that around with my tongue and it sounds just right.

  —Byron Tetrick

  Tanith Lee

  Evillo the Uncunning

  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, Don’t Bite The Sun, Night’s Master, The Storm Lord, Sung In Shadow, Volkhavaar, Anackire. Night’s Sorceries, 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, Metallic Love, No Flame But Mine, Piratica: Singular Girl’s Adventure Upon the High Seas, and a sequel to Piratica, called Piratica 2: Return to Parrot Island. Her numerous short stories have been collected in Red As Blood, Tamastara, The Gorgon, Dreams of Dark and Light, Nightshades, and The 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 The Secret Books of Paradys and a new collection, Tempting the Gods. She lives with her husband in the south of England.

  Filling your head with stories of wild adventure and heroic deeds is a tempting way to pass the time when you live in a place as boring as the tiny charmless village of Ratgrad, but as Evillo the Uncunning is about to learn, trying to duplicate those adventures can get you into more trouble than you’re really prepared to handle…

  Evillo the Uncunning

  Tanith Lee

  1: Above Derna

  Some way up behind the steep forested canyon wherethrough flows the slender River Derna, lies a depressing landscape dotted with small villages. One evening, a male child of less than two years was found wandering in the vicinity. Smothered by the dim red dying of the light, among tall clumps of spite-grass and blackly spreading thorn-willow, the infant might easily have gone unnoticed. But it is possible his gleaming golden hair may have been mistaken for something valuable in the metallic way.

  The fellow who did so, by name Swind, having learned his error, still carried the infant to the adjacent village of Ratgrad.

  “Ho, Swind: Could you not have left that thing where it was? Where is your charity? No doubt some passing hungry gib or ghoul would have welcomed it.”

  “Tush,” said Swind sullenly, dumping the crying boy in the dirt. “In the era of sun’s death, life is ever valuable and must be preserved—so that it may also be punished for the insolence of persisting.”

  Accordingly Swind and his wife, Slannt, were given the child to raise, which they did following the village tradition. They starved the boy and rained constant blows upon him, these actions ornamented by witty verbal abuse in the village mode. Despite such care, he grew to the age of eighteen. He was well-made and handsome, with a tawny skin, large dark eyes, and his hair still golden under the filth Slannt and others diligently rubbed in it.

  His given name was Blurkel. But by the time of his seventh year, he thought nevertheless that he had recalled his real name, which was, he believed, Evillo. Nothing else could he remember of his former life.

  Ratgrad was married to another local village, the equally charmless Plodge. Once every month, the denizens of both villages would meet on a bare rock, known either as Ratplod or Plodrat Spike. There they would sit about a large fire and drink fermented erb berries, next singing various unharmonious songs, and telling stories of the most uninspiring kind.

  Fell the day of the festival.

  To the Spike trooped all Ratgrad, Evillo perforce going with them.

  The celebration proceeded as it always did, becoming more loathesome by the minute. By the hour that the old sun began to crawl to its lair in the west, the Spike and its surrounding shrubland rang to uncouth carroling and eructations.

  Evillo, to escape the attentions of certain unpalatable village maidens, had climbed up a tall lone daobado that spread its bronzy limbs behind the rock. From here, suddenly he beheld a solitary figure walking towards the Spike. Evillo stared with all the power of his dark eyes, thinking perhaps that he imagined what he saw; visitors were infrequent thereabouts. But curiously, as a sunfall red as an over-aged wine of Tanvilkat obscured the scene, the figure grew ever more apparent. It had the shape of a man, but was closely robed and hooded.

  Something thundered in Evillo’s ears: his heart.

  Just then, the village look-out, who was that evening the master-hacker Fawp, also noted an arrival and let out a yowl.

  Startled silence beset the revellers. Many jumped drunkenly to their feet, and every eye fixed upon the grey-cloaked stranger.

  “Stay,’” bellowed Fawp, who had drawn his cleaver. “Proclaim your type and intention.”

  “Also be aware,” added Glak, the carcass-heaver, “while we slay enemies instanter, friends who visit us are required to present a gift.”

  The mysterious figure had drawn near and now spoke in a low and sonorous tone.

  “I am neither enemy nor friend. But I will present a gift.”

  Stupid greed overcame the stupid bravado of the villagers. They pressed forward and now clustered about the stranger as he entered the sphere of firelight.

  Up in the tree, Evillo watched, half waiting for some magic sloughing of disguise, revealing the man to be a frit or other fiend. But the hooded figure did not metamorph into anything else. He came to the fireside and rested himself on a large flat stone. And precisely then, through the mesh of the hood which concealed his face, Evillo fancied that he glimpsed two human eyes that glowed with a mental ability far beyond the average. For a moment, they met his own, and then passed on.

  “Be seated,” said the stranger to the villagers, and such was his authority that each of them at once obeyed. “The gift I offer is modest, but you shall have it. Know then, I am Canja Veck the Fabler. He who is compelled, by a nameless but omnipotent force, to travel the dying earth, and there to recount its stories to any that will hear.”

  It was as if the mindless, drunken clamour had never been. As if the sinking sun had wiped all trace of it away with the last swipe of a wine-soaked sponge. In utter stillness, eyes wide and lips parted, the village folk sat waiting like ensorcelled children. And Evillo with them; he more than all.

  For every hour of that night of ever-unmooned nights, the Fabler told his tales.

  They were by turns swift and fearful, glamorous and enmarvelled, mystic, ribald, hilarious, and of a shocking horror. Canja Veck so controlled his captive audience that none moved more than a muscle, gave no sign of life beyond a blink, a gasp, a sigh or flash of laughter. Drink untasted, fire smouldering low, so they sat. While for Evillo, it was as if at last he had found true reality, the world itself, and it was nothing like the cramped cell he had,
from two years old, been forced to occupy.

  As he outlined the histories of his heroes and heroines, Canja Veck described also the varieties of place that formed a backdrop. Of Ascolais he spoke, and the white, half-ruined city of Kaiin, of Saponid lands, whose golden-eyed peoples dwelled beyond high Fer Aquila. He suggested the oblique Land of the Falling Wall, and wild Kauchique, and such antique metropoli as doomed Olek’hnit, and such occluded and occult regions as the Cobalt Mountains, and that fearsome forest the Lig Thig or Great Erm. He indicated the demonic realm of Jeldred, created only to house evil, which surely it did; Embelyon too, an alter-world the unseeable magician Pandelume had made to conceal himself, whose skies were fluctuant rainbows. And he told of Almery in the south, from whence stalked—less a hero than the transverse of all heroism—Cugel, the self-styled Clever, an arresting person, long of leg, deft of hand, light of finger, blessed by the luck of fiends—and the unluck of one cursed, which two states constantly cancelled each other out. Cugel was, besides, a perfect genius of cunning and razor wit, and also, on ocassion, an utter numbskull.

  At last, the black of night grew threadbare in the east. The red sun pulled itself from sleep and glared upon the world that it must still serve, though itself of more than pensionable age.

  The spellbound villagers slipped from their enchantment.

  They stared eastward to gauge, in the manner of the time, how the solar disc fared. Seeing that it still burned, they looked around again to the rock where Canja Veck had been seated. But he was gone.

  Only Evillo, who had not bothered with the sun, had seen him rise up, shake the dew from his robe, and move silently away. Only Evillo, sliding down the daobado, had dared pursue this mage among story-tellers away from the rock, the villages, and, without a backward glance, down into the cliffy forests above the Derna.