Forever Shores

by Peter McNamara

  Ragnar stumbled to her feet and took Torvald’s feet as William instructed. She did not know or care what he wanted to do. She had brought him to murder. Now she supposed they would dispose of the body.

  The body. They half dragged Tor over to the side of the Longboat which was anchored close to the water and, straining and pushing, heaved him over the edge. Ragnar felt sick at the thumping sound his body made as it landed in the bottom of the boat. She climbed in beside him, gagging at a queer acrid smell as she lifted Torvald’s golden head onto her knees.

  ‘Thorn!’ William called and Ragnar looked up in time to see the seagull stagger hippity-hop over the sand to his feet with a creaking caw of delight. He scooped the bird up and put it in the boat then pushed it off into the water and climbed in beside them. Ragnar stared up at him as he lifted a plastic bottle from the bottom of the boat and tipped what looked like water over Torvald’s unconscious form. Greedy squawked as he was drenched, and the smell was intensified as William sprinkled it over Ragnar’s legs and dress.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It is the test,’ William said, emptying the last of the liquid over himself and the boat.

  Ragnar watched him throw the bottle into the water and rummage in his pockets, before withdrawing something. ‘A test?’ she asked dully.

  William lit a match that flamed the colour of the clouds on the horizon all shot through with the bloody brightness of the sun’s death, and smiled at her.

  ‘Do not be afraid, Princess. It is the last test of courage required by the gods—know that we are worthy to dwell in their realm.’

  ‘William …’ The clouds in Ragnar’s brain dissolved as the match fell onto Torvald’s body. Flame made a feast of him, but he did not move because he was beyond pain.

  She watched the flames play over him and William came to sit beside her. He took her hand, sticky with tears and petrol, in his own thin strong fingers and kissed it reverently.

  ‘What comes will be a moment of pain before the gods pluck us from the crucible.’ He looked down at Torvald. ‘Love was first born where we journey, Princess. Hold fast to that, for all love in this world is but the palest shadow of it. Where we go, love has magical properties and there may be a way to bring him back.’

  ‘We will die …’

  ‘No. It only seems so, else there would be no testing. But hold fast, Ragnar, for you are a princess and the gods are watching.’

  Ragnar wondered if she was mad but as the flames tasted the petrol on her dress and licked along the hem almost teasingly, she felt a surge of hope, for it seemed to her she could hear the brassy call of a horn, peeling out an eldritch welcome for a long-lost princess.

  She stroked Torvald’s face as flame licked flesh, and steeled herself not to scream, for she was a princess among the gods, and she was bringing her beloved home.

  As flame rose around them like a winding sheet, Thorn the hunter lifted himself on crippled wings and flew.

  Players in the Game of Worlds

  Damien Broderick

  There’s a world I know where the women are a head taller than the men, and file their ferocious teeth to points. The men are fierce little guys.

  A different world, but the same, another earth, has luminous rings spread brilliantly across the whole sky, bright as a full moon. Those rings are all that remained of the moon when it fell chaotically too close to the world and got torn apart by tidal forces. There are no people there, only about twenty million different kinds of dinosaurs in a range of sizes and colours. Lots of them are meat-eaters, with shockingly bad breath.

  On a third world, the people are lean and lightly furred. The pale pupils of their eyes are slitted vertically. I believe their remote ancestors, maybe fifteen million years ago, were the great Ice Age cats now extinct in our world. All the apes and humans are extinct in theirs. Has any of them managed the trick of slipping here through the mirrored cracks between the worlds? If so, perhaps they gave rise to legends of vampires or werewolves. I don’t think any of them came here, though. They love the taste of simian blood, which is why the apes and humans are extinct in their earth. We’d have noticed them, trust me.

  On a fourth, the humans are gone, but machines are everywhere. Evolution by other means. Same old, same old, but different. Always different.

  I don’t suppose I have the appearance of a Player in the Game of Worlds. You wouldn’t think it, to look at me. Well, that’s not true, of course, since that’s exactly how I look—but if you knew about us you’d probably expect a Player to resemble premium Bruce Willis, all bruised muscles and weary but romantic hard-bitten sarcasm. Or maybe you’d think we look like those macho but insanely handsome Hollywood guys with ponytails who spend most of the day working up their lats and pecs and biceps, and fine-tuning their flashy karate kicks.

  Nah—I’m just this Aussie walking down the street, booting a loose plastic bottle top into the gutter, hands in my pockets, hair in my eyes, looking a bit wary. Just another graduate student dressed in black, in fashion uniform.

  It’s the first uniform I’ve worn in a decade, since I got marched into the principal’s office for turning up at school in jeans, high-tops and sweat shirt.

  ‘Mr Seebeck,’ the principal started frostily.

  ‘Ms Thieu, that’s pronounced “Zay-bek”,’ I said quietly, standing in front of her desk with my hands joined behind my back. Maybe my hands were a little sweaty. It was easy being nervous around adults when I was a kid.

  She blinked. ‘“Zaybek”, eh? August, what do they call you for short? Gus? Auggie?’

  ‘August,’ I said.

  She blinked again. After a moment she went on smoothly, ‘Where are your family from, August?’

  ‘Australia,’ I told her. Good grief. ‘Fourth generation. My great-great-grandfather was Estonian.’ I paused, and just as she started to say something else, I added, ‘On my father’s side.’

  The principal coughed behind her hand. ‘Yes, obviously, Mr Seebeck. It’s deeply sexist, but society has always preserved the parental name only through the male ancestors.’ Actually, that’s not so obvious once you know about the other worlds, where they do things differently. As a nearly pubescent kid, though, I didn’t know about them, and Ms Thieu certainly didn’t. She just straightened up in her leather chair, considering me with a serious look. ‘However, young man, I haven’t requested you to join me in order to discuss your family history. I want to know why you aren’t in school uniform.’

  ‘I don’t like uniforms,’ twelve-year-old-me said. I wasn’t rude, but I didn’t budge or apologise.

  ‘One of the features of living in a civilised society,’ Ms Thieu informed me, fingers pressed together in a steeple, ‘is that sometimes—often, in fact—we must do things we don’t like.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘You do see what I’m getting at, August?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘School uniforms suck. They just make us instit—, instut—’ I broke off, the word blocked on my tongue.

  The principal looked surprised. ‘Institutionalised? That’s a big word for a …’ She shuffled the papers on her desk, found my records, ‘a twelve-year-old boy. And an inappropriate one, luckily. We are not trying to break your spirit, Mr Seebeck. We don’t wish to turn you into a faceless robot. Far from it. This school’s policy demands that all students wear the same clothes precisely to protect your individuality.’

  I gazed at her in frank disbelief.

  ‘Think about it, August. If everyone could wear anything they liked, the place would turn into a squabbling barn yard. Wealthy children might choose to wear expensive designer outfits. That would make the less privileged feel uncomfortable.’

  Right. And that doesn’t happen already? I said nothing, just looked at the floor, waiting for her to finish and let me return to class.

  It went on for a while, and instead of going back to the class room I was sent home early with a note to my parents, asking them to ensure that I wore appr
opriate uniform items in future. I talked it over with Mum and Dad that night, and they agreed with me: it was my decision. Next day I went back in jeans and polished leather shoes and neatly ironed school shirt. Mr Browning, the arithmetic teacher, was in charge of assembly. When he saw the jeans, he freaked, sent me back to the principal’s office.

  Yack yack, blah blah, yada yada. I just waited it out. I ended up missing three weeks of school, studying happily at home, and Dad and Mum met the school board on five separate occasions. An article appeared in the Advertiser that embarrassed the school, and eventually they just dropped the issue. I wore whatever I wanted after that.

  James Davenport, the class clown, turned up a week later in a taffeta tutu and dancing shoes with pink pompoms, and said it was against the equal rights laws to forbid his free choice of garb. Everyone laughed a lot, and the teachers choked with rage but Ms Thieu decided to let it ride without a word, and three of the fourteen-year-old tough kids tried to beat Davers up and called him a gayboy, but the rest of us stood up for him, to his surprise, and all he copped was a bruised arm. His sister’s dress got mangled. He didn’t wear it again, not that he wanted to, because he’d made his point, and so had I, and school life went on as usual.

  I didn’t know about the different probability worlds back then. I didn’t know about the Tree Yggdrasil. But I did know I was different, not quite like the other guys, not even mad Davers who probably really did have a screw loose. Over the next few years I did my homework and went to class and sailed through most of the material in English and Mathematics and Social Studies and Geography and the dreary rest of it, and watched a lot of TV, and learned to play electric guitar and sang fairly badly in our band Pillar of Salt with three other dudes from the neighbourhood.

  When my parents were killed in a plane crash in Thailand, everything went white and empty for a long time.

  I started back at a different school, in the adjacent state of Victoria, when Mum’s older sister Aunt Miriam became my legal guardian. She lived in Melbourne, nearly a thousand kilometres away from Adelaide. I had to go through the whole uniform thing again, but I guess there must have been a note about that sorry history tucked into the file of records sent across from the previous school. The head of my new centre for involuntary servitude finally shrugged and agreed that dress code was a matter best left to the individual conscience.

  I liked that. Mr Wheeler was a decent guy, and a good football coach. I played a little with the school team, but never really got the hang of it. Guess I’m pretty much a loner, outside of my special buds. That’s okay, too.

  Aunt Miriam fell in love with a violinist, the second chair in the National Orchestra, when I was sixteen and in my second-last year of school. He lived across town in upmarket South Yarra, and I went to live with them for six months in his pleasant but rather cramped apartment, took the long train ride every day to school, but none of us really enjoyed the arrangement. I think I cramped their style, even though I spent most of my time either at the gym, practising with the band, at the library or in my own room. When Itzhak had the chance to go to Tel Aviv for a year, naturally Miriam went with him. They agonised over taking me too, but decided that I’d had enough trauma and moving from place to place in the last few years. Would have been cool with me. Whatever.

  So I ended up for six months in the care of Great-Aunt Tansy, Miriam’s and Mum’s aged aunt, who still lived in a ramshackle old house near the top of a hill in Thornbury, the next suburb over from the one where I’d first stayed with Miriam. That meant I didn’t need to shift schools again—in fact, it was closer.

  Saying that I ended up in her care is misleading; more accurately, Great-Aunt Tansy ended up in my care. That makes it sound as if she were senile. Nothing like that. She was a fine person, Tansy, and I had always been fond of her. It’s just that strange things tended to happen around her.

  Now I know why, of course. But I didn’t then, and for a long time it creeped me the hell out.

  Itzhak was invited to first chair in Chicago at the end of that year, and he and Miriam rented a large place of their own just outside the central business district. I went across the Pacific crammed into economy class for a holiday and stayed for a year, finishing high school. That was the year Kennedy was elected President—John, I mean, son of the war hero Jack, not his Uncle Robert, who had greeted the returning Apollo astronauts although it had been his disgraced nemesis Richard Nixon who’d launched the Moon project. There were plenty of mutters from the Republicans that year at what they denounced as the disgraceful nepotistic sight of one Kennedy all but following another into the White House. Me, I was apolitical, didn’t care for those games. I had enough trouble being taken seriously when I told the kids in my new school that the Australian president had once been a TV quiz champion. But the Honourable Barry Jones seemed to me a good choice for head of state; he knew a damned sight more about science and technology, not to mention cinema and art and history and all the rest, than most of the lawyers and political insiders who jostle for the reins of power in both my own nation and the USA.

  Being the first Aussie that most of my new high school class mates had ever seen in person, I was a novelty item, subject to the sort of attention usually reserved for rock stars or sports heroes. Celebrity life had its merits. I happily abandoned my virginity in the back seat of Tammy Nelson’s fire-engine red Mustang convertible, something I’d never quite managed back home. Somehow, between carousing at senior parties and learning the rules of American football, I managed to graduate with honours, and flew home to kill some time before starting a medical degree at Melbourne University. Great-Aunt Tansy welcomed me back, gave me my old room, then waved me off a week later as I headed for the outback to do a little jackarooing, which is tending huge herds of beef cattle that roam across dry grassland spreads the size of small European nations. It’s not done on horseback these days, not much. Helicopters and four-wheel drives are the preferred method. I learned to round up a few thousand head of cattle at a time from the back of a bounding Suzuki motorbike, and on a blazing 41 degree Celsius Christmas Day I ate ritual damper and rum cake with the other jackaroos and two hotly pursued jillaroos, drinking Bundy rum and Coke and singing western laments. American West, that is. Nothing is more unnerving that hearing three Aboriginal stockmen whose ancestors had dwelled in that part of the country for upward of 50,000 years singing ‘The Streets of Laredo’ in totally unselfconscious American hillbilly accents. That’s how they heard it on the radio, that’s the way they sang it.

  I drove home in the old four-wheel-drive Pajero I’d won on a lucky hand of poker, with a swag of tax-free cash in each of my high-top R.M. Williams boots, and at a drive-through booze shop bought a bottle of Bundy for myself, for old times’ sake, and a bottle of premium sherry for Aunt Tansy. Dugald O’Brien, her old golden Labrador, met me joyously at the gate, tail wagging. I don’t know how he does it; somehow he knows when I’ll be arriving, and welcomes me with his simple, blessed affection.

  ‘Do Good, my man,’ I told him, ‘likewise,’ and scratched his ears, then crouched to give him a proper hug, dropping my swag. The poor chap was growing old, and he limped a little as he followed me into the hallway.

  The comforting smells of Tansy’s home welcomed me in like a warm memory of childhood. It made me embarrassed: I was grimy, and I’m sure I stank like a horse. I found her in the enormous kitchen, gave her a kiss, deferring the hug for later, and told her I was headed upstairs for the shower. She lifted the remote and flipped off her TV set.

  ‘I’m sorry, dear, you can’t.’

  ‘Huh?’ I paused halfway up. I’d driven 1500 kilometres with not much more than fuel and food breaks; I was numb with fatigue, starting to see double.

  Great-Aunt Tansy was cutting her pastry mixture with a metal template shaped like a heart. She looked up at me, eyes wide and watery blue and honest. ‘This is Saturday night.’

  ‘What there is left of it. I know should phone around, catch u
p with people, Tansy, but I’m bone tired. After I’ve have a good soak, I think I’ll just slip into—’

  ‘No, darling, that’s what I’m saying. You can’t have a shower upstairs. Every Saturday night, there’s a corpse in that bathroom.’

  I choked, came all the way down the stairs again rather carefully, not clattering, and poured a cup of coffee, waiting. Tansy did her magic with strawberry jam, popped the tray into the hot oven, began blending a fresh mix for date scones. She made the best jam tarts since Queen of Hearts, which I guess made me the Knave, since I’d pilfered plenty of them over the years. She sat perched on a three-legged stool beside the heavy oak kitchen table, rolling an amorphous lump of putty in flour with an old-fashioned rolling pin. As ever, no conscious effort went into the expert motions of her hands: it was a tantra, as graceful and automatic as I was trying to make my martial arts kata. Absent-minded as an old hen, Great-Aunt Tansy, and twice as industrious.

  After a time, I raised my eyebrows. ‘And that’s why I can’t have a bath tonight? Because you have a dead man in the bath.’ If anyone else had made that comment, I’d have laughed, or said something scathing. But it was Aunt Tansy’s testimony, and she was in her eighties, as fragile as expensive glassware.

  ‘You can use mine, dear, downstairs. In fact, I think you should, and the sooner the better.’ Her white bun of ancient silky hair bobbed. ‘The fact of the matter is, you stink like a polecat.’ I watched her press down on the white, datey dough, and the clean round shapes of the scones came out of that putty and sat snugly on the tray she had waiting for them. I felt the sleepy contentment of that large old eccentric nineteenth-century house closing around me again, and my mind drifted away from her absurd statement. It was easy to forget at Aunt Tansy’s. I yanked myself out of the sleepy mood, and thought of a corpse in a bathroom.