Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  The youth was eager, and they began at once. With his hand upon a strong young arm for support when needed, Zalazar felt confident that his old limbs and heart would serve him through the climb.

  They stopped at the foot of an old rock slide to rest, and to drink from a high spring there that the old man knew about. The midsummer grass grew lush around the water source, and with a sudden concern for the mundane, Zalazar pointed this out to the boy as a good place to bring the flocks. Then, after they had rested in the shade of a rock for a little longer, the real climb began. It went more easily for Zalazar than he had expected, because he had help at the harder places. They spoke rarely. He was saving his breath, and anyway, he did not want to talk or even think much about what they were going to discover. This reluctance was born not of fear, but of an almost childish and still growing anticipation. Whatever else, there was going to be magic in his life again, a vast new store of magic, ebullient and overflowing—and feeding the magic, of course, a small ocean at least of mana. Maybe with a supply like that, there would be enough left over to let an old man use some for himself . . . unless it were all used up, maintaining that altered cloud, before they got to it . . .

  Zalazar walked and climbed a little faster. Mana from somewhere was around him already in the air, tantalizingly faint, like the first warm wind from the south before the snow has melted, but there indubitably, like spring.

  It was obvious to the old man that his companion, even encumbered as he was by bow and quiver on his back and the small lyre at his belt, could have clambered on ahead to get a quick look at the wonders. But the youth stayed patiently at the old man’s side. The bright young eyes, though, were for the most part fixed on ahead. Maybe, Zalazar thought, looking at the other speculatively, he’s a little more frightened than he wants to admit.

  Maybe I am, too, he added to himself. But I am certainly going on up there, nevertheless.

  At about midday they reached what was now the mountaintop. It was a bright new tableland, about half a kilometer across, and as flat now as a certain parade ground that the old man could remember. The sight also made Zalazar think imaginatively of the stump of some giant’s neck or limb; it was rimmed with soil and growth resembling scurfy skin, boned and veined with white rocks and red toward the middle, and it bubbled here and there with pure new springs, the blood of Earth.

  From a little distance, the raw new surface looked preternaturally smooth. But when you were really near, close enough to bend down and touch the faint new warmth of it, you could see that the surface left by the mighty plane was not that smooth. It was no more level, perhaps, than it might have been if made by a small army of men with hand tools, provided they had been well supervised and induced to try.

  The foot trail had brought them up the west side of what was left of the mountain. The strange cloud in its long, killing glide had come down also from the west, and had carried the whole mass of the mountaintop off with it to the east. Not far, though. For now, from his newly gained vantage upon the western rim of the new tabletop, Zalazar could see the cloud again.

  It was no more than a kilometer or so away, looking like some giant, snow white, not-quite-rigid dish. It was tilted almost on edge, and it was half sunken into the valley on the mountain’s far side, so that the place where Zalazar stood was just about on a horizontal level with the enormous dish’s center.

  “Come,” he said to his young companion, and immediately led the way forward across the smoothed-off rock. The cloud ahead of them was stirring continually, like a sail in a faint breeze, and Zalazar realized that the bulk of it must be still partially airborne. Probably the lower curve of its circular rim was resting or dragging on the floor of the valley below, like the basket of a balloon ready to take off. In his youth, Zalazar had seen balloons, as well as magic and parade grounds. In his youth he had seen much.

  As he walked, the raw mana rose all around him from the rawly opened earth. It was a maddeningly subtle emanation, like ancient perfume, or warm air from an oven used yesterday to bake the finest bread. Zalazar inhaled it like a starving man, with mind and memory as well as lungs. It wasn’t enough, he told himself, to really do anything with. But it was quite enough to make him remember what the world had once been like, and what his own role in the world had been.

  At another time, under different conditions, such a fragrance of mana might have been enough to make the old man weep. But not now, with the wonder of the cloud visible just ahead. It seemed to be waiting for him. Zalazar felt no inclination to dawdle, as he sniffed the air nostalgically.

  There was movement on the planed ground just before his feet. Looking down without breaking stride, Zalazar beheld small creatures that had once been living, then petrified into the mountain’s fabric by the slow failure of the world’s mana, now stirring with gropings back toward life. Under his sandaled foot he felt the purl of a new spring, almost alive. The sensation was gone in an instant, but it jarred him into noticing how quick his own strides had suddenly become, as if he too were already on the way to rejuvenation.

  When they reached the eastern edge of the tabletop, Zalazar found he could look almost straight down to where a newly created slope of talus began far below. From the fringes of this great mass of rubble that had been a mountaintop, giant trees, freshly slain or crippled by the landslide, jutted out here and there at deathly angles. The dust of the enormous crash was still persisting faintly in the breeze, and Zalazar thought he could still hear the last withdrawing echoes of its roar . . .

  “Grandfather, look!”

  Zalazar raised his head quickly, to see the tilted lens-shape of the gigantic cloud bestirring itself with new apparent purpose. Half rolling on its circular rim, which dragged new scars into the valley’s grassy skin below, and half lurching sideways, it was slowly, ponderously making its way back toward the mountain and the two who watched it.

  The cloud also appeared to be shrinking slightly. Mass in the form of vapor was fuming and boiling away from the vast gentle convexities of its sides. There were also sidewise gouts of rain or spray, that woke in Zalazar the memory of ocean waterspouts. Thunder grumbled. Or was it only the cloud’s weight, scraping at the ground? The extremity of the round, mountain-chopping rim looked hard and deadly as a scimitar. Then from the rim inwards the appearance of the enchanted cloudstuff altered gradually, until at the hub of the great wheel a dullard might have thought it only natural.

  Another wheel turn of a few degrees. Another thunderous lurch. And suddenly the cloud was a hundred meters closer than before. Someone or something was maneuvering it.

  “Grandfather?”

  Zalazar spoke in answer to the anxious tone. “It won’t do us a bit of good to try to run away.” His own voice was cheerful, not fatalistic. The good feeling that he had about the cloud had grown stronger, if anything, the nearer he got to it. Maybe his prescient sense, long dormant, had been awakened into something like acuity by the faint accession of mana from the newly opened earth. He could tell that the mana in the cloud itself was vastly stronger. “We don’t have to be afraid, lad. They don’t mean us any harm.”

  “They?”

  “There’s someone inside that cloud. If you can still call it a cloud, as much as it’s been changed.”

  “Inside it? Who could that be?”

  Zalazar gestured his ignorance. He felt sure that the cloud was inhabited, without being able to say how he knew, or even beginning to understand how such a thing could be. Wizards had been known to ride on clouds, of course, with a minimum of alteration in the material. But to alter one to this extent . . .

  The cloud, meanwhile, continued to work its way closer. Turn, slide, ponderous hop, gigantic bump, and scrape. It was now only about a hundred meters beyond the edge of the cliff. And now it appeared that something new was going to happen.

  The tilted, slowly oscillating wall that was the cloudside closest to the cliff had developed a rolling boil quite near its center. Zalazar judged that this hub of wh
ite disturbance was only slightly bigger than a man. After a few moments of development, during which time the whole cloud-mass slid majestically still closer to the cliff, the hub blew out in a hard but silent puff of vapor. Where it had been was now an opening, an arched doorway into the pale interior of the cloud.

  A figure in human shape, that of a woman nobly dressed, appeared an instant later in this doorway. Zalazar, in the first moment that he looked directly at her, was struck with awe. In that moment all the day’s earlier marvels shrank down, for him, to dimensions hardly greater than the ordinary; they had been but fitting prologue. This was the great true wonder.

  He went down at once upon one knee, averting his gaze from the personage before him. And without raising his eyes he put out a hand, and tugged fiercely at his grandson’s sleeve until the boy had knelt down, too.

  Then the woman who was standing in the doorway called to them. Her voice was very clear, and it seemed to the old man that he had been waiting all his years to hear that call. Still, the words in themselves were certainly prosaic enough. “You men!” she cried. “I ask your help.”

  Probably ask was not the most accurate word she could have chosen. Zalazar heard himself babbling some reply immediately, some extravagant promise whose exact wording he could not recall a moment later. Not that it mattered, probably. Commitment had been demanded and given.

  His pledge once made, he found that he could raise his eyes again. Still the huge cloud was easing closer to the cliff, in little bumps and starts. Its lower flange was continually bending and flowing, making slow thunder against the talus far below, a roaring rearrangement of the fallen rock.

  “I am Je,” the dazzlingly beautiful woman called to them in an imperious voice. Her robes were rich blue, brown, and an ermine that made the cloud itself look gray. “It is written that you two are the men I need to find. Who are you?”

  The terrible beauty of her face was no more than a score of meters distant now. Again Zalazar had to look away from its full glory. “I am Zalazar, mighty Je,” he answered, in a breaking voice. “I am only a poor man. And this is my innocent grandson—Bormanus.” For a moment he had had to search to find the name. “Take pity on us!”

  “I mean to take pity on the world, instead, and use you as may be necessary for the world’s good,” the goddess answered. “But what worthier fate can mortals hope for? Look at me, both of you.”

  Zalazar raised his eyes again. The woman’s countenance was once more bearable. Even as he looked, she turned her head as if to speak or otherwise communicate with someone else behind her in the cloud. Zalazar could see in there part of a corridor, and also a portion of some kind of room, all lined in brightness. The white interior walls and overhead were all shifting slightly and continually in their outlines, in a way that suggested unaltered cloudstuff. But the changes were never more than slight, the large-scale shapes remaining as stable as those of a wooden house. And the lady stood always upright upon a perfectly level deck, despite the vast oscillations of the cloud, and its turning as it shifted ever closer to the cliff.

  Her piercing gaze returned to Zalazar. “You are an old man, mortal—at first glance, not good for much. But I see that there is hidden value in you. You may stand up.”

  He got slowly to his feet. “My lady Je, it is true that once my hands knew power. But the long death of the world has crippled me.”

  The goddess’s anger flared at him like a flame. “Speak not to me of death! I am no mere mortal subject to Thanatos.” Her figure, as terrible as that of any warrior, as female as any succubus of love, was now no more than five meters from Zalazar’s half-closed eyes. Her voice rang as clearly and commandingly as before. Yet, mixed with its power was a tone of doomed helplessness, and this tone frightened Zalazar on a deeper level even than did her implied threat.

  “Lady,” he murmured, “I can but try. Whatever help you need, I will attempt to give it.”

  “Certainly you will. And willingly. If in the old times your hands knew power, as you say, then you will try hard and risk much to bring the old times back again. You will be glad to hazard what little of good your life may have left in it now. Is it not so?”

  Zalazar could only sign agreement, wordlessly.

  “And the lad with you, your grandson. It he your apprentice, too? Have you given him any training?”

  “In tending flocks, no more. In magic?” The old man gestured helplessness with gnarled hands. “In magic, great lady Je? How could I have? Everywhere that we have lived, the world is dead. Or so close to utter deadness that—”

  “I have said that you must not speak to me of death! I will not warn you again. Now, it is written that both of you must come aboard. Yes, both; there will be use for both.” And, as if the goddess were piloting and powering the cloud with her will alone, the whole mass of it now tilted gently, bringing her spotless doorway within easy stepping distance of the lip of rock.

  Now Zalazar and Bormanus with him were surrounded by whiteness, sealed into it as if by mounds of glowing cotton. While cushioned firmness served their feet as floor or deck, as level always for them as for their divine guide, who walked ahead. Whiteness opened itself ahead of her, and sealed itself again when Bormanus had passed, walking close on Zalazar’s heels.

  The grinding of tormented rock and earth below could no longer be heard as the Lady Je, her robes of ermine and ultramarine and brown swirling with her long strides, led them through the cloud. Almost, there was no sound at all. Maybe a little wind, Zalazar decided, very faint and sounding far away. He had the feeling that the cloud, its power and purpose somehow regained, had risen quickly from the scarred valley and was once more swiftly airborne.

  Je came to a sudden halt in the soft, pearly silence, and stretched forth her arms. Around her an open space, a room, swiftly began to define itself. In moments there had grown an intricately formed chamber, as high as a large temple, in which she stood like a statue, with her two puny mortal figures in attendance.

  Then Zalazar saw that there was one other in the room with them. He muttered something, and heard Bormanus at his side give a quick intake of breath.

  The bier or altar at the room’s far end supported a figure that might almost have been a gray statue of a tormented man, done on a heroic scale. The figure was youthful, powerful, naked. With limbs contorted, it lay twisted on one side. The head was turned in a god’s agony so that the short beard jutted vertically.

  But it was not a statue. And Zalazar could tell, within a moment of first seeing it, that the sleep that held it was not quite—or not yet—the sleep of death. He had been forbidden to mention death to Je again, and he would not do so.

  With a double gesture she beckoned both mortals to cross the room with her to stand beside the figure. While Zalazar was wondering what he ought to say or do, his own right hand moved out, without his willing it, as if to touch the statue-man. Je, he saw, observed this, but she said nothing; and with a great effort of his will Zalazar forced his own arm back to his side. Meanwhile, Bormanus, at his side, was standing still, staring, as if unable to move or speak at all.

  Je spoke now as if angry and disappointed. “So, what buried value have you, old man? If you can be of no help in freeing my ally, then why has it been ordained for you to be here?”

  “Lady, how should I know?” Zalazar burst out. “I am sorry to disappoint you. I knew something, once, of magic. But . . .” As for even understanding the forces that could bind a god like this, let alone trying to undo them . . . Zalazar could only gesture helplessly. At last he found words. “Great lady Je, I do not even know who this is.”

  “Call him Phaeton.”

  “Ah, great gods,” Zalazar muttered, shocked and near despair.

  “Yes, mortal, indeed we are. As well you knew when you first saw us.”

  “Yes, I knew . . . indeed.” In fact, he had thought that all the gods were long dead, or departed from the world of humankind. “And why is he—like this?”

  “He
has fallen in battle, mortal. I and he and others have laid siege to Cloudholm, and it has been a long and bitter fight. We seek to free his father, Helios, who lies trapped in the same kind of enchantment there. Through Helios’s entrapment, the world of old is dying. Have you heard of Cloudholm, old mortal? Among men it is not often named.”

  “Ah. I have heard something. Long ago . . .”

  “It stifles the mana-rain that Helios cast ever on the Earth. With a fleet of cloudships like this one, we hurled ourselves upon its battlements—and were defeated. Most of the old gods lie now in tormented slumber, far above. A few have switched sides willingly. And all our ships save this one were destroyed.”

  “How could they dare?” The words burst from Bormanus, the first he had uttered since boarding the cloud-vessel. Then he stuttered, as Je’s eyes burned at him: “I mean, who would dare try to destroy such ships? And who would have the power to do it?”

  The goddess looked at the boy a moment longer, then reached out and took him by the hand. “Lend me your mortal fingers here. Let us see if they will serve to drain enchantment off.” Bormanus appeared to be trying to draw back, but his hand, like a baby’s, was brought out forcibly to touch the statue-figure’s arm. And Zalazar’s hand went out on its own once more. This time he could not keep it back, or perhaps he did not dare to try. His fingers spread on rounded arm-muscle, thicker by far than his own thigh. The touch of the figure made him think more of frozen snake than flesh of god. And now, Zalazar felt faint with sudden terror. Something, some great power, was urging the freezing near-death to desert its present captive and be content with Zalazar and Bormanus instead. But that mighty urging was mightily opposed, and came to nothing. At last, far above Zalazar’s head, as if between proud kings disputing across some infant’s cradle, a truce was reached. For the moment. He was able to withdraw his hand unharmed, and watched as Bormanus did the same.

  The goddess Je sighed. It was a world-weary sound, close to defeat yet still infinitely stubborn. “And yet I am sure that there is something in you, old man . . . or possibly in your young companion here. Something that in the end will be of very great importance. Something that must be found . . . though I see, now, that you yourselves can hardly be expected to be aware of what it is.”