The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eight

by Jonathan Strahan

  "You are right, Squire Digges," said the boy. "It is without end. Only that would be big enough for God." He looked fallen, pale and distracted. "The cold bests me. I must away, gentlemen."

  "The morrow?" Rosary asked. "We meet before we go?"

  The wordsmith nodded, clasped Rosary's hand briefly and then turned and trundled down the steps. The platform shook and shuddered. Dee stood still and dark for a moment, decided, and then with a swirl, followed.

  Winding down the stairwell past people-smelling bedrooms, through the dungeon of a dining room. The future that awaited them? Out into the paneled room, flickering orange.

  "Young Sir! Stay!"

  The boy looked embarrassed. "Nowhere else to go."

  Such a poor, thin cloak. Was that the dust of Rome on it? Or only Rome wished for so hard that mind-dust fell upon it? But his eyes: full of hope, when I thought to see despair. "Young master. Have you heard of the Brotherhood of Night?"

  Hope suspended like dust, only dust that could see.

  "I see you have not, for which I am thankful. We are a brotherhood devoted to these new studies late from Germany and Denmark, now Austria and Italia. None of us can move, let alone publish, without suspicion. That man Vesuvius is as much spy as guide, the Pope's factotum. How, young Guillermus, would you like to see Brahe's island of philosophy, in sight of great Elsinore? Uraniborg, city of the heavens, though in fact given over to the muse of a study that has late been revived. And all this by a man with a golden nose. Would you like to see again your starry twin Galileo? See Rome, Verona, Athens? Not Carthage, not possible, don't say that in good company again. But Spain, possible now. The courtship of Great Elizabeth by Philip makes travel even there approved and safe."

  "My… I'm an actor. I used to play women."

  "You still do." Dee's grim smile lengthened. "Men like Vesuvius dismiss you. Bah! Religion is destroying itself. The Protestants prevent the old Passion Plays, and in their stead grow you and Marlowe. You write the history of tragic kings. That has not happened since the Greeks."

  Guy shook his head. "Ask Kit to do this."

  He is, thought Dee, a good, faithful, fragile boy. And something in his thin shoulders tells me that he's contemplating going into Orders. That must be stopped.

  Dee said aloud, "Kit draws enemies." The boy's eyes stared into his. "Men who want to kill him. They love you."

  Out of cold policy, Dee took the boy into his arms and kissed him full on the lips, held him, and then pushed him back, to survey the results in the creature's eyes: yes: something soft, something steel.

  Guy said, "You taste of gunpowder."

  "You would still be able to wright your poetry. Send it to Kit in packets to furnish out the plays. In any case he will be undone, caught up in these Watchmen unless we hide him. As you might well be undone if you stay here and miss your chance to see the world blossom. Move for us and write it down. And learn, boy, learn! See where Caesar walked; breathe the scents of Athens's forest. Go to high Elsinore."

  Shakespere stood with his eyes closed. The old house crackled and turned about them. The world was breaking. "Are there tales in Denmark of tragic kings?"

  Dr. Dee nodded. "And things as yet undreamt of." He took up his long staff and the black cloak that was taller than himself. He put his arm around the slender shoulders and said, "Riverwalk with me."

  The door shut tight behind them, and only then did Bessie come to open it.

  Outside, white carpeted everything, and Bessie stepped into the hush. Somehow it was snowing again, though the sky overhead was clear. She kicked snow off the stone step and sat down, safe and invisible. It looked as if the stars themselves were falling in flakes. The idea made her giggle. She saw thistledown: stars were made of dandelion stuff.

  As so often once it starts to snow, the air felt warmer. The blanket of white would be melted by morning; if she were abed now she'd have missed it. So she warmed the stone step by sitting on it, and let the snow tingle her fingertips. She scooped up a ridge of it and tasted: cold and fresh, sweeter than well water.

  She looked up, and snow streaked past her face like stars. Her stomach turned over and it felt as if she were falling upward, flying into heaven where there would be angels. She could see the angels clearly; they'd be tall and thin with white hair because they were so old, but no wrinkles, with the bodies of men and the faces of women. The thought made her giggle, for it was a bit naughty trying to picture angels. She lifted up her feet, which made her feel even more like she was flying.

  * * *

  An hour later and Guy came back to find her still seated on the step.

  "Hello, Bessie." He dropped down next to her and held up his own pink-fingered ridge of snow. "It's like eating starlight."

  She gurgled with the fun of it and grabbed her knees and grinned at him. She was missing a tooth. "Did you see the old gent'man home?"

  "Aye. He wants me to go to Denmark. He'll pay."

  "Oooh! You'll be off then!"

  He hugged his knees too and rested his head on them, saying nothing.

  She nudged him. "Oh. You should go. Chance won't come again."

  "I said I would think on it. He wants me to spy. Like Kit. I'd have to carry a knife."

  "You should and all. Round here." She nudged him again. "Wouldn't want you hurt."

  "You're a good lass, Bessie."

  "Aye," wistfully, as if being good had done her no good in return. He followed her eyeline up into the heavens, that had been so dreary and cold. The light of stars sparkled in her eyes and she had a sweet face: long nosed, with a tiny mouth like a little girl, stray hair escaping her kerchief, a smudge of ash on her face. He leaned forward and kissed her.

  "Hmm," she said happily and snuggled in. These were the people he wanted to make happy; give them songs, dances, young blades, fine ladies in all their brocade, and kings halfway up the stairs to God.

  "What do you see when you look at stars, Bessie?"

  She made a gurgling laugh from deep within. "You know when the sun shines on snow and there's bits on it? Other times it's like I've got something in my eye, like I'm crying. But right now, I'm flying through 'em. Shooting past!"

  "Are you on a ship?" He glimpsed it, like the royal barge all red and gold, bearing Queen Elizabeth through the Milky Way, which wound with a silver current. Bessie sat on the figurehead, kicking her heels.

  "Oh, I don't know!"

  "Like Sir Walter Raleigh with a great wind filling the sails."

  "That'll be it," she said and kicked her heels. She leaned forward for another kiss, and he gave it to her, and the rising of her breath felt like sails.

  "Wind so strong we're lifted up from the seas, and we hang like the moon in the air." He could see the sails fill, and a storm wave that tossed them free of the sea, up into the sky, away from whatever it was held them to the Earth. "We'll land on the moon first, beaching in sand. It's always sunny there, no clouds. We'll have taken salt pork and hardtack."

  "Oh no, we'll take lovely food with us. We'll have beer and cold roast beef."

  "And we'll make colonies like in the Caribbean now, on Mars, and then Jupiter. They'll make rum there out of a new kind of metal. We'll go beyond to the stars."

  Bessie said, "There'll be Moors on Mars."

  Shakespere blinked. She was a marvel. They all were, that's why he wrote for them. He loved them.

  That old man: like the Greeks had done, he said. Their great new thing that he and Kit were doing. And the others, even miserable old Greene; their Edwards and their Henrys. Mad old John Dee had made them sound old-fashioned, moldy from the grave. Bessie didn't care about the past. She was traveling to Araby on Mars.

  So why write those old things from the grammar school? Write something that was part of the explosion in the world.

  I need to bestir myself. I need to learn; I can turn their numbers into worlds, such as Bessie sees, where stars are not crystals, where the moon is a beach of gravel and ice.

  Dee
would be gone by dawn. He and the Danes were sailing. Were the Danes still in the house? If they were he could leave with them.

  As if jabbed, Guy sat up. "Bessie, I'm going to go."

  "I knew you would," she said, her face dim with pleasure for him.

  Go to that island of philosophy, be there with Rosary; he liked Rosie, wanted to kiss him too – and Rosie could explain the numbers. Guy jittered up to his feet, slipping on the slush. He saw Fortune: a salmon shooting away under the water. He nipped forward, gave Bessie a kiss on the cheek, and ran into the house, shouting, "Squire. My good sirs!"

  From inside the house came thumps and racketing and shouts, the Squire bellowing "Take this coat!" and the Danes howling with laughter. Outside, it started to snow again, drifting past Bessie's face.

  Well, thought Bessie, I never had him really.

  She was falling between stars again on a silver ship shaped like a swan with wings that whistled. They docked on a comet that was made not of fire, but ice; and they danced a jig on it and set it spinning with the lightness of their feet; and they went on until clouds of angels flew about them with voices like starlings and the voyagers wouldn't have to die because they already were in Heaven, and on the prow stood Good Queen Bess in silver armor and long red hair, but Good Queen Bess was her.

  Shakespere's next play was called A Midwinter's Nonesuch on Mars.

  THE SLEEPER AND THE SPINDLE

  Neil Gaiman

  Neil Gaiman (www.neilgaiman.com) was born in England and worked as a freelance journalist before co-editing Ghastly Beyond Belief (with Kim Newman) and writing Don't Panic: The Official Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion. He started writing comics with Violent Cases, and established himself as one of the most important comics writers of his generation with award-winning series The Sandman. His first novel, Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett), appeared in 1991, and was followed by Neverwhere, Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, Anansi Boys, and The Graveyard Book. His most recent book is major novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane. Gaiman's work has won the Caldecott, Newbery, Hugo, World Fantasy, Bram Stoker, Locus, Geffen, International Horror Guild, Mythopoeic and Will Eisner Comic Industry awards.

  It was the closest kingdom to the queen's, as the crow flies, but not even the crows flew it. The high mountain range that served as the border between the two kingdoms discouraged crows as much as it discouraged people, and it was considered unpassable.

  More than one enterprising merchant, on each side of the mountains, had commissioned folk to hunt for the mountain pass that would, if it were there, have made a rich man or woman of anyone who controlled it. The silks of Dorimar could have been in Kanselaire in weeks, in months, not years. But there was no such pass to be found and so, although the two kingdoms shared a common border, no travelers crossed from one kingdom to the next.

  Even the dwarfs, who were tough, and hardy, and composed of magic as much as of flesh and blood, could not go over the mountain range.

  This was not a problem for the dwarfs. They did not go over the mountain range. They went under it.

  Three dwarfs were traveling as swiftly as one through the dark paths beneath the mountains.

  "Hurry! Hurry!" said the dwarf in the rear. "We have to buy her the finest silken cloth in Dorimar. If we do not hurry, perhaps it will be sold, and we will be forced to buy her the second-finest cloth."

  "We know! We know!" said the dwarf in the front. "And we shall buy her a case to carry the cloth back in, so it will remain perfectly clean and untouched by dust."

  The dwarf in the middle said nothing. He was holding his stone tightly, not dropping it or losing it, and was concentrating on nothing else but this. The stone was a ruby, rough-hewn from the rock and the size of a hen's egg. It would be worth a kingdom when cut and set, and would be easily exchanged for the finest silks of Dorimar.

  It had not occurred to the dwarfs to give the young queen anything they had dug themselves from beneath the earth. That would have been too easy, too routine. It's the distance that makes a gift magical, so the dwarfs believed.

  The queen woke early that morning.

  "A week from today," she said aloud. "A week from today, I shall be married."

  She wondered how she would feel to be a married woman.

  It seemed both unlikely and extremely final. It would be the end of her life, she decided, if life was a time of choices. In a week from now she would have no choices. She would reign over her people. She would have children. Perhaps she would die in childbirth, perhaps she would die as an old woman, or in battle. But the path to her death, heartbeat by heartbeat, would be inevitable.

  She could hear the carpenters in the meadows beneath the castle, building the seats that would allow her people to watch her marry. Each hammer blow sounded like a dull pounding of a huge heart.

  The three dwarfs scrambled out of a hole in the side of the riverbank, and clambered up into the meadow, one, two, three. They climbed to the top of a granite outcrop, stretched, kicked, jumped, and stretched themselves once more. Then they sprinted north, toward the cluster of low buildings that made the village of Giff, and in particular to the village inn.

  The innkeeper was their friend: they had brought him a bottle of Kanselaire wine – deep red, sweet and rich, and nothing like the sharp, pale wines of those parts – as they always did. He would feed them, and send them on their way, and advise them.

  The innkeeper, chest as huge as his barrels, with a beard as bushy and as orange as a fox's brush, was in the taproom. It was early in the morning, and on the dwarfs' previous visits at that time of day the room had been empty, but now there must have been thirty people in that place, and not a one of them looked happy.

  The dwarfs, who had expected to sidle in to an empty taproom, found all eyes upon them.

  "Goodmaster Foxen," said the tallest dwarf to the innkeeper.

  "Lads," said the innkeeper, who thought that the dwarfs were boys, for all that they were four, perhaps five times his age, "I know you travel the mountain passes. We need to get out of here."

  "What's happening?" said the smallest of the dwarfs.

  "Sleep!" said the sot by the window.

  "Plague!" said a finely dressed woman.

  "Doom!" exclaimed a tinker, his saucepans rattling as he spoke. "Doom is coming!"

  "We travel to the capital," said the tallest dwarf, who was no bigger than a child, and had no beard. "Is there plague in the capital?"

  "It is not plague," said the sot by the window, whose beard was long and gray, and stained yellow with beer and wine. "It is sleep, I tell you."

  "How can sleep be a plague?" asked the smallest dwarf, who was also beardless.

  "A witch!" said the sot.

  "A bad fairy," corrected a fat-faced man.

  "She was an enchantress, as I heard it," interposed the pot girl.

  "Whatever she was," said the sot, "she was not invited to a birthing celebration."

  "That's all tosh," said the tinker. "She would have cursed the princess whether she'd been invited to the naming-day party or not. She was one of those forest witches, driven to the margins a thousand years ago, and a bad lot. She cursed the babe at birth, such that when the girl was eighteen she would prick her finger and sleep forever."

  The fat-faced man wiped his forehead. He was sweating, although it was not warm. "As I heard it, she was going to die, but another fairy, a good one this time, commuted her magical death sentence to one of sleep. Magical sleep," he added.

  "So," said the sot. "She pricked her finger on something-or-other. And she fell asleep. And the other people in the castle – the lord and the lady, the butcher, baker, milkmaid, lady-in-waiting – all of them slept, as she slept. None of them have aged a day since they closed their eyes."

  "There were roses," said the pot girl. "Roses that grew up around the castle. And the forest grew thicker, until it became impassible. This was, what, a hundred years ago?"

  "Sixty. Perhaps eighty," said a woman wh
o had not spoken until now. "I know, because my aunt Letitia remembered it happening, when she was a girl, and she was no more than seventy when she died of the bloody flux, and that was only five years ago come Summer's End."

  "...and brave men," continued the pot girl, "aye, and brave women too, they say, have attempted to travel to the Forest of Acaire, to the castle at its heart, to wake the princess, and, in waking her, to wake all the sleepers, but each and every one of those heroes ended their lives lost in the forest, murdered by bandits, or impaled upon the thorns of the rose bushes that encircle the castle –"

  "Wake her how?" asked the middle-sized dwarf, hand still clutching his rock, for he thought in essentials.

  "The usual method," said the pot girl, and she blushed. "Or so the tales have it."

  "Right," said the tallest dwarf, who was also beardless. "So, bowl of cold water poured on the face and a cry of 'Wakey! Wakey!'?"

  "A kiss," said the sot. "But nobody has ever got that close. They've been trying for sixty years or more. They say the witch –"

  "Fairy," said the fat man.

  "Enchantress," corrected the pot girl.

  "Whatever she is," said the sot. "She's still there. That's what they say. If you get that close. If you make it through the roses, she'll be waiting for you. She's old as the hills, evil as a snake, all malevolence and magic and death."

  The smallest dwarf tipped his head on one side. "So, there's a sleeping woman in a castle, and perhaps a witch or fairy there with her. Why is there also a plague?"

  "Over the last year," said the fat-faced man. "It started a year ago, in the north, beyond the capital. I heard about it first from travelers coming from Stede, which is near the Forest of Acaire."

  "People fell asleep in the towns," said the pot girl.

  "Lots of people fall asleep," said the tallest dwarf. Dwarfs sleep rarely: twice a year at most, for several weeks at a time, but he had slept enough in his long lifetime that he did not regard sleep as anything special or unusual.

  "They fall asleep whatever they are doing, and they do not wake up," said the sot. "Look at us. We fled the towns to come here. We have brothers and sisters, wives and children, sleeping now in their houses or cowsheds, at their workbenches. All of us."