Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle

by Peter S. Beagle

  “Hold our friend up to see him. Watch what happens.” For a while, afterward, she tried to forget how grudgingly she had reached into her coat pocket and slowly brought her cupped hand up again, into the light. Farrell shifted position, moving close on her right to block any possible glimpse of the unicorn. It posed on Julie’s palm, head high, three legs splayed slightly for balance, and one forefoot proudly curled (exactly like every unicorn I ever drew when I was young, she thought). She looked around quickly—half afraid of being observed, half wishing it—and raised her hand to bring the unicorn level with the dim little figure of the hermit.

  Three things happened then. The unicorn uttered a harsh, achingly plain cry of recognition and longing, momentarily silencing the Brueghel lecturer around the corner. At the same time, a different sound, low and disquieting, like a sleeper’s teeth grinding together, seemed to come either from the frame enclosing the tapestry or the glass over it. The third occurrence was that something she could not see, nor ever after describe to Farrell, gripped Julie’s right wrist so strongly that she cried out herself and almost dropped the unicorn to the gallery floor. She braced it with her free hand as it scrambled for purchase, the carpet-tack horn glowing like abalone shell.

  “What is it, what’s the matter?” Farrell demanded. He made clumsily to hold her, but she shook him away. Whatever had her wrist tightened its clamp, feeling nothing at all like a human hand, but rather as though the air itself were turning to stone—as though one part of her were being buried while the rest stood helplessly by. Her fingers could yet move, enough to hold the unicorn safe; but there was no resisting the force that was pushing her arm back down toward the tapestry foreground, back to the knight and the squire, the mincing damsel and the strangling garden. They want it. It is theirs. Give it to them. They want it.

  “Fat fucking chance, buster,” she said loudly. Her right hand was almost numb, but she felt the unicorn rearing in her palm, felt its rage shock through her stone arm, and watched from very far away as the bright horn touched the tapestry frame.

  Almost silently, the glass shattered. There was only one small hole at first, popping into view just above the squire’s lumpy face; then the cracks went spidering across the entire surface, making a tiny scratching sound, like mice in the walls. One by one, quite deliberately, the pieces of glass began to fall out of the frame, to splinter again on the hardwood floor.

  With the first fragment, Julie’s arm was her own once more, freezing cold and barely controllable, but free. She lurched forward, off-balance, and might easily have shoved the unicorn back into the garden after all. But Farrell caught her, steadying her hand as she raised it to the shelter of the forest and the face under the trees.

  The unicorn turned its head. Julie caught the brilliant purple glance out of the air and tucked it away in herself, to keep for later. She could hear voices approaching now, and quick, officious footsteps that didn’t sound like those of an art historian. As briskly as she might have shooed one of NMC’s kittens from underfoot, she said, in the language that sounded like Japanese, “Go on, then, go. Go home.”

  She never actually saw the unicorn flow from her hand into the tapestry. Whenever she tried to make herself recall the moment, memory dutifully producing a rainbow flash or a melting movie-dissolve passage between worlds, irritable honesty told memory to put a sock in it. There was never anything more than herself standing in a lot of broken glass for the second time in two days, with a faint chill in her right arm, hearing Farrell’s eloquently indignant voice denying to guards, docents and lecturers alike that either of them had laid a hand on this third-rate Belgian throw rug. He was still expounding a theory involving cool recycled air on the outside of the glass and warm condensation within as they were escorted all the way to the parking lot. When Julie praised his passionate inventiveness, he only growled, “Maybe that’s the way it really was. How do I know?”

  But she knew without asking that he had seen what she had seen: the pale shadow peering back at them from its sanctuary in the wood, and the opaline glimmer of a horn under the hermit’s hand. Knight, lady and squire—one another’s prisoners now, eternally—remained exactly where they were.

  That night neither Farrell nor Julie slept at all. They lay silently close, peacefully wide-awake, companionably solitary, listening to her beloved Black-Forest-tourist-trash cuckoo clock strike the hours. In the morning Farrell said it was because NMC had carried on so, roaming the apartment endlessly in search of her lost nursling. But Julie answered, “We didn’t need to sleep. We needed to be quiet and tell ourselves what happened to us. To hear the story.”

  Farrell was staring blankly into the open refrigerator, as he had been for some time. “I’m still not sure what happened. I get right up to the place where you lifted it up so it could see its little hermit buddy, and then your arm… I can’t ever figure that part. What the hell was it that had hold of you?”

  “I don’t see how we’ll ever know,” she said. “It could have been them, those three—some force they were able to put out together that almost made me put the unicorn back with them, in the garden.” She shivered briefly, then slipped past him to take out the eggs, milk and smoked salmon he had vaguely been seeking, and close the refrigerator door.

  Farrell shook his head slowly. “They weren’t real. Not like the unicorn. Even your grandmother couldn’t have brought one of them to life on this side. Colored thread, that’s all they were. The hermit, the monk, whatever—I don’t know, Jewel.”

  “I don’t know either,” she said. “Listen. Listen, I’ll tell you what I think I think. Maybe whoever wove that tapestry meant to trap a unicorn, meant to keep it penned up there forever. Not a wicked wizard, nothing like that, just the weaver, the artist. It’s the way we are, we all want to paint or write or play something so for once it’ll stay painted, stay played, stay put, so it’ll still be alive for us tomorrow, next week, always. Mostly it dies in the night—but now and then, now and then, somebody gets it right. And when you get it right, then it’s real. Even if it doesn’t exist, like a unicorn, if you get it really right….”

  She let the last words trail away. Farrell said, “Garlic. I bet you don’t have any garlic, you never do.” He opened the refrigerator again and rummaged, saying over his shoulder, “So you think it was the weaver himself, herself, grabbing you, from back there in the fifteenth century? Wanting you to put things back the way you found them, the way he had it—the right way?”

  “Maybe.” Julie rubbed her arm unconsciously, though the coldness was long since gone. “Maybe. Too bad for him. Right isn’t absolutely everything.”

  “Garlic is,” Farrell said from the depths of the vegetable bin. Emerging in triumph, brandishing a handful of withered-looking cloves, he added, “That’s my Jewel. Priorities on straight, and a strong but highly negotiable sense of morality. The thing I’ve always loved about you, all these years.”

  Neither of them spoke for some while. Farrell peeled garlic and broke eggs into a bowl, and Julie fed NMC. The omelets were almost done before she said, “We might manage to put up with each other a bit longer than usual this time. Us old guys. I mean, I’ve signed a lease on this place, I can’t go anywhere.”

  “Hand me the cayenne,” Farrell said. “Madame Schumann-Heink can still manage the Bay Bridge these days, but I don’t think I’d try her over the Golden Gate. Your house and the restaurant, that’s about her limit.”

  “You’d probably have to go a bit light on the garlic. Only a bit, that’s all. And I still don’t like people around when I’m working. And I still read in the bathroom.”

  Farrell smiled at her then, brushing gray hair out of his eyes. “That’s all right, there’s always the litter box. Just don’t you go marrying any Brians. Definitely no Brians.”

  “Fair enough,” she said. “Think of it—you could have a real key, and not have to pick the lock every time. Hold still, there’s egg on your forehead.” The omelets got burned.

  T
HE LAST SONG OF SIRIT BYAR

  How much? How much to set down one miserable tale that will cost your chicken wrist an hour’s effort at very most? Well, by the stinking armpits of all the gods, if I’d known there was that much profit in sitting in the marketplace scribbling other people’s lives and feelings on bits of hide, I’d have spent some rainy afternoon learning to read and write myself. Twelve copper, we’ll call it. Twelve, and I’ll throw in a sweetener, because I’m a civilized woman under the grease and the hair. I promise not to break your nose, though it’s a great temptation to teach you not to take advantage of strangers, even when they look like what I look like and speak your crackjaw tongue so outlandishly that you’d mimic me to my hog face if you dared. But no, no, sit back down, fair’s fair, a bargain’s a bargain. No broken nose. Sit.

  Now. I want you to write this story, not for my benefit—am I likely to forget the only bloody man who ever meant more than a curse and a fart to me?—but for your own, and for those who yet sing the songs of Sirit Byar. Ah, that caught your ear, didn’t it? Yes, yes, Sirit Byar, that one, the same who sang a king to ruin with a single mocking tune, and then charmed his way out of prison by singing ballads of brave lovers to the hangman’s deaf-mute daughter. Sirit Byar, “the white sheknath,” as they called him out of his hearing—the big, limping, white-haired man who could get four voices going on that antiquated eighteen-course kiit other men could hardly lift, let alone get so much as a jangle out of it. Sirit Byar. Sirit Byar, who could turn arrows with his music, call rock-targs to carry him over mountain rivers, make whiskery old generals dance like children. All trash, that, all marsh-goat shit, like every single other story they tell about him. Write this down. Are you writing?

  Thirty years, more, he’s been gone, and you’d think it a hundred listening to the shit wits who get his songs all wrong and pass them on to fools who never heard the man play. The tales, the things he’s supposed to have said, the gods and heroes they tell you he sang for—believe it, he’d piss himself with laughing to hear such solemn dribble. And then he’d look at me and maybe I’d just catch the twitch at the right corner of his mouth, under the wine-stained white mustache, and he’d say in that barbarous south-coast accent he never lost, “What am I always telling you, big girl? Never bet on anything except human stupidity.” And he’d have limped on.

  I knew Sirit Byar from when I was eleven years old to his death, when I was just past seventeen. No, he didn’t die in my arms—what are you, a bloody bard as well as a mincing scribbler? Yes, I know no one ever learned what became of him—I’ll get to that part when I bloody well get to it. Don’t gape at me like that or I’ll pull your poxy ears off and send them to your mother, whatever kennel she’s in. Write—we’ll be all day at this if you keep on stopping to gape. Gods, what a town—back-country cousin-marriers, the lot of them. Just like home.

  My name is Mircha Del. I was born around Davlo, that’s maybe a hundred miles southwest of Fors na’Shachim. My father was a mountain farmer, clawing a little life from stone and sand, like everybody in this midden-heap. My mother had the good sense to run off as soon as she could after I was born. Never met her, don’t even know if she’s alive or dead. My father used to say she was beautiful, but all you have to do is look at me for the facts of that. Probably the only woman he could get to live with him up there in those starvation hills, and even she couldn’t stand it for long. No need to put all that in—this isn’t about her, or about him either. Now he did die in my arms, by the way, if that interests you. Only time I can remember holding him.

  At the age of eleven, I had my full growth, and I looked just as hulking as I do now. My father once said I was meant for a man, which may be so, though I’d not have been any less ugly with balls and a beard. That’s as may be, leave that out too. What matters is that I already had a man’s strength, or near enough—enough anyway to get a crop in our scabby ground and to break a team of Karakosk horses—you know, those big ones? The ones they raise on meat broth?—to do our plowing. And when our neighbor’s idiot son—yes, a real idiot, who else would have been my playmate even when I was little?—got himself pinned under a fallen tree, they sent for me to lift it off him. He died anyway, mind you, but people took to calling me “the Davlo sheknath” for a while. I told Sirit Byar about that once, the likeness in our nicknames, and he just snorted. He said, “You hated it.” I nodded. Sirit Byar said, “Me, too, always have,” so maybe there was our real likeness. It made me feel better, anyway.

  Well, so. There used to be a tavern just outside Davlo, called the Miller’s Joy. It’s long gone now, but back then it was as lively a pothouse as you could find, with gaming most nights, and usually a proper brawl after, and every kind of entertainment from gamecocks to shukri-fighting, to real Leishai dancers, and sometimes even one of those rock-munching strongmen from down south. My father spent most of his evenings there, and many of his mornings as he got older, so I grew in the habit of walking down to Davlo to fetch him home—carry him, more times than not. And all that’s the long way of telling you how I met Sirit Byar.

  It happened that I tramped into the Miller’s Joy one night to find my father—purely raging I was, too, because our lone miserable rishu was due to calve, and he’d sworn to be home this one night anyway. I delivered the calf myself, no trouble, but there could have been, and now I meant to scorch him for it before all his tavern mates. I could hear their racket a street away, and him bellowing and laughing in the middle of it. Wouldn’t have been the first time I snatched him off a table and out the door for the cold walk home. Grateful he was for it most times, I think—it told him that someone yet cared where he was, and maybe it passed for love, how should I know? He was lonely with my mother gone, and too poor for drink and the whores both, so he made do with me yelling at him.

  But that night there was another sound coming from the old den, and it stopped me in the street. First the fierce thump of a kiit strung with more and heavier courses than the usual, and then the voice, that voice—that harsh, hoarse, tender southern voice, always a breath behind the beat, that voice singing that first song, the first one I ever heard:

  Face it,

  if you’d known what you know today,

  you’d have done the same stupid fucking thing

  anyway….

  Yes, you know it, don’t you, even in my croak? Me, I didn’t even know what I was hearing—I’d never heard anything like that music before, never heard a bard in my life. Bards don’t come to Davlo. There’s nothing for even a carnival jingler in Davlo, never mind someone like Sirit Byar. But there he was.

  He looked up when I pushed the door open. There was a whole sprawl of drunken dirt farmers between us—a few listening to him where he sat cross-legged on a table with the kiit in his lap; most guzzling red ale and bawling their own personal songs—but Sirit Byar saw me. He looked straight across them to where I stood in the doorway: eleven years old, the size of a haywagon and twice as ugly, and mucky as the floor of that taproom besides. He didn’t smile or nod or anything, but just for a moment, playing a quick twirl on the kiit between verses, he said through the noise, “There you are, big girl.” As though he’d been waiting. And then he went back to his song.

  Face it,

  if she’d been fool enough to stay,

  you’d be the same mean, stupid bastard

  anyway….

  There was one man crying, doubled over his table, thumping his head on it and wailing louder than Sirit Byar was singing. And there was a miner from Grebak, just sitting silent, hands clasped together, pulling and squeezing at the big scabby knuckles. As for my father and the rest, it was drinking and fighting and puking all over their friends, like any other night at the Miller’s Joy. The landlord was half-drunk himself, and he kept trying to throw out little Desh Jakani, the farrier, only he wouldn’t go. The three barmaids were all making their own arrangements with anyone who could still stand up and looked likely to have two coppers left in his purse at closing time. B
ut Sirit Byar kept looking at me through the noise and the stink and the flickering haze, and he sang:

  Face it,

  if we all woke up gods one day,

  we’d still treat each other like garbage

  anyway….

  What did he look like? Well, the size of him was what I mostly saw that first night. Really big men are rare still in those Davlo hills—the diet doesn’t breed them, not enough meat, and the country just hammers them low—and Sirit Byar was the biggest man I’d seen in my life. But I’m not talking about high or wide—get this down now—I’m talking about size. There was a color to him, even with his white hair and faded fisherman’s tunic and trews; there was a purpose about him as he sat there singing that made everything and everyone in that roaring tavern small and dim and faraway, that’s what I remember. And all he was, really, was a shaggy, rough-voiced old man—fifty anyway, surely—who sang dirty songs and called me “big girl.” In a way, that’s all he ever was.

  The songs weren’t all dirty, and they weren’t all sad and mean, like that “Face It” one. That first night he sang “Grandmother’s Ghost,” which is just silly and funny, and he sang “The Sand Castles”—you know it?—and “The Ballad of Sailor Lal,” which got even those drunken farmers thumping the tables and yelling out the chorus. And there was a song about a man who married the Fox in the Moon—that’s still my favorite, though he never sang it much. I forgot about my father, I even forgot to sit down. I just stood in the doorway with my mouth hanging open while Sirit Byar sang to me.

  He really could set four voices against each other on that battered old kiit, that’s no legend. Mostly for show, that was, for a finish—what I liked best was when he’d sing a line in one rhythm and the kiit would answer him back in another, and you couldn’t believe they’d come out together at the end, even when you knew they would. Six years traveling with him, and I never got tired of hearing him do that thing with the rhythms.