Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle

by Peter S. Beagle

  The ghost saw them.

  On her plain, unremarkable little face the joy of Richter’s presence, his existence—the fact of him—leaped up like a flame in dry grass. Seeing this recognition, the tall man took her hands between his, bowed over them, and began to cry, almost soundlessly. She drew her hands free and held him close; but over his shoulder her eyes met Jansen’s, and he actually staggered back a pace, shaken by the depth of the sorrow and sympathy—sorrow specifically for him—that he read there. He heard himself saying aloud, in absurd embarrassment, “Hey, it hasn’t been as bad as all that. Really.” But it had been, it had been, and she knew.

  Then she gently released her son, and knelt down beside Gavrilenko, where he lay on his face, hands covering his eyes. With her own hands on his upper arms, she silently coaxed him to face her. Gavrilenko screamed once—not loudly, but in a tone of pure terror, and of resignation to terror as well, like a rabbit unresisting in the clutches of a horned owl. He scrambled to a sitting position, his hands now flat on the ground beside him, face dazed and alien. The ghost commanded his eyes as she had Jansen’s—how long ago?—holding them in thrall to her own, seeing through them and past them, down into uttermost Gavrilenko, his body shaking with the need to hide his eyes again but unable to do so. He whimpered now and then; and still clung to himself.

  By and by he began to speak. “After first death, really is no other. You and me, Henry—you remember us? Two tired, lonely, nervous boys in uniform, pretending to be men, doing job….” He rose slowly to his feet. “I kill so many people since then—you know? Easy, really. Easy. Killings, I am telling you honestly, but no deaths… not after her.” He did meet Zinzi Richter’s quiet eyes then, though again Jansen saw the physical shock spread through his body. He said, “Different, you understand?”

  Jansen asked, “You stayed in the army? No… what, you were KGB?”

  “Oh, please, no KGB anymore,” Gavrilenko reproved him. “In new democratic Russia, FSB—execute you with new democratic pistol. No, Henry, I did my time in private enterprise. Big capitalist, all American values, even before it was common. You would be proud.”

  “The Mafia.” Richter’s voice was tight and thick, for all its evenness. “You worked for the Russian Mafia. You killed people for them.”

  Gavrilenko grinned at him like a skull. “Kill for the Mafia, kill for Mother Russia—what difference? I was an independent contractor, just like American plumber.” He nodded toward Jansen. “I went here, I went there, fix the sink, the toilet, go home, rest tired feet, watch the TV.” He spoke directly to Zinzi Richter now, to no one else in the world. He said, “This is your blessing. You made me so.”

  Something he couldn’t guess at made Jansen look away, and he fancied that he could actually see the darkness moving in around them if he watched it closely enough. From where they stood, nothing was visible now but the tower, the Wall in one direction, and the dark wall itself in the other… and after studying it, when he looked again on Gavrilenko he saw something that he could not have been expected to recognize, yet felt he should have seen from the moment he and Richter had entered the guardroom. With a sudden surge of wonder and pity, he whispered, “Leonid. You’re like her….” He was trembling, and it was hard to get words out, or to remember what words were.

  Gavrilenko shook his head slowly, heavily. “Not like her. She is long dead, forever young, forever innocent. While Leonid Leonidovich Nikolai Gavrilenko lies in Petersburg hospital, Walther PPK bullet in coward’s brain.” He grimaced in bitter disgust. “So many heads, so many bullets, one to a customer… only Gavrilenko, pig-drunk, old, sick, shaking with fear, cannot even kill himself decently… coward, coward, pathetic….” There were a few more words, all Russian.

  The ghost of Zinzi Richter spoke then, without making a sound. Picking up her blue duffel bag, she looked at the three of them and mouthed a single word, rounding it out with great care and precision. Jansen could not read her lips, but Richter nodded. His mother gestured broadly, intensely with her free arm: pointing first toward the crouching, stalking darkness, then toward the Wall, unmistakably inviting them all to run with her while there was still time. She mouthed the silent word a second time.

  Jansen and Richter both sensed Gavrilenko’s decision before he even turned. They clutched at his arms, but he broke free with a frantic, wordless cry and dashed away from them, lunging and stumbling back toward the East Germany of their memories. Richter, quicker off the mark than Jansen, almost caught him at the inner wall; astonishingly, the old Russian hurled himself at it like a gymnast, leaping to catch the top, and was up and over it and straight into the darkness without hesitating. He vanished instantly, like a match-flame blown out, leaving no sound or glance behind him.

  Richter stopped, staring at the edge.

  Jansen joined him, and they stood together in silence for some minutes. The darkness, if it did not retreat, at least advanced no further. Jansen said finally, “You really think it was him that brought us here? It wasn’t your mother?”

  “I have no idea,” Richter said, turning away from the void. “Maybe we all did it.”

  Jansen looked at the ghost of Zinzi Richter, waiting for them by the guard tower, forming for a third time the word he could not understand. “What is that?” he demanded of Richter. “What’s that she’s saying?”

  Richter smiled. “Freiheit. German for freedom.”

  Abruptly Zinzi Richter turned and began to run, heading once again for the Death Strip, and Richter ran after her, his face as bright and determined as the face of any small boy racing with his mother. Jansen came panting in the rear, no better conditioned than the average sixty-six-year-old kitchen remodeler, but resolved not to be left behind in this place, to find his way back to a maternity clinic in Klamath Falls, Oregon. Arl… Arl… I’ll be right there….

  The spotlights came on, and the gunfire began.

  Crossing the Death Strip, Jansen placed his feet exactly in Zinzi Richter’s tracks, as her son was doing, and hunched down as low as he could, even as the rifle shots kicked up gravel close enough to sting his face and twitch at his shirt. He tried to shut the awareness out of his consciousness. Real bullets? Memories of bullets? Ghost bullets, fired by ghosts back in 1963—God! And then, despite a sudden blossoming fear of dying where he didn’t belong, a single thought consumed him. It’s not enough to follow. I’ve got to get there first.

  Just as Gavrilenko’s old legs and big old hands had taken him over the inner wall without assistance, so Jansen’s legs, when called upon, somehow responded with speed that did not belong to him, and never had. He passed up a surprised Richter and forcefully crowded past Zinzi Richter as she set her ladder’s hooks, stopping only long enough to pull the wire cutters from her duffel before starting to climb. Up the shaking rungs, atop the Wall, he worked faster than she could have, snapping wires real enough to tear his face and hands in half a dozen places. Then they were there with him, the mother and the son, and he swept them before him through the gap he had created, holding their hands as they eased themselves over the other side. He turned his back on the gunfire, covering both his charges with the width of his own torso, breath pulled deep into his lungs as if he could somehow expand to shield not just these two, but everything in the world. He felt their fingers slip away from his and he smiled.

  The rifle fire kept up, but Jansen didn’t move, thinking shit, if the Krauts didn’t fire in damn platoons, they’d never hit anybody.

  He heard the one sharp crack they say you never hear, and closed his eyes.

  Arl, hugely pregnant and wheezing with the effort, was trying to keep him from falling out of bed in what must be the clinic’s emergency ward. There were half a dozen beds around him, most empty, a couple with curtains drawn around them and nurses coming and going. Jansen caught himself, scrambled crabwise back onto the bed, said, “What the Christ?” and tried to sit up. Arl pushed him back down, hard.

  “No, you don’t—you stay put, old man.” Th
ere was relief in her voice—he caught that, having looked long for such things—but also the same dull rancor and plain dislike that colored their every conversation, even the most casual. “You’re staying right here until Dr. Chaudhry comes.”

  “What happened? The baby?”

  “The baby’s all right. I’m all right too, thanks.” That wasn’t just him, he knew; everybody asked about the baby first, and it was starting to piss her off as she neared her term. She said, “They found you on the floor in the waiting room. They thought it might be a stroke.”

  “Oh, Jesus. I just fell asleep, that’s all. Been staying up too late watching old movies. I’m fine, shit’s sake.” He looked at his hands and wrists, saw no barbed-wire wounds, and started to get up, but she pushed him down again, and he could feel the real fury in her hands.

  “You stay there, damn it. A lot of people think they’re just fine after a stroke, and they get on their feet, take a few steps, and bang, gone for good this time.” Her face was sweaty with effort and anger; but he saw fear there as well, and heard it in her voice. “On good days I can just about stand you, and on the bad ones…. God, do you have any idea?”

  “Yes,” Jansen said. “Matter of fact.”

  Arl drew a long breath. “But when I saw you….” Her voice caught, and she started again. “I realized right there, I am not ready to have you gone, I’m not. Not you too, it’s too damn much, do you understand me? Don’t you dare die on me, not now. Not fucking now.”

  Jansen found her hand on the bed, and put his hand over it. She did not respond, but she did not pull the hand away. “You look like me,” he said. “Gracie’s all Elly, but you’ve got my chin, and my nose, and my cheekbones. Must have really hated that, huh?”

  The smile was thin and elusive, but it was a smile. “I hated my whole face. Most girls do, but I had reasons.” She looked down at their hands together. “I even hated my hands, because they’re too much like yours. I’m okay with them now, though, more or less.”

  Jansen said, “You’re like me. That’s what you hate.” Her eyes widened in outrage, and she jerked away, but he held tightly to her hand. “What I mean, you’re like the good me. The best of me. The me I was supposed to be, before things… just happened. You understand what I’m saying?”

  Arl was beginning to frown in an odd way, staring at him. “You sure you haven’t had a stroke? I wish the doctor’d get here. You talked while you were out, I couldn’t make anything out of it, except it was really weird. Like you were having a weird dream.”

  “Not a stroke,” Jansen said. “Not a dream.” He did not try to sit up again, but kept his eyes fixed on her. He said, “Just someplace I needed to be. Don’t ask me about it right now, and I won’t ask you about stuff you don’t want to tell me, okay?” She did not reply, but her hand turned slightly under his, and a couple of fingers more or less intertwined. “And I promise I won’t die until you’re finished yelling at me. Fair?”

  Arl nodded. “But this doesn’t mean I actually like you. Just so you know that.”

  “Fair,” Jansen said again. He did withdraw his hand from hers now.

  Dr. Chaudhry came in, a brisk young Bengali with a smile that was not brisk, but thoughtful, almost dreamy. He sat down on the opposite side of the bed from Arl and said, “Well, I hear that you have been frightening your good daughter quite badly. Not very considerate, Mr. Jansen.”

  “I’m not a very considerate person,” Jansen said. “My family could tell you.”

  “This is something you must change right away,” Dr. Chaudhry said, trying to look severe and not succeeding. “You are going to be a grandfather, you know. You will have responsibilities.”

  “Yeah,” Jansen said. He looked up at the lights on the ceiling then, and let Dr. Chaudhry count his pulse.

  THE TALE OF JUNKO AND SAYURI

  In japan, very, very, long ago, when almost anybody you met on the road might turn out to be a god or a demon, there was a young man named Junko. That name can mean “genuine” in Japanese, or “pure,” or “obedient,” and he was all of those things then. He served the great daimyo Lord Kuroda, lord of much of southern Honshu, as Chief Huntsman, and was privileged to live in the lord’s castle itself, rather than in any of the outer structures, the yagura. In addition, he was handsome and amiable, and all the ladies of the court were aware of him. But he had no notion of this, which only added to his charm. He was a very serious young man.

  He was also a commoner, born of the poorest folk in a poor village, which meant that he had not the right even to a family name, nor even to be called Junko-san as a mark of respect. In most courts of that time, he would never have been permitted to look straight into the eyes of a samurai, let alone to live so intimately among them. But the Lord Kuroda was an unusual man, with his own sense of humor, his own ideas of what constituted a samurai, and with a doubtless lamentable tendency to treat everyone equally. This was generally blamed on his peculiar horoscope.

  Now at this time, it often seemed as though half of Japan were forever at war with the other half. The mighty private armies of the daimyos marched and galloped up and down the land, leaving peasant villages and great fortresses alike smoldering behind them as they pleased. The shogun at Kyoto might well issue his edicts from time to time, but the shogunate had not then the power that it was to seize much later; so for the most part his threats went unheeded, and no peace treaty endured for long. The Lord Kuroda held himself and his own people aside from war as much as he could, believing it tedious, pointless and utterly impractical, but even he found it wise to keep an army of retainers. And the poor in other less fortunate prefectures replanted and built their houses again, and said among themselves that Buddha and the kami—the many gods of Shinto—alike slept.

  One cold winter, when game was particularly scarce, Junko went out hunting for his master. Friends would gladly have come with him, but everyone knew that Junko preferred to hunt alone. He was polite about it, as always, but he felt that the other courtiers made too much noise and frightened away the winter-white deer and rabbits and wild pigs that he was stalking. He himself moved as quietly—even pulling a sledge behind him—as any fish in a stream, or any bird in the air, and he never came home empty-handed.

  On this day, as Amaterasu, the sun, was drowsing down the western sky, Junko also was starting back to the Lord Kuroda’s castle. His sledge was laden with a fat stag, and a pig as well, and Junko knew that another kill would load the sledge too heavily for his strength. All the same, he could not resist loosing one last arrow at a second wild pig that had broken the ice on a frozen stream, and was greedily drinking there, ignoring everything but the water. It was too good a chance to pass up, and Junko stood very still, took a deep breath—then let it out, just a little bit, as archers will do—and let his arrow fly.

  It may have been that his hands were cold, or that the pig moved slightly at the last moment, or even that the growing twilight deceived Junko’s eye, though that seems unlikely. At all events, he missed his mark—the arrow hissed past the pig’s left ear, sending the animal off in a panicky scramble through the brush, out of sight and range in an instant—but he hit something. Something at the very edge of the water gave a small, sad cry, thrashed violently in the weeds there for a moment, and then fell silent and still.

  Junko frowned, annoyed with himself; he had been especially proud of the fact that he never needed more than one arrow to bring down his prey. Well, whatever little creature he had accidentally wounded, it was his duty to put it quickly out of its pain, since an honorable man should never inflict unnecessary suffering. He went forward carefully, his boots sinking into the wet earth.

  He found it lying half-in, half-out of the stream: an otter, with his arrow still in his flank. It was conscious, but not trying to drag itself away—it only looked at him out of dazed dark eyes and made no sound, not even when he knelt beside it and drew his knife to cut its throat. It looked at him—nothing more.

  “It would
be such a pity to ruin such fur with blood,” he thought. “Perhaps I could make a tippet out of it for my master’s wife.” He put the knife away slowly and lifted the otter in his arms, preparing to break its neck with one swift twist. The otter’s sharp teeth could surely have taken off a finger through the heavy mittens, but it struggled not at all, though Junko could feel the captive heart beating wildly against him. When he closed his free hand on the creature’s neck, the panting breath, so softly desperate, made his wrist tingle strangely.

  “So beautiful,” he said aloud in the darkening air. He had never had any special feeling about animals: they were good to eat or they weren’t good to eat, though he did rather admire the shimmering grace of fish and the cool stare of a fox. But the otter, hurt and helpless between his hands, made him feel as though he were the one wounded, somehow. “Beautiful,” he whispered again, and very carefully and slowly he began to withdraw the arrow.

  When Junko arrived back at his lord’s castle, it was full dark and the otter lay under his shirt, warm against his belly. He delivered his kill, to be taken off to the great kitchens, gravely accepted the thanks due him, and hurried away to the meager quarters granted him at the castle as soon as it was correct to do so. There he laid the otter on a ragged old cloak that his sister had given him when he was a boy, and knelt beside the creature to study it in lamplight. The wound was no worse than it had been, and no better, though the blood had stopped flowing. He gave the otter water in a little clay dish, but it sniffed feebly at it without drinking; when he put his hand gently on the arrow wound, he could feel the fever already building.

  “Well,” he said to the otter, “all I know to do is to treat you as I did my little brother, the time he fell on the ploughshare. No biting, now.” With his dagger, he trimmed the oily brown fur around the injury; with a rag dipped in hot nihonshu, which others call sake, he cleaned the area over and over; and with herbal infusions whose use he had learned from his mother’s mother, he did his best to draw the infection. Through it all the otter never stirred or protested, but watched him steadily as he labored to undo the damage he had caused. He sang softly now and then, old nonsensical children’s songs, hardly knowing he was doing it, and now and then the otter cocked an ear, seeming to listen.