The New Voices of Fantasy

by Peter S. Beagle

  “What is your business here?” was their first question, Sant told me. Sant was skilled as guide and translator both, and through him I explained myself as a scholar and seeker of knowledge, come to observe and learn the truth of them as a glorious people out of time.

  There was some back-and-forth between Sant and the shorter envoy as he worked to communicate my abstract endeavor. He spoke at length, waving back at me several times, and once even opening his purse to display some of the coin I had already paid him. At the end of the exchange the shorter envoy broke into laughter and clapped Sant on the arm, which I took then as an auspicious sign. The tall envoy yoked the tube across his shoulders, hooked his elbows and lazily dangled his hands. The shorter asked me a question, which Sant translated, “What have you brought to trade?”

  I answered that I offered an opportunity to have the story of their faded but still extant glory spread to the wider world. Sant conveyed my meaning, and the envoy laughed again, swinging his head and sprinting a short circuit out into the air and back. The taller one maintained his bored expression. Sant spoke more, but it soon resolved that they were unable to see value in the fame I offered. We were informed that the village would offer provisions and a night’s hospitality to traders only.

  No mention of commercial exchange had been made in any of my texts, nor had the subject been broached by Sant, on whom I relied to have some practical knowledge in those few areas of modern complication I had been unable to research. When I enlisted his services in Reninep, he had been impressed with the extent and depth of the investigations I had conducted into the history of the Hiatha people. I related tale upon tale as I bought us tankards of beer, and found in Sant a most attentive audience. For his part, he said that in his time crossing the Gamal he’d taken many a detour to the Bridge Blower’s territory, knew their tongue, and had ever found them an agreeable people. That he should turn out to have such a crucial gap in his knowledge made me suspect then that my generosity had induced him to accept a position for which he was, in truth, underqualified.

  Still, Sant was a merchant, and so happened to be quite as well provisioned to engage in trade with the Hiatha as if he did have some foreknowledge of this complication. He began to remove items from his pack: bolts of cloth, steel needles, pouches of spice. The Hiatha envoys examined his goods and engaged in some negotiation before selecting their items. Then they turned expectantly to me.

  “Have to pay the toll to get what you came for,” said Sant.

  I considered what I had to trade. Surely this could not be the purpose for which I was destined to need Marta’s quilt; a section of squares in the upper left showed mountains, and human figures silhouetted against the sun, but there were several panels—the shrouded faces, the broken-link chain, the icy feather—whose meanings remained fully opaque. I had not expected to have much use for money, and so left the bulk of my own purse (along with the outstanding half of the fee I’d promised Sant) with a bank in Reninep. All of my other possessions were necessities. I asked Sant if he could not trade for me as well.

  “You bought my knowledge, not my wares,” he said. A man of business, every bone and bulge of him! And since he knew I’d no choice but to buy, his wares came very dear indeed. I did attempt negotiation, but he rebuffed me with his constant, implacable calm. In the end he got out pen and paper, and I wrote him a promissory note for the full, exorbitant amount. I rubbed the signatory tattoo on my forearm to weeping, seared the paper, and fairly felt my pockets lighten as I handed the sheet back to him. The envoys seemed amused by the whole ordeal. Sant allowed them to select more goods, and then they went straight back to their village, while we resumed the more circuitous route. As my donkey bumped along the path, I lamented that I would have only a single day among the Hiatha. It would be impossible, in such a small portion of time, to connect deeply with these strangers. In one day, and without a shared language, it seemed unlikely I would be afforded the easy and pleasurable companionship I had so recently received among Marta’s clan.

  As we approached the village, though, my disappointment gave way to amazement. Never had I seen such a landscape. Viewed up close, the Hiatha settlement was a place where domesticated land abutted wilderness snug as tiles in a mosaic. Raw, untamed crags were interrupted by small patches of farmland, hospitable order that abruptly gave way again to jagged brutality. The terrain was far too rough for aqueducts, but there was no need for them; the Hiatha could situate their terraces in natural spillways. Scratching out life here was palpably impossible, save for people able to make ground from air. As I watched them moving from patch to patch above my head, I was reminded of a Hiatha legend—perhaps contemporaneous with our own tales of the wildersurge—in which a plague of beetles swarms the mountain peaks. They crawl into every crevice and decimate the crops. The Hiatha are able to survive only by building a breath-supported field of soil for their seeds, a place the beetles couldn’t crawl to. For an entire growing season the town works in shifts to keep the crops aloft, crouching on ridges as beetles swarm over their bodies.

  There was a deep cunning within the Hiatha’s primitive simplicity. I resolved then to ask if perhaps this was the village from the legend, if the opportunity arose, but I confess it never did.

  We reached the village two hours later, and were led to an area that Sant identified as the “youth garden.” All around us the mountain was a hive of homes that fronted on the open air. In the youth garden, for the first time, were structures as I was used to recognizing them: flat ground, freestanding buildings with sensible doors and windows, and a wall around the perimeter to prevent falls. This was the area of the village in which children whose talent had not yet matured could stay safely unattended. It was amusing to think that for all my scholarly erudition, for all that the Hiatha envoys had been scarcely able to understand my purpose, I was in some ways like a child to them. The other children of the garden were playing chase games or working at simple crafts. The oldest I saw was a girl of maybe twelve or thirteen, watching the younger ones run and occasionally tripping them with a whistle. She was charming, even with her bare skin, and I caught her eye, then startled her with a loud whistle of my own. She stumbled at the sound, attempting to dodge a blow that wasn’t coming. Her indignant shouts at my trickery were a delight, and made me wish again I had more time to spend. When several of the younger children came over to inspect our donkeys, the whistling girl watched from a distance.

  An older man with ashen hair brought us water, and even knew the word for it! When he proffered the skins he said “water” in the common tongue, clear as anything. I thanked him and asked him how it was he had learned to speak to me. Sant rushed over and explained that some Hiatha had picked up snippets of our language over the years from traders. The grey-haired man’s face betrayed an impatient expression. “Follow,” he said, and led us to a building in the youth garden we could use for rest. Sant immediately unburdened his donkeys and spread his bedroll, seemingly content to nap until it was time to eat. I laid out Marta’s quilt, but reminded him that we were here to absorb Bridge Blower culture. Granted only a single day among them, wasting even a minute would be unconscionable. Sant, in response, said something to the grey-haired man which he declined to translate. The man, for his part, began to inquire about our needed provisions. He and Sant discussed the issue, and I wandered back to the garden to resume my immersion in Hiatha daily life.

  I found that all of the children were grouped at one edge of the garden, chattering excitedly to one another, hopping and tittering. I looked for the whistling girl, but she was gone. I couldn’t see what had aroused the children’s interest. I retrieved my two adult companions, and Sant asked the grey-haired man why they were excited. He spoke to the young ones, then explained that it was because a skink had entered the village, and there was to be a hunt.

  The Gamal skink was a creature I had seen mention of many times in my studies as I prepared for the trip. They are described as being up to five feet long, w
ith blue tongues, pebbled scales, and the ability to both crawl up sheer cliffs with their powerful claws and use the skin between their digits to glide through the air. There are stories of these large carnivores posing a danger to young children, though none of the children in the garden seemed particularly afraid. Perhaps the thrill of seeing a hunt was more potent than the fear of a monstrous lizard.

  The grey-haired man offered to take us to a vantage from which we could observe the hunters more closely. I immediately accepted this offer of a walk across the air with a Bridge Blower. But upon accepting, I had then to find in myself the mental fortitude to go over the wall, when all my instincts said that a step beyond the edge would send me tumbling to a certain death. I closed my eyes and probed with my foot, ignoring the burning alarm from my lower back and trying to let myself believe that there was yet more ground in front of me. I clung to the grey-haired man’s elbow as we walked, eyes shut tight, until he squeezed my own arm to let me know that I was, in fact, once more standing on solid land. Sant, as far as I could tell, remained entirely unperturbed by the experience, and settled himself down between two rows of plants.

  We were on one of the terrace farms. There were hunters, including the tall envoy we had met earlier, running across the air below us, taking aim at something obscured from our vision by the ridge. Then the skink swept into view, all four feet spread like giant fans as it sailed from one cliff face to the next. It was much, much larger than the books had said. Eight feet long, or perhaps even nine. Certainly larger than any of the people hunting it. It slammed into the cliff with astonishing force, and was instantly scurrying up and back down and around in streaking, sinuous curves. Its tongue—brilliant, jewel-blue—slid in and out of its mouth, and it was trailed by scattered explosions of rock dust from darts fired by the Hiatha hunters.

  I observed that the skink was far larger than I had read about in the histories, and the grey-haired man muttered something in response. Sant translated his comment as, “Because we switched places.”

  I asked for clarification, and, after another exchange with the man, Sant said, “Before the Empire, they were the top here. But the top is the skink now,” leaving me more confused than I had been before.

  “The apex predator,” the grey-haired man said. “When we were more populous, we were the apex predator in this region. But now the skink has assumed that niche.” He spoke with a strange accent, but was once again perfectly intelligible to me as he explained that when the Hiatha were more numerous they controlled the skink population, but that now the skinks had grown large, and forgotten their fear of people. He said that the Hiatha no longer hunt them unless they enter the village or seem likely to drive the mountain goats away.

  It was clear that the man’s fluency encompassed more than snippets. I asked how it was he had gained such a facility with the language, but before the grey-haired man could reply, Sant directed our attention back to the hunt, saying, “Take out a few traders every year, they do. But not this one, I think! Watch now!”

  Below us, the Hiatha hunters were moving in ways I had never before imagined. Some of them raced across flat surfaces of air, but others seemed to slide down slopes, or else just fall through the air very slowly, as though sinking through honey. They worked in pairs, one hunter responsible for guiding the path of his partner, and the other tasked with use of the blowgun. The hunters chased the skink back and forth across the chasm, until finally one of them took the beast down in mid-flight. It tumbled limp for a short span before crashing into an invisible butcher’s block of air.

  “Ever you eaten skink?” asked Sant. “Might now get your chance.”

  Marta would have said that as prophesy it lacked ambition, but Sant’s prediction did prove accurate. And it seemed the prospect of the meal, or perhaps the excitement we had watched, stirred the trader’s blood like nothing else. He spoke continuously, of other places he’d been and meals he had eaten, an uncommon rush of recollection that filled the air as the grey-haired man took us across the village again. It was more words in a row than I’d ever heard from him before, and he didn’t stop until after we’d been left in another terrace farm, this one shaped like a layered crater in the slope, strongly reminiscent of an amphitheater. A large portion of the tribe was there, having emerged from their homes to share in the unusual meal. The beast was well large enough to go around, and when the preparations were complete some hours later, we eventually received bowls of vegetable mash and boiled skink meat.

  Dining on the flesh of a Gamal skink was a novel experience, certainly, but it was not half so diverting as what came after. When the meal was through, several of the Hiatha started to sing. They were soon joined by others, and the group began weaving counterpoints and harmonies. Had I been able to get there unassisted, I would have run back to the youth garden for my gimmicked ear. But in truth, no mere recording can accurately capture the music of the Hiatha. They can sing notes of silence, or bend the note they’ve just sung while they ready the next, constructing whole crescendos that are finished before they start to be heard. A Hiatha singer can pluck his partner’s tones out of the air, and each member of a Hiatha chorus is responsible for the gestalt, rather than just a single voice. Like collaborative sculpture as much as song, something to be touched and heard at once. Listening to Hiatha singing feels like standing in warm rain. Or, on occasion, warm hail; the whistling girl was among the chorus, and when she saw me creeping closer she cast in my direction a trill that made my chest sting. How I ached to be able to respond in kind and set her breast buzzing! But instead I contented myself to experiencing the world’s most naturally gifted vocalists singing for the sheer joy of being alive.

  Sant was insensitive to the arts, though he indulged my interest. But when the music receded he insisted that we be escorted back to the youth garden so he could sleep. The garden was far more tranquil without the children present. From its dull plane I could hear murmurs leaking out of windows above and below, and debated a twilight climb to learn what alpine treasures pass between a Hiatha family in their high stone privacy. But the base of my spine tingled, and while I was deciding whether to let cautious self-preservation win over my researcher’s curiosity, the grey-haired man appeared again.

  “We’re told you are rich,” he said.

  I replied that I was fortunate. Certainly more fortunate than many, who could not afford an undertaking such as mine, even had they the cognitive fervor to pursue it.

  The grey-haired man turned his gaze to the building where Sant was already abed. “A rich man should be able to afford better friends,” he said. “That one will bleed you weak if he can, and people here will be happy to keep helping him do it.”

  I didn’t understand at first, but questioned further he revealed to me that Sant had conspired with the envoys to make my brief visit as financially taxing as possible, to their shared benefit. The opportunism of a tradesman, so perfect and bare! I nearly laughed to see it. But Sant’s machinations were trivial compared to this, the opportunity to finally speak directly with a Bridge Blower. I thanked the man for his advice and told him how thrilled I was to speak with him, how many questions I still had. Chief among them was, how could I spend more time in the village, so that I might properly learn what there was to know of Hiatha life?

  “Wealth is the bottom of a valley,” the grey-haired man said. “Every insecure thing will fall in time to meet it.” Then he vanished back over the wall before I could ask him to explain, or discover the source of his fluency, or inquire any number of other things. The way he weaved as he disappeared from view, it is possible the man was drunk. I wondered at his words, at what ethos of privation made him choose first to leave the mountains—as he must surely have done—and then to recant that decision. I surmised from his dismissal that I represented, for him, a symbol of what he had fled to return home. A tragedy, that. But for the arbitrary tangles of pride and history, he could have been the conduit through which I found my full acceptance and understanding
among the Hiatha. I returned to the little stacked-stone building, to Sant’s snoring and Marta’s quilt.

  The morning comes earlier in the mountains. I was unprepared for wakefulness, let alone for travel, when the sun on my face announced that my welcome in the village had expired. Sant had risen before me, and was already loading the satchels on his donkey when I emerged into the garden. My own donkey was where I had left it, and the whistling girl was there too, running her fingers over its joints and carvings. I hefted my pack and approached, and she did not withdraw from me.

  We couldn’t speak to one another, but I removed from my pack the tiny tablet with the donkey’s name and showed it to her. Then I let her slide it into my donkey’s mouth and watch as its eyes opened and it began to kick at the ground. The girl removed the tablet and put it back in over and over, animating the beast and then letting life wash out of it a dozen times.

  It felt important to leave the girl something valuable, some bauble beyond language to let her know she was appreciated in the world outside the mountains. I slid my hand down my back and pinched at the skin over my tailbone. Then, with a playful whistle, I dragged my fingertip along her jawline. She recoiled from the sting of my touch, and I could discern the small, bruise-dark spot where the sigil had planted. The girl skipped off over the wall and across the valley, just young enough to still be scared of innocuous unknowns. But she would understand soon. My own guard sigil had grown so furiously it threatened to displace the other tattoos around it. I was sure that its offspring would be just as clever and intricate. I hoped she chose to follow its call out of the mountains someday, so she would see that I had made her as welcome in my world as she had made me feel in hers. Perhaps she would seek me out, and I could make her feel more welcome still.