by Neil Gaiman
Is that what you wish?
The drip of distant water. “Yes,” I said.
From out of the shadows it came, and it stared down at me with empty sockets, smiled at me with wind-weathered ivory teeth. It was all bone, save its hair, and its hair was red and gold, and wrapped about the branch of a thornbush.
“That offends my eyes.”
I took it from your mind, said a whisper that surrounded the skeleton. Its jawbone did not move. I chose something you loved. This was your daughter, Flora, as she was the last time you saw her.
I closed my eyes, but the figure remained.
It said, The reaver waits for you at the mouth of the cave. He waits for you to come out, weaponless and weighed down with gold. He will kill you, and take the gold from your dead hands.
“But I’ll not be coming out with gold, will I?”
I thought of Calum MacInnes, the wolf-gray in his hair, the gray of his eyes, the line of his dirk. He was bigger than I am, but all men are bigger than I am. Perhaps I was stronger, and faster, but he was also fast, and he was strong.
He killed my daughter, I thought, then wondered if the thought was mine or if it had crept out of the shadows into my head. Aloud, I said, “Is there another way out of this cave?”
You leave the way you entered, through the mouth of my home.
I stood there and did not move, but in my mind I was like an animal in a trap, questing and darting from idea to idea, finding no purchase and no solace and no solution.
I said, “I am weaponless. He told me that I could not enter this place with a weapon. That it was not the custom.”
It is the custom now, to bring no weapon into my place. It was not always the custom. Follow me, said the skeleton of my daughter.
I followed her, for I could see her, even when it was so dark that I could see nothing else.
In the shadows it said, It is beneath your hand.
I crouched and felt it. The haft felt like bone—perhaps an antler. I touched the blade cautiously in the darkness, discovered that I was holding something that felt more like an awl than a knife. It was thin, sharp at the tip. It would be better than nothing.
“Is there a price?”
There is always a price.
“Then I will pay it. And I ask one other thing. You say that you can see the world through his eyes.”
There were no eyes in that hollow skull, but it nodded.
“Then tell me when he sleeps.”
It said nothing. It melded with the darkness, and I felt alone in that place.
Time passed. I followed the sound of the dripping water, found a rock-pool, and drank. I soaked the last of the oats and I ate them, chewing them until they dissolved in my mouth. I slept and woke and slept again, and dreamed of my wife, Morag, waiting for me as the seasons changed, waiting for me just as we had waited for our daughter, waiting for me forever.
Something, a finger I thought, touched my hand: it was not bony and hard. It was soft, and human-like, but too cold. He sleeps.
I left the cave in the blue light, before dawn. He slept across the cave, cat-like, I knew, such that the slightest touch would have woken him. I held my weapon in front of me, a bone handle and a needle-like blade of blackened silver, and I reached out and took what I was after, without waking him.
Then I stepped closer, and his hand grasped for my ankle and his eyes opened.
“Where is the gold?” asked Calum MacInnes.
“I have none.” The wind blew cold on the mountainside. I had danced back, out of his reach, when he had grabbed at me. He stayed on the ground, pushed himself up onto one elbow.
Then he said, “Where is my dirk?”
“I took it,” I told him. “While you slept.”
He looked at me, sleepily. “And why ever would you do that? If I was going to kill you I would have done it on the way here. I could have killed you a dozen times.”
“But I did not have gold, then, did I?”
He said nothing.
I said, “If you think you could have got me to bring the gold from the cave, and that not bringing it out yourself would have saved your miserable soul, then you are a fool.”
He no longer looked sleepy. “A fool, am I?”
He was ready to fight. It is good to make people who are ready to fight angry.
I said, “Not a fool. No. For I have met fools and idiots, and they are happy in their idiocy, even with straw in their hair. You are too wise for foolishness. You seek only misery and you bring misery with you and you call down misery on all you touch.”
He rose then, holding a rock in his hand like an axe, and he came at me. I am small, and he could not strike me as he would have struck a man of his own size. He leaned over to strike. It was a mistake.
I held the bone haft tightly, and stabbed upward, striking fast with the point of the awl, like a snake. I knew the place I was aiming for, and I knew what it would do.
He dropped his rock, clutched at his right shoulder. “My arm,” he said. “I cannot feel my arm.”
He swore then, fouling the air with curses and threats. The dawn-light on the mountaintop made everything so beautiful and blue. In that light, even the blood that had begun to soak his garments was purple. He took a step back, so he was between me and the cave. I felt exposed, the rising sun at my back.
“Why do you not have gold?” he asked me. His arm hung limply at his side.
“There was no gold there for such as I,” I said.
He threw himself forward, then, ran at me and kicked at me. My awl-blade went flying from my hand. I threw my arms around his leg, and I held on to him as together we hurtled off the mountainside.
His head was above me, and I saw triumph in it, and then I saw sky, and then the valley floor was above me and I was rising to meet it and then it was below me and I was falling to my death.
A jar and a bump, and now we were turning over and over on the side of the mountain, the world a dizzying whirligig of rock and pain and sky, and I knew I was a dead man, but still I clung to the leg of Calum MacInnes.
I saw a golden eagle in flight, but below me or above me I could no longer say. It was there, in the dawn sky, in the shattered fragments of time and perception, there in the pain. I was not afraid: there was no time and no space to be afraid in: no space in my mind and no space in my heart. I was falling through the sky, holding tightly to the leg of a man who was trying to kill me; we were crashing into rocks, scraping and bruising and then . . .
. . . we stopped.
Stopped with force enough that I felt myself jarred, and I was almost thrown off Calum MacInnes and to my death beneath. The side of the mountain had crumbled, there, long ago, sheared off, leaving a sheet of blank rock, as smooth and as featureless as glass. But that was below us. Where we were, there was a ledge, and on the ledge there was a miracle: stunted and twisted, high above the tree line, where no trees have any right to grow, was a twisted hawthorn tree, not much larger than a bush, although it was old. Its roots grew into the side of the mountain, and it was this hawthorn that had caught us in its gray arms.
I let go of the leg, clambered off Calum MacInnes’s body and onto the side of the mountain. I stood on the narrow ledge and looked down at the sheer drop. There was no way down from here. No way down at all.
I looked up. It might be possible, I thought, climbing slowly, with fortune on my side, to make it up that mountain. If it did not rain. If the wind was not too hungry. And what choice did I have? The only alternative was death.
A voice: “So. Will you leave me here to die, dwarf?”
I said nothing. I had nothing to say.
His eyes were open. He said, “I cannot move my right arm, since you stabbed it. I think I broke a leg in the fall. I cannot climb with you.”
I said, “I may succeed, or I may fail.”
“You’ll make it. I’ve seen you climb. After you rescued me, crossing that waterfall. You went up those rocks like a squirrel going up a tree.”
I di
d not have his confidence in my climbing abilities.
He said, “Swear to me by all you hold holy. Swear by your king, who waits over the sea as he has since we drove his subjects from this land. Swear by the things you creatures hold dear—swear by shadows and eagle-feathers and by silence. Swear that you will come back for me.”
“You know what I am?” I said.
“I know nothing,” he said. “Only that I want to live.”
I thought. “I swear by these things,” I told him. “By shadows and by eagle-feathers and by silence. I swear by green hills and standing stones. I will come back.”
“I would have killed you,” said the man in the hawthorn bush, and he said it with humor, as if it was the biggest joke that ever one man had told another. “I had planned to kill you, and take the gold back as my own.”
“I know.”
His hair framed his face like a wolf-gray halo. There was red blood on his cheek where he had scraped it in the fall. “You could come back with ropes,” he said. “My rope is still up there, by the cave mouth. But you’d need more than that.”
“Yes,” I said. “I will come back with ropes.” I looked up at the rock above us, examined it as best I could. Sometimes good eyes mean the difference between life and death, if you are a climber. I saw where I would need to be as I went, the shape of my journey up the face of the mountain. I thought I could see the ledge outside the cave, from which we had fallen as we fought. I would head for there. Yes.
I blew on my hands, to dry the sweat before I began to climb. “I will come back for you,” I said. “With ropes. I have sworn.”
“When?” he asked, and he closed his eyes.
“In a year,” I told him. “I will come here in a year.”
I began to climb. The man’s cries followed me as I stepped and crawled and squeezed and hauled myself up the side of that mountain, mingling with the cries of the great raptors; and they followed me back from the Misty Isle, with nothing to show for my pains and my time, and I will hear him screaming, at the edge of my mind, as I fall asleep or in the moments before I wake, until I die.
It did not rain, and the wind gusted and plucked at me, but did not throw me down. I climbed, and I climbed in safety.
When I reached the ledge the cave entrance seemed like a darker shadow in the noonday sun. I turned from it, turned my back on the mountain, and from the shadows that were already gathering in the cracks and the crevices and deep inside my skull, and I began my slow journey away from the Misty Isle. There were a hundred roads and a thousand paths that would take me back to my home in the lowlands, where my wife would be waiting.
My Last Landlady
My last landlady? She was nothing like you, nothing at all alike. Her rooms
were damp. The breakfasts were unpleasant: oily eggs
leathery sausages, a baked orange sludge of beans.
Her face could have curdled beans. She was not kind.
You strike me as a kind person. I hope your world is kind.
By which I mean, I’ve heard we see the world not as it is
but as we are. A saint sees a world of saints, a killer
sees only murderers and victims. I see the dead.
My landlady told me she would not willingly walk upon the beach
for it was littered with weapons: huge, hand-fitting rocks,
each ripe for striking. She only had a little money in her tiny purse,
she said, but they would take the notes, oily from her fingers,
and leave the purse tucked underneath a stone.
And the water, she would say: hold anyone
under, chill salt-water, gray and brown. Heavy as sin, all ready
to drag you away: children went like that so easily, in the sea,
when they were surplus to requirements or had learned
awkward facts they might be inclined to pass on
to those who would listen. There were
people on the West Pier the night it burned, she said.
The curtains were dusty lace, and blocked each town-grimed window.
Sea View: that was a laugh. The morning she saw me twitch
her curtains, to see if it was properly raining, she rapped my knuckles.
“Mister Maroney,” she said. “In this house,
we do not look at the sea through the windows. It brings
bad luck.” She said, “People come to the beach to forget their problems.
It’s what we do. It’s what the English do. You chop your girlfriend up
because she’s pregnant and you’re worried what the wife would say
if she found out. Or you poison the banker you’re sleeping with,
for the insurance, marry a dozen men in a dozen little seaside towns.
Margate. Torquay. Lord love them, but why must they stand so still?”
When I asked her who, who stood so still, she told me
it was none of my beeswax, and to be sure to be out
of the house between midday and four, as the char was coming,
and I would be underfoot and in the way.
I’d been in that B & B for three weeks now, looking for permanent digs.
I paid in cash. The other guests were loveless folk on holiday,
and did not care if this was Hove or Hell. We’d eat
our slippery eggs together. I’d watch them promenade
if the day was fine, or huddle under awnings if it rained. My landlady
cared only that they were out of the house until teatime.
A retired dentist from Edgbaston, down for a week
of loneliness and drizzle by the sea, would nod at me over breakfast,
or if we passed on the seafront. The bathroom was down the hall. I was up
in the night. I saw him in his dressing gown. I saw him knock upon
her door. I saw it open. He went in. There’s nothing more to tell.
My landlady was there at breakfast, bright and cheery. She said
the dentist had left early, owing to a death in the family. She told the truth.
That night the rain rattled the windows. A week passed,
and it was time: I told my landlady I’d found a place
and would be moving on, and paid the rent.
That night she gave me a glass of whisky, and then another, and said
I had always been her favorite, and that she was a woman of needs,
a flower ripe for plucking, and she smiled, and it was the whisky made me nod,
and think she was perhaps a whit less sour of face and form. And so
I knocked upon her door that night. She opened it: I remember
the whiteness of her skin. The whiteness of her gown. I can’t forget.
“Mister Maroney,” she whispered. I reached for her, and that was forever
that. The Channel was cold and salt-wet, and she filled my pockets with rocks
to keep me under. So when they find me, if they find me,
I could be anyone, crab-eaten flesh and sea-washed bones and all.
I think I shall like it here in my new digs, here on the seashore. And you
have made me welcome. You have all made me feel so welcome.
How many of us are here? I see us, but I cannot count.
We cluster on the beach and stare at the light in the uppermost room
of her house. We see the curtains twitch, we see a white face
glaring through the grime. She looks afraid, as if one loveless day we might
start up the pebbles towards her, to rebuke her for her lack of hospitality,
to tear her for her bad breakfasts and her sour holidays and our fates.
We stand so still.
Why must we stand so still?
Adventure Story
IN MY FAMILY “ADVENTURE” tends to be used to mean “any minor disaster we survived” or even “any break from routine.” Except by my mother, who still uses it to mean “what she did that morning.” Going to the wrong part
of a supermarket parking lot and, while looking for her car, getting into a conversation with someone whose sister, it turns out, she knew in the 1970s would qualify, for my mother, as a full-blown adventure.
She is getting older, now. She no longer gets out of the house as she used to. Not since my father died.
My last visit to her, we were clearing out some of his possessions. She gave me a black leather lens-case filled with tarnished cuff links, and invited me to take any of my father’s old sweaters and cardigans I wanted, to remember him by. I loved my father, but couldn’t imagine wearing one of his sweaters. He was much bigger than me, all my life. Nothing of his would fit me.
And then I said, “What’s that?”
“Oh,” said my mother. “That’s something that your father brought back from Germany when he was in the army.” It was carved out of mottled red stone, the size of my thumb. It was a person, a hero or perhaps a god, with a pained expression on its rough-carved face.
“It doesn’t look very German,” I said.
“It wasn’t, dear. I think it’s from . . . Well, these days, it’s Kazakhstan. I’m not sure what it was back then.”
“What was Dad doing in Kazakhstan in the army?” This would have been about 1950. My father ran the officers’ club in Germany during his national service, and, in none of his postwar army after-dinner stories, had ever done anything more than borrow a truck without permission, or take delivery of some dodgily sourced whisky.
“Oh.” She looked as if she’d said too much. Then she said, “Nothing, dear. He didn’t like to talk about it.”
I put the statue with the cuff links, and the small pile of curling black-and-white photographs I had decided to take home with me to scan.
I slept in the spare bedroom at the end of the hall, in the narrow spare bed.
The next morning, I went into the room that had been my father’s office, to look at it one final time. Then I walked across the hall into the living room, where my mother had already laid breakfast.
“What happened to that little stone carving?”
“I put it away, dear.” My mother’s lips were set.
“Why?”
“Well, your father always said he shouldn’t have held on to it in the first place.”