* * *
Inside another day, the village was entirely renewed. Even the rusty straw thatch glinted like gold. She had worked her miracles. Now would come her own time.
A couple of the men had kept up sentry-go from the first evening out, and last night, patrolling the outskirts of the huts, they had even idled a minute under the tree where I was roosting. I had hidden my mare half a mile off, in a deserted bothy I had found, but tonight I kept her near, for speed. And this night, too, when one of the men came up the slope, making his rounds, I softly called his name.
He went to stone. I told him smartly who I was, but when I came from cover, his sword was drawn and eyes on stalks.
“I’m no forest demon,” I said. Then I asked myself if he was alarmed for other reasons, a notion of the scheme Draco had accused me of. Then again, here and now, we might have come to such a pass. I needed a witness. I looked at the soldier, who saluted me slowly. “Has she cured them all?” I inquired. I added for his benefit, “Zafra.”
“Yes,” he said. “It was—worth seeing.”
“I am sure of that. And how does the child fare?”
I saw him begin to conclude maybe Draco had sent me after all. “Bonny,” he said.
“But she is leaving the village, with the child—” I had never thought she would risk her purpose among the huts, as she would not in the town, for all her hold on them. “Is that tonight?”
“Well, there’s the old woman, she won’t leave her own place, it seems.”
“So Zafra told you?”
“Yes. And said she would go. It’s close. She refused the litter and only took Carus with her. No harm. These savages are friendly enough—”
He ended, seeing my face.
I said, “She’s gone already?”
“Yes, Skorous. About an hour—”
Another way from the village? But I had watched, I had skinned my eyes—pointlessly. Witchcraft could manage anything.
“And the child with her,” I insisted.
“Oh, she never will part from the child, Eunike says—”
“Damn Eunike.” He winced at me, more than ever uncertain. “Listen,” I said, and informed him of my suspicions. I did not say the child was half East, half spice and glisten and sins too strange to speak. I said Draco’s son. And I did not mention sacrifice. I said there was some chance Zafra might wish to mutilate the boy for her gods. It was well known, many of the Eastern religions had such rites. The soldier was shocked, and disbelieving. His own mother—? I said, to her kind, it was not a deed of dishonor. She could not see it as we did. All the while we debated, my heart clutched and struggled in my side, I sweated. Finally he agreed we should go to look. Carus was there, and would dissuade her if she wanted to perform such a disgusting act. I asked where the old woman’s hut was supposed to be, and my vision filmed a moment with relief when he located it for me as that very bothy where I had tethered my horse the previous night. I said, as I turned to run that way, “There’s no old woman there. The place is a ruin.”
We had both won at the winter racing, he and I. It did not take us long to achieve the spot. A god, I thought, must have guided me to it before, so I knew how the land fell. The trees were densely packed as wild grass, the hut wedged between, and an apron of bared weedy ground about the door where once the household fowls had pecked. The moon would enter there, too, but hardly anywhere else. You could come up on it, cloaked in forest and night. Besides, she had lit her stage for me. As we pushed among the last phalanx of trunks, I saw there was a fire burning, a sullen throb of red, before the ruin’s gaping door.
Carus stood against a tree. His eyes were wide and beheld nothing. The other man punched him and hissed at him, but Carus was far off. He breathed and his heart drummed, but that was all.
“She’s witched him,” I said. Thank Arean Mars and Father Jupiter she had. It proved my case outright. I could see my witness thought this too. We went on stealthily, and stopped well clear of the tree-break, staring down.
Then I forgot my companion. I forgot the manner in which luck at last had thrown my dice for me. What I saw took all my mind.
It was like the oven of the hallucination in the tent, the thing she had made, yet open, the shape of a cauldron. Rough mud brick, smoothed and curved, and somehow altered. Inside, the fire burned. It had a wonderful color, the fire, rubies, gold. To look at it did not seem to hurt the eyes, or dull them. The woman stood the other side of it, and her child in her grasp. Both appeared illumined into fire themselves, and the darkness of garments, of hair, the black gape of the doorway, of the forest and the night, these had grown warm as velvet. It is a sight often seen, a girl at a brazier or a hearth, her baby held by, as she stirs a pot, or throws on the kindling some further twig or cone. But in her golden arm the golden child stretched out his hands to the flames. And from her moving palm fell some invisible essence I could not see but only feel.
She was not alone. Others had gathered at her fireside. I was not sure of them, but I saw them, if only by their great height which seemed to rival the trees. A warrior there, his metal faceplate and the metal ribs of his breast just glimmering, and there a young woman, garlands, draperies and long curls, and a king who was bearded, with a brow of thunder and eyes of light, and near him another, a musician with wings starting from his forehead—they came and went as the fire danced and bowed. The child laughed, turning his head to see them, the deities of his father’s side.
Then Zafra spoke the Name. It was so soft, no sound at all. And yet the roots of the forest moved at it. My entrails churned. I was on my knees. It seemed as though the wind came walking through the forest, to fold his robe beside the ring of golden red. I cannot recall the Name. It was not any of those I have written down, nor anything I might imagine. But it was the true one, and he came in answer to it. And from a mile away, from the heaven of planets, out of the pit of the earth, his hands descended and rose. He touched the child and the child was quiet. The child slept.
She drew Draco’s son from his wrapping as a shining sword is drawn from the scabbard. She raised him up through the dark, and then she lowered him, and set him down in the holocaust of the oven, into the bath of flame, and the fires spilled up and covered him.
No longer on my knees, I was running. I plunged through black waves of heat, the amber pungence of incense, and the burning breath of lions. I yelled as I ran. I screamed the names of all the gods, and knew them powerless in my mouth, because I said them wrongly, knew them not, and so they would not answer. And then I ran against the magic, the Power, and broke through it. It was like smashing air. Experienced—inexperiencable.
Sword in hand, in the core of molten gold, I threw myself on, wading, smothered, and came to the cauldron of brick, the oven, and dropped the sword and thrust in my hands and pulled him out—.
He would be burned, he would be dead, a blackened little corpse, such as the Semite Karthaginians once made of their children, incinerating them in line upon line of ovens by the shores of the Inner Sea—
But I held in my grip only a child of jewel-work, of poreless perfect gold, and I sensed his gleam run into my hands, through my wrists, down my arms like scalding water to my heart.
Someone said to me, then, with such gentle sadness, “Ah Skorous. Ah, Skorous.”
I lay somewhere, not seeing. I said, “Crude sorcery, to turn the child, too, into gold.”
“No,” she said. “Gold is only the clue. For those things which are alive, laved by the flame, it is life. It is immortal and imperishable life. And you have torn the spell, which is all you think it to be. You have robbed him of it.”
And then I opened my eyes, and I saw her. There were no others, no Other, they had gone with the tearing. But she—She was no longer veiled. She was very tall, so beautiful I could not bear to look at her, and yet, could not take my eyes away. And she was golden. She was golden not in the form of metal, but as a dawn sky, as fire, and the sun itself. Even her black eyes—were of gold, an
d her midnight hair. And the tears she wept were stars.
I did not understand, but I whispered, “Forgive me. Tell me how to make it right.”
“It is not to be,” she said. Her voice was a harp, playing through the forest. “It is never to be. He is yours now, no longer mine. Take him. Be kind to him. He will know his loss all his days, all his mortal days. And never know it.”
And then she relinquished her light, as a coal dies. She vanished.
I was lying on the ground before the ruined hut, holding the child close to me, trying to comfort him as he cried, and my tears fell with his. The place was empty and hollow as if its very heart had bled away.
The soldier had run down to me, and was babbling. She had tried to immolate the baby, he had seen it, Carus had woken and seen it also. And, too, my valor in saving the boy from horrible death.
* * *
As one can set oneself to remember most things, so one can study to forget. Our sleeping dreams we dismiss on waking. Or, soon after.
They call her now, the Greek Woman. Or the Semite Witch. There has begun, in recent years, to be a story she was some man’s wife, and in the end went back to him. It is generally thought she practiced against the child and the soldiers of her guard killed her.
Draco, when I returned half-dead of the fever I had caught from the contagion of the ruinous hut—where the village crone had died, it turned out, a week before—hesitated for my recovery, and then asked very little. A dazzle seemed to have lifted from his sight. He was afraid at what he might have said and done under the influence of sorceries and drugs. “Is it a fact, what the men say? She put the child into a fire?” “Yes,” I said. He had looked at me, gnawing his lips. He knew of Eastern rites, he had heard out the two men. And, long, long ago, he had relied only on me. He appeared never to grieve, only to be angry. He even sent men in search for her: A bitch who would burn her own child—let her be caught and suffer the fate instead.
It occurs to me now that, contrary to what they tell us, one does not age imperceptibly, finding one evening, with cold dismay, the strength has gone from one’s arm, the luster from one’s heart. No, it comes at an hour, and is seen, like the laying down of a sword.
When I woke from the fever, and saw his look, all imploring on me, the look of a man who has gravely wronged you, not meaning to, who says: But I was blind—that was the hour, the evening, the moment when life’s sword of youth was removed from my hand, and with no protest I let it go.
Thereafter the months moved away from us, the seasons, and next the years.
Draco continued to look about him, as if seeking the evil Eye that might still hang there, in the atmosphere. Sometimes he was partly uneasy, saying he too had seen her dog, the black jackal. But it had vanished at the time she did, though for decades the woman Eunike claimed to meet it in the corridor of the women’s quarters.
He clung to me, then, and ever since he has stayed my friend; I do not say, my suppliant. It is in any event the crusty friendship now of the middle years, where once it was the flaming blazoned friendship of childhood, the envious love of young men.
We share a secret, he and I, that neither has ever confided to the other. He remains uncomfortable with the boy. Now the princedom is larger, its borders fought out wider, and fortressed in, he sends him often away to the fostering of soldiers. It is I, without any rights, none, who love her child.
He is all Draco, to look at, but for the hair and brows. We have a dark-haired strain ourselves. Yet there is a sheen to him. They remark on it. What can it be? A brand of the gods—(They make no reference, since she has fallen from their favor, to his mother.) A light from within, a gloss, of gold. Leaving off his given name, they will call him for that effulgence more often, Ardorius. Already I have caught the murmur that he can draw iron through stone, yes, yes, they have seen him do it, though I have not. (From Draco they conceal such murmurings, as once from me.) He, too, has a look of something hidden, some deep and silent pain, as if he knows, as youth never does, that men die, and love, that too.
To me, he is always courteous, and fair. I can ask nothing else. I am, to him, an adjunct of his life. I should perhaps be glad that it should stay so.
In the deep nights, when summer heat or winter snow fill up the forest, I recollect a dream, and think how I robbed him, the child of gold. I wonder how much, how much it will matter, in the end.
SCOTT BAKER
Sea Change
Venice is an ancient city, with a proud and ancient past—but, as the following eloquent and passionate story suggests, the glories of its past may not even begin to compare with the glories of its future.…
Scott Baker is another writer who has made a large impact with a relatively small amount of published work. Primarily known for his short fiction, his stories have appeared in Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and elsewhere. One of his Omni stories, “The Lurking Duck,” has become something of an underground cult classic, and was published in French translation as a book. His grisly story “Still Life with Scorpion,” first published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, won the World Fantasy Award as best short story of 1985. His first novel was called Nightchild, and his most recent is Firedance. He lives with his family in Paris, France.
SEA CHANGE
Scott Baker
The bathtub was a deep oval seashell of green-veined white marble. The broad end of the shell extended upward like the headrest of a bed, with two ornate brass faucets supposedly resembling dolphins—though they reminded Rob more of tadpoles—set into the carved stone. The Tla who had been living in what was now their house had been found dead and dissolving in the tub, and though Rob’s mother had been assured that nothing of either the Tla or whatever might have killed it could possibly have filtered through the monomolecular protective film to contaminate anything, she had still spent most of her first day in their new house scrubbing and rescrubbing the bathroom. Her efforts had made no difference whatsoever that Rob could see, but when she’d finally been satisfied she’d ordered him into the tub, and from then on he’d had to take two baths a day, one before school and the other before bed, instead of the single before-bed bath that had satisfied her in Arizona. Venice felt filthy to her, with its heavy air and sky, its dirt and discoloration sealed to the statues and walls beneath the Tla’s impenetrable protective film, yet looking as though it would come away in your hand if you so much as brushed it.
He could hear his parents fighting in the kitchen downstairs, but they were keeping their voices too low for him to make out what they were saying. He listened a moment longer, then let himself slide down in the tub with his neck back so that just his ears were under water.
“Are you there?” he whispered. “Please let me see you. Show me what you look like.” But the voices were distant, indistinct; all he could really hear was the sloshing of the tub water.
He sat back up. It was getting late, he should already have been ready for school, but he didn’t want to face his mother and father, see the way they were hurting each other, or have them turn their anger against him. Besides, even before he’d begun hearing the voices whispering to him from the water, he’d discovered to his astonishment that he actually liked the time he spent sitting alone in the warm, soapy water. He’d always enjoyed swimming but hated baths before, yet he loved lying back with his head resting between the dolphin taps and looking out over the shiny black marble floor and through the big window that gave on the geranium-choked walled garden in front of the house and the equally geranium-filled Rio degli Ognassanti visible through the garden gate’s wrought-iron grillwork. Only the almost imperceptible undulation of the mass of pinkish red flowers and dull green leaves and stems ever betrayed the fact that the geraniums were floating, like the tangled raft of seaweed the Tla’s genetic manipulation had made of them, a flooded garden, and that the Rio degli Ognassanti was not an overgrown flowered alleyway, but a canal.
A bedraggled seagull was waddling pompously ar
ound on the water-stained marble statue of a woman with half-melted features whose torso jutted from the geraniums. Rob watched the seagull absently as it hopped down from the flower-mass and started poking through the stems and leaves, trying to think of something he could do to make things right between his mother and father again.
They were always fighting about him. He loved them and they loved him, but it would have been better for them if they’d never had him. Then they wouldn’t have had to fight all the time and they could have just been happy together.
After a moment the gull gave up and took flight, only to strike the invisible walkway overhead with an indignant squawk. It recovered and flew away, disappearing up over the house. Probably looking for a boat to follow for scraps, or at least some open water with fish it could eat. There were only a few hundred people in Venice now, not nearly enough to provide the garbage that had once fed over half a million pigeons and gulls, and the geraniums had choked not only the canals and the lagoon separating Venice proper from the Lido but had extended out for hundreds of meters into the sea around them. Yet for reasons nobody had been able to explain, they showed no signs of spreading any farther despite the fact that some of the neighboring islands were actually closer than Venice was to the Lido.
“Why can’t he keep on going to school here?” Rob’s father was almost yelling.
“Because he’s all alone here! There isn’t anyone else his age!” They were so angry they’d forgotten again that he could hear what they were saying.
He stood up carefully, stepped out of the tub, and eased the bathroom door open so he could hear them better, then got back in the water.
“He’ll get more individual attention here.” His father’s voice was still loud, but there was a conciliatory, almost pleading note in it. “And there’ll be some kids coming in with the new people when the Palace housing is ready.”
“One or two more kids won’t make any difference.”
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection Page 28