by IGMS
The magician snorted. "That's rubbish."
"Oh, and you've seen a swan die, have you?"
"If a swan died and wanted to make a noise, it would honk or hiss or something," the magician said. "Like it had been doing all its life. Death isn't that important."
"Then why is someone's last performance called a swansong?" the dancer said.
"Because somebody made something up about swans, and told it to somebody like you, and somebody like you believed it because it was beautiful," the magician said. "Doesn't make it true."
"I disagree," the dancer said. "If it wasn't true in some way, you wouldn't think it was beautiful, and you do. You're just trying to be clever. And swans don't honk. They sort of grunt."
"You're beautiful," the magician said, matter-of-factly. "Did I ever tell you that, back at the circus?"
"No," she said. "I sort of guessed you thought so, given the way you used to watch me from the bushes every evening, but it would have saved time if you'd said it earlier."
"I was young," said the magician. He was now thirty-two.
They sat there in silence as the sun crept towards the horizon. It was warm, and the swans stirred lazy ripples across the lake.
"I should have said something earlier," the magician said. "But I used to enjoy watching you dance every evening."
"You can watch me this evening," the dancer said. "But you have to sing for me first."
Years passed. The magician still looked for better magic, but not in every town, because he was now on the committee to help organize the carnival and it took a great deal of his time. The dancer still danced every night, and was learning the violin.
"Why did you bring me back?" the dancer asked one day.
"I ask myself that every day," the magician said shortly. He was trying to get a card trick right. The magic was fiddly, and he was in a bad temper.
"I mean it," the dancer said. "Were you in love with me?"
"I suppose so," the magician said. His cards were shuffling themselves backwards. This would have been a good trick, but it wasn't what he asked them to do, and he wasn't sure how he'd made them do it. He thought perhaps they'd done it on their own, just to spite him. "How should I know? Maybe I was in love with the idea that I could bring you back."
The dancer stood. "I'm going for a walk."
"Bring back milk," the magician said. "We're running out."
The dark magician came back one night, as they sat in their caravan eating dinner. The hand the dancer had given him had vanished into smoke when the five o'clock chimes had died away, and he had come seeking vengeance.
The magician was middle-aged, still strong and selfish but with streaks of gray silvering his temples, and he held back the other magician's dark power with fireworks. They were as brilliant and as blinding as the ones he had made the night the dancer first kissed him, though by now they had something more of skill. They illuminated the world outside with flashes of clarity and soared into the air like stars on fire.
While he was doing this, the dancer crept up behind the dark magician and hit him over the head with a cooking pot. He crumpled and fell.
The blow should have done no more than render him unconscious, but when they checked they found that his body had melted away and left only a pile of rags. Perhaps he had died long ago, and was relying on his will alone to give him physical form, or perhaps the dancer had hit him harder than she had meant. They burned the rags, just to be safe.
The dancer lost no sleep over his death. He had been a dark magician, and more importantly a truly unpleasant magician, and he had caused the deaths or mutilations of dozens. Vanquishing him was what good magicians should do. The magician didn't mind too much either, given that his life had been on the line, but he felt a little sorry for him without knowing why.
"I didn't ask to be tied to you like this," the dancer said. It was a rainy day, and both were bored and fed up. "I didn't ask to have to rely on you for my very existence."
"I didn't ask for this either," the magician said. "I wanted you alive. I didn't want to hold your life in my hands. You don't know how much I want to just put it down sometimes, and I can't."
"At least you're free to do that, if you really want it," she said. "You're not depending on another person for every breath you take."
"Do you really think I don't depend on you?" he said. "My life is built around you now. If I gave you up those years were all for nothing."
"Oh stop being so dramatic," the dancer snorted, and stormed out of the caravan into the rain.
Later that night he came to her. "I didn't mean I disliked it," he said. "Not most of the time."
"I know," she said. "Neither did I."
Years passed. The dancer became not only the best dancer in the world, but possibly the best dancer who had ever lived, then grew tired of it and took up the flute instead. She still danced the big performances, though, and every now and then she would dance for the magician. He still searched for better magic, but only in the big libraries.
One day, when the dancer and the magician were walking through a town doing their shopping, they were stopped by a man. He was younger than the magician, clad in leather and armour, and had the staunch gray eyes of a hero.
"Excuse me," he said. "I saw you dance last night, and knew you must be the best dancer in the world. And I saw you with her, and knew you must be her lover the magician."
"Can we help you?" the dancer said.
The hero reached into his cloak, and pulled out a wrapped parcel. "Years ago, you slayed a dark magician. He lured my brother into his house one day, and tricked his heart from him, and I made myself into a hero to slay him for it."
"I don't know about slayed him," the magician said. "She hit him with a pot."
"My brother's ghost is at rest because of what you did," the hero said. "Please accept this from me."
The dancer took the package, and there was a flash of silver as she unwrapped it. It was a sword.
"Made by the hammersmiths of the Iron Mountain," the hero said. "Its edge will never fail any one who can wield it."
"Thank you," the dancer said.
"What on earth are we going to do with that?" the magician asked, after the hero had gone. "Chop carrots?"
"It's a beautiful thing, and we did some good in the world," the dancer said, sternly. "Stop complaining."
"Fine," he said. "But you can carry it. I've got all the apples."
They were quiet on the way home, and afterward, and when it turned out one of them had forgotten to buy tea it didn't seem to matter. They drank hot chocolate by the fire instead.
Years passed.
The magician was old when the dragon came. His face had grown less selfish and vain over the years, as his hair turned to white, but there were lines around his eyes and his back would twinge when he stood too quickly. The dancer was a year older, but she had not aged at all.
The first the carnival heard was a roar from the mountains, and a wind that carried the smell of ash and brimstone through the camp. Then word came that the creature had alighted in the nearby mountains, to terrorize the village that had been waiting for the carnival. It was fifty feet long, or more, and green or red or gold, and had teeth as sharp as knives, or frost. In any case, it meant death.
The ringmaster ordered the carnival to come to a standstill. Going on or going back would draw the dragon's attention, and shortly afterwards the dragon. Their best hope was to sit it out and hope that it would move on.
"How many people has it taken?" the dancer asked.
The ringmaster shook his head. "Seven, or twenty, or thirty. Either way, they're only the first. It'll have the town, probably, and then fly off to sleep for another hundred years. It's what they do."
"Oh," said the dancer.
The magician was busy all that night and much of the following day, and the dancer didn't see him until the following afternoon when he came back to the caravan.
"Are you going to slay the dragon?" she asked him, b
efore he'd even taken his boots off.
The magician snorted. "You must be joking. I don't slay dragons."
"Why not?" she said. "You have a sword."
"We use that sword as a letter opener," he said, dropping heavily into his armchair. "Once or twice to cut the carrots when all the other cutlery was dirty."
"What kind of a magician are you?" the dancer demanded. "Any good magician would try to slay the dragon. Any dark magician would try to help it."
"Wrong," the magician said. "Any self-respecting magician would spend all night fire-proofing the carnival, then sit here by the stove and have a sleep because fire-proofing is very difficult. By astonishing coincidence, that is what I have done, and am about to do. Try not to make too much noise."
"People are dying," the dancer said.
"People are always dying," the magician said with a yawn. In his defense, he really was sleepy. "You've done it yourself. I've done it myself. Someday I'll probably do it again, but I don't want it to be today. I haven't yet found better magic."
The dancer folded her arms and glared at him. "Sometimes I wonder why I even like you."
"If I thought I could slay a dragon, then maybe I would," he said, turning to face her for the first time. "Probably I would. But I doubt it's possible. And if I die, it's your life as well, you know. You need me to sing you another day."
"If we all thought only about what we needed," the dancer said, "there wouldn't be any heroes."
"I'm not a hero," the magician said. He stretched out in his chair and closed his eyes. "I am a magician."
The dancer sighed. "I know. I wish you'd stop going on about it."
The magician fell asleep almost at once. He wasn't sure what woke him, only that it did so with a start. It might have been a log falling in the fire, or it might not have.
When he woke, the dancer was gone, and so was the sword.
The den of the dragon was in the midst of the mountains, filled with ash and rock and bones. The air was heavy with smoke and heat, and the magician clambered through it for what seemed like a hundred years, but was really an hour. Then suddenly the dragon's glowing head rose out of the smoke and fixed on him, and he was face to face with it.
The magician stood amidst the shards of broken rock and faced the dragon. He was no longer young and selfish enough to be brave. He was tired and his back hurt and the hot smoke made him cough, but he faced it anyway.
"Have you seen the best dancer in the world?" he said. "She's tall and graceful, with thick dark hair that tumbles to her waist and eyes the color of the filling in apple pie. She's very brave, and I think she would have been carrying a sword."
The dragon arched its neck and drew closer to him. Its skin was scaled and leathery, and emanated heat.
"If you have her," the magician said, "then I want her back."
The dragon was startled into speaking for the first time in over a hundred years. "Do you know who I am?" it asked. "I am a dragon. I am older than the earth. I am crueler than an April frost. I can burn whole cities with a breath, and make the mountains shake when I walk. I am fire, and pain, and death."
"I'm none of those things," the magician said. "I'm just a magician, and not a very good one. But I'm at the end of my life, so I'm more old than you'll ever be. I'm so selfish that I died and came back again just to get what I wasn't even sure I wanted. I can make truly rubbish fireworks in a frenzy of first love, and a fairly decent cup of tea. And I will not let you have her."
"I have her," the dragon said. "Her and her sword. I bit her in half and swallowed her before she could scream."
The magician laughed then. His laugh was one of the few things he had never thought to be vain about, but it was a good laugh. "Oh, is that all? Then you don't really have her at all. Death does. And he gave her back to me a long time ago."
In the den of the dragon, for what he knew would be the last time, the magician sang the song. His voice was another thing he had never thought to be vain about, this time because it had never really been very good. It wasn't very good now, because the den of the dragon had terrible acoustics, and because at some point he felt the tears on his cheeks and realized he was crying. But it was something the dragon had not heard in all his long life, and he stopped to listen in amazement, and for a moment all the world seemed to stop and listen too.
Then, as the final note died away, a bright point flashed in the dragon's belly, and a bright sword burst through its scaled and leathery hide.
The dragon roared, in pain and surprise and dismay, and the sound was so loud the magician clapped his hands to his ears and was forced to his knees. He barely even felt it when the dragon lashed its tail and knocked him flying, nor when he hit the ground and lay there broken.
Swans are supposed to have a song inside them, that they keep secret all their lives, and only sing in the moment before they die. They don't, of course. But dragons do. The dragon sang his now, in a single note, and the magician heard it. It was the most beautiful thing he ever heard, except for one, and that was the thing he heard next.
The dancer emerged from the dragon's belly, whole and beautiful and alive, and called his name.
He called back to her; faintly, but she heard him.
She ran to him.
"You slayed the dragon," he said. "I told you it wasn't a job for a magician."
"We slayed the dragon," she corrected him. She knelt down by his side. Her eyes were the color of the filling in apple pie, but they were filling with tears. "I'm so sorry."
"Death was right," the magician said. "There are no new stories."
The homeopathic witch was waiting when the dancer carried the magician back to their caravan. They were many miles from her house, but neither of them questioned that she should be there. She had made tea and toast, and stoked the fire, and changed the sheets, and by the time the dancer came back after washing she had laid the magician gently on the bed and cleaned the blood from him.
The dancer sat down next to the magician, and the witch closed the door behind her. For a long time, neither of them spoke. Outside, the sun was setting.
"I think perhaps I do love you after all," the dancer said. "Because when I think of you in the Underworld, I find that all I want is to follow you there."
"That's very strange," said the magician, and he said it very softly. He was dying, of course, but perhaps he would have spoken softly anyway. "Because when I think of myself in the Underworld, I find I don't mind the thought of going, if only I could find you there again. Is that selfish?"
"Very," she said. "Do you think love is?"
"I don't know," the magician said. "I'm fairly sure I am." He was quiet for while, so long the dancer checked for the rise and fall of his breath. "I'll sing the song for you for the last time tonight," he said. "Then I'll teach the song to the person you tell me, whoever that may be. You'll wander the earth one day at a time with them, until they find better magic. And then -"
"Oh shut up," said the dancer, and she kissed him. They were still kissing when the clock struck five, and when the chimes died she disappeared like smoke in the wind.
The Far Side of Extinction
by K.C. Norton
Artwork by Scott Altmann
* * *
Mosegi Steyn was tired of the Moa.
"It is all they come to see," he complained. "And why? Every museum has its Moa. They aren't even native."
The Moa itself was rather shabby, going bald in places; its lush chocolate-colored feathers were knotted and ratty. It had been stuffed quite haphazardly, as if the taxidermist responsible for the display had never seen a live specimen and resorted to guessing at the thing's shape based solely on the skull and the dimensions of the tanned flesh. The result was a bird lumpy in places, concave in others. Its glass eyes bulged. Even the fake beak, polished to a hardwood gleam, was succumbing to a combination of termites and rot.
"We can't throw it out," said Tale. She rubbed her hands across her face; she wasn't sleep
ing well, and was tired of Pharmacant Steyn's bottomless dissatisfaction. "What do you propose?"
He shook his head, tapped the polished glass of the display case disapprovingly. "We need new blood."
"A new display."
"That is what I said."
Tale nodded sagely, and thought about slapping him hard enough to make his eyes bulge like the Moa's. "A new display of what, precisely?"
"Something unique. Something impossible. Something that will put Transvaal on the map." He tapped the glass again.
A list of impossible things scrolled through Tale's mind: cryptids, myths, and local legends. The gemsbuck, the Cape bull, the ostrich - or a wildebeest, ha! As if anyone old enough to walk the Bush believed in them.
"Something phenomenal," Steyn was saying; he often spoke as though he were a classroom thesaurus and seemed to think it made him sound wise.
On any other day, Tale might have let it go. But there was a gleam in the Moa's glass eye that might have been a reflection of the incandescent bulbs, or might have been a call to action. She was still looking into that eye when she said, "A dog."
Steyn turned to her. "Pardon, Pharmacant de Kaant?"
"Just a thought." She smiled at the Moa.
"A ridiculous thought. I don't know why you brought it up."
"Because it would be phenomenal," she said.
Pharmacant Steyn shook his head. But she could tell that he was thinking about it.
"Since the discovery of the dodo in 1662, there has been a marked increase in the number of species known to science. True, some die out - the last okapi was seen in 1901 - but there are breeds that seem to appear from nowhere, such as the 1883 discovery of the quagga, now common in certain parts of the Bush; and, only a few decades ago, the American passenger pigeon. New species are met with scientific interest, of course, but nothing sparks popular imagination like the cryptids. Photos of species such as the mountain gorilla, the manatee, and the black rhinoceros have appeared in a number of publications. So far, all have proven to be hoaxes. The most elusive and unlikely of these is, of course, the dog. Every schoolchild has heard of it; but we know that dogs, like the fabled elephant, are to be found only in storybooks."