The Wildside Book of Fantasy: 20 Great Tales of Fantasy

by Gene Wolfe

  This is not to say, of course, that the churches were not full, or that the convents did not enjoy a sudden influx of pious novices. Monasteries and nunneries alike doubled their personnel overnight, and their superiors were very glad to be so richly deluged with gifts and bequests. Alas, when the plague arrived, hot on the heels of the panic, the newly-repopulated convents and recently-swollen congregations of the riverside towns were as comprehensively decimated as the remote villages and hamlets where the habits of confession and communion had never becoming deeply entrenched.

  Far upriver, in the foothills of what is nowadays called the Massif Central, there was then a small market town named Coramdram, which has long since vanished from the map. The people of Coramdram and its environs were sharply reminded, by more than a score of exceedingly ugly deaths, of the duties which they owed to all the gods who might protect them. Prayer was a duty that Coramdram’s Christians and pagans alike had been rather apt to neglect, but the Christians, at least, resumed it without suffering too many pangs of conscience; human vanity is ever-ready to assume that a good God will always be on hand, patiently awaiting the attention of His followers during those intervals when other occupations seem far more important.

  Perhaps the Christians were correct in this assumption, and the streets of Coramdram would have been profusely littered with rotting corpses had the Lord not extended His mercy to a reasonable extent—but people rarely count their misfortunes accurately, nor do they often agree on the final sum. Those who consider that they have endured far more than their fair share of disaster are outnumbered only by those who think that their neighbors have had far more than a just allotment of good luck. The moral arithmetic of human existence is always inclined to overestimate an individual’s own immediate aches and pains, while refusing to acknowledge all but the most fatal afflictions of others. Perhaps it is this imperfection in the artistry of calculation that is responsible for the continued popularity of deities whom Christians deem far less worthy of worship than their own jealous God.

  At any rate, there were some in Coramdram—as there invariably were in those days, whenever the Visitor of Plague and Pestilence set his footprint upon a recently-Christianized region—who preferred to address their placatory prayers to the gods that had been theirs for hundreds of generations rather than a mere eight.

  In the opinion of the church’s historians, these heretics were addressing the plague-demon’s immediate superior, Satan, instead of the Lord who had cast that fallen angel into the depths—but that was not the way the unrepentant followers of Gothic tradition saw their own situation. In their eyes, the author of the disaster was merely one god among a company of equals, none of whom was any better or worse disposed towards humanity than the rest.

  Why should one pray to a good God for protection, the pagans’ reasoning went, when even a blind man could clearly see that evil was a more powerful force than good in the world of men? What good could it do to beg Jesus Christ and the martyred saints to provide a shield against disease, given that not one of them had been able to defend himself or herself against the direst misfortune? Was it not more sensible to cut out all mediators and go straight to the source of the trouble? Was it not more reasonable, instead of asking that an entire street, or a whole town, or even a region should be spared, to pray instead that the disease would strike down everyone except for one’s own immediate family? Surely, the pagans thought, the god of plague and pestilence must be grateful for such prayers, given that they offered a welcome endorsement to his overall strategy—which was always to spare a few while killing the many, in order that he might find each of his old haunts deliciously repopulated whenever he chanced to pass that way again.

  One of the careful folk who assessed the situation in these terms was Ophiria, wife of the ruddy-faced harness-maker Remy Brousse, Indeed, Ophiria went even further than others whose philosophy ran along the same lines, because she did not trouble to accommodate Remy in her prayers for salvation. Quite the reverse: the advent of the plague seemed to her to offer a welcome chance of deliverance from a marriage which had come to seem unbearably tedious. When she offered up her secret prayers to the god of pestilence, therefore, she took care to include Remy in the list of names of those she would most like to see breaking out in horrible spots, seething with fever, streaming mucus from every orifice and writhing in hideous agony.

  Ophiria’s list was quite long, because Coramdram was the kind of town in which everybody—even those who were scornfully excluded from the best gossiping-circles—knew everybody else’s name. Because she was a scrupulous person, she never allowed herself the luxury of any casual omission or forgetful abbreviation. On the other hand, by way of ameliorating what some of her neighbors might think unwarranted malice, she never specifically mentioned buboes among the afflictions she wished upon her more distant acquaintances.

  Even Ophiria’s closest acquaintances—none of whom was sufficiently close as to think of her as a friend—would have been surprised to discover the extent of her disaffection from her husband. Remy Brousse was not cruel or quarrelsome, nor was he given to adulterous liaisons. By the standards of the region at the head of the Dordogne valley, that was sufficient to make him an unusually good and devoted husband. His only marital crime, if crime it could be reckoned, was to have allowed himself to become extremely fat and rather indolent.

  There were corpulent wives in Coramdram who would not have reckoned the former item as an unforgivable sin, but Ophiria had remained as slender throughout their marriage as the day she was wed, when her late mother-in-law had been unkind enough to judge her unpromisingly thin. An indolent husband is always reckoned undesirable even by an indolent wife, but Ophiria was far more energetic than the average—perhaps surprisingly so, for one of her meager dimensions. Had she borne her husband any children she might have lost her energy as well as her trim figure, but the marriage was barren.

  Remy Brousse was a popular man in the district in spite of his indolence, because he was very ingenious with his hands. Although he did not like to work hard he did take considerable delight in working cleverly; he took as much pride in the ease with which he accomplished a task as in the perfection of the result.

  “It is the glory and privilege of mindful beings,” Remy often told his clients, “that we may accomplish our ends without breaking our backs or sweating away our bodily mass.” This saying was repeated far and wide along the Dordogne—perhaps even as far as Bordeaux—in a relatively good-humored manner.

  Remy had another saying too, which had an equal bearing on his popularity, which was: “Necessity is the mother of improvisation.” He said this because he was not a man to walk far in search of conventional materials when there was something close to hand that could be pressed into service. In a region where leather was reckoned expensive, he was always able—and perfectly willing—to make harnesses for poorer folk from rope, or cord, or anything else which came conveniently to hand.

  Alas, this virtue, like his others, went unappreciated by Remy Brousse’s bitter spouse, who had an instinctive dislike of any object or instrument that had not been formed from its proper material, according to its proper pattern.

  At the time when the great plague came to Coramdram the Brousses had been married for nineteen years. Ophiria, having recently passed her thirty-fourth birthday, felt that old age had not yet marked her irredeemably, but knew that cruel time would not leave her unmolested for many years longer. She knew, too, that if she were to obtain a second husband more to her taste, she would need better bait than her narrow face. Given that her husband’s shop would make a very attractive marriage-portion for an ambitious leather-worker, she felt that her own necessity required a certain amount of improvisation. This factor also entered into the equation whose solution was expressed in her devout prayers to the god of plague and pestilence, causing her not merely to mention Remy’s name in her prayers but to give special prominence to it.

  “Please, please, please take
my husband Remy, even if you take no one else I have identified as a suitable sacrifice,” Ophiria would say, whenever she reached the end of her exhaustive list. “He has become useless and burdensome to me, but he would make a fine and fleshy morsel for one such as you—and it is surely the glory and privilege of divinity that a god such as yourself may accomplish your ends without bending your back or shedding a single bead of sweat.”

  The church’s historians would dispute the identity of the being which responded to this prayer, but whether it was a member in good standing of a pantheon of peers or merely one of Satan’s imps, it did as it was asked. Remy Brousse fell dreadfully ill with the plague.

  First the unfortunate harness-maker broke out in horrible spots, which turned into hot sores that drove him mad with their unquenchable itching. Then he developed a seething fever, which exported acrid moisture from his shriveling flesh by the gallon. His every orifice began to drip mucus—most of it grey-green in color, except when it was mingled with blood, when it became blue-black. All the while he writhed in hideous agony. The only mercy was that his armpits and groin remained free of buboes—but even that, in the end, only served to prolong his suffering for a day or two longer than was strictly necessary.

  While she watched the corpulent body of her husband fade gradually away, as if the flesh were melting from his bones—which observation she was careful to make from a safe distance—Ophiria took some trouble to pose as a devoted Christian widow-to-be. There were several reasons for this precaution, of which the first and foremost was that worshippers of a god of pestilence need to be even more secretive than usual in a time of plague. Ophiria had always been suspected by her neighbors of being the sort of person who might pray to a dubious god, and there was not a man or woman in Coramdram who would not have been glad of a scapegoat upon whom they could vent their righteous anger against the ravages of the disease. Supplementary to that fundamental caution, however, was Ophiria’s knowledge that if she hoped to obtain a new and better husband, she had to advertise herself—much more carefully than she had contrived to do heretofore—as a devoted and loyal wife. For these reasons, she set herself to outdo her neighbors in her public displays of grief, although this was not an easy thing to do when there was not a family in the district that had not suffered its own grievous losses.

  Perhaps, in addition to these practical considerations, Ophiria actually began to feel slight stings of guilt and remorse while her husband came nearer and nearer to his end. It is, after all, never pleasant to observe—even from a respectful distance—the many ways in which disease and decay can maltreat a man. If so, her improvisations of grief might have contained at least a tiny measure of necessity.

  When the death-cart paused outside the door of Remy Brousse’s harness-shop, so that his body might be collected and ferried to the hastily-dug and abruptly-consecrated pit that was to serve as a collective grave for all Coramdram’s plague-victims, Ophiria commenced to make loud protestations against the unkindness of the cruel demon who had robbed her of all that she held dear in the world. When the cart pulled away again she followed it through the streets, weeping and wailing in a prodigious manner.

  Because the pit had been dug on the far side of the town, and because the route that the death-cart followed through the streets was so circuitous, Ophiria had to walk for miles, but she never faltered in her keening. She was joined in due course by other wives, and by mothers and grandmothers too, but the competition they provided only spurred her on to greater efforts.

  Hundreds of people—almost every one of whom was named on her secret list—saw Ophiria following Remy Brousse’s body. If they were surprised by the fact that a woman as thin as she could cry so effusively, they only had to remind themselves that she had always been an uncommonly energetic woman. Even the most snobbish and scornful among them must have felt a pang of sympathy as they saw how badly she had reacted to her loss.

  “Perhaps, after all,” a few good Christians whispered to their neighbors, “Ophiria Brousse was not as unloving as she sometimes seemed. Perhaps she was one of those unhappy souls who are incapable of giving voice to their true feelings until the worst comes to the worst, and then must endure in a few desperate hours the irresistible flood of emotions pent up for years.”

  Ophiria heard more than one such comment, and was greatly gratified to discover that her performance was appreciated. Never one to proceed by half-measures, she decided to carry the masquerade through to its limit. When the cart reached the pit and Remy Brousse’s body was thrown in on top of a hundred others, she cast herself upon the ground and beat the turf with her fists. When the priest of the parish and the town’s mayor decided that the pit could hold no more and would have to be filled in, she hurried to the rim for one last lingering look at her beloved—and when the spade-men began to seal the grave, every clod that fell wrung a moan from her emaciated lips.

  Nor was that enough for her; unlike her late husband, Ophiria believed that if a job was worth doing it was worth doing properly. On the next day, the widow went to the church on the hill above the place where her late husband and a hundred others lay, to join the throng of mourners. Like the wives of other men, and the mothers and grandmothers who had lost children, she was clad entirely in black, with no shoes on her feet. Like these others, she went after hearing mass to kneel upon the freshly-turned earth, directly atop the place where she had seen her husband’s dead body set upon the terrible heap. Like all the other widows, she cried and cried and cried.

  Even Ophiria’s energy began to flag in the end, but she carried on regardless, forcing more tears to come in floods by surreptitiously pinching her tenderest flesh between her sharp fingernails. Her voice was very conspicuous in lamenting the vile injustice of the world, and the awful cruelty of the demon which had sent the plague—but within her secret thoughts, she made her apologies and gave abundant thanks to the Visitor of Decay, who had taken such care in answering the most fervent of all her prayers.

  On the first and second days after Remy Brousse’s death, this performance proceeded exactly as his widow had planned, and won more than a few admiring and sympathetic glances from those fortunate enough to witness it. On the night that followed the second day, Ophiria paused to wonder whether she might now have done enough, not merely to allay suspicion but also to establish her worth as a potential wife for some unlucky widower—but she liked to do things properly, and she decided that a person as completely lacking in indolence as herself owed it to her audience to continue the pantomime for one more day.

  The following morning, Ophiria got up bright and early and put on her black dress. Leaving her shoes beside the hearth, she walked yet again to the church, where she heard another morning mass sung by a sadly-depleted choir. Afterwards, she went to the grave which Remy Brousse shared with so many of his erstwhile clients and friends. She knelt down on the darkened earth, exactly as she had done twice before, at the very spot where Remy Brousse’s buried body lay. When the tears did not begin to flow spontaneously, she carefully mustered her resources, and pinched herself bruisingly, sobbing in a heart-ending manner.

  The other mourners who had taken up their stations immediately after hearing mass looked sideways at the sound of Ophiria’s sobbing, but they paid her little enough heed. They had seen and heard it all before, and they had their own aching grief to nurse. No sooner had Ophiria begun to moisten the earth with her false tears, however, than the earth sealing the mass grave was disturbed by a horrid churning and wriggling.

  Ophiria recoiled in dire alarm, but she was too late to regain her feet. She turned heads readily enough when she screamed—and this time, once the eyes of the other mourners were fixed upon her, they could not easily be torn away.

  It seemed to the dizzied Ophiria that a monstrous earthworm had coiled itself around each of her wrists, holding her tightly and making certain that she remained on her knees. Another graveworm appeared, and then another, each one longer by far than any she had ever seen
before—and then the worms began to crawl upon her body, climbing up her prisoned arms to her shoulders, neck and face.

  The sensation of having such creatures crawling on her flesh filled Ophiria with the purest horror, and she tried to scream even louder, but she could not do it. She discovered that she was already screaming as loud as she possibly could; there was no further margin to be exploited or explored when the worms began to extend themselves over her terror-stricken face, around her skinny neck, and into her thin blonde hair.

  Had she been less confused, Ophiria might have been able to feel, if not to see, that the worms that had arranged themselves about her head and shoulders were combining their bodies like the threads in a cord or a rope. The resultant amalgamation was further entwined into the shape of a bridle and rein. More worms—many, many more—were winding themselves about her waist to form a girth-strap, while a huge mass of them was accumulating on her bent back to form a kind of living saddle.

  It did not matter that Ophiria could not feel or see any of this, for she could not possibly have given further expression to the horror of it. She had exhausted her capacity for screaming now—and also her capacity for weeping, moaning, crying and groaning.

  While the looping graveworms bound her hands to the moist brown earth Ophiria could not even stand up, let alone run away—but that was a temporary inconvenience. The worms that held her down were quick to release their grip as soon as their multitudinous kin had crowded a sufficient wormy mass on to the makeshift saddle to depict the form of a small but conspicuously well-rounded rider.

  By this time, it did not matter that Ophiria Brousse was no longer able to scream, because the other mourners at the mass grave had seen and understood what was happening. Even those who had been grieving the longest had plenty of screams still in reserve.