The Wildside Book of Fantasy: 20 Great Tales of Fantasy

by Gene Wolfe

  I was stunned. I sat and gaped. I had wanted to pour out my adventures in the street of the dead, but now I could not. It was bad enough that our child might be marked by a fish-faced wizard and his demon plants without filling her head with images of rats and skeletons. I pasted a grin on my face, kissed her and made much of her, but for the first time I resisted when she tried to draw me into bed. I told her she looked ill, that she should rest, and this was true, but I wanted to start on the work that would free us.

  I labored for hours, fascinated but appalled by the creatures that begged for release. I thought I’d seen a shy rabbit in the wood I had brought home, a dancer from Lilaret, a hound biting its paw. What emerged were a snarling rat, a demon capering on a skull, a ghoul gnawing a bone.

  I was surprised to see that Dendra had joined me to paint my demon. She looked well enough, but her glances at me were apprehensive. I had no idea how to explain the work I was doing, so I pretended to be absorbed in it, and soon that was true.

  When I next looked up, she had retired. Stretching my fingers, I nearly screamed from the pain. Without noticing, I had worked beyond the limits of flesh. The world outside was gray, stung by the flashes of brilliant blossoms.

  She painted while I slept, so that my wares were ready for the public when I rose at noon to breakfast on bananas and figs.

  “I wasn’t sure what color to paint that ... thing,” she said, indicating my ghoul.

  “Green looks right.”

  “You don’t like this place at all, do you?”

  Careful not to sound like the grumpy bear she sometimes called me, I said, “I’d be happier if we weren’t beholden to a patron. And you must admit that we’re far from the center of things. Just getting to the theater—”

  “I think I need peace and quiet now,” she said. “And this lovely garden—wouldn’t it be so much nicer for a child than a noisy street full of whores and cutthroats, with musicians over our head and opium-eaters next door?”

  This was not an entirely unfair picture of our former home, but she’d once praised its urban diversions. I restrained myself from telling her what I knew and suggesting that even our old neighbors on Ashclamith Square would have been preferable to plague-stricken corpses. Though I was horrified by the length of the stay her words implied, I said mildly, “You don’t want to put down roots here.”

  She laughed. “That’s exactly what I feel like doing!”

  It seemed wiser to get the money we needed to move before we argued about moving. Her lips tasted oddly bitter when I kissed her, like privet leaves. I had heard that pregnant women ate curious things.

  Heading for the gate with my armload of carvings, I met Dwelphorn Thooz.

  “But what have I done,” he said when I told him where I was going, “that you should deny me the first chance of buying your creations?”

  “After all your kindness, I can’t ask you to buy my work.”

  “You mean, my kindness has denied me a right enjoyed by the first wretch you meet? Would you oblige me if I were a monster of cruelty? Why then, trolls lusting to couple with infants and posthumes gorged on virgins’ blood will tremble at the whisper of my deeds! Should Dwelphorn Thooz be written on the earth and the word kindness inscribed on the remotest star, the universe will crumple with shame for holding so inapt a juxtaposition.”

  I believed he was joking, but how could I know? Reading a Sythiphoran face is impossible, I have since learned, even for the owner of another one. I arranged my pieces on the grass, resigned to the necessity of offering a gift. He seized on the ghoul and scrutinized it from every angle.

  “Have you been perambulating our necropolis at midnight, young man?” He studied me even more intently than he had my sculpture. “Where, then, have you seen a ghoul?”

  “In the wood,” I said, and explained how I worked.

  Excepting Dendra, no one had ever heard me out with such alert interest and apparent comprehension. “Extraordinary,” he said. “And it’s an extraordinary likeness, although the color is wrong. They’re gray, you know.” While I again debated whether he was making fun of me, he said, “Some day we must have a serious talk about your future. Your talent is perhaps greater than I supposed. I had thought of taking on an apprentice....”

  “An apprentice botanist?”

  “Yes.” He laughed. “Something like that.”

  I gave him the ghoul, but then he insisted on buying the other pieces for a sum that staggered me. It so staggered me that I failed to notice that no money changed hands. Instead of real silver from the market, I was left with promised gold from my host. But how could I press him for payment while I accepted his free room and board?

  These thoughts crushed me only later, and I was still grinning as he said, “I would highly recommend the water from the Bower to your wife. Strength, grace, stature and long life are the least of the gifts it imparts.”

  I blurted, “I hate that place!”

  “I thought you might, and so I must warn you to stay away from it. Trees are sensitive, too, you know, and I wouldn’t want my darlings upset by your hostility.” I blushed with guilt for the test I had made with my knife. I think he knew about it. “But I’m sure they would welcome your charming wife. Women are different.” He pinched my arm playfully before scurrying off with the work that had cost me a sleepless night and the strength of my hands.

  * * * *

  Dendra scoffed at my suspicion that our host had taken my work to keep us from leaving. She scorned my suggestion that he meant us no good.

  “You’re just not used to dealing with the upper classes,” she said with an infuriating sniff.

  “Polliel spare me from the upper classes, and may Sleithreethra tear out their ribs for needles to knit their shrouds!”

  This group included her and all her relatives, and she lectured at length on the proper handling of bumptious churls. I stamped about and grumbled, then attacked my work with a vengeance. My mood soured further when I realized that I was acting just like my father, who would chop trees with especial vigor after quarreling with my mother. I took a perverse pleasure in the pain I inflicted on my cramped hands.

  I freed a botched creature like a cross between a man and a shark. Dendra criticized it with slapdash painting, and we both laughed at the absurd result. We ended by embracing tenderly, but I knew that our argument had only been put aside. I had to convince her that this place was unhealthy. Perhaps it was only the light diffused through the plants crowding our windows, but I thought her skin was taking on a greenish tinge.

  I worked through the night again. Before dawn I gathered those pieces that Dendra had already painted into a bag and lowered it over the wall into Amorartis Street, where I doubted that any sane footpad would lurk. If our patron again relieved me of my creations on my way to the gate, I would at least have those figures to sell.

  As I returned home stealthily, a pale form shimmered from the Bower. I froze, imagining things worse than a human intruder. It was nothing but a man, however, whom I failed at first to recognize in his pasty nakedness as Dwelphorn Thooz. His halting gait was bringing him directly towards me, and I withdrew into the shelter of a plant whose red mouths parted slackly as the darkness faded. Perhaps I could have fled unnoticed, but I was curious to see if his body displayed fishy anomalies.

  He looked normal enough, but as he passed close by me I saw that his skin was scored with fresh scratches and welts. A gleam lit his eyes, and a smile flickered on his bruised lips as he muttered a litany of female names. In those days, on the rare occasions when I gave any thought to the topic, the amorous practices of the old amused me; but at that moment my impression that he was stumbling home from an orgy gave me a chill. I stayed in hiding until the sun was fairly risen, desiring a glimpse of the ladies who had frolicked with the ancient lecher, but no one else walked away from the slim and swaying trees of the Bower.

  * * * *

  I don’t remember if I kissed Dendra goodbye, or what words we said.
I was preoccupied with the details of my escape, as I saw it: which pieces I would offer our host if he stopped me, how I would word my refusal if he asked to buy them all. As it happened, I never saw him, and I walked through the gate like a free man. My other bag of sculptures lay undisturbed outside the wall. I slung it over my shoulder and began to whistle as I tramped to the lower town.

  My whistle soon dried in the plaza fronting the Temple of Polliel, a notable marketplace for handicrafts. Not just the permanent stalls, but pillars of the surrounding colonnade had been claimed by the craftsmen’s ancestors and passed down to them, or so they maintained with words, fists and feet. Trying to do business here, I was told by a priest whose sanctity cowed my attackers, was like barging into a stranger’s home and sitting down to his place at the table. For a fee, he said, the Temple would assign me a space, but I calculated that the rights to the darkest shadow of the remotest column would cost me more than I would earn if I lived forever.

  The gods took note of the priest’s rebuke and heaped my shoulders with a massive weight of dead, hot air that stretched to the very top of their pitiless dome. I wandered into streets undisturbed by merchants and buyers alike, a desert of brick and stone with not one cool tree for shade and no undisputed place to sit down, where householders practiced art criticism with dogs, cudgels and slop-buckets. My carvings seemed hammered from iron, as did my shoes. When the morning crawled into the furnace of afternoon, bloated clouds piled themselves to phantasmagorical heights and blackened the green slopes beyond the city.

  Darkness fell long before sunset. Hot air gusted randomly. I knew that a storm was coming, but I clung to my purpose. Even though I managed to sell a few things, I was engaged in folly, for how long could I carve all night and walk all day?

  I spoke that question aloud, and I was answered by a crack of thunder that scrambled my bones inside my skin, by rain like a mountain torrent, by chunks of ice that rebounded from the cobblestones to the highest eaves. Bolts of lightning fell as thickly as the hail, and just as close, while I cowered in a doorway and babbled absurd promises to whatever god might protect me.

  I had lived through many storms in the open air, and they hadn’t much frightened me; but in the forest, I would know to avoid the oaks and festirons that heaven loves to blast and shelter under a depsad or a beech. In this stone wilderness I knew nothing, I was just a naked target on a battlefield where light and noise fought the final war. The door I clung to gave me no more shelter than a raft on a wild ocean, but I glued my body to its deaf and unyielding panels. Except for continuous shaking, I could no more move than one of my sculptures.

  I kept telling myself that storms like this pass quickly, but I was wrong. During those lulls when it gathered its strength for an even wilder assault, the wailing of a distant multitude rose from every direction, led by crazed shrieks from nearer houses. It was no comfort that every other soul in Crotalorn shared my belief that the Last Day had come. The wind ripped slates from the roofs and bricks from the walls to shatter in the street, then tired of finicking vandalism and flung down the building next door. The rain pressed down so hard that the dust from this disaster shot out horizontally to batter me as a blast of gritty mud. I couldn’t hear my own screams, much less any that might have come from the steaming rubble that towered before me.

  Whether I fainted or was knocked senseless, I don’t know, but I woke to comparative silence and darkness. The men working on the fallen building were bellowing orders to one another, their picks and shovels clattered and rang, but the noise was thin and unconvincing. They were only a few steps away, but they might have been gnomes laboring on a far mountain.

  I watched them dully for a while before I thought of lending a hand. Then I thought of Dendra, and I ran all the way to Amorartis Street through bewildered multitudes who milled in a light drizzle of rain.

  * * * *

  I knew that our home was empty when I crossed the threshold and felt its ghastly silence, long before I had called through every room and run outside to bellow in the dripping garden.

  “Ringard, Ringard, find all your courage, for you have need of it,” said a soft voice at my shoulder.

  “What have you done with her?” I screamed at Dwelphorn Thooz.

  “I?” Like an enigmatic messenger in a dream, he held up Dendra’s tiny green shoes before my eyes. “Not I, poor boy, the gods! They envied us her company. They snatched her away.”

  “Damn you, foul wizard, what are you babbling about?”

  “The storm. Didn’t you notice it?” He thrust the shoes at me, and I seized them. The velvet was singed, the silver filigree fused. “She was gathering despodines when the bolt struck.” He burst into convulsive sobs and tore at his hair as he managed to finish: “Those pretty little shoes were all we found.”

  His show of grief seemed genuine to me, who had never seen any man but an actor on the stage shed tears. I gripped his hands to keep him from tearing out more of his beard. But my voice was still harsh as I said, “I saw the storm. It blew houses down, but not one petal of your garden is disarranged.”

  “We were spared its full fury,” he said, “as sometimes happens. A shower of rain, that one stroke of lightning—and dear Dendra was no more.”

  “Take me to her.”

  “Haven’t you heard me? Of course you haven’t, forgive me! No human ear can hold such horror. She was totally consumed, or if you wish, assumed bodily into the eternal happiness of Mother Ashtareeta’s arms. Count yourself blessed that no charred bone remains—”

  Screaming to blot out such words, I shoved him aside and dashed to the parterre where Dendra had once clapped her hands and exclaimed over the glory of the despodines. I battered them under my feet, I ripped them from their stalks, worthless weeds that still existed while she could not. I roared her name until my throat tore. At last I fell exhausted to my knees in a bare patch. In the darkness I felt only stubble about me, which crumbled to ashes under my hands. I had found the spot where lightning had struck; but only that.

  * * * *

  The old man gave me a room in his palace, where I stared out a window and ignored the food his slaves brought. He became a familiar object, like a chair whose absence I wouldn’t have noticed. He talked to me at length, he read from books that might have been inspirational, but it was all just words, words, when the only word was Dendra, and that word meant nothing.

  One night a storm broke overhead. I was driven to run outside and leap crazily through the garden, shaking my fists at the gods and daring them to take me, too. In the midst of these antics I woke from my long trance and sobbed while the storm thundered and flashed past.

  Another man might have fled the scenes that recalled his lost love, but that happy man could have buried all hope with a palpable corpse. This decisive act was denied me. I had only my host’s testimony that he had observed a thunderbolt and found a pair of shoes. Dendra might spring from a flowery thicket at any moment, laughing at the trick she had played. Perhaps the bolt had erased her memory, and she had wandered off, but would return here when she came to her senses. She still lived in my dreams, but they might not follow me among strange scenes and foreign faces. I was chained to the place.

  Wood whose captives I had meant to free was brought to me from the garden-house. What captives, I couldn’t remember as I turned the pieces this way and that. I saw nothing but sticks. My knife could only cut big pieces into little ones.

  I went out among the gardens of the dead to look for better wood, but nothing in the jumble of lines and curves spoke to me. The only shapes and textures that mattered had been stolen from the universe, leaving chaos.

  No trees had ever spoken to me so loudly as those in the Bower. They knew what had happened to Dendra, and I would sooner trust them than my host. I ignored his warning and went there, struggling to hear. I remembered my panic as one remembers a childish game that no longer compels. I sat beside the well, which was only a well, and meditated on the trees, which were only t
rees.

  I looked for the one I had wounded, but I couldn’t find it. I would swear it had been removed, but no gap marred the perfect ring, and I was doubtful where it had stood. If it had been replaced, it had been replaced by a fully grown specimen without disturbing the ancient moss of the surrounding earth.

  Its replacement might have been one tree that differed from the others, its lines disfigured by a swelling of the bole probably due to disease or insects. This was curious, for elsewhere in the garden there was no worm in the apple or canker on the rose. I stroked the deformity, thumped it, learned nothing. Inchoate feelings stirred as elusively as tatters of a dream, and I thought for a moment that they signalled the return of my lost hearing, but they were soon still, and I was alone among silent trees.

  * * * *

  My inability to work shamed me, but my patron never mentioned it. At mealtimes he lectured of plants and their marvelous properties to heal or harm, not seeming to care that I wouldn’t have understood even if I had listened. I watched him, though.

  I was most alert when he guided me through his indoor jungles, less to the names and peculiarities of his gorgeous monsters than to the layout of the palace. No one interfered with my prying whenever his duties took him from home, for his dull slaves tended to drowse in his absence, and I was free to explore everything from his fishy kitchens to his fishier bedroom. A priest might have clucked over his queerly illustrated books, but my only concern was for traces of Dendra, and I found none.

  Behind the kitchens lay cages of small animals and a pen for goats. Although none of them figured in our menu, the stock was regularly thinned and restored. I learned the reason for this one morning when I assisted the botanist in feeding cats and rabbits to some of his livelier horrors.

  “My boy, you’re a marvel! Other prospective apprentices may have shown more aptitude for study, but none of them could abide the glory of nature unveiled. Botany is no field for the squeamish.”

  The sight of a shrieking cat gripped by the claws of something whose appearance partook of the orchid and the octopus might have disturbed me in my previous life, but now I merely watched. When I shivered, it was from the question that I spoke as soon as it pierced my mind: “Could one of your specimens eat a human being?”