The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17

by Gardner Dozois

  Hurrying through the village with his messages – there were easily a dozen packets of orders, warnings, and advices that first day – Will experienced a strange sense of unreality. Lack of sleep made everything seem impossibly vivid. The green moss on the skulls stuck in the crotches of forked sticks lining the first half-mile of the River Road, the salamanders languidly copulating in the coals of the smithy forge, even the stillness of the carnivorous plants in his Auntie’s garden as they waited for an unwary frog to hop within striking distance . . . such homely sights were transformed. Everything was new and strange to him.

  By noon, all the dragon’s errands were run, so Will went out in search of friends. The square was empty, of course, and silent. But when he wandered out into the lesser streets, his shadow short beneath him, they were empty as well. It was eerie. Then he heard the high sound of a girlish voice and followed it around a corner.

  There was a little girl playing at jump rope and chanting:

  “Here-am-I-and

  All-a-lone;

  What’s-my-name?

  It’s-Jum-ping – ”

  “Joan!” Will cried, feeling an unexpected relief at the sight of her.

  Jumping Joan stopped. In motion, she had a certain kinetic presence. Still, she was hardly there at all. A hundred slim braids exploded from her small, dark head. Her arms and legs were thin as reeds. The only things of any size at all about her were her luminous brown eyes. “I was up to a million!” she said angrily. “Now I’ll have to start all over again.”

  “When you start again, count your first jump as a million-and-one.”

  “It doesn’t work that way and you know it! What do you want?”

  “Where is everybody?”

  “Some of them are fishing and some are hunting. Others are at work in the fields. The hammermen, the tinker, and the Sullen Man are building bicycles-that-don’t-move to place in Tyrant Square. The potter and her prentices are digging clay from the riverbank. The healing-women are in the smoke-hutch at the edge of the woods with Puck Berrysnatcher.”

  “Then that last is where I’ll go. My thanks, wee-thing.”

  Jumping Joan, however, made no answer. She was already skipping rope again, and counting “A-hundred-thousand-one, a-hundred-thousand-two . . .”

  The smoke-hutch was an unpainted shack built so deep in the reeds that whenever it rained it was in danger of sinking down into the muck and never being seen again. Hornets lazily swam to and from a nest beneath its eaves. The door creaked noisily as Will opened it.

  As one, the women looked up sharply. Puck Berrysnatcher’s body was a pale white blur on the shadowy ground before them. The women’s eyes were green and unblinking, like those of jungle animals. They glared at him wordlessly. “I w-wanted to see what you were d-doing,” he stammered.

  “We are inducing catatonia,” one of them said. “Hush now. Watch and learn.”

  The healing-women were smoking cigars over Puck. They filled their mouths with smoke and then, leaning close, let it pour down over his naked, broken body. By slow degrees the hut filled with bluish smoke, turning the healing-women to ghosts and Puck himself into an indistinct smear on the dirt floor. He sobbed and murmured in pain at first, but by slow degrees his cries grew quieter, and then silent. At last his body shuddered and stiffened, and he ceased breathing.

  The healing-women daubed Puck’s chest with ocher, and then packed his mouth, nostrils, and anus with a mixture of aloe and white clay. They wrapped his body with a long white strip of linen.

  Finally they buried him deep in the black marsh by the edge of Hagmere Pond.

  When the last shovelful of earth had been tamped down, the women turned as one and silently made their ways home, along five separate paths. Will’s stomach rumbled, and he realized he hadn’t eaten yet that day. There was a cherry tree not far away whose fruit was freshly come to ripeness, and a pigeon pie that he knew of which would not be well-guarded.

  Swift as a thief, he sped into town.

  He expected the dragon to be furious with him when he finally returned to it just before sundown, for staying away as long as he could. But when he sat down in the leather couch and the needles slid into his wrists, the dragon’s voice was a murmur, almost a purr. “How fearful you are! You tremble. Do not be afraid, small one. I shall protect and cherish you. And you, in turn, shall be my eyes and ears, eh? Yes, you will. Now, let us see what you learned today.”

  “I – ”

  “Shussssh,” the dragon breathed. “Not a word. I need not your interpretation, but direct access to your memories. Try to relax. This will hurt you, the first time, but with practice it will grow easier. In time, perhaps, you will learn to enjoy it.”

  Something cold and wet and slippery slid into Will’s mind. A coppery foulness filled his mouth. A repulsive stench rose up in his nostrils. Reflexively, he retched and struggled.

  “Don’t resist. This will go easier if you open yourself to me.”

  More of that black and oily sensation poured into Will, and more. Coil upon coil, it thrust its way inside him. His body felt distant, like a thing that no longer belonged to him. He could hear it making choking noises.

  “Take it all.”

  It hurt. It hurt more than the worst headache Will had ever had. He thought he heard his skull cracking from the pressure, and still the intrusive presence pushed into him, its pulsing mass permeating his thoughts, his senses, his memories. Swelling them. Engorging them. And then, just as he was certain his head must explode from the pressure, it was done.

  The dragon was within him.

  Squeezing shut his eyes, Will saw, in the dazzling, pain-laced darkness, the dragon king as he existed in the spirit world: sinuous, veined with light, humming with power. Here, in the realm of ideal forms, he was not a broken, crippled thing, but a sleek being with the beauty of an animal and the perfection of a machine.

  “Am I not beautiful?” the dragon asked. “Am I not a delight to behold?”

  Will gagged with pain and disgust. And yet – might the Seven forgive him for thinking this! – it was true.

  Every morning at dawn Will dragged out batteries weighing almost as much as himself into Tyrant Square for the villagers to recharge – one at first, then more as the remaining six standing bicycles were built. One of the women would be waiting to give him breakfast. As the dragon’s agent, he was entitled to go into any hut and feed himself from what he found there, but the dragon deemed this method more dignified. The rest of the day he spent wandering through the village and, increasingly, the woods and fields around the village, observing. At first he did not know what he was looking for. But by comparing the orders he transmitted with what he had seen the previous day, he slowly came to realize that he was scouting out the village’s defensive position, discovering its weaknesses, and looking for ways to alleviate them.

  The village was, Will saw, simply not defensible from any serious military force. But it could be made more obscure. Thorn-hedges were planted, and poison oak. Footpaths were eradicated. A clearwater pond was breached and drained, lest it be identified as a resource for advancing armies. When the weekly truck came up the River Road with mail and cartons of supplies for the store, Will was loitering nearby, to ensure that nothing unusual caught the driver’s eye. When the bee-warden declared a surplus that might be sold downriver for silver, Will relayed the dragon’s instructions that half the overage be destroyed, lest the village get a reputation for prosperity.

  At dimity, as the sunlight leached from the sky, Will would feel a familiar aching in his wrists and a troubling sense of need, and return to the dragon’s cabin to lie in painful communion with him and share what he had seen.

  Evenings varied. Sometimes he was too sick from the dragon’s entry into him to do anything. Other times, he spent hours scrubbing and cleaning the dragon’s interior. Mostly, though, he simply sat in the pilot’s couch, listening while the dragon talked in a soft, almost inaudible rumble. Those were, in their way, the
worst times of all.

  “You don’t have cancer,” the dragon murmured. It was dark outside, or so Will believed. The hatch was kept closed tight and there were no windows. The only light came from the instruments on the control panel. “No bleeding from the rectum, no loss of energy. Eh, boy?”

  “No, dread lord.”

  “It seems I chose better than I suspected. You have mortal blood in you, sure as moonlight. Your mother was no better than she ought to be.”

  “Sir?” he said uncomprehendingly.

  “I said your mother was a whore! Are you feeble-minded? Your mother was a whore, your father a cuckold, you a bastard, grass green, mountains stony, and water wet.”

  “My mother was a good woman!” Ordinarily, he didn’t talk back. But this time the words just slipped out.

  “Good women sleep with men other than their husbands all the time, and for more reasons than there are men. Didn’t anybody tell you that?” He could hear a note of satisfaction in the dragon’s voice. “She could have been bored, or reckless, or blackmailed. She might have wanted money, or adventure, or revenge upon your father. Perchance she bet her virtue upon the turn of a card. Maybe she was overcome by the desire to roll in the gutter and befoul herself. She may even have fallen in love. Unlikelier things have happened.”

  “I won’t listen to this!”

  “You have no choice,” the dragon said complacently. “The door is locked and you cannot escape. Moreover I am larger and more powerful than you. This is the Lex Mundi, from which there is no appeal.”

  “You lie! You lie! You lie!”

  “Believe what you will. But, however got, your mortal blood is your good fortune. Lived you not in the asshole of beyond, but in a more civilized setting, you would surely be conscripted for a pilot. All pilots are half-mortal, you know, for only mortal blood can withstand the taint of cold iron. You would live like a prince, and be trained as a warrior. You would be the death of thousands.” The dragon’s voice sank musingly. “How shall I mark this discovery? Shall I . . . ? Oho! Yes. I will make you my lieutenant.”

  “How does that differ from what I am now?”

  “Do not despise titles. If nothing else, it will impress your friends.”

  Will had no friends, and the dragon knew it. Not anymore. All folk avoided him when they could, and were stiff-faced and wary in his presence when they could not. The children fleered and jeered and called him names. Sometimes they flung stones at him or pottery shards or – once – even a cowpat, dry on the outside but soft and gooey within. Not often, however, for when they did, he would catch them and thrash them for it. This always seemed to catch the little ones by surprise.

  The world of children was much simpler than the one he inhabited.

  When Little Margotty struck him with the cowpat, he caught her by the ear and marched her to her mother’s hut. “See what your brat has done to me!” he cried in indignation, holding his jerkin away from him.

  Big Red Margotty turned from the worktable, where she had been canning toads. She stared at him stonily, and yet he thought a glint resided in her eye of suppressed laughter. Then, coldly, she said, “Take it off and I shall wash it for you.”

  Her expression when she said this was so disdainful that Will felt an impulse to peel off his trousers as well, throw them in her face for her insolence, and command her to wash them for a penance. But with the thought came also an awareness of Big Red Margotty’s firm, pink flesh, of her ample breasts and womanly haunches. He felt his lesser self swelling to fill out his trousers and make them bulge.

  This too Big Red Margotty saw, and the look of casual scorn she gave him then made Will burn with humiliation. Worse, all the while her mother washed his jerkin, Little Red Margotty danced around Will at a distance, holding up her skirt and waggling her bare bottom at him, making a mock of his discomfort.

  On the way out the door, his damp jerkin draped over one arm, he stopped and said, “Make for me a sark of white damask, with upon its breast a shield: Argent, dragon rouge rampant above a village sable. Bring it to me by dawn-light tomorrow.”

  Outraged, Big Red Margotty said: “The cheek! You have no right to demand any such thing!”

  “I am the dragon’s lieutenant, and that is right enough for anything.”

  He left, knowing that the red bitch would perforce be up all night sewing for him. He was glad for every miserable hour she would suffer.

  Three weeks having passed since Puck’s burial, the healing-women decided it was time at last to dig him up. They said nothing when Will declared that he would attend – none of the adults said anything to him unless they had no choice – but, tagging along after them, he knew for a fact that he was unwelcome.

  Puck’s body, when they dug it up, looked like nothing so much as an enormous black root, twisted and formless. Chanting all the while, the women unwrapped the linen swaddling and washed him down with cow’s urine. They dug out the life-clay that clogged his openings. They placed the finger-bone of a bat beneath his tongue. An egg was broken by his nose and the white slurped down by one medicine woman and the yellow by another.

  Finally, they injected him with 5 cc of dextroamphetamine sulfate.

  Puck’s eyes flew open. His skin had been baked black as silt by his long immersion in the soil, and his hair bleached white. His eyes were a vivid and startling leaf-green. In all respects but one, his body was as perfect as it had ever been. But that one exception made the women sigh unhappily for his sake.

  One leg was missing, from above the knee down.

  “The Earth has taken her tithe,” one old woman observed sagely.

  “There was not enough left of the leg to save,” said another.

  “It’s a pity,” said a third.

  They all withdrew from the hut, leaving Will and Puck alone together.

  For a long time Puck did nothing but stare wonderingly at his stump of a leg. He sat up and ran careful hands over its surface, as if to prove to himself that the missing flesh was not still there and somehow charmed invisible. Then he stared at Will’s clean white shirt, and at the dragon arms upon his chest. At last, his unblinking gaze rose to meet Will’s eyes.

  “You did this!”

  “No!” It was an unfair accusation. The land mine had nothing to do with the dragon. The Scissors-Grinder would have found it and brought it into the village in any case. The two facts were connected only by the War, and the War was not Will’s fault. He took his friend’s hand in his own. “Tchortyrion . . .” he said in a low voice, careful that no unseen person might overhear.

  Puck batted his hand away. “That’s not my true name anymore! I have walked in darkness and my spirit has returned from the halls of granite with a new name – one that not even the dragon knows!”

  “The dragon will learn it soon enough,” Will said sadly.

  “You wish!”

  “Puck . . .”

  “My old use-name is dead as well,” said he who had been Puck Berrysnatcher. Unsteadily pulling himself erect, he wrapped the blanket upon which he had been laid about his thin shoulders. “You may call me No-name, for no name of mine shall ever pass your lips again.”

  Awkwardly, No-name hopped to the doorway. He steadied himself with a hand upon the jamb, then launched himself out into the wide world.

  “Please! Listen to me!” Will cried after him.

  Wordlessly, No-name raised one hand, middle finger extended.

  Red anger welled up inside Will. “Asshole!” he shouted after his former friend. “Stump-leggity hopper! Johnny-three-limbs!”

  He had not cried since that night the dragon first entered him. Now he cried again.

  In midsummer an army recruiter roared into town with a bright green-and-yellow drum lashed to the motorcycle behind him. He wore a smart red uniform with two rows of brass buttons, and he’d come all the way from Brocielande, looking for likely lads to enlist in the service of Avalon. With a screech and a cloud of dust, he pulled up in front of the Scrannel Dog
ge, heeled down the kickstand, and went inside to rent the common room for the space of the afternoon.

  Outside again, he donned his drum harness, attached the drum, and sprinkled a handful of gold coins on its head. Boom-Boom-de-Boom! The drumsticks came down like thunder. Rap-Tap-a-Rap! The gold coins leaped and danced, like raindrops on a hot griddle. By this time, there was a crowd standing outside the Scrannel Dogge.

  The recruiter laughed. “Sergeant Bombast is my name!” Boom! Doom! Boom! “Finding heroes is my game!” He struck the sticks together overhead. Click! Snick! Click! Then he thrust them in his belt, unharnessed the great drum, and set it down beside him. The gold coins caught the sun and dazzled every eye with avarice. “I’m here to offer certain brave lads the very best career a man ever had. The chance to learn a skill, to become a warrior . . . and get paid damn well for it, too. Look at me!” He clapped his hands upon his ample girth. “Do I look underfed?”

  The crowd laughed. Laughing with them, Sergeant Bombast waded into their number, wandering first this way, then that, addressing first this one, then another. “No, I do not. For the very good reason that the Army feeds me well. It feeds me, and clothes me, and all but wipes me arse when I ask it to. And am I grateful? I am not. No, sirs and maidens, so far from grateful am I that I require that the Army pay me for the privilege! And how much, do you ask? How much am I paid? Keeping in mind that my shoes, my food, my breeches, my snot-rag – ” he pulled a lace handkerchief from one sleeve and waved it daintily in the air – “are all free as the air we breathe and the dirt we rub in our hair at Candlemas eve. How much am I paid?” His seemingly random wander had brought him back to the drum again. Now his fist came down on the drum, making it shout and the gold leap up into the air with wonder. “Forty-three copper pennies a month!”